SPEAKER_03
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SPEAKER_00
Namaste, that's our corona, namaste. People are legit doing the foot handshake. Like several people have done this to me, be like, all right, yep, corona.
SPEAKER_03
One of my co-workers, Bobby, on Instagram, he's like, handshakes are discussing right now, you have to do other things. And he put a video of him and another co-worker, Katie, having their feet with their toes interlocking.
SPEAKER_00
It was so funny. It just triggers everyone. Yeah, he was like, you can't handshake anymore,
SPEAKER_03
you have to do other methods. Their toes were interlocking.
SPEAKER_00
That's like, that is the best content on social media is these photos that will just trigger people. When they see that, there was one where this guy was on a plane and he was barefoot and he put his foot on the armrest of the person in front of him. And it got like, I don't know, whatever the max number of Twitter users are that could share, that's how many people share this thing.
SPEAKER_03
That's awesome. We should, I should take that from him and share it on my stuff, because I'll steal their clout. Last podcast we talked about, Run the World.
Yeah. Okay, so.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, big major retraction. I signed up, me and Alan did it. Sorry guys, it didn't work.
SPEAKER_00
Platform sucks right now.
SPEAKER_03
Platform sucks. I think that if they're listening, you can get it right, but you missed it this time.
SPEAKER_00
And you tweeted at them, did they respond to you?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, good customer service. And they, I got a, I sent it to you last night, I couldn't go to bed last night, two or three in the morning. They just screwed up.
SPEAKER_00
So it's just kind of buggy, right?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, yeah. All right, that's unfortunate. We'll figure it out.
SPEAKER_00
We'll figure it out. We'll try another one at some point.
SPEAKER_03
But we definitely did it. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Yeah. Is there any, okay, so we can get.
SPEAKER_00
Other updates. How about Henry with the microphone? Talking to that, get that smooth voice, that Barry Manilow voice on here. What's up guys? I'm Henry.
Oh man, look at that. On the pod. New fan favorite.
SPEAKER_01
That's awesome. I'm the Jamie of, from the Joe Rogan experience for this podcast. Powerful young Henry.
SPEAKER_00
But he is leaving. I know, but for now it's powerful young Henry.
SPEAKER_01
I am leaving in a week, but Alan will be replacing me. So you'll have a new fresh face. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_00
So now when we need to look stuff up and then Henry finds the information cause we don't know what the hell we're talking about. Now he can say it into the mic, which is great.
SPEAKER_03
Are there any other updates that we have to talk about? Run the World didn't work. Henry has a mic.
SPEAKER_00
No, that's good.
SPEAKER_03
We asked people to subscribe and unsubscribe and send videos. I don't think it worked.
SPEAKER_00
Don't think that worked. But podcast is growing anyways. So I feel happy.
We're up I think 55% since last month.
SPEAKER_03
Which is awesome. Solid growth. If you are listening to this, you don't have to do much just share this with a friend and you could tag either of us on Twitter and we will, I'll for sure reply.
Sean will say he will and he might.
SPEAKER_00
I may or may not reply. But here's the thing. I was on my way over here today and you know I like to get in the mood.
Like I like to prime the pump. I was like, what should I listen to that's gonna get the ideas flow and get the wheels turning so that when I come in here, my brain is already firing. There's no podcast to listen to.
That's like this dude. I hate to say it. There's no other podcast that does this where it's like, there's a lot of good podcasts where it's great storytelling, great interviews but nobody is playing mental hopscotch with ideas.
And so I couldn't get anything to get me going.
SPEAKER_03
So that's a good sign for when I wasn't here. Stu did it and I listened to it and I loved it. And I love the notes even more.
Right. I love the notes. I had no idea about the whole Christian tithing business.
Awesome. And that's when I know it's good because I typically hate anything I'm involved in.
SPEAKER_00
And how about the guy who's doing the tithing business?
SPEAKER_03
He like. Oh yes. A guy messaged us.
It sounds like he was English. He must be in England.
SPEAKER_00
He's in the UK. He's basically, so his thing was, we didn't give him the idea. He also- Say the background.
So the background is we were talking about, I mean, Stu we're talking about, okay cool, religious, religion tech, church tech. And one of the ideas that came up are one of the things I told him I said, somebody had reached out and said, give me three months. I'm gonna be on the podcast because I'm gonna build this thing.
It's badass. You guys should know, you're talking about church tech. There's this company that does digital tithing.
It's called PushPay. It's big. Four billion processed, 98 million in revenue.
There's another one called Tithely. And he's like, but they're not big in the UK or Europe right now. I'm gonna build it in the UK and Europe.
And in the Facebook group, which we'll put the link in the show notes, he's providing these video updates. So he posted his first video update. I don't know if you saw it.
He's like, I got 23 customers, churches who were interested in doing this, including one that runs 2000 churches. And he's young. And he's a young guy.
He's a smart guy. And he's like, look, here's how I came up with this idea. And I'm doing it.
I'm gonna provide video updates every week in this thing. And I love the work. I love when people share their work.
I love when people work in public. I think it's an extremely underrated thing to do. And every time you do it, you get this army of people who are rooting for you and opening up doors for you as you go.
SPEAKER_03
I completely agree.
SPEAKER_00
And it keeps you accountable.
SPEAKER_03
I'm excited to see what he's gonna do. Hopefully his next video is a little shorter.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, this one was like six minutes. Eight minutes. I watched two of the eight,
SPEAKER_03
but I enjoy all two that I watched. I like that guy. So, I guess we should put Abruz, I think that's how you say his name.
SPEAKER_03
Abrayu. We should put his show notes in the...
SPEAKER_00
In the description. Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_03
This guy is a listener. He just makes these great notes. We don't know him.
I mean, I met him recently. He called me a little bitch when I first met him. That's what he did.
He was like, doggie or what? Well, I met him and he goes, hey, why don't you follow me on Twitter? I was like, I don't know. I'm sorry. And he goes, just stop being a little bitch and follow me.
That's one of the first things he said when I met him. I was like, nice to meet you. So, kudos to that guy for whatever you wanna give him.
SPEAKER_00
I had this blog post. I used to try to blog about business back in the day when we were doing our very first start up right out of college. And none of my posts got read by anybody.
Nobody cared. But one post went semi-viral and it was called the first to curse advantage. And basically I was saying how in a meeting, the first person who uses a curse word sort of establishes himself as the person who just doesn't give a fuck about the, they put themselves in a position of power.
And it also builds a different level of rapport because you're obviously using informal language with somebody else. And you're demonstrating that you're not seeking their approval in a way. And so I always, in meetings, I do this.
I try to be the first to curse in a meeting.
SPEAKER_03
But can I say, I don't love that. And I'm like, people-
SPEAKER_00
Because you don't like cursing in general?
SPEAKER_03
No, I mean, I actually, when I hear myself curse, I'm like, man, I sound kind of trashy.
SPEAKER_00
I agree. I don't like when I hear myself do it. And I think I do it too much.
But I've noticed in meetings, it changes the dynamic instantly. And for better or for worse, but I've-
SPEAKER_03
But I think there's a difference between being crude and being cursing actually. So like saying bitch, I fucking hate. Oh my God, did you just hear that? That wasn't on purpose.
So I don't like when people say that. I don't- I don't- I don't- I don't- Quick story before we get into this. I went, I got married in September.
And I had to go, I got married to a Catholic church and you got to go meet with a priest ahead of time. And I was really nervous because I don't, I'm not practicing, I don't go to church. And, but I wanted, the whole wedding was, they had to approve it.
And the whole wedding was on the line, right? So I had to like be a good Catholic or at least appear like one. And I remember I was sitting there and the priest was asking me and my wife, my future wife about like, so do you guys agree on children? What do you think about birth control? All this stuff or whatever he was asking. And I would just say whatever I thought had to be so- The right answer.
I was very nervous. I was like, yes sir, yes we go to church three times. Like I just said everything.
And then my phone rings and I was so nervous I go, I go, oh fuck, sorry.
SPEAKER_01
It went really loud.
SPEAKER_03
And then he looked at me and I was like, shit, my bad, I didn't mean to cuss. And I was so embarrassed and mortified. That's amazing.
But he let it go. He let it go. Good guy.
Yeah, he let it go. I thought I made a joke about how I was asked about school he went to and he said he had a lot of student debt and he said, he's like, yeah, but the church-
SPEAKER_00
Is he a young guy?
SPEAKER_03
Like young? Like he was 30s or maybe late 30s. And he said, but the church pays for it. And I made like a joke like, ah, so that's why you joined.
And he didn't- He didn't appreciate that. He didn't like that.
SPEAKER_00
You wanna get into it? Yeah, let's get into it.
SPEAKER_03
So you make that bigger?
SPEAKER_00
Curly girl hair. So you guys in Trends did a post about the natural hair movement.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, that's a big thing. And mixed race and black women.
SPEAKER_00
And so talk a little bit about what was in the report and then I'll tell you sort of what I've seen separate from that.
SPEAKER_03
It sounds like you're more interested in it. You tell me what was in it.
SPEAKER_00
All right, so I'll start with, so my sister-in-law got super curly hair.
SPEAKER_03
And if you've never seen Sean, he's Indian.
SPEAKER_00
I'm Indian and she's Indian. And she's got super curly hair. And curly hair takes a lot of maintenance, right? Like gets humid, boom, it's frizzy.
And you have like this episode of Friends where Monica's hair is like an afro. That happens. Or it's flat.
Or you wanna straighten it or whatever. It's a lot of maintenance of curly hair. And so she was telling me, she's like, yeah, I downloaded this.
Like I joined this thing. I bought this PDF that's called the Curly Girl Guide or something like that. And it's this method to like taming your hair and getting, because I told her, I was like, your hair looks great nowadays.
Like what are you been doing? And I just thought she would say, oh, I use this other product. She's like, no, there's like a 12-step process I'm doing every night.
SPEAKER_03
Is this just for Indian women? Anybody with curly hair. Black women, anywhere else. So my wife, if you're, well, I guess they would be able to see this, my wife's black.
She's half white and half black.
SPEAKER_00
She's also not here, even if they're watching.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. So she's half white and half black. And she buys a lot of this stuff as well.
SPEAKER_00
Right. And so like there's a whole thing of like, when you go to sleep, you need to wrap your hair in a certain way to sort of like whatever the oils, blah, blah, blah. And so then, and like some basics that you just don't do.
So like she, you know, she had curly hair her whole life, but didn't know, oh, I'm not supposed to use shampoo in the same way that most people use shampoo. And so she was telling me about some of these differences. Anyways, opportunity.
I was like, I like these businesses where you could put out content and information that just helps people. And then sort of on the back end, sell the kit. That's like, oh, by the way, like if you just want to push a button and get the solution, I have the kit that has all the shit you need.
Because she spent hours researching all the different products that like, what is the best version of this oil I'm supposed to have? What is the best version of the shampoo for me? And so anyways, I think there's an opportunity to do this curly girl hair kit because there's this huge number of women that have curly hair. The spend is in the multi-billions per year in the US for how this gets treated. And there is this natural hair movement where it's less about doing these really damaging things, like permanently straightening your hair, or weaves and whatnot.
Now there's a sort of a natural hair movement. And so people need content, like education, plus the tools, this sort of the hair kit to take care of the hair.
SPEAKER_03
OK, I love that. Henry, can you do me a favor on a new tab? Type in Reddit curly hair. So there's a whole subreddit.
One of the ways I like to look at validation and ideas for different companies is I like to look at the engagement and size of a particular subreddit. How many subscribers does this subreddit have? I can't read that from here.
SPEAKER_00
Use that mic, you got it. Henry, what are you doing?
SPEAKER_03
That's pretty good, I think, actually, for a curly hair. And particularly because Reddit is mostly men. And this is a woman's focused curly hair subreddit.
SPEAKER_00
Exactly. So great way to sort of validate the demand and the community aspect to this, where people are sharing information and recommending products to each other. The other side of this is it photographs great.
So before and after, I believe, is the best ad that you can do before, which is a photo, after, which is a better photo. And you don't even need to show your product. You just need to show whatever I took gave me this outcome.
I was here, now I'm there.
SPEAKER_03
So my wife loves this subreddit. OK, so here's for their validation. OK, so particularly, so I think that the angle here is you have to go ethnicity or race specific.
So whether it's Indian, I have no idea if Asian women suffer from this. But if they do, do that. I know from firsthand experience that mixed race women, whether they're white and black or any other combination, suffer from this as well.
And further validation is Fenty. Rihanna has that brand that sold to the Louis Vuitton company, or what's it called?
SPEAKER_03
LVMH. And you could read about the deal. I think it was valued at $800 million.
And a lot of her thing is towards mixed races. And then another idea here, and everyone knows about this woman, but Kayla, it's new.
SPEAKER_00
It seems. It's seeing. It's seeing.
SPEAKER_03
What's their thing called?
SPEAKER_03
Sweat or some. Yeah, Sweat's her app. This is, I sound like a.
SPEAKER_00
Your wife does it. My wife does it.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I sound like an idiot because I'm a guy and I don't pay attention to this stuff.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, this whole segment is like bros trying to talk about products they don't understand. But I'm fascinated. I'm interested.
I'm trying. And everyone loves to try it.
SPEAKER_03
So Kayla's thing, I heard that's $100 million for your company. It is, the fitness app itself. That's crazy.
And it was just built off her Instagram following, so that's crazy.
SPEAKER_00
She started with the same thing. The bikini body guide, I think, was her content that she
SPEAKER_00
And it was PDF. And then the PDF got circulated everywhere. And basically, she allowed the paid PDF to get bootlegged and just shared everywhere.
And what that did was it just gave her tons of awareness, tons of marketing. And then she launched the app, which you couldn't bootleg and you had to pay for it. And then boom.
SPEAKER_03
And the most interesting part about her thing was she. So she's mainstream popular. And typically, when things are mainstream popular, maybe sometimes people who think they're cool can think it's kind of lame.
And Sarah's an Ivy League educated New Yorker. And she was like, oh, I love this PDF. Right. And so she has access to all types of interesting things. And she still uses it.
And I thought that was amazing that people really respected and liked it.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, she comes across very well, if you've ever seen her content. She's not hateable. She doesn't come across as hateable.
SPEAKER_03
I thought that's cool. Oh, and last thing, Diva Curl. Have you heard of Diva Curl? I have not.
SPEAKER_03
Another mixed race shampoo. Maybe it's for black women, or maybe it's, I don't know what the, I forget if it's black women or mixed race women. That's what we use for shampoo.
And it was acquired for a quarter of a billion.
SPEAKER_00
Nice. And there's some things on the opposite side, like Tristan Walker, who was, I think, either the co-founder or first employee of Foursquare, left to start his own African American men's skin care product company. Walker Brands.
Walker Brands, where it was like shaving stuff, because the hair is different. It's coarse. It's going to, the traditional shaving gear was causing problems, and didn't work out, went under.
And that kind of brings me to, I don't know why it went under exactly. I don't know if it was the business fundamentals.
SPEAKER_03
Well, I think it's why they just raised too much money and fucked everything up. OK, so when we started our business, we knew how to create our product, and we knew how to get sales. But I had no idea how to run payroll.
I didn't know anything about health care. I didn't know anything about that stuff. And so when we first started, we used a handful of different payroll providers, a couple of different HR providers.
And none of them were that great. And so I read about this guy named Parker Conrad, who launched this fantastic company called Rippling a couple of years ago. And since I read about it, I've been researching it, and we finally pulled the trigger and started using them.
And they are actually today's sponsor. So it's called Rippling. And what it does is, when you hire new employees, it makes it stupidly simple in order to onboard them.
It makes it really easy for your new employees to see your handbook, to see all the software you use, to get access to that software. And it actually makes something that I never even thought was a problem until I experienced it, which it makes it really easy to track all of your hardware and devices. You can see which employees use which computer, what software they're using.
And it's all one platform. So you could pay payroll, you can track health care, you can track hardware. You could do a bunch of really interesting things on it.
They're today's sponsor. They're one of our only sponsors that we've had. We've been very selective of who we are allowing to sponsor this podcast.
And we worked with them this time because I use Rippling personally, and I love it. So give it a shot, rippling.com. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G.com.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, so Atrium is a company that has raised $70 million.
SPEAKER_03
$75 million. You made a great comment that I've stolen and I've told everyone. But basically, Atrium, what they did, they never did anything really, unfortunately.
They tried to do a bunch of things. So at first, it was almost like you'd pay a flat fee and get a service done. And then they were like, all right, let's create software so lawyers can contribute with their clients and you can see what they're doing.
But you said, why didn't they just make a law firm? Exactly.
SPEAKER_00
So basically, Atrium, if you don't know, started by Justin Kahn, who is the founder of Justin.tv, which became Twitch. And a well-known guy in Silicon Valley.
So he raises $75 million pretty much out the gate, like in two rounds, I believe. But the first round, I think they raised $10 million out of $90 million valuation on Justin saying, hey, I'm going to do a new thing. And then they raised more money and they raised it all pre-product market fit.
So before they knew what they had and what the market wanted, they raised a ton of money. And what I call this is the curse of money expectations in people. And so what does that mean? The curse of money is when you get too much money before you actually know what you're doing, that actually decreases your odds of success.
It doesn't increase your odds of success. The second is expectations. Justin Kahn, famous guy, serial entrepreneur, raises a bunch of money at a high valuation.
Now you have the weight of those expectations, which makes you less nimble, less agile, and less responsive to changing up your own product.
SPEAKER_03
And he nobody told me. He spoke at HustleKahn. I hung out with him backstage.
One of my secrets of HustleKahn is I make everyone come an hour early. And I lie to them about when they have to speak.
SPEAKER_00
Starts at 2. Yep.
SPEAKER_03
So I hang out with him backstage. And I meet all these people. I told one guy, the founder of Zapier, I hung out with that dude all day, Wade doing this thing.
And what Justin told me was he goes, I have a chip on my shoulder that Twitch sold for $1 billion. This has to be $10 billion, or I'm not interested. And I was like, I don't know if that's a healthy attitude.
I don't know, Justin. He goes, I have a chip on my shoulder, which I think that is actually healthy. I'm all for that.
But he told me he's like, here's what the expectations are. And I was like, that's a little crazy, dude, but whatever.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that is a little crazy. And the last one is the curse of money, the expectations of people, and people is when you have all this money and you have all these expectations, you start hiring a bunch of people. So they laid off like, I don't know, 100 people.
I think 200. Why do they even have 100 or 200 people?
SPEAKER_03
And they were lawyer, like lawyer type. I mean, these people cost a lot.
SPEAKER_00
Right. And so before you have product market fit, you want to have as few people as possible. You want to have as sort of lightweight expectations.
You want to be extremely nimble and agile. So they tried to do a hybrid. Like you said, I went to one.
So one of the things they did really well was Justin leveraged what he had. Leverage your assets, right? So his asset was he's got a name in the tech community. So here's what he did.
First, when he raised money, he raised like a bunch of VCs. Because he knew, well, they have companies, they're going to send their clients. Those are my future clients.
SPEAKER_03
And I love what you're about to say now. I think that's even better.
SPEAKER_00
And so I don't know if you know, but so I'm talking about these weekend things he hosted. Yeah. So did you go to one? No.
SPEAKER_03
So I went to one of these. I almost went to a few.
SPEAKER_00
So he basically said, cool, weekend workshop. Justin Kahn is going to do an atrium academy workshop on the weekend. And I don't remember what the promise was.
I think it was like how to raise money for your company. And so I went to one of them because I wanted to see what was up. And it's a kind of an all day thing.
And he's talented. At the atrium office. And Justin's a very charismatic magnetic speaker.
Yeah. And so he starts telling the atrium stories. Like, you know, when we started this company, and he's like, you know, one of the things about I always thought, he's like, I became involuntary.
I became an involuntary power user of legal services. I love that phrase. He's like, because, you know, when we were selling Twitch for a billion dollars, we needed a bunch of lawyers.
And when I did this other thing we raised money for, I needed a bunch of lawyers. And I do all these investments, and I need a bunch of lawyers. So I just realized, man, legal system sucks.
And everyone's nodding their head. And he's like, you know, it's weird that you don't know the price of something. You know, they bill you by the hour.
So they're incentivized to spend as much time and bill you as much as they can. You want it fast, and you want to know your price. We're like, yeah, you're righteous.
And I do want that. And he's like, you know, the second thing is, he's like, why I looked into it. Why isn't there a competitor? No, no, the second one was, he was like, I was having dinner with my friend who's a lawyer.
And I asked her, you know, what do you guys use for project management? She's like, what do you mean? He's like, do you use Trello or Asana? And she's like, I don't know what those words are. He was like, lawyers don't use anything for their project management. Isn't that crazy? Or like, yeah, that's crazy.
Last one, he was like, so then I was like, why doesn't somebody start a competitor? He's like, I realized there's some legislation that says you can't start a law firm, and I'm going to butcher what the actual legal problem was. But like, there was a rule, you cannot start a law firm unless you're a lawyer. Unless you've been a lawyer for a certain amount of time or whatever it was.
He's like, so that's why no outsider has done this. But luckily we found a loophole that let us start this law firm. So we're one of the only new law firms that started not by these people.
By the end of it, you're like, do you take my money? I want to invest in your thing.
SPEAKER_03
Your impression of Justin Khan is so condescending and so funny.
SPEAKER_00
I don't mean it that way. I was impressed. I'm trying to say he told this story and I was eating it up.
And so I was like, this is amazing. This whole workshop was amazing. He brought in his friends who were giving advice and they were fucking awesome.
They were so good at giving advice. And so anyways, by the end of it, and he gives me advice, he was just like, because we were building on the Twitch platform with like a Twitch sort of like the streaming app thing. And he was like, yeah, you know, we thought about doing that and we don't think it's valuable.
I don't think everything's gonna be valuable. And he was pretty much right. We had to pivot.
And so anyways, by the end of this, I was like, this was an amazing way to acquire customers. And that's my like long-winded way of saying, he used his assets, he did these workshops. It's not a scalable thing, but man,
SPEAKER_03
he won people over. I think you're so wrong. What, that is not a scalable thing? First of all, you don't need that many customers for this thing to make a very large of people.
SPEAKER_00
He could have got a hundred clients easily within a couple months.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. And I hate when people say that. They go, this isn't scalable.
Like they'll talk about agencies and they'll say it's not scalable. It's like, what are you talking about? I mean, some agencies have 20,000 people. That seems like it's scaled to me, like perfectly fine.
I do think those are scalable actually.
SPEAKER_00
It depends, right? If you're a product that needs thousands and thousands of customers, then doing workshops with 20 people at a time is not gonna get you there. So it's not scalable in that sense.
SPEAKER_03
So you wanna hear a cool story about that? The founder of Pandora, his name's Tim Westegen. I went and met with him. When I went and met with him, we were, we went out to lunch and he's like, oh, I forgot to do something.
Can you walk with me? And I walked with him and then we go and he goes, I gotta get a haircut. So I just sit next to him. And this guy's worth probably $600 million.
We go supercuts. Right. And he gets a haircut for $12 and we're sitting there in the barber shop. It's on a Tuesday at one, no one's there.
And he's telling me this story. I go, what did you used to do? How'd you go Pandora? He goes, here's what I would do. Monday through Thursday, he goes, I had a COO who ran the company.
I would go, I would just, he goes, this was, I think it was a little bit before social media was around. He said, I would email people and I would say, I'm gonna be at this library in New York at this time. Any Pandora users in the area, come and talk to me.
And he said he did that for four years. And he goes, here's the first one I did. And he showed me a picture of him at a coffee shop.
He goes, two people showed up. And he goes, here's the last one I did. And he showed me a picture and it was at the library and there was two or 3000 people there.
He goes, I would do that. Monday to Thursday, I did meetups everywhere. All I did was travel and I did it for years.
And it worked out. He goes, he goes, I was like, did it work? He goes, every time I did it, he goes, it would take a little while. But after a couple of years of doing it, I would go to the South or I'd go to Atlanta and we would see more advertisers come.
So it was just like, he goes, it worked out perfectly. Because I said the same thing. I go, wow, that's a horrible waste of time.
He goes, no, it worked. We made a lot of money off of it and I got to connect with users and I would relay the feedback back to my CEO and they would do it.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so that case, he's not trying to grow Pandora's active user base. He's taking fans and turning them into diehards. And he's generating advertising revenue, which you can get, that actually scales enough to where you can get advertisers and he's getting feedback firsthand, which is like great for the product to get better.
That's a dope story.
SPEAKER_03
It's a dope story. I love that story. There's a clip.
SPEAKER_00
Related to that, by the way, there's a, you know, there's probably like 10 blog posts that matter the most if you're gonna do a startup. One of them is the Paul Graham essay, Do Things That Don't Scale, where he's talking about with Airbnb early on. And if you're kind of in the startup world, just fast forward 30 seconds.
But if you're not, you'll like the story if you haven't heard it. So Airbnb is in Y Combinator. They're struggling.
Airbnb is not really working. They have like, I don't know, 20 customers or something low. And they go into Paul Graham's office.
He's the advisor from Y Combinator. And he's like, okay, so tell me how it's going. And they're like, well, you know, it's small and not really growing.
And he's like, okay, but tell me, what have you learned from your customers? You've been out there, what'd you learn? And they're like, well, you know, most of our customers, you know, most of our customers are in New York and they're putting their apartments up. He's like, they're in New York? They're like, yeah, like most of your customers are in New York? He's like, yeah, he's like, what are you doing here? Like go to New York. You need to go to New York now.
And like, why are you in San Francisco if your customers are in New York? So he sent them over there. And what they did, which is something that nobody else was doing was, if you ever saw an apartment listing before, the photos looked like shit because it would be somebody on their crappy mobile phone at that time taking a photo of a dirty apartment and listing it for rent. And so it was like the worst sales pitch.
And so they started themselves going in. They said, hey, can we send up? They would tell their customers, hey, we want to do professional photos of your place. It increases bookings by 40%.
Are you open to that? And then they would show up as the professional photographer and be like, hey, by the way, I'm the founder. And they would take photos and that Airbnb listing started to look great. And everyone told them this won't scale.
And they also thought this won't scale. And to an extent it did because even now today, there's a sort of fleet of photographers that will come and take photos of your place to list it because it was just that important. And they found a way to make it scale.
SPEAKER_03
I think that's a great story. Another thing that shocks people is I think even if you have hundreds of thousands of users, maybe as high as millions, you could really, I've done this with us, I will just call and talk. I only need to talk to about 10 people and I can see the pattern that represents tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.
You could just tell. So like what you could do is A, B test it and wait if you're just starting, you're not gonna, it's not gonna be significant. And that could work fine.
If you just call 10 people, you really get the information you need.
SPEAKER_00
Totally, I was talking to Emmett, so Emmett's the CEO of Twitch where I'm working and being at a big company has all these different weird things that aren't really related to my core interests, which is startups. So I ask Emmett all the time, just tell me about the early days. And so I asked him, I said, hey, when you guys were pivoting from Justin TV to Twitch, was that obvious? He's like, no dude, at Justin TV, like less than 2% of the watch time was on video games.
It wasn't obvious that this was the thing to do. He's like, I just liked it and I thought there was an option. And he goes, and then I talked to a bunch of customers and I said, do you have your notes from that? And he's like, yeah, I do.
And so he sent me his notes from the initial conversations he had with all these streamers, all these customers. And we publish those? No, probably not. But I was reading through them and it was fascinating.
So first was just like, first lesson was just, go ask the founder or CEO about the early days. I bet you they have a bunch of resources that are awesome. Like he sent me the old pitch decks and stuff like that.
I think I sent you one slide, which was my favorite slide, the title of the slide, because it was a progress update for their early investors. Yeah, that's a logo. And then he said, we're like a bulldozer in a field full of flowers.
And then it was a list of all the shit they got done that month. And I was like, this attitude, like if I said that today at Twitch, it would be like, what is this maniac saying? Like, why is your slide so aggressive? But that's how they were early on. So then he had all these notes of his customer conversations and he always tells everybody at Twitch, he's like, go talk to people, by the sixth conversation, you'll hear the same thing over and over again.
It takes six phone calls basically to figure out the pattern and by the sixth one, you'll know. And you won't even want to do 50 conversations. You'll be like, all right, I can predict what this person is gonna say before they even say it after six.
SPEAKER_03
That's awesome. I think we can just got ourselves another clip. Clip it.
Clip it. What do you wanna, wanna, first of all, share that deck with me again and also ask him if we can make that pump.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I will ask him actually, cause it's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_03
What do you wanna do?
SPEAKER_00
The one thing I can share out of that, by the way, he asked three questions, he's like, I said, oh, customer interviews, is there a whole skill set to learn? He goes, no dude, I asked three questions. I said, what do you like about your current platform? What do you dislike about your current platform? And what will it take to get you to switch to Twitch? And that's what he asked, every single customer. And then he just heard the common things and he would build it and he'd go back to me and he said, you told me this is what it would take for you to switch? Two weeks later, here it is.
Are you ready? And then sometimes they're like, no, still. He's like, okay, cool, what's next? And he would just like keep doing that, three questions.
SPEAKER_03
That's badass. Just to wrap that up, if you wanna learn about this stuff, I think the best book I've ever read on this is called The Mom Test.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I love that. Jack recommended me that book.
SPEAKER_03
It's fantastic. Me too, it's the best thing. Tiny book too, like, I don't know.
It's a long blog post. 50 pages, actually. That book, in terms of your business life, it might change a lot.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, The Mom Test. Okay, so there was this great write up in the Trends Facebook group by this guy, Morgan, or girl Morgan, I'm not sure exactly, but Morgan Key. And it was talking about, hey, the founder of Trader Joe's just died.
I think Joe, I don't know how you say the last name, but Joe from Trader Joe's, passed away and so we dug into the model and said, what is it that makes Trader Joe's work? And there's a bunch of really fascinating things where they basically broke all of the rules, and I thought it was just a great example of when you wanna do something different or you wanna make a splash in the industry, it pays to just change a bunch of the rules. So some of the things that they do differently. So they, most grocery stores have a ton of SKUs.
They're like, oh, people want all the options. We gotta carry everything that people ask for. Trader Joe's has on average, I think 4,000 SKUs, and average grocery store will be 40,000.
So one-tenth the number of SKUs. The next thing that I thought was interesting was they overstaff not understaff, so every other grocery store's trying to sort of have minimal labor costs and they go the exact opposite direction and try to provide like an experience for shopping. They private label basically all of their goods.
So how do you, okay, great, I overstaff. That seems impossible. I overstaff, but that's like expensive.
So where do they make their money back? They make their money back by not buying, not by buying wholesale and selling retail. They actually just private label their stuff and have a way bigger margin on their items.
SPEAKER_03
So what's an example of that?
SPEAKER_00
So like their tomato sauce, for example, they will have our salsa. It'll be called Trader Joe's salsa. And people will be like, oh, I love Trader Joe's salsa.
And it's actually the same exact salsa that somebody else carries. They go straight to that supplier or manufacturer and they say, hey, we want our own line of this.
SPEAKER_03
And so it's usually- Oh, so Trader Joe's isn't making it.
SPEAKER_00
No, they go to the supplier, but they private label that exact item.
SPEAKER_03
Oh, I didn't know that.
SPEAKER_00
They carry it. They get a much bigger margin because they're cutting out the sort of retailer. And they have all this pricing power to go to suppliers with and say, hey, we have all these locations.
So we are already a big customer from day one. We want you to give us our own brand of popcorn, our own brand of this, our own brand of that. And then on the other side, that makes customers love it because people will get addicted to this.
And they think, oh, that pretzel, that chocolate cover pretzel I loved, I can only get it at Trader Joe's. That's not the reality. Because there's no brand on it, but they can actually get that same thing.
They just don't know the brand and it's from some other brand.
SPEAKER_03
I just felt that exact same way about a lot of the product.
SPEAKER_00
And so there was a few other ones that I thought were interesting. I'm gonna dig it up, but talk for a second while I just-
SPEAKER_03
So I'll tell you guys a quick story since we were talking about scaling. I talked to Max Mullen at Hustlecon. And you listen to this story.
He told me that when they first started Instacart- Who's Max Mullen? Max Mullen started Instacart. He goes, our first store was Trader Joe's and they wouldn't let us go in there and they wouldn't give us all their inventory. He goes, it cost 25 grand.
I bought everything in the store. We brought it to our apartment. Took a photo of it.
It took pictures of every single thing. I love it. And it was $25,000.
So he goes, one of everything was about 25 grand. And he did that with Whole Foods and then five other stores. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_00
Okay, a couple of the points that Morgan brought up. So no data collection. So they're not collecting data on their customers.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, they don't ask for your sales.
SPEAKER_00
They don't do sales, coupons, loyalty or advertising. The biggest expense, so their marketing, is samples in the store. So they go above and beyond on samples and don't do a whole bunch of other promotional stuff.
They expanded very slowly. So they have about 500 locations after 50 years. And so they really went sort of slow and steady with their growth, sort of like in and out or whatever.
SPEAKER_03
And are they owned by someone at the moment?
SPEAKER_00
Private company. I don't think they got bought by a private company. I think it's literally like owned by the original, whoever's there's a couple of people involved.
And so in the end, their price per, or sorry, their earnings per square foot in their store. So they'll earn $2,000 per square foot revenue. And like Whole Foods would do 1.
2K. And then Walmart will do 600K. So they're way more profitable per square foot because of, or sorry, way more revenue per square foot because of these different changes they made to the standard model of the store.
SPEAKER_03
I dig that. I don't know why we didn't, we should publish that.
SPEAKER_00
I think it's a $10 billion company overall.
SPEAKER_03
Like I thought they were owned by all these for some reason.
SPEAKER_00
You might be right, I don't know on that. But shout out to Morgan, I thought this was a great breakdown. Love it, do more of that in the groups.
We love this stuff and we'll share the information because yeah, more people need to learn from this stuff.
SPEAKER_03
So that's actually an interesting take, which is what are the interesting components that make something special? So we're doing this thing that we're gonna publish on Tuesday on hotels. And I thought that that was really interesting. And so it's not live yet.
So I haven't been able to read all of it. But basically a lot of the largest hotel chains, what they do is they don't actually own the property. I mean, or sorry, sometimes they own the property, but it's all franchised.
And so 90% of their money is made via franchising.
SPEAKER_00
Hilton's, Marriott's, whatever.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I had no idea. And so that's one of the secret sauces, which is you have to do franchising. And it's really expensive.
Like it could be $10 million to start a Marriott franchise. Very expensive. That's not that expensive.
SPEAKER_00
$10,000, that's cheap for a franchise.
SPEAKER_03
Sorry, I said 10 million. Oh, 10 million, okay. Like it could be millions of dollars.
Okay, yeah, that's a lot. It's crazy. And so what we've been doing on trends, and what I have always loved doing, which is what's like the thing that makes something special? What makes it tick? Yeah, so for example, with software, typically it's just what makes a great software business is like, I'm just rippin' here, but I'd have to find the exact numbers.
But it's like, is the annual revenue per customer at least $5,000? Can you make it so churn is only 4% a month? And then there's probably only one or two more rules. But it's usually churn and can it be at least five grand a year? For a SaaS business you're talking about. Yeah, and so I love seeing those like.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so what investors do is they see so many deals and they talk to so many founders and they do this for a number of years. They get to see how these play out. They start to do what they call pattern recognition, which has pros and cons.
The pros is, great, you can recognize a good thing when it's a good thing. The con is if you're trying to make everything fit your pattern, you'll miss the outliers and that's a big issue. But it's still a tool in your tool belt that you should have.
So I feel like this should not just be investors that do this, this should be entrepreneurs as well. So you should be looking at different businesses, industries, breaking them down, listening to podcasts like this or others, and trying to identify the patterns and commonalities and try to characterize, okay, what made that business tick? What made this have a different outcome than that? What are the sort of minimum requirements on, let's say, churn or customer value for a SaaS business to work? And start to get these rules of thumb or like kind of common patterns in place in your brain.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, and what I've been trying to do is figure out those on all types of things. Yeah. And that's been exciting. You wanna do one more?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, let's do one more. So there's this thing called THNKS.
SPEAKER_03
Where is that on here? Oh, it's just right in the middle. Oh, okay, what's that?
SPEAKER_00
So I saw this in an Instagram ad or something like that. I thought it was kind of clever. So B2B gifting.
So what THNKS does, or I think it's probably THNKS that they're trying to do, which is saying THNKS.
SPEAKER_03
Oh, that's stupid. I hate cute spelling.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, cute spelling kind of tripped them up there. So what it does is it's like, from your phone, you can instantly just send a little gift to any business acquaintance. So it's like, you could send a bottle of wine.
You could send a box of chocolate. You could send an Uber ride. You could send $25, Amazon thing, whatever.
So they have a whole bunch of different digital gifts that are, it just looked, in the ad, it looked frictionless of like, how easy this would be to just send this little thank you to everyone. So for someone like you guys, you guys have advertisers. We have guests that come on the podcast.
And I know, I would love to send them gifts. I know that I should. I know these little things go a long way, even though it just seems like they shouldn't.
But I don't take the time to do it. And so I think if somebody actually made a really good B2B gifting platform that did both the actual gifting, so being able to send it to your contact, but also they sort of accounting for it. So keeping track of it in a spreadsheet and all that stuff, maybe helping you expense it.
I think that could be a big business.
SPEAKER_03
I think a lot of sales people would use this. I totally agree. The way, what do you point, did he do that?
SPEAKER_01
No, there's a company called Alice and they do artificial intelligence powered B2B gifting. It's really cool. They basically scan your social profile and they figure out what your interests are.
They send you an example of a gift they wanna send to you, like on behalf of a company. And then you're able to either donate the value of that to a charity of your choice or pick from the marketplace a gift of similar value.
SPEAKER_03
That's badass. I like that. I would do one or two things.
The first thing that I would do is, I think the way that I would set this up is I would make it pretty heavy on Slack or integrate with Salesforce. So we've built a couple of Salesforce plugins that we love and other people have asked us to give it to them. What's an example of one? I'm not involved in our Salesforce thing, but basically, one example is we've connected our quick books in our Salesforce really effectively, which was a previously a really hard problem.
I mean, that's really nitty gritty accounting stuff. Gotcha. But it was really frustrating.
Another thing that we built in Salesforce was, so the way that we built our business is, we can get a line of credit on our invoices and we've synced it all up. So our bank knows which invoices we have based off Salesforce and things like that. And it's really effective.
But what I would do in this is I would hook it up to Salesforce or Slack, and I would make it so you could send coworkers as well. And basically the boss puts your credit card down and she allocates it so every employee gets automatically some number of $10 to $200 a month. And you can type in like, send Henry a gift at San Francisco office.
And like for example, I buy gift cards for people all the time where someone has done something really cool or like, Edie was saying, her car is, I don't know if her car is messed up, I'd be like, send Edie $100 Uber gift card. That thing, that would be fantastic. And the way that I would build it is that it would remind every employee how much balance they have left at the end of the month.
So you for sure know it's gonna get used. That's kind of, that's really interesting. And I would also look at, what's the fruit baskets that are popular?
SPEAKER_01
Edible arrangements.
SPEAKER_03
Edible arrangements, yeah. I would look at their, I would go, I think they're publicly traded. I would go and read all about how they do it and where they say are the biggest markets for their B2B clients.
SPEAKER_00
Right, is it real estate agents who need to, always be out there, is it sales, is it, I don't know, whatever else. So there's some stats that are on here, I don't know who added these, but great. 89% of, Oh, beat it to Alan did.
Nice, Alan, shout out to Alan. 89% of C-suite execs believe that gifting brings people closer together. Okay, love it.
And then after receiving a gesture of appreciation, individuals feel like sort of the rule of reciprocity. So 56% more likely to reciprocate. And I think it's great.
I have a friend, Greg Eisenberg, who's all about gifting. Ramon is a great gifter as well.
SPEAKER_03
He's almost obnoxiously good.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and so they just are so thoughtful and by little things that go a long way. It just makes you love the person.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, so another thing I would do to run this company is I would go to, is it, it was a book called Influence by Robert Chaudhini. He's got this thing called the rule of reciprocity. It's summed up in basically, I can do a favor for Sean and he's gonna do a favor back to me, even if he didn't ask for me to do him a favor.
And it is likely that he will repay me back in a disproportionate amount. So for example, there's been times, you could like go up to someone and you could be like, hey, can I give you a Coke or can I give you like this small $10 gift and I could be negotiating with you for selling a car and get a deal. And get a deal.
Right. Or for example, I could say something like, hey, can you grab my mail or let me grab your mail for you when you're out of town. And then two weeks later, I could be like, hey, can I borrow your car for five days? And typically people will do it.
And so I would make the whole tagline of my company, which is like, I would make, I always think of like, in terms of headlines and copywriting for sales pages, I would make the whole headline all about how you can manipulate, you have to use positive language, but how you can manipulate people by giving gifts.
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that, I would-
SPEAKER_03
What would your headline be? I would go to that book, The Rule of Reciprocity and I would find it interesting. In fact, maybe that's what the headline would be. It would be the definition of the rule recipe.
Like, I would make it look like a definition, a rule of reciprocity, like noun or something, defined as a disproportionate given in response to a gift. In other words, we help you make more money.
SPEAKER_00
So there's, I just went to their website, growing business with gratitude, build strong business relationships through efficient, personalized and thoughtful gestures of appreciation.
SPEAKER_03
That's whack. That's whack.
SPEAKER_00
That sounds like a good company. Dude, I get, every company we mention on here, I get a message that either the CEO starts listening to it or they were already listening to it. So like we talked about OnlyFans, the founders listened to this.
No shit. We talked about Pipe, the founder of Reachout. Hey, I love it.
SPEAKER_03
I'm listening to it.
SPEAKER_00
Why don't they reach out to me? I talked about Mystery Science. I hung out with the founder yesterday and he was like, we're jamming- Which was Mystery Science? Mystery Science is the amazing business. It's Bill Nye, the science guy, delivered into schools.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, wait, why don't we get those people on here?
SPEAKER_00
We can, yeah, he was awesome. And by the way, I didn't realize he had, you know, three little exits under his belt and he was doing this and the business is just spitting off cash. It's amazing.
It's used by like a crazy number. You know, the public thing, he told me some other numbers, but I'll say the public thing he told me, which is that 50% of elementary schools in America are active users of their product, which is insane penetration, which, that just means one classroom within the school, but whatever, you got to 50% of schools being active users on a weekly basis for their product.
SPEAKER_03
I love that. Incredible. Let's get those people on here.
Let's go to questions, eh?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, let's do some quick ones.
SPEAKER_03
All right, so we asked people to do subscribe and unsubscribe and send us a video of them doing it and we would answer a question that they sent. The truth is, is a lot of the questions were pretty okay. So we're going to avoid some of the okay ones, like what would you do if you had unlimited money? I'm not going to answer that.
I think that's an okay question. Let's see, but let's see what is a couple good questions.
SPEAKER_00
Love the podcast. What's your best SEO hack for a new website from Steven Cintra? So I know zero about SEO. So for me, I love marketing, I love growth, but you sort of specialize in certain sub-practices within that, SEO is not one of mine, but Metaguy yesterday, and he was like, he was telling me he's grown these content sites.
He's got a pretty repeatable model to grow content sites over 100,000 monthly visits, up to a million monthly uniques like within two months. And he's done it like 10 times. And I was like, okay, well, what's the formula? Are you a SEO guru or what? He's like, oh no, I don't know SEO.
I don't do backlinks. I don't know what a schema is. I don't do any of that stuff.
He's like, I'm all content, and I just try to rank on quality and relevance. And he's like, basically he just looks at what questions people search for using a tool like Ahrefs or whatever. And so he goes and finds what questions are people searching for, looks at the search result.
And if somebody's like, the 20 best tips for closing a sales meeting, he'll do the 30 best tips. And he'll put in a YouTube video, and he'll add all this value in. And so he literally just crushes it on those questions.
And some of the times those questions are like, people Google their deepest darkest secrets. They're not politically correct things. They'll be like, what's the best way to tell your girlfriend you're cheating on them or whatever.
And so he'll be like, the best way to tell your girlfriend you're cheating on them. Things that companies most sites are not blogging about. He's like, if there's demand, I will write the best content for it.
And I will rank over the course of a couple months and I'll get my website up.
SPEAKER_03
I'll tell you a quick story real quick. First, I would say my answer to this is I've done the same thing. I've accidentally been good at it.
I would just use two tools, HA refs, and then SEO Moz, or is it SEO Moz? Sorry. Yoast, Yoast. It's a plugin for WordPress.
That's the, just use those two tools and you'll be fine. And when YouTube first started in 2000, from 2010 to 2009 to 2012, I had a YouTube channel that had millions of, tens of millions of views. And all I would do is I would find words, people, things that were, things people were searching for.
And I would put a video with that exact same title and then I would make it just a picture and not actually a video, the clickbaitiest picture. And then I would sell space on that video as background music. And I made hundreds of dollars a month when I was a senior in high school doing that.
And so if you ever want to see a thumbnail video of a guy, the most popular video, they took it down. It's called, Black Guy Beats Up, White Guy. Ha ha ha ha.
SPEAKER_00
So people were searching for that. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_03
And you could just type in, and what you could do is you could just type in the word white and it would auto fill or type in the word like fight. And these fight videos were popular or probably still are.
SPEAKER_00
Look at the auto complete.
SPEAKER_03
And it would auto, and it all auto complete. I did that same thing. And for some reason I learned that those fight videos did great.
SPEAKER_00
Okay, another question. So Robert asks, what big picture thing should I be looking at for my podcast to be profitable? It's a medical podcast where I talk about certain diseases and interview people who have them. And then he shots out the name of it, which is the patient will see you now.
All right, so what should he be, how should he be thinking about making this podcast profitable? Should we tell him as experts of a not so profitable podcast?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, we do not have a profitable podcast.
SPEAKER_00
We don't have a lot of ads. Well, it's profitable. It's just small relative to like other opportunities we could be doing.
It makes money every month.
SPEAKER_03
What's your answer?
SPEAKER_00
I would basically, so not try to go for big, so podcasts you can either go big audience ads, or you can say my podcast is lead gen for other things that I do. And so like I've gotten more value out of businesses and investment opportunities coming from this podcast than the ad revenue we get every month. And so similarly, I think here, if you're the people who are gonna listen to this podcast, you know, they might be patients with a certain disease, you might be able to sell some premium ad spot to, you know, some pharmaceutical company, but you probably don't have the scale.
And so instead, what I would be looking for is I'd say, cool, if I had a podcast with 5,000 doctors listening to it every month, what can I do with that community? What other adjacent opportunities, business opportunities could I create out of that loyal community? And so I'm a big fan of just build the tribe first, the opportunities reveal themselves as you go, and that's how I would go about it. I wouldn't try to do ads for your podcast.
SPEAKER_03
Because it's one upscale. I've got nothing to add. I think it's a good idea.
Cool.
SPEAKER_00
You wanna do one more? Yeah, let's do one more. Okay, first three months of your business, what are your first three steps? Very generic question.
SPEAKER_03
Is that even useful? I think that question. Okay, let's combine it with best. Man, some of these people, they ask the most general question.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, okay, here's some advice. I have a phrase, ask a better question, get a better answer. So ask a specific question.
Don't ask like, you know, in the first three months of a business, what are your first three steps?
SPEAKER_03
It's like saying like, what art is good?
SPEAKER_00
Right, or like, you know, how do love you? Like what?
SPEAKER_03
Like I can't tell you what, it's like, how do you do art? I don't know, man. You wanna talk about like oil painting, the Renaissance era? We could, let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_00
Okay, here's a question that I will ask to entertain myself here. What's your favorite interview question? When you're interviewing somebody for a job?
SPEAKER_03
On a scale of one to 10, how lucky? Do you think you are? Nice, where'd you get that from? When I interviewed at Airbnb, the founder asked me it.
SPEAKER_00
It's the Jeff Bezos question. He was the, I think the originator of it, or made it popular at least. They asked Jeff Bezos, what's your favorite question? He said this, and now a bunch of us have stole this.
SPEAKER_03
Joe, Gebbia asked me it, and I told him a nine or a 10, and he said why, and I explained to him why, and I go, why'd you ask me that? He goes, people who say they're really lucky are the people I wanna be around. And I was like, why do you think that? And he goes, well, if you're lucky, if you think you're lucky, you must be talented and things just fall in your place, or you actually are lucky, and I wanna surround myself with lucky people. I don't wanna be around other lucky people.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the specific question is, how lucky of a person do you think you are? One to 10, one, two, three is like, I'm not very lucky, I don't consider myself a lucky person. Four, five, six is, I think I'm pretty, I think I'm decently lucky average, and I think I know why, or sorry, I don't know why. That's just how it is.
And then this sort of the eight, nine, 10s are, I consider myself a very lucky person, and here's why. And you want people who are either, if luck is a thing, you want them around you, just like he said, or if they're not, you want people who are optimistic, and when you're building a young business, you need optimistic people. And then the why part is interesting too, because some people know how to air, engineer serendipity.
They know how to engineer lucky situations for themselves, or they're looking out for situations where they may be getting lucky and pounce on those opportunities, and that's again, somebody you want in an early business.
SPEAKER_03
And then I'm gonna ask you the same question, and I think I know who yours is, but I'm gonna say another one that is deadly. I love this question, and this is when you backchannel on someone and you wanna ask about, so let's say I'm interviewing Henry, and you're his old boss, and I'll go,
SPEAKER_00
Reference check.
SPEAKER_03
I'll go, Sean, what would you give Henry out of 10? Just say a number.
SPEAKER_00
I'll give Henry a seven.
SPEAKER_03
Okay, and you're gonna give him a seven, because you don't wanna completely shit on him, but you also wanna be realistic. And so then I would say, okay, well, what can he do to get the remaining three points? What can make him a perfect 10? That is the only way I've ever found to get critical feedback on a person, other than saying, what are they bad at? Well, you know, they're pretty good. That's what they'll always say.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, for sure, because people, like I said, wanna be polite, and then people also don't wanna lie
SPEAKER_03
based on their own experience. That is the best way I've ever found to get it.
SPEAKER_00
Love it. Okay, yours? I have a question for that specific thing.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I know what it is, and you should tell it.
SPEAKER_00
I don't remember, what? Because I've told the story once, but I don't even remember what it was. The founder of Second Life told me once.
SPEAKER_03
Who you are, who you wanna be, or?
SPEAKER_00
Oh, this one, yeah, this is a good one. Yeah, you know I love questions like this. I ask this in job interviews, but I also just ask this in social situations to be awkward.
Fill in, I say, hey, we're gonna play a little game. I want you to fill in the blank. First thing that comes to mind, first answer, best answer.
I'm gonna say the first part, you finish it. And I'll say, life is, Alan, let's play. All right, Henry, you have the mic.
So, let's play. First answer, best answer, answer as you go. Life is.
.. Great. People are... Tough. I am...
SPEAKER_02
Henry. Oh, okay, the middle one was the only good one.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so you use it to sort of have a little bit of a conversation. You try not to judge people too much off the top of the mind, but I actually just think this is useful for yourself. So this is like your core outlook.
It's like, what's life? And you said life is great. Cool, optimistic sort of grateful person. Then you said, people are tough.
That's interesting. Why do you say people are tough?
SPEAKER_03
Do you have a girlfriend? Yeah, I do.
SPEAKER_00
Are you guys at a good spot? You dealing with some stuff right now?
SPEAKER_03
You are? Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_00
That's what I'm saying. What's a situation where people have been tough? Tough to deal with.
SPEAKER_02
I don't know, right now I'm trying to figure out where I'm going and figure out a job. I'm ultimately gonna get a career I'm gonna do. And it's just tough, just communicating with other people.
SPEAKER_00
I'm getting them to realize what you want
SPEAKER_02
and making them see what you see in yourself.
SPEAKER_00
People are tough to persuade or tough to get on your page.
SPEAKER_03
That's a great question. You can see what he struggles with and values.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and then the last one, which is I am, and you went with Henry, which is a very literal answer. If you were gonna do another one, what would it be? I am... I don't know, like a student? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Okay, and then the second question I'll ask is, so I usually pause there, I do the psychoanalysis, and then a couple things happen.
People are like, oh, okay. They just want to leave because they feel so uncomfortable. Or they'll be like, what are yours? Cool, I like that, that's a good sign when you ask what are yours.
And then I'll tell them mine and then they'll do the same thing back to me. And the last question is, I tell them, I say, you know, one thing I did was, I did those answers top of mind and I didn't really like what I said. And then I just reassessed it.
I was like, what do I think the answer should be for me? Like, what do I want my answers to be? What do I want my outlook of life, people and myself to be? Right, what do I want my mental model to be? And then I revised it. And then the best people come back a few days later and they're like, hey, by the way, I came up with my own and here's mine. And those are the people I'm like, I'm gonna be friends with you for a long, long time because you're like me, you like to do the stuff.
Clip. Cool. I think we're done by the way. I got to call the guy from Levels.
I got to get my glucose monitor installed for the weight loss challenge.
SPEAKER_03
Oh, okay, we'll do an update on that. I didn't have to call him.
SPEAKER_00
I think we're supposed to.
SPEAKER_00
Well. You can join me on this call.
SPEAKER_03
Call to the other. Click share. Or is that like a, is there a button, like a share button? If there is, do it.
SPEAKER_00
Just help us get more listeners. Thank you. Yeah, tell a friend.
Bye.