MFM #157: Instagram Food Drops Making $200k/Week, Chrome Extensions That're Crushing & Open Salaries

Shaan Puri

It's insane. This whole guy's life is insane, is what I could see from this. I mean, this guy's steroids are, you know, as good as his cookies, I would say.

Sam Parr

that's what yeah give I want the hgh drop

Shaan Puri

you look fantastic you upgraded

Sam Parr

I'm currently recording. I wish I could turn the camera around, but I don't want to screw it up. I'm sitting at my friend Jack's house in Hawaii, where I'm having a week vacation.

Shaan Puri

congratulations well deserved

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's cool. I just got here, but I'm going to be here for maybe 5 days. But it's alright. How are things going with you?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, things are good. Did you see this thing that these guys tweeted at us? They were like, "Dude, we will pimp out your stream." Did you watch the videos that they made?

Sam Parr

No, I've been flying, but they said that they booked a ticket to Austin. Are they actually going to my house?

Shaan Puri

I don't know if they... I don't think so. They're waiting for us to be like "yes" or "no." But these guys applied very intelligently; I gotta give them credit. So basically, they saw that we were trying to upgrade our stuff, and they're like, "We'll do this for you. We'll make it no hassle. I'll come to you, and I will hook it up." A few people tweeted something like that at us, and you were kind of, you know, humoring it, I guess. Then these three guys are... I think they're like college seniors or something like that. I don't really know; I didn't look too far into it. But they sent us a video. They said, "Watch, here's what we're gonna do," and they recorded a video. It looks like a Casey Neistat video; the quality is like that, and the editing style and storytelling are like that. It's a funny video, and it was basically telling us how to "pimp" out our stream. They kept calling it, you know, "My First Million to the Moon," and "We're gonna take this baby to the moon. Here's how we're gonna do it." So they did two things. He showed how his camera setup works for their podcast, and it looks awesome. It looks way better than ours. Then, the next day, he sent us an edited clip of a compilation of you telling the story of bumping into the Silk Road founder at a party, and you, like, stole your girl or whatever. They edited a little clip, and they're like, "Dude, we'll pump out clips like these all the time. My First Million to the boom, baby!"

Sam Parr

are they good

Shaan Puri

they're good they're really good both videos are really good

Sam Parr

Where, first of all, let's hire them. And second, where did they send this to on Twitter? I've been flying since Saturday.

Shaan Puri

It's on Twitter. I sent you a link because I was like, "Dude, fuck yes! This is like... this is, you know, like the opposite of a job application." Normally, you get a job application where you put a job up that you want to hire somebody to do, and then some people apply. You're kind of squinting, thinking, "Do I really think this person's going to be able to do it?" Then you make a guess, and it takes some... fucking six weeks to ramp up. Or, this guy just applies, showing, "Look, I can do it. I've done it for myself; I'll do it for you. Let me make this easy for you. Let me show you how bad I want this." I just thought, like, this is so much better than what we've been talking about in trying to find people to do this stuff.

Sam Parr

I'm looking at his... okay, cool. His name is Dylan Jarden. Weird last name. I keep... because I want to say Jordan. Yeah, Dylan, if you're listening to this, let's do it. I'm in.

Shaan Puri

And you know, I don't know, there's probably people at The Hustle who have similar jobs, but I think we should reward the hustle of these guys and be like, "The gig is yours to pimp out the video side of our podcast." I think we should give them the shot.

Sam Parr

alright I'm in

Shaan Puri

cool alright we have a bunch of topics we wanted to talk about where do you wanna start you wanna start with this open salary thing

Sam Parr

no let's start with food because I've you was this yours

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

I've thought about this for years, so I have a lot of... I've got something boiling up. So, you want to... you want to...

Shaan Puri

Take that, let me intro this. Alright, so I'm talking to Ben, my right-hand man. Ben is kind of like, you know, I'm easily excitable; you could tell by the way I talk. Ben is the opposite. He's in chill mode, always relaxed. But when Ben mentions things, I've learned that when he says something, it's just like, "Oh, this is cool! You should check this out." It's actually *amazing*. He just doesn't say, "Hey dude," or shake you and say, "Look at this! This is amazing!" So he showed me this thing that is amazing. He goes, "Check out this website or this Instagram handle: My Cookie Dealer." I was like, "My Cookie Dealer?" So I go to it.

Sam Parr

you should click this website I'm looking at it now I wanna eat this

Shaan Puri

Dude, so alright. He sent me three Instagram accounts. He sent me "Buy Cookie Dealer" and click the second one, "1900 Ice Cream." So, like, 1800 but 1900 Ice Cream looks so good. Just describe what you're seeing; it's incredible.

Sam Parr

Is it a pie? I don't know what this is exactly, like what you would call it, but it's a cone. Well, I don't know what shape this is.

Shaan Puri

It looks like there's a stick, so at the top of the stick where you would normally have a popsicle, instead it's a full ice cream concoction. It's like the ice cream and all the toppings and the fudge on top or whatever. Oh my god, it looks amazing! You should, if you have Instagram, go to **1900 Ice Cream**.

Sam Parr

There's one called the **Cupcake Wonderland**, which is vanilla ice cream, rainbow sprinkles, and strawberry marshmallow icing. God, so they call...

Shaan Puri

They call themselves the "Ice Cream Thirst Trap" and "Thick Check" [trademark]. They have a bunch of followers and have grown really quickly—26,000 followers. So, Ben would start sending me these, and I was like, "Okay, cool, a food account on Instagram. That's not too new. What do I care about this food porn?" He's like, "No, no, no, dude! I've been trying to send you one of these, and I've been trying to get these myself. They do weekly drops of their stuff, and these are selling out instantaneously." I go, "What do you mean?" So he showed me "My Cookie Dealer." My Cookie Dealer does a cookie drop every week. They do a random cookie drop with a different flavor or whatever, and it sells out within literally seconds. They're doing $200,000 a week—$10,000,000 a year—dropping cookies on Instagram and just instantly selling out. Then they ship them, you know, a few days later. They know how many orders they get and then they ship them out nationwide or whatever. And there's another one, "Ali's Banana Bread." Go look at this banana bread! Dude, just look at this banana bread. I want to print this banana bread out and just lick the paper; it looks so good. Same thing—it sells out.

Sam Parr

wait

Shaan Puri

wait wait wait

Sam Parr

Wait, wait, wait, dude! Check this out. So if you go to mycookiedealer.com... Yes, that's the website. Okay, click the Instagram page. Are you on their Instagram? Tell me when you're on their Instagram page.

Shaan Puri

I'm on it

Sam Parr

Okay, you see? Go scroll up to their profile, and you see where it says, "The owner is this guy named Juan Diesel Moore Morell."

Shaan Puri

who's that

Sam Parr

click it

Shaan Puri

oh dude he's like a bodybuilder

Sam Parr

This guy is huge. This guy is so big.

Shaan Puri

He looks like, if you've ever seen ESPN or a bodybuilding competition, where the guys are this crazy color of skin that nobody is. And he's just humongous. He was.

Sam Parr

like well I no I I can't tell if it's like the tan I think it's a black guy is he like he's so dark

Shaan Puri

I think it's a white guy you know they all like the white guy had to do the black tan for bodybuilding

Sam Parr

well and then look at his wife

Shaan Puri

It's insane. This whole guy's life is insane, is what I can see from this. I mean, this guy's steroids are, you know, as good as his cookies, I would say.

Sam Parr

That's what... yeah, give... I want the HGH drop. This is awesome, man! This is cool. Okay, so, Ali's banana bread.

Shaan Puri

so ali's banana bread so there's a bunch of these so ben is like deep knee deep in this world of like instagram food brands that are basically they're kinda like drop shipping baked goods all around the country so they have them for cakes ice creams banana breads and they're just specialists and so there's a couple cool things that I wanted to bring up about this and I know you have some stuff on food too but the part that I thought was cool is so the internet is the internet is really good at doing this which is norm before the internet you would just go to whatever's like your local whatever so you'd find the best within your local radius of 5 to 10 miles or whatever it is that's what you would go by but with the internet whether it's news or comedy or whatever the best thing can just get distributed everywhere and so the best brand wins on the internet and so this is why you see things get so big you know like facebook and other other platforms because the best the best thing will get all the users and it's what's interesting is that these guys are doing this with food so if these guys really do make the best goddamn banana bread or best cookies or best ice cream they don't need a physical shop they could just through instagram alone spending $0 on marketing have customers worldwide like ali's banana bread literally ships worldwide and so if you're the best at making something now you have a pathway to become like a multimillionaire where that really wasn't possible if you were just a local baker and whatever in cincinnati you know you were always restricted by however many customers you could get into your local radio so I thought that's pretty cool the second thing is if you think about this you know this is like a mix of a bunch of things that we've been talking about for a while so we've been talking about cloud kitchens so these are essentially like cloud ice cream shops or cloud bakeries they don't have like a physical storefront necessarily they're all in the cloud and you just order online the second thing is direct to consumer so they're going direct to their fans they're getting their fans' phone numbers and so that when they do a drop they just text everybody like one picture of the new thing and then instantaneously people buy and I think that's kind of like amazing a way to go to direct to consumer you don't have to worry about getting on the shelf at you know whole foods or wherever else to to build your your brand as a cookie company or whatever and go ahead no keep going last one is if you think about it like you know who's gonna be the next missus fields or ben and jerry's or like auntie andy's pretzels it's gonna be one of these brands it's gonna be one of these cloud bakeries doing it on instagram building a cult following like these guys are doing and and you're gonna see I I predict you're gonna see just like I forgot what was the name of that meme company that sold for like $100,000,000 they hit like they were the ones behind daquan and whatever like the couple of the meme instagram accounts

Sam Parr

yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that it was about 8 months ago maybe

Shaan Puri

yeah we talked about it on the pod it's like and

Sam Parr

ray will pull it up and she what you see it right there you see it I can't read it from here

Shaan Puri

Imgm Media. So, basically, you know, some brand that just owned a bunch of meme accounts on Instagram sold for like $100,000,000. I think, if I remember correctly, you're going to see the same thing in the food space. You're going to see a bunch of private equity companies coming in, and they're going to buy up, you know, Ali's Banana Bread. They're going to buy up 1-900 Ice Cream because they're going to be like, "Dude, this is the next Ben and Jerry's." We're going to take this thing, we're going to put it on steroids, we're going to advertise the heck out of it, and then we're going to get it into retail stores on top of what it's already doing. So, I think you're going to see a bunch of these. If I could go invest in those four brands that we talked about right now, I would go give them each a $25,000 check because I think these are going to get scooped up.

Sam Parr

Okay, so let's break this down further. I've thought about this a ton. The reason I've thought about this a lot is that I'm a media guy. Right? By the way, is my mic good?

Shaan Puri

yeah you're good

Sam Parr

alright I'm a media guy I love content and I've studied what goes viral and why for years and one thing that I've always been fascinated with is I've known people who have worked at thrillist and thrillist started as a food well they started as like things to do in new york but one of their biggest things is food and I remember when I started dating my wife she was from new york city and I hadn't been there since I was the first time I've been there was when we started dating 26 27 years old and I went there and I would see these long like I would go to like the areas that you see in movies where like the cute people hang out where they all dress like you know like they dress like they go to nyu yeah like they just dress like for me that was like wow I feel like everyone looks like a movie star everyone was cool and hip by you know I don't I don't know madison square park or washington square whatever those parks I don't know I don't spend a lot of time there but you know what I mean they would have the longest lines and I'm like what what are all these people waiting for and it was like the the latest thrillist craze that went viral and so I I would walk through brooklyn and everything and I would see these lines and I'm like what is going on and I would do research and I kinda broke it down into I like I've like studied this for a while and or not studied is the right word but thought about it a lot and I basically broke it down into the into a handful of categories and what it appears what what seems like what what happens is people have a small store a relatively like pretty like a corner store in hip parts of brooklyn or new york where there's people who share so like college kids mostly and they create 1 or 2 things that that thrillist or buzzfeed or someone because all those companies are located in the cool parts that I'm describing in soho things like that and one of these buzzfeed or thrillist folks sees it a whole bunch of college kids see it and then it creates a line and it creates hype and it becomes like a good business that lasts for 3 to 6 months and then it kind of like goes away and maybe like it still is a remainder but like still is a business but it mostly like is a hype cycle or whatever and I was like what is going on and so I broke this down into a few categories and I want to go through these categories because I agree with you I think this is so cool and I've tried to break this down so first and these are like different ways

Shaan Puri

to formulas for virality

Sam Parr

Yeah, like formulas for food virality. Okay, the first one is: **make a side ingredient the main thing**. So, something that's normally a side ingredient, make it the main thing. The best example of this is cookie dough. There's a lot... like, this is a thing I saw in New York. There was a line out the door for someone who sold cookie dough as if it's ice cream. So it's like sprinkled cookie dough, then like ice cream-flavored cookie dough. It was like cookie dough is the main thing. Another one is cheese. Like, people do fondues, they have fondue bars... Something that's... What else is a side ingredient that could be [made into a main dish]?

Shaan Puri

I don't know if it's a side ingredient exactly, but cereal does this too. There were these viral things where it's like cereal bars. All you do is just milk and cereal, and that's it. You can come... normally that's not a restaurant, it's a side... it's like literally a side dish of a side dish. And they made it the focus of the restaurant, and that made the restaurant notable and remarkable for people to talk about and go to.

Sam Parr

Or an eye or a whipped cream ball, like a whipped cream store. Just like anything that is typically an afterthought, that is a topping or a side to the main thing, make that your thing. Okay, the second one is to have normal foods but in different colors. A few examples: rainbow bagels. They were crazy popular. They're still popular, but they went through a cycle. The second one is rainbow kettle corn. That's quite popular. When I was a kid, I remember a couple of times buying green ketchup. Do you remember green ketchup?

Shaan Puri

yeah dude

Sam Parr

I love green ketchup

Shaan Puri

it was just red ketchup but green right it was literally just the color was different

Sam Parr

It's just the name. It's just a normal thing but a different color. The latest trend this year on TikTok was cloud bread, which is basically... you know, everyone is baking at home now. It's just bread that's kind of blue and white and looks like a cloud.

Shaan Puri

Right, and by the way, your side thing, main thing... I got another example of that. You know Captain Crunch? The Crunch Berries were always just the extra. Then they came out with Captain Crunch, just the berries—just the Crunch Berries—and it was like way more popular.

Sam Parr

yeah or like lucky charms with only the marshmallows

Shaan Puri

yeah exactly

Sam Parr

So, you take the thing that's supposed to be the topping... yeah, the topping, the second or third string thing, and make it the first string thing.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

Okay, the third one is the same thing but a different size. This is pretty common. So, like huge pizzas that you can't fit through the door, huge sundaes—they call it "everything but the kitchen sink"—or a sushirito. Have you seen sushirito? That's a chain, right? Yep. So, it's just sushi that isn't cut; it's just a long piece of sushi. Another example is I had a friend named Sol—you probably know him—and he created a KitKat bar that was the size of a cake.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

He would make these things, and so I've actually never seen this sold. But you get the idea: a KitKat bar that's the size of a loaf of bread.

Shaan Puri

In San Francisco, they have this place called Bob's Donuts (or Bob's something). They have this humongous doughnut - it's like a doughnut the size of, you know, two of my heads. You could buy it and then try to eat it, and then you could take pictures of it because you're eating this enormous donut. Boom!

Sam Parr

That's the whole hook. It's not special, but I mean, it becomes special. It's just a normal thing but a different size, okay? Or like in Saint Louis, the whole thing is... this is so silly how this works. In Saint Louis, our pizza is cut into squares.

Shaan Puri

right right right

Sam Parr

so it's around remember

Shaan Puri

You kind of said one earlier about sushi. Sushi sometimes comes in these like boats, or if you go to a beer place and they serve it in a boot or whatever. It's like... it can also be, you know, a punch bowl that's in a fish bowl or whatever.

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

It could be bigger and in a non-traditional container, like the kitchen sink.

Sam Parr

Yes, the same thing but different size. Okay? Or it could be miniature, you know, just something that... you know, whatever. Like White Castle mini cheeseburgers. Okay, so the fourth one: combine two things that are quite different. I've got a... this is a really easy one. There are a ton of examples. The first one is the cronut. Pretty easy, right? The latest trend right now on TikTok is pancake cereal. I don't even know what it is. There's a recipe, but I don't even know what it is. But it's... I don't know. Okay, look it up actually while we're talking, Brea. It's probably... it's probably just... I don't know.

Shaan Puri

probably pancakes and cereal okay

Sam Parr

No, they bake it. They call it "pancake cereal." It really is just probably normal cereal made out of like the same ingredients. They just bake it at home and it looks like the shape of a pancake. Same with donut cereal. But... do you remember ramen burger?

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

okay so there's ramen burger there's fairy bread do you know what fairy bread is

Shaan Puri

no what is that

Sam Parr

It's basically just bread with sprinkles. Okay, so you're just taking two things that don't normally go together and you mash them up. Just like a dessert burger, very simple. Or you can get a cream cheese bell pepper sandwich.

Shaan Puri

Right, and the more unusual it is... You know, it's Doritos Locos Tacos, right? It's when KFC came out with the fried chicken bun or whatever, and I was like, "The bun is fried chicken?" You know, the more shocking, I would say the better in this case.

Sam Parr

Yes, you just take two things and smash them together. It's pretty easy and relatively simple. Okay, the fourth or fifth thing is you make something that's normally a crappy food and turn it into something fancy. For example, tater tots or mozzarella sticks—you add a fancy twist to them. Or you could go the opposite way, taking something pretty fancy and making it not fancy, although that might be gross. But you get the idea. Then the final one is you take some type of food allergy. This one isn't actually that sexy. You take some type of food and just make something for food allergies. For instance, there's Banza, which is chickpea pasta. Then there's Lewellen's ice cream, I think it's called, in Brooklyn. It's vegan ice cream—only vegan ice cream.

Shaan Puri

Right, like Oatly is like this, right? It's milk not made from cows. Boom! This is now so popular that this almost can't go viral anymore. But maybe if you chose some category that's not typical... it feels like a lot of these are now mainstream at this point.

Sam Parr

It works so well! Here's what I would do: I would open up... this was what I was thinking about doing. I mean, I would never... I don't think I would do it, but maybe one day I would want to actually. It seems pretty fun. I would have a kitchen in New York, and I would get it in a really high-traffic area. Every three months, I would try to do a launch, right? Launch like a rainbow cheesecake or, you know, I don't even know. I'm just making stuff up. Then, what I would do is mix a ton of stuff and just post a picture. I would drive a little bit of traffic to it and see what had the cheapest cost per click.

Shaan Puri

Right, yeah. So what you're saying is just reuse the hype cycle. No, embrace that the hype cycle exists and just make a kitchen that's going to rotate every month into a new crazy concoction. People will line up every month to go try the new thing, and you'll build your brand as like Willy Wonka when he would create, you know, now... everlasting gobstoppers or whatever. You know, like it creates a new crazy concoction that you gotta get from [the kitchen].

Sam Parr

It goes a step further. Do you remember the cronut? Yeah, so cronuts got popular in 2013. It was invented by a guy named Dominique... what's his last name? I don't know what his last name is, but he's a French pastry chef. He's a big name chef. He made the cronut because he was like, "I just want to have fun and create something new and interesting all the time." And this one just kind of hit. He actually trademarked the name "cronut," and he is like a purist; he's like an artist. So, he didn't actually want to license it to people, but he easily could have made tens of millions or more by licensing that name to someone. So, there's a step further. You create the food, and you've got to come up with a really cute name. You could actually get it trademarked, and there are licensing deals there. I think this is super fascinating. I think if someone invested one year of their life to do this and $100 or less, they could probably get one or two hits.

Shaan Puri

Right, which may not be the right thing to do with your life. But if that's you, if you're like, "I'm doing it," great, great, good!

Sam Parr

it's definitely fun it seems fun but yeah

Shaan Puri

It'll teach you a lot. I think it'll teach you a lot about business and marketing to be able to approach food this way. Okay, so a couple of other opportunities I see here. I mentioned, I think, investing or private equity. I think we'll start to scoop up these brands. I think that's one opportunity. The second one is, I think somebody could build a kind of Guy Fieri of Instagram food character who basically just goes and tries to find the next... you know, who really does make the absolute best oatmeal or whatever, right? Like, come up with, you know, go to every category and then just hunt for the best one ever. Then you do the drop on Instagram for that brand, for that shop. Maybe you found, you know, the absolute best Philly cheesesteak in Philly, and then you drop that. So I think somebody could create that if they were a foodie and that was their thing. The other thing is a little bit more boring, which is like we've talked about cold chain 3PL. So basically, how the heck do you ship all this stuff and keep it where it actually tastes good when it arrives, you know, 3 to 5 days later across the country? How do you make it work? I think that there's just a bigger and bigger need for cold chain logistics. I think we've heard this a few times now, and I feel like if somebody's working on that or somebody has one of those, I would love to talk to you just to learn. I think this business is booming, and I think more and more people are going to go into it.

Sam Parr

Okay, do you want to hear one more food thing that we could discuss? Do you remember as a kid seeing these books? I'm pulling them up now, called "Eat This, Not That"?

Shaan Puri

no what is that

Sam Parr

Okay, so it was awesome. I loved it! I bought it once just because it was at Barnes & Noble, and it ended up being pretty amazing. Google "Eat This, Not That." It started as one book, almost like a coffee table-esque book.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

And on the left side, it says "Eat this," and on the right side, it says "Not that." For example, it started as just a general comparison, but then they eventually expanded to include desserts, fast food, and all types of food. An example would be: "Eat this: Arby's Beef Cheddar Classic, 450 calories, 20 grams of fat. Not this: Arby's Roasted Turkey Ranch Sandwich, which has 800 calories." So it shows two things that are quite similar and suggests eating one instead of the other.

Shaan Puri

To say "eat a salad, don't go to Arby's" is like saying, if you're at Arby's, get this one, not that one.

Sam Parr

Yeah, or let's see if they have different Denny's breakfasts, or like IHOP versus Denny's, or whatever. "Eat This or..." Yeah, you get the idea, right?

Shaan Puri

yeah okay this is cool

Sam Parr

it's are you looking at it do you Google it

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

It's pretty sick, and it's been around since probably 2002. I mean, I think I bought this when I was pretty young. Let's see, there's a whole...

Shaan Puri

Half a million followers on Instagram, which is... I think all these old, kind of publications like either magazines or little brands like this, today they're all just Instagram accounts. I think that's the way to reinvent these [publications].

Sam Parr

Wow, okay. So the "Eat This, Not That" as of 2012 had sold 8 million copies of the book. And they spun it up into a magazine. Wow, it's freaking amazing. I'm just pulling this up... Here's what I would do right now today if I wanted to get popular on Instagram: I would do the same thing, just for Instagram. Just a whole "Eat This, Not That" on Instagram.

Shaan Puri

Totally, and the format is so good. It's just a split screen: it has half the food item on the left and half the food item on the right, and then it has the nutrition facts about why one versus the other. I think a lot of this stuff is super shareable on Instagram, and you would grow very quickly. Like, I can see their Instagram right now... it looks kinda shitty. They're not doing a great job. I think you could basically steal this concept, pick a different name, and grow a big Instagram account off this.

Sam Parr

oh yeah if I

Shaan Puri

was bored I would do something like this

Sam Parr

Yeah, and it's kind of a fun topic. I'm reading all about it now. This is pretty amazing; I hadn't thought about this in forever. But anyway, there you go. I think if you did that for 6 or 12 months, you'd get hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram.

Shaan Puri

alright we'll switch off food let's go to something else what do you want to talk about

Sam Parr

do you want to talk about money real quick tiller money

Shaan Puri

okay yeah what's this

Sam Parr

okay very fascinating do you you what do you use to track your money

Shaan Puri

I don't use anything to track my money I use excel

Sam Parr

Okay, everyone says that—who I've talked to, not everyone, but a lot of people. Here's usually the answer I hear: "I use Mint" or "I use Personal Capital" or "I use..." right? I have...

Shaan Puri

mint yeah as well

Sam Parr

and can I ask you why don't you use mint

Shaan Puri

I used Mint back in the day. I mean, I used Mint like 10 years ago, so it's just kind of one of those things that I don't have a habit of going and looking at. I don't like looking at that stuff because it makes me focus on... you know, expenses and saving money here and there. I just don't think that's fun. I don't enjoy that.

Sam Parr

So, I went and looked at a bunch of subreddits about money because I usually use Personal Capital, and I don't like it for a bunch of reasons right now. When I asked about 10 different people how they track their money, most of whom I asked—maybe 5 or 6—use Excel. That's kind of crazy to me because how many accounts do you have that you need to track? Over 10?

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, so it doesn't matter if you're wealthy or not wealthy. Most people, if they have a wife or a husband, have like: - Your checking account - Bank account - 401(k)s - Stock investments - Maybe your home loan These are common financial elements for couples, regardless of wealth status.

Shaan Puri

credit card

Sam Parr

Credit cards... you probably have 2 or 3 credit cards. Typically, I imagine the average Joe has 10 or more, so it's actually a lot to track, regardless of whether you have money. I've noticed that a lot of people use Excel. I did some research and found this thing called Tiller Money. It's not like I've discovered it; I think it's pretty popular already. The landing page is beautiful, but I'm just fascinated by this business. All it is, is if you go to Google Sheets and click on "Tools," then "Add-ons," you'll see the ability to add plugins to Google Sheets. Tiller Money is just a plugin for Google Sheets that costs $100 a year. What it does is automatically import your bank accounts and any other accounts into Google Sheets, using templates that they have, or you can just make your own template. I've never seen someone build such a sick and awesome business off of a Google Sheet add-on. It's incredibly fascinating.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, this is good. I like this. I think this is, of all the money manager things, this appeals to me more because it feels like I'm managing my own money. In reality, you know, the thing I'm always worried about is data. I don't want my data on all these different services. Like, I'm not gonna try your new finance app because I just don't want to link my bank account to all this new stuff. But if they could do this where this was like self-hosted in some way, like it's just a template, that'd be great. It doesn't look like that's the case, but it is sweet. I like it.

Sam Parr

So, if you go to Google Sheets right now and click "Add-ons" on the top right, once you're in a sheet, you can see the add-ons. I actually just realized I use a few add-ons. The other add-on I use is called **Supermetrics**, which pulls in data from SQL and stuff like that. I bet they do close to **8 figures** a year in revenue. We've talked about plugins for WordPress, and we've talked about plugins for Chrome. Google Sheets plugins is another thing that is super, super fascinating to me, and I completely overlooked it. It's so neat! I don't know what else to say other than it's cool.

Shaan Puri

So, you had a thing that I thought was kind of interesting about open salaries. What is this? Do you want to talk about this, or where do you want to go?

Sam Parr

I'll let you lead a little bit, but it's so funny. I'll put stuff in here throughout like two weeks and...

Shaan Puri

you I

Sam Parr

3 days goes past and I'm like wait did I write that or did you write that

Shaan Puri

So, alright, we'll do it quick. You put this thing on here, and I got kind of intrigued. So, what is the idea behind open salaries? It's kind of crazy that we don't know what other people make. Not in a gossip kind of way, but really, the company knows what everybody makes, while the employees don't. This actually puts the employees at a pretty big disadvantage. You don't know when you're underpaid. You don't know if there's any systemic bias. For example, women or minorities might not be getting paid as much as tall white males or whatever. It's kind of weird that this is a taboo thing; nobody talks about it. You're not allowed to talk about it, and it's seen as kind of a faux pas. However, it would actually benefit any employee to have transparency regarding what people are getting paid. It can be anonymized, but being able to see what others in your role at your company are earning is important. You mentioned that Colorado has a law stating that, starting in 2021, employers have to disclose pay rates and ranges for job posts of any job that could be worked in Colorado, including remote jobs. I thought that was kind of interesting. Then we have companies like Buffer and Whole Foods that have been doing this for a while. Buffer kind of tried to make a name for themselves by being the open, transparent company. They share everybody's salary, and literally, you can find a link to see everyone's salary at Buffer.

Sam Parr

whole foods lets you now whole foods you can see people's salary

Shaan Puri

You put that in there, or Abreu did? I don't know. I haven't seen that one, but I wanted to share a couple of interesting things that I found when I was digging into this. First, check out this spreadsheet of Buffer salaries. I just put it in the chat so you can click this. Anybody can Google this and find it. You can see that Joel, the CEO, is making $280,000 this year. You can also see what his EA is making; she's making $89,000. You can just go down the whole company roster. Everybody's salary is public, which I think is pretty insane but interesting. Then you have things like the Google kind of secret spreadsheets. I don't know if you've seen these, but at big companies, people are starting to make an anonymous spreadsheet and say, "Hey, put in your salary, your level, and your location here so we can all have more transparency." You don't have to put your name next to it, and they circulate it within companies. Microsoft had one, Google had one, Facebook had one. In the Google one, I forgot who it was, but some woman created this, and within two days, 10,000 people had put in their information. Now, there's over 20,000 people in the open Google database. You can go to...

Sam Parr

link can you link to that

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's right here. I have it at the bottom. So, these are kind of cool, and it's interesting how viral these go. Then I was looking at Levels.fyi, which I know you know about.

Sam Parr

it's yeah yeah yeah

Shaan Puri

It's a place to go see. You can go and say, "Alright, I'm interviewing at Amazon and Facebook." They labeled me an L5 Software Engineer located in the Bay Area. What am I going to get paid? How much is it? Or I got an offer, and I don't know if that was a fair offer or a low offer. Did they lowball me? You can go on Levels, and FYI, it's the same thing—crowd-sourced information about what you make at these different companies. If you look at their traffic, they're getting about 1.5 million visits a month. This thing has really elevated from a side project to something pretty legit. They have job boards now. If you click at the top, they actually have the thing we were talking about last episode: "Negotiator as a Service." If you click the top, it's a slick little website where they have a calculator that says, "What company? Where are you located? How many years of experience? Here's what you're getting. Here's what we think you should get paid based on the Levels database," which is now in the tens of thousands of entries or something like that. Then they basically say, "Hey, if you pay us $500, we'll negotiate your offer for you." They have former recruiters from these companies that freelance with them. You book a time, talk about your offer, how you're feeling about it, and what you really want out of this. Then they'll negotiate for you. They show all these success stories, like this person at Facebook got $20,000 more than their offer, this person got $40,000 more, and this person got $10,000 more. They just take a flat fee of whatever—$500, $600, I think. I think there's some interesting stuff going on in this transparency around what people are making. It really fits in with my values. I think it's crazy that people don't talk about money more. I think it would help everybody if we talked about money more. It would be less taboo and less like a big, deep, dark secret if people were more open about it. I think that's the whole world is going.

Sam Parr

can I give you a counterpoint for that

Shaan Puri

go for it

Sam Parr

I thought that was interesting, and I'm not saying how I feel because I'm still thinking about it. But Leo... I forget his last name, Leo, but he did it from Buffer, the co-founder of Buffer who no longer works there. So, Buffer started with this whole transparency thing. That was like the whole shtick, and it worked.

Shaan Puri

about everything users revenue salaries everything

Sam Parr

It was a shtick that got popular among bloggers, in particular. There's this guy named Pat, and he has this blog called **SmartPassiveIncome.com**. I used to read it when I was 15, 16, or 18—something like that in high school. He would make money by creating books and doing a bunch of other side businesses. He would reveal his income every single month, and other bloggers copied him. It was a really cool thing. John Lee Dumas did it, all these really cool people did it, Buffer did it, and that was their shtick to get popular. And it worked because Buffer's product isn't really special; there are so many different versions. Leo said in an interview, someone was like, "Dude, this whole transparency thing is pretty cool. You guys got traffic and everything. Do you think that it would work?" I believe—I don't want to quote them because I saw this a year and a half ago, two years ago—but something like this works now, and it's great for us. However, I have a feeling when we get to 75, 80, 90, or 100 people, it's not gonna work anymore, and it's actually gonna hurt us big time. I forget exactly why, but I believe Steve... what's that man's name? I'm getting all my names screwed up. Someone else at Apple, like a head honcho at Apple, said something similar. He was like, "No, the transparency thing actually can hurt. It hurts the company after a while." We tried it, and so I actually think that maybe this is good for startups, but it kind of sucks after a long time. Because look, let's say you own a small business that does $20,000,000 in sales, and you're the business owner. If you wanted to pay yourself $3,000,000 a year, that's pretty shady compared to a $50,000 receptionist or something. But that's like your right to do that. Why would you want to share that with everyone?

Shaan Puri

yeah as the employer it's not great right buffer used it to get a bunch of traffic because there's the it was it was an effective growth tactic for them hey if we're open about this we'll get a bunch of people asking what the heck is buffer and some of them will use it but as the employer it's not great as the employee it's great and so that's it depends kinda which side of the coin are you on also it depends how far you go the buffer thing where they write everybody's name and how much they make bit much but the Google thing where it's like hey look there's thousands of employees here I need to know that within my level within my kind of area am I underpaid overpaid or you know somewhere in between it gives people peace of mind and and it gives them you know an opportunity to get more sort of fairness or equity in terms of being able to negotiate with information information that the other side has that you don't have so I like it from the employee perspective and I think it's but I wouldn't go the buffer way of writing everybody's names down now at a small company cool that kinda happens but I thought that was I think it's kinda cool I think there's definitely interest around this so you know a couple little ideas of of things that people could do so levels f dot f y I is cool is working I'm surprised that somebody like you know our buddy andrew wilkinson doesn't go buy a company like this it's it's kind of a n of 1 company it has like a unique data advantage it's in it does job boards which he loves as a business model on top of all this traffic that they're getting and it's kinda like a side project that's probably like you know reached the max of that of of which you know the 2 guys behind it really can take it the other ways that you could do this I think you could do this in any vertical so I don't know is there levels of fyi in the like hedge fund world or consulting or banking like if you're in those worlds and there isn't a tool like this you should just make the levels of fyi database for your industry nursing I don't I don't know whatever the industry is this product can work across those and so I think that's cool even within levels somebody could go further and be like alright I'm gonna take product managers or data science and really own that if they were somebody who has a big audience for that like if if that guy lenny lenny who's got a big blog and and kinda audience around product managers he could do this for product management and do it better than levels can generally so I think the levels concept could be exported and and done in different areas

Sam Parr

When we first launched, like maybe the first couple of months, we didn't have an audience. I'm saying this so anyone could do it. We didn't have an audience, so I wrote a post called "How Much Money Do Founders Make?" because I was trying to figure out, like, do I pay myself or do I not pay myself, right? If you Google "How much money do founders have in their bank account?" you might see it on The Hustle. All I did was take a Google Form and post it on Hacker News, and it went to number one. They eventually took it down because I think that goes against their terms of service, like having a survey. But I got like 300 or 400 replies. I asked people how much money they have in their checking account, how much they have in their bank account, how much they pay themselves, how much they have in illiquid assets, what their job title is, and where they live. I got hundreds of replies, and I published all the data. I took out any information where you could learn about someone, and people loved sharing anonymous information. They loved reading anonymous information. It was amazing. So, I agree, I think it's pretty sick. It was way... oh, there it is! You posted it. It was way easier to get people's... I'm not literally getting their information because it's all anonymous, but people were so forthcoming with us. It was pretty cool and pretty interesting.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I want somebody to do this with VCs. I think most people don't know how much VCs make and all the different people in the food chain, like the GPs versus a partner versus an associate or whatever. I feel like somebody should kind of crack that egg open and be like, "Look, here's the numbers, here's what it is," and anonymize it, but give people some transparency into what's really going on.

Sam Parr

Let's talk about this for a second. There are two companies that come to mind that are interesting to me when we're discussing this. The first is PitchBook. You know what PitchBook is?

Shaan Puri

yes you know what do you pay for it

Sam Parr

It's so expensive! No, my sister-in-law works there though, and so every once in a while she'll be kind enough and let me ask her a question to look up. No, I don't pay for it because it's really expensive. It's like $25,000, I think.

Shaan Puri

yep

Sam Parr

So, PitchBook is kind of like Crunchbase but souped up. You pay $25 and get access to a lot of information about privately held companies. The reason PitchBook is interesting is that they have a team of outsourced folks. I don't know which country they're in, but I think it's the Philippines. They literally have around 200 people. By the way, PitchBook is a publicly traded company. You can go and read about them; they're owned by Morningstar. You could actually see their operations and how they work. They're growing like crazy, with over $100 million in revenue. They have a team of folks who call venture capitalists (VCs) and literally just ask them for information. They also call companies to gather information. For some reason, I don't know how or why, people give them information. That's one of the many ways they get data. The second thing is this business called... is it called "the org"? Is that what it's called?

Shaan Puri

yes

Sam Parr

Okay, The Org. Very interesting because in a nutshell, their tagline is: > "The Org: Transparency starts here. Build a better organization with a public org chart. Celebrate your colleagues." Basically, that's just kind of crap. Yeah.

Shaan Puri

let's not read their marketing

Sam Parr

yeah really what it is I mean I'm sure they do all that nonsense but

Shaan Puri

it's a fucking it's an org chart it's a public org chart

Sam Parr

You pay money and you get access to people's org charts. This helps you know who to email to sell things to.

Shaan Puri

right exactly

Sam Parr

And that's cool. I don't know why they don't just say that, but they've raised a lot of money—like, I think tens of millions of dollars. It's probably going to be a monster business. So, I would do two things with the salary thing. First, I would actually hire people in the Philippines or wherever and just hit it hard. I would trust that a lot of people would be pretty transparent. The second thing is I would paywall it, kind of like the organization, and I would sell this to every HR department in the country.

Shaan Puri

So I have a friend that is doing this with Shopify sales. I showed him a way to estimate how much a Shopify store is doing in sales. It's not a rough estimate, it's actually pretty good.

Sam Parr

What is that? What can I get you? You don't have to say if it's true. Is it because you order from them and you see what the order number is?

Shaan Puri

That's one of the ways, yeah, and that was one of the best ways. So I showed him, I said, "Look, this is useful. People want to know what their competitors are doing."

Sam Parr

and the second way is you look at the traffic

Shaan Puri

Yeah, you still need a couple of other pieces of information. For example, you need to know how much the average order is and things like that. But roughly, that will tell you how they're doing. So now, he emails me a report every month that shows me these four companies that I decided, "Hey, I want to track these four companies." He emails me a report that includes their sales, their social media following, how many ads they're running on Facebook, and one other thing, which is the month-over-month changes between those. I think it's a great idea. He was kind of looking for something to do, and I told him, "Look, I think this is a good pivot." I don't know exactly how well he's doing. I should really shout out the name, but I kind of don't remember. Let me look it up while we're doing this.

Sam Parr

how'd you find this person

Shaan Puri

He was in my mastermind. Let me see what his thing is called. It's called... *dramatic pause*... let me figure it out.

Sam Parr

and you came up with the with the

Shaan Puri

I told him, "Look, he was like, 'Dude, I'm good with data. I'm interested in this kind of stuff, but I also have a team in the Philippines.' So, I really like this." Okay, so here it is. The website is **ShopSalesData.com**. I hope he gets a bunch more customers from this. I hope he's still doing it; he still emails me my report. I hope he's taking on more customers right now. It's a monthly report of Shopify competitor data in your inbox every month for **$100** or something like that a month.

Sam Parr

Yeah, this is great! I mean, you could do the same with Facebook ad accounts. Just like... because Facebook shows everyone their ads, you can say, "Email me my competitors' ads every time they launch a new one."

Shaan Puri

Exactly. I think there's some good stuff in these kinds of data-based businesses where you're: 1. Collecting data from public sources 2. Cleaning it up 3. Structuring it 4. Offering it as a service to a bunch of other companies This approach can be quite valuable in the current business landscape.

Sam Parr

okay do you wanna do a mini one do we have a mini one

Shaan Puri

Yeah, let's do a quick one. What else we got? Do you have anything good from your first week working at a real job?

Sam Parr

It is my first week, and now I'm in my second week. I'm sitting on a beach in Hawaii, so you're doing it! Having a job rocks. I should have done this years ago. I love having a job; it's cool, man. HubSpot announced that they had a $1,000,000,000 run rate in revenue. That's pretty amazing! So, there are like two things. This is my first real job, or like a corporate job. I mean, that's not exactly true. I would have friends, like my friend Neville, who works for himself. He would be like, "Hey, do you want to go hang out on a Wednesday at noon?" And I'm like, "No, dude, I have a job!" So, I treat running my company as 100% more than...

Shaan Puri

more than a job it's 2 jobs yeah

Sam Parr

It's more than... I would call it a 9 to 5. I'm like, "Yeah, it was in fact way more than 9 to 5." But I was like, I'm pretty straight; I get to work at 9, I do my thing. Anyway, I tease about this, but yeah, my first corporate job is going to slow down. The amount of meetings is pretty crazy. I told them I'm not doing meetings like this anymore because I'm going to make stuff. But I don't know how... it's still crazy to me how people find time to get the actual work done.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I realized how that works. Managers don't get work done; managers just go to meetings. Then, individual contributors, or ICs as they're known, are the ones who actually sit down and do the work because they don't have back-to-back meetings throughout the day.

Sam Parr

but I think even

Shaan Puri

like your work is basically just communicating between people

Sam Parr

But my 7 days of working have shown me that even ICs have a lot of meetings.

Shaan Puri

They should not have that many. They should have like 1, 2, or 3 a day, but they should have somewhere between 3 to 5 hours of uninterrupted time.

Sam Parr

Yeah, like... So is that... I just don't understand how people... So like, I'm telling everyone at HubSpot, "Don't talk to me for these hours." I... and I say it nicely of course, but I say, "I'm doing this for the better of everyone. Like, I'm gonna make good stuff, so let me go up in my hole and just don't bother me."

Shaan Puri

alright what's been the worst part so far the meetings

Sam Parr

let's be honest

Shaan Puri

okay what what what meet were the meetings boring or just the amount of them

Sam Parr

The amount of paperwork is overwhelming. I didn't know what Workday is, and there’s just so much paperwork that I've always had people do for me, and now I'm having to do it myself. What's the worst part? You know, everyone asks, "Is having a boss weird?" because I've never had a boss before. No, I think it's going to suck after a while, of course. Having a boss might suck, but I'm so pumped! I don't have to make certain decisions anymore. I get to just shovel things onto Kieran's plate that I don't like. For example, I can say, "Hey, should we hire this person?" and I don't have to make that decision. I love that! I think it's awesome. So, having a boss has not sucked so far. I don't know, what do you think would be the worst parts? I'll tell you if they are. What was your worst experience?

Shaan Puri

Part of the issue is that there are certain meeting types that I found completely soul-sucking. One of them was called a **calibration meeting**. It's basically like... even just describing it gives me some pain. Essentially, you're trying to promote people, but how do you know if every manager has their own criteria for promotions? How do you ensure you're promoting people equally and fairly throughout the company? So, you have to do these calibration meetings where you sit down and say, "This person's up for promotion," or "They're getting promoted because of this, this, and this." Then, another person might say, "Well, I felt like they weren't great at this," or "They didn't do a great job with that project." You have to kind of defend them. For me, it was boring on two levels. First and foremost, I didn't know anyone else in the company. I just sat there for three hours, unable to say anything because I hadn't interacted with any of these people. I just got here; I just got bought. I don't know these people, so I can't give any input, nor do I have any opinion on whether the feedback is valid or not. The second thing was that, even after all this talk, I still felt like the person who was the most vocal and the best salesperson was getting their way, while the person who wasn't that great at talking was not getting their way. We could have just skipped all of this. It would have almost been better had we not gotten into this room and just said, "You sell your person, and you sell your person, and you debate this person." It feels like the better debater wins in big companies, and I think that's really crazy.

Sam Parr

Well, I think we do this at our company all the time. For example, if a meeting is scheduled for 30 minutes and during the meeting I feel like, "Okay, I've said what I had to say. I don't need to be here anymore," I’ll just leave. It wasn't considered rude to say, "Hey, you need to leave now. You're done." It was kind of a helpful thing. I'm still trying to figure out how to politely do that here. I might ask, "Do you guys need me here? Can I leave?" Or I’ll just say, "I'm out." You know, I've said what I needed to say and I've heard what I needed to hear. You guys can talk, especially...

Shaan Puri

On Zoom or whatever, you just sort of like hold up, wave, and then click exit.

Sam Parr

The second thing is HubSpot is doing really well, especially in the software business. This sounds like obvious stuff to anyone who's in software, but I've never been at a company like this. If you figure out how to reduce your churn to very little, or even positive—so for every dollar someone spends, it's above $1 the next year—and you pick a big enough market, it's just magical. Now I understand why people are saying, "Oh, you know, why is this company valued so highly?" It's because of sticky revenue. Software revenues are something where you're building an entire business off of it, and you know that the switching costs are quite high. It's pretty amazing. Software—just start a software company! It's so much better than everything else. It's really hard and it's a slog early on, but if you can get your churn right and you pick a big enough market, it's just something. And if you can figure out how to have a good marketing machine, which all of this sounds like, "Oh yeah, if only you could do that," I know. But you can kind of figure it out, actually. I think given enough time—if you give yourself like 5 years to figure it out—I think you can.

Shaan Puri

Well, I think all the things you're saying are true, and they really just point to this one lesson I've learned the hard way over and over again. It's much more important to pick what game you play than to try to be the best player at a game. Because if you pick the wrong game, even becoming the best player still ends up in a small outcome or a really painful path. But if you pick the right game to play, whether you become the best or not—even if you're just kind of in the top 25%—it's just so much better to win that way. In this case, we've talked about and done different types of businesses, right? I did a social network; I tried to make a new social network. It was the wrong game to play, dude. It's so hard—so hard. So, there's a low chance of probability of success. You did a media business, which is also hard. It has higher odds of success, but a lower size of the prize. If you...

Sam Parr

you get it right way lower size

Shaan Puri

E-commerce is just a pain in the ass. There are tons of headaches all the time with your supply chain and logistics because you have real-world products. You have to ship them all around the world, and you're going to have customers with returns and things that are just not as easy as software. We've talked about all these different models, like doing a paid newsletter or whatever. For my money, by far the best one is to build a software business. A software business can scale and can be improved over time. Unlike e-commerce, when you make a crappy e-commerce product, you have to create a better version. That takes you six months to make, and then you release it. All those old customers who got the bad product still think you suck. With software, you push the update, and all of a sudden, every single customer has the new best thing. There are just so many tiny advantages, and software is the way to go.

Sam Parr

But we... I want to say something that David Siegel [said]. So we had David Siegel on last time. He had a $1 billion, or close to $1 billion, tea business. And I go, "David, why are you doing brick-and-mortar stores when you could be doing software?" And he said the right thing. What did he say?

Shaan Puri

he was like oh it's fun I love selling product

Sam Parr

And I was like, "That's the best answer! That is a wonderful answer." I think that, like, will I ever be able to start an enterprise software company? I think that if I was going to, it would either have to be very soon or even a few years ago. You have to do it when you're really in a place where money is the number one thing. It's like, "I got to get paid. I got to get my hit." In that case, yeah, I would do anything to make money. But where I am now, and where I think a lot of people are, is that you really have to... I agree with everything you said, but you have to add the "and also." Not just being passionate about it, but what excites you enough that you're willing to get good at it over a decade?

Shaan Puri

Right, we'll float your boat. Alright, so let's take you... Okay, you're happy at HubSpot, everything's great. You're gonna be there for 20 years, we know that. Alternate reality, you know... We all know you're happy at HubSpot, you'll be there for 2 decades. It's great, it's... you know, sunshine and rainbows. Let's say alternate reality: they fire you tomorrow. You're gonna go build something else. Where do you think you would go build? Would you do what you're... would you go media? Would you go something totally different? Would you go software? What do you think you would do?

Sam Parr

Everyone's gonna laugh at me because I say trucking, but I would do something in the agriculture space. Yeah, I think AgTech is interesting. I had a great call with this guy who I'm gonna... we gotta have this guy on the podcast. His name's... his son's name is Jordan. I can't remember, Rob Van Trump. It's called the Van Trump Report. So, the Van Trump Report is this guy who has a newsletter that does $20,000,000 a year in subscription revenue. He's the only writer, and he was telling me all about AgTech. Do you know what AgTech stands for?

Shaan Puri

yeah agricultural tech

Sam Parr

And he was just saying all types of things about what's going on. I think working with people from middle America, whether they're rich or not, they're more humble. They create things that actually impact the world, like getting food to you. I would do something in that space, or I would start another media company.

Shaan Puri

But okay, let's say you go into AgTech. You're probably going to be open to whatever, you know? You'll think of it then, but knowing what you know now: - Would you do media in agriculture? - Would you do something with actual farms and logistics? - Would you do technology? Hard tech like self-driving trucks? - Would you do a job-related thing? What model would you be wanting to do in that space?

Sam Parr

Well, okay, so I don't like this question because it could change every single day you ask me, but as of right now, I would start a blog in the ad tech space. Then eventually, I would turn it into a database. Kind of like this company TheOrg... I think I could create something like a database that's better. Yeah, that's what I would do. Okay, nice. I think that's what I would do as of right now. That fascinates me. Or I would create... do you know what Tiger 21 is?

Shaan Puri

isn't that like a like a kind of a conference or club or mastermind thing or something like that

Sam Parr

It's like a club for people who have investable assets north of **$10,000,000**. It costs **$30** a year, and they have about **1,000** people who are subscribed. My friend joined, and I looked at the back end. It was horrible, and I thought, "Oh, I'm just gonna clone that."

Shaan Puri

and what do they do with the with the members is it events or is

Sam Parr

It's like both, but they create little safe communities where you meet in groups of ten. You kind of show off your portfolio, and people criticize you and try to make you defend your position so you get better. But it got bought by private equity, so it makes a lot of money.

Shaan Puri

alright that's cool