almost. That's our corona. Now, Wednesday, Um, people are legit doing the foot handshake like several people have done this to me. Like all right. Yep. Corona,

one of our top of my co workers Bobby, put on on Instagram. He's like cancer. Handshakes are just discussing. Right now. You have to do other things. And he put a video of him. Another coworker, Katie. Having their feet with their

Toshio triggers

everyone. Yeah, he was like, You can't hand check anybody. Other methods, their toes

are interlocking. That's like that is the best content on social media is thes photos that will just trigger people when they see that there was one where this guy was on a plane and he was barefoot, and he put his foot on the arm, rest of the of the person in front of him, and it got like, editor. Whatever the max number of Twitter users are, that could share. That's how many people

we should Ah, I should take that from him and share shared on my stuff. Uh, get some of their I'll steal their clout. Last podcast we talked about run the world. Yeah. Okay, So retraction. Yeah, big major retraction. I signed up me and Alan did it it. Sorry, guys didn't work.

Platform sucks

right now. Platform sucks. I think that if they're listening, you can get it right. But you missed it

this time. And you tweeted at them. Do they respond

to? Yeah, good customer service. And they Ah, I got Ah, I sent it to us. I could go to bed last night. Two or three. In the morning. They just screwed up.

Just kind of buggy. Yeah. Yeah, that's a portion. We'll figure it out. Figure it out. We'll try another one at some point.

But we definitely did it. Unfortunately, didn't work. Yeah. Um, is there any okay so we

can get other updates. How about Henry with the microphone talking to that. Get that smooth voice that Barry Manilow voice on

here. Guys, I'm

Henry. Oh, man. Look at that body. New fan favorite.

That's awesome. Gave me of ah, from the from the Joe Rogan experience for this podcast. Powerful young Henry. But he is leaving.

I know, but for now it's powerful.

Young Henry. I am leaving in a week, but Alan will be replacing me so you'll have a new fresh face. That's

awesome. So now when we need to look stuff up and then Henry finds the information cause we don't know what the hell we're talking about now he can say it into the mike, which is great.

Are there any other updates that we have to talk about? Brother World didn't work, Henry as a mike.

Ah,

Let's, um we asked people to subscribing on subscribing send videos. I don't think

it worked. Don't think that worked. Um, but what gets grown anyways? So I feel happy we're up, I think 55% since

last month, which is awesome growth. If you're listening to this, you don't have toe do much. Just share this with a friend and you could tag either of us on Twitter. And we will, I'll for sure, Birthplace. Sean. Well, right. If you say he

will, he might. I may or may not reply, but here's the thing. I was on my way over here today, and, you know, I like to get in the mood like I like to prime. I like to prime the pump. Um, I couldn't I was like, What should I listen to? That's gonna get the ideas flow and get the wheels turning s so that when I come here in here, my brain is already firing. There's no podcast to listen to this like this. Dude, I hate to say it.

There's no other podcast that does this where it's like there's a lot of good podcast where it's great storytelling, great interviews. But nobody is playing mental hopscotch with ideas. And so I couldn't get anything to get me going. So that's

a good sign for when I wasn't here. Stew did it, and, uh, I listened to it and I loved it. And I love the notes even more right. I love the notes. I had no idea about the whole Christian typing. Ah, business. Awesome. And I That's when I know it's good, cause I typically hate anything

I'm involved in. And how about a guy who's doing the tithing business? He

like? Oh, yes, a guy message. Just, um, I sounds like he was English. He must begin.

It was in the UK, basically, so his thing was, we didn't give him the idea, he said around. So the background is we were talking about me and you we're talking about. Okay? Cool. Religious, religion, tech, church, tech. And one of the ideas that came up are one of the things I told him. I said somebody had reached out and said, Give me three months, I'm gonna be on the podcast because I'm gonna build this thing.

It's badass. You guys should know you're talking about church tech. There's this company that as digital tithing, it's called push pay. It's big four billion process, 98 million in revenue. There's another one called tightly, and he's like, but they're not big in the UK or Europe right now. I'm gonna build it and you get in Europe And in the Facebook group, which will put the link in the show notes. He's providing these video update. So post his first video update on If you saw it, where he's like, I got 23 customers, churches who were interested in doing this,

including one that runs 2000 churches and he's young. He's a young guy, He's a smart guy, and he's like, Look, here's how I came up with this idea and I'm doing I'm gonna provide video updates every week in this thing, and I love the way I love when people share their work. I love when people work in public. I think it's extremely underrated thing to do. And every time you do it, you get this army of people who are rooting for you and opening up doors for you As you go,

I completely

agree and keep you accountable,

Which I'm excited to see what he's gonna do. Hopefully, his next video's a little

shorter. Yeah, this one's like, six minutes. Eight minutes. I I watched two of the but I lie joyful to

that. I watched. I like that guy. So So I guess we should put a bruise. Ah, I think it's how you say his

name, Hombre. You pray

you. Yeah, um, we should put his showed up in the in the description. Yeah, absolutely. Guy is a listener. He just makes these great notes. We don't know him. I mean, I met him recently. He called me a little bitch.

That's what he just to shock your Well,

I've met him and he goes, Hey, why don't you follow me on Twitter? I was like, I don't know. I'm sorry. And he goes to stop you little

bitch and follow him. That's the

first thing she said when I bet I was, like, nice to meet you. So, uh, kudos to that guy for whatever

you want to get my head. This is a block post I used to try to block about business back in the day when we're doing our very first started right out of college. And none of my posters got read by anybody. Nobody cared, but one post went semi viral, and it was called the first Curse advantage. And basically, I was saying how in a meeting, the first person who ah, who uses a curse word sort of establishes himself as the person who just doesn't give a fuck about the, um, there. They put themselves in a position of power, and it also builds a different level of report because you're obviously using informal language with somebody else and you're demonstrating that you're not seeking their approval in a way. And so I always in meetings, I do this. I try to be the first to curse in a meeting. Can

I say I don't love that,

and I'm like, because you don't like cursing in general?

Well, I mean, I actually, when I hear myself curse, I'm like a band. I sound kind of trashy.

I agree. I don't like when I hear myself do it, and I think I do it too much. But I've noticed in meetings it changes the dynamic, like instantly and for better, for worse. But I But I think

the difference between being crude and for being cursing actually so, like saying bitch, I fucking hate, right? I got used to that. That wasn't on purpose. So I don't like when people say that I, uh quick story before we get into this, I went and I got married in September and I had to go. I got a married Catholic church and you will meet with the priest at a time. And I was really nervous because I don't I don't unwrap practicing. I don't go to church. And but I wanted the whole wedding was they had to approve it, and the whole wedding was on the line, right? So I had to, like,

be a good catholic or at least appear like one. And I remember I was sitting there and the guy was asked. The priest was asking me and my wife my future wife about like so Do you guys agree? And Children, what you think about birth control, All this stuff or whatever he's asking? And I would just say whatever I thought had to be right. And I was very nervous. I was like, Yes, sir, Yes, we go to church three times, Like I just settle everything. And then my phone rings and I was so nervous ago. Ah,

go. Oh, fuck. Sorry. It went really loud. And then he looked at me. It was like shit, my bad. I didn't cuss. And, uh, I was so

embarrassed. Mortified. That's amazing. Yeah, but he let it go. He let it go. Good

God, Yeah, he let it go. I thought I made a joke about how I was asking what school he went to. And he said he had a law student debt and he said, Ah, he's like, Yeah, but

the young guy, young

like, is thirties, maybe late thirties. And he said, Ah, but the church pays for it. And I made, like, a joke like, Ah, so that's why you joined. And he didn't appreciate that he didn't like that. You

want to get into it.

Let's get into. And you, Ah, make that bigger,

curly girl hair. So you guys in trends did a post about napped? The natural hair movement?

Yeah, that's a big, big thing. And, um um, mixed race, mixed race

and black women. And so talk a little bit about what was in the report. And then I'll tell you sort of what I've seen separate

from that. It sounds like you're more interested

in that. You tell me what? Okay. All right. So so all start with, uh So my sister in law got has super curly hair and

I've never seen Sean. He's Indian

Indian, and she's Indian, and she's got super curly hair. And, uh, curly hair takes a lot of maintenance, right? Like it's humid boom, it's frizzy. And you have, like, this episode of friends with Monica's hair is like an Afro. That happens, or it's flat, or you want to straighten it or whatever. It's a lot of maintenance of curly hair. And so she was telling me,

she's like, Yeah, I downloaded this Like I joined this thing. I bought this. Pdf that's called the Curly Girl Guide or something like that. And, um, it's his method to like taming your hair and get it because I told him that your hair looks great nowadays, like what you've been doing. And I just thought she would say, like, Oh, I use this other products was like, No, there's like a 12 step process. Anybody with curly hair, my man anywhere. So

my wife, if you're well, I guess they would be. Well, see, that's my wife's black. She's

halfway. He's also not here, even if they're watching.

She's half white, half black, and she buys a lot of this

stuff as well, right? And so, like, there's a whole thing of like, you know, when you go to sleep, you need to wrap your hair in a certain way to sort of like whatever oils, blah, blah, blah. And so then and like some basics that you just don't do so like she you know, she had curly hair whole life but didn't know. Oh, I'm not supposed to use shampoo in the same way that most people you shampoo. And so she was telling me about some of these differences anyway, opportunity.

I was like, I like these businesses where you could put out content and information that just helps people and and then sort of on the back and sell the kit. That's like, Oh, by the way, like if you just want to push a button and get the solution, I have the kid that has all the shit you need because she spent hours researching all the different products that, like, What is the best version of this oil I'm supposed to have? What is the best version of the shampoo for me? And, um, it's ready. But I think there's an opportunity to do this curly girl. Hear Kitt because there's a huge number of women that have curly hair, the Spaniards in the multi billions per year in the U.

S. For how this got treated. And there is this natural hair movement where it's less about doing these really damaging things, like permanently straightening your hair or, you know, weaves and what? Not like. Now there's a sort of a natural hair movement, and so people need content education, plus the tools, this sort of a hair care kit to take care of their

okay. I love that. Henry, can you do me a favor on a new tab. Type in reddit curly hair. So there's a whole subreddit, one of the ways I like to look at validation and ideas for different companies. As I like to look at the engagement and size of a particular subreddit. How many subscribers does this Subroto have? I can't read that

from here. Use that. Use that. Mike, you got Henry. What were you doing

there under 37,000? That's pretty good, I think, actually, for a curly hair and particularly because Reddit is, uh, mostly men. Right? And this is a woman's focused curly hair subreddit with

exactly so great way to sort of validate the demand and the community aspect to this where people are sharing information and recommending products to each other. The other side of this is it photographs. Great. So, you know, before and after, I believe is the best ad that you can do before, which is a photo after, which is a better photo. And you don't even need to show your product. You just need to show whatever I took gave me this outcome. I was here.

Now I'm there. So my wife loves this subreddit. Okay, so here's for their validation. Um, okay, So particularly so. I think that the angle here is Do you have to go ethnicity or race specific? So whether it's Indian, I have no idea if Asian women some from this. But if they do go do that I know from firsthand experience that mixed race women are, Ah, whether they're white, black or any other combination suffer from this as well. And further validation is Fenty. Rihanna has that brand that sold to Ah, the Louis Vuitton Company. What's called L

l V a M

h lvmh there and you could read about the deal. I think it was valued at $800 million. And her a lot of her thing is towards Ah, yeah, of course. Next race is, um and then another idea here and everyone knows about this woman. But Kayla, it's new. It seems

this thing, it's it's seen. What's there or some sweats Wrap. This is something your wife doesn't wife. Does

it sound like an idiot? Because I'm a guy and I don't pay attention

to this whole segment is like Bro's trying to talk about, you know, products they don't understand, But I'm fascinated. I'm interested. I'm trying and everyone

loves a try. So Kayla's thing I heard that's $100

million a year company. It is. The fitness app itself was like

crazy, and it was just built on her instagram following. So that's crazy.

I mean, it started with She started with the same thing beach. The bikini body guide, I think, was her content that was put out and there was pdf and the pdf got circulated everywhere, and basically, she allowed there, like, paid pdf to get bootlegged and just shared everywhere. And what that did was it just gave her tons of awareness tons of marketing. And, um And then she launched the app which you couldn't bootleg and you had to pay for

and then boom. And the most interesting part about her thing was she. So she's like, mainstream popular. And typically, when things are mainstream popular, maybe sometimes like people think they're cool can think it's kind of lame. And Sarah's on Ivy League educated New Yorker, and she was like, Oh, I love this pdf right s. So she has access to all types of interesting things and she still use it. And I thought that was amazing, that people really respected and liked

it. Yeah, she comes across very well. If you've ever seen her content, she's not like, um, she's not hate herbal like Come across sustainable.

That's cool. Um uh oh, and last thing. Diva curl. Have you heard of diva Carl? Not now. Ah, another mixed race shampoo. Maybe it's for black women, but maybe I don't know what the I figured if it's black, women are mixed race Woman. Um, that's what we use for shampoo. And it was quiet for acquired for a quart of a 1,000,000,000.

Nice. And there's some things on the opposite side, like Tristan Walker, who was, I think, either the cofounder or first employee of Four Square left to start his own African hair. African American men's skincare product company Walker Brand Locker brands where it was like, you know, shaving stuff because you know, the hair's difference course it's going. The traditional shaving gear was causing problems and, uh, didn't work out win under, And that kind of brings me to I don't know why it went under exactly. I don't know if it was like, fundamental, Why

They just raised too much money and fucked everything up. Okay, so when we started our business, we knew howto create our product. We knew how to get sales, but I had no idea how to run payroll. I didn't know anything about health care. I, uh I don't know anything about that stuff. And so when we first started, we used a handful of difference payroll providers. Ah, a couple of different HR providers. And none of them were that great. And so I read about this guy named Parker Conrad who launched his fantastic company called Rippling a couple years ago. And since I read about it, I've been researching it and we finally pulled the trigger and started using them,

and they are actually today sponsor. So it's called rippling. And what it does is when you hire new employees, that makes it stupidly simple in order to on board them. It makes it really easy for your new employees to see your handbook to see all the software used to get access to that software on it actually makes something that I never even thought with a problem until I experienced it, which it makes it really easy to track all of your hardware and devices. You can see which employees use which computer, what software they're using. And, ah, it's all one platform so you could pay payroll. You contract healthcare, you contract hardware. You could do a bunch of really interesting things on it. They're today's sponsor. They're one of our only sponsors that we've had.

We've been very selective of who were long response to this podcast, and we worked with them this time because I use rippling personally and I love it. So give it a shot rippling dot com. That's r I p p L i n g dot com Atrium folded. Yeah. So Atrium is a company that has raised $70

million 75

million, $75 million. Um, you made a great comment that I have stolen and I've told everyone but basically a tree and what they did, they never did anything. Really. Unfortunately, they tried to do a bunch of things, so at first it was almost like it. You'd pay a flat fee and get a service done, and then they were like, All right, let's create software so lawyers can contribute with their client and you could see what they're doing. But you said, why don't they just make a law firm?

Exactly. So basically, atrium, if you don't know started by Justin Khan, who is the founder of Justin dot TV, which became twitch. And, um, you know, well known guy in Silicon Valley. So he raises 75 million pretty much out the gate, like in two rounds, I believe. But the first round, you know, I think they raised 10 million bucks out of $90 million valuation on just Justin saying, Hey,

I'm gonna do a new thing. Um, And then they raised more money, and they raise it all pre product market fit. So before they knew what they had and what the what the market wanted, they raise a ton of money. And what I call this is the curse of money, expectations and people. And so what does that mean? The curse of money is when you have too much money before you actually know what you're doing, you that actually decreases your odds of success doesn't increase your odds of success, right? The second is expectations. Justin con famous guy serial entrepreneur, raise a bunch of money at a high valuation. Now you have the weight of those expectations, which makes you less nimble, less agile and less responsive too, you know, changing

up your own. And you know what he told me? He spoke it house Turkana hung out with them backstage. One of my secrets of a hustle Khanna's I make everyone come in our early and I lied to them about

when they have to speak. So it starts

at two. Yep. So I think with backstage and meet all these people, I told one guy, the founder is a peer. I am not with that dude all day. Wade doing this thing and what Justin told me was he goes, I have a chip on my shoulder that ah, twitch sold for $1 billion. This has to be 10 billion or I'm not interested. And I was like, I don't know about the healthy, healthy attitude.

I just

if he goes, I have a chip on my shoulder, which I think that is actually healthy. I all for that. But he told me he's like, Here's what the expectations are. And I was like, That's a little crazy, dude, But whatever.

Yeah, that is a little crazy. And the last one is the curse of money. Explanations of people and people is when you have all this money and you have these expectations, start hiring a bunch of people. So they laid off like, I don't know, 100 people think 200. Why did they even have 100 or 200 people?

And they were lawyer lawyer type? I mean, these people will cost

a lot, right? And so before you have product market fit, you wanna have as few people as possible. You don't have his love, you know, sort of lightweight expectations. You wanna be extremely nimble and agile. So they tried to do a hybrid. Like you said, I went to one of the one thing they did really well. Was Justin leveraged? What? He had leverage your assets, right? So his asset was He's got a name in the tech community. So here's what he did.

He first when he raised money raised from, like, a bunch of the seas because he knew Well, they have companies. They're going to send their client. They're gonna send there. Those are my

future clients, and I love. What? What you're about to say now I think that's even better.

And so I don't know, but I'm talking about these weekend things he hosted. Yeah. So did you go to one? So I went So he basically said Cool Weekend workshop. Justin Khan is going to do an atrium academy workshop on the weekend, And I remember what the promise was. I think it was like how to raise money for your company. And so I went to one of them cause I wanted to see what was up, and it's ah, kind of an all day thing at the counter at the atrium office. And Justin's a very charismatic magnetic speaker. And so he starts telling the h M stories, You know, when we, um, we started this company and you know,

one of the things I always thought I became involuntary. I became an involuntary power user of legal service is love that phrase. He's like because, you know, when we were selling twitch for a $1,000,000,000 we needed a bunch of lawyers, and when I did this other thing, we raised money for any a bunch of lawyers, and I do all these investments, and I need a bunch of lawyers. So I just realized the man legal system sucks. Everyone's nodding their head. He's like, You know, it's weird that you don't know the price of something, you know, they bill you by the hour,

so they're incentivized to spend as much time and bill you as much as they can. You want it fast and you want to know your price. We're like, Yeah, you're right just and I do want that. And he's like, You know, the second thing is that why I looked into it? Why isn't there a competitors know? The 2nd 1 was like I was having dinner with my friend was a lawyer and I asked her, You know, what do you guys use for project management? What do you mean? He's like, Do you use trail O R. Sana?

And she's like, I don't know what those words are. He was like, Lawyers don't use anything for the project management. Isn't that crazy or Yeah, it's crazy. Last one, he was like he's like So then I was like, Why doesn't somebody started? Competitors like I realized there's some legislation that says you can't start a law firm, and I'm gonna butcher what the actual legal problem was. But like there was a rule, you cannot start a law firm unless you're a lawyer. Unless you've been a lawyer for a certain amount of time or whatever it was he's like. So that's why no outsider has done this. But luckily,

we found a loophole that let us start this law firm. So we're one of the only new law firms that started not by these people. And by the end of it, you're like, Do you take my money? I want, you know, I want to invest in your

thing. Your impression of Justin Khan is is so condescending and so funny.

I don't need it that way. I was impressed. I'm trying to say he told this story and I was eating it up. And, um and so I was like, This is amazing. This this whole workshop was amazing. He brought in his friends who were giving advice, and they were fucking awesome. They were so good at giving advice. And so anyways, by the end of it on, he gives me advice. He was just like, because we're building on the twitch platform with a twitch. Sort of like the streaming app thing. He was like,

Yeah, you know, we thought about doing that, and we don't think valuable. I don't think everything's gonna be valuable. And he was pretty much right. Um, we had to pivot. And so we Anyways, by the end of this, I was like, this was an amazing way to acquire customers. That's my, like, long winded way of saying he used his assets. He did these workshops is not a scalable thing, but,

man, he I don't

like you need one people

over. You're I think you're so wrong. Why do you think I'm not a little thing? First of all, you don't need that many customers for this thing to make a very larger

he could have got 100 clients easily within

a couple months. Yeah, and I hate when people say that they go. This isn't scalable. Like, uh, we'll talk about agencies, and it's not scaleable. It's like talking about some agencies have 20,000 people. That seems like it's scaled to meet like, perfectly fine. I do think those are scaleable, Actually, Um,

it depends, right? If you're a product that needs thousands and thousands of customers. Then doing workshops with 20 people at a time is not going to get you there. So it's not scalable in that sense.

So you want to hear a cool story about that. The founder of Pandora, his name's Tim West surgeon. I went and met with him. When I went and met with him. We were going. We went out to lunch and he's like, Oh, I forgot to do something that you could walk with me and I walked with them and then we go. He was gonna get a haircut. So I just sit next to him and this guy's worth probably $600 with Supercuts, right? And he gets a haircut for $12 we're sitting there in the barber shop. It's on a Tuesday one. No one's there and he's telling me the story. I go, What did you use to do?

How'd you go? Pandora, he goes. Here's what I would do Monday through Thursday, he goes, I had a CEO who ran the company. I would go, I would just he goes. This was, I think, was a little bit before social media was around, he said. I would email people and I would say, I'm gonna be at this library in New York at this time. Annie Pandora users in the area come and talk to me and he said he did that for four years and he goes, Here's the 1st 1 I did And he showed me a picture of him at a coffee shop because two people showed up and he was Here is the last one.

Didn't he showed me a picture and it was out of the library and there was two or 3000 people. There he goes. I would do that Monday to Thursday. I did meet ups everywhere. All I did which travel, and I did it for years. And ah, it worked out. If he goes, he goes. I was like, Did it work? He goes every time I did it. So he was. It would take a little while, but after a couple years of doing it,

I would go to the South, are good Atlanta and we would see Maur advertisers come. So it was just like he goes. It worked out perfectly right because I said the same thing. I go Wow, that's a horrible waste of time, he goes. No, it worked. We made a lot of money off of it, and I got to connect with the users, and I would relay the feedback back to the my CEO and they would do it.

Yeah, so that case, he's not tryingto grow Pandora's active user base. He's taking fans and turning them into diehards. And he's generating advertising revenue, which you can get that actually scales enough where you can get advertisers. And he's getting feedback first hand, which is like, great for the product to get better. Uh, that's a dope story. It's a love I love. I love that story.

There's a there's a clip

related to that, By the way, there's ah, you know, there's probably 10 block post that matter the most if you're going to do a start up. One of them is the program essay. Do things that don't scale where he's talking about with Airbnb early on. And if you're kind of the start of world, just fast forward 30 seconds. But if you're not, you'll like this story. Um, if you haven't heard it, So Airbnb is in y Combinator, they're struggling Airbnb is not really working. They have, like,

20 customers or something low, and they go into programs office. He's the adviser from Y Combinator, and he's like, Okay, so tell me how it's going. Well, you know, it's small really growing, And I'm going to tell me, what have you learned from your customers? You've been out there, What'd you learn? And then, well, you know,

most of you know, most workers are in New York, and they're putting their apartments up there in New York. Yeah, like most your customers in New York. Yeah. What you doing here? Like, go to New York. You need to go to New York now. And like, why are you in San Francisco Of your customers in New York? So he sent him over there and what they did, which is something that nobody else was doing was if you ever saw department listening before the photos look like shit. Because it would be somebody on their crappy mobile phone at that time taking a photo of a dirty apartment and listing it for rent. And so is,

like the worst sales pitch. And so they started themselves going in. They said, Hey, can we send up? They would tell their customers, Hey, we want to do professional photos of your place increases bookings by 40%. Are you open to that? And then they would show up as the professional photographer and Billy Hey, by the way, I'm the founder and they would take photos and that Airbnb listing started to look great and everyone told them this won't scale And they've also thought this won't scale and to an extent, it did, because even now today there's a sort of fleet of photographers that will comment, Take photos of your place to list it because it was just that important and they found a way to make it scale.

I think that's a great story, another thing that shocks people's. I think even if you have hundreds of thousands of users maybe as high as million's, you could really I've done this with us. I will just call and I only need to talk to about 10 people and I can see the pattern that represents tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, right? You could just tell you so like what you could do is a B test ship and wait. If you're just starting, you're not gonna It's not gonna be significant. Um, and that could work. Fine. If you just call 10 people, you really get the information,

right? Totally. I was talking to Emmett Emmett, the CEO of Twitch, where I'm working and one of you know, being at a big company has all these different weird things that aren't really related to my core interest, which is start ups. So I asked him it all the time. Just tell me about the early days. And so I asked him. I said, Hey, when you guys were pivoting from Justin TV to Twitch was that obvious? He's like, No, do that, Justin TV,

like less than 2% of the watch time was on video games. It wasn't obvious that this was thing to d'oh. I just liked it. And I thought there was an option. And he goes, And then I talked to a bunch of customers and I said, Do you have your notes from that? And he's like, Yeah, I do. And so he sent me his notes from the initial conversations he had with all these streamers. All these customers and we publish is now I don't probably not, but I was reading through them. It was fascinating. First was just like first lesson was Just go ask the founder CEO about the early days. I bet you they have a bunch of resource.

Is that our awesome? He sent me the old pit stacks and stuff like that. Um, I think I sent you one slide, which, with my favorite slide, the title of the slide because he was a progress update for the early investors. Yeah, and it just said We're like a bulldozer and a field full of flowers, and it just It was a list of all the shit they've got done that month that I was like, this attitude like, if I said that today at which it would be like, What is this maniac saying, like, Why is your slide so aggressive? But that's how they were early on.

So then he had all these notes of his customer conversations, and he always tells everybody had to what she's like. Go talk to people. By the sixth conversation, you'll hear the same thing over and over again. It takes six phone calls, basically to figure out the pattern. And by the by the 6th 1 you'll know and ah, you'll you won't even wanted to 50 conversations. You'll be like, All right, I can predict what this person is going to say before they even say it after six.

That's awesome. I think we just got ourselves another clip. Clip it. Uh, what do you want? Oh, first of all, share that deck with me again. And also ask him if

we could make that. Yeah, I will ask him actually, because it's pretty cool

what you want, what you want to d'oh

the one that I can share out of that, by the way he asked the request is like I said, you know, Oh, customer interviews. Is there a whole skill set to learn? He goes, No, dude, I have three questions. I said, What do you like about your current platform? What do you dislike about your current platform? And what will it take to get you to switch to twitch? And that's what he has every single customer. And then he just heard the common things and he would build and you go back to me, said you told me.

This is what it would take for you to switch two weeks later. Here it is. Are you ready? And then sometimes they're like, No, Still, he's like, Okay, cool. What's next? I mean, we're just, like, keep doing that.

Three questions. That's bad ass just to wrap that up. If you want to learn about this stuff, I think the best book I've ever read on this is

called The Mom test. Yeah, I love that. Jack recommended me that book. It's fantastic.

It's the best

tiny book to like

a long block po. 50 pages of that book in terms of your business, life might change.

Yeah, the mom test. Okay, so there was a great write up in the Trends Facebook group by this guy Morgan or Girl Morgan? I'm not sure, exactly. But Morgan Key and it was talking about Hey, the founder of Trader Joe's just died, I think, Joe, I don't know how you say the last name, but Joe from Trader Joe's passed away and you know, So we dug into the model and said, What is it that makes Trader Joe's work? And there's a bunch of really fascinating things where they basically broke all of the rules. And I thought it was just like a great example of, um of like,

you know, when you want to do something different or you want to like big a splash in an industry like it pays to just change a bunch of the rules. So some of the things that they do differently so they go through the rules So they most grocery stores have a ton of skews. They're like people want all the options. We got to carry everything that people ask for. Trader Joe's has. On average, I think 4000 skews average first or will be 40 thousands of 1/10 the number of skews. The next thing that I thought was interesting was they overstaffed, not understaffed. Every other groceries tryingto sort of, uh, I have minimal labor costs, and they go the exact opposite direction and try to provide, like, an experience for shopping.

They private label, basically all of their goods. So how do you Okay, great. I overstaffed possible. I overstaffed, but that's like expensive. So where do they make their money back? They make their money back by not buying, you know, not by buying wholesale and selling retail, they actually just private label their stuff and have a way bigger margin on their items.

So what's an example of that? Like their

tomato sauce, for example, they will have our salsa. It'll be called Trader Joe's Salsa, and people will be like, Oh, I love Trader Joe Salsa And it's actually the same exact also that somebody else carries. They go straight to that supplier or manufacturer, and they say, Hey, we want our own line of this. And so it's usually Trader

Joe's isn't making

it. No, they go to spy. But the private label, the that exact item. Oh, I didn't carry it. They get a much bigger margin because they're cutting out the sort of retailer, and they have all this pricing power to go to suppliers with and say, Hey, we have all these locations, so we're already a big customer. From day one, we want you to give us our own brand of popcorn, our own brand of this on Brenda. That and then on the other side, that makes customers love it,

cause people get addicted to this and they think, Oh, that pretzel that chocolate covered pretzel I loved. I can only get it at Trader Joe's, but that's not the real because there's no brand on it. But they could actually get that same thing. They just don't know the brand, and it's from some

other. I've felt that exact same way about a lot of the product.

And so there was a, uh, there's a few other ones that I thought were interesting. I'm gonna dig it up, but talk for a second while I just

So you guys a quick story that we're talking about scaling? I talked to Max Melinda House. Akani, listen to this story. He told me that when they first started in whose maximum Max Mullin started insta card. He goes, she goes, Our first store was Trader Joe's and they wouldn't let us go in there and they wouldn't give us all their inventory. He goes, I took it. He goes. It cost 25 grand. I bought everything in the store we brought to apartment, took a photo with pictures of every single thing. I love it. It was $25,000 he goes. One of everything was about 25 grand, and he did that with Whole Foods and then five other stores.

That's amazing. Okay, a couple of the points that Morgan brought up So no data collection said they're not collecting data on their customers. They don't do sales coupons, loyalty or our advertising the biggest expense of their marketing. It's samples in the store, so they go above and beyond on samples and don't do a whole bunch of other promotional stuff. They expanded very slowly, so they have about 500 locations after 50 years. And so they really went sort of slow and steady with their growth, sort of like a in and out

or whatever. And are they owned by someone at the moment?

Private company? Um, I don't think they got bought by a private. I think it's literally like owned by the Joe Original. Whoever's there's a couple people involved, Um, and so in the end, their price for our started their earnings per square foot in their store so they'll earn $2000 per square foot revenue. Um, and like whole foods would do 1.2 K and then you know, Walmart will do 600 k, so there way more profitable per square foot because of our way more revenue per square foot Because of these, uh, he's different changes. They made that to the standard

model. I dig that. I, uh we should I don't know why we don't publish

that. I think it's a $10 billion company. Overall, I

thought they were owned by all these. For some reason,

you might be right. I don't know on that, but a shadow to Morgan. I thought, there's a great breakdown Lovett Doom or that in the groups We love the stuff and we'll share the information because we have more people need to learn from this stuff. So that's actually

an interesting take, which is what are the interesting components that make something special? So we're doing this thing that we're gonna publish on Tuesday on hotels, and I thought that that was really interesting. And so it's not live yet, so I haven't been able to read all of it, but basically, ah, lot of the largest hotel chains. What they do is they don't actually own the property. I mean, sorry. Sometimes I own the property, but it's all franchised. Yeah, and so 90% of their money is made VF Franchising. Hilton's Marriotts Whatever.

Yeah, I had no idea. Yeah. Ah, and so that's what I like The secret sauce is, which is you have to do Franchising. And it's really expensive. Like, could be $10 million to start a Marriott franchise, Right? Very expensive.

That's not that expensive. 10,000. That's cheap

for Sorry. I said

10 million. 10 million $1,000,000. Okay, yeah,

that's a lot. It's crazy. And so what? What we've been doing on trends and what I have always loved doing, which is what's like, what's like the thing that makes something special. What makes it tick? Yeah. So, for example, with software typically, it's just, um ah, what makes a great self owned businesses like There's I'm just riffing here, but I'd have to find the exact numbers, but it's like our is the annual revenue per customer, at least $5000.

Um, can you make it so Churn is only 4% a month, and then there's, ah, probably only one or two more rules, but it's usually turn And can it be at least five grand a year

for a sass business?

Retirement? Yeah, so I love seeing those like

yeah, you want. So what investors do is they see so many deals and they talk to somebody founders, and they do this for a number of years. They get to see how these play out. They start to do what they call pattern recognition, which has pros and cons. The prose is great. You can recognize a good thing when it's a good thing. The con is if you're trying to make everything fit, your pattern, you'll miss the outliers, and that's Ah, that's a big issue. But, um, but it's worth It's still a tool in your tool belt that you should have.

I feel like this should This should not just be investors that do this. This would be entrepreneurs as well. So you should be looking at different businesses, industries breaking them down, listening to podcasts like this or others, and trying to identify the patterns of commonalities and try to characterize. Okay, what made that business tick? What made this have a different outcome than that? What are the sort of minimum requirements on let's say, turn or customer, you know, customer value for a sass business to work and start to get these rules of thumb or, like, kind of common patterns in place in your brain.

Yeah, And what I've been trying to do is figure it, figure out those on all types of things. Yeah, and that's been exciting. You won't do one

more. Yeah, let's do one more. So there's this thing called. Thinks th NK

s. Where is that on here

in the middle.

Okay, what's that?

So I saw this in a, um, an instagram at or some like that. That was kind of kind of clever. So, um, b to b gifting. So what things does or thinks probably thinks that they're trying to do, which is saying thanks.

Oh, that's stupid. I hate

cute spelling. Yeah, keep spelling. Kind of kind of tripped him up there. So what it does is it's like from your phone, you can instantly just send a little gift to any business acquaintance. So it's like you could send, um, you know, a bottle of wine you can send a box of chocolates. You could Santa Uber ride. You could send $25 you know, Amazon thing. Whatever s. So they have a whole bunch of different digital gifts that are just looked in. The in the ad, it looked frictionless of like how easy this would be to just send this little thank you every one.

So for someone like you guys, you guys have advertisers. We have guests that come on the podcast, and I know I would love to send them gifts. I know that I should. I know these little things go a long way, even though it's just seems like they shouldn't. But I don't take the time to do it. And so I think if somebody actually made a really good B to B gifting platform that did both the actual gifting, so being able to send it to your contact, but also they sort of accounting for it. So keeping track of it in a spreadsheet and all that stuff, maybe helping you expense it. I think that could be a big business. I think a lot of sales people would use this.

I totally agree with way. What point did he do that? No, there's a company called Alice, and they dio artificial intelligence powered B to B gifting. It's really cool. They basically scan your social profile and they figure out what your interests are. They send you on example of a gift they want to send to you, Um, like, on behalf of the company. And then you're able to either donate the value of that to a charity of your choice or pick from the marketplace a gift of similar about that's bad ass. I like that. What I would do one or two things. The first thing that I would do is I think the way that I would set this up is I would make it pretty heavy on slack or integrate with sales force. You know, we've built a couple salesforce plug ins that we love and other people have asked us to give it to them.

What's an example

of one? Uh, I'm not involved in our sales force thing, but basically, like one example is we've connected our QuickBooks and our sales force really effectively. Um, which was a previous, previously really hard problem. I mean, that's really nitty gritty accounting stuff, but it was really, uh, frustrating. Another thing that we built in sales force was so that we were the way that we built our business is, uh we could get a line of credit on our invoices, and we've sink that all. We've sink it all up.

So our bank knows which invoices we have based off sales force and things like that, right? And it's really effective. But what I would do in this is I would hook it upto salesforce are slack, and I would make it so you could send co workers as well. And basically the boss puts your credit card down and he allocates it or she allocates it. So every employee gets automatically like some number of $10.200 dollars a month, right? And you have you can like typing like send Henry a gift at San Francisco office, right? And like, for example, I buy gift gift cards for people of time where someone has done something really cool. Or like E. T. Was saying her cars.

I don't know if her car's messed up. I'll be like sent $8100 uber gift card, right that I think that would be fantastic. And the way that I would build it is that it would remind every employee how much balance they have left at the end of you for sure. No, it's going to get right used. That's kind of that's really interesting. And I would also look at ah, what's the What's the fruit baskets that are popular Edible rain, edible arrangements. I would look at there, I would go, Yeah, I think they're publicly traded. I'll go and read all about how they do it. And where they say, are the biggest markets for their beauty.

Is it real estate agents who need thio must be out there. Is it sails? Is it, um you know, whatever else eso there's some stats are on here. I don't know out of these, but great 89% of elegant nice Alan Chinatown. 89% of C suite execs believe that gifting brings people closer together. Okay, Lovett, um And then, after receiving a gesture of appreciation, individuals feel like sort of the what the rule of reciprocity sent 56% more likely to reciprocate. And I think it's I think it's great. I have a friend, Greg Eisenberg, who is all about gifting. Ramon is a great gift,

er as well. He's almost obnoxiously

good. Yeah, and so they just are so thoughtful. And by little things that go a long way. It just makes you love

the person. Yes. Oh, another thing I would do to run this company is I would goto is it? Ah, it was a book called Influence by Robert Houdini Is that this thing called The rule of reciprocity. It summed up in, uh, basically I could do a favor for Sean and he's going to do a favor back to me, even if he didn't ask for me to do him a favor, and it is likely that he will repay me back in a disproportionate amount. So, for example, there's been times you could, like, go up to someone, and you could be like,

Hey, ah, you want you want to Can I give you a coke or can I give you Ah, um, like this small $10 gift And I could be negotiating with you for selling a car and cannot deal and get a deal, right? Uh, or, for example, I could say something like, Hey, can you grab my mail or let me grab your mail for you when you're out of town? And then two weeks later, I could be like, hey, can I borrow your car for five days?

And typically people will do it. And so I would make the whole tagline of my company, which is like I would make I was sick of it. In terms of headlines and copyrighting for sales pages, I would make the whole headline all about. How you can make it you have to do is part of the positive language. But how you can manipulate people by giving gifts.

I was older

headlights. Why would go to that book the road reciprocity, and I would find a signed agreement that maybe that's what the headline would be. It would be the definition of the rules. I would make it look like a definition rule of reciprocity, like down having defined as inadequate or ah ah, disproportionately given in response to a gift. Yeah, In other words, we help you make

more money so that so there's There's is I just went to the website growing business. The growing business with gratitude build strong business relationships through efficient, personalizing, thoughtful gestures of appreciation.

That's whack.

That's whack. That sounds, by the way, dude, I get every company we mention on here. Um, I get a message that either the CEO starts listening to it, or they were already listening to it. So, like we talked about only fans. The founders. Listen to this. We talked about Pipe the founder. Reach out. Hey, love. It reached out to me.

I talked about mystery science. I hung out with the founder yesterday, and he was like, Weird. And ministry science. Mr. Science is the amazing business. It's Bill Nye, the science guy delivered into school. So, yeah, why don't we get those people in here? We can? Yeah, he was He was awesome. And by that I didn't realize he had three little exits under his belt and he was doing this.

And the business is just spinning off cash. It's amazing. It's used by, like, a crazy number, the public thing that he told me some other numbers. But I'll say the public thing he told me, which is that 50% of elementary schools in America are active users of the product, which is insane penetration, which that just means one classroom within the school. Well, whatever. You got to 50% of school being active users on a weekly basis, um, of the product.

I love that. Let's get those people on here. Let's go to questions,

eh? Yeah. Let's do some quick ones.

Ah, so we asked people to do, subscribe, unsubscribe, and send us a video of them doing it, and we would answer a question that they sent. The truth is, a lot of the questions were pretty Okay, so we're gonna avoid some of the okay ones. Like, what would you do if you had unlimited money? I'm not gonna answer that. I think that's okay. Question. Let's see. But let's see what is Ah, couple good questions.

Love the podcast. What's your best CEO hack for a new website from Stephen Cintra. So I I know zero about Seo. So for me, I love marketing a love growth, but you sort of specialize in certain sub practices within that Seo is not one of mine. But I met a guy yesterday and he was like, Hey, was tell me he's grown these content sites. He's got a pretty repeatable model to grow content sites over 100,000 monthly visits, up to a 1,000,000 monthly, unique within two months. And he's done it like 10 times. I was like Okay, well, what's the formula usto guru? What he's like?

Oh, no, I don't know SDO I don't do back links. I don't know what a schema is like. I don't do any of that stuff. He's like, I'm all content and I just try to rank on quality and relevance is like, basically, he just looked at what questions people search for using a tool like a eight drafts or whatever. And so he goes and finds what questions were people searching for. Looks at the search result. And if somebody is like you know, the 20 best tips for closing a sales meeting, he'll do the 30 best tips and he'll put in a YouTube video and he'll like Anil this value him. And so he'd literally, just,

like, crushes it on on those questions and some of that. Sometimes these questions are like, you know, people Google their deepest, darkest secrets. Not like politically correct things will be like, you know what's the best way to, you know, like tell your girlfriend you're cheating on them or whatever, and so he will be like the best way to tell your girlfriend cheating on them things that company's most sites are not blogging about. He's like, If there's demand, I will write the best content for and I will rank over the course of a couple months and I'll get my website up.

I'll tell you a quick story real quick. First, I would say My answer to this is I've done the same thing. I accidentally been good at it. I would just use two tools H a refs, and that s E o mas. Sorry. Uh ah. Yost Yost. It's a plug in for WordPress. That's the that. They just use those two tools and you'll be fine. Ah, And when YouTube first started in 2000 from 2010 just 9012 I had a YouTube channel that had millions of tens of millions of views. Ah, and all I would do is I would find words, people,

things that were things people were searching for. And I would put a video with that exact same title, and then I would make it just a picture and not actually a video, the click baby's picture. And then I would sell space on that video as background music and I made hundreds of dollars a month when I was a senior in high school doing that. So if you ever want to see a thumbnail video of a guy the most popular video they took down, it's called Ah, black guy Beats up white guy

Supreme. We're searching for

that. Oh yeah, and you could just type in. What you could do is you just type in the word white, and it would auto fill or type in the word like fight fight videos for popular problem. Still, our look at the other one paranoid auto in an all out a complete I did that same thing, and for some reason I learned that those fact videos did great.

OK, another question. So Robert asks, What big picture things should I be looking out for my podcast to be profitable? It's a medical podcast where I talk about certain diseases and interview people who have them. And then he shouts at the name of it, which is the patient will see you now. All right, so what should he be? How should be thinking about making this podcast profitable? Should we three experts of not so profitable broadcast

we did not have a profitable podcast.

We don't know it's profitable. It's just small relative to like, other opportunities we could be doing. It makes money every month.

What's your answer?

Uh, I would basically not try to go for big. So podcast, you can either go big audience ads. Or you could say my podcast is lead Jen for other things that I do. And so, like, I've gotten more value out of businesses and opportunity investment opportunities coming from this podcast. Then the ad revenue we get every month. And so similarly, I think here, if you're the people who are gonna listen to this podcast, um, you know, they might be patients with a certain disease. You might be able to sell some premium ad spot Thio, former company,

but you probably don't have the scale. And so instead what I would be looking for us, I'd say cool if I had a podcast with 5000 doctors listening to it every month. What what could I do with that community? What other adjacent opportunities business opportunities could I create out of that that loyal community? And so I'm a big fan of just build the tribe first, the opportunities were revealed themselves as Ugo and that's how I would go about it. I wouldn't try to do ads for your podcasts.

One ups and add. Thanks a good idea. Cool. Do

one more. Yes, dude. One Maur. Okay, 1st 3 months of your business. What? Your 1st 3 steps. Very generic question.

Eyes that even a useful. Okay, let's combine it with best. Uh, some of the people they asked the most

general questions. Okay, here's some advice. I have a phrase. Ask a better question, get a better answer. So I asked a specific question. Don't ask, Like, you know, in the 1st 3 months of a business What? Your 1st 3 things.

Like what? Art is

good, right? Or like, you know how Do love you. Like what? Like

I can't tell you what it's like. How do you How do you do? Art e? I don't know, man. You want to talk about like oil Peattie? Uh, right in the Renaissance era, we could talk about

that. Okay. Here. Here's a Here's a question that I will ask to entertain myself here. Um what? Your favorite interview question when interviewing somebody for a job?

Uh, on a scale. 1 to 10. How lucky do you think you are?

Nice. Where'd you get that from?

Ah, When I interviewed at Airbnb, the founder asked me if

it's the Jeff Bezos question. He was the I think the originator of it were made It popular. At least they asked basis. What's your favorite question? He said this. And now a bunch of us have stole this

joke. Gaby asked me it and I told him a nine or a 10. And he said Why? And I explained to him why? And I go, Why did you ask me that? He goes people who say they're really lucky or the people I want to be around. I was like, Why do you think that it goes well, if you're lucky, if you think you're lucky, you must be talented and things just fall in your place or you actually are lucky. And I want to surround myself with lucky people. Don't wanna be around on lik

e people. Yeah, that specific in the question is, how lucky person do you think you are? 1 to 10? 123 is like I'm not very lucky. I don't consider myself a lucky person. Um, 456 is I think I'm pretty. I think I'm, you know, decently Lucky average. And I know I think I know why are so I don't know why there That's just how it is. And then this, uh, sort of 89 10 R. Um,

I consider myself a very lucky person, and here's why. And you want people who are either. If luck is a thing, you want them around you just like he said. Or if they're not, you want people were optimistic. And you know, when you're building a young business, you need optimistic people. And then the Y part is interesting, too, because some people know how to Aaron, engineer serendipity. They know how to engineer lucky situations for themselves, or they're looking out for situation where they may be giving lucky and pounce on those opportunities. And that's again somebody you wanted early

business. And then I'm gonna ask you the same question I had, and I think I know yours is, but I'm gonna say another one that is deadly. I love this question, and this is when you back channeling someone and you want to ask about So let's say I'm interviewing Henry and her his old boss Reference check. I'll go. I'll go. Shawn. What would you give Henry out of 10? Just saying number.

Uh, Henry. Uh, seven.

Okay. And you're gonna give him a seven, because you wanna you don't wanna completely shit on them and you, But you also wanna be realistic. And so I would then I would say. Okay, well, what what can I What can he do to get the remaining three points? Welcome, madam of Perfect 10. That is the only way

I've been able

to get a critical feedback on a person other than saying what a bad at,

uh well, you know,

they're pretty good. Are like That's That's what I always say.

Yeah, for sure. Because people like you said want to be polite. And then people also don't wanna, like lie based

on their own experience. The best way I've ever found to get it. Love it. Okay. You're

a good reference check question for that specific

thing. Yeah, I know what it is. And you

should tell it. I don't remember what because I've told a story once, but I don't remember what it was the founder of Second Life. Told me once who

you are, who you want to

be here. Uh oh. This one. Yeah. This is a good one, huh? Yeah. You know, I love questions like this. Uh, I ask this in job interviews, but I also just ask this in social situations to be awkward. Uh, filling. I say, Hey, we're gonna play a little game.

I want you to fill in the blank first thing that comes to mind. First answer. Best answer. Um, I'm gonna say the first part, You finish it and I'll say, life is our Alan. Let's play bartender, you have the mic, So let's play first answer. Best answer. Answer as you go. Uh, life is great. People are Oh, I am in the middle of the only good one.

Yes, and use it to sort of have a little bit of conversation. You try not to judge people too much off the top of the mind, but, um, I actually just think this is useful for yourself. So this is like, your core outlook. What's life? And you said life is great. Cool, optimistic, sort of grateful person. Then you said people are tough. That's interesting. Why'd you say people are tough?

Are you? Do you have a girlfriend? Are

you guys not dealing with some stuff right now?

You are. That's

what What's a situation where people have been tough, tough to deal with? I don't know right now. Kind of like Like figure out where I'm going. And, like, figure out what job like it ultimately gonna get a career I'm gonna do. And it's just, like, talk. Like just communicating with people are getting numb to realize what you want in, Like, people are tough to persuade or tough to to get on your

under page. That's a great question. You totally you know, you could see what he struggles with and values.

Yeah, And then the last one, which is I am. And you went with Henry, which is a literal answer. If you're gonna do another one, what would it be? I am like a student, huh? Okay. Ah. And then the second question, I'll kind of ask is so I've usually pause there. I do the psycho analysis, and then a couple things happen. People like, okay,

they just want to leave because they feel so uncomfortable or they'll be like, What are yours? Cool. I like that. That's a good sign when you asked, what's yours? Um, Then I'll tell the mind, and then they'll do the same thing back to me. And the last question is like I tell him I said, You know, one thing I did was I did those answers. Top of mind. I didn't really like what I said, and then I just re assessed it. I was like,

What do you think the answer should be for me? Like what? I want my answers to be what I want, my outlook of life, people on myself to be right. What do I want my mental model to be? And then I revised it, and the best people come back few days later and they're like, Hey, by the way, I, uh, you know, I came up with my own and here's mine and those of the people I'm like, I'm gonna be friends with you for a long, long time because you're like me. You like to do this stuff clip cool. I think we're done. By the way. I got to call the the guy from levels I gotta get my my glucose monitor installed for the weight loss challenge.

Oh, okay. We'll do an update on that. I didn't call him. I think we're supposed to, huh? Okay, well,

you could join me on this

call there. Er, is that like, is there a button like share button? If there is something more listeners thank

you.