SPEAKER_02
I've really heard this a bunch of times, which is a lot of times as an entrepreneur, you just need to be in the market. You need to be in the game. And even if your current thing's not working, if you are aware of these like inflection points, you're the perfect person to just shift over.
SPEAKER_01
All right. We had a good episode. Well, I think we talked about a lot of stuff.
What did we talk about? We talked about the Zapier for sound. We talked about,
SPEAKER_02
We talked about the opportunity now that college athletes can make money. What are the business opportunities around that that just opened up? And I think if you're interested in software,
SPEAKER_01
I think Sean, you actually gave like one of the, one of the better ideas in the last three months that we discussed. So that's kind of interesting. We talked about a new company that's creating a search engine for company documents.
It sounds boring, but it's actually could be quite a big business. What else did we talk about? The last thing is we talked about this
SPEAKER_02
business model idea of basically go take the R&D that the big companies do and that they make custom software for themselves, like the Starbucks mobile app or the Domino's pizza ordering app, and then make that available to all the mom and pop. So we did a bunch of examples of that and
SPEAKER_01
where the opportunities might be. All right. Listen up.
Let us know how, and how you liked it. My Twitter is theSampar, and then Sean's is SeanVP. While you're listening to this podcast, you're probably doing something else too.
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Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com. All right. What's going on? Yo.
I'm in New York. I had a hell of a week, but I'm here. Tell the story.
So I leave. So I'm driving. So I got this nice car, and I love driving it.
I'm living in New York for a few months. I wanted to do that long drive because it's fun for me in my car. I'm already, I got my dog, everything.
I get 15 hours into the drive. I get out of my hotel room, and I have two spare keys on the same ring because you can't leave one of these fancy keys in the car. Otherwise the car won't shut.
Right. So when I go to the hotel, I put them on one ring, and then when I get in the car, I separate them. I'm on the phone with my mom, firstly in the morning, just saying what's up.
Put my keys, both of them on the roof for a second. Get in the car, start the car, drive off. 60 minutes later, I stop for gas, and I go, shoot, the car's telling me that I can't start it because the keys aren't here.
What the heck? Where are the keys? Turns out I left them on the roof, 60 miles back, drove off, and I go back to find them over many hours of searching for them. Someone ran over both the key fobs. So you actually found the destroyed key.
I found the destroyed parts, and I had a locked bike. My nice bike was locked to the roof along with my Thule rack was locked in there. I find those keys, thankfully.
Otherwise I was going to have to call the welder to weld my bike off and pop this lock open. And I find those keys, but my fobs, my 800, I think they're 800 or 1000, they're expensive, completely smashed to bits. I call Mercedes, they tow my car.
This is on a Thursday. They go, we are not going to get a new key in until Thursday. So I was like, fuck.
SPEAKER_02
Oh, you're supposed to be in New York. You're stuck in Tennessee. You drove from Texas to New York.
You get stuck in Tennessee. Your car keys get smashed. Your car is just sitting at a gas station, and you can't get a new car key for a week.
And I'm with my dog too, who's like an 80
SPEAKER_01
pound Pipple. And I'm like, dude, what do I do? And he's like, well, we can just store it here. So I'm like, all right, well, I'm not going to stay in Tennessee for like eight days.
I try to get a private flight. I try to fly because you can't fly with a dog. Eventually, I like waited in line for hours to get a.
So for my point of view, I get a text message in our
SPEAKER_02
group chat that's like, how much does a private jet cost? What? Yeah, and I need to get to New York. I'm stuck here. I can't get on a normal flight because my, I have an 80 pound Pipple with me.
I don't want to leave my car, but I guess I have to. And how am I going to come back and get my car?
SPEAKER_01
Very confusing situation. It was a very confusing situation. Now, let me tell you a few things that I learned.
And this is related to this podcast. So I've flown private once or twice. I've never paid for it.
It was just like a rich guy who I went along. So yes, what I learned was, so we have a friend in this group. We don't have to say his name.
I don't know. We could or could not. But anyway, he went to Europe and he sent, he goes, I got a hotel that was $3,000 a night for $350.
And I was like, what? How? And he sent me, he sent us a screenshot of the email and he emailed the general manager of hotel and he goes, Hey, I'm, I work at this company. I'm going to be there. I don't, I mean, he said he worked at this company because it's a huge company just for clout, but it doesn't really mean anything.
I'm going to be there with my fiance, my budget's $400 a knife. Do you have anything available? I would love it to stay in this room or this room. Right. And he
SPEAKER_02
searches for all the five star hotels in that area. And he just sends the same thing to all the general
SPEAKER_01
managers. Yes. And then every once in a while, they give him a hotel. So he's staying in a $3,000 night hotel for $350.
And that got me thinking. So I Google Nashville private airport. And I was like, look, I want a private flight either like right now or first thing in the morning.
My budget is I'm willing to spend $7,000. Do you have any airlines or do you have any pilots that want some like quick work? And they were like, well, like it really costs $15,000. I was like, well, look, you tell me what, if you have someone who has work, you tell me what's the like, because like you think like private airlines, like there's no room to haggle, but it's like, they're, they're just like small businesses.
And so they get me a quote and that ended up falling through. But I realized that you could, they're like, uh, you know, like they actually got another bid, whatever. So it didn't work out.
But I realized you could totally haggle with these people. It was so fascinating. Yeah. The hotel thing is great because I feel like anybody can do that. And,
SPEAKER_02
and, you know, if you have a little social media following or whatever, I know Instagram influencers do this. I've never even thought about doing it. I probably still won't do it because it sounds like it's kind of time consuming.
But I thought that was pretty great. That little tactic that he uses, I thought, uh, you know, the situation when you got in a pickle, you had to get creative and, um, you probably like learned a bunch of stuff that you didn't know, you know, 24 hours before that and never really would have paid attention to had you not done that. Like, yeah, Bob's, you know, what to do when you're stranded private jets, can you commission a private jet? Can you hop onto somebody else's thing? Like, what are the other options? You know, you somebody's like, somebody from this podcast or the listener was like, I'll drive your like, Hey, when you get your key fob, I'll drive it to you in New York.
If you, uh, like hang out with me for 30 minutes
SPEAKER_01
or something like that. Yeah. I saw, I don't know what I'm going to do. My, it's not going to be the situation that I even resolved till tomorrow.
So I got to figure out what I get out of do. Coincidentally, I have to be a natural for work. August first ish.
There's like a podcast conference that helps out once we go to, so I might fly down there and drop. Anyway, crazy week. But can I tell you a few things I noticed when I, so I've driven and then we'll get some, we'll get to ideas, but I drive cross country a lot.
I've done it a bunch of times. I love doing long road trips in America and it's always fun to get out of our little Silicon Valley or New York or whatever, like fancy tech guy bubble. And a few things that like I noticed the first dude, the average American eats so poorly.
And it's, what makes you say that? Well, granted, I am like on the road, but like, I try to like actually go to these small towns, but man, like just seeing what I'll just like go to a gas station or I'll go to McDonald's or I'll go to like a restaurant and I, you know, because I eat in the parking lot with my dog and I'll just like sit at what and just look at what people order and like the lines are packed for rallies or sonic. Man, people, this whole healthy eating thing that I think is popular amongst like affluent people, I don't think it's popular among all types of people. And that is crazy to me because they're just killing themselves.
SPEAKER_02
You didn't see a lot of keto and intermittent fasting on the road trip. I'm what I'm hearing.
SPEAKER_01
No, man, just processed foods and I'm not like the healthiest. I mean, I splurge, I like diet, Coke and I'll eat McDonald's. But oh my gosh, when you're driving, you're going to see it's like pit
SPEAKER_02
stops. It's like here, you stop here for gasoline, you stop here for sugar, you stop here for caffeine. And then you just repeat that loop gasoline, sugar, caffeine, gasoline, sugar, caffeine.
SPEAKER_01
I'm just shocked at the, I'm shocked at just how there are very few healthy options. It's amazing. I just like, when I would go to like a fast food place, I'm like, dude, just give me a grilled chicken breast and like vegetables.
That's all I need. By the way, we had talked about
SPEAKER_02
vending machines before and then you're talking about this healthy eating thing. I got pitched to this company. I don't think I'm going to invest, but it's called daily blends.
And what it is is basically it's a vending machine. It's a healthy eating vending machine, but instead of snacks, it's basically just a meal in a jar and you push a button and it basically gives you a jar and the jar has like a ready made meal inside. All you got to do is kind of like put the dressing on top, mix it up and then you're ready to go.
And the thing I think is smart is they are, they're basically doing big corporate partnerships. So they're getting into like every hospital. So like every hospital needs to be, you know, should they, should a hospital really have a vending machine that's just like Twix, you know, you know, candy bars and like, you know, Red Bulls or should it actually have like healthy options? And so whether it's like big companies, big hospitals, the sort of thing, I can kind of squint my eyes and see like, obviously it depends on the food and how that works, but you know, they're able to charge way more than a typical vending machine because people are getting like a healthy meal out of it.
And they basically have like a central kitchen, they make all the jars and they go stock all their vending machines in that city. And I think this is kind of a cool idea. I'm not going to invest, but it reminds me a little bit about that, that water company, you know, the like office water company that's done
SPEAKER_01
really, really well. Yeah, it's like a like a billion dollar company, I forget, such as a bee.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Yeah, it's something. Bevy. Bevy is the name of it. Yeah. So Bevy is like one of these genius things. It's like, Hey, does your office want like fancier water fountain? Good.
Use a bevy and they just get planted in every company. And then it's just like a recurring chart.
SPEAKER_01
And the guy who Quinn, the guy who came on to talk about vending machines, he said that the thing is that these healthy options, like the the the honeypot is at WeWork where you have like a $8 sandwich. But he's like basically like most of America just wants a monster. Yeah, but I think
SPEAKER_02
I think that's fair. But I think the one smart thing they're doing is they're going to there's like if you just take hospitals and airports and things like that, like they kind of they're in sort of incented to have like another option and a kind of a better option, even just from optics point of view. And so I think you could do pretty well just by getting prime placements through through that.
But anyways, random tangent off of what you said about healthy eating on a
SPEAKER_01
road trip. And then the last thing that I'll mention is I am so bullish on America over the next two years, dude. Every rent a car place that I've gone to sold out, like it's so hard to rent a car.
Right. I had a friend maybe it was your friend, someone, I don't know if you're part of the said that they had a hitchhike in Hawaii because they couldn't get a rental car. They had to just like hold on and pick them up.
So rental cars are crazy. I like to stay at motel. Sometimes I'll stay at like a I'll range from a $30 night place to a $200 night place just like whatever I'm in the mood for, everything sold out.
The roads are packed. Every convenience store is packed. I'm so bullish on America.
And I went and talked to some of my staff and some of my friends who are just like average Americans, they have saved a significant amount of money over the last two years. And they're all like, I want to I want to go buy something. I need to spend.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. What was it after like the world war, whatever the roaring twenties, it seems like we might have the roaring 2020s here where people are ready to travel. They're ready to just go like kind of like max out all their experiences after being sheltered in place for a year plus sometimes
SPEAKER_01
and potentially saving money. Have you so I like went out and talked to people like who I know earn between 50 to like $150,000 a year. And I was like, how much money have you saved? And they're like more than I've ever saved in years.
And I was like, what are you gonna do? And they're like, I'm ready to I want to buy a Rolex or I want to buy a little bit. They want to spend. So like my traveling lately when we went to Miami and everything and we saw it like it just consistently like I try to buy a accessories for my trip like a like a new rack for my car.
Everything is out and I'm so bullish on America over the next two years. So that's just an interesting insight from traveling. You want to talk about ideas? Yeah, let's do it.
All right.
SPEAKER_02
So I think the big one is this NCAA thing. We had touched on this briefly, but basically the law changed that allowed college students to make money off their name and likeness. So previously, you're a college athlete.
Sorry, I should have said athletes. Previously, you're an NCAA athlete. If you make money, you lose your amateur status, you can't play your sport anymore.
And you can have your scholarship sort of like revoked even potentially if you run afoul of those laws. So that changed. And all of a sudden overnight, a bunch of opportunities opened up.
So this thing that was just bottled up because of regulations and rules, all of a sudden the court got taken out of the bottle and you get to see what was going to happen. And so I don't know if you've paid attention to this, but I think we should do a mini brainstorm on just what we see that's interesting or what you saw people doing. Yeah. So can you explain the rule because I think
SPEAKER_01
that there's some stuff around it. Can you not make the money yet? You can't access the funds?
SPEAKER_02
Is there anything weird like that? I don't know about that. I think they definitely started getting like signing contracts and getting paid. I don't know what the nuances of the fine print
SPEAKER_01
of the law is. I didn't look into that. So I had this sweetmate in college.
So if you Google Pure Sweat, have you heard of Pure Sweat basketball? Pure Sweat. So this guy named Drew Hanlon,
SPEAKER_02
he's from my hometown. Drew Hanlon. Yeah, he's the trainer like on Instagram that you always see
SPEAKER_01
with every NBA player. Yeah. So that I've known him since I was a kid and he was my sweetmate in college. So I've known him high school and then we went to college together and I was a track and field athlete.
He was a basketball player in college and he was my sweetmate. So I got to know him quite well and he'd be working on this thing called Pure Sweat. It started out just as like a binder of like paper binder full of workouts that he would sell for like $50 to kids in the neighborhood.
And then eventually he like made a website and an app and I don't know how successful it is, but he was always working at night on this thing. He didn't drink or he didn't party and he was always working on Pure Sweat. And he eventually after college started training, what's that guy like the Greek freak or whatever and then like Brandon Beale, Bradley Beale because he's from
SPEAKER_02
St. Louis, David Lee. Jason Payne, Zach Levine, Joe Amin.
Yeah. So he like trains all these guys
SPEAKER_01
and I've always, I wasn't close enough to ask him, but I was like, I wonder how much that pays. But anyway, he has this app that's like $100 a year and in college, I like we, I was a college at divisional college athlete. I wasn't like even remotely a big deal, but they make you sit to these seminars on how you are allowed and are not allowed to use your image or your name.
And he was in that office all the time because he was, he was wanted to make sure he was following the rules because he had this business Pure Sweat. So he couldn't sit like he, I think he was allowed to say like, this is true handling from Belmont University or whatever. But anyway, this guy crushes it.
I bet you makes $5 to $10 million a year off his little business. And I have a feeling, and by the way, do you know that like these like summer camps for basketball programs, that's the
SPEAKER_02
money maker. Yeah. My, I have friends that run these. That's the money maker.
And these guys,
SPEAKER_01
my friends, they were, they were paid by the hour, I think, but I think they were getting paid like $50 to $100 an hour, like something crazy in the program makes so much money from these camps. So what I think would, what I think is an easy opportunity is you're going to see loads of little pure sweats, which is like a really simple app that just has basketball workouts that you pay $100 or $200 a month or a year for. I have to imagine you're going to see loads of
SPEAKER_02
that. That's just such an easy low hanging fruit. My best friend, Trevor, he was a kid from Wyoming, sort of like a five foot nine on a good day.
White kid who when I got to Duke, I had found out, oh, the roommate I got randomly matched with, he's trying to walk onto the basketball team. So I'm expecting this like six, eight black dude to show up. And instead of this five, nine white guy shows up from Wyoming.
And I'm like, no, no, my roommate is trying out for the basketball team. I don't know who you are, but he's like, no, that's me. And you know, this guy was kind of like a drew hand type of guy, super hard worker, amazing shooter, you know, like whatever you would expect.
So he was like the best high school basketball player in Wyoming comes to Duke and tries to walk on, ended up long story short, didn't end up making the team. He was like the last guy cut. And then, you know, stayed on a sort of like water boy hoping for his like Rudy moment.
And then like that never came. Like some spot opened up. And then they took some other guy because his dad is like super rich and he's a booster of the school and they put him on the team instead.
And he was like, oh, fuck this. But anyways, in the summers, what he would do is he would go back to Wyoming. And people knew him there.
They were like, oh, you, you went to Duke, you're a, you're, you were like a legend in high school basketball here. And he would run these camps. And every single day, he would have basically like three camps running simultaneously.
Each kid just pays $100. He was underpricing it like crazy. And you would make his whole year's worth of money in like a two and a half month period.
And then he spent the other nine months out of the year just traveling around, learning stuff, and then come back and do it again the next summer because he had that brand affinity, the way that you're talking about that local brand affinity. So I wanted to go over a couple of things I saw happening. So the first thing is cameo was a winner.
So winners and losers. So, so cameo was a winner. All of a sudden, every athlete just put themselves up on cameo.
And if you go to cameos, like NCA page, you'll see, you know, they already cameo already has an NCA page. Yeah. They already have an NCA page. They were ready to go.
And this is like, you know, one of the easy ways celebrities make money. There's like, you know, 17 pages of people available on the NCA
SPEAKER_01
page. Oh my God. That's so funny.
And they're also cheap. It's like $25. Yeah. Right. Cause they're
SPEAKER_02
like, Oh, sweet. That's, you know, three meals from the young campus here. Okay. So the second is,
SPEAKER_01
did you see what Barstool did? Yeah. So Barstool sponsored an athlete for gambling. Right. So,
SPEAKER_02
so Dave Portnoy, I don't know the exact story, but I saw, I was just sort of following this on social media. He goes, he's like emergency press conference. He goes on online and he just says, I'm announcing Barstool athlete.
What is that? I have no idea. And like, that was like, basically his emergency thing. And so then somebody, so some athlete message him, it was like, I'll be the first Barstool athlete.
And he's like, okay, great. We got this, you know, like, whatever, some volleyball player girl from this college, she's our first Barstool athlete. So he tweets it out.
You know, the more people start rolling in, he's like, I didn't even say what this is yet. And so then he goes, he goes on for a second video. And he goes, listen, a lot of you asking how to become a Barstool athlete.
If you play division one sports and you blink at me, I will sign you. I will send you a t-shirt. You want pizza? You want Campari? I don't know what's going to happen here.
We may just become the most powerful agency in the world here. And so I actually think that like, that legitimately could happen because now the athletes can have lawyers, they can have agents that are helping them with their brand deals. And Barstool is just there.
They're ready to take advantage of this. They have that brand that's super loved amongst college athletes. And so I think they're going to do really well out of this.
So I would say they're another winner. That's that, that we talked about the four levels of luck. That's level four luck where your reputation is such that luck finds you.
And so that's what's going to happen. The best athletes are going to want to work with Barstool just because of their reputation.
SPEAKER_01
It's almost boring to discuss the ideas for this because it's obvious. You just look at what I mean, it's just, they're now professional athletes almost that anyone has. But what I think is interesting is this idea of inflections.
So like there's these cultural things that happen. Well, it's not, sometimes it's cultural, sometimes it's political, sometimes it's technology driven. But Mike Maples who we had on the podcast, he actually has a blog post where he talks about inflections because I look for inflection.
So it could be everyone has an iPhone. So now GPS is possible or we are able to build this technology to making GPS possible. So that's a cultural inflection or like, you know, being gay is cool now or not cool, but it's accepted.
So now like having like a gay dating app or whatever, you know, like that's like a cultural shift or weed is no longer frowned upon. That's a cultural inflection. Now, there's also regulation in political inflections.
One of them being about two years ago when telemedicine, the law changed, although it's changing back, that provided a huge gap. This is a perfect example of a regulation slash political inflection. And that big businesses are built in times like this.
I'm not going to be the one because I don't care about this. But this is the type of inflection that we're going to look back, same with sports gambling, you know, what those guys have been at it for years and years and years and it was pretty horrible businesses, I believe for a long time, something changed, boom, they took off. Same with UFC, they weren't allowed in New York, they weren't allowed here, something changed, boom, they're allowed.
This is one of those moments that we'll look back on in 20 years and be like, think of all the businesses that came from
SPEAKER_02
that one ruling. Yeah, there's a couple examples of this. So with, you know, GDPR, this is the like kind of like privacy, it's the thing where you go to a website and it says, we want, we want to, you know, use cookies to enhance your experience, you know, like, okay, accept cookies.
And so this is a, you know, a law change that happened. And then you saw companies come out of this that were like, I think pretty, pretty big companies. So one of them is OneTrust.
So I think OneTrust is like over 200 million an annual recurring revenue, it's probably the fastest growing enterprise SaaS company in the last 10 years. And it's basically it's GDPR compliance as a service, hey, big company, you are not, the way you set things up, it's not compliant with the new laws, you can get smashed for not being compliant here. It's going to spend, it's going to take your team of lawyers and engineers in your company, like weeks, if not months, to just understand the laws, then make the changes so that you're compliant, like we can do this for you.
And so OneTrust, you know, already had a $5 billion valuation in less than, I don't even know when GDPR came out, that's like, I don't know, five years ago or something. So that's kind of like a great example. Osano is another one of this company I wanted to invest in that same space, because that regulation change made that happen.
Another one, UnitedHealth. So when Obamacare kicked in, companies like I think Oscar and UnitedHealth, I don't know too much about this space, but what I do know is if you go look at the stock chart for UnitedHealth, it's like, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat. Oh, something happened in like 2009, 10 range.
What happened? Oh, you know, like as the, as Obamacare kicked in, the stock price went from like $24 a share to $400 a share now. And so, you know, that was a better investment than Amazon, Google, Netflix, whatever, during the same period of time, because they were well positioned to take advantage of the new law changes. So one of the law changes that I think you could take advantage of here is there's the obvious ideas, which is great.
You're an agency for NCAA athletes, like what we're talking about Barstool or your cameo, right? You're a platform where they can go on and monetize their name and face. Another one is these athletes have to report the deals that they're doing to their school. So you can't just do like anything, you have to report it.
I can tell you what, most of these athletes are not going to do a good job of keeping track of all their deals, how much they have paid, what the date was, what the terms were, and all the collateral they're going to need to report this. And the schools are going to need it to report it to the NCAA. And so somebody who builds that back office sort of reporting tool, that underlying infrastructure layer, that's going to become incredibly valuable.
A way to think about that is like CARDA or Angel List, like these underlying platforms that sit underneath the entrepreneur. And so that's one opportunity that I could see
SPEAKER_01
taking off here. I actually think that's the best idea that you've had in a long time. All right, I'll stop there.
I won't give you more. I don't know what the total addressable market is for that, but I mean, it's enough. Well, just for, I mean, what's happening right now, by the way? I mean, universities just spend tens of thousands a year for your software.
SPEAKER_02
Like, that's, there's enough. And you'll be sticky, right? And you'll become the system of record for all these things. They're not going to want to switch two years in because this other system of record has a new feature.
So whoever gets plugged in as the system of record has the opportunity to like own that data, you're entrenched in all these universities who are not looking to take a bunch of risk. And then you could build on all the add-on services. So you could build on other things that allow, you know, whether it's banking or it's contracts or it's marketplace for deals, whatever, you could build all that on top of the data record book.
SPEAKER_01
You know what I just realized? Now, this company that you and I invested in, there's actually a lot of competitors, but we invested in this company called Stan. I don't even know the URL.
SPEAKER_02
It's like Stanwith.me.
SPEAKER_01
Stanwith.me. And basically what it is is you put a link in your Twitter bio or your LinkedIn bio, you click that link and it's like LinkTree where you see like five different pages you can click off to, but it says like book a call with me, sell you this thing. It's basically for commerce, you know, like giving you money for an exchange for some type of, whether it's time or document.
Perhaps we'll see those types, although I don't necessarily believe that that will be the case, but this thing might like impact that business. But so I think there's a bunch of cool inflections here. And this whole like idea of inflections, I think there's a lot to learn from.
I was just reading about Thomas Edison and basically he was like, look, I just invented this light bulb. It's going to work. It's amazing.
But there was no power at the time. And he's like, well, we can power it by putting up these wires that go from house to house to house. And the government was like, no, we're not doing this.
And so one day he hosts a dinner and he goes, I want all you guys to come to this dinner. And they come up to the dinner and there's no lamps. So it's pitch black.
And they're sitting there. They're like, what the hell are we doing? And then he just flips a switch and boom, his lights come on automatically and there's waiters there ready to greet them. And they're like, and he's like, this is how people are going to live from now on.
And they go, oh, great. Okay, fine. We will allow you to put electricity throughout Manhattan in the small area to test it out.
And so this idea of it and that is how-
SPEAKER_02
By the way, I got chills while you were telling that story. I love that.
SPEAKER_01
And that is how GE came to be eventually was in a bunch of these companies that Thomas Edison had on, you know, he was involved in a little bit of everything.
SPEAKER_02
I saw you tweet something that Thomas Edison invented the word hello.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So basically before Edison, people would say greetings or good afternoon, like hello wasn't even a word. In fact, the word hello, it was pronounced a little bit differently.
It was like, hello or like something silly like that. And when he invented the phone, he was actually partially deaf and also the phones weren't very good. So he would call like an operator in order to set this up and they would have to think of a word to say to be like the greeting on the phone.
And he was like, well, the word hello, I can actually stream that pretty easily. And so I'm going to start saying hello. Like it was hello.
It was like originally it was meant to like as a word to like say, oh, you surprised me. Hello, you surprised me, you know. And so that's how he started saying it.
And then once people started using the phone, they started saying it and the phone got better and then it just became a hello. Wow. And that's how the word hello came to be. And then anyway, this idea of inflections are actually really interesting.
So there's all types of moments where these things are capable. And I think that this NCAA thing, it's interesting. The idea you said is interesting.
But the concept here of inflections is actually more important because we're actually seeing it happen right now. And by the way, I hear this so often.
SPEAKER_02
Two, two, two examples come to mind. One, I was talking to this guy, Jesse Pooji, who we should have on the podcast. I know him.
He lives in St. Louis. That's right. And he was telling me his story.
Oh, how'd you build your company? He built this company Ampush. It was like this digital marketing agency that was working with Dollar Shave Club and Blue Apron and all the big brands. And so, and they eventually sold it.
And so one of the things he had said, he's like, yeah, we were just doing this other thing and it was kind of wasn't working. And then that's when the Facebook platform launched or Facebook announced, newsfeed or Google launched AdWords or whatever, right? There's all these like moments where new thing comes into existence. He's like, well, like this thing we're doing is not working.
So like, let me go jump on that. And the same story is true for our friend, Sully, who he was like, yeah, I quit my job at Microsoft. I wanted to go be an entrepreneur.
I didn't know what I was going to do. So I moved back into my parents' house. And like that day that I moved in, I was just browsing the internet.
I saw that Facebook launched this new platform, app platform. So I was like, okay, cool. Like let me try to build an app today.
And he's like, I didn't know if it was going to be a thing, but like he was one of the first app developers on there built a simple dumb app and like immediately started to like go to fly on Facebook because Facebook was that good of a like platform. And it was so new that people wanted to play with the new thing on the platform. And so that was like their start.
And I've really heard this a bunch of times, which is a lot of times as an entrepreneur, you just need to be in the market. You need to be in the game. And even if your current thing's not working, if you are aware of these like inflection points, these shifts, these platform shifts, or big changes, either in law or technology or open platforms, things like that, you're the perfect person to just shift over because you're kind of like already jogging.
You're not at like a cold start. You're not like at a job where you got to decide if I should quit or not. And if you weren't so successful at your current thing that you're that you were married to it, so you hop on over.
And I've just heard this many, many times over this same, same model of like, yeah, I was just doing this thing. It wasn't really working that great. And then boom, I saw that Facebook ad platform launched.
So I made an ad for t-shirts and I started selling like crazy. And then I started, you know, then, you know, those are the glory days. And it's all downhill from there.
But and we are
SPEAKER_01
seeing these, we're seeing these actually constantly. So like there's a thousand examples that we could just give that just happened in the last five or 10 years. I mean, you said Facebook, you said Google, you said, you could say the same for Snapchat, Clubhouse likely won't pan out.
But that was definitely an opportunity to have one. This NCAA thing, the medical thing where now doctors could practice remotely because COVID, I mean, working remotely, I mean, there's just, it happened constantly. What I like to do is I like to read Politico.
Politico is a cool site that tells you on regulation updates. That's a great way to learn about these. But there's like loads of different inflections and they happen consistently.
And you could be an insider to have to see some of them. So like, you know, if you're not working in tech, you're not going to see like the power of Facebook early on. But like a lot of them are actually like the information is oftentimes blatantly obvious.
It's not obvious that this is going to be the one, but it's blatantly obvious like, all right, this
SPEAKER_02
could be an inflection. Right. Yeah. And it goes back to that same two by two matrix. This athlete thing is basically it's new problem.
Like all of a sudden a whole bunch of people have a new problem. These athletes have to keep track of the records. They want to make money.
They can now do this. And there's going to be old, you know, you can take some old solution and repurpose it for this new opportunity, this new problem that exists in the world. And so.
SPEAKER_01
All right, everyone. Today's episode is brought to you by Imperfect Action, hosted by Steph Taylor. It's a podcast on HubSpot's podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals.
Imperfect Action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners. So join Steph Taylor as she answers all your business marketing questions that deep dives into the nitty gritty of online marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and marketing for strategy for business owners. A few recent episodes include some of the biggest mistakes you can make with your launch.
Another one is why growing your audience feels so hard in 2022. And another one is five ways to make content creation less consuming. So check it out.
It's called Imperfect Action. You can look it up
SPEAKER_02
wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's move on. Let's do another one.
Do you have one?
SPEAKER_01
Or you want me to do one? Yeah. So I just found this company and I actually heard of it for a while. I'll tell you two interesting companies that I discovered.
The first was it was called Nira.com. Before this, it was called FYI, I think. Yes. So the reason why I came, I found this. Do you know who Heat and Shy is? I know he's shy.
Yeah. I invested in Nira, by the way. Oh, you did? Yeah.
Oh, sick. All right. Well, we can talk about it.
So Heat and Shy, so there's this guy named Neil Patel who's like the face. And if you are probably a little bit younger than me, then you probably don't know who he is. But if you're about my age or older, you probably know who Neil Patel is.
He had this amazing blog called Quick Sprout. And this was like, if you wanted to learn anything about search or Google his blog for somehow, I don't know how he managed this, covered pretty much everything. And he built a huge blog for SEO and it became a huge business.
And he launched loads of different software products on top of it. Well, Heat and Shy was his right hand man and probably the operator behind and the brains behind this. He just launched this new business a while ago.
And I had looked at my old messages. I DM'd him two years ago when he first launched it, but I didn't have any money at the time. And I was like, dude, this is amazing.
And so he changed the name to Nira. And it's really simple. What it is is basically if you are a company like HubSpot, so you have 30 or 3000 employees or the hustle when we had just 10 employees, even when you have 10 employees, my current Gmail has 100 gigs full.
So let's say you do times 10, that's 1000 gigs. That's like a terabyte, I believe of data. That's like hundreds of thousands of documents and images and whatever.
It's really hard to find all of those images, but also it's hard to know who has access to all these things. So for example, you have this document called salaries and you must have like accidentally said like share to everyone who has access to this folder, you don't fucking see that. Or if someone quits, they still have access to this document called passwords, like stupid stuff.
Well, he didn't built this software that I didn't even realize this was a problem. I mean, I have had this problem, but I'm like, oh, this is actually
SPEAKER_02
a great thing that you could sell. It was a blind spot. You're just like, oh, this is just the way the world is.
You know, it's just like a problem you live with until somebody says, by the way, you know, you can, you could stop that, right? Yeah. And so he's been working on it. But here's
SPEAKER_01
so anyway, it's the product is interesting, but that's not even what I care about. It's basically just a search engine for an entire company's documents.
SPEAKER_02
Well, okay. So that's what it originally was. That's the F that's what FYI was, which was like a quick way you just type in, you don't need to know that the doc is in like normally you want to find a doc.
You think, oh, that's in Google Drive or that's in Dropbox or maybe it's in Asana. So I need to go find this thing. So what he made was just like one search bar to go find the document across all your cloud apps.
And I think, you know, after a bunch of trial and error and customer development, you found out that that's not the problem worth solving. The problem worth solving is that second part you talked about, which is the security. If you go to Nero.
com, it's just, it says protect your company documents from unauthorized access, which is exactly what it says. And that's the problem you were talking about, right? Like, I just brought somebody on board and they were showing me, you know, like a spreadsheet from a previous company that they worked at. And I was like, you still have access to this? And he's like, yeah, I don't know, like, obviously I'm not doing anything bad with it.
But like, you shouldn't have that, you know, that's like their KPIs. And I'm guilty of this too. Like you said, like, you share one thing with a group or a list and now they have a bunch of stuff, or somebody leaves and they shouldn't have it, or you're sharing it with some vendor and like they vendor still has access.
And it's, it is impossible to go through all your documents that are in the cloud and make sure that who has the right thing. And so near us solving that problem by creating like one interface with so I think that's kind of a, like a pretty genius problem, like a problem that they identified that's worth solving. I think every, this is a every company problem as far as I'm concerned.
And only growing
SPEAKER_01
but I want to explain why first of all, how'd you hear about this? You're because your friends
SPEAKER_02
with Heaton, he hollered at you. Yeah, loosely. He, we're not best buds, but he's like, we're cool with each other.
And then I saw this, I was like, Oh, that's dope. How did you see how are you know
SPEAKER_01
all this? See, I'm friends with them. And he like, I, we talked, I'm in a group chat with him. And so I saw he was talking about there.
Oh my God. That's so funny. You're, you're in on everything.
He, but there's a few things that's interesting. First of all, like, I'm pretty positive this has the, I mean, he could screw it up. And, and I mean, like there's execution risk, risk here.
But I think like it's going to be pretty big, like if, as long as I just have C plus execution. But what is interesting to me is, and this is out of my world, you know, you and I do stuff that we come up with an idea and we can make money off of it in five days, but it can also like go away pretty easily. He's been working on this for two years before is getting any customers with like 10 employees, because in order to sell these enterprise contracts, especially to the IT department, where everyone's like uptight as they should be, you have to, everything's going to be buttoned up.
And it's really cool that I get Intel or insight into that because I normally don't ever see that. You have to have so much patience to build these SaaS tools. And so I don't think I'm cut out for it.
But I thought it was really interesting, specifically the enterprise ones, right? There's
SPEAKER_02
two types of SaaS. There's like bottoms up, where it's just like kind of like consumer, like, oh, you just have this cool product, a developer hears about you, a PM hears about you, they just sign up themselves. And you're hoping it kind of spreads virally throughout the company, because the product is so good.
It's product driven growth. And then there's enterprise sales. Enterprise sales is basically saying, I need to go be able to knock on the doors of people, the right people at the top of a company.
I need to be able to sell a product for over $100,000 a year eventually. And that's my game. And the sales cycle might be six to 18 months.
And I'm going to do what I can to accelerate that. But in reality, that's just the way these companies move. And I'm with you, that that is not the DNA I have.
That's not where I would be. That's not where I would be strong. But other people who do it, obviously enterprise sales is like extremely valuable when you can
SPEAKER_01
do it. Yeah. So I just wanted to bring this up because it was interesting to like talk to him and be like, yeah, we've been working for two years doing this. Our roadmap is this.
And that is just not really what we talk about a lot of like this like epic planning and like really like, all right, in three years, hopefully we'll be here. Next in two quarters, we'll be at this. And I actually think that that's good.
I wish I were like that a little bit. I'm not. But I thought it was a crazy fascinating to see how you have to sweat the details so much before you even get a customer and you just spend so much money, right, you know, 10, 20 engineers to do this.
So I just wanted to bring that up. You want to do another one? Yeah, let's do one. I think I've said this
SPEAKER_02
once before on the pod, but I want to do I'll do it quickly. You tell me if we've already talked about it. But it's this idea of Zapier for sounds.
Have I talked? Do you know what idea I have here?
SPEAKER_01
You didn't bring it up last time, but I've heard this phrase before from you. I don't think you
SPEAKER_02
brought it up. You're the one who kind of really highlighted Zapier to me, right? I was using it. Zapier for all I knew might have just been like two dudes, you know, who built this as a side project and they're kind of in there on indiehackers.
com, bootstrapping and they're at, you know, 8,000 a month of MRR. No, Zapier is like a billion dollar company. Multi-billion dollar.
Multi-billion dollar company that was largely bootstrapped, I think. I think they got ready for it. There is
SPEAKER_01
a million dollars in funding and use that million dollars in funding to get to a billion dollar
SPEAKER_02
status. Right. So pretty free and impressive. And when you go to the product, it's like a very simple thing.
Zapier just lets you say, Hey, it's like a pipe. So it just connects two different services. So you might say, Hey, whenever somebody signs up for my on my website, for my mailing list, put them into this spreadsheet or like send me an email.
And so you're just connecting like Gmail and your, your, your website or you're connecting like whatever Shopify and Slack. So you just connect, you just create these little formulas. If this happens, then do this.
And so that's what Zapier is. And Zapier has become very, very successful, obviously, because people want that they want to say, Okay, they want to basically nobody wants to build anything. It's like, there's a million, there's a tool for everything, but they don't speak to each other.
So the Zapier is like a connector between tools. So anyways, Zapier for sounds, what is it? So my friend, Samir had this idea and Samir Bala, and he was going to do it. And then he like found a better opportunity.
Like there's a fast growing startup and he joined as like a exact there instead. And I was like, Oh dude, I love this idea. And I agreed for like, I put like a one and a half year embargo on talking about this idea, because I thought he might do it.
At this point, I'm pretty confident he's not going to do it. But the vision he outlined was pretty damn good. He goes, every team, every company has something in there, some event that happens in their company that they celebrate.
For the hustle, it might be getting an email subscriber, maybe it's getting a new advertiser to come on board or selling a trend subscription. And the like wouldn't be great if there was just a sound, right? The old kind of like, and in most offices, there's like a gong. I bet you guys had a gong or your sales.
Yeah, you have a gong, you have a gong, you literally you go, you make a sale, you stand up, you walk to the gong, you grab the thing and you hit it. And everybody knows, boom, the good thing has happened. And in our office, we used to manually wire this up.
We built a charity product. And every time somebody donated, it would go cha-ching on the like speakers in the office. And you would do that until it gets too annoying.
And then you kind of turn it off. If it gets like too frequent. And so I really like this idea of basically taking any service you have, maybe it's Stripe, maybe it's your email list, maybe it's your bank account, whatever.
And anytime the good, you just basically create these formulas, you say, if this good thing happens, play this sound, play it on my phone as like essentially like a ring tone. And you know, or play it on my Sonos speakers or whatever in my office. And so the cool thing that you could do with this is I think that's a pretty simple problem.
I think people will like that. They'll be able to hook it up. But it actually gets pretty sophisticated because you can't, what you can't do is you can't say like, Hey, you know what, at the beginning, notify me about everything.
And then as it gets more mature, what you really want is to say, Hey, when we get, if we hit 100 subscribers today, play that sound, I want to know when we hit 100 for the day, right? Because everyone now it's too annoying, it's too frequent. So let me set this better rule. So there's nothing that lets you set those rules.
So I think there's a very simple company to build here. That's Zapier for Sounds. That could be a SaaS company that, you know, I think it could do a few million dollars a year, but maybe it's more like Zapier.
Maybe this is a bigger problem than I would have otherwise expected and could get into the tens of millions or even $100 million of revenue, just celebrations as a service. What do you think?
SPEAKER_01
All right. What my reply is going to sound like a tangent, but it's not. So again, I'm on this Edison kick.
I'm reading all about them. And in the biography, when he created the phonographs, basically a record player, people are like, why are you wasting your time on this stupid toy? Like this is not interesting. This is not going to help anyone.
This is so dumb. This looks janky. And obviously it wasn't right.
It changed the world. And it was the first time that anyone had ever heard someone's voice before, besides, you know, just talking. And a lot of really cool ideas that great people have or ideas that turn out to be amazing, whether it's Airbnb or Uber, they sound like these stupid dumb things.
You're actually particularly good at finding things that are toys or silly on the surface and making the case for why this could actually be huge and big. And you're because you kind of default to optimism. What is your default to optimism on how this could be big? Because my default is this is such a silly.
I'm I'm I recognize that I default to that. But although I'm trying not to my default is this is just a what like what that's such a
SPEAKER_02
small silly thing. Tell me everything. Yeah, I think it probably is a small silly thing.
But I like things that for sure can win at the small scale. And there's a hey, who knows path that you can go down because I think most things that end up quite big. They typically will start with what looks like a kind of humble, humble level of ambition, right? Facebook, it's a college network for Harvard.
And then maybe it's a social network for all colleges. And then it becomes now you know, they literally just are building this like, internet pipe in Africa, basically bring bring internet to more people in Africa, so more people can use Facebook, right? Like, their ambition was progressively growing. There's interviews of Zuck early on when they're like, Oh, are you going to expand to high schools? He's like, No, I don't know.
I mean, like, does it have to it could just be a cool college thing. Right. That was Zuck then and Zuck now is like, you know, let me take over the universe. And so I think I like ideas like this that that will start small.
The thing that gives me hope that this might be big, bigger than you think is every single company I know wants to celebrate their wins and morale goes up when you celebrate your wins. And so if you can come up with simpler ways to celebrate progress, I think it'll make happier companies. And I think that managers will want that, want that option or want to be able to configure that option so that, yeah, everybody feels a sense of progress.
Everybody feels a sense of a boost as you know, like you used to say, every emails, we're a pirate ship and every email subscriber is a little bit of wind in our sales. Right. So how do you make it actually feel like that versus just sitting in every day in the office and only focusing on all the problems and all
SPEAKER_01
the things that are broken? I actually think that there's a great lesson here. I didn't use to think about this way when I was a little bit younger and now I'm changing. But I remember when I first started creating stuff and I see a lot of people who are early in their career of creating stuff, they think like, the market's like too saturated, like no one buys courses or you know, there's already like ads, no one clicks ads.
But what you actually just did was interesting is you looked at the macro, like the high level, like human beings do want this. So you, so the way that you just described it, you go, you go, everyone I know, all companies want to celebrate a win. Like we all know celebrating a win is first or is great.
We also know that a lot of them celebrate a win with a sound. Therefore, it actually is plausible that this could be interesting. And I think that that's far more productive and helpful than starting the other way around.
So for example, I would justify a course, like we all know that people want to learn how to do this. And we also know that a lot of people buy stuff. So like it's pretty justifiable that if I execute, well, people will buy this.
And that's like an easy way to like back yourself into like, of course, this can succeed. It can succeed a lot. I don't know.
But and I think that that's actually a really interesting way that you tend to look at things.
SPEAKER_02
And that's cool. That's cool. All right, let's do one more, one more idea right now.
Do you have
SPEAKER_01
one or you want me to do one? I could tell you one. And I don't want to make this all about stuff that I'm investing in. But so I will disclose I am an investor in this, but I actually am not entirely sold on the idea.
I'll say that. So click that website, stake.rent. Okay, I'm on it. So
SPEAKER_02
let me just tell you what I see first reaction. It says cashback for rentals is here. Pay your rent and get cashback at a home or office that offers state.
Okay, so what does that mean? Okay, so
SPEAKER_01
there's this guy. I don't even know his name. I barely talked to him, but he created the rewards program for AmEx and a couple other airlines.
And so these reward programs, they give you stuff in order to make you happier. So you want to stay with AmEx. So discounts to stuff.
In order to, you know, when you sign up for AmEx, you get discount for movie tickets or on your insurance. And so he was thinking, and this guy knows nothing about real estate. I don't think so.
And he was like, we should do actually do this for rent. And when you think about it, a lot of actually renters or landlords actually do this. So they say, I'm going to give you a months free
SPEAKER_02
or two months free. Have you seen signs for that? Yeah, especially to start your lease. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So it's very common. So they're already doing that.
And he was like, you know, if you give someone one month free, that's 8.3% of annual rents that you're giving someone a year. If instead you made it, so you get three or four or 5% cashback every month that you pay your rent on time.
That's actually kind of an interesting way to build loyalty amongst the renter. And it's like a smaller, you know, it's like a gold star, like sometimes Sean might be happier if I give him a gold star versus like giving him $100. Right. You know what I mean? Okay, that's
SPEAKER_02
interesting. And so the math, I mean, 3% every month would add up to more than eight for the year. So how does the math work? Is it like more like 1% cashback basically or what? Yeah,
SPEAKER_01
it's a smaller fee. I don't know what the exact fee, but it's usually less than, it's like less than 6% a year. Gotcha. And so it's something like $20 a month. But and they get the money if they pay the rent on time.
And they're basically,
SPEAKER_02
they're proving to the landlord, hey, look, if I give, if I help your renter, if I, if your renter feels like I'm getting a bonus for paying my rent on time every month, I will lower the, I will lower your, your sort of defaults and your late payments on rent by extra. If they can show that one behavior, then they can go to every landlord and say the same
SPEAKER_01
thing. That's the idea. Exactly.
And I thought that was kind of interesting. And the reason why I thought was interesting is there's actually a few things I don't, I don't care about the stake that rent, whatever, who cares what there's a few things interesting here. One, what I like is a guy with no experience in real estate, but experience with human behavior being around loyalty and looking at different places to apply that that intrigues me.
I lost my train of thought, but, but that's really interesting to me. Oh, and the second thing is when I heard this idea, I'm like, well, this is like, this doesn't seem like a groundbreaking idea. Like this seems shockingly obvious and easy to pull off.
Why isn't anyone doing this? Part of me was like, well, if no one's doing it, there's a reason why no one has done it, right? Like that's one side of things. The other side of things is like, maybe there's, isn't the right outsider. So I thought this was like an interesting idea.
Do you think that this,
SPEAKER_02
this can work? Yeah, I think this could work. I think it's hard because if you, it depends on your worldview. Like the first time I heard about, what's he called layaway,
SPEAKER_01
you know, you know about layaway and this doesn't really exist much anymore. But yeah,
SPEAKER_02
sound like privileged. I think it exists. I think it exists in a big way still.
So I think at like,
SPEAKER_01
you know, I think it was more popular years and years and years ago. Like when my dad used to tell
SPEAKER_02
me all the time when he was a kid, he would do layaway. Right. So, so basically layaway, I didn't know about this, but basically, let's say you go to a Walmart and you go to Walmart, you want to buy something, you don't want, you don't have the money to pay the whole thing. You basically say, I want to put this on layaway and you, it's what I thought was going to happen is it's more like those, you know, buy now, pay later type of things where it's like, you have to keep it.
If you, yeah, like it's like a firm or something like that where you, you buy the thing and instead of paying the whole $100 upfront, you make four payments of 25 bucks and you, you pay it over time, but you get your thing from day one with layaway from what I understand is the exact opposite. Layaway, you just put the thing on hold there and then you come back every month and start making your payments until you own the thing. So it's like kind of like, it's like doing a tour in a way, right? It's like telling your parent, hey, like, I will, I will work hard for four straight months in order to get this thing.
And so this is apparently like a very big, I should have looked this up. I didn't know we were going to talk about it, but layaway is actually like a pretty huge part of like the economy, especially in, in like kind of like lower end retail, like Walmart's and stuff. And so, so I thought that was kind of interesting and it got me thinking about like all these little like incentive structures around paying for things.
So what you're talking about is incentive structure for rent. There's other incentives around rent. Like, I don't know if you've seen, have you seen Rhino? It's like a rent service.
Basically, you pay your rent
SPEAKER_01
and you build your credit by paying. Yeah, man, I love those. I wanted to do one of it.
So it's say Rhino.com. I wanted to use one of them because for years, my credit was only okay because I didn't have credit, but I'm like, it's bullshit that your rent doesn't count as credit.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. So I don't know if that's what Rhino does, but some people do that. And what Rhino is doing is they're basically like, they looked at what most people, when you go rent a place, you put the first or the first and second months rent down as a deposit.
And they're like, dude, that means there's like X hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that are just deposits that are just locked away. And so, and so, and so basically what they created, I think was like an insurance product that said, Hey, you don't have to pay, you don't have to pay your, you don't have to put $1,000 down as your deposit. Instead, you pay $5 a month as an insurance policy.
And we will, we will cover the landlord if the deposit ever kicks in, and you get to keep your money instead of putting down thousands of dollars as a deposit and having that dead money just locked away for a while. And I thought that was, I think that's what Rhino does now. But there's all these like interesting things around either real estate incentives.
Another one I want to tell you about is smile.io. Have you ever seen this? Probably not. It's more of an e-commerce thing, but I'm, right now I'm in the process of designing like a loyalty program.
And so when you, when you said this thing about the guy who did it for AmEx, that's interesting. I was just researching AmEx as loyalty, like the psychology of these programs. And let me, let me read it.
So smile.io, turn
SPEAKER_01
your hard earned sales into repeat customers, maximize your customer acquisition efforts and turn transactional sales into passionate brand advocates. I don't really know what that is.
SPEAKER_02
I don't really know what that means. So I'll explain. So do this instead.
Go to this website and just look at the bottom left where it says, where it says give 10, get 10, give 10% get $10. Well, I see three for 40. At the bottom left.
See, there's a little pop up that says give 10, get 10. So in this is two things. So this is powered by smile.
io. So basically what smile.io is they're going to e-commerce stores and they say, Hey, you should have a loyalty program.
You should have a referral program just like Starbucks and AmEx and these companies that spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours fine tuning and designing this thing. We'll just make it like a Shopify app for you. And so what does the Shopify app do? So basically you go on and it's like, you want a referral program? Cool.
Here's the thing that will be on your site. So any customer who comes in, they know that if I share this with a friend, I get a discount and they get a discount. So create a two way reward system.
The second thing is if you scroll down, there's like a little like points program in this case, it's called bubbles. But the points program basically says, here's how you earn points. You follow us on Instagram.
You like our stuff. You buy for every dollar you spend in the store, you get five points. Tell us your birthday.
Well, if you create a birthday, we'll give you 500 points, write a review, you get 200 points. So they incentivize all these behaviors that you know leads to a stickier customer. And in doing so, they get points that they can redeem for free shit in the store, like store credit basically.
And so all of that, like reward system magic, they just make available and easy for any e-commerce store, right? So then it sounds a bit like an infomercial, but the really, I don't, I have no skin in the game here. I just think it's a sick product. But I love the idea of basically taking like what the big brands do and what the big brands have spent millions of dollars developing for themselves.
And then just turning that into an app that any little mom and pop can just plug into their store and have that same user experience. And so I've seen this as a trend as a business, like kind of like model blueprint. I told you about that company I invested in Joe Coffee.
They did the same thing. They took the Starbucks mobile app, which was like super slick, made it easy to order on your phone. You earned stars for everything that you buy.
And they basically give any mom and pop coffee shop a white labeled version of that same app called Joe Coffee. And so now you can have order ahead, you can have loyalty points, you can have push notification marketing. You have all the things that Starbucks put like probably tens of millions of dollars into building.
They just made for, and they said, good, we're going to arm the rebels. We're going to give this to all of the indie coffee shops instead of just Starbucks having it because they can afford the
SPEAKER_01
R&D. This is sick. Yeah, this is sick.
I'm looking at it now. Does this work? Have you implemented this? Like when I see these rewards programs or things like that, like when I go to a lot of e-com sites, there's like a wheel that you spin. If you enter in your email, you get something.
SPEAKER_02
Like there's all these like tricks. We went from normal and pretty looking thing that says, hey, give us your email for a discount code to the wheel. A tripled conversion rate, triple.
SPEAKER_01
So have you implemented this club tub? Yeah, I just started working on this last
SPEAKER_02
night to implement it, but I'm figuring out what are the perks because you have to find the balance. If you give too much value away, it eats all your margins. And if you make it too shitty, then nobody's motivated to do anything.
You wasted your time. You got to find the sweet spot where it's like compelling enough to them and it doesn't eat away your margins. And that's the art of this, of doing it.
But I love that I can do this without knowing how to code. I think that's kind of like a great business model and idea. And so I would do that.
If I wanted to think of other ideas like this, I would just go look at what do the top retailers like go to Starbucks, I go to Lululemon, I would go to whoever, Macy's, Nordstrom. And I would walk around, I would use their online shop and I would walk around their store and I would say, what have they built that's custom and awesome for them? And then how can I make the white labeled version of that and offer it to every other retailer that's competing with them? There's this great thing I want to bring up,
SPEAKER_01
I want to bring up basically, I don't know where I heard about it, but at Facebook, Chimath or someone early on discovered that there's like the magic number of seven. Basically, if you create a Facebook account, we need you to add seven friends right away. And if you add seven friends, you're likely to become a Facebook user forever or for a long period.
You know what I'm talking about?
SPEAKER_02
Yes, basically, they said the aha moment, meaning aha moment when we talk about in product building is just like a user comes to your site, they don't know what the fuck's going on, they're kind of confused, they're trying to sign up. And finally, there's an aha moment where they get actual value from the product. They're like, oh, you know, like if I go to mint.
com, the aha moment is seeing all my financials, you know, like laid out in front of me in my budget in my pie chart. Oh wow, automatically, that's the aha moment for mint. You got to do a whole bunch of shit, connect a whole bunch of big accounts and credit cards to get to that.
But when you're there, you're sticky. For Facebook, what they found was seven friends in 10 days was the aha moment. So once you saw seven different friends on your feed, and if you could do that within 10 days, you were like super, super sticky.
SPEAKER_01
So at the hustle, we found, I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but we found like if you open five out of seven days right off in the first seven, five times the first seven, you're going to be with us and we're going to call you a gold person. Right. And so whatever. And we have this new thing called snippets where we're trying to automate a lot of the email content and you sign up for the hustle and you tell us what type of news you care about and we automatically like give you a customized email.
And what we're seeing is that the people who fill that information in and it's like a relatively long flow, they are like three or four times more engaged than other people. Right. And a debate that I have, and I'm bringing this back to what we're talking about, is that I actually think the question is like, were those people more likely to become power users anyway, and they are filling that out? Or are they becoming power users because they fill that out? And I would argue it was the second one. So like if someone's going to give, what's this tub, whatever this would become, whatever we're talking about, are they going to become, are they power users already? And so they're more likely to give you your email and like you on Instagram.
I would actually say no, because you are there going through this little small indoctrination process, they are now becoming power users. It's like, what are you, are you confident? Therefore, you're going to flex your muscles or do you flex your muscles and then become feel like you are confident. Right. And so I actually think that making users do this stuff, you are turning them
SPEAKER_02
into power users. Yeah, I think that's true too. I think it's an element of both.
I think that the people who are already power users are going to be like, oh my God, my favorite thing has more value I can go get. Like let me go do it. And then there's a whole bunch of other people that are potential power users.
If the circumstances were right, if they followed you, so then they would see your updates. If they gave you their email so that you could show them the new stuff, blah, blah, blah, then you're going to get more, you're going to higher likelihood of turning that casual person into a hardcore person. And so I think both do happen.
Do you want to save this? You want to
SPEAKER_01
wrap up now and save some of the stuff for next week? Yeah, actually, I just want to say two more
SPEAKER_02
examples of the same trend. So the same trend, if you go and look at the Hustle's emails, you guys have at the bottom like a survey thing, it's like, were you happy, medium or sad from this email? You have an ambassador program. And a lot of those were like things you either you got off the shelf and modified or you just built homegrown.
And so if you're a newsletter, if you want to build something for the newsletter industry, go look at what the hustle, go look at what, you know, Axios or what these guys are all using and be like, cool, how do I give every newsletter the ability to just have this feature without, without having to build it themselves? Because clearly it's working and they're competing with groups like the hustle that are like years ahead, have employees have money to be able to spend on this type of stuff. Yeah. And we did have to build a
SPEAKER_01
lot of that by the way. And it was horrible and it breaks all the time. And like, it's I would wave rather like a lot of people, a lot of people who there's this whole, there's a large contingency of people who say, Oh, let's build our own stuff.
A lot of people who have been there done that will say the exact opposite, which is never build anything if you don't have to always use off the shelf, right? I fall into that category. And I wish I wish a lot of the stuff had existed. I'd rather pay a software fee than an engineer.
And you talked about this once you were talking
SPEAKER_02
about paywall software, you're like, yeah, I'm in the media business and like, the best sites have really good, smart paywalls that convert. And then the rest of us are using this kind of like crappier version of that. Like, why don't we all just pretend and say the New York Times has the best paywall flow that's causing highest conversion rates.
Somebody should take that and just say, do you want the New York Times paywall on your site? Great. Here's the New York Times paywall as a service. Another example in this trend is slice.
So basically, Domino's had the best pizza ordering experience. It's like you would order the pizza on your phone. Then it would show you the progress bar.
It's like, Oh, you know, like, you know, John has put it in the oven, 20 minutes. Oh, it's out of the oven. We're just putting the toppings on top.
Oh, it's in the car. It's almost near you. Hey, it's at your door.
And so like, you know, they spent a lot of money doing that because they're Domino's, they can afford that. And what Slice did was Slice went to every indie poppy, indie pizza shop and basically gave them an app that was the Domino's mobile ordering experience and said, Hey, now you can compete against that. So let's just compete on the basis of whose pizza is the best, rather than, well, they made it so easy and fun to order.
And mine still is like, call me and I'll write it down on a piece of paper. And they became a billion dollar company doing that in that space. So it's the same model that when you see three or four versions of these, that's the pattern recognition to say, Oh, okay, that's a, that's a blueprint I can follow to get a new business idea.
SPEAKER_01
I agree. You want to wrap up there? Let's wrap up this one. And then, yeah, we're out.
We, uh, that's the episode. Holler.