#114 with Steph Smith - The Head of Trends Talks Insider Trading and The Gen-Z Mafia

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like the days off on a road travel never looking back we are live my apologies guys i was just saying i was late today i'm sean only the late one i've been late twice in a row now my apologies sean that was a dig at you which i thought as was a compliment you know i i'm not late i thought that's how i took it you are not late it is me but we are with steph smith steph smith as my coworker steph runs trends and is just like a creator at our company and we kinda just sell her to do stuff and she does a great job i've met steph how did i meet you steph on twitter i think so you reached out i wrote an article i run a year ago and you reached out based on that it's steph article it had one of better headlines i've read i'm a big copywriter headline fan and it was to be great just consistently be good right yeah something like that exactly anyway and it was a great headline but so we're gonna have stuff here but before we get it into that sean i did meet up with ty lopez texted me last night and he goes hey i'm in new york do you wanna meet up oh sure i met up with gym for about an hour and we talked about how to hire had a mostly had a hire and a bunch of great stuff he's cool man kai a cool dude he likes to he's changed my i've i've changed on him how sw was he he's big he is a buff dude his dad was a professional body builder he said so he definitely has genetics could he beat you up i he's probably stronger than me but no i think that i probably have twenty years younger than him i have an there's a fist inside you that he is not aware of you don't think he's aware i think people are aware i don't know anyway i don't need to talk about beating tie up i like ty he's my friend now right what are we gonna talk about today steph came with like a list of ideas which i always love when people do this she it's a six page list so i think this is gonna be like a twenty six part episode alright steph so did we do you justice introducing you or did we leave out any important bits i think he did me justice i work on trends at at sam's company hustle and i create stuff for fun i think that's a pretty quick summary of what i do she has a good a personal website steph smith dot io o and now steph is just like you you know there's like there's this whole community sean they're called indie hackers you know what they are yeah of course steph is like the definition of an indie hacker it's like this weird nerdy community of do who build awesome stuff she's better than ninety nine percent of the indy hackers ever met the most of the indie hackers i've met build stuff and they never get it to anyone like there's like zero distribution muscle and so i gotta give her credit because she actually like write stuff that people read build stuff that people we'll see and i think that's like a pretty big separator that's a line in the sand like there's one line in the sand which is like you make nothing or you make something alright cool and then it's like you make something and people see it and like it or nobody ever hears about it you know it's just a a tree in the forest and so i gotta give you credit but and also your website is awesome i just before five minutes five minutes before this i messaged i was like hey who made your website was like i made it i was like what and then i just offered to buy the template i was like i wanna wanna i want one of those can i have that like can i you have a website as cool as yours so it's definitely awesome you should check it out alright we need to stop just like suck up to stuff suck stuff no i appreciate it and i'm super we're stoked to be here but yeah happy to john jump into some of these ideas if you guys want yeah and what's on the way sean i think steph listens to the most episodes we do which is weird definitely i listened to every single one great taste too alright so what are some of the ideas that that you know you're interested in right now you cool so the first one i'll start out with and throughout there is remote slash work from home stuff which i know i feel like everyone listening to this is doing a little irr roll because it's like the most common thing that people bring up but i feel like most of the things that people are talking about in this space they're either like collaboration tools the next zoom they're just basically taking stuff that's already out there and being like how how can i use my skills to create exactly this and i don't think that's you know there's a lot of room for that right now but what i do think there's room for is a lot of other niche ideas if you just kinda from the fundamentals of what does like a remote worker need what are the new gaps that exists so let me to talk about a couple of them the first one is just how benefits change for especially large companies so if you think about companies like google facebook amazon they're known in the past for having these like incredible offices this is you know perks in general are one of the things that they actually use as a competitive edge to bring talent in and so with in remote how do these companies still have an edge while you you can't really at least i think right now they don't but they can start to develop it and other companies can develop it as well so there's some cool companies that i found that couple of them are happier hop dot com june dot io another one's called comp dot io o c o m t p t and basically these companies are kind of identifying all of these new types of benefits that remote companies can have so it's anything from like mental health support to you know at home fitness but i did a twitter throughout the other their day and there were some really interesting ideas one of them was just you know a s ins that people can spend on upwork so that they don't have to do all the shitty stuff that they don't wanna do that was i think the guy who came up with that sean wasn't he on the pod i didn't see it what's his name chris was it chris back i saw it there was a guy that that came up with that and it was really viral i think that was him and so basically steph his thing said are perk towards employees as we give five hundred dollars a month for up upwork is that right yeah i think it's it's basically like okay what are all the things that you hate doing in your job how can we make those disappear for very little cost to us and that actually you know this is a net benefit to us because now you have this much more time to be an awesome employee do what we actually hired you to do and so that's one benefit and then there's all types of stuff like you know i've heard of people like buying their employees like one or beer subscriptions anything from like come actually starting to pay yep maids pay for their internet their utilities is like what are like all the things that you would normally pay for like in an office you're paying for utilities you're paying for a made you're paying for these things to make your employees lives easier better and how does that kind of switch so now that everyone's working from home and then as i mentioned how do these big companies kind of get a competitive edge and say hey we're gonna make your lives awesome we're gonna make you want to join this company because it's gonna be you know just so easy for you to work at home and you're gonna love it and so i think there's a huge the examples you have are happier h o p p i e r dot com and june dot i o those two seem pretty much like the like the same exact thing right how big do you think these are so i think they're just starting and i was researching some of these before this and i think hop especially that was actually a company that pivoted they used to do like in office snacks like they were actually targeting companies that had offices and they're like okay well that's gone at least for now what do we do to like fill those gap and i think from what i saw most of these companies operate where they actually they just get they say hey the hustle you want to give your employees like fifty bucks every month to spend on whatever and there's this like assortment of things that you can spend that on and then you know the hustle pays i think like five bucks a month per head extra to have happier like figure out the logistics and all this i think the there's opportunity to extend this in a couple ways like one if you you've ever have you ever heard of this site key values it's key values dot io o yep so it's an awesome site and it's it's run by one person and it's just this site that basically aggregates like the key values the key things that an engineer looking for a company would want and it kind of isolate okay if you care about like lunches with your team then like these companies do that if you care about remote before everyone was doing remote these companies do that let me ask you well i'll ask you about this in a second but do is this how big is this key values thing you think dot io o or tech com key values dot i o or sorry dot com sorry it's this so i know i don't know the exact run rate but it's one person doing it and i know she gets a couple thousand dollars from each of these companies per year to be on this website because it's again it's kind of like this is a b to b to b site where companies are like look i want our company to look good i want you know even if i get like one engineer from this who's awesome then it's worth like three k i spend so i don't think this is like a a venture scale business at all but for an individual they could go do the same thing with this like remote benefits idea and i think they could kill it so there's there's two like interesting variations of this right one is how do i use money to make my people more productive so obviously you can get great tools but another thing might be well if i'm always worried about you know my health benefits or if i have to clean my house because i'm working at home and that's just a task i do that's an hour i spend doing something that's not work right so this was like the google which is like hey just come into work and stay here will feed you you don't have to worry about that we'll do your laundry you don't have to worry about that right these really weren't like retention perks so much as they were more like what i'll call productivity perks they knew they can squeeze an extra two hours out of each person's day by automating away a bunch of the the the busy work that they had to do to run their lives and and so there's there's perks like that that exist and then there's the perks that are like these perks say something about us these are our recruiting perks these are you know we're trying to make our people happier and feel like they're at a company that's like aligned with them at their core and that's where you know you you get something like key values or you know i know right now at our company there was big like hoop blah about like are you gonna match charitable donations that we make and there was like a lot of like pushback of like why isn't the company matching and i was like dude because the company doesn't have to match like that's a crazy expectation that the company should just donate to your favorite cause because you decided to donate they they you know so it was crazy to me that it was so expected and anger was out there right but this is you know i guess a thing that people care about and where they work and this is where me and sam both i think kind of agree where we're like on everybody so cod and so we got i got it i someone in our at our on our company and that's cool if he's listening to with this that's great continue sharing your opinion but i'm gonna disagree with it but they shared their opinion in our slack of saying we should do a percentage of sales to this charity or something and i was like no not a chance not a chance like we can give money away sometimes but like to say a percentage of sales no right and so so i think you know the interesting thing about these tools is that they're arming companies with different ways to either solve the productivity problem or solve the you know what i'll call the the values the values opportunity with with their employees and i like the i like the upwork example i like the cleaning you know how a cleaning person example i think those are some things that that do make sense because i've seen the the expenditure of what you know what our company would would spend on office you know just office cleaners power insurance like just the the the net money that goes into paying for a commercial building you have a lot of if you're not paying for that anymore you have a lot of buffer to go around that you can either drop to the bottom line or you can like stockton out in some way so our lease in san francisco was about fifteen grand a year and then probably add another three thousand on top of that for just random stuff yeah we're maybe five thousand we're we're definitely saving probably close a quarter of a million and we're a thirty person company right did you do any unusual perks like at at the hustle or any any company ever been have you ever done any unorthodox perks what would you do the one that people love that i don't think is that special but people love it is unlimited amazon book that's a good one unlimited is like cap that five that's kinda like the values thing right because you love books and you're like me we just buy any book if somebody says it's good you just immediately buy it yes and and another thing that we've done in the past and people are like oh it's so generous of you and i'm dude i'm doing it because you're gonna make me more money which is if staff or anyone wants to go to anything educational related even if it's kind of related to her job and it'll cost five grand i'm like yeah go i don't care that's cool dude and and i'm like i and i tell them i'm like it's very selfish of me i want you to be better and more valuable and you'll make us more money so great did these things matter to you or or not you know they're nice to haves but they weren't like key decisions i mean i think the the learning one definitely huge and sam like he he puts his money where his mouth is like he's willing you know if you come he actually approached me one day he's like hey here's this three thousand dollar course like looks really good you wanna do it and i actually had done the course it was ref forge but he's definitely very keen on like helping people educate through like res skill so i think it's awesome to be fair to your point i don't know if it always moves to the needle but it is kind of like a signaling thing and helps your your employees stay happy we did one that was like i think i think people will emulate something like this where we basically we created a bonus pool that was tied to our kpi so it's tied to user growth so the more the i said this pool is gonna start at five thousand dollars a month and as it grows as as our user user base grows this pool is gonna grow and i showed kind of how it's gonna grow and then i said every month you're get we're gonna be voting peers gonna vote on who kicked ass this month and i get a double vote because i get to see a lot more of what you guys are doing you guys don't all see each other stuff so me and our our our cto we both got like two votes and and this did two things one it was like it forced all of our engineers who are you know totally allergic to emotions to like exhibit some appreciation for each other like they would you'd have to write why why this person kicked ass and we would read them out and so people were like it was like this forced kind of awkward thing but people liked hearing good things was that effective sean for motivating i felt it was effective but again maybe on biased maybe you'd have to ask one of the engineers so how effective but this the the i know the part that they really liked which was you get the money and so we said there's a first and second place so the first place got four k the second place got one k and the rule was this is not like money to live your life like we pay you well enough you get you know you get a hand salary as an engineer in silicon valley you don't need you know grocery money this goes towards something that you wouldn't otherwise buy for yourself but you'd love to have so it was only experiences travel like learning opportunity so like jason hitchcock used it to get a stylist and he like read redid his whole wardrobe and another person did it to first time traveling outside the country they didn't even have a passport before this that's cool and so they really like those things and then our only rule was you know you gotta tell the story to the team about what you blew your money on in an entertaining way when you're done and so that i thought was awesome but like it was very tedious for me to set up alright i wanna take you a quick break to talk about start up investing you know i'm a big fan of start of investing i do it myself but there's many different ways for people to get involved and start up investing this week's sponsor our crowd is a new way that i just heard about you know if you wish you were early in some of the best performing ipo of twenty nineteen or twenty twenty our crowd investors were and you could join them to see what's next with our crowd any accredited investor can have access to invest directly easily and most importantly early cloud investments have ipo like beyond meat or been bought by companies like intel nike microsoft and oracle today you can join cloud investment in t a software startup revolution how leading enterprise companies provide remote customer support you can get early into companies like tech or other companies if you go to our crowd dot com slash the hustle if you're interested in investing your account is free just go to o u r cr r o w d that's our crowd dot com slash the hustle k can i let me bring something up that i want steps to opinion on this is the most interesting thing that she said she brought this company and she said it's a one person operation she has shown me another company that's a one person operation sean i think is interested in one people one person people operations businesses we could we get extend up to three people but what are the most interesting one to three person operations you've ever seen that's a good one let me think if you have one start i'm gonna i'm gonna start thinking has one i know she does well i mean there's there's so many these days but i'd i just you know i'll call it up the obvious one that i think a lot of people are familiar with his peer levels it's a friend of mine but he he kind of started this like revolution i mean he didn't started it but he really kick started a lot of people getting into it and what i think i'd call out is you know years ago before a lot of people were like indie hacking on their own he did this thing called twelve startups ups in twelve months and a lot of people tried to recreate it i wouldn't actually you know say that people should recreate that they should recreate something where that allows them to explore a bunch of things and then exploit them after but basically he started with something called no medal list and it was just it was four problem that he knew very well you know classic story he created started with i think a spreadsheet which he posted on hacker news and then he just knew exactly who his people worked so we knew that he was looking for additional nomads who were looking for places to go and no my list has grown a ton now it does probably i think like half a million a year then you expanded that to remote okay which also does around half million a year and it's all done so through him and then i think he he contracts out his servers to one guy that he pays like you know two grand a month for or something and it's so funny because he's he's also known for this like you know a lot of people over complicate things they're like which framework do i use and he always you know if you follow them on twitter i think yesterday he like oh like this business which brings in x thousands of dollars every month runs off of like one ph piece script and all these people on hacker news they're like it's so funny actually if you went on hacker news because it trend there someone was like oh well i'm sure there's some like deep infrastructure behind this and he's like nope it's it's actually just more simple than you think so he's someone that i think a lot of people were inspired by that i was inspired by too is that what you thought she was gonna say sam yeah she told me about it you're and it's fascinating i think it's cool his website it's not like he's one of the i always i call these people nerds i say i'm a nerd too so but he his branding is pretty sick like he's got these cool hype videos like he's like a cool guy like so anyway i like that do you know of any sean the one i was gonna say was sort of like in the i think there's a lot of these in the creator space or media space right like i think you know joe rogan is a good example of this where it's basically him in you know powerful young jamie and the two of them have built was essentially a billion dollar enterprise just sitting in a room with a microphone and an the internet connection and there's a bunch of examples of this like ben thompson from right he's sitting in taiwan you know writing about tech in a email newsletter and i think it's just him i don't even know if he has like sort of a his young jamie i i i i've heard he's got he has some people i i think what ends up happening is that because i always say this too right like like my next path i think he's gonna be very sole and i think everybody either has you know an army of sort of outsourced contractors who deal with you know customer service and social media and stuff like that or they have like one right hand man type person that is happy to be behind the scenes it's like you know i i think i talked to the guy from weight but why and it's just the two guys and one of them really the the public guy and then one of them is the behind the scenes guy and they just they write their blog they do cool shit they buy businesses that are profitable and like that's their that's their show and they just they're happy to just be the two of them working on it and so i think that there's quite a lot of people in the creator space that create content or media companies like joe with joe rogan being i would say the biggest example alright i'm gonna give you a bigger example do you know matt dr have because i've heard a dr drug report steps canadian so she maybe doesn't know what it is you've told me about it i've heard of about okay so dr report conservative or right wing i don't know what you wanna call it news ag it's dr report dot com or org or and i don't know what it is but it says sean it looks like i could see your glasses it looks like you're reading it right now yeah if you scroll to the bottom right it'll show you how many page views it has had in the last thirty days does it say oh me go see past thirty days seven hundred and thirty three million just a cool seven thirty mil so seven hundred and thirty million let's assume they get a ten dollar cpm pm across probably fourteen dollars to be it could be so what's that so do seven hundred fifty million divided by a thousand equals like never seven hundred like seven seven million so million tend to multiply that by let's say eight dollars because he's conservative so we probably people ban them all the time for advertisers let's say eight dollars so six million a month like bet is what this guy makes and the rumor is is that yeah it's just him and one other person and he's been doing it since nineteen ninety six for the record not bigger than joe rogan but dude what you're talking about that's revenue of seventy two million dollars a year yeah joe rogan is making more for that i'll i'll spotify now no he is he has a deal that is potentially up a hundred million dollars i believe over a few years i think it's per year and i would say okay yeah joe rogan great his set up great but i think this guy set up his way better because anyone could be had anyone could anyone can add those links all it is a lame ass website which is random links anyone can do that also this guy's been doing it since nineteen ninety six and it used to be even bigger than it is now it he was he was the guy that broke the monica le bill clinton scandal so this guy's been around doing this for a long ass time so his i bet you he's made if you told me he's made a billion dollars off this website over the course of a lifetime i wouldn't be surprised buzzfeed feed news has them at thirty million in ad revenue per month there we go their month wow incredible do nuts the the the bit my favorite kind of like got rich lucky story by the way which i think it's a different question is bumped into somebody who was and their friend came over started start talking to us and when the friend walked away my friend goes you know that guy has a crazy story he's you know he has a successful company he's like but he basically became a billionaire because when he was starting up his office was you know where the google guys were starting there were like right next door and so they needed server space when they're i i think they're still at stanford at this time and they needed server they needed more servers and so he was like yeah you can like rent some servers from me like just you know you i'll host you and he sort of renting them servers and you know they just paid him in google shares and so he became like i'm like a billionaire just renting dig a a few servers to the google guys super super early on well you heard the story about the guy you did that facebook right he the painter david c they're like hey can you paint paint some graffiti on our wall and he goes it's like gonna be fifty grand and they go how about fifty grand in stock and he goes yeah okay and so she made a hundred million dollars off it yeah not not all lottery tickets you know are printed so so some of these are are pretty amazing alright steph you have a whole bunch more ideas we should we should jump into them so you wanna talk more remote work or you wanna shift to a different kinda area i'm not lots of remote work stuff but let's move on just so we get more diversity diversified kinda tied to one of the what we were just talking about how there's like you know a lot of celebrities have their own digital space but most of the time they're focusing on social they're focusing on deals with big companies like spotify one of the opportunities we called out in the trends group recently is this opportunity to almost become like the agency for celebrity websites and if you actually go to many celebrity websites like a shocking number of them they're really really bad and so we called out a couple of them drake was like a one page site that went to like a broken link roger federer who does you know his net worth is four hundred and fifty million if you go to his page it's like broken css like completely unread looks like it's from the nineties david copper field to like surprisingly has a net worth of eight hundred and seventy five million his site doesn't have an ssl again looks like it's like from the eighties even and so what's amazing is that these people have so much money but because they're in a particular industry they're a little bit shielded from like the potential of creating their own you know digital home a lot of them go to instagram a lot of them go to tiktok or just don't really believe in or really see the opportunity on these sites what's the next website i like google drake and up comes up yeah i can't break website i was doing so i don't even know if it's maybe it's not even his his official website but that's what come you looked up if when i looked up drake it's like drake official dot com and now it's actually looks like it's even more broken then before it looks like it might even be down googled drake official and it october very own comes up number yeah i don't even know what that is interesting well there you go so and then even in addition to drake i looked up a ton of celebrities many of them don't even have a site at all jennifer garner ryan reynolds like just tons of famous people who don't have a site at all and i think you know you probably wouldn't start with people of that size because one like they're doing pretty well on their own they clearly don't care about it and so it would be a little bit of an uphill battle to try to convince these people like hey i'm gonna create a great site for you but i stumbled upon this spreadsheet of i think we shared it at the hustle and it's cameo highest earners and so what's interesting here is that cameo is you know anyone on cameo is like doing well enough to be on cameo but not doing well enough to like not be on cameo that's right like by the way that's like the secret that's how you see which celebrities are broke you go to cameo and then you sort by cheapest right and so yeah you're like okay if you're if you're doing well you're not gonna create like a thirty dollar tiktok video for someone and so if you go here what i would do if i was someone just like who could build websites really well i would just go down this list and just go to each of these people's website see they even have a website and just be like hey like this is how your website could look this you could even build it them if you know how to build a website quickly be like i'll tell you this website for x you know either x dollars or x shares of of your products that you sell through it and i think you could just make a killing because so many of the peep of people in in kind of like media entertainment have no idea how to do tech well and so i do think it's a little bit of an uphill battle but i think if you're able to get crack into this like there's so much opportunity what do you think sean yeah i kinda love this one i wouldn't do it as an agency because fuck agencies and i also wouldn't try to sell it back to them because you're selling to a one buyer party so you have no leverage so i would instead i would take advantage of the fact that you have really really popular names that gets searched all the time that don't own the you know definitive domain about that name and i would figure out a way to auto generate you know you know news about drake or drake like biggest fans or whatever like would basically take their full name you know dot com or you know official at the end or something like that and i would make it a kind of a fan page slash news site that just aggregates their instagram post their twitter post puts information you know their wiki page their net worth like all the things that people wanna hear about like who are they married to is their wife hot you know like if you just go look at what people google about celebrities like is this person gay you know i would try to rank number one on seo for this person's name and all the questions about this person and then i would just monetize through you know one of the following i would either you know just do adsense and not bother ever selling this back to them or i would create some kind of like paid text list to get some kind of like you know updates and then i would potentially sell them back be like hey anytime time you wanna sell something i have your most loyal fans i've like three thousand of your most loyal fans whenever you have new tickets new shows new merch new whatever you know you just tell me and i will text it to them and then you know you we cut a deal of how much revenue share i get and i would would start doing deals that way way later but i would i would just start totally permission initially i love that because when we when we talked about that in the transcript group there was pushback with people being like yeah you know i think the biggest problem here is that some celebs just don't care and i love that approach because it's just like you know what doesn't matter if they don't care i'm gonna go take all the search volume people trying to look through something take advantage of the fact that they don't care right they clearly don't care so how can i how can i benefit from them not caring well yeah i'm gonna sound like a broken record i'm gonna make it what i would do is make them make their landing page just an email capture form mostly and so they would build a big email list i i i actually had an idea similar to this before i started the hustle i mocked up this business where i noticed that so like it was this was obvious back then so it wasn't like crazy but musicians only made their money basically off of concerts and i used to use this website called song kick in order to find which concerts were coming towards me to me and i was like man like if my favorite band had my email address and my zip code this just email me when they're coming or they should like talk to me on a regular basis and get me to buy stuff from them on a regular basis and so i went and actually pitched a handful of bands i was like you guys let me build this website for you and the way it's gonna work is that i'm gonna ask people to zip code and they're gonna be notified on a regular basis when you're gonna be near and i'll teach you how to sell stuff to them i didn't go through with it because i don't think musicians have enough money to pay what i wanted to make but it wasn't a similar vein and i think it's quite interesting i alright i really like that one steph here on a roll give me another one alright cool so the next one is hipaa compliance and it could be other kind of legal compliance things as a service and so the reason i'm pulling this one up is because so a lot of people if you don't know what hipaa it is it was started nineteen ninety six under bill clinton it it's has to do with health care and making sure that certain details are you know kept appropriately and things like that but there's all you know as most legislation like it's hard to understand it impacts different industries and a lot of people don't know how to become compliant and the reason i'm pulling this one up is because so i had a call with a coworker couple months ago and he his fiancee works in she's like a therapist or a psychologist and i'm just asking like you know during covid has changed etcetera so obviously they're doing everything online and i was asking what tech they're using and they're using zoom but one thing that was really interesting is he said you know they they're actually only allowed to use zoom zoom is the only hipaa compliant solution on the market and so i just not found that so interesting like every single app out there literally cannot sell to certain industries because they're not hipaa compliant and they probably don't even they either don't know that they're not hipaa compliant or they don't know how to become hipaa compliant so you can easily just create you know a service that says hey you actually approach these companies say did you know that you're actually losing out on sales in all these industries because you're literally not allowed to sell to these individuals so i think that's one interesting thing but you could also you know past hipaa i do the same thing or you basically hire a couple lawyers you track what legislation is coming to fruition in the next like three months six months whatever and then you are the first mover and you basically say hey i know exactly what you're like you know ppp recently know exactly what you need to do with ppp here's the like three two one of what you need to do and you just create that as a service and you're just like the first mover on any new legislation for companies okay those are two different ideas that are both pretty interesting the hipaa compliant one is kinda cool that's that's pretty easy to do right i mean that's a very simple this is a very simple business to pull off i would imagine right because it's like a it's like a checklist to become hipaa compliant right i think it's simpler than people think but if you're not an expert you're like where do i start that's pretty cool how do i know if i'm compliant etcetera there's when i had an alcohol business you there is a company that you pay money and they make sure your online sales are compliant with laws regarding alcohol i don't know if they did do well but it's it's a similar idea what did operator you just share i think you're sharing some examples of hipaa compliance on service i i've seen some startups that i do this as well so this is definitely an idea that is in motion and then there's other versions of this like there's companies like work os and others that are providing for developers you know if you develop a a piece of software that you want to be enterprise ready you have to you know soc to compliance and sso sign on you know make that available and this is just like a bunch of repetitive grunt work that you know a developer would have to do just to be able to handle enterprises and pass their security audit and so you these companies are doing really really well basically just providing those as you know services to any developer who wants to pass the enterprise security audit and offer enterprise level features out of the box i love those businesses a company i link is huge they they just top think five thousand they have thousands of employees and they kinda do a similar thing to what you guys are talking about just like making making sure companies are gdpr compliance stuff like that yeah they raised two hundred million dollars at one point three billion dollar valuation holy moly one trust one trust okay i like and what was the second one wait one trust oh wow one trust was the number one fastest growing company eight p oh one trust was number one on inc five thousand pretty cool well let me let me by the way another is inc five thousand like basically some bullshit like forbes thirty to thirty or is it like eight what does number one mean is that like actually on some objective way or is it yeah so inc five thousand you might need to pay money to submit yourself but it's all you have to submit yourself and you have to submit the trailing three years of financials so it's it's not bullshit like forbes we're just like who you know it is entirely objective but it's bullshit in the sense of it's only for people who submit them themselves who one trust is not actually number one necessarily but they are amongst the people who who submitted on some rank they they ranked to the top okay yeah and and it and it's like it tells you they're growth so in their cases it says forty eight thousand percent three year growth and like they so that's verified by inc go sorry stuff go no it's okay we did an analysis bank and there's like a surprising number of people who are on who have been on it for like ten years and you're like okay there can be this many companies that are actually at the top of you know everything for that many years and so it is like samsung and people have to submit to it and it's not the top of it everything yeah very few silicon valley companies too which is interesting i'm a assuming that's what why i'm saying like yeah how can this be the indicative list if it doesn't have most of you know the high growth tech startups on there but doesn't matter okay you know whatever who cares about inc inc five thousand tell me about this subreddit you know what what do you what do you what are you doing when you work around about it because i think that's a an area where there's a ton of signal and i know you guys look at it for trends so steph tell me what you've been seeing on on reddit yeah so i i specifically was calling out a tool it's called on vodka we're gonna have to link it in the in the show notes because it's and it's a pretty gnarly url but basically it's this amazing tool so i know there's tools like subreddit stats and other things that i'll say like hey this subreddit has x number of people on it or these are the keywords that are trending but this one i love because you enter any subreddit into it and so just like you can start with anything super broad like if you start with our slash digital no you enter that in there and then it just gives you this like mind map of like of people interested in the subreddit like what are all of the notes that are related to this and then of those nodes like what are the like niche of reddit related to that and it's this amazing just like you know mind map again of like where you can discover ideas and so just to give you an example if you look up r slash longevity you're like okay longevity is like i understand what that is but like some of the things that come up as like related stuff there's like microbiome topics few dark trans singularity and you're like whoa like example okay that that's really interesting like what are those things and you like double click on that and and it's just like this wormhole hole where that i think is really interesting not just to like go get ideas but if for example you're creating something to do with like you know longevity you're trying to understand your users better you're trying to understand like who is this person that i'm trying to attract and then you try you get like a wider view of like your your type of individual your users not just this like niche like they're interested in longevity you're like oh they're actually you know probably super technical and you know interested in things like singularity and they're probably developers and they care about their health because they're looking at stuff like fitness and new topics and so i think it's just this amazing tool that i think more people should use i love this i think this is really neat i would use this if i was paying buying advertising places so like i typed in flexibility and there's another one called that i'd never heard of i've called overcoming gravity there's another one called grip training and there's another one called the progress it's pretty funny yeah it's typed in i just typed in a not say for work one and it's amazing well it just came out of right oh whole world i didn't even know about there's some terms in here i'm gonna have to google after this wow this is crazy yeah i did what do those do yeah that's pretty crazy i like this what would you use this for immediately the first thing that came mind was is if you're running reddit ads this tells you what other niche subreddit could target or post content into other than that i think you know for me the most interesting part about reddit is if if because i i care about like you know what's actionable so like this is cool because it's so simple and it gives you a simple output i it doesn't give you like the best output ever but it took like two seconds to do so it didn't take much input what i really like is the you know the subscriber growth and if i could ever figure out the like the ranks sorry like the retention so basically you know on every subreddit it shows you kinda like how many are currently on the the page and so what i like is the ratio of like total subscribers to how many people are currently on the page because that's kind of the engagement levels and what i found is that you know the subreddit where there's a lot of opportunity are the ones where that ratio is really really high where you're you're able to get a lot of engagement per per subscriber to the community so one way to do that it's manual so what i've been doing is i use this tool to kinda like scope out things and then if you go to sub stats you enter a subreddit and then it'll tell you the rank and all this stuff but as you're saying it what matters is like who's active is it more active now than yesterday versus a year before so you can see how subscribers change over time but there's also this feature where you can see the most popular posts and you can see that within the last year versus all time etcetera and you can basically see like a like in the last year are there popular posts and are those posts more popular than the ones from the prior year and so that's kinda like a quick gut check to be like is this actually more engaged with or is it just you know kinda dead subscribers on this right and steph you you're one of the writers or you the main writer for trends what was okay what happened i don't write for trends anymore he goes no i i lead the product so i don't write as much anymore yeah oh death by promotion okay gotcha so so give me so if you don't subscribe your trends go put your credit card down and it's basically like podcast but better and written format so it's easier to to consume give me something from this week's trans maybe last last couple weeks that that stood out to you that you're like oh that's actually really cool that's a really cool opportunity for somebody so i'm gonna call it a quick one just because it's timely and something that you know everyone's obsessed with the markets but one of the cool things that ethan one of our analysts found is this thing it's basically the site that tracks all insider traits and so if you are an executive somewhere you need to buy law port any trades that you do above a certain amount i believe and so it's the site that just tracks all of these things or all of these insider trades of people selling buying etcetera you can see exactly who it is exactly what their title is and i think there is this quote of from that ethan found which is like you you don't know exactly why someone sells but you always know why someone buys and if someone buys it's because they think the price is gonna go up and if they're an insider you know it's not full this is definitely not financial advice but it's a signal that for whatever reason whatever they know inside is is leaning towards positive and so what i think would be cool is if someone just took all of that information and they just created like an insider or trade smart alert system that you could configure based on certain industries of stocks that you're interested in could track certain stocks if you you know if i'm really interested i think cloudflare flares is an amazing company if i could just know every time there's an insider trade for cloudflare and it would just text me i'm not saying that it would be super actionable but i think that would be a neat little project and in general i think that site is is super interesting so interesting we should do this for one it is so interesting and this week's swan shawn was public storage the daughter of the founder who i don't know if she's a chairman now or what she is but she bought tens of millions of dollars of public storage stock right mh that that's kind of amazing alright we're down three percent today storage is it but that's okay maybe she down down a little bit today that's fine yeah i don't know that's interesting i that's my one my favorite section lately is the insider trades i don't i'm not gonna buy any stock because i don't buy any stock but or no one off stock but that's crazy cool because that it was just cool to learn about it yeah you don't even need to buy stock but yeah for example like the storage space it's like oh okay well this person obviously thinks this their company is gonna do great what does their company do what's the gap that maybe exists outside of that company within storage and like you know could i create a company there so i think that in general is like just a signal of like insiders that you know you can't get if you're not paying attention so i think that be someone to create that i would subscribe to that so i'll tell you my insider trading story so i i accidentally did an insider trade not too long ago where i i sold a bunch of my amazon stock and i bought i sold whatever i did a transaction and then i real i've remembered i was like oh shit there's a a window in which because technically i'm an amazon employee there's a window in which i'm allowed to do this and this you know the trading window opens up once every quarter or something like that and that's the time when you could do this and i was doing i i had done it outside the trading window and i was like damn it this is how i die you know i i go down for insider trading of all things i didn't even have any info and so then i my email our our our general counsel and i was like hey you know i did this you know i don't know if this is gonna trigger you know a swat team outside my door in five minutes but you know hope hope we could figure this out and then and i was really worried i was like it's like more worried than i probably should have been and then he emails me back like ten minutes later and he's like like don't worry you don't have any insider or info i was like i was like candy compliment yeah i was like fuck you you don't know what i know you don't know what i do and so i got really then i was upset for the other reason and but at least i'm off the hook and i'm not in jail there was a what was it a funny story a friend worked at a company and her she had her laptop on her computer a friend there's a friend of a friend she had her laptop on her computer and her boyfriend this is her story went and looked over at it and saw the numbers and he went and shorted the stock and he made a quarter of a million dollars and they arrested him for it yeah it's crazy stuff but it has to be happening all the time all the time has to be happening putting all the fucking time there's no way there's no way that this stuff is is i like i remember i had a i have a a a friend who worked out in a hedge fund in new york and i don't know if this is true or not i don't i don't even know if he was just kind of like i don't know exaggerating but he's like every monday there was a manila folder that would show up under our door and he's like we paid a lot of money for this manila folder and inside this manila folder with some information and he's like every hedge fund had this goes was getting this manila folder and you didn't tell me anything else you didn't need to tell me anything else i was like say no more you know i love a good conspiracy what i hear one i i'll in infer the rest from here sure they they that we we don't haven't you seen the tv show billions we know they already to do that alright can i bring up one idea that i saw so last week apparently i shit on something called the gen z mafia i didn't mean a shit i didn't mean a shit on it more so i was making fun on the article because i have no idea what it is but i did shit on it so i went up to that but i apologize kinda but anyway one of the kids reached out to me so gen z mafia stuff it's this group of i guess gen z people who have like a slack channel or something what yeah didn't have a discord i think or a slack a discord and they just like our building stuff and one of the kids who reached out to me which is pretty cool and i just he i don't have any insider of information but on his profile this kid he he must be twenty years old he has this website called f tech so it's f f i o n dot tech and the headline is detect wildfires before they start stop them before they spread and he's building it's just fascinating he's building technology to help you track and predict when and where wildfires are gonna start and it looks like he's gonna sell to hedge funds and people like that crazy fascinating i did some i did a little bit of research there are people in this space obviously and they some of them are are meaningfully big hundreds of millions in sales it looks like but crazy pool that a this young kid is doing this and b this that this exists pretty cool if they can pull it off yeah how are they doing this how are they getting the info it says that they have twelve or fifteen data sources and they kinda use those data versus to predict what's gonna happen okay so i just joined the mafia discord because they had invited basically when you shit on it and i was like standing up for them they were like yeah fuck am and we love sean and so i got an invite to it yesterday i just i just joined it let me tell you my experience as i joined so first i joined and immediately i just had to sign a code of conduct so it's a discord it's a discord i had to sign a code of contact which has been signed by eleven hundred and sixty nine people there's a okay on the right there's the council which is the admins i think there's the ministry of building which is another group sixteen people online right now yeah this is crazy there's a lot of people in here and i think this is awesome what they're doing like this is what i wish i was doing when i was like seventeen years old like this would have been way better than just sitting there and playing n nba a k all day yeah it's pretty awesome and i i actually i wasn't shitting on them because i don't no i don't know anything about them but that article was horrible and the guy wrote to me he goes yeah that article was horrible she totally it was by that one journalist that that bella guy hates but and she he was like yeah she totally over exaggerated x y and z so it was just the article but super fascinating group right yeah it's great so okay i'm gonna hang out in here and i'll report back i'll tell you if it's if it's great tell you if it's just okay or i'll tell you if it sucks it's go ahead stuff are they all working on their own projects or what's what are they doing well i think it's like anything like any group like some people are actively working on something things some people are like toy with something and then a lot of people are just kinda hanging out and you know waiting for them inspiration to strike i guess right well this ties into one of the ideas that you guys have actually talked about before how like so let me break this down so one of the things that you guys have talked about and i agree with is that corporate training or anything like that any sort of like educational thing that happens within large companies sucks and in general even you know education in general is is like lacking in terms of it not being like entertaining and and not captivating like young people so what i think people should do these like large like corporate training companies is go and like hire a bunch of these gen years to create basically like a like hype videos but also to like make the actual training more like a game versus you know what it is now that you know no one actually wants to go through and what actually made me really think of it this is sam i know you saw you see the nuclear energy girl sean no who's this so she's let me pull up her actual is this like someone on tiktok no she'll she's on tiktok but i saw it on twitter but so her twitter handle is esa i s a b o e m e k e like i'll just send it since right now but anyway she created this like amazing kinda like tiktok video about oh yeah and how how it works like why it's actually really chill and and why it's better than most other energy forms it was like the best example i've seen of someone taking like a relatively boring topic that most people don't wanna engage with and making it like so compelling and so i think these companies should go hire this girl is about other people go hire them saying i'm gonna pay you like ten k to go like made a couple of videos about you know whatever they're trying to train their their employees on and i think it would kill it or or you know a holding company can do this as well but you what i mean like i just think these gen ears are so good at actually making content that people wanna engage with it's unfortunately just often not about things that are you know important in the world but yeah i think someone should do this did you did see this video sean no but when i but you described it great and i'm looking at it now it is weird she's weird she's no weird and awesome she looks like a ai like character or something it looks like you know little m mckay or something yeah exactly but i think there's actually a really genius content idea that i'm gonna probably do maybe i'll do it soon honestly and then you know but too late i already just out of myself so i think it'd i'd be really hilarious if you just hire you know you know that scene in the movie the big short so great movie and then there's this one scene where they're trying to explain like mortgage backed securities or something like that that yeah and then it like cuts to like i forgot who like some actress or some model sitting in a bathtub hub selena gomez as i think i'd don't need selena to gomez but yeah yeah yeah she's in one and then margot robbie in a another margot robbie is the one who who who who has thinking up it's like her in a bathtub with champagne with her like leg out and then she just explains this like really boring topic but she's like really sexy so you're like you know i'm i'm mean i'm entertained enough to to go through this i think somebody should just bake you know at hot models teaching science as like a a youtube or tiktok channel and i think you just do extremely extremely well just off that like combination and how controversial slash viral would be yeah one more thing i'll throw out there related to this have you guys heard of art school art q o o l no tell us about it it's this guy who i follow on twitter who's like amazing like creative genius his name is julian gland and he created this thing called art school which is basically this online game which is kind of like a parody of actual art school in that you know people joke that in real art school pay much money and you don't learn anything and so he created this like online world or you know you have this like character i think guess name like fro or something and you go around and you learn about art and you actually learn about art through this art ai that grades your art which is another parody on like how art is actually graded but you actually do learn about art and you you know it it is actually like a school and i thought this was just like a genius example of how you could turn learning into a game that people actually wanna engage with and in general i just wanted to you know shout out julian because his stuff is awesome his okay i went to the website his he has a sales video on vimeo and this is a good way to figure out how big something is is you if you click through and look at the video on vimeo you can see how many views has or youtube and you could like see like what engagement is thirty five thousand views a lot of people are buying this it's five dollars to buy this game this kid is awesome do gen z is so cool hey don't don't try to make up for it now don't don't try to make up for now know how you feel that imf i have proof i've written this at our slack i said everyone at j z dresses cool and is good looking and they can all dance well this is what i've i've been on tiktok enough to know them the this like they all wear vans and like cool hoodies and have like great skin and badass great skin and they like how teens are great skin now you dude what i don't know they all look like rihanna they're just like cool looking but like the look at this website it's like it's like a cool kid made it like the nerds are cool and the nerds are cool oh we just end the podcast all that way as amazing have you used tiktok i i have but tiktok is like you know the the one cool kid who gets famous on like the feed is like the best of it's not like what everybody is no they're all creative they're so creative gen z is so creative it's because they just grew up with instagram they're just they just god i love gen z although they are all like depressed and they don't have sex either you know they're impressed about i thought they're good looking with great skin and creativity what why are they depressed well they only look like that because they compare themselves to one another all the time i'm telling you gen z has like a massive depression problem and the guy guys aren't horny like that's like a thing like no for real like i went to a the sounds so old i went to a conference and we had a whole session on gen z and they're like the rate at which they're having sex is super low right you know what what's was interesting about that is like i think our society just in general is is going towards of like japan japan's been like this for many decades right they do everything online like you know dudes don't it's out with anyone they're like you know stuff like that which has been going on in japan for i think we japan is like the perfect place to just look and be like what's trending in japan or what's trend it in japan like five ten years ago and i wanna steph i wanna hear you describe dudes in japan again without like you were navigating the trip wires there go you're gonna try that again well they're due of japan who no there's a ton of guys who literally like there's an abnormal number of single guys in japan who actually you know i see other people think like fall in love with like these avatars dude have tell me i that's weird so my friend nikita he he's he's a great follow on twitter is his handles is like nikita beer or something like that make nikita underscore beer b i e r and he created that app tb that facebook bot and then you know just like this goofy teen app or whatever and he always he's great because he just shits on like a lot of the mainstream stuff he's like basically he's tweeted something out like you know all the nerds in silicon valley arguing over notion versus rome forget that nobody nobody fucking takes notes like nobody no no real person takes notes outside of like our bubble and like that's not what's interesting or what's taught to like people and so i like everything he said like these are very pro provocative things another one that like to me chamber mind that's like of that mindset is i was looking at like a bunch of internet stats internet traffic stats and the the conclusion i came to was everybody talks how they wanna talks about how they wanna meditate but nobody meditate everybody mas and like that's you know if you take away one thought about building products for people try to build the thing that people actually wanna do and not the like cool virtue signaling thing that that that really an in actuality very few people are doing that's all that's awesome he did that tweet was that was that tweet well loved that was me that one was the second part was me but it's channel my inner nikita because i've just been reading his stuff and love it you came up with this whole master and had a meditate idea that's a good i just broke ground right here that there's a three hearing deborah been said that's a good one that that that okay we're gonna run with that in a at a different point i gotta think about that that's the title of the podcast people don't meditate they no i mean it's definitely true i think we're gonna wrap up right we're we're at my trainers here i mean alright thank you steph sweet thanks for having this is fine going through like a third of your document so you can come back on you know every couple weeks and we could just we finish this document at some point i'm game for that you did the heavy lifting thank you