#107 with Chris Bakke - This Serial Entrepreneur is an Idea Machine

u yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like the days off on a goal travel never looking back okay well i would typically introduce you but i don't even know you so i only know you from twitter i'll introduce what i know from twitter you're good on twitter you have hot takes don't take yourself too seriously like it's like the perfect thing where it's like a nugget wisdom wrapped in like kind of like a witty slash jab at something exactly that's what we try to go for i think you do a good job of it and so when sam was out i was like okay who should i have on and i tweeted that out and a couple people said your name and i was like oh good that's a guy i've been following and i don't really know like i don't know your story so give me like the two give me the two minute version and then i'll kinda ask you about whatever j in there for me but give me the two minute version who the heck are you you're you're chris bak you said right that's what i say yep chris and what's your twitter handle it is at chris j ba so it's at chris j b a k k e that's right okay cool so so what's your story man who are you alright so i i have been in the bay area for about eleven years now so i moved from los angeles where i was in college up to the bay area to join a startup right out of college and that startup up was in the online real estate space and so we were helping all of these brokers this is like two thousand nine thousand ten twenty eleven as the you know market was rebounding in all of these hot cities miami chicago new york we were helping real estate agents basically manage all of their listings and all of the leasing that they were doing and so joined early and and kind of just did sales partnerships biz dev at this company called rent use and after a couple years we had raised a seed and series a and that sales call is acquired by zillow because say it's called rent juice rent juice a very terrible name to try to explain to to customers but yeah the business was called the rent juice not not the most fortunate name i that use of juice i you know we had greg is on and he talking about naming your startup and we there's he has all these like this random list of like name like kind of add ons so either at you know at the beginning or the end of a name so it's like okay we're doing some of the bank space okay but you can be like bank juice or like bank buddy right or bank house or whatever right greg is a fan of of blaine bueno i believe that's right yeah yeah bank one yep yeah so it's it it's it's a great it's a great catchy name especially for like the kind of s you know stale real estate industry like something with juice at the end like alright we're gonna like juice up our listings or something and so we sold in early twenty twelve to zillow who was just going public in twenty twelve and we were zillow second acquisition and so i stated zillow for about two years and ran business development at zillow from twenty twelve to twenty fourteen and so that was really helping them build out a bunch of new verticals up until twenty twelve zillow was really known for this estimate like you could go on a map and you could figure out what your home is worth and you could contact a broker who would then listed it on zillow so it as a marketplace of homes and so we were super interested in doing the same thing for rentals doing the same thing for mortgages doing the same thing for interior designers and contractors so fell in love with the online real estate space fell in love with marketplace businesses and then went on to a early stage startup that was coming out of y comb around that same time called forty two floors and forty two floors was building zillow but for commercial real estate right and so joined as one the first or something jason friedman yep yep so he he he hired me and and and is one of the first business hires and we were all working out of like a awesome house in in soma when when selma was slightly less sketchy i think than it is right now and and really the goal was you know air airbnb was just kinda becoming big and so that business forty two floors had already raised a bunch of money prior to me coming on so it was it was a pretty it was a super hot company coming out of white comb they had raised like back to back i think over the course of less than twelve months close to twenty million dollars and really my job and a couple of other people's job on the growth side and on the biz dev side was how do we make money from this thing you know there's huge expectations the expectations are that you know we really want to build kind of an airbnb or zillow experience but for finding office space for finding retail space industrial space and so we started in san francisco eventually expanded to new york we grew the team to about eighty people and we but that was all like rapid fire we went from a team of eight people to eighty people in like twelve months we were like you know using all this money to to go hire great people and then after about i think probably like sixty seventy eighty people we noticed that we we started to have problems you know every startup up has problems but i think our problem was that we really just were hiring mostly un culture fit and so we had hired all of these like people that we just wanna to hang out with yeah cool people not necessarily i think the right people to build that business and so it was it was like the most fun company you know i've ever worked at but there are you know ramifications to that which is that we actually i think did an amazing job with the the engineering side of the house and so we hired all of these great engineers we hired some great you know qa people and and data people and then on the business side on the sales and marketing and and customer support side we we just had like awesome kind of young cool people and i think a lot of startups go through this right you get money in the bank and you just wanna you know you wanna pass the airport tests you wanna work with great people and so around that time in in late twenty fourteen early twenty fifteen brother what what's the airport chance like if you're stuck at the airport would you wanna hang out with this person something like that yeah exactly like you're you get you know you get unexpectedly reroute through chicago for a six hour layover do you hate that layover or is it like the best layover of your life right like are you are you like making buddies with like this work colleague or are you just having the worst time and and just trying to power through it gotcha it and so and so that really that experience of hiring some some amazing engineers hiring a lot of great people but people who actually weren't great fits at you know kind of entry level sales entry level customer support we started doing i think what inevitably a lot of startups ups start doing and they read these books about hiring and and so we went out and we bought this book by las ba who was at the time running hr google and i forget the name of the book but it's it's an excellent read and basically his his take on it was look at google we do take home tests we do work samples we try to get a piece of the work that you know this candidate would ultimately doing if if if he or she got the job and so we started building these in google docs in kind of late twenty fourteen early twenty fifteen and then that ultimately became this idea that we left so jason friedman is is kind of a a pioneer of of of just like if you have an idea like i will support you you know leave the company and he was like an awesome factor to us so myself and and and two others darren nicks and daniel o's shay we were all early employees there we had this idea to take what we were doing in google docs which were basically take home test like we were taking actual customer emails from you know angry tenants and angry landlords and stuff that we were getting and saying you know if you wanna apply to this customer service job why don't you craft a response that would be kind of indicative of how you would handle this if it was actually your first day here at forty two floors right and so we looked at a bunch of companies and at the time there were lots of companies like hacker rank and caliber and all these companies doing this for technical so for if you're like hiring for software engineers if you're hiring for qa forty there were like six or eight companies that did this really for like the non technical type roles you found these like really old antiquated solutions that were like multiple choice tests and it was you know like testing cognitive ability more so than you know how is this person gonna perform on the job and so in early twenty fifteen we started a company called interviewed we ran that company for two and a half years i one interesting story is we did founder led sales the three of us sold the first two million dollars in arr that company and we were just going out to big companies saying hey do you have this problem of failing to hire great customer service reps and we really started with that kind of vertical and then eventually we expanded into entry level sales entry level financial analyst we're working with fidelity and ibm some pretty big companies and indeed was one of our seed investors and so after two and a half years we sold the business to indeed for a high eight figure amount and then stayed at indeed for three years and the three of us all ran different team so i ran an enterprise product team at indeed for three years and then just three weeks ago left indeed and i'm now kind of working on the next thing love it i love that product by the way because that's the way i hire as well is like hey let's do a project together i i have this old kind of phrase i always use i don't know where i steal it from but it was like you know the only way we're gonna know if we wanna work together is to work together and mh you know so what's the mini sample of that we can do now that will tell us hey if we should try this for three months then if it's good for three months great let's do this for three years and like that's typically the way we do it and i have a friend in the e commerce space who is just the other day bitch pitching about you know hiring customer service reps so hard they send in like kind of resumes i don't what is your resume gonna tell me you know first you're applying for a customer service rep job and secondly like don't know if you can actually do this and so he was like manually trying to create this and it sounds like for you you guys did the same thing you're manually creating some workaround to make this process work for you and then you spun off and said let me let me actually export that as a business i've i always talked about this import export framework which is if you're inside of a bigger company you're gonna inevitably build these like kind of internal tools work systems you know stuff that solves a problem for you but guess what there's thousands of other companies just like you who have that same problem you know a hundred of them are baking up their own solution and it's a pain and they're not maintaining it and and if you could export your good solution and actually make it work then there's probably a market for that that's kind of the the export side import is the opposite where god we run into this problem all the time i wish somebody just had a solution that would do x and when you're in a big company you could see what those problems are that they would import or export a solution for and that's totally yep i love that and so okay so that's who you are and and what are you into so are you into the whole kinda like vc venture backed go for the billion dollar outcome thing because i've seen some of your tweets where you're also interested in like kind of more niche simple profitable bootstrap business like what's your you know business palette now what do you like what flavors you like i i think i think my i really try to advocate for this hybrid approach and i think that that's what we'll ultimately do on our on our next company and so that the hybrid birch is is you know you generally have you have one camp who historically said you know go get as much money as you on the best terms possible and and generally these people are like angel investors or their former vcs where they are vcs i think there's a lot of merit to that and then you have this other camp which is you know the the bootstrap camp or the kind of like services business camp which is you know i wanna own a hundred percent of this business or i wanna do things my own way i don't wanna have to kind of work for any investors and and i think a lot of you know those both have a lot of upsides and so i was trying to think about well what are the what are the downsides to see each of these camps and is there kind of a a hybrid approach and so what we did at interviewed was we raised two million dollars total we got to you know a kind of low seven figure like two or three million dollars in arr with with founder led sales and then brought on a couple sales people and ultimately built that into a profitable business by the time that we sold it and so i think if there's this hybrid approach where i see a lot of my bootstrap friends work for like a year or two years or four years and and largely these become like consulting businesses because you get you know you get starry eyed when a big customer comes along and says hey will you build this custom thing for me if there's no money in the bank and somebody's waving you know three hundred thousand dollars to you and your team to go build something in a lot of cases you build it and so you know two three four years out there's you you may be doing well you may own a hundred percent of a business but it's generally a much smaller business than if you would have taken some capital and so there's this like you know raise a sane amount of venture capital i don't think know there's very few businesses that need to be going off and raising tens millions dollars and so i like those types of businesses that say hey if i can raise a million bucks if i can raise two million bucks it helps me skip over those years of having to go you know be a consultant and kind of do that agency style work for big customers to put money in the bank and i think the more times you'd would do businesses like this obviously the better terms that you get and so that's that's really the the approach that i think has worked really well for for myself and and for my cofounder i've now worked with across you know three businesses over the last eight years and and i think that ultimately i think a lot of it is determined by your market and and how big that market is and so i love you know my my coke founder and i just for fun like while we were working out in dean we would start e commerce sites on shopify just like play around with shopify and obviously we're not gonna raise capital for that but also our our expectations are pretty low like if we can ever get that business to the point of making you know thousand dollars in profit per month like we're we're super stoked about that and and i think that you know ultimately too i think in our space in in the last business that i was in candidate assessments what you saw were these very large companies like higher view that that came out and had raised you know i think nine dollars or a hundred million dollars and the space just wasn't that big and so if you raise a million if you raised two million dollars i think very similar to to what you know you and your team did you just have a lot of optional right like ten million dollars twenty five million dollars fifty million dollars these are all like game changer or exits for for you personally as a founder and for your team and again i think you can do this much faster than a than a than a bootstrap would be able to you can get to that ten million dollar fifty million dollar exit a lot of times you know i've seen it in you know three or four years versus you know kind of a ten year s doing that business and owning a hundred percent of it at the end right right okay that's interesting and we before we came in on i was like you know are you kind of an idea person right like these podcasts work best when we're brainstorming ideas right the reason i get excited to do these is typically i'm either hanging at with sam who i already know and we only talk ideas or it's somebody new like you who i like to get to know your story i think it's interesting and then i like to shoot the shit after that and say cool what's on your mind what's interesting to you 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 of 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 you're heart 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 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 a 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 and i and i use it all the time so check it out so i'm curious did you did you do your homework did you bring any ideas or interesting spaces to the table yeah let's let's run through a you jump in jump in let's give me one so this this this one idea i almost did and and i have a lot of research on it and i have a lot of thoughts about it if anybody wants to do this feel free to email me it's chris at las l a s k i e dot c o and the idea is shopify but for saas businesses right so i have this this kind of thesis that shopify has empowered hundreds of thousands of accidental commerce entrepreneurs by providing a framework here's how to choose a name for a business here's how to go and incorporate that business here's how to set it up i think stripe atlas and some of these businesses have done similar things with sas but they haven't taken it all the way and so if you look what shopify has done as a platform for people who want to sell you know gadgets widgets candles whatever it is online i think that there are thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of small niche saas businesses where i think really honestly like the best in class thing today is something like an accelerator something like an incubator you know somebody to take a a a sizable percentage of your company and hand hold you through that process of this is how to find your first ten customers this is how to actually like set these things up and i think if you if i think about a lot of these saas businesses you know your example earlier about import export you're only you know exporting so many types of business from a company and so a lot of times you know people say how can we do what we're doing with excel or how can we do what we're doing with google docs and turn that into its own standalone platform and i think when you think about the components of a of a you know software as a service business you only have so many components right you have like you know user registration you have you know admin privileges you have payment collection you have analytics and dashboards and then you have like something else that that business is doing but a lot of these things are component and so i think if you have a business that has some sort of like low code way for people who have a saas idea to come on and and register that business create it get it set up come up with the name set up the website all of that stuff is easy and you can go do that on you know squarespace or million other places but then actually build and kind of component ties in in a low code way the back end and and the the reason that we came up with this idea is when we were doing customer research we met the guy actually here in in minnesota where i am now and he was working a full time job and his job is designing high end cabinets for these like multi million dollar late homes and he and a couple friends have created a one million dollar a year saas company that is like a crm for high end cabinet makers right and they've had to do this through an insane process over six years where they have you know hired people on upwork they've hired developers they've like kind of patched all of this together and and the main guy ryan he gets on the phone with me and calls me and ask for advice and like it's kind of an insane process but at the end of the day like that you know business for high end cabinet makers there's never going to be like you know something that would get you venture back returns and i think that if you look at holding companies in a lot of cases like you know constellation software in canada they're comprised of thousands of very small you know addressable market businesses that i think you know shopify similarly you have a lot of these kind of small t shirt sellers and and candle makers and like you know gadget makers that are selling a couple thousand dollars and i think if you can do that in a really easy and efficient way there's a huge market there that's interesting so when you first set it you know shopify or anything i'm like whoa we have maybe and then i didn't understand at first what you meant but now i do which is that okay you're gonna build the app that actually solves a customer problem but then there's the generic set of things to be a saas business such as landing page views registration payment collection having different billing plans and right now you either build that yourself or you stitched together three or four tools to be able to do the do the rest of that and a store builder for saas developers is actually kind of an interesting thing because on one hand you think well people who build saas businesses is they're they can code anyway so why wouldn't they wanna do this but it's like they don't wanna code the stuff that's non core to their business and a what can be sort of outsourced will be outsourced if they if you make it sort of convenient and simple enough actually like that the you and you said you did research on it you decided not to pursue it what or i think you said you decided not to pursue it what is the kind of main challenge or hold up or what what got you to sort of say okay sounds like you you initially had a hard on for this business and then something kinda cooled you off what what cool you off yeah i think the the challenging thing with this business is really that you have these subject matter experts often these people are already already running their own successful businesses so you know the the person who's selling you know high end cabinets he's probably making collectively with his business over you know million dollars a year else would just like stop making high end cabinets and go do the saas business first time and so i think that you have this problem of trying to you know glean information from the subject matter experts what do you know about you know building log cabins or what do you know about like managing trailer parts what do you know about installing cabinetry what do you know about you know industrial scales that nobody else knows and glean that information from people is is really hard and so i think the thing that i i like about this is i think that there's a massive opportunity if you can you know go and find those people i think finding people who are already have you know subject matter expertise and are running these successful companies convincing them to you know give you information give you customers whatever that is is hard i think that there are ways to do this through like revenue shares and stuff like that but i think really that's the piece that that made us go you know there's there's probably more exciting up opportunities out there that that that you know could actually make cash a lot faster than this idea so i think that this is probably like a good like venture backed business i think you could go raise a couple million dollars with this framework with this idea and then take what a lot of these you know no code tools are doing through the various components and stitch them together and and if you can find that end customer who's wanting to make a thousand dollars a month ten thousand dollars a month in kind of incremental saas revenue that there seems to be a a pretty interesting market there right you tweeted something out the other day that's a different idea that i think your buddy or your your business partner is building it's like it's a it's a asynchronous golf instructor so tell tell people what that is and what you liked about that business yeah so so my c cofounder daniel o's shay as a customer of this business that i love i i loved it before and i like it even more in in kind of crazy covid times so he lives in austin texas and he has been in his in his first month off from from leaving indeed he's been trying to improve as a golfer and so all you do is you you take you take your iphone and there's this guy i can't think of his name but i it's like professional golf dot com or something has this this like pretty decent domain but it's just an individual guy he works a full time job and this is his side hustle business and so what he tells you is for ninety nine dollars a month you can upload there's some parameters i think it's like a two or five minute video of you at the driving range and i think you take like two minutes of footage you know driving a couple balls at one angle and then you move the camera behind you and you do another two minutes of it and so i love this business because all he's doing is he's taking video content and he's talking about something that he loves so he has some sort of you know application or software where he's uploading your video and he's just recording audio over it and then in real time he's marking up your actual golf swing you know see here how you're left knee you know buckle a little bit see how your hips weren't aligned to the ball and so it's this like highly tailored solution super cheap i think way cheaper than you know a a golf instructor would be and then the great thing for him for my c cofounder as a new dad is like he can go do this whenever he gets a break he doesn't have to commit to kind of this like you know regular sync of meeting a golf pro at the golf shop and so i i i think that you know there's huge advantages for you know if you're trying to get better at exercising if you're trying to get better at a certain sport you know meeting somebody in person i think you're gonna get you know the best experience but there's all of these like youtube you know videos that just give like generic you know golf advice that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and so why not monetize this you know if you can get you know ten people charge them a hundred dollars a month and you're probably improving your own golf game as you're giving you know the user's feedback think that this is a great little side hustle i like it i was i'm wondering how how this guy is doing i feel like there's you know you'd sort of do the math a hundred dollars a month and you know could could this person be serve because there it's a personal thing these like servicing these you know these customers but you know i think it let's say it might take them thirty minutes per customer to do this to take a two minute video annotate give you good feedback and send it right back to you so you know maybe thirty minutes per customer let's say he wants to work out know five hours a day so he's gonna get you know what what is that so ten you know ten customers a day serviced and he's gonna do this twenty days a twenty days a month and so you know servicing two hundred customers at a hundred dollars piece right so you know it's sort of i up where you're like okay this is for something you probably would do for free for fun anyways because you just can't resist because you're you know you're a golf met you know it's a very conveniently designed business i think that's what's beautiful about this is adds it's not so much that there's a big market or it's using some fancy technology it's like off the shelf technology generically big market but i like the design of this business because i think it's probably like a passion that can monetize without taking over your life and becoming it totally yep i totally agree it's really interesting i like that one alright what else you got i've also been thinking a lot about franchises so i'm kind of obsessed with you know how do we create more entrepreneurs how do we create more founders in in america and i i think that i'm i'm all about these like hybrid approaches and i love your your framework that you've talked about many times on the podcast which is you know you kind of draw this like two by two matrix and you have you know old problem new problem old solution new solution and i think you know crossing those and and finding these hybrid approaches is something that i'm super passionate about as well right and so actually i think you know many months ago and i think you first talked about that framework i was thinking at the same time about franchises and about how you know throughout the nineteen sixties seventies eighties and nineties there was this hybrid approach to entrepreneurship in in america and all over the world which was you know if you if you don't want to start a company from the ground up you don't wanna have to go set up a bank account and hire people and you come up with an idea and register that business and do all of the hard work come up with an idea but you want more upside than working you know in nine to five of a big company you could go open a mcdonald's early on starbucks head franchises you could go open a starbucks and you would der risk yourself as an entrepreneur but you would still have a lot of the benefits of entrepreneurship around hiring people and so i think you know how has the world shifted over the last six months and what kind of new franchise opportunities are available that are more asset light i think the big problem with with franchises that almost all franchises are tied to these like very asset heavy businesses yes you know dry cleaning you have to rent the equipment you gotta rent the space you know obviously fast food and and coffee businesses same thing you have these huge equipment expenditures you have high rent and so i'm really obsessed with like you know what in this framework how can you take this you know seven year old idea of a franchise business and apply it to you know these times where everybody's working from home and i think that somebody will build like a multi billion dollar company basically doing like a franchise version of geek squad i think that that's one super interesting example so at indeed the the company that i just had about twelve thousand employees and we would provide like remote kind of help desk support you know from indeed it team in austin texas to employees who had broken laptops their internet connection wasn't working and they couldn't troubleshoot it and there was all sort of like tech issues when you move a company with tens of thousands of people to go work from home and i think that this you know something like this has this like regional approach where you could actually sell specific geographies to you know founders or entrepreneurs who wanted to run you know the bay area version of this business and it it seems like there's huge demand right now so somebody tweeted out that their dad as i was thinking about this idea their dad's company had spent like fifty thousand dollars it was a small i think accounting firm of like twenty people and they had spent fifty thousand dollars through accenture and accenture set them up with like zoom licenses and dropbox and just like gave them off the shelf software and then basically did like a webinar like here's is how to use it but i think increasingly as you have you know so many different technologies that you're running from home and that becomes mission critical to actually doing your job i think that there's like a personal element of having somebody come over and you know fix your tv fix your printer but there's also this idea of you know somebody coming an she fixing your laptop and the great thing about this business is that i'm i'm fairly convinced the large companies and small companies would just like pay a monthly fee to just have this problem go away and so i think that there's like a direct to consumer side she's and then there's also this like b to b element that i'm super excited about where you could go contract with large company and i think that there's actually a lot of these businesses i think if you look at asset light franchises you know every company when they set up whether they're a financial services company or an hr tech company or an educational tech company they all need to do a million integrations and so you know one of the problems with these like integrations companies is that there's all these independent you know developers who will like do your integration with sap or with oracle or whatever and i think building a layer of trust building a simple pricing you know page doing all of this thing and then just running this like a startup makes for this super interesting like franchise kind of hybrid approach that is a lot less cost intensive than spending you know a million and a half bucks c to get a mcdonald's open yes yes is my answer to this i love this idea i have ton of thoughts so first i've i've personally encountered a couple of friends who did this as their side hustle as like an eighteen year old seventeen eighteen year old so you're in minnesota my friend tyler hayes did he had a business called tyler the tech and basically he'd come he was geek squad and he would come fix your shit and he would like set you up and like tell you why your router sucks and gives you a new router because that's why your wifi is terrible in your house like he would just solve little problems like this and i had a friend in college guy named to who we would be in college and he would just he would be the only guy who went to go check his mail we were like why do you care about checking your mail and the reason why is because he's getting checks in the mail and we're were like what he getting checks for he's like oh i i started this kinda like you know i forgot it was called like nerd nerds on wheels or something like that was the name of it something something like that as you know it's geek squad and he's in west virginia and he was fifteen years old i think when he started at fourteen fifteen and he was like oh i know how like technology works and like oh my god my dad doesn't he'd started with his dad's like i think doctor doctor's office and he's like oh they need like networking and so he would like go set up your internet for any doctor's office hospital dentist office that sort of thing and this guy basically paid for college and you know i went to do because like an expensive ass school and he was like yeah look this this is a twenty four thousand dollar check he's like this is just like my cut i gave the business to like another kid because he's you know i'm gone now and he's he can run that and i just get like a royalty checking out a little bit out of it and so he was making a ton and i was like wow this is in very interesting and so i think there's two interesting bits to this one is i think geek squad itself i don't know what the state of that business is but i don't think it's doing very well just given it's i think it's part of best buy correct and so so i think that you know when the parents dying you know the the the that the child is is gonna be in trouble as well so i think was probably gonna be in trouble i love that it's mom and pop fragmented everywhere which means that if you actually had a franchise system where you'd have a local operator and you could find that sixteen fifteen year old kid or a group of four who are you know tech savvy and you could say look here's the brand here's the website here's the marketing budget playbook i'm gonna give you leads you go fulfill and it reminds me of this company i invested in called nana so have you ever heard about nana yeah i love what they're doing they're if for for those don't know nana is like a i think they they're doing this but in the appliance repair space so the equivalent of geek squad was sears sears has had this huge fleet of appliance repair technicians and sears has gone bankrupt and you know that home services business actually was still doing pretty well but who knows what'll will happen to it now so they had like hundreds of thousands of technicians all around the country that could come fix your dryer come fix your fridge come fix your dishwasher and so what and then you know and besides them was just mom and pop you know find some guy guy yellow pages or google and find somebody on craigslist list or whatever to come fix your stuff and so what nana is doing is is they're unifying this under one brand that's simple just nana it's on demand you push a button in your app and somebody will come and fix your thing like i my driver is broken pushed a button an hour later and guy showed up and they were basically dispatching local technicians to come fix your stuff and they were guaranteeing the technicians hey you don't need to learn how to market yourself and get customers like i will just send you a message when there's somebody within five miles of you that need something fixed and you either say yes or no and this guy was making you know between seventy five thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand a year working flexible hours i was like this crush is being an uber driver need and then they created an academy which was like in one month you can go from not knowing how to fix any appliances to one month you can repair one appliance and in two months you can repair two appliances and so on and so forth and so if you're earning powers thirty thousand a year well here's a pathway for you to for free learn how to do this job and then get free customers to you know deliver to your phone that you can go and you can now be making seventy five k more a year it's like this amazing thing for the economy so that's why i invested in that company but that model applies to what you're talking about in a pretty big way and i think that the there's other spaces as well that this applies to so one that i've been thinking about that i meant to bring up on the podcast but i wanted to do a bit more research but fuck it you know we're talking about it now so with no research are you familiar with k a little bit it's like the learning centers right yeah exactly so k i i didn't have this grown up but my wife is from this area in california and it's like everybody knows about coupon around here and you you live in in in in in the same areas i do so so you'll see them at the corners into every strip mall will have one of these and so coupon is like a place you say your kid to get good at math so it has the stereotype of like you know asian asian parent you know forcing their kid to become like you know good at math but you know parents really care about this stuff and so k was a franchise that you could open up and they give you the playbook they give you the all the materials it's kinda like kaplan or you know whatever like where you where you can teach people how to pass the sat yep so so coupon is this for little kids and they charge you know a handful and parents are willing to pay so i think that you can create the airbnb b of k which sounds ridiculous but what i mean is you don't need a brick and mortar shop for this anymore i think you could arm people and say hey do you have like a dining room in your house because you can create a little micro school of you know ten kids who are each paying you know a hundred bucks a month to come learn from from you and who are you you're a college kid or you're like i have a twenty five year old or you're a eighteen year old who knows math and we give you the brand we give you the materials to like outfit your room and and make this work and so k coupon i think those billions of dollars a year in revenue and i think somebody can create the on with the asset light model meaning use the sharing economy use people's garages use their living rooms use their extra spare bedrooms and turn them into little classrooms for the neighborhood and give them you know materials and lesson plans that they can teach off of and i think that that could be a monster monster business like that's one that i would consider doing and building because i think it would transfer love that you know the way education works there's a another variant of this is my sister has this program that she created these childcare care centers or are kinda like preschool schools in san francisco and initially her model was smart where she would buy a house so she she wanted to own a home the the home had extra space like a whole bottom floor that was separate entrance and exit so she was like i really want this house but i can only afford half of it oh what if i created you know a childcare care center at the bottom of her here in home childcare care center because there's the shortage of childcare care center so there's permits for in home and i can have twelve kids and in san francisco each kid pays three thousand dollars a month to go to school so you're you know you're making right thirty six thousand dollars a month in revenue and and you basically pay you know four teachers as your salary and the rest is you're you're you're renting your own space and so she's paying for a you know a multi million dollar home in san francisco she's profiting by having you know her own little school and she sends her own kids to it too and so it's like you know her own child care as well as taken care of and so she built this really good model and then to expand she was like you know i really want my kids to get outdoors more so she created this thing called nature kids and i think this could also be a franchise model so what she did was she was like forget the house because that has know i have to go find a home that has the separate entrance and exit permitting and all that stuff yeah there's beautiful parks everywhere what if there's a half day program where you sent your kids and it's away from technology jeez it's it's outdoors it's in nature learning about like animals and trees and plants and building things and stuff like that and i pay zero rent and and so she created a whole curriculum for this thing and it's working it's taken off because a covid like that helped but b parents just want their kids outside and so i've told her like hey instead of thinking about how you can add ten more kids to nature kids you should be bundling this up as a franchise in every kind of like you know enterprise mom or dad who wants to create a local business around childcare care and they want a better option for their own kids and there's like two parks near them they should be able to buy this business in a box and they can go make six figures a year doing something like this with essentially zero risk what do you think of that idea yeah yeah i love that it it reminds me so i growing up i lived in colorado and in jefferson county which is a suburb of denver in fourth fifth and sixth grade i think parents can opt out of it but there is basically like a one week nature camp that you go to but these are privately run amazing business because you basically build like you know sixteen log cabins out in the woods in the middle of nowhere in colorado like the cheapest spot of land that you can find and then you teach kids you know how to like boil water over a fire and you just do this for an entire week and it's an amazing you know one week vacation for the parents so they love it like every parent signs their kids up for this the kids get to get run around in the woods and and i love this like doing it doing it without the real estate component i think it's super smart there's also this business in in manhattan that's taken off and i think you know inc or entrepreneur entrepreneurs or something wrote about these two women who they have like a big suburban and they go around to all these high end you know penthouse around manhattan and the pitches like your dog hates walking around on man manhattan sidewalks right and so we have this plot of land in upstate new york it's like ninety minutes north of the city and we load your you know your dogs like twelve at a time into this suburban and we just let them go like dig holes and play with each other and just like run around and it's i think in one of the women's backyard in in in in you know northern northern new york and and they get like an insane amount of money i think like one day of doing this there's like twelve dogs it's like eighty dollars per dog so every day they do this they're like printing a thousand dollars for real estate there have you know on this like five acre plot of land that one of the women lives on any business like that you know getting pets kids whatever out to nature i think it's it's genius that's that's so funny even a adults out nature right like i did tough mud fart race and what are these right it's like i can get your you know you're out of shape thirty year old body off of a desk into nature and i'll let you take photos that you can put on instagram like that's the model right like i hope this doc thing i hope they're taking i hope they have like you know some drone that flies around and it just takes high quality videos and just sends it to the parent you know to the to the dog owners or the parents and it's just like look how much fun your dog is having right now like look how messy they're getting and don't worry i'm gonna bathe them and bring them back later and you know this eighty dollar a day day count for your dog to like for your dog to have a vacation out of the city for like boo people is a hilarious hilariously great business that that i'm outside of yeah i love the i love the videos and and photos i think that was a big part of like wag business model right they'd come to your house and walk your dog for thirty minutes and they would get a video or a photo and think it was up to each dog walker but that was a huge part of their growth i think was watching your dog have fun is a is a huge value add right yeah i just think that there's more experiences that should be like fun or enrichment but like doubles as like babysitting setting right so like that's another thing with like after school activities is like great take my kid for the hour like thank you and and one reason i like the local coupon is you don't have to drive so far to do like if there really was one in every neighborhood which i think realistically in every single neighborhood there's some there's at least five kids who are in high school who are good good students good at math and wanna earn thirty five bucks an hour to teach little kids you know little kids math and if you give a playbook they'll just follow the playbook and you know now that's within walking distance or like a two minute drive away rather than like a okay i'll drive for twenty five minutes drop you off now i have forty five minutes to kill and then i gotta pick you up again it's not even worth going home and it's like parents get exhausted by this sort of like know just becoming a new uber driver for your kid yeah or i don't know my kids tiny i don't know about all this but i this is what i understand you'll find out soon yeah exactly i also like you know your for your geek squad idea another framework i like is for business ideas is what do the rich have that the poor would want and it's not money and so like you know the rich rich people had private drivers and now everybody has private drivers through uber you know rich people got like these crazy vacation homes that they could go to and that airbnb says cool you know stay in this log cabin in tahoe you just don't have to own the place and it'll make it really easy they reduce the the friction required for you to have the same experience that rich people have and door dash right like you know don't cook get food you know get get restaurant quality food you know you don't have to have a private chef here's like a a chef that'll make it and deliver to you in thirty minutes so similarly with companies when cup what do big companies have that small companies would want because it know they have a whole department that deals with this pain in the ass we can't afford that department we can't even afford one it guy but what if you know we could just subscribe to this geek squad thing for you know three hundred dollars a month and like our it needs are taken care of whatever right like i think that's another way to look at this is what's a department inside a big company that small companies don't have and then spin that department out and turn it into a you know a service business or turn it into a product in some way or yeah a hundred percent yeah i think this works really well i mean there's any sort of you know fractional executive is another idea that i love right and so i think this is another business where when we were starting interviewed five years ago you know day one if you have two people you don't want or need to hire a cfo you don't need head of hr but you want like somebody to keep you compliant in these areas and i think that you know similar to all of those businesses these are areas that like require huge levels of trust right if you're handing over all of your financials if you're handing over all of your you know human resources files to a person who's working with you and twenty five other companies right you wanna make sure that that person knows what they're doing and i think you know bench in a lot of other companies are are are trying to get good at this more for like smb accounting and get there's you know similar companies you know rip and and gust and and stuff have come along and shift away at parts of kind of you know payroll automation and and you know new hire onboarding but i i still think that there's a whole stack of things just in you know in in like fun cultural things like a a fractional office manager right you know in accounting in hr in any of these departments it that that would be hugely valuable for a you know two person to and i think a lot of cases up to like two hundred people you can't afford it or you don't wanna hire these as as full time rolls quite yet so like that's like here's a you know ninety five percent of businesses here's a bad idea that's a version of that right so so a a good a good idea that i think just has it quite clicked but my friend marin started a company called tool and got famous because it famous you know raised a bunch money was doing well and then it blew up overnight and like i closed and like okay whatever that was sort of a financial fiasco of just sort of mis managing the the cash flow not being able to hit payroll but the the idea was really really solid which was again rich people or executives or big companies have this one benefit which is that they have ea right so i have a executive assistant and that's because i'm at a big company but when i'm in a small company i'm not gonna hire an ea it's just too expensive and i don't have that sort of need so what they did was a fractional ea i could have seven hours a week of this person's time and she could be serving servicing you know let's say eight clients at the same time and so more people got access to the service for a lower price and then that the the service provider is able to fractional divide their time and end up making twice or three times more than they would at any one company so that's the good idea the bad idea version of this is like you talked about kinda you said the word company culture and every company i've been at there's been like the kind of the one person who really like keep track of everyone's birthdays and you know oh somebody's having a baby let's send them a gift basket and like hey this person's you know they came down with something and how do we help them get well and they're sort of the person that makes everybody like a little bit human in the company and they they're thoughtful they buy gifts they organize things they organize parties they organize like you know off science and things like that and i feel like there's you know for the person who has the skills of a party planner or a wedding planner but it's like okay here's like a boring version of that like corporate the corporate fund and and how do you provide that to a thirty person company who doesn't have that person or today it's your head of marketing who just does it because otherwise no one's gonna do it and maybe that there's somebody you could have that's just like the thoughtful person in your company and what a fun job to be doing from home if you're kind of a stay at home mom or dad just to provide that for for you know four companies is you're you're there like people person and you're cheering everybody up you're bringing a little surprise and delight to every everybody in the company and they'll pay you you know whatever a thousand dollars a month to be doing this yep yep i love that and i think in a lot of ways that's completely un un uncharted territory so one of the one of the side projects that my my c cofounder and i had a couple friends created is this company that we're still working on but it was like a side project called team location and it was this idea of like you know now that every company is a remote company what all remote companies would do before this like you're a cool you know twenty person remote company as you would go you know get an airbnb d up in napa once a or whatever for once every half year everybody in yeah and and i i think in our experience even if you have that person or those people who like and i think you need to make you know new hire onboarding like core to or business that's really hard to outsource all pieces of it or you will have like a terrible culture but the the idea of having like a travel agent that knows these niche spots where you can get twenty or forty or sixty people into a house they're actually kind of hard to find and i think you know then you have like all of the travel coordination okay right maybe for the first time ever these companies are having to set up you know expense policies for you know how much per diem you get if you're on the road if you're driving in versus flying in and so just being able to take that i think and maybe give parameters you know hey we have fifteen people this is our budget just go book something awesome we think that there's an interesting business there if anybody wants to run this site for us feel free to reach out to me and yeah i'll i'll give somebody a job around it you you have that domain that's a good domain too if you have to team do yeah so that's a good domain good idea i would hate to run that business just because i'm a terrible logistics person like i'm awful god awful at it but i would love that right like for my team of twenty thirty people who are like you know remote if we could say if if all we had to say was this is our date we're we're we're we're we're we're down to leave on this day come on this day and here's our parameters budget and here's you everybody's like location so you know geographically where where to send people and if somebody was like great we've found you guys the spot we've organized the activities we've booked your travel we're handing everybody kind of a temporary expense card that we have that like we'll just keep track of everything for you for you guys and when you get there you'll have your your swag or your good bag or whatever you're i get that would be i think something that a lot more like the market for that has been created now because of covid because of the sort of increase the sort of exponential increase in remote work there's a market for this now that was very different four years ago when only a handful of companies were were doing remote only and then they they built internal systems for this this is exporting their internal system and making it like a button new push for for team team vacations so i like that idea i would hate to run but i think you know it'd be interesting if someone did same it's fun to build the website i i have no plans of actually doing the back end of all that work myself alright love it we should wrap up where we're almost at the hour has been fun you you are you're one of you're one of us you you are an idea machine who who thinks about things and i think a a good way where you're looking at what's changing you're looking at pain points and you're trying to figure you know how do i find that either new solution or old solution to to either old old paint phone or new pain point so where should people find you so twitter is the best way to split best place to follow you yep follow me on twitter again at chris j ba b a k k e on twitter or feel free to send me an email to chris at l a s k i e dot c o and are you ready to talk about where your new company is or do we have to end the recording and then i ask you a bunch of questions about that so the the high level is that we are we're really in love with helping large enterprise businesses find where the problems are in their organization and then you go solve those and so the high level of this is that you know i've worked at a couple very large companies that are growing fast and i think that there's this general aversion to things like mckinsey and bain and you know bc g and bringing in these high end expensive consultants that big companies like coke cole would go you know pay all day long and i think that there's also a way where professional services a huge part of that job is coming into a company and cracking open a new spreadsheet and then getting down to business flying people in to start interviewing and so the core of this business will be you know effectively building mckinsey two point o and helping high growth companies with some of their biggest business problems so this will be a service it would be a consulting business it's a so the the idea is actually to take what consultants do and turn these into turn it in software so at my last company we took something that was done in a spreadsheet we built an entire you know saas business around it and then we sold it so the idea here is to find these pain points that that's you know what should i price my product historically you would go pay mckinsey for a study of that you know startups ups can't afford to do this and so we are building software to help you you know price your product distribute products a lot of things around product distribution but also a lot of things around you know hiring and actually building up you know building up that company and so anything that a large company would turn to mckinsey to solve you know in the next three to five years it's our goal to you know have pieces of software or partners that we can go you know refer these executives and founders too to go help some of these critical business problems interesting okay i like you a but i don't if i like this pitch i feel like finding one of these in building the software solution to one of these is it itself probably like a big a big company worth building and would take time to build and so i'm not sure i'm not sure i'm on board with or i'm not sure i believe this sort of like we're gonna solve a bunch of these may maybe that's cool i mean i'm interested to see how that goes we we i think i think it's like a keith or boy quote you always want you know like fifty percent of people to not understand the idea you want like twenty five percent of people to hate it and you want five percent to love it i think we're like pretty equal on that ratio okay i think to be clear like i think day one we have a very specific pain point that we're gonna go solve and a lot of that just starts with research talking to a ton of founders talking to a ton of business executive so if there are any you know business leaders and team leaders at large companies who wanna just talk to us about some problems and and we can give you some free advice feel free to shoot me note nice alright cool thanks for coming on man i appreciate the the guest guest spot and maybe maybe if people like this we'll have you back i think they will i think you had some pretty solid pretty solid ideas so thank you for coming on yeah of course thanks for having me cool