SPEAKER_01
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Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com. I have a lot to talk about. I bet you do too.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I added a bunch of things this week. Okay, let's jump right in. People have been craving a brainstorm and we're gonna give them a brainstorm.
SPEAKER_01
Can I tell you one thing really quick before we get to the brainstorm? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so I'm gonna go buy a car in about three hours and I'm gonna live, starting August, I'm gonna live in a new city each month for 12 months and it's gonna be, I'm looking for a list of happiest cities. So okay, how about, let me know.
SPEAKER_02
Well, I've seen that once before and I think it was like, you're talking about US only, right? I think like Switzerland or Sweden is number one
SPEAKER_01
or something. Yeah, I would go to Canada. I wanna go to Mexico City, because I love it, but the corona thing, I don't think it's under control there.
At least to drive there. I wouldn't wanna drive through those cities in order to get there.
SPEAKER_02
So where are you starting? Do you know number one?
SPEAKER_01
I think it's gonna be Provo, is it called Provo or Provo? What's it called? Provo, Utah? Utah. The Mormons are definitely the happiest. So I'm gonna go and hang out with them and then I don't know, I got a plan it.
SPEAKER_02
Okay, well, I think that's good. You should figure it out as you go. And somebody tweeted this as a reply because I think you mentioned this maybe on the last one.
And they were like, dude, you must have the coolest wife who's just down to do all this stuff. They were like, we need to get her on the pod. So I have two questions for you about that.
A, what's her reaction to your life plans like this? Like crazy life plans? Is she, does she feed into them? Does she pull you back a little bit and say, hey, here's what's a little more realistic? Is she just down for whatever? Like what's her role?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, she's down. She's a little more conservative than I am, but she's down, but does this seem like a crazy idea? This doesn't seem like a crazy idea at all.
SPEAKER_02
I don't think it's crazy necessarily, but it's definitely an orthodox, right? Like most people don't do this. So let's say it's unusual. I don't think it's crazy.
I think it's a good idea.
SPEAKER_01
Does your wife think this is weird? You were good.
SPEAKER_02
If I told my wife, if I said, well, now we have a baby. So that's probably-
SPEAKER_01
Wait, you're saying when you were childless.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, childless. Yeah, if I had said, hey, I wanna move every month to a different city, she would have been like, why are we doing all this? Like, no, let's not do that. Like, okay, you wanna go on vacation, let's go on vacation.
I think that would have been her reaction. No, we're- If I really pushed for it, if I was like, I need this, she would have done it, but-
SPEAKER_01
It helps that I don't have kids, and we know that we're gonna have, Sarah's 27. So we're gonna have kids in three years. So we're definitely like, let's just party.
SPEAKER_02
Right, yeah, that's good. Sonya's a year older than me, and so from day one, it's been like, yo, buddy, I'm on the clock, let's do this. Okay, so that's one thing, that's one question.
And then the second question is, does she listen to the podcast?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, she does. So- Nice. That would be interesting to have wives come on because they have to deal, like how do they handle, like Sarah, it's a handful for her to work with me, for sure, like, because I'm so crazy.
SPEAKER_02
We should do it as a happy hour episode one time. Right. A late night happy hour episode.
SPEAKER_01
Not crazy, like, I wanna do a wild shit all the time, but emotionally, I'm just like fucking nuts. I think a lot of people who create stuff are. So she does have to put up with shit, she's patient, so it's good.
SPEAKER_02
My wife goes crazy on the minor and is down for the major. And what I mean by that is like, if I suggest something that's a minor change or inconvenience or setback, she overreacts. And then if I'm like, like she was pregnant and I was like, I'm gonna quit my job, we're gonna have no healthcare, I'm gonna go do this crazy thing, it's super high risk, high reward.
And she was like, okay, yeah, I believe in you. And so like on the major thing, she's like the switch flips in her head and she's like, okay, I gotta be super resilient now.
SPEAKER_01
Wait, did you just reveal something?
SPEAKER_02
No, this was before. Oh. When she was pregnant before, before we had our baby. Cause I was like, look, I'm gonna sell this company or I'm gonna end the company.
But one of two ways, we're not gonna continue this as is. Like I'm gonna go for the sale hard for 30 days, which is too short. And if we get a term sheet, we get a term sheet.
If we don't get a term sheet, I actually wanna just go do something else that I think is higher upside. And that'll mean no salary, no healthcare, no nothing. And if this doesn't work out.
SPEAKER_01
Well, and you moved, I mean, I feel like you bought a house and moved on a whim.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I did that too. Okay, let's jump in. Let's do some of these topics.
What do you got?
SPEAKER_01
Where do you wanna start? Okay, let's start with DuckDuckGo. Okay, I was on the James Altensure podcast. James was here with us a few weeks ago.
James is like a, like a dork, nerdy guy. I say this with love, I like him a lot. He's like a nerdy guy, libertarian guy, libertarian audience.
And I can't decide if this whole privacy stuff that we're talking about. So hay.com, email service launched a few days ago, a few weeks ago, a week ago.
Yeah, its premise is like, one of its many promises is it's on privacy. Okay? And so I'm really into this privacy thing. The founder of Pandora told me that he is seeing his customers who are middle America people actually care about privacy.
And when I was on my trip, I saw DuckDuckGo billboards everywhere. For those who don't know, DuckDuckGo, it's a Google competitor, it's a search engine, and it's all based on, they don't track you. Which like fucking ruins the business model.
I have no idea how they make money, but.
SPEAKER_02
No, no, no, it doesn't. So their thing was like, it's not no ads. So they still do search ads, but they're like, look, when you search for, you said you're gonna go buy a new car.
When you go search for, you know, Mercedes versus BMW or whatever you're gonna search for, they'll serve you an ad. They just don't need to know that you're Sam Parr, that you live in this place, that you have a wife. You know, they don't need the personal data for the ads to still be effective because search is high intent.
They know what you're looking for, so they can serve you a relevant ad. And their insight was, the slight drop off you get by not personalizing is not so bad if that can become your value proposition, that hey, we're not using personal information to serve these ads.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so I just sent you their traffic. So go to duck.go.com slash traffic. So here's my question to you.
SPEAKER_02
First of all, we're looking at a hockey stick. We're looking at 2010, 2010, they're at, you know, this is queries per day or this is average?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so they average 62 million queries per day. I have no idea. I mean, what do you think Google's queries per day? Probably like, like five billion.
SPEAKER_02
Insaneless. I mean, I'll break it, see if you can find, see if you can find Google's queries per day so we can put this, a 3.5 billion per day.
SPEAKER_01
No, I wasn't off. Google or DuckDuckGo is at 50, 60 million a day. So they're, I don't even know.
What's that like 3% the size? Anyway, DuckDuckGo, what do you think about that? I personally love this. And what I want to know from you is, do you like DuckDuckGo? And do you also think this privacy thing, like building products where the main feature or values in like, or like the main thing the brand stands for is privacy. Do you think that's going to be a hit?
SPEAKER_02
I think it's a hit. I used to think the opposite. I used to be of the camp that was like, look, people don't give a shit.
Like if you just say, yeah, sure. In theory, people want privacy if you offer no privacy or privacy. But when it comes down to products, they're like, oh, this is a free good thing and I have to give up all my data.
All right, here you go. And so I used to think that people in practice were willing to easily trade privacy. And I think that's still true on the whole.
But if you said, where is the pendulum swinging? And so I think the pendulum is swinging more towards people caring about privacy because these things stack up, right? So as you, you know, the more paranoid you get, the less lack of trust you have in the system and of the big companies, it doesn't matter. You don't have to know which one is the straw that breaks the camel's back. Maybe it's the fake news stuff on Facebook.
Maybe it's when your information gets breached for the 35th time and you get an email saying, hey, sorry, your personal info might have been leaked. Like you don't know where it is, but these things just keep happening. And to the point where I believe people care more than they did before and they'll continue to care more.
So that's number one. Number two, you have to do it on a global product, like a product everybody uses because it's still a niche audience, right? Like you said, Google is about 50 times the search query size than DuckDuckGo. So like 50 to one.
And so you need a product that's used by pretty much everybody for those ones to add up and be a big enough market for you. So I wouldn't do it on some niche product. It's like, oh, you do some niche mailing, you know, Mailchip software thing.
Cool, I'm gonna make a privacy focused version. It's like, no, that's a niche of a niche.
SPEAKER_01
But if you take a niche of a mainstream, it works. Like hey.com, I call it hey.
com. Because I don't need to call it hey. Email's global, right? Email's everybody using.
Yes, it is global, but like, you don't need that many users to build a billion dollar company.
SPEAKER_02
Totally, that's what I'm saying though. You need to, you're only gonna get the sort of 2%, let's say that value privacy enough to make a change. And so, you know, like superhuman did the same thing.
Email is such a huge market. Cool, we'll go get the 1%, 2% who are willing to pay 30 bucks a month for a free, instead of free email. And so I think this is the same thing happening here.
SPEAKER_01
Abrayu, how old are you?
SPEAKER_01
You're a little old for this question. The Zoomers.
SPEAKER_02
Back to five years ago.
SPEAKER_01
No, it's a generational thing. I wanna know, do the 22 year olds give a shit about this? Because the way that the Zoomers, the way that they live and think is really old.
SPEAKER_02
Dude, they don't give a shit about getting coronavirus. I don't know, man.
SPEAKER_01
They don't care about the privacy of their data. They don't care about their body. They're a pretty conscientious group of people, I think.
I don't know, I wanna know how they think. But that was my question. Okay, so here's another privacy, here's another opportunity for privacy that I'm interested in.
Do you know that when you go to Safeway, so in California, we have Safeway, in the South you've got Kroger, in the other South you've got Publix. What else is there? Albertsons. Albertsons, okay, so when you go to your grocery store, like your major grocery store, you enter in your phone number to get a discount.
What they do with that is they understand your buying behavior and they'll show you, they'll send you stuff in the mail or they will just learn about inventory, whatever. And this is incredibly effective, so effective that there's a famous story about a woman being a 16 year old woman getting mailed stuff to her dad's home, saying like baby supplies. And the dad was like, hey, my daughter's 16, she's not pregnant.
What are you talking about? I thought she was pregnant and they knew it because in your first month you know what to buy. Anyway, when you go and buy that ship, did you know that you can submit like a request and they'll send you all of your... A do not track request. Well, you could do a do not track and they can send you everything you've ever bought.
SPEAKER_02
Oh, that's pretty cool, okay, I like that.
SPEAKER_01
And so what would you do with that data?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think that's just an interesting thing you could do in general like a mint.com style. I think you could say, hey, what's your phone number? Okay, then you go request it on behalf of the customer and you give them cool visualizations about their spending patterns over time and other products they might like.
But what would I do with that data if I was the company or if I was myself? What are you thinking?
SPEAKER_01
If you're trying to build a business.
SPEAKER_02
I would go figure out other areas where this sort of like linking and tracking will work. And so a lot of people have already done this, right? Like the ad market, it's kind of like porn where porn innovates first. Okay, a close second or third might be the ad market.
So Furcon who was kind of my co-founder or CTO of my previous company, his previous company was an ad tech company. And one of the versions of their app that they made, so the company's called App Lovin. And so initially the premise was what apps are your friends loving? We will recommend those apps to you.
And so it was like, if I know what apps you have and I know that you're my friend because you're in my address book, then it can tell me that Sampar loves this app.
SPEAKER_01
I thought it was a play on Mick Lovin.
SPEAKER_02
No, it was, I don't know, maybe that was a side benefit because everybody loves Superbad. But then all kinds of little edge cases started fucking them up. So they would tell me that you love Grindr or whatever.
So first it's like not everybody's app behavior, they want to be transparent to their friends or their contacts. And I think there was one really horrible case where, then they switched us trying to do this for app install. So they're like, okay, if I'm playing a game and it's awesome, or sorry, forget about it, it's awesome.
I'm playing a game and they want you to download that game because they get paid nine bucks if you download the game. They would show my face from your address book as, hey, Sean's playing Candy Crush right now, tap here to play Candy Crush two. And that was like a super effective ad unit.
Like they were like printing money. And I think something really bad happened where like the CEO of Expedia or something like that got an ad that like his deceased wife was playing this game or something like that. Like someone from his address book who had this app was shown to him and he's like, what the hell is this? And so it got back to them and they had to turn it off.
And they did a similar experiment around location tracking like kind of a life 360 thing. And so you gotta be really careful with these like data. Oh, let's use data to give you information about either yourself or others.
You can get the situation like the dad who finds out his 16 year old is pregnant.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I, long story short, privacy.
SPEAKER_02
The privacy. I have a privacy idea for you. I love.
A privacy idea for you. So I just got to see your house.
SPEAKER_01
I think it's just because I've become like, as the older I've gotten, I've gotten like more libertarian and like fuck the government, like mentality.
SPEAKER_02
Well, there's two things that are happening. There's people who become a libertarian, which is like F the government and F the man in general. And then there's people who are becoming more nationalistic, which is like it's us versus them.
And us versus them means sort of keep them out and raise us up. And I think in both cases, you see this sort of like retreat. In both cases, it's a sort of, it's not like a shelter in place physically, but it's a shelter in place sort of psychologically, behaviorally, where you reduce your like openness and your spread in your behaviors and your data in other ways.
So I think people in general, when times get a little crazy, people have, there's a flight to safety. And I see, I think you see this with investing. I think you see this with the way people act and behave.
So I think that more people do it when they're, when times get turbulent. Now, a privacy focused idea that I had the other day. So moved into this new house, need to get internet set up.
Oh shit, gotta play the Comcast game. Comcast comes over. And of course, you know, Wi-Fi doesn't really work great in my house.
So I was like, okay, I need to invest in good Wi-Fi because not having good Wi-Fi is like not having water to drink. And so I'm like looking for these like Eero, these kind of mesh networks that you use in your house. I just bought one.
To give you more coverage. So I just bought Eero, but I was talking to Furka on it. And I was like, I think Eero sucks.
Well, I hope it doesn't suck cause I just bought it. But the idea that I was thinking about was, you know how when you, what typically happens is you have your Wi-Fi router and then on your laptop, you'll have like a VPN. So a lot of people have VPNs.
VPNs are more and more popular. Some people have it for work. Some people have it to hide their traffic as they go bootleg movies on the internet.
And they don't want it to be sort of traced to them. And so VPNs are kind of complicated. Like to set up, like you gotta download one.
You don't know if it's malware, you're setting it up. The average person doesn't even know what the hell VPN is. So the idea was actually, why don't you build VPN into the router? So you never need to download anything.
It's just VPN by default. And it's built into the hardware itself. And so you actually, the value prop of the router is, this is secure internet.
And so Furka on, of course, was like, you know, there's people doing this. And so I can't say I'm the first to have this idea, but he was telling me about a couple of companies to check out if you're interested in this. So Next DNS is one of them.
Ubiquiti is another one. And so he was showing me a few of these that today are still kind of like, you kind of need to be a developer to know about these or be like, know how to configure them to set them up. And so I think if somebody takes the Euro level of simplicity and design, but they make the value prop, hey, your internet search traffic, your whatever you're doing on the internet is private.
If you buy this box instead of that box,
SPEAKER_01
I think people can get behind that. The hard thing about these companies, so first of all, the VPN businesses, I wrote about them because I think that it's gonna explode. And they already are exploding, but a lot of them are based in Panama because of the privacy laws there.
And a lot of them are notoriously scammy and weird. They're also ridiculously profitable. Like I talked to the one guy, he had one that made $200 million a year in revenue and like a hundred million in profit.
Like stupid. But Eero, do you remember, you know, Eero got bought by Google, I think?
SPEAKER_02
Amazon, I think.
SPEAKER_01
Amazon. It like got acquired for nothing. These companies are so hard to make money because it costs so much money.
SPEAKER_02
Right, yeah, I think hardware is hard. Everybody knows that. Like Ring Doorbell, you know, it gets a billion dollar outcome, but like I don't think it was like ultra profitable at the time, I think it was strategic.
The reason it got bought. But the reason I think Wi-Fi router is interesting because Wi-Fi is like email, it's like Google search. It's a thing that everybody has.
Every physical place has a router. And so, the 2% of that market that cares about privacy, I think is still a big market. And I think, I don't believe that it's so hard to make money because again, you like with this Comcast box that I have here, I gotta pay these guys 14 bucks a month just for this router to sit here.
There's no way this router is worth more than like $50. But they're gonna make money on me, you know, they'll break even in five months. And they know I'm never gonna like get rid of my router.
And so, yeah, I think that there's something interesting there. Yeah, also fuck those guys. Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Comcast.
SPEAKER_01
What do you got?
SPEAKER_02
Okay, here's something interesting I saw the other day. All right, so.
SPEAKER_01
By the way, this Costco for services that I brought you put, freaking awesome, but go ahead.
SPEAKER_02
Okay, all right, so the one I was gonna say is much more boring. It's about tax. So I've been getting into tax stuff now because when you get a little bit of money, you're like, oh shit, why am I paying so much tax? Is there a way, I think rich people avoid this.
How did they do that? I need to learn their game. And so I was learning about like a what are legal sort of tax avoidance tax shelter strategies. How do you, you know, avoid paying 48% tax, which is what I ended up paying a lot of stuff in California here.
And so one of the things that I learned about was, so there's solar credits, right? So solar is one of these things that the government subsidizes, so if you have a building, you can buy solar and you can take 100% of the installation cost as a tax write off. So I was like, okay, that's cool, but okay, where am I gonna put that on my house? I don't know. So I've been trying to find what are these deductions? How do they work? Do I qualify? Now, interesting market that I saw.
So my father-in-law was like, yeah, you know, solar, I was like, I don't own a building. He's like, yeah, if you own real estate, you know, you can depreciate the real estate, you can do solar. I was like, I don't own a building.
So what do you want me to do here? He's like, well, you know, technically you could buy the solar for another building and lease it to them and then you write off your whole and your capex, whatever. And so what I found was there's this business. So if you ever notice, there's a long way of saying, if you ever notice when you drive by schools, that schools all have solar panels on top now.
Sometimes, yeah. And so if you see in California, especially, you go every middle school, high school, it's just got solar panels all along the roof. And the way this works, I found out was companies like Chevron and Exxon or whoever, they want tax credits.
And so what they do is they go to the school and say, hey, we will buy solar for your school. And they buy solar panels for the school. It becomes a tax write off to them.
The school leases it from Chevron. And so Chevron gets a monthly payment from the school and the school gets lower utilities without ever taking a dollar out of its pocket. So I thought it was very interesting and it sort of, I don't know much about this yet.
And so I may, I'm gonna dig into this, but it seems like there's a business to be had for basically pairing up schools, churches, other types of entities that want solar. They want a lower utility bill. They don't have the money to invest to do this whole infrastructure thing.
And businesses which are looking for tax write offs and just make it where you push a button, the project happens and you receive your paperwork that says, here's your deduction. And here's your income stream coming from the lease. So I think there's a business to be built basically pairing up the two sides of the marketplace, a physical building, like a school or whatever that needs, that wants solar and doesn't wanna pay any money.
It doesn't wanna do any work. And a company that's looking for tax write offs that is willing to go give that school solar in exchange for the tax write off.
SPEAKER_01
Love it. I'm gonna tell you something even very similar as well. And this is in the same vein of very half-baked, 10%-baked, 1%-baked.
Most highway medians and government property or public property has grass. And the reason it has grass is grass is the cheapest way to cover land. But grass is actually incredibly expensive to upkeep.
Like if you're an immediate, you have to mow it. Like the way that the math works out, it's something like, I forget the exact, there's math behind us, but and then plus having to mow it and water it and do all this stuff, it's incredibly expensive. And in LA, I have to remember the numbers, but in LA, I think that like 20 or 30% of all water went to watering lawns.
Right. And so what they did was they tested this out and they gave turf to their residents. They just gave it away.
They go, here, we'll do it for you. And it reduced water usage significantly amount. And I started thinking about it.
I'm like, that's kind of interesting. What if you just went to the government and you're like, I'm just, we're just gonna, let's just turf all the medians in America. Right. Cause I heard that on NPR, they did this whole thing, they're like about how bad grass is. And I was like, that's pretty amazing.
I gotta look into this, but.
SPEAKER_02
No, no, no, let me give you one more. Okay, so here's the general theme of these really random ass topics we're talking about is when you look around the world, and this is what I'm now training my brain to do. When you look around the world and you see some item or object or patch of grass, just think to yourself, how did this get here? And what you realize is there is a business underneath every single thing.
Like this is what going back to when we said, you know, in offices, you got that poster about like the kind of HR hazards or whatever, like the stupid labor law poster you have to put up
SPEAKER_01
in your office.
SPEAKER_02
It's a huge business. It's a huge business. I was blind to this, right? I just saw this poster.
I didn't ask how it got there. I didn't ask why it had to be there, why every office has this. But whoever asked that question realized there's an opportunity here.
And they started laminating these fucking posters and making $50 million a year, giving you this annual poster that you have to update in your office. So that's the test for the listener is start to look at the world and say, how did this get here? Who wanted this here? What is the economics of this game here?
SPEAKER_01
And oftentimes, that's a good, great point, Sean. A lot of times when people, they don't think about that stuff. And if you dug deep, a lot of times you could realize that there was some bureaucratic decision that was a fucking horrible decision.
SPEAKER_02
Right. Yeah, and there could be opportunity. It could be a totally broken system.
A ton of opportunity.
SPEAKER_01
So a lot of times there is like a scrappy entrepreneur who comes up with something cool like that sign business. Other times it's like, why did you guys decide to like make the screws five inches instead of six inches? It's like, because like the six on the keyboard was worn out.
SPEAKER_02
Right, right. All right, so here's another example of these like hidden and plain sight businesses. All right, you go to a, you go to an airport, you take a flight, you go to baggage claim.
Okay, cool. Nine times out of 10, your bag's there. Now the other 10 times out of a hundred or whatever, you know, your bag is lost and they recover it, but there still ends up being this 0.
3% of luggage that's never claimed. And is that the number? 0.3. So it goes to 99.7% of luggage, I believe, is gets claimed.
And so 0.3% of luggage is just unclaimed baggage. So I saw this business called unclaimed baggage.
What they have done is they went and they partnered with every airline and they said, hey, we will take the unclaimed baggage because they have some protocol. Like, I don't know what it is. Like after 21 days, if no one claims it, now we're just stuck with this shit.
And somebody was like, hey, that's not shit. That's a suitcase and that's some stuff inside. And so they were like,
SPEAKER_01
have you seen the 60 minutes episode on this? It was like a two-point series. Are they based in Alabama? Birmingham, Alabama, I believe?
SPEAKER_02
They're based somewhere random. It's the, yeah, they have a physical store in, where is he at? Alabama, Scottsboro, Alabama.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I know this company well. I love it.
SPEAKER_02
So you can go to their website, unclaimedbaggage.com. It's the, there's things as the nation's only retailer of lost luggage. That caught my eye.
Anytime you say only, that means I locked up an exclusive on this shit. I'm so happy that I can be the only player, which means I'm gonna extract a lot of value here. So what they do is they donate a bunch of stuff that they get in the bags, two charities, cool.
There's a feel good component to this. They take orphaned bags and they recycle them, they sell them or they donate them. And those three combined are a business.
And so this was just like, to me, such a cool, clever idea. I couldn't find like their revenue. I didn't have a chance to check, but you can go on the site and it's like, What's it called again? Unclaimed.
Unclaimed bag. It's like, you'll buy this. There's a Rolling Stones, collector's limited edition leather motorcycle jacket for $500 up for auction on this thing.
SPEAKER_01
What's it called? Unclaimed baggage?
SPEAKER_02
Unclaimed baggage.com.
SPEAKER_01
Well, we could find this out. I remember 60 minutes, but it did a big like expose on the, a while ago. And it was like, they have like tens of thousands of square footage.
SPEAKER_02
Right, yeah. They have a huge, huge facility there. The other one that's like this, which I think is more popular, people know about this more is the group that takes the, okay, you go to a hotel, you use, you know, two squirts of shampoo out of the mini bottle.
And now there's still three squirts left. And then you check out and they can't, they don't want to give that empty, half empty bottle to the next guest. So they ditch it.
And so some guy was like, Whoa, that's a lot of waste of plastic and shampoo. And so someone started going into hotels and partners and I will take all your used shampoo bottles, conditioner bottles, body wash, whatever. And so they built a huge business, just recycling this stuff.
SPEAKER_02
They take it, they reuse the goods, they donate certain things to charity. And it's such a good business. It's like doing good while doing well.
And I think those are great.
SPEAKER_01
I love that. Here's why I just Googled. So Doyle Owens is the founder of Unclaimed Baggage.
He's dead now. He died recently. And if you Google him, he's just like an old Southern white looking dude.
I mean, just a normal ass looking dude.
SPEAKER_02
And the guy who watches Billy Madison three times a day. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Well, the reason why I like him is because, or I like this, is because I think that people tend to overcomplicate things and I'm very passionate about the mission of reducing waste. Just don't, the idea of don't consume what you don't have to consume and just don't be wasteful. I was raised Catholic and this idea of gluttony and waste, it's in my blood.
I hate it. This fucking guy, this is the definition of just turning shit into gold. He's just like, it's a super simple, it's not fancy.
It's in Alabama, which I'm from the South, so but no disrespect to the South, but people look down on that shit because they think they're in Silicon Valley, they're special. This guy reduced waste significantly and got very wealthy in the process. Right, love it.
And created, he probably created maybe thousands of jobs for low income people. This guy is the best, I love this.
SPEAKER_02
If you know about a business like this, I'll call these hidden in plain sight, super simple ideas, just things that, when you look around the world, most people just take them for granted and then somebody out there is like, no, wait, how did this get here? Who picks this up when it's done? What's the business of that? Tweet those at me, I wanna know what other businesses are like this out there.
SPEAKER_01
Dude, Doyle Owens is this guy's name who started Unclaimed Baggage. I love this guy. I gotta cover this on the hustle.
This is a super interesting story.
SPEAKER_02
An example of this that you guys covered on the hustle is the mannequin lady in Oakland, who takes, I guess, either used or damaged mannequins out of stores, because again, what are you gonna do with this hunk of plastic? Like who needs this mannequin? And she's just gotta warehouse some mannequins and then ships them out and makes a killing. So that's another example of these. Oh, like these are parts of the world that you didn't realize are businesses.
All right, Abraiyu, give us Costco for services. What are you thinking here?
SPEAKER_00
So this is kind of like a pendoo-odoo thing, right? So, shopping in bulk, you get a discount. So this is the two-part thing. So what you would do is you would go to these companies, SaaS companies, say like in Adobe, and say, hey, what kind of tiers? What kind of pricing, discount per tier would you offer? Let's say, hey, if I can bring 100 customers, we can offer a 10% discount, 5% discount of our normal prices.
And the second thing would obviously just have a website where people can kind of create groups and claim that discount, right? You can call them pods, clusters. Let's say you get a 10% discount for 50 people. The website will show, hey, 40 people already in this pod, 10 more, you guys get to claim this discount.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, what you're describing is group buying, and it could be great. A few companies that do something similar to this are AppSumo, Stack Social, I think does it. They're good companies.
I know, and then there's a new one called, is it called Secret or Ghost? You know what I'm talking about, Sean?
SPEAKER_02
No, Ghost is like a blogging platform. So, that's why I know.
SPEAKER_01
I think it's called Secret or something like that. Anyway, it's called Secret, I think. I'm looking at them, because I was gonna partner with them in some capacity.
It's an interesting business model that a lot of people have tried. Founder's Card is another one. That's like probably a $12 million dollar year business.
It's an interesting business. No one has actually made this scale wonderfully, and I talked to, I'm gonna name drop a little, and at the backstage of HustleCon, we had the founder of WeWork, not the one that's in the news, but the other one, Miguel, this is his name. And what they did, I don't remember how many tenants they had, maybe 50,000 at the time, and he said they launched just like rewards card, where they got group discounts, and he said no one used it.
And that shocks me because, what you're describing, Abraiyu, I'm like, yeah, you wanna save money? Of course you're gonna use that. But for some reason people don't do it. I don't know why.
Businesses that have made this work in an indirect way are retailing me not. They kind of made it work a little bit. I mean, that company sold for like a billion dollars, I think, I mean, it was a huge exit, or maybe it's still independent, but large business.
What do you think, Sean?
SPEAKER_02
I like group buying. I have a friend who taught me a lot about group buying, or he was telling me a lot about group buying companies, everything was fascinating, but I didn't retain any of the information, so we're gonna ask him to come on and explain some of these group buying companies. All right, let's move on to the next one.
I have some other interesting things. First, did you know Jeff Bezos was adopted?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, by Cuban dad.
SPEAKER_02
Cuban dad. I don't think he was adopted as an orphan. I think his mom remarried.
His dad left, his parents got split, his mom remarried and his new dad.
SPEAKER_01
Does he still talk to his normal?
SPEAKER_02
I don't think so, because for Father's Day he posted like, this is my dad, and so I don't know if he's, that's like a-
SPEAKER_01
Well, I read his bio, he considers his Cuban father, which I think is a step, like is a Cuban guy as his dad-dad, his real dad.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and I just thought it was crazy, like imagine adopting the wealthiest man in the world.
SPEAKER_01
Steve Jobs was adopted too, and then he met his birth father at a restaurant, and his birth father didn't know that that was-
SPEAKER_02
Oh, I didn't know that,
SPEAKER_01
I didn't know that part of the story. And then when he went to the restaurant and he saw his birth father, Steve knew who his birth father was, and the birth father goes, oh my God, Steve Jobs is at my restaurant, I cannot believe this, and like flipped out over it. And I don't think Steve ever told him that he was his son.
SPEAKER_02
That's amazing, I didn't know about that. Okay, I have another company that I think is cool, I wanna talk about-
SPEAKER_01
Wait, that's it, you're just gonna save Jeff Bezos, was adopted?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that's the whole subject. I just thought, imagine adopting someone who became Jeff Bezos, that's crazy.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, let me tell you a quick tip then, that isn't a business. Companies house, that's the name of it, and then there's the equivalent of Australia. Did you know that in Australia, and many of the countries in Europe, if you're a privately held company, that's above like 40 million in revenue, I think, you have to submit an annual report? Yes.
I didn't know that. I went to the Australia's version, and the Australia version costs $5 per report. It's called Companies House for Britain, it's completely free.
I just like looked up all these cool companies, and you can see how much dividends they make.
SPEAKER_02
Right, my friend started this in Great Britain, also called Due Diligence, this is called Due Deal, is his company, and I think it's like a massively, last I checked, it was like a massively successful company, and I was like, how are you getting all this private company data? He's like, oh, it's just like, you have to make it available here. So what we do is we just aggregate it, present it, make it searchable, and I was like, oh my God, like, you know, Jesus, hey, I wish that existed in the US, and be what a simple, beautiful business to do.
SPEAKER_01
It was called the Australian, ASIC, Australian Securities and Investment Commission, I guess that's the equivalent of the SEC. Right. And it cost money, so I looked up a research business that was similar to mine, and I was curious, and the founder just pays himself $10 million a year, and I just looked at the financials, it was pretty big. It's called, you probably know this, Ibbis World.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ibbis World. I didn't realize that's how big it was. 100 million, 120 million.
So, the idea is, and these might exist already, but you can build a layer on top of these just to make them more user-friendly, searchable, sort of easy to use, clean up the data in some way, and those can be pretty awesome businesses. Import Genius is a great example of this. Publicly available customs data that they make, it's not even that easy to use, but they make an interface that makes it very sort of simple and easy to find the data that you're looking for.
And so, if there's some entrepreneur in Australia who wants to take ASIC and make it more of a consumer-facing website, or maybe that exists, but that would be a cool opportunity.
SPEAKER_02
So, I saw this company I liked called Align. I almost hesitate to even talk about it, because I'm very interested in it, may invest, may use it, may something.
SPEAKER_01
Align, like the teeth thing?
SPEAKER_02
Not the teeth thing, it's pretty cool. So, you know how Lambda School sort of popularized income share agreements? They, basically, I train you, you go get a job, you have to pay me back out of that, sort of like a novel way of doing student debt. So, income share agreements are getting more popular as Lambda School has sort of proven that they work.
So, all the Lambda School clones.
SPEAKER_01
I don't think they've proven they've worked. I think that they're proven that some people are interested in them.
SPEAKER_02
In what? Income share agreements?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, my opinion is I'm skeptical, which is...
SPEAKER_02
Here's what I think is a very valid skepticism of it. Hey, you're making this sound like a totally new thing. This is just a different form of student debt.
Like, I go to school and then when I graduate, I have to pay back X dollars for my education. That's student debt. That's how an income share agreement works.
That's also how student debt works. So, there's a lot of people who are like, oh, you know, student debt, evil, student debt, big problem in the country. Income share agreements, novel disruption.
And really, they're both just debt instruments that work slightly differently. So, anyways, I think that's the valid criticism, which is this is not that different. The income share agreement is not that different.
You know, the one difference would be with student debt, you owe it regardless of whether you get a good job or not. For income share agreement, you only owe it if you get a high paying job. So, the incentive is kind of aligned for the school to train you up and help you get a good paying job, which is your goal as well as a student.
So, I think that's a fair counter. But anyways, my point is, the income share agreements, whether you like them or not, they are getting more popular. They've sort of were non-existent five to 10 years ago, and now they're getting more popular.
And it's a financing instrument. And so, what Align is doing, I think the website's helloalign.com, they basically made like sort of a stripe for income share agreements.
So, it's just a way for anybody who wants to set up an income share agreement to do so with like sort of one line of code type of thing. They take care of the whole income share agreement process. So, let's say I, which is true, have ideas for new education models, new schools, new ways to teach people and help them earn more money.
I could now set up an income share agreement website, like without having to do any of the sort of finance, compliance, like all that work that I would normally need to pay a bunch of lawyers and spend a bunch of time doing. Now, I just get it out of the box. So, it's like when Twilio made SMS, an easy thing to use out of the box.
Or Talkbox made it easy to use video streaming. Or Stripe made it easy to do credit card processing. Now, these guys did it for income share agreements,
SPEAKER_01
which I think is a very clever niche. How big are they? What's their traction?
SPEAKER_02
Anything? They're brand new. I think they're in early access right now.
SPEAKER_01
I'm on board with that. I don't think I would invest because I'm not investing in, I don't want to invest in private companies right now because I have, I'm just a pussy, but I'm just fucking fearful at the moment. No, that's fair.
I'd rather be the stock market, but that's cool. I like it enough that I would be close to putting my money where my mouth is on it.
SPEAKER_02
Right, I don't think I would invest either, but I just think it's cool that somebody built this. And also, I think it's a good example of identify niche trend. A lot of people do this when bots started getting more popular.
They're like, cool, here's a bot maker. Or voice, the echo gets big and people start buying a bunch of Amazon Echoes. And then people made it easy to make voice apps using things like voice flow.
I think you want to be on the edge where, is this a trend? If it is a trend, I can spin up the super simple website or service like, you know, oh, maybe email marketing is going to get big. Let me build a really easy way to email a mass list and track the opens and whatnot. And sure, eight times out of 10, that trend is going to be, is going to fizzle out or end up being much smaller than you think, but being early really matters in these spaces.
And so I think that's cool. Here's another niche thing that I thought was cool. It's something called agent fire.
So this is a website for a real estate agent. It's like a Wix or a Squarespace, specifically for real estate agents. So it's like, push a button.
Here's a real estate agent website. This company's doing $100,000 a month. And what's interesting is that there's a guy you should follow.
His name is Twitter handle is Vin Robb, V-I-N-R-O-B. And it's got Robin Vander Hayden. And what he's doing is, I don't know, I haven't met the guy yet, but his claim is, I help people productize their service.
So here's what happened here.
SPEAKER_01
Many requests. Oh my God.
SPEAKER_02
Somebody was making a service to do this for agents, like you pay me X dollars, I'll build you an agent website. And what he helps them do is turn that into just a specific standalone SaaS product that will just let an agent do it automatically. So now there's no human service in the loop.
And he posts a bunch of, he tweets out a bunch of examples of profitable niche services that have turned into products. And so I thought this is kind of a goldmine of like cool little ideas and hacks and agent fire, which is one of these, which is a guy who was doing this as a service, turning into a product, now doing 100% of this.
SPEAKER_01
Oh, this is amazing. Who's many requests? Like, I mean, you said who he is, Robb. Is this guy raising money?
SPEAKER_02
I don't know. He's based out of Singapore. Everything about this guy, I'm interested.
I'd like to be this guy. I think people should follow him because he's tweeting out gold and he's only got 2,000 followers. So most people aren't.
SPEAKER_01
I'm following him now. All right, let me wrap it up with one thought.
SPEAKER_01
We've talked about, we've had a bunch of people on here who are investors and we had a friend, is raising a fund right now. You know, I think I've changed my mind. I think that investing is fucking stupid.
SPEAKER_02
I would have been $1,000. You were gonna say stupid. I would have been wrong because he's a fucking stupid, but like, why is investing stupid? I would love to hear why investing is stupid.
SPEAKER_01
Tell me if I am being like just a baby here and like, but it's just like, I just find this like financial arbitrage shit to be so boring and like meaningless.
SPEAKER_01
And I watched the TV show Billions and I'm like, oh, that's cool. Like they're doing all this big things. It looks exciting.
And then I'm like, well, those guys are losers. Like they're not actually adding to, I mean, they're just, they're wealthy and they're accomplishing dreams. So I respect it.
But I also am like, oh my God, that's so soulless. And that's what I think like a lot of, like I've got friends that create these websites that, like they're already wealthy and they're building these websites that are like, they're just hawking shit and they will admit that they are. I'm like, what the fuck's the point of this? And that's kind of what a lot of investing is.
SPEAKER_02
Okay, but the friends hawking shit, that's different than investing, right? That's just like settling out to some degree for money, right?
SPEAKER_01
It's from a similar, yeah. It's just like, if you already have a little bit of cash, which if you're still trying to get your hit, you gotta go for it. But if you already got a little bit of cash, like do something cool and meaningful.
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so here's, I'll give you two thoughts on this. I'll give you the first as an example that supports your case and then I'll give you the feel good reason why you're wrong. So the support your case.
So I mentor this guy who's 20 years old and he's at this point where like he tried to do some stuff and it kind of didn't work out. And now he's like, fuck, do I need to go get a job? I need to pay my bills. I don't wanna go move back home with my parents.
And so he's like, he's like about to take this job. And he's like, should I leave this entrepreneurial path and go get a job? I need to pay bills in two months and I don't think I can spin something up in the next 60 days that will get so profitable that I know I'll be able to pay my rent. And I said, I empathize with the problem.
But I said, let's just slow down for a second. Before you go take that consulting job, let's just talk things through for a second. So I said, how much money do you need to live every month? What's your burn rate? Two grand.
I said, okay, two grand, fantastic. And I was like, so let's say you wanted a year of runway to go try some shit. You need to come up with 12 months times two grand.
You need to come up with 24 grand. I said, I know you do some investing in the stock market. You're kind of a degenerate, you like to pick stocks, you try to buy Bitcoin and shit.
I was like, because at the beginning of the conversation, he's like, my good, the thing that's going well is my investments have done well. The thing that's going bad is I'm about to have to take this job for my bills. I was like, well, those two things don't add up.
I was like, do you have enough money in the stock market right now that you could just sell and you could use to live off of to chase your entrepreneurial dreams? He's like, yeah, I could, but then I'd have to sell and I don't want to sell because I'm getting good returns. I said, okay, let's do the math real quick. What do you think you could generate per, let's take just the 24,000 that you need.
I don't know how much money you have. You don't have to tell me. Let's take the 24,000 that you need.
How much do you think you could generate per year in return average? He's like, 50%. I was like, okay, mini war and Buffett, you think you could do 50% a year, but let's assume your delusional number is correct and that you could do it consistently, which is the hard part. You could do it for one year for sure, but consistently generate 50%.
So let's say you do the war and Buffett, you invest perfectly, you get your 50% way above market return and your 24 grand has turned into 36 grand now. Like fantastic. Congratulations, you made $12,000.
Like you are still nowhere near where you're trying to get with your goals. And how many years would you have to continue to get this absurd return for you to be where your goals are?
SPEAKER_01
I was like, Not that many, but that would never happen.
SPEAKER_02
You would never happen, right? You'd never get the 50%. So anyways, I was like, you're talking about this year going and trading all your time for money at a consulting gig, when instead you could just sell some of your stock, get 24 grand of runway, and you could live for 12 months and give yourself a bunch of shots on goal to try to build something that you believe in. And you'll learn way more, you'll have way more fun and you'll have way more upside than if you go take the consulting job.
So like you're crazy. So he was of the mindset of, well, I heard that rich people invest. So I want to invest and I want to get return.
I want my money to work for money. He had kind of heard all these things and was investing for that reason. So I think investing doesn't make sense when you have very little amount of capital overall and you're trying to go invest that capital and then you're trading your time for dollars in other ways.
Now, the other, so that's the argument for times when I think investing would be stupid is when, you know, if you take a normal return, the amount of money that you're making every month is not, or every year is not going to change your life and you're locking up money in the stock.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, but what's the second point? Cause I think the second point is going to be better than the first point. The first point that you made was that, well, only invest if you got a lot.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, exactly. If you don't have a lot, I'd rather you use that money. If you're entrepreneurial, if you're one of the 5% of people who actually want to build a business or do something on their own, you're better served investing in yourself and investing in buying your time back and going, taking a bunch of shots on goal.
Now, the second is investing stupid. Well, I think you're kind of right that it is not the most exciting thing, but excitement is different for everybody. But here's the cool way of thinking about investing.
Like for anything to work, you need leverage, right? So you run the hustle, but day to day you write zero emails probably, you don't write the daily email, you don't do the trends report. This podcast is the most active thing you do for the hustle. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_01
We can say yes for sake of argument.
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so for the sake of argument.
SPEAKER_01
Your argument is correct. I'm leveraged.
SPEAKER_02
So you're leveraged because you got a bunch of humans doing work for you, cool. Another form of leverage is media. So people are gonna, we're gonna talk for one hour and then this is gonna get listened to for hundreds of thousands of hours out there.
So media is another form of leverage. And then the last one is capital. Capital is another form of leverage.
And so here's the cool way of thinking about it, which is if you have capital, investing is your way of allocating capital to things that are either A, gonna return the most, or B, gonna like change the world in a way that you care about. And so capital is your way of influencing the way that the world goes, because you get to assign units of energy to different companies and causes that are gonna go do shit in the world.
SPEAKER_01
I get that. And I think that's a great point. I think that what I'm completely burnt out of is just lame ass investments.
SPEAKER_02
Like what's a lame ass investment?
SPEAKER_01
Like I've got a friend that gave a lot of money to some like an investor who's gonna buy a bunch of multi-family real estate. And it's simply a, like I don't ever see this. I don't touch it.
Like this is just-
SPEAKER_02
Give me 7% a year, yeah.
SPEAKER_01
This is simply an asset class. And it's just a thing on a spreadsheet. And I'm like, oh my God, that's so boring.
Like, I just, I can't decide if I'm being a little like bitch hater or, yeah, but my, or like when I have, we have some friends who are buying companies and they just look for anything that like checks the boxes of does net churn this and is the acquisition cost this. And that's it. That's all I mean like- Mechanical, yeah.
Yeah. And I get it. I'm like, all right, that's a great way to make money.
But it's just like so fucking lame sometimes. I'm like, oh my God, you guys, like can you like, can we please do something exciting? Like I think it happened when I was traveling. I'm like, I just see these normal ass people at the gas station and they're with their wives and kids.
And like they, like I would, I'm way more fascinated about how do I just make that person just a little bit happier or a little bit better? Not like, how do I eat out a little more profit out of this service? Do you know what I'm saying? I'm like, I remember being at this gas station and I saw this mom give her kid like a generic Coke. And I was like, oh God, that kills me that this little girl's gonna drink this shit. How can we like help this mother like either afford or learn that this thing or that thing is not as like, how can we help her make a better decision? Make a better decision easy.
Not, how do I get a five percent net profit?
SPEAKER_02
I think I actually understand what you're saying now, which is it's not that investing is stupid. It's not that putting money in someplace and getting a return is stupid. What you are starting to get annoyed over or tired of is the amount of your mental energy that goes towards thinking about how to reap returns out of cash deploy.
So it's actually about where do you devote mental energy and not where does money go? It's kind of like, I get that money, you gotta do something with the money. Might as well put it in a place that's gonna grow. Might as well fund a company that's gonna do something.
But it's about mentally spending cycles thinking about how do I get seven percent versus eight percent versus tax efficient nine percent versus just mentally spending those same cycles thinking about something else. Like I'm reading a book, talking to a person, building something cool, writing a song, whatever it's gonna be. Is that more accurate?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, just like get out of this financial arbitrage circle jerk and actually make a difference and have an exciting, wonderful life for myself and others.
SPEAKER_02
I'm with you on that. I'm with you on that. I catch myself doing that all the time where I'm like, how many hours is my brain spending on, you know, in this financial game? And there's some amount that's correct, but it's very easy to slip into more than what you need.
SPEAKER_01
More than what's adding value to your life. I love that TV show Billions. And I'm like, oh man, like Bobby Alcara, this powerful billionaire guy, he's going to war versus other people.
That's fucking awesome. I love that. Yeah, he's an alpha.
And then I'm like, but he's also just a jerk off who's just trying to like squeeze pennies out of this thing and that thing. And it's complete nonsense. Right. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think, you know, I think what's what also happens is important, which is in your 20s, you're trying to figure out what like 20s in many ways about feeding ego. It's like whether you're parting, trying to make friends, trying to date people, trying to, you know, get your get your name on the map in, you know, your career or your industry. I feel like a lot of people, including myself, their 20s are spent feeding the ego.
And then your 30s are spent figuring out that, okay, my ego is either full or it will never be full. And I actually want to feed the soul in some kind of way. And I actually want to become more conscious of how I spend my time and my energy.
And then there's this constant push and pull of like, maybe I just want to make a bunch of money. Like maybe I'm not ambitious enough. Well, I think you can do both.
Wait for money focus. And there's like these debates that I have in my head. It sounds like you do too.
SPEAKER_01
I think you could do both. And I think that I guess the point is I'm beginning to realize I love the builders more than the allocators. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That fucking a builders over allocators all day.
SPEAKER_02
Okay, yeah, good. That's a good way to end the podcast. I put, if you, if you listen to us meander through that last five minutes, hopefully there was some value in the end for you.