SPEAKER_00
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Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com. Sweet gold shoes, dude. Thank you.
They are, they're women's. I got women's foot locker. Thank you.
They're women's. Size, I think they're size 14.
SPEAKER_01
Did you have to like convince them to like give them to you?
SPEAKER_00
Well, they're like, they're like, you know, those are women's. I was like, yeah, I don't care. Right. Who cares?
SPEAKER_01
Give me. It's like when we were buying these chairs, we were like, give us the reddest, brightest chair you've got. And they're like, well, you sure you don't want this good looking chair? Like, no, no, no, we want the brightest, reddest chair in the store.
We want two of them and we want them now.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that's what happened with these shoes. OK, so we're going to try. We're doing this as a reminder.
We're doing this to get 100,000 listens per episode. We're doing good. The last 30 days have been the most listened ever.
So here's what I want to do. If you like this podcast or if you don't like it, just do this anyway, please go to iTunes and give us a five star review. Take a screenshot of you doing that and DM one of us and we'll give you a surprise.
SPEAKER_01
I'll take a four star even. I'll take a four. Yeah, four will be five.
SPEAKER_00
Give us an honest review. That's all I care about. We have 250 or 300 reviews.
Let's say we can get to a thousand. So leave us a review and we leave at us and we will do something.
SPEAKER_01
We got to figure out something cool.
SPEAKER_00
And follow the hustle and Sean and me on socials and we're taking all these videos and turning them into clips and we'll be sharing them and all that shit.
SPEAKER_01
And all the links for this are going to be in the notes of the podcast. So you don't have to remember our handles or whatever.
SPEAKER_00
All right, leave us a review, send a screenshot and we will mail you back a special surprise.
SPEAKER_01
So let's give the people what they want. Let's give them some good stuff. All right, I see up here, Craig's the story.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so we ended this yesterday and I thought that this would be a cool story to start things off. So when we started our company, when I started this company, the first office that I had, did you ever go to that one?
SPEAKER_01
I've been to it. Well, is it the Craigslist one? Yes, I've been there.
SPEAKER_00
The first office I had, we didn't have a lot of money. And I moved. We I started me and C.
A. But my friend, we we co-leased an office in the inner sunset, which is a non popular neighborhood in San Francisco, but it's lovely.
SPEAKER_01
And it just looked like an apartment.
SPEAKER_00
It was a house that they that was zoned mixed use. And when we went to visit it, there was a sign that said Craigslist 1996 to 2000 and whenever we moved in 15 or 16 or 17, I forget. My portion of the rent was $500, which was a lot of money at the time.
And because we had just started the business, we only were making 30 grand a month. And we move in and there was a desk still in one of the rooms. And this was like a it wasn't a shitty apartment, but it kind of was a shitty apartment.
Yeah, it was a three bedroom apartment, less than a thousand square feet. And I move in and Craig from Craigslist, Craig, Newark, he actually left his desk there and his desk was a kitchen table. That was his desk, but it was too heavy to move.
And so we just kept it there. So that's what I use. And the landlord, I came in, his name was Emmanuel, I believe he came in and I was like, Hey, so Craigslist was here.
He's like, Yeah, Craig started the he lived down the street in Cole Valley. He started the company here from 96 up until recently. I go, Oh, what was that like? He's like, Yeah, they're kind of like little celebrities in the neighborhood.
Everyone knew about him. And at the time when they moved out, they were making something like five or six hundred million dollars a year in revenue. And this whole apartment, my half of the rent was $500.
Sierra was like 2000. So we paid $2500. And it could only see at most 12 people probably.
And that was tiny. That was the Craigslist team. And I go, Well, what were they like? He's like, Well, they were cool.
Craig told everyone if he introduced, like if I talked to me and I'd be like, What's your job here? He wouldn't say he owns it or that he's the founder. He would say I do customer service for Craigslist. Nice. And they were so he said they were so cheap and frugal that in the lease, it said something like Emmanuel had to give them toilet paper each month. And every once in a while, he would forget or not bring it on time and they wouldn't pay the rent until they got the toilet paper.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. If you just close your eyes and imagine the Craigslist website and then start to imagine an apartment or a house, it looked like that. It looked like the UI of the site.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
And if you Google Craigslist office, you'll see photos of it. They had a big sign on it. It was great.
And did you ever meet him? I saw I called the email them, Craig, and we talked back and forth. We talked on the phone a little bit and I was like, Hey, can you come and take a picture with me at the office? And he never made it over. But we did talk.
Yeah. And I we correspond every once in a while. It was awesome.
And a lot of people don't know how Craigslist makes money. They make money only from jobs, jobs, and cars, all in certain markets. Yeah. And they make everything else free. They make like five or six hundred million dollars a year that way.
And they've never bought a company. They only employ at this point, probably 30 people. So they just must.
It must be one of the most profitable companies in the world.
SPEAKER_01
Right. And if you if you've never seen this, there's a diagram floating around. If you just Google like Craigslist, unbundling.
Yeah. There's a diagram that basically takes the homepage of Craigslist when you're in one of the cities and there's like all the different categories. And it just draws a line from like, let's say shared housing and it'll draw a line to like Airbnb.
And it'll be like temporary shared shared housing couch surfing. And it basically goes through every category.
SPEAKER_00
And then the apartment rentals that goes Zillow and Trulia. Exactly. Home for sale.
SPEAKER_01
And so you can just see how many different businesses just realized that, Hey, if if there was demand for it on Craigslist, maybe we could build a specialized version for of just that one feature. We could build a whole site of just that one service that it's offering. And there are like hundreds that are in this.
And this is actually happening to dollars in enterprise value. Yeah, exactly. And so huge, huge number of successful companies that literally did that.
And companies like Airbnb bootstrapped off of Craigslist.
SPEAKER_00
So I don't know how we when I started my first company being John. Because you were as we're doing a roommate thing. A roommate thing.
We got we would get thousands of users.
SPEAKER_01
So what'd you do? Break it down. How did you leverage?
SPEAKER_00
John's premise, John started it. And then I joined him. The premise was in major cities like San Francisco, New York, there's a lot of young people who are moving there who don't know anyone and getting a one bedroom or two bedroom apartment is prohibitively expensive.
And so what we would do is we would holler at people apartments and landlords who had two, three, four, five bedroom apartments and we would throw massive parties for people who were interested in it. And what we would do is we would take the five bedroom apartment apartment that was five grand and post it on room shares for a $1,000 per bedroom. And yeah, and then we would throw these parties with 50 people who all had similar interests and we'd pair them up in groups of two, three, four, and they would move into a place.
Okay. Cool idea, but it didn't work well.
SPEAKER_01
And then what happened with Craigslist? How did you guys sort of leverage Craigslist the most?
SPEAKER_00
So what we would do is we would create, John was good at Photoshop. And at the time Craigslist stopped doing this because so many people like us did this.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. And we would, the ad was just an HTML file and it looked like this big image and it said, click here at this big button to sign up and you would click there and it would go straight to our website. I'm saying we would get thousands of people a day.
And then what we did was once they banned that, we would just post it without the image and people would email the Craigslist address and we had an auto responder that said, great, apply here. Right.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there's a story about the Airbnb guys, how they got started, right? Cause every marketplace, you have this chicken and egg problem. You have no supply because you don't have supply. You don't get demand.
And they just sort of, it's a chicken and egg problem. And so one thing that came out that Airbnb did, they're not very public about this. They've actually, I think denied in some cases this, but you can go out there and you can find this.
I found the whole description of it in one black hat forum, black hat marketing forum, but basically they did two things. So what people know about is that they scraped Craigslist listings. So they said, okay, if you listed your apartment for, for rent on Craigslist, they would scrape Craigslist every day.
They would take all those listings, make a listing for it on Airbnb with those same same photos. So they, they said, they say it's like, we, they would just share the supply, right? And then if somebody came to Cra, to Airbnb and tried to book that, it would email the person via Craigslist and say, Hey, you got an inquiry. Come check it out on Airbnb.
And so that's like how they started. That part is generally seen as like, okay, the part that they got a little bit of heat for was they went one step further. They started creating fake personas, Linda or Cindy or whoever it was.
And they would go and they would email every listing that was up for, um, for rent on Craigslist. And they would say, Hey, I'm super interested in this. And they're like, Oh, great.
You know, here's the details. And they would say, Oh, do you guys have an Airbnb? I really only want to rent through Airbnb. It's much more trustworthy than this.
And then they'd be like, no, what's Airbnb? They're just like, here's the link. It's pretty awesome. I'm really be interested if you guys would use, do this via Airbnb.
Otherwise I'm not interested. And they would just send this to thousands of people every single day. And so all these people were like, shit, seems like if I use this Airbnb thing, this customer would have bought from me.
And that's how they grew a lot of their awareness. I love that. I'm totally in favor of that.
SPEAKER_00
A few other services have done similar things and they got sued and put out a business, Airbnb pulled it off. Yeah. They escaped. When we, when I was out that office, the police would show up on the street and a couple of times a month because they would get subpoenaed.
Like someone would be murdered or stolen car was sold on Craigslist. And the police would come to our office like a sheriff thinking you're the Craigslist office. Yeah. I was like, so like, you know, they're not here anymore. And we would get mailed cease and desist letters or we would get mailed subpoenas.
We would get mailed letters from people who bought, who are email messaging Craig. It was cool. It was wild.
SPEAKER_01
It's a sorry they're not here anymore. But do you guys like news? Do you guys like email? Yeah. We got a newsletter.
SPEAKER_00
It was awesome. And there on the sign it said Zappos was started there as well on the right floor. It was a two story.
There was a one apartment up top one apartment at bottom now nugs.net, which is a trading marketplace for mixed tapes for grateful dead mixed tapes. No way.
Yeah. That's real famous too for people who are into that shit. That's hilarious.
SPEAKER_01
All right. What else we got? So your buddy has an interesting company. So Andrew Wilkinson, who you've talked about a couple of times on the podcast, owns a bunch of different companies, Dribble, MetaLab, blah, blah, blah.
One of the companies he has now is podcast related. Actually, I have two podcast related ones. One is Castro.
You use Castro, right?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Big fan of Castro. I've been using it to listen to I like true crime podcasts.
I use it for that. And I like they have this feature that allows you to clip and or trim some of the clips and share that on your social feed and with friends.
SPEAKER_01
And so you were using what before Castro to listen to podcasts? Just a podcast app, which is horrible for searching. Right. And so with Castro, from what I understand, they have two things that are good. One is, you know, when you have the podcast app and you're like, oh, I'm interested in this show.
And just by being like, I'm interested, I subscribe. It downloads like every episode of theirs, whether you're listening to it or not. And then like your phone's out of space the next time you go take a photo.
So what Castro does is like the podcast you listen to a lot of they download. They have them right there at your fingertips and the ones you're just kind of dabbling in picking and choosing. They don't clutter up your whole phone with all the episodes from those podcasts.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, actually, I had to help with my mom the other day. Everyone has to do this when they go home for Christmas. I had a space.
She was going to go buy a thousand dollar new phone. And I was like, let me see your phone. And I looked at it and she had eight.
It was a 16 gig phone. She had eight gigs of podcasts. Right.
SPEAKER_01
And then they have this other thing which we're going to use now, which is they have this like promote program. So promoted podcasts. So we're trying to go this podcast.
As we said, as we said many times, podcasts has already grown, you know, six months, we got to a million downloads, but we're looking to, you know, five, ten X that even more. And so what they have is they have a bunch of people who use their app. So as a podcaster, we can submit it to be promoted.
And if you pay, you can actually get your podcast in front of a bunch of the right audience. And so we're going to try this out, see if this helps us grow. If you want to promote your podcast, go to Castro dot FM slash promote.
That's Castro dot FM slash promote.
SPEAKER_00
Let's go with the. Okay. So something that interests me two years ago, I would have thought this would have been a horrible idea, totally bought into it now. Uh, new email clients.
Okay. So there's superhuman superhuman is, uh, the base here in San Francisco, the guy who started it, his name's Rahul. Is that his name? Yep.
He's, uh, previously started reportive, which is now table stakes, but at the time was groundbreaking. Right.
SPEAKER_01
And I remember the first time I used that shit, I was like, this is magic. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
It is magic. What it does is you could type in anyone's email and it could tell you if it's the right email and it could tell you all their social links. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Like in the sidebar of your Gmail, it like took over the webpage and then the sidebar pop up a photo of the person's face, their Twitter, their last few tweets, their job on LinkedIn. It was like, it was like having a great memory, uh, or like being a great sort of networker without having to do anything.
SPEAKER_00
I used to call it my stock and talk method. It would help me stock them. Then I would.
SPEAKER_01
And if you needed to guess somebody's email, you would just type it in and if reportive had nothing, it's not their email. Right. You try a different variation of like.
SPEAKER_00
Well, you could, you could put a hundred emails in there and then highlight each one. Right. Right. It was great. Well, got bought by LinkedIn or something.
15 million bucks. I think a great outcome for him. Uh, I'm friends with him on Facebook.
So he bought himself fancy Lamborghinis and shit. Okay. So email apps. He launched a thing called superhuman.
I think they have about 20,000 paying subscribers at $300. $30 a month. $30 a month.
I bought it. It's cool. Um, yeah, I use it as well now.
There's a new one coming out. Hey.com.
SPEAKER_01
Right. So two, two kick things on superhuman. So if you don't know, if you already know, just skip forward 30 seconds.
If you don't know what it's good at, it's trying to make you really fast at email. So the idea is most business people spend a lot of freaking time in email. And so they just made it really fast.
Lots of hot keys, little smart little details.
SPEAKER_00
It's hard to use.
SPEAKER_01
You have to literally learn it. So they will not let you use the product. You cannot sign up for it.
You cannot give them money unless you go through their onboarding where they call you, they video call you and they teach you step by step for 30 or 40 minutes. All the different tricks, all the different little tips that make it faster for you. And then every day, the founder emails you one more tip of a thing that makes it slightly better than normal email.
Yeah. And I would say it is better than normal email, but I'm not a big email guy. So I'm not really giving the value out of it, but you know, do you know how many it's like having a Louis Vuitton bag in Silicon Valley is to have a superhuman email account.
SPEAKER_00
The numbers work out to where there are more email addresses per person in America. So everyone has a roughly two emails. Yeah. So that's just in America, let alone everywhere else. It seems very plausible that you can get a million people to pay $30 a month.
Right.
SPEAKER_01
A million pro pro users of email. So that's a superhuman. On the other side, you have Hey.
So yesterday, Jason Fried, who's the founder of 37 Signals, that's a company based in Chicago. They make stuff like Basecamp. What are some other big products? So they have Campfire.
That's Campfire. They shut it down. They kind of double down on Basecamp really, but they built stuff.
They've been around for a long time.
SPEAKER_00
It's definitely okay, I think. They've been around for 15 years.
SPEAKER_01
They actually kind of punch above their weight because they're very, very smart. So first they released a bunch of books on the way they work. Rework is a phenomenal book.
I fucking love that book. And so Rework is one of their books that they launched and that's made a lot of money and got grown awareness of their brand. They also just love to pick fights with Silicon Valley, which I don't agree with
SPEAKER_00
all the time. It does.
SPEAKER_01
It's a brilliant marketing tactic. Even if you don't agree with the opinion, it's like such a smart, just smart thing to do for them. Yeah. So they're like, Oh, Silicon Valley will say you got to work 80, 90 hours a week. That's crazy.
40 hours more than enough. And they just take the week in the summertime. They do four day work weeks during the summertime.
They don't have ambitions to take over the world. They're like, we're not interested in conquering, disrupting. We just want to build a good business for our customers, make our customers happy.
And they just really try to be the anti-silicon Valley. They're a tech company, but they're an anti-silicon Valley tech company. And because of that, they get a lot of flak, but really just get a lot of attention.
You know, so it's brilliant marketing and they may believe exactly what they're saying.
SPEAKER_00
So yesterday, Jason.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So he announced his new project. Hey, hey.
com. Like baller domain.
SPEAKER_00
I bet that domain, if they had, they probably already owned it. They probably owned it for a while. That could probably cost a quarter of a million to half a million dollars.
Easily.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So they, they came out and they basically said, Hey, just go to the website. They kind of explain in a letter what they're trying to do.
It's a little bit vague because the product's not out yet, but basically they're trying to make email. They're like, look, email is great. It's awesome when you get a, when you get email from a friend.
It's awesome when you get a newsletter that you really wanted to get, but that's like 1%, 2% of all the email most people get. Most people just get a slew of automated shit and it's just made email really unpleasant experience. We're going to try to make it pleasant again.
The old 37 signals way. I'm interested. What do you think? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
Very interested. So I signed up for the beta. We'll, we'll find out if I got it.
Uh, very interested. I think that there's a lot of cool stuff going in the email space. Another one is a front app.
Yep. Is it called front front? Um, this, the woman who started it released a lot of their details like their deck and you can kind of reverse it.
SPEAKER_01
You can see there's series a fundraising deck to search front series a and you can read the whole thing. It's great. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
And what other email apps are there?
SPEAKER_01
And what front does a little different fronts like for team. So let's say we for this podcast want to have a email address where, where listeners can email us front says, okay, you don't need to like make one account and share all the credentials and then everyone's logging in from different devices and you don't know who's read what. So front is email designed for a team.
So it's good for customer service. It's good for marketing. It's good for any like shared inbox that five people in your company all need to use pretty smart because that's actually a common thing.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
And then there, uh, this actually was shut down recently or a few years ago, actually this guy named Gentry underwood started this thing. This thing called mailbox. Yep. They were trying to reinvent email. It was acquired before they even launched a hundred million hundred million dollars.
Good deal for very nice UI. So they were kind of the first ones to do it. I think that this is a massive, massive, massive opportunity.
Yeah. I think that there is not even close to enough competitors in the space. There's room for everyone to win.
Right. There are a lot of people to win.
SPEAKER_01
Um, and the key, the reason it works is email is interoperable. The protocol is not owned by anybody. So you can make a new client and unlike a messaging app, if I make a new good messaging app, I have to convince you to switch off a by message or Facebook messenger to come message me over here, but email doesn't work that way.
I can use superhuman. You can use Gmail. He can use hotmail and all of our email works.
We don't need to convince each other to move. Yeah. That's why email clients can work as a business.
SPEAKER_00
So can I tell you what I think is the biggest opportunity here? Go for it.
SPEAKER_00
So I would actually make it a free email client. Um, but what I would do is make it so you can purchase products inside the email. So the way email works now, let's say you send an email to an email to a hundred thousand people.
You got to click out. If you're lucky, you'll get a 30% open rate. So you have 30,000 people of those 30,000 people, then maybe 5%.
So what's 5% of 30,000? Henry. What is that? 6,000? Is that 6,000? So is that right? No, less 600. 600. The 600. I think it's 600.
Yeah. So you'll get 600 clicks on a hundred thousand cents. That's just the way the math works.
Yeah. Um, if you can make it to where you can purchase products quickly in email, that'd be great. The reason why you can't now is the way Gmail is set up, like JavaScript, things like that.
It doesn't work. I'm not technical, uh, but our team explains this as it just, it physically is impossible. So the only way that you can make email like this work is through building it from scratch.
SPEAKER_01
Do you think somebody would want to, oh, I'm going to use this new email client so that I can buy things through email? Like that makes sense if you're the sender.
SPEAKER_00
No, but I think that that's an interesting way to monetize though. Right. I think it's an interesting way. So this is a, this is not like a weekend project.
This is a massive project. Right. Um, but I think that like there are other, like if I was super human, I'd be like, man, I want to, instead of like charging, could I somehow take a cut of merchants? Right. And get mass adoption.
Um, I think it's incredibly interesting. Uh, another thing with email is I've been hacking with this in my brain and we've thought about doing it here is it's a few interesting things you can do with email. The first thing is you can't put movies in sounds in email, right? But you can put GIFs, which are basically movies without sound.
And another thing that you can do is if you tell us, if you can put a GIF in there and say, Hey, refresh this and you can refresh it and you could upload a new image on the back end. So it shows like part two. So I've been hacking around with this.
I think it'd be cool if you could have actual movies and images, uh, audio that are long in email. It's quite interesting. I think the, what's the, I think the size of the, the size of the size limit for email is man, I'm going to sound like an idiot.
It's at 150 megapixels.
SPEAKER_01
Make a bike. Uh, I know, I think it's smaller than that because Gmail makes you zip stuff. When it's over 25.
So maybe 15, sorry.
SPEAKER_00
Is it 15? Uh, I don't even want to sound, I mean, I don't know. We are, I know that there's a limit though. And our tech team knows what it is.
Anyway, very interesting stuff with email. Right.
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah. I like, I like the project. Huge project, uh, and very hard, but very valuable if you can crack it because everybody, everybody uses it.
SPEAKER_00
Um, I'm pretty, I'm pretty into that.
SPEAKER_01
I'll give you another idea that I really liked that didn't work, which is probably a stupid thing to talk about on the podcast, but idea I think is dope. That got tested, that didn't work. Um, it was this company that got sold.
It was called earn. It sold to coinbase. It sold basically because the main guy is, uh, like very high profile.
Yeah. Bollogy. Um, we should get him on.
He apparently Mark Andreessen calls Bollogy's the most, uh, the highest ideas per minute that he's ever seen and anybody has ever met. He said this guy has the highest velocity of ideas.
SPEAKER_00
Is this like a good looking Indian dude?
SPEAKER_01
Not that you're looking, but he's an Indian dude. He looks like a celebrity. I wouldn't say so, but maybe to you.
SPEAKER_00
Um, so I know he's got, he's on Twitter. He's got like an image. Yes. Like a cartoon.
SPEAKER_01
Yes, exactly. So this guy, he's really interesting guy, big time into crypto. So he tried this crypto project, which was pretty cool concept.
It was look, uh, we all get too much email and a lot of businesses are always trying to send people email. Um, but the incentives are not aligned because email is free to send. So it's free to, it's free for me to bother you.
Uh, but you don't want to get bothered and you don't get any value when you respond. So he, he set up a different premise, which was, what if you could just set up price? We said, if you pay 10 bucks, I guarantee I'll reply to your thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
So there's another one. There's a few of those. And the reason I know this is when we send a million emails, we have a reply address.
I love it at all time. And it says, you've got to pay a dollar to reach this person. Interesting.
SPEAKER_01
What are they, what do you know what they're using?
SPEAKER_00
It's such as the D. I don't, I can't remember off the top of my head, like discord or discourse or is, is a word similar to that. I don't remember off the top of my head.
Um, Facebook messenger. Uh, tested this as well where if you wanted to cold message someone, you'd have to pay a dollar. I used to do it all the time.
SPEAKER_01
And would they receive the dollar or Facebook gets the dollar? Facebook. Right. So this is different where this says, I will get five. I will get, if it's 10 bucks, I get nine.
The service gets one. And the person gets a guaranteed reply. And I think that's pretty cool for, you know, high profile people or important people, you know, recruiters who want to reach people is pay per reply.
I think that's interesting. It didn't work, but maybe there's a V2 that will work eventually because the premise makes a lot of sense to me.
SPEAKER_00
I'm into it. Cool. What else we got? Uh, let's do the, uh, what's the streaming thing? Streaming payroll.
SPEAKER_01
Okay. So this is an idea by buddy Furcon gave me. Um, so he was basically like, Hey, there's an interesting crypto project.
And, uh, I was like, what is it? And I forgot the name of it. I forgot the name of it now, but he basically was describing it. He's like, you know, you know, we get payroll, like we get paid every two weeks or one, you know, whatever bi-weekly.
Um, why don't you just get paid per minute? Like that you work. Why aren't you just like we stream video and it just, you know, bit by bit, just comes to us instead of having to download a full thing and then watch, you know, the way video turned into streaming money should become streaming. And, uh, I should just get paid all every hour I'm working, not once every two weeks.
And, uh, so the crypto project trying to do this, I think this would be awesome. If the world could make it work.
SPEAKER_00
Why does it have to be crypto crypto to make this work? It doesn't have to be crypto to make it work. I'm like, I don't want to talk.
SPEAKER_01
It doesn't have to be crypto to make it work, but you're building basically on new financial rails to do this. So there's a reason we don't do this in the traditional financial system, but in this case, uh, you know, there's another company that's very successful that doesn't use crypto for something very similar. It's called earn in.
So what earn in does earn in is a company they've raised now $190 million. And, um, what earn in does, you'll see their ads on Tik Tok. This is how you know, uh, they're doing something interesting.
Um, so they basically say, if you're a retail worker, most, most people, three fourths of Americans are paycheck to paycheck. So if there was a two day delay in getting their paycheck, they would have problems making rent, paying their bills, et cetera, et cetera. And so what earn in does is that's a shame.
You work at this job. You've worked there for two years. We know you're going to get paid.
Um, why don't we front you the paycheck? So this has existed like payday loans, which are really precious. So you just connect your bank account, it scans your bank account and it'll just see, oh, every two weeks, it gets a deposit from the same company every two weeks. Okay. We understand that's your paycheck. And what they do is they say, Hey, if you want to access your paycheck now, um, you just click this button and it's actually free to do that.
So they're not taking some aggressive payday loan. The way they do it is once you get your thing, you can tip. So it's whatever you, however happy you were with the service you tip.
So it's all pay it off. And your tip becomes the front for somebody else's paycheck, payday loan. But basically, oh, I hate that.
And so it's doing really, really well. That's shocked me. I hate companies that are based off of.
I'll tell you another story about donations. Are you sure this is good? It's doing really well. Just pay for it.
SPEAKER_00
I'll just pay five dollars for that. So you do, you do pay two, five dollars for it, but you just do it voluntarily.
SPEAKER_01
I hate that. You can hate it. It works.
It works. It works. And so I have another example of this.
Crazy to me when I was in the restaurant industry, there was a restaurant. I can't remember which one. I think it was Panera Bread.
Panera Bread ran an experiment somewhere. I think Missouri, maybe actually. Oh, you know why? That's where I'm from.
That's because it started.
SPEAKER_00
We call it St. Louis, Breadco. Right. Exactly. So they went and they did a thing there.
SPEAKER_01
They were like, look, there's a low income area. We want to make this restaurant. It's pay, pay what you want.
And they did a pay what you want experiment. And I was talking to the guy who was like, I'm going to make this restaurant. And I was talking to the guy who ran the experiment.
And he said, we've done it over a year now. He's like, the data is crazy. He goes, I don't know if it's just because it's a novelty thing, but we've gone a year now.
And what they found was that if the average checkout at the time, I think it was like $9 at Panera at the pay what you want thing, it was $12. And they were making they were making more money per customer on the paycheck. Because he said the majority of people will do the recommended and some people are generous and some people are sort of freeloaders.
But on average, they were making more money per customer in this. Now, that might have been a novelty thing. I don't know, because like maybe the people who go there, you know, who are sort of self select Everlane.
SPEAKER_00
They do what? You know, Everlane? Yeah, yeah. Cool t-shirts and shit like that. It's all tipping.
No, when they have instead of putting. So they for sure have it. I think it's instead of sales, but they have a selection of items that are pay what you want.
Right. And what they do is there's a baseline like $40. And you could easily figure that out just by lowering the thing.
But it's like, what do you want to pay? Just pay it. And if it's below that threshold, they don't accept it. And so what I do is I just lower it.
I just find out where that baseline is. And that's what I pay. Right. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. Another example.
I think it's really stupid. Another example for you.
SPEAKER_01
So I'm at Twitch right now. Twitch has two two ways to pay two main ways. One is you subscribe, pay five bucks to Twitch.
Twitch gives a cut, you know, half to the to the streamer roughly. And you get these benefits in the chat. You get to use these special emojis, blah, blah, blah.
The other thing is you can just donate straight to the streamer. You get no perks, but 100% of the money goes to the streamer. Streamlabs, which is a company that runs that tipping service, they put out a quarterly report every every every every quarter.
And it's public. So you can go read this. But there are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the tipping service where you get no benefit.
It's crazy to you. It's crazy to you, but I'm telling you, there's something to this. I have enough data points to believe.
SPEAKER_00
Yes. PPS, you know, PBS, they've been doing this. NPR has been doing this.
And I don't know what their numbers are. I'm sure they're public, right? But shocking to me. Shocking to me.
I don't I don't understand.
SPEAKER_01
It may not be optimal, but it is above the bar of not working, right?
SPEAKER_00
I would not want to run my business that way. Sure. That's so maybe there are what's the phrase? The rule, not exceptions to the rule, exceptions to the rule. Maybe I think these are the exceptions.
SPEAKER_01
Could totally be the case.
SPEAKER_00
That's mind boggling to me. I would not want to be in that position where I have to ask for donations. We talked about Ted Turner yesterday.
That's what they did when they first started, though, they would do.
SPEAKER_01
How much is Wikipedia raised when they do the donations based thing? Do you know? Can you Google how much does Wikipedia raise in their donations? I'm curious, because they're probably the biggest example of a donation based
SPEAKER_00
global service web archive, I think does it to write.
SPEAKER_01
But Wikipedia is one of those popular websites on earth, right? So that one's going to be how much you think we could be cost to run 20 or
SPEAKER_00
$30 million a year.
SPEAKER_01
I have no idea. I mean, it's a lot of bandwidth, right? They're static pages. What's that? You think they get that for free? Maybe maybe they maybe they get donations there, too.
SPEAKER_00
Okay. You know, you want to talk about Wikipedia real quick? Have you got gold dot com as a gold dot com or golden golden golden dot com. Some of our friends invested in it.
They're trying to compete with Wikipedia. Andreas and Horowitz invested in it. Rumor has it there's another big around big round that will be discussed soon.
Right. Like, I think a pretty large round.
SPEAKER_01
So golden dot com. What they're trying to do is very hard for me to actually figure out what they're trying to do. I've been watching them for a while.
I don't get it. It's very confusing. I like the guy behind it.
Jude, I like him a lot. I think he's really smart, but golden is almost too smart for me. So it's basically like Wikipedia, but they'll explain topics that something that sometimes Wikipedia doesn't do a great job of explaining.
So like science topics or things about companies, stuff that Wikipedia doesn't do a great job of. It seems like a long, slow, hard road to build something like that.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I don't quite understand what they're doing. I mean, I know what they're trying to do, but I don't get the angle. Another person who's trying to do the same thing is Mockbood from.
He's rap genius. I think he's a crazy person. I've hung out with him a little bit.
I think he's nuts. He started rap genius, which was like Wikipedia for rap lyrics. Yeah. Now he has this thing and he's been doing it for a while called every. Is it every Pedia or ever? Pedia here.
I think it's stupid. Yeah, I think it's stupid too.
SPEAKER_01
But then again, I thought rap genius was pretty stupid initially, but it's not a good business. And then I switched. I switched because when they said the stat, which was that 2% of all Google searches were for lyrics.
Yeah, like AZ lyrics. It's just insane. And then they grew that thing.
And then it sort of like crashed because the founders are crazy and it wasn't a great business.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it's hard to monetize that stuff, but they went the media route. I don't think that was the right route. Did they sell to Spotify yet?
SPEAKER_01
It seems like they're just trying to sell to Spotify. They like look like Spotify.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but I think they raised it like a billion dollar valuation. Like it's like 100. Oh, that ship sailed now.
SPEAKER_01
Like, yeah, I think no recovering from that.
SPEAKER_00
I think it was north of a hundred million dollars. I mean, it was a lot of money. Right. Um, yeah, I don't get that. Wait, what about Wikipedia? What's the answer? They say.
They raised according to Business Insider in 2016. They raised 82 million. 82 million dollars in one year.
Donations. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. See, and that's the biggest website in the world. Pretty good.
One of I don't, I don't, I don't think it's great. I'm not a fan. Um, what's this period?
SPEAKER_01
So more money than that gets donated to Twitch streamers every year, which is something wrong in the world. Wikipedia is great.
SPEAKER_00
Let's do a period apps. And then number eight and nine you have here.
SPEAKER_01
Okay. Uh, period apps. So I don't have a, I don't have a ton to share here.
This is very surface level, but, um, I saw, I, I, I've been tracking this for a while. So there's two types of apps that didn't work very well early on when the app store first came out that now there's a bunch of successes for. And, um, so the lesson here for an entrepreneur is, um, just because it didn't work then something might have changed now.
And I think people just got more used to using apps to run their life.
SPEAKER_00
Is this period like time or period like a menstruation?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So basically there's two types of apps. So, you know, we just had a baby.
Uh, there's these apps that are about what I think one's called what to expect. Yeah. And these apps do phenomenally well. Oh my God.
Like the, the downloads, the usage, the monetization, it's all on point. And that one's a little bit tough. Cause when you get out of the, you know, after nine months, you sort of churn because you've moved on.
That's okay. But during that nine months, you'll buy anything during that nine months. You a have to buy a lot of shit.
Um, so like you, their sponsorships are crazy. Like dove is going all out. And so is Huggies and all these other guys crazy sponsorships.
The forums are crazy. So what they do is they bat you. They say September mommies, you know, October, 2019 mommies, whatever.
And so they bat you by, by birth month. And the forums in this thing are like, I've never seen this level of engagement because the moms want to know what's going on. They want to share ideas.
They want to ask questions. And this is like the safe place to do it. So that's what to expect.
Then there's the ones that are about generally tracking, uh, you know, menstruation cycles, fertility and that sort of thing. These companies are crushing it. So I saw some numbers for a company.
They're, uh, one of the, one of the companies as a tracking app, going to do 30 million this year annually. First year they turned on monetization. What's money? It's insane subscription.
And in the subscription, you get, I think probably either access to either more information. So there's some like mini courses inside or, um, it's, uh, like sort of just unlocking more data about yourself. So better tracking around certain things.
So between fertility, menstruation tracking, uh, you know, the birth cycle process, these apps, I would literally remember when the app store first came out, people tried to do these things and they got no traction. They did not pick up.
SPEAKER_00
I remember in college, me and my girlfriend would do it.
SPEAKER_01
And so now they, these have become like very mainstream in the same way that calm sort of took many, many years. And now boom, meditation apps are making, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars now. Uh, the same thing has happened with these niche apps.
SPEAKER_00
If I wanted to make money right off the bat with this, how would I make it a newsletter where I would say, tell us about it. Tell us where you are in your pregnancy or like, are you, uh, just, you just got pregnant? Are you, uh, how, you know, whatever, if you know, are you a week, you just gave your birth a week ago, where are you at? And then you can send daily or weekly emails on what to expect.
SPEAKER_01
I think that's a very smart approach. And you make it, you're going to make that shit one time. And I think it would work better than the app.
Because I think an app has a whole different problem of like people remembering to check it, whereas email just goes to their inbox. And so if, if somebody's doing this or you're interested in doing this, talk to me because I want to partner with you on the, on the, specifically around, uh, babies, either, you know, pre pre, uh, pre birth or after birth, I'm very interested in that space.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. I think I would do it in email. You know, what the cool thing about email is you can make this stuff one time and you'd have to write a lot, but you could do it as you go.
It's like a lesson plan. You do it as you go, but then you could continually reuse it and you make it a drip sequence. So you can download the convert kit, mail champ, whatever.
SPEAKER_01
Love it. You sign up. It's week one of pregnancy.
Here's what you need to know. This is exactly how, what, what to expect. That's how it works.
You start with that basis as you're in week one, here's everything week two, it changes. That sort of thing.
SPEAKER_00
And then you can have a basic ass Facebook group where it's $30 a month to be part of. And it's just as here's the top posts from this week of related to people who are in your category. Right.
SPEAKER_01
And I have a half baked idea around this. So last night, we went to a class because our baby's five months old and that's when you start introducing solid foods. And so my wife was like, Oh, we need to go to this class.
They teach us how to do this. Like we don't know how to prepare the foods. We don't know what, how many times to do it.
We don't know how to blah, blah, blah. So I was like, okay, so we went to our class. Nice lady teaches us and there's just like a bunch of families there.
All of us with our crying babies crying during the class. And I was just sitting there thinking, I was like, man, information like this is actually super critical. Like I've never paid attention in a class more than I was for like figuring how to feed my baby.
And why and like, why isn't this like just an online thing? Why isn't there life school that just teaches you real life shit? West that you need to know.
SPEAKER_00
I want to start that. I want to start real life. Our engineer West goes to one for buying a home.
So he bought a home and he went to a, I think it was a couple of weeks where there's a maintenance class and he learned how to fix a freezer, an air conditioner, all this crap.
SPEAKER_01
Fixing shit, learning. I have friends that just came into a little bit of money and they're like, Hey, I know I'm supposed to be investing, but like I got no clue. And everywhere I look, I just feel like they're trying to rip me off.
So I'm just like, I left it in my checking account for four years. And this is like life school. Here's how that works.
Here's how a mortgage works. Life school. Here's how, you know, going through the divorce.
Here's what divorce looks like. You know, like, people just need, people just need information that's not selling you the service.
SPEAKER_00
When I got married, we were thinking that we're looking at the annulment stuff or not the annulment, pre-nup stuff. Right. I had no idea where I was. I had knew nothing about that shit.
And that was hard to figure out.
SPEAKER_01
But so how did you end up figuring it out?
SPEAKER_00
I paid a lawyer. Yeah. But I didn't know who I just wanted to help. Right. But I was overwhelmed.
SPEAKER_01
So you did a pre-nup.
SPEAKER_00
We didn't end up doing it. Didn't end up doing it. Why not? Because we both were coming to the table with equal things.
With some things.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Yeah. And who, who was trying to do it? Were you trying to do it? Was she trying to do it? Because I've always thought like, man, that's a awkward conversation to have.
SPEAKER_00
It wasn't, it wasn't awkward at all.
SPEAKER_01
And why was that?
SPEAKER_00
Because we're both, we have the same values. Who brought it up?
SPEAKER_01
You brought it up or she did?
SPEAKER_00
I brought it up because me and Sarah, my wife is a very successful, comes from a very successful family. And we were just like, we have the same values when we got married was, so it starts with love. We love each other.
But also the second thing was like, this is like, sounds weird. It's almost like an arrangement. Like it's a team, like we are, we are, we're joining forces and it is about love.
But also like a partnership. Here's the rules that we're going to agree. You know, I mean, that's really what it was.
It was like, all right, do you want to raise your kids like this? Because if that doesn't fit how I, my values and this partnership doesn't work. It was very much a partnership. It was like, all right, so what, what can we expect for the next five or 10 years? Right.
The operating agreement.
SPEAKER_00
We had an opera, basically what it was. We said, we sat down and we said, this is how I feel. Do you agree or not? Me need to hash this out.
Otherwise, we're not going to get married.
SPEAKER_01
And so let me ask you a different question. If one of you, let's say you or her, let's just say, let's just say for, for a hypothetical, let's say she was a come to the table with, let's say equal financial means at the time, would you have still brought it up and do you think it still would have worked?
SPEAKER_00
So the logical side of me says, yes, you have to do it. The emotional side of me, there's a funny quote from Ari Gold, an entourage, and they say like, Ari's telling all his actor friends to get pre-dups. And they go, what about you? He goes, I'd kill my wife before we got divorced.
I'm like, look, if I'm going to commit, I'm in this forever. And, you know, we both said that we're like, you know, we hate each other. Like, because we're both Catholic and like, this is, this is, we're committing.
You're fucking Indian. It's like the Indians are like that too. Yeah, Indians don't get divorced.
SPEAKER_01
But for different reasons, it's like, what will society say if we got divorced?
SPEAKER_00
That's how I felt like if I commit, I'm committing forever. And no matter how bad a fuck up, unless it's like physical abuse, like it's forever. That's how I felt.
SPEAKER_01
Why did you even explore the prenup if you feel so strongly?
SPEAKER_00
Because every smart person, like all the lawyers that I have,
SPEAKER_01
they got in your head a little bit.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, they're like, you should do that. And who the fuck knows? It might come up and bite me in the ass. Right. We had a handshake agreement. I think there's also some laws around California that whatever you come into it is already separate.
SPEAKER_01
I think there should be the thing you were talking about, the operating agreement. I think there should be like a little quid, a questionnaire quiz that couples take before they get married. I think this should be an online service that says, how do you feel about this? How do you feel about this? And then it compares your answers and it tells you, here's where you guys are super overlapped and here's where you guys are most different.
And maybe you guys should have a conversation and here's some tools that might help you guys. So there is this thing.
SPEAKER_00
Succeed. Is it in the New York Times, this guy like came up this list of 23 questions and they're like, how to like get to know someone, how to fall in love with someone in five minutes? Have you heard of this thing?
SPEAKER_01
Nobody in college, we made up a similar thing called the get to know you game.
SPEAKER_00
And they're like, if you ask these five questions and this is like when I was single, I was like, shit, I'm gonna do this in the first day.
SPEAKER_01
What are some examples of the questions?
SPEAKER_00
I don't fucking remember. It was something like, if your parents were dying, what would you tell them? It starts off as like high level, like simple shit. Yeah, beets or mountains.
Look at Henry, look this up. Look up 23 love questions or some bullshit like that. Like, yeah, look up that.
And it's like, New York Times, 23 love questions. Yeah, New York Times covered it. 36 questions.
36, what is it? What's it called? 36 questions that lead to love. 36 questions that lead to love. Can you give me some examples of the questions? It starts easy and gets harder.
So we did that early on. Nice. And yeah, we were like, not pretty agreement would be great, but you didn't do this.
SPEAKER_01
I think everybody does it in some informal way and ad hoc way and incomplete way.
SPEAKER_00
We sat down and hashed out.
SPEAKER_01
Ours was incomplete, I feel.
SPEAKER_00
Sarah, I'm lucky. You know, Sarah, she's very, she's pretty business minded.
SPEAKER_01
Like very rational, very rational.
SPEAKER_00
And that's why I love her. And one of the reasons and when we got married, we had to go to the church and you got to talk to the priest. And I was raised Catholic, but I don't do any of that shit anymore.
And he was like, so why do you want to get married? And we like, well, we have similar values. We want the same things in life. We're both really driven.
We're both a business and we said all this shit like that. And he goes, what about love? And we're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. And while we were meeting this priest, I remember he was like, so you guys are Catholic.
He's like, and I was like, yeah, Catholic is shit. Super Catholic. And I remember I was so nervous because I didn't want him to turn us down, which we're not really Catholic.
I remember my phone rang and I go, oh, fuck. And I go, I was like, oh, shit, sorry, I didn't mean to cuss. Like I was trying to like not get banned.
SPEAKER_00
But anyway, that's we went the whole process. What are some questions? So when did you last sing to yourself? That's an easy question. But then one of the questions like 30 and 25, when did you last cry from another person? When did you last cry?
SPEAKER_01
Of all the people in your family, who's death would you find most disturbing? Yeah, these are good questions.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. So if you're single, I think these are good things to ask in the first couple of dates. Yeah, I think it's great.
It's icebreakers and you can get intimate fast.
SPEAKER_01
Love it. Good stuff. Okay, cool.
What else we got?
SPEAKER_00
You want to wrap up with number eight or number nine? Okay.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, let's do I don't know either. I'm going to do number nine. So this is just something I'd notice.
All right. So this one that I have up here, it's called three reasons versus one reason. So I noticed this because in the last 24 hours, I did three different like deals or negotiations.
And what they are one, I definitely cannot say one was at work. All business business business related. One was at work where a guy on my team wanted to leave and go do this other team.
And he's like one of our star guys. And we were like, I was like, no, you can't leave. Why do you want to leave? And he was giving me his reasons and I was trying to convince him essentially, don't leave.
We, you know, we need you. You're great. It's great.
Whatever's wrong, we can fix it. And another was a business transaction where I was buying something and negotiating a price. And in all cases, I noticed this thing, which is there's two types of this.
There's I'll start at a high level. There's two types of disagreements. There's a disagreement you have, you can actually fix them.
Disagreement you can't because you're fundamentally misaligned. So let's focus on the ones where, uh, how do you figure out which one you're in? So in any time, anytime somebody puts up resistance, there's the stated reason and the real reason. And I think because I played poker a lot growing up, I just now assumed that the stated reason is never the real reason.
It sometimes is, but I just always assume it's not. And I've noticed in a lot of people that I hire after teach them this, which is whatever they told you, that's the stated reason. And they're not necessarily lying to your face.
It's just what they feel is polite or it's what they think is true, but they haven't really assessed it themselves. But there's the stated reason. There's the real reason.
And if you find the real reason you want to figure out, is it three reasons or is it one? When it's three reasons or it's a bunch of different things and they, you start to ask why and they're like, well, there's this and then this and this, what you're getting is an emotional reaction. They are just emotionally hurt and they want to, they want change. If you get one reason, that's that, that's an actual reason that if you just solved it, they'll change their mind.
And so I found this where I'm talking to somebody, I'm trying to convince them of something or we're trying to find some common ground. And when they give me three reasons and I start to use logic to address those reasons, it never works. They'll just pop up a fourth reason and a fifth reason and a sixth reason.
It's because it wasn't a logical problem to begin with. It was an emotional problem. They weren't feeling the love.
And I just got to show them the love and then we'll see what happens. And when it's one reason, if I start to show them the love, it doesn't do anything because I got to actually problem solve the one reason. It's actually a rational decision that they're making.
So it's just an observation. If you're talking to somebody and they give you resistance, first figure out, this is the stated reason. What's the real reason? You do that by probing, asking questions.
And then when they give you the real reason, is it one or three? If it's one, you could probably solve it. If it's three, it's an emotional problem and you need to show them the love.
SPEAKER_00
That's cool. And that book, High Output Management, discussing something similar, which is when you meet with people, employees, there's really only one or two, actually three or four reasons why meetings exist. The first one is just to exchange information.
The second one is they say they have a problem and you solve it. And the third one is you just got to listen. Someone just wants to complain and don't like, you know, a lot of complaining you don't want to put up with, but everyone's involved.
People just have, they just want to vent. Right. They just got to talk about shit. And you just got to sit there and listen and you don't try to solve the problem.
You just got to listen to it.
SPEAKER_01
And that's usually the hardest.
SPEAKER_00
And that's the hardest. But it's, you can overcome that shit. It's just, I think men in particular, you hear, they go, I got a problem.
You go, okay, we're going to solve by doing this. We're going to do this. Right. A lot of times they'll be like, well, no, look, you're not hearing me. Well, even worse, a problem.
I'm just trying to get it off my chest.
SPEAKER_01
Even worse, you'll say, that's not a big deal. Look, let's just do this and this. So not only have you minimized the problem, you basically told them they're stupid for thinking it's a problem and you tried to fix it when they didn't want either of those two things.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. No, I've, I've had a learn.
SPEAKER_01
You have an executive coach. I had one that basically taught me a phrase that she said, are you listening to learn or you're listening to fix? Are you listening to learn? Or are you listening to fix two different modes? Yeah. And people typically will actually just want you to listen to learn.
You're actually listening to understand how they feel and what's, what's wrong.
SPEAKER_00
Well, not listening to fix. We share the same executive coach company torch. We got to talk about them next week.
They just sent up to sponsor with us. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
I was going to say we, this is free sponsorship for them that they're getting.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. No, we, they, and they just sent it. We just sent a deal with them.
So we'll actually have, maybe they'll actually be like a proper advertiser, but we'll talk about them regardless. Maybe next week. Cool. Because it's kind of cool. I really dig that.
They're, they're good.
SPEAKER_01
Like it. Okay. That's all I had today.
SPEAKER_00
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SPEAKER_01
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SPEAKER_00
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