#106 - The Q&A Special: We Answer Your Questions Live

what's up guys sean here sam is still out with his his kidney problem and we're wishing him a speedy recovery scary stuff hopefully hopefully it turns out not to be anything too serious this week in the meantime we're gonna try to fill in as best as we can with a few different guests you know big shoes to fill but we're gonna do our best today's episode is actually a q and a we did for trend subscribers a couple months ago and so in the trans community it's pretty awesome they bring in different speakers and you know you could do a q and a with a small group of people and so they asked us questions like how do you find interesting businesses what are your contra opinions what's something you were completely wrong about how would you validate this idea i have for a mental health app what news do you consume what other businesses do you own how do you make great connections like how do you build a network in the digital era where you're not meeting face to face and then business questions like you know what are some big opportunities in the work from home world what are your biggest failures in business how would you be able to newsletter from scratch and then book recommendations and some other fun stuff so hope you guys enjoy this q and a episode let's do it u yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's all on a road travel never looking back okay we will get going we're at seventy people now i think there's gonna be two hundred people here we'll keep going okay today is one year anniversary of one year anniversary of trends and steph asked that sean and i come here and just answer questions we don't have much in an agenda today but for those of you who don't know sean who you can't see i don't think you could see him now but he's visible once he talks sean and i have been very close friends since probably two thousand thirteen no know thousand fourteen and we have this podcast called my first million that sean created and now i was brought on as a c and sean and i have an interesting perspective first of all i run this business or i don't run it on everything about it but i i started it and so i have a lot of insight to advertising businesses and subscription businesses and we're like an eight figure company or whatever you wanna call it and so anyway i've got that insight but what makes sean and i kind of unique is we have this massive network of people who are significantly more successful than we are and we also have this massive network of people who are way less successful than we are but are more likely than not gonna be way more successful so we're able to see all these interesting things and behind the scenes of all these interesting stuff and when when sean started the podcast he basically just interviewed people so he's got all these other insights and anyway we just see probably more things than you guys do just because it's our job so it's kind of a lucky job and so what we can do today is answer questions on patterns or trends we see on what else sean what can we talk about i mean really it's whatever whatever people are interested and so we obviously on the podcast where always brainstorming new ideas do opportunities trends that we're seeing or we'll break down a business and say hey have you heard of this thing they are crushing it here's their model so that's what we like to nerd out about but you know this is a a sort of a community give back so hey you know we're here for an hour whatever you guys wanna talk about what we'll talk about structured as a q and a and there's two ways to do it so you can either submit a question in the q and a portion of zoom so you can you could type out your question if you prefer or if you actually wanna ask a question live on on audio or video and hop in we can do that as well so just type in the chat hey i'd love to ask a question about you know whatever you know get feedback on my pitch or i'd love to ask a question about how you guys you know do your hair whatever it is so so there's two ways to do either type it in or say i wanna call in either way works for us and it doesn't look like anyone has ask anything so what you do is i think on the bottom left like we see like those three dots and maybe it it might say the word more click q and a and ask the question so we gotta we got one or two coming in well we will let a few come in what do you wanna do sean what do you wanna this first one okay i'm just gonna say you can also the questions so if you see a question you're like well i'd really love sam and john to answer this make sure not output we get to the wise so okay i'll i'll ask the question for alex alex ask a question which was to sam how do you do research and i think this is a good question because like normally if i saw this in a q and a be like how do you do research what what does that mean but sam you actually have a like a knack for finding information and and dis information that most people don't have well i think we both do i i i definitely think we both you're you're definitely better at it than me like you've taught me a lot by being like yeah actually here you know have you heard of this company here's what i know here's how i found it here's where the signals i look for which you know he's kind of so talk about your process or or i think rather than generically if you just what's what's something you researched recently and then talk about the rabbit hole you went down yeah so the way that i research is i talk about this all time i talk about this with stuff and brett basically for me researching is kinda like writing a song so writing a song it has a set there there's like a handful of combinations maybe a couple dozen that just work all the time and the way that you come up with those combinations is you see patterns but then you also you might see like an interesting r from like maybe i could be like slash from guns and roses and i'll see something i'll see just a baked beethoven thing i'm like oh my god that little like structure he did had right there for that cord that that's solo that's amazing i'm gonna steal that or maybe he'll like see assign this like graffiti that says sweet child of mine like in a poem and he'll just like take that so that's what i do is i find interesting things and then and typically what i do is i have a variety of tools plugged into my browser and whenever i'm looking on the internet i just whenever i see anything that catches my ai and that's interesting i throw it through this process so i use a combination of similar web a combination of wikipedia which is anyone can use a combination of annual reports from privately owned publicly owned companies at anytime i ever see something interesting i throw it through that process of looking at similar web looking at reddit i if it's an app i'll go on the eye store and i'll just read the reviews and then what i tried to do is just completely d to figure out exactly how it works because it's my theory that the reason why no one broke the four minute mile and then in the sixties i think it was roger ben broke the four minute mile own five other people did it that year is it's a lot easier to accomplish things when you know what's possible so my logic is whenever i see anything that catches my eye i put it in similar web i put in a reps which is a software for search analytics i look the reviews on itunes and i try to figure out how the business works because then i wanna know what's possible and i'll add a couple other scrappy techniques so you said similar web that tells you the traffic you can use app annie that'll tell you downloads if you go to the google play store and you search an app you scroll it down to the bottom it'll tell you how many installs of the app has these really easy simple heuristic to figure out how big something is nothing you could do contact x employees i've done this before i called them i say hey an x employee doesn't really have anything to lose at this point for that company so i'll say hey you were on ran beatty for this company you know would love to learn what you found you know what worked for you what didn't i get on the phone with them for thirty minutes and in that conversation i'll ask something like so like you know ballpark how big was this was it like ten million dollars in revenue or or a hundred i have no way to tell and then i asked a question like that to triangulate answers from ex employees i'll also you know it it all the time or i'll be like it said here you guys did x that's right bullshit right and said yeah no way we did this yesterday on on our podcast with this guy we were like there's no way your margins more than thirty percent right and you could say something like that and don't want if you ask what is your margin you'll never get an answer but but they'll be like they're like they're like you know we wish and then you know that to close or we'll say like that would be horrible if our margin was that bad and then you which way hire right exactly another you know i'll i'll add some scrappy techniques that i did in the past so when i was twenty one twenty two the first business i ever did out of college was this sushi chains a sushi restaurant chain we wanted to make the chipotle sushi i wanted to know what our customers were are what our competitors were doing in revenue and i did two things that that worked the first was we sat in a parking lot outside of their restaurant and we counted customers and cars and then that got really boring because we're sitting there for twelve hours a day just to trying to get a sense of is this a good location for restaurants or not and then we found you could order on receipts and we you could go in in in the morning we would buy the cheapest thing and then the evening would buy the cheapest thing and we would compare those the numbers of the order numbers and we would know how many orders they did that day by the way you can still do this with e commerce stores yeah you can go and when you get when can get a shopify receipt at the beginning of the month and the end of the month you'll know how many orders a shopify store is done i've also called and said and that this is true at the time i'm a student and i really wanna learn about your business and write a report can you know would you be down to answer ten questions for for me i have a student at this university they didn't know i was a student also trying to launch a business but you know those were some of the more i call it scrappy other people say oh that was mis you know dis but i'm trying to give you content that you're not just gonna find everywhere if you just google how to do research so but long story short the point is that you're just looking for a little tidbits bits of information and then there's thousands thousands of tactics that you can do to dig deeper sean what's a someone asks us what's a opinion that you hold that is con a country opinion i hate this i don't like this question because it's just asking me to be controversial but why don't you answer it yeah know why don't you answer the shit question no it's a it's a good question but it's a hard question so the idea here is what's a contra opinion you hold so what's something you believe that few others other let's make it business related or it it and in that in that sphere so i i think you know as i've been doing the podcast the thing i've learned that has the thing where my opinion has changed the most and i now view it as a controversial opinion is that starting a company is not the best way to build large wealth i think that actually buying a business is the best opportunity in business right now so you know traditional path go get a job non traditional path start a company in the tech world that's usually like start a software company raise money from investors all this other stuff and i've just now seen people sorry the the other one is i'm a bootstrap i will put my own credit card money into this and i'll i'll i'll try to make profits on this i'll build this organically myself from scratch but now it seems like the lowest hanging fruit is to buy an existing business there's i'll give you an example i looked at a business that does two million in revenue it does five hundred thousand in eb this business you can buy it today for one point two million and you so you can buy a business for one point two million so it's about a two year payback period to slightly over two years and that's and you so you push a button that says i'm interested in this business they tell you everything about this business so you're just getting an mba first secondly you don't have to put out a million dollars right you sba you you get an sba loan because this business has existing cash flow so how how would you buy this business you would put down about ten to fifteen percent as a down payment that's about a hundred to a hundred fifty grand you can either put that yourself from your savings or you can borrow money from friends family to buy this business that is already proven to be successful and and then you get a loan on the rest it's sba loan it is personally guaranteed but you're buying businesses that are mature that have existing cash flows and you you should do your diligence to make sure this is durable it's not a you know flash in the pan you're not buying a lemon but you're gonna buy a business that's doing two million dollars a year in revenue five hundred thousand in in in you know sd which is the sellers discretionary your earnings and you're gonna be able to pay every month that you're paying off your loan you're actually profiting you have more net profits from month one than you would if you did your own business from scratch or you went and got a job and so i just think that so few people you know the people who are doing this they're like it's obvious i see some people in the chat like hey here's a great book on this i agree with this this is such an obvious path that is so under populated it's like the best city in america that nobody's living in right now there's like a hundred people there and they're like this is fantastic don't tell anyone i'll i'll say too and one of them is the opposite of what sean said the first one is i used to think that the best product would win that's not true the best whoever has the best sales and marketing process i think we'll win and if it just and if your have product happens to be good that just makes sales and marketing a lot easier and the second thing is i loved banking and finance and all that stuff i think that's shit is just it is like sip out all the soul of anything interesting i think that like starting stuff and making stuff from a place of like act like just simply going after an opportunity because it makes money i think i i just can't stand it and i think it just sucks the life out of mind of me and i it's so hard for me to do so that's a little bit different than what sean said but it doesn't have to be different cool so if i had one more contra opinion it's probably not that controversial in this group but i would say in mainstream society this would be contra which is that college if you're a smart kid who wants to be successful you shouldn't go to college go so disagree with you sean i think if you can get into a top twenty university you want hundred percent should go i went to top twenty university and i disagree so that's why it's a contra opinion right because i think most people would disagree with me and that's why it's one of my opinion damn what if you can't get in the top twenty do you still manage you go i i think you should go to a state school but you should not go to into debt or you should go to community school or you should just take two years off and just fuck around i i what i guess what i mean is i think that between eighteen and twenty two you should have the freedom and the ability to just be in idiot and be a fool and learn about yourself and sexuality and get drunk and have sex of people and try new jobs and do all that great stuff but you shouldn't spend thirty grand a year to do it unless you can in last year like like my wife went to penn and she's a academic she's a thinker an academic we need women like her but i went to a school that costs thirty grand a year a private school that was a total waste cool next question or where do you wanna go okay let's i don't wanna talk about research gustavo we'll talk about that in a minute we already answered that or we talked to some similar we'll come back to that though it's highly does anyone wanna call in i'd love to actually just there a couple of people in the chat there was a sean k has a mental health app idea so sean if you wanna if you wanna talk just raise your hand in zoom we'll get you on live adam has has also ping this he's a full time real estate investor he might wanna come on live okay but your questions to be fast short okay and while you're pulling that person up somebody asks for a broker like where you find companies i i think sean does this as well we use quiet like brokerage which is pretty helpful yeah there's several you know quiet light is good for curated smaller number of high quality ones but you don't always get the best value there because you know you don't get the diamonds in the rough there and also other people are fishing for in that same pond and so honestly the best businesses are not for sale yeah so i i like to go find a business that's doing well contact the owner and get them to see if they you know or sorry not get them to sell but ask if they would be open to selling and now you're bidding against nobody yeah like for example i'm i'm not trying to buy a company right now because i've i've have a job and i have my i'm busy but like for example hemingway app dot com i think one hundred percent someone should buy it and just to like because i can't help myself i email them and ask if they would sell and they would in infect sell it doesn't mean it's a good good price but yeah they will sell nice okay so we've got not other sean actually k i'm gonna sean i'm gonna allow you to talk i'm not sure if that worked here we go there's sean sean feel free to be guys yeah i you guys how you doing i say yes from you great name yeah spelling well there's a lot of different ways yeah i posted in the chat about an idea i am toy around with also put post the facebook group a while back as well basically it's a mental health app think com app but instead of des stressing and calming yourself down it's more guided sessions for improving your critical thinking problem solving focus motivation great just wondering kind of where you would get started on testing the market if this is a viable idea can i just jump right into this i i was just talking to my friend about this great sean are you finished talking i shouldn't have put you off yeah i'm go ahead i was just talking to my friend about this where i'm like everything that's going on in the world right now it a lot of it boils down to like young men and young women not being good at processing emotions whether it's good emotions or bad emotions but like how to effectively process how you feel about something and i totally thought about this because i you i used to be i'm if you ask steph some people or sean still say i've got a bad temper you to be way worse where i would i would be angry all the time and i started using calm and it totally helped to meet identify emotions and try that to like be what's it called impulsive about it and i think one guy who's kinda exploiting this opportunity in the good way is sam harris with wake up and i don't know for a fact but if i had a bet bet i would say that's a ten million dollar a year company that is almost one hundred percent profit so i understand what you're trying to do i think it's incredibly interesting and i think the way that these guys grow is by just do shit tons of paid performance marketing on the app store is that right sean you think i mean sean barry what do you think that is how grow unless you're sam harris then you also have your normal audience to grow through but the thing i would say is like okay cool you know that's a worthy problem so it's like it's a problem worthy of your time it is a real problem so you're not trying to validate that part you need to validate so the question is what are you trying to validate and really what you're trying to validate is can i acquire customers at a profitable rate and then secondly you know do i actually have a way to deliver this value how do do i a way to deliver anxiety relief stress relief to the customer right so like you know what is my product is it act does it actually work and then secondly can i acquire customers profit alright today's episode is brought to you by tempo tempo dot fit is the website i actually use this i've used this for a few months now and it's this machine that has a touch screen in this three d sensor and what it does is they give you weight like a hundred and fifteen pounds in weights and it's for strength training so what it is is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting it sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in what your part rate is it's pretty amazing and then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift how many to lift what workout to do whether you wanna do a twenty minute ten minute fifty minute workout it's pretty amazing but the best part is the leader board the other stuff all the features that they have that's cool but i'm obsessed with the leader board because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing and you can compete with other people who have taken the same class so it's maybe wanna work harder lift more weight or have more endurance it's just pretty freaking fun and the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that'll will make you live longer and this product tempo it checks that box for me so they're our sponsored today if you use the code tempo hustle you'll get a hundred dollars off so tempo dot fit is the url and tempo hustle one word you'll get hundred dollars off so check it out i use it if you look me up on twitter you'll see i'm always filming videos where i'm talking to that company say i'm trying to crush their employees on the leader board because i actually love this thing and i i use it all the time so check it out and so you know that's where you would that's where i would focus all my energy alright it's not about saying is this a good idea or a bad idea that you have to zoom in and say what part of this and do i not know that i need to know to be successful and in this case i believe it's can acquire customers profit and if i can yeah i'm gonna gross this i completely agree there's it's not a question of do people want this you already have that that it's lance already back in the already validated you already i was gonna say i i wanted to make a data clarify i'm not talking about an app that stresses and you know reduces your anxiety and calms you down and all that i'm talking about going the other direction and kind of submit motivation yeah all that great great so let's say all those are positive things fantastic same same idea which is worthy because i believe you could do it you know maybe there's open space in the market that's all great i guess that it comes down to do you have a a growth machine where you'd be able to acquire a customer for a dollar and make two dollars fifty or three dollars off them so that you could plow two dollars back into buying the next customers yes only how these businesses work i completely agree it's kinda like when john rockefeller started standard oil like there was no question if there was a demand for care scene there was just a question like his secret sauce but that he made a deal with the railroads so he could profit get his care seen all over the country that's what this is it's not about demand necessarily it's about ten use service demand profit yeah i would also just add that it's it's about whether people are willing to pay or everyone wants me more productive everyone wants me more mindful are people willing to put their money where their mouth is in some industries it's obvious in some industries it's taken a lot of time for people to be like oh i absolutely should spend thirty bucks on my mindfulness this month and i do see a change in that but you need to validate that people actually are willing to put money behind productivity yeah actually even on that front i wouldn't worry about that personally i've i've failed to see any apps that people use regularly that don't monetize well so if you get enough scale then the sort of you know the way mobile apps work it's not like you're getting fifty or a hundred percent of people typically to pay you know usually these apps are freemium models games are really extreme where all the revenue comes from one percent or even less than one percent of the revenue the whales and apps like calm are a little bit different because they put a pay up right in front and they sort of have just like the seven days of free calm or whatever but i i guess like i used to do this with my earlier start i would try to validate i tried to prove everything and some great advice i got was like when you step back which one of these do you really doubt is true and it's like you know some things you need to prove because you need to do them and actually show it's not just a thought but as an entrepreneur you wanna focus most of your energy on the thing you actually don't know is true or not and so so that's why i would focus the majority of energy which in this case is is is acquiring customers one little pilot prototype of this so couple months ago i put out a podcast that's called the nine minute morning routine because i do this nine minute morning routine it helps me with the things you talked about motivation clarity of thought all those things helps me be basically more successful so i put it in as a podcast and i think podcast is a very cheap way to pilot an idea and build an audience that's not an app because for an app you gotta get a developer and build them a app that's a whole like set of work that maybe you don't wanna do right now and another example to look at that's like this i talked to these guys who build the sleep app i forgot what it's called yeah this shit's amazing and they started out just by having a podcast where they would read sleep stories i think it's the opposite they started with a with a website i start with a with the app and the app gotten really popular and the app does you know a few million bucks in revenue and it has millions of users and now they're actually doing more podcasting they started doing podcast podcast podcasts to to sell the app to basically grow the app but the podcast they got way more users quickly and so now he's like dude love this i don't have to bother maintaining an app maybe i could just build this whole business on the podcast and i never really heard anything like that but that's sort of leads me to believe that might be an interesting prototype for you is put the content on the on on as a podcast drive customers to that and see if you can get a huge base of of hooked subscribers and you're not monetizing them yet that's okay maybe you threw ads or whatever but and then you could transfer that audience to an app if you needed to later that's one way i i would consider approaching this thank you sean what's go awesome thank you much for your see you can we can i answer one of these questions yeah absolutely tom schmidt asked what's one thing of biz that you believed ended up what what's one thing that you one hundred percent percent believe ended up opposite of what was expected i'm reading that funny you guys get what i mean yeah i'll say a few i was with with ryan hoover the day before he launched product hunt and he told me what it is and i was that is so stupid you're wasting your time the second thing is i when i started my business i thought that like i was gonna like i'm gonna be this operational powerhouse and lead every single day just like jeff bezos that that didn't happen and i think that that doesn't happen with most people the third thing is charge more money than you think for stuff and people actually are happier that way those are good i like those i was also totally wrong on a product hunt in fact ryan had interviewed for a job at my company that like week before he started product hunt and we we didn't bring him on board i really liked him but my team wasn't sold and then he was like okay next week he's like i launched this thing so i'm on user fifteen of product hunt and i remember showing my team be like hey that guy we interviewed here's what he's doing and we all just sort of laughed and like this is silly i've been wrong many many times on apps like that my my snapchat username still has the word test in it because i thought this app's is going nowhere this is just a test account just to see what this dumb thing is that'll it'll be gone in two months and here we are like seven years eight years later or whatever it is so i've been wrong many times on that i was also wrong in some things i believed would happen in the future so i'll give you an example i thought that the way everybody the way all these you know when the web got popular these services like squarespace and wix and all that they let anybody build their own website and i was convinced this is gonna happen for mobile apps and maybe i'm right but on a way slower time scale what i thought no people are gonna wanna like you're gonna have no code people basically you're gonna have non code building apps just like non code build websites and i also thought the way i have you know sean dot com people have their own personal websites i thought oh it'd be great if tim ferris just had the tim ferris app and he could directly connect with his audience and he could push notify them when he has any blog post and i just thought that would be great and it turned i was totally wrong on that that's just like one specific example of things that i thought the future would be that it doesn't seem like it's played out that way great nice to that someone else on life yeah so jackie jackie says he bought the largest towing directory in the us i'll let him speak but sounds like something super interesting jackie can go ahead hey guys how's going what i know who you are yeah i i think i messaged you a couple of weeks about youtube stuff nice meet you sean yeah so i actually stumbled across one of these directories our backgrounds in seo so i managed to rank for like going company near me etcetera so what we're doing right now is like we're essentially selling ad space in each city for like a flat one k a month for example sure but now that i'm listening to some of these calls i realized like the customer experience is so bad and like these guys have no idea how to run a company and i was wondering if there's like some some way to disrupt this industry and it's one of these like really boring but i i would say pretty lucrative industries so what i have is a bunch of traffic so essentially people looking for towing but no one to fulfill it and how would i rule it out in the us when i'm based like germany does it baked good money as is with the lead gen i mean i bought it last month at like two hundred and it makes two hundred bucks a month last month this month we're gonna hit like two three k and it's just pure profit because it's just it's a website right and wait so how are you trying to do sell leads to tow truck companies so right now that's what we're doing i'm running facebook ads and we're offering like thirty days for free just free calls we're tracking everything but what i wanna do like the fifty million dollar one hundred million dollar idea is be like the next trip way so i have a friend who built exactly that he tried to build an extra called swoop i think it got bought like maybe fifty million bucks something like that by an existing tow trucking company so if you actually wanna do this i can connect you with him and he could tell you everything about the tow trucking industry why it's hard to disrupt and where it still can't be disrupted he was telling me and i was just getting bored but like you know it's obviously highly relevant for you so i'll i'll i'll hook you up with him just dm me on twitter after this the other thing that i would say is like the lead gen revenue just seems really really low for that business like i'm guessing that a tow job is like i don't know hundreds of dollars at least right what's the average job like six hundred dollars no actually it's depending on what they need so flat tire is like fifty bucks oh actual tow is like a hundred something well so but that's definitely there's definitely a enough of that in america to build a big business yeah so so i would definitely try to like just i i would first ask myself how big should this lead gen business be and i would do it back in the envelope and figure out is that two or three k a month or is it thirty k a month or is it three hundred k a month two million i mean it it can definitely be up to i calculated if we sign up one person in each city i mean major at least fifty k a month we're just getting to the sales side of it building the funnel is like everything's from scratch i'm using some like jan seo resell platform right now but jackie you're talking about that's not if you did something disruptive that's just the lead gen business right exactly yeah right but like the the the disruption is like rolling out in cities and out offering actually like becoming a tow company my lies sorry go ahead sam let me say this i sold one of my companies like it was a small exit to this a lead gen company for apartments and they scaled they bootstrap it to about twenty five or thirty million in revenue and the i thing about lead gen is it was it was very profitable it i think it did thirty i think we're probably doing when i maybe two million a month in sales and like four hundred thousand dollars a month in profit which is great and then what happened was they were buying all this traffic from search which is what you're gonna probably do and they tried to rank on search and they're like well shit we're doing all this transactional revenue with these companies who buy leads from us we have a few problems the first problem is is if some of the then you work with a combination of third parties like apartments dot com and all these other places and they give you a cut of the lead and what the problem was is two things first of all users were they were coming to that website and it's a very transactional relationship and the and so when this company that i worked for wanted to build a relationship and create actual products that people would surely buy the users were like for the fuck of you like i don't know you you've just imp me off the other people and that will probably happen to you the second thing is you if you are just selling leads and then you wanna become a tow truck company your revenue provider goes fuck that you're gonna compete against me we're out and they equip they're gonna quit paying you any money and so yeah in my opinion this company this apartment company that did this with us they should have just kept that going it and just let let it make two million dollars a year in revenue and like ten million in profit and just took all that money and gone and started something else or from the very beginning they should've have said like we're going we're gonna do it the hard way it's gonna take a long time but it might be way cooler and way better and because they got addicted to this lead revenue and it just completely screwed them over it's kinda like we at my company we've done a good job of this of doing revenue from and and subscription revenue but if it's really easy for people to get addicted that ad revenue and they're like no we can't promote our subscription so that is what would happen probably yeah okay we we can sort wrap it up but i guess what i would say is advertising personally i would just try to get the lead gen revenue to fifty k a month and i would move on i would take that revenue and i would take the profits and i would invest it into other things unless you're really saying the next five years i wanna build able a start trucking company that's like the top thing you're most excited about yeah if you're no i can completely got one hundred percent degree don't don't don't turn you know something that's awesome into something that's shitty by trying to reach for scale and you you know doing ninety percent more work for you know some potential return it sounds like for a little a a little additional work over the next six to twelve months you can get this thing to be a cash cow that nobody knows about and you don't hire anyone and you just milk it that's what i would do okay yeah yeah because i was i mean i i was looking for that fifty million dollar idea i guess i'll just settle up for like an not really about settling it's sort of like if you were if if this is really the fifty million dollar idea you want great go for it but it sounds like this is an amazing fifty k a month idea and with you know are you have a clear line of sight to that it sounds like and i would do that maybe when you get there you'll reassess and you will be able to overcome the problem sam talking about or maybe you don't and you're like you know what this is actually a great cash count and my fifty million dollar business idea is this other thing i'm really passionate about that i'm gonna use the you know my seo skills to go do one of my favorite companies right now flex port that's exactly how they started they end the software that was and and they go it probably won't let's not fuck this up but let's just go start something new yeah also one thing that didn't add up in what you were saying was that was like a really low ticket price and you said you could do a lot of money through legion and that just didn't add up so i would go check those numbers and be like alright do i believe this can do fifty k and walk through step by step for that and get a second pair of eyes to look at it alright next question thank you we thank you thank you see you step can we rapidly go through some of these other questions is that and i was gonna say there's thirty six questions in the q and i if people could go and upload them so we get the best one the split top well let's rapidly go through somebody sean i'll i'll save my answer in two sentences and you say here's the two sentences how to make new connections wait fuck where'd to rico how how to make great connections in the in the in a digital era twitter twitter and writing yeah blogging and right and email list blogging or twitter like you can get famous in six months from this it won't be you don't need a huge audience you just need like a thousand really smart people to think you're smart and that's actually trivial to do if you are smart yeah i would say twitter what how about okay if you're trying to launch a popular blog should you start wide or narrow narrow narrow next question you have a great blog post on this i think it's called mitch niches get riches or something like that go google that standpoint you always go narrow so someone said sam the hospital newsletter was the first generation newsletter blog or anything it was a blog and then a newsletter newsletter is way better sean and sam what other businesses do currently own i don't know if sean wants to answer that does he yeah i can't talk about it right now so yeah can't talk about that i own the majority of the hustle i have partnered with my friend ramon and we i'm a minority owner of a software company both sean and i are our advisors to a few things that we have shareholders in i wouldn't say we're a owner but we own equity owners pieces of i have angel invested in not many companies five right so we own partially own those anything else i've got like maybe three or four things that pay bills like it i make money from each month but they're all like tiny yeah i my also i would just say my goal is not to own many things everything you own owns a piece of you and i don't want to own many material things i don't wanna own many businesses i'd rather own you know nothing or one amazing thing and you know i have this phrase if you ever seen jerry maguire he talks about the kwan and he talks about you know basically like he wants the money and he wants the quality of life and he wants to have that it factor i have a similar for phrase which is i don't wanna be ball out of control i wanna be qualified out of control and q is corny but q is like quality life and i i i i say it to myself specifically my i have my brother we always talk about the little things and the quality of life he walks his daughter to school every single day and you know having the freedom to just go work out whenever he wants and travel whenever he wants those are those are wealth and i don't wanna own businesses and i don't wanna have money tied to things that take away my quality of life great what media and entrepreneurship organizations let's okay so media for me i'm not gonna say anything associated with i consume business insider hack and hacker news every single day i also go tech me and that's it the only media i really consume is social media i don't read any news i do listen to sports stuff just to kind of me too yeah escape kill my my list stuff or entrepreneurship organizations i pay attention to anything that white comb does i pay attention to anything that something a group called n does and i pay attention to what's going on in india because i think there's a lot of really things there and have a whole bunch of people who feed the information about the startup seen in india that's where i'm and i also have private groups so i have several private groups that are either just chat like messaging groups or we meet up once a month that are full of other founders and those are my favorite entrepreneurship groups and that's where i learn from i don't listen to the news or read anything i don't read tech crunch or anything that sean what are some of the ideas that you've seen in india that you're surprised haven't happened in in north america yet i'll give you an example so this guy i i should shout him up because he's kind of amazing i actually gonna just turn this into a newsletter there's a guy who knew how interested i i was in india and he just he said i'd love to tell you it his name is sum send gupta so shout up to him so he sends me this thing every week so i said send me one interesting business every week and he just does and he was like i'll send you report and i like no just dm me on twitter three things what's the name of the business what's the one line description give me three bullet points of why you think it's awesome and screenshot it for me because i don't have an android phone i wanna download this app and like get it all set up and so he does exactly that so like he told me the just last night midnight he says kinda a business club business called cr the founders this guy can the idea is to create a virtual club like a credit card club like like i diners club used to be popular one my dad had for the one percent of india so they launched in early twenty nineteen they've raised hundred seventy five million they're already processing a billion dollars of payments they have two million users and valued to five hundred million dollars this all happen in essentially one and a half years and then he's like here's why it's awesome here's my two cents of where it might be weak and i just think it's pull that up hold that up i'm me read that step let's make this a section in the trent email each week where we like list four things or in non american countries that are doing stuff interestingly sean we had nike reach out to us and ask us to pay us money to build this corporate like paid information thing and all we do is talk about about shit going on in different countries yeah i think it's great and so i'm i'm super interested about can hold that up i wanna see how he writes it alright let me show so he's just got little emojis next to the certain things i don't know if you could see it oh my god and then it's just like oh wait there you go and then he has like at the bottom he has like a little screen cast where he walks me through the app and i'm like like this like this is business school this is why you don't need college because you could do this this guy does this in you know one week and i'm learning from it so and anyways was lot infinite ways to learn if you motivated thought he just does this for fun the guy he must he doesn't he he loves the podcast he reached out and he he was like how can i help and i was like hey i want this and then he did such a good job it and i'm like okay we're gonna turn this into a thing so that you can like more people should read this it should not be locked in my dms it's like there more people should benefit from this information now people are saying they'd love to see it in the chat so this is the problem i always end up competing with the hustle here now you guys gotta do it you know this poor guys gonna get ripped off well hey no there's a newsletter called s i think it's called and all they do is talk about this type of shit but in china and i've bet actually that guy makes a million dollars a year doing that yeah i think that if you like could we wouldn't analyze this crap i mean maybe we would but like one person could do like a weekly newsletter just on the landscape of india but for an american and yeah a lot of people would buy that yep okay what else we got let's say i wanna find something that's different here's one in the in the chat i know you guys talked about the rx bar in the past so someone someone did a test with your friends imitate the rx bar in europe how would you approach differentiation and protein in the protein bar market when there's already so many products that are super similar we wanna talk about what we talked about yesterday today sean go forth you do no you you're better than me yet okay so we did this podcast get released did i don't know if our podcast from yesterday no tomorrow no gets that tomorrow so we did a podcast with the founder of liquid death and which is a water a canned water drink that's taken a totally different brand and he was like you know this whole business for us is about branding because clearly you know people don't buy water really because they you you did a blind taste us of ten bottled waters people wouldn't be able to tell which one is which which one's better than the other so really you're working on form factor you know the bottle and the brand and so they have a new form factor cans rx bar did the same thing their packaging is very very distinct and unique and then the second thing is like brand what do we stand for right who are we speaking to what do we stand for for his thing he was like you know the water brands all try to speak to like yoga moms purity it's a picture of a mountain you know crystal geyser like all that luxury it's luxury all that stuff and he's like you know he himself was a punk rocker and was on tour and they used to you know be promoted by monster energy and he talked about how on the monster can you know they would be checking these things he's like dude the tour schedule is brutal how are you out here in a hundred degree he drinking monsters like and they're like oh this is water inside it's called on the bottom of the can it says monster tour like tour beverage or something like that and tour beverage means water in a monster can and you know so what he was just trying to think of like you know it's true there's no water brand that speaks to fun and there's no water brand that speaks to these different demographics who don't necessarily wanna be holding the sort of purity clean you know brands buy things like said he said like we wanna be like water that when you're smoking weed like go ahead do like smoke weed or or get drunk or do drugs like do something that maybe isn't always physically healthy for you but it's exciting and also drink our water right and you see this all the time right you there's medical drinks to replenish and re you that are electrolyte drinks and they look like a pb light and they look like a medical drink to re you and then gatorade came out and just ref factors that same thing with the brand of this is what the top athletes in the world in the world drink and then you know there's you so you just take a customer first and then you say okay to this customer is there already a brand in this category that speaks to that customer that that that is fits that customer's lifestyle and if not go for it but you know you need to have that clear insight about this customer to uses this product or wants this product but there's not a brand in that category that knows how to speak to that audience i wanna we have forty for quick we're not gonna get all these but i definitely wanna try how how can we do that stuff let's just power through them do people want rapid fire or do they want in depth of a few questions i don't know okay let's we'll we'll try this from justin say hold on let's let let's look at the chat let's we you sean asked a question sean said you guys want rapid fire rapid fire okay blind rapid fire there we go okay steph you wanna read this question that we just rapid fire sam you can go first on each one yeah okay so with work from home becoming more prominent after covid what are your thoughts on the work from home economy they seem to think there will be a market for benefits company benefits at home the big market i think is gonna be in helping set up different entities in different state still very hard we have a full time woman who works at our company in ed who helps us with this it's hard totally agree there's a big economy i don't think it's around benefits i think it's around things like tele conferencing work collaboration tools software like that things like you talked about hr things to to deal with this new world or i advise this company called first base which is providing actual like hardware to your home office like the company needs to give you a computer a desk and a monitor in webcam so that you can actually work from home and companies don't know how to do that they don't wanna deal with the logistics of that these guys are doing it for them and i think that's a awesome business too facebook going remote with twenty thousand people the hardest thing is i think is gonna taxes is how to handle the taxes that's so hard yeah okay cool so another question any advice to one to four years just out of college young ambitious people who are affected by covid either fur load or laid off is it worth trying to intern or should they focus on finding the full time job what do you recommend people i answer first if i was in that position man it's so fucking weird right now i kinda was in that position and i moved to san francisco and it worked out well the second thing that i did and also worked out really well is i learned a scale most college kids don't have a skill i learned the skills copywriting running which means i was always able to have a job so i would learn a skill set and i have one hundred percent cent would intern the i think there's two answers there's one if you're in the top five percent of people and your goal is to be sort of entrepreneurial or if your goal is to get on the career track go get a job or get an internship and start climbing that ladder and so if your if your goal is more entrepreneurial which i'm assuming it is if you're in this community right now then i would learn how to make money in the internet i think that's a incredible skill that's gonna be useful for a long time and i think it takes a lot of trial and error and i would be like okay i'm gonna live like a cockroach very cheap and i'm gonna find a way to just cover my bills every month and i'm gonna learn how to make money on the internet it might take me two years to figure that out but i'm gonna find every model of how people are doing it and i'm gonna learn how to make money on the internet and cool someone's asking sam you said yesterday that you'd like to use research coming out of trends to eventually launch a business how far would you deviate from the hustle or trends model basically like how far would you deviate from media which score in right now well we're gonna have this business we do trends in hospital and that will be it's one thing and then we will invest in stuff our company has not invested in anything i sam paul personally have invested in some stuff that we've discovered and i think that's what i wanna do is either have a fun underneath our company arm or use our profits to invest in that and we would invest in anything we just mean some guy built this hotel that sean and i r on the other day and i need to see if the economics about are as good as see as good as it looks but like something like that i totally would invest in and i have i have been invested at fifty fifty or seventy thousand dollars collectively and interesting stuff like that sam where'd you get sure somebody wants now so wants to know i i have i don't even wanna wanna realize much anyway i got it from target yeah okay great what's next cool so someone's asking about second third order effects of covid and obviously the protests what do you see in terms of business opportunities given where we are i think cities with good living but typically we're like sea level cities like denver or charlotte are gonna just fucking explode in san francisco in new york are gonna crash yeah this is too too hard to do rapid fire but we talked about this in the podcast i believe and there's a great pdf somebody put out there a second order or third order effects someone in the community found after we talked about it and i would look at that and there's a bunch of ideas in there yeah the guys this name was emmett okay another question so sean you mentioned on facebook group angel investing and now you're talking about buying businesses what platforms would you recommend people find internet businesses we talked about this a little earlier quiet light brokerage is where i would start cool alright so george is asking can you guys i this isn't a quick one either but talk about some of your biggest failures what you learn for them i'll just say this i haven't had many failures because i've not really probably swung as hard as a i shit i'm the opposite i feel like i failed on everything you know the last even the company that we just sold in all reality was a failed company like our ambition was to be you know the next twitter youtube twitch etcetera and then instead we ended up selling to twitch and you know it wasn't like some mega mega home run you know a few money type of exit or anything like that so from my perspective i feel like my capability is here and my results are here and i'm trying to bridge that gap but i would say like every business is that way your capabilities here and here's a reality every person is usually that way and you should be trying to you you should be trying to figure out how to climb up that gap you know the first thing i did was this restaurant business you know it failed you know the second business i did got a bunch of progress and bunch of funding from a strategic person i left and it failed later i did an ideal lab for five years where we're swinging for the fences to build the next big social thing we i do not own the next big social so in that sense i failed i want this podcast to be the biggest podcast in the world in that sense i failed you know like my goals are here and my results are here and that's the good news is my goals are so much higher than the average person that even when i'm failing my results are so much higher than the average person and i completely agree with that i've never failed though because i've failed in that failed there is still that gap but i've never had like a run out of money failure because oh also kind of funny it's safe kind of corny but there's a great book called when learn that just written by conor mcgregor coach it is an amazing philosophy to adapt you don't need to read the book read the cover it's called winner learn and all it says is whenever you do something and there's an outcome there's a result you just how to say did i win or did i learn there is no lose and it's corny but the reality is that that's the best people they they act that way if they fail they don't worry about losing or failure they they just say what did i learn and then that's winning in a different way cool someone is launching a d product will be in the market in beta in a couple days they're wondering if they should do kickstarter and their concerns specifically is whether people might seal their idea or or basically launch it faster than them if they choose to do a kickstarter i'm not gonna talk about that you can go sean i don't know anything about it sounds like if your product's ready to go to market you don't need a kickstarter or you don't need to raise capital you already you already got to the starting line you use kickstarter to get to the starting line like hey i need some money to build the thing so i can get to market it sounds like you're already there so just start selling it see how it goes if it's going well people wanna invest if it's not going well a kick kickstarter is not gonna save you either so you're it sounds like you're already at the start line it's time to time to go cool i'm gonna go through some of these just like rapid fire ideas guys let me know what you think of them so one of them hotel living team of cleaners come every day to do small things make your bed take your trash out fresh towels to give you that quote unquote hotel feeling what do guys think love it don't think you can make the economics well yeah don't think the economics work unless you can get entire neighborhood to do it alright what's your take on whether companies will or should start to move away from gig and ten ten ninety nines or and move to w two i don't have an opinion on that i don't feel like i'm educated yeah i agree i i don't have a real opinion on it i would just say generally i think the world i i forget those labels i think the world as a whole is moving more towards freelance and free agency than full time one company like we already broke the paradigm of worked for one company for forty years in retirement on your you know sort of retirement plan with that company that's gone you know average tenure in in any high growth industries you know two years or less so that paradigm already broke the next paradigm is breaking is is working from an office when you're not working from an office you're not gonna have the same sort of identity and tie to one company at a time so full time employment with one company is probably gonna go two i think the ideal world is where you're paid for output and production and you can be working for one or more companies at any time you can be one person or you can be a gang of four people who are known to be awesome at doing x and you're more like an agency so i think the world moves more towards on demand you know gigs and you get paid based on merits and output nice okay i have to answer a few faster okay next idea apartment rentals by auction i that's i don't know okay cool sam what's your advice for building a newsletter from scratch start figure fuck i don't know advice pick a professional related topic so for example something that employees use not something that is like sports or her fun because you'll make more money that way and start very very very niche so like people who are any sports newsletters worked to to become huge yep are there any really big sports daily newsletters well maybe bar stool started that away oh they did okay that i know of no but thrill us is a five hundred million dollar company and they started out as like newsletters for like men's clothing so you definitely can do some of these fun stuff but if you wanna make more money and make it faster do b2b to okay rob is asking about sourcing manufacturers whether it be in china or north america seems like it's a blur to him to actually get past that step of by a lot from other people i can't talk about that sean you can that at all yeah i've been through that process it's hard i think it's good that it's hard otherwise there would be so much more competition you know so if you're in the game you want that barrier because only the few who climb over that wall we'll figure it out i actually think that the bigger opportunity is to break down that wall so if i was somebody rather than trying to start a product company like that i would say oh my god it's so hard to get through this manufacturing process and all the uncertainty and you know like yesterday i wired fifty grand to china you know how hard it is to wire fifty grand to china is like not easy to do these types of things so you know there's so many pain points finding a supplier knowing if they're good getting examples made wiring money to them and trusting that you're gonna get your product back figuring out how the hell shipping works like all of that stuff is super complicated i think somebody should create either probably already but like source as one of them but you should create more companies that help people not need to know how to do that just like i can launch a website i don't need to know how to code aws made it so i don't need to know how servers work i can just get to my end end goal so i would do i would focus on that rather than building one if i really wanted to go big that's what i would focus on someone in the facebook group asked why i don't like the course business they said i hate it i don't actually mean that i don't truly hate it i have very very very little experience with it i just hate the idea that someone's paying me money for something and they're only paying me one time versus providing value and getting paid all the time alright there's still a lot of questions in the chat but why don't you take a second to scan through san juan and see if there's any that you want to answer because we only got a little bit of time left yeah and if we can just grab these questions could even do a podcast episode answering the spill over one i can send these to you guys after alright i'm gonna scroll and try to find a your loan what opportunities do you guys and galaxy see between community and law enforcement right now fuck a good one that's a good question i don't have an answer i i i'm sick to my stomach every single night watching the news how police officers are there in the country let's just google up account many let me guess i think in new york there's twenty thousand yeah so there's seventeen thousand agencies so i wonder if there's like like a messaging app or some kind of like secure messaging app that you could build for that industry like discord built a messaging app for gamers and there's enterprise messaging apps like slack but i wonder i just would never wonderful i would never wanna sell to a government that would be a pain in the ass not because i'm pro type government government but so much bureaucracy oh my god fuck i have an idea i'm gonna talk about on the podcast next next episode which is around things like this which is this model where really hard sales cycle to get in but get in they that you never get out this exactly george said this in the chat they're sticky so there's a class of businesses like this i've always resisted them because i'm impatient and i can't imagine dealing with the sort of bureaucracy in the sales cycle there but then on the other hand the reality is that stickiness and durability and the moat is what makes your business valuable over time so i'm gonna share a couple of examples of business that have done this well on the next podcast great let's talk about book recommendations if i'd recommend one to me it's a biography of john rockefeller it's called titan the reason why i like him is he was a ruthless businessman yeah he was a wonderful father and a wonderful husband and my issue when reading about bio i'd typically read about men because i'm a man and i identify with them more and they are either a good businessman they're the rarely are they good at business and great ep family and he was that that's why i like it nice okay i'll give you three quick quick ones happiness hypothesis good book story worthy great book if you wanna get become a better storyteller and the last one is the game i think the game taught me more about people in psychology than any other book so i bet steph have you read the game i haven't oh my god it seems like something that you would read it's so fun yeah have you heard have you read end game that's like a i've read game too yes is that also about like looking about two very different books game sign no the game is about this like underground world of pickup artists oh interesting no have not read that that's so fascinating mary has asked this a couple times and wanna make sure we get to your a question what's the best way to value a a health care related business specifically geared towards users aged fifty to seventy five and she's basically she's asked a couple times like how do you target that user base what's the best way to do that well fake facebook advertising but i don't know like the legal like if i'm just selling like bullshit online that is not like fda approved or won't kill you or something i just trade landing pages even if the project doesn't exist and they accept payment form them it i just do with trends it didn't exist and i accept i accept the payment forms and then i returned the money and i called them and i asked them why they bought and i would do this but when when you say health related i don't know like you can't like pre sell certain medicines but facebook you can find them all on facebook yeah facebook basically the best way to reach most people on our and that demographic did she say women between fifty and seventy that's probably like la woman just i'd said oh just people that that is the best place to reach that that demographic alright how are you guys doing for time i know we're a little bit over i can spill over i have a i could spill over a little bit how about this have fifteen minutes i can go yeah i can go about that how do you start becoming an advisor paid or equity companies somebody asked me and sean this day today we got lucky start podcast and people email you and i say no to most every single one even been people who pay me money yeah i i don't know if the question is is how do you become it you know if you wanna become an adviser you gotta like done something so like in this case both me and sam have built companies that are you know sam still running his companies it's worth tens of millions of dollars i sold mine for tens millions of dollars so you know do something that shows that you probably know what you're talking about or know your a level above wherever they're at in terms of you know if this is martial arts you wanna be a brown belt or a black belt that's how you get the opportunity and then the real question is like is it something you wanna do or not have you heard of these at expert networks are you an expert in i'm part of these one of these expert network it's called like gl they give you like guess a thousand dollars an hour or five hundred dollars an hour to talk to like a bank i used to do that and it's so funny even though like that's a lot of money i'm like oh my god i don't wanna do that kills please yeah those are great they've reached out but then it's never come through so i never got paid on them yet we'll see sure this is an interesting one ray says that he's created decent and engaged following on instagram i'm sharing do it yourself healthy baby food recipes he's not sure what product he can launch he thought maybe an app with a baby meal with baby meal plans but there's a lot of those already the app store potentially also recipe books but those aren't very profitable so any thoughts there yeah do get me the page i don't know which you mean by decently engaged following that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people you know if you're talking about a page with a million followers and you're getting you know a lot of action that that you have different opportunities than if you're at nine thousand followers which is definitely good it's not zero but you still have a long way to climb and i talked about this i think on the last podcast that i did solo which is don't do bank shop companies are double miracle companies like first i need to make a super influential instagram account and then i need to make a super super great product after that like don't plan for that if you find yourself in that position great but like if that's your plan you should just go do the one thing that's valuable and put all your effort into that because otherwise you're gonna put all your effort into one thing and you're still not gonna be at the promised land you're gonna have to then go do other really hard miracle thing just to get some value out of it unless you can throw money at the problem and you're like willing to burn through tens of millions or hundreds millions of dollars like like a tesla or something well let's get na has been hasn't he's had his hand raise like an hour he's in the hospitality business seems to be hit hard by covid he seemed feel free to talk to his live just gotta unmute yourself well i can read out in his seamless comment in the chat instead so you said we're in the hospitality business invested in a web mobile platform we were getting ready to raise money but now with covid all all these is you know not going so well many venture back hospitality startups ups are going through rough times we made two million in annual revenue but now with covid we're down i'm not sure how much they're down but they're just doing okay in the last three months thinking of pin footing can you talk to how you might grow the user base and customers for a marketplace such as this that's a really specific question we need to know more about what what you what value you actually provide in the space yeah i don't even wanna touch that alright well it's just it's it's it's i i don't ever i'm thankful people listen to some of our advice i would be very nervous or about saying something and someone believing it yeah hey we just need more context to even ask questions there so that's a longer discussion one time gary van vaynerchuk said something in like some fucking thing and i really admire him and i like thought that was like and i like built a business like i did like something like i based a lot of my life on there and like bet money on there and then when i was on hips podcast this year i asked him about that and he's was like what i yeah i remember gonna think it was i don't know joe just shoot the shit i don't know i'm just saying shit and i was like fuck it's so i don't wanna i i've always ever doing that same thing with other people alright looks like edgar girl's got his hand raised he has question about the sorry the by the way but you hopefully you get it hi hello can you y'all hear me yep hey oh okay hey how are you everything well yeah question sure what's up awesome awesome hey so i've been i've been watching all for a while i appreciate what you do this is super state that you guys had this conversations i'm in san diego i'm twenty when years old i've run family business we have two restaurants so of course you know we've had restrictions and so we're we're only doing carry out as of now but i i understand how you know or i guess i'm really intrigued on house i called you works and people are gonna stay home more often we hear about a lot of company shifting to you know to people staying at home and i'm working from home so i know that for example uber eats psychology gru hub door all these delivery applications they they charge a high commission for a lot of these restaurants especially you know these are mom and pop restaurants so i was thinking you know how can we i guess bring that to more of a i guess how can we support small businesses per s in the delivery in the delivery form so how can we bring power back to the small businesses so they can i don't i i believe it would be some type of a platform that allows the community to connect to that certain business does does that make sense or i'm don't know i understand what you're saying and so so i definitely understand what you're saying just to rephrase you're basically saying hey restaurants need to adjust you to covid we're trying to do delivery the current delivery platforms take such a huge break it's not great for the restaurants they're still struggling even the by the way that the sentiment is that restaurants are angry at uber i i'm not i wouldn't say that we're angry but the restaurant industry is pretty hit by the commissions these delivery apps are charging especially you know the average food margin for a lot of restaurants is around anywhere between twenty and five to thirty percent uber and and door dash you know at the end of the month are taking around maybe a thirty forty percent commission you know photo so it's it it it is a it is a big a bigger hit for them so so what i'm what i'm trying to propose is is an idea for for a platform where actual business actual restaurants can begin to create a a i i guess to collect per s different addresses phone numbers of people who would want their food to be delivered to a to a home right oh look so i understand what you're saying and i i think that what you're you're saying you're saying the problem is is that restaurants are upset with uber so what you're really saying is restaurants are hurt and they need to make more money and i actually don't think that the solution that you're saying is actually the right solution to the problem and i don't i'm not the restaurant industry so it sounds like you are i would actually wanna know has anyone ever made you happy as a restaurant owner are you ever happy at yelp are you happy at group po are you happy at uber like who has done something that has made you happy because that's what i would be curious about what solutions do make restaurant owners happy because whenever someone talks about group po my belief is that they hate it my belief is that restaurants hey yell my belief is that restaurants don't like uber but what who do they like yeah i i i i agree him i think i think we should we we should move to the next question but i think i think sam said the right thing which is the solution you're proposing i think has a lot of problems i don't wanna to sort of go into each one of them right now but it's true the ag in the middle door dash etcetera they have a lot of power they're gonna continue to have a lot of power there's not really much the restaurants can do against that but you should try to figure out instead of trying to create a new platform with one one millionth of the resources that they have and a you know no heads instead just figure out what's something we could do to make money as a restaurant what what assets do we have that we can leverage to create create value and i'd focus on that so that's that that's my point my edgar which is i the the i do not think the solution is to take ten percent instead of thirty i think the solution is what to me it's like you're obsessed with the solution you're not obsessed with the you might be but you you are also obsessed with the solution and you are also obsessed with the problem fuck that only care about the problem and i think you need to come up with the creative way that group on has one way to do that but that doesn't make people happy it seems like yelp has one way to do that doesn't be so find some other way that like maybe like someone's already kinda in that industry and it's kinda making them happy and i would definitely like you get out of this lane you gotta get out of that lane a little yeah want uber eats is a shift goes i believe one one last quick question before before i let y'all leave what if if i do want to go into wholesale industry like the food wholesale industry i i would like to put i guess one of my recipes you know on it would probably some type of like beans that we have are really really good how would i take steps to to start going into that lane do you know are you i actually couldn't hear what you said edgar but why don't you just email me or dm me and can go further there but i wanna make sure that we're able to talk to more people's questions i understand thank you so much thanks much alright i think a lot of people on this call will find this one your answer to this one interesting so it's targeted specifically at trends sam but i i think we can expand it to like how you guys think about ideas for the podcast so the question is what's on your radar for upcoming research reports and specifically what inspires you to basically say like this topic is worthy of researching or share on trends and similarly for the podcast i sean and i have a doc called md d and we just fill it out like i just think that people are over are are over how little of a seed of an idea will come across and then we'll just put it in there and then just go down this rabbit hole i don't think people realize how much information you can get on wikipedia or off of a tweet like i we to see a tweet and like go to wikipedia and then google like so i think people are actually over our skill set something on the docket is something sean and i have talked about a lot is jd d power this business model of like licensing like your your approval for trends i'm trying to get chunk to right about that for the brainstorming sessions sean he has this whole idea about business or sales channels that are really hard to go into but once you get in there the best you already said that earlier yeah yeah basically if you wanna be interesting be interested so get into whatever you're interested in or something that catches your curiosity where you're like that's interesting i've never heard about that or wow it makes that much anything that sort of evo that type of reaction just boom write it down and then start researching it that's how i do but i think steph does most of the research anyways for trends so you know really by the way that's your answer my trends i don't fucking touch it i read it the day comes live my answer for trends is basically like if you see something and you think if i shared this with ten random people if any less than two people would already know that then it's interesting and it's we're like worthy of trends or or potentially my first million but just think about like if i shared this with someone how many people would already know this if it's like more than fifty percent it's probably not that interesting it's most people already know it one question from ellis how could you imagine this is an opinion question but how could you imagine one of the paying companies being un seated and specifically which one do you think is most likely to be un seated if that were to happen right now facebook the the the amount of frustration people have towards them is quite high the angle that i think someone's gonna take them is is gonna be two different angles the first is i think they're gonna be an extreme version of saying everything all free speech is okay anyone can come on this platform that's gonna attract one group of people and then the other end it's gonna someone's gonna create an a version where it's gonna be like we don't notify you too much we we curate your feed so you're not overwhelmed it's more intimate i think something like that will happen i would not be surprised if duck duck go get gets huge i'm very fascinated with duck duck gov i think privacy is very important to people to normal to normal people in the america now whereas before it wasn't yeah i actually don't think any of them will be un seated oh yeah me too by the way i don't think of them will be i think these companies they already sort of got disrupted three or four times and survived you know mobile was a huge shift google buys android facebook pivot the whole company and puts it in lockdown mode to get its mobile apps up you know social networking gets disrupted by you know photo sharing and messaging facebook would spends twenty three billion dollars acquiring companies in that space right like the these companies facebook's gonna be like ford they're gonna be an upper hundred years i think and so you know i think what ends up happening is not that these companies lose what they have but actually that a new thing comes up that just turns out to be more important or more relevant of where the puck is gone and so the the the old phrase is when you have a castle and it's got a big big deep moat around it the castle doesn't die because somebody siege the castle they cross the moat magically and then take over the castle it's that somebody finds a small little shack on another piece of land you know ten miles over and that land actually has more fertile soil and then your castle becomes irrelevant nobody cares about taking your castle everyone's more interested in that soil over there so like you know this is why facebook's trying to launch its own cryptocurrency libra or whatever they renamed it to because you know it turns out that bitcoin was the biggest value creator in the last ten years and who could have thought it didn't look like a photo sharing app right uber airbnb these didn't look like google facebook linkedin microsoft they didn't look like any of those companies so the big opportunity was in a totally different space and those companies missed it because they don't do that that that was that's not what their castle was about so really it's about finding the next next fertile soil where the next castle will be built and hopefully over time these castles become less relevant and less powerful because there's more castle out there yeah and i would also say that a lot of deep like all the fan companies are way more diversified than i think we give them credit for they're making like a ton of acquisitions every single month especially during covid when prices are down and so you might think of facebook is just like the the community product that it is but it does it's invested in way more than that so vr takes off they've they own oc if you know like they own instagram and they own whatsapp so they're not just facebook and so even though i do think there's concerns obviously with that company they're not just the platform that many people imagine them to be my computer's on one percent guys i'm gonna have to join yeah i gotta that time anyway thanks so much for staying over sam sean thanks for doing the podcast every week i listen to it every time i'm sure everyone on here does to just so yeah thanks everyone i feel like you know me even more because i'm in your ears yeah we've had like people come up to it i i had this white kid come up to it i can call me a little bitch and i i'd like dude i don't know you and i and i forgot that he thought he do be and that we are friends that he call a bitch that's funny alright well thanks everyone for joining us see you next time see bye a