#175 - Brainstorming Million Dollar Ideas with Elaine Zelby

by the way by the way first unicorn and officially today want my one of my age investments officially raised at over a billion dollars yeah i feel like i could rule the ahead know why i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back alright everyone we have a great episode but first before we get into it i've got a huge favor there's this new feature in the itunes store so i wanna show it you i wanna give able the first to use it so go type in my first million or hopefully you're already if you're not if you're on an android you could ignore this for now or you no a matter fact you can do this spotify so go to your itunes store right now or your podcast app my apologies podcast app type in my first million and find our podcast and then you're gonna see a button it should be blue on podcast podcasts and it says subscribe click that button and something really amazing is gonna happen and i want you to tweet at me the sam with a picture of that and we're gonna you're gonna see this brand new feature that apple just for launch it's it's a really cool hack that we just discovered so click that button and tell us what's happened this is what they were talking about in the keynote yesterday right yeah it's like a big deal only a few people got access to it i knew a guy and i got access to it so go ahead and click that subscribe button and if you're in spotify i talked to daniel l he actually they're releasing something too click the buttons of file daniel the cousin of daniel ec the actual founder is spotify right it's their cousins right a it's a thing or you know swedish thing whatever he is is it's a scandinavian thing anyway today we've got a great episode so sean who we who do we have we had elaine z on she's a vc at signal fire and more importantly she is an ideal woman so she has a subs that's three new ideas every week very much like what we she also does this thing called don't know what it's called but it's it's a podcast about boring businesses like un sexy it's called un un sexy it's about like you know oh you run a chemical plant tell me about that you know so things like that so very much in line with what we do we had a bunch of we brainstorm started a bunch of ideas so we talked about ideas of the the adult vault we'll tell you what that is the sn sleep sleep bed for adults the punch was one of the ideas a subscription shoe company idea and and then we also one with the the the start saas bundle that was the best star saas bundle and also she kinda of gave us a peek under the hood of it so signal a fire has this thing that's like a this data machine that spits out like you know great investments using all the twenty seven different same data signals and we were kind of faster like hey is that bullshit is that just marketing seems like it's just marketing is that bullshit and she gave a pretty good response so we kinda talked about that as well alright we're gonna get to the episode but first remember go to the the podcast store click that button that says subscribe and then you have to send me a picture on twitter the sam par and you're gonna see this new feature that apple released i promise it's gonna be worth it so make sure everyone do does it right now thank you so hey what's going on i'm sam par we haven't met i think you were on the podcast before when i was sick yes so sam last time she was on she had one idea that well two ideas one that went kinda like semi my viral that was the milk bombs idea of like a functional milk bomb i don't know if you even know what that means like yep you get the you get that the picture basically you dunk a little like a bath bomb you dunk dunk it into your milk and it sort of has a little fizzy color whatever experience and you're adding some so adapt chance ne neutral trope or whatever to your to your milk because that thought that sounds kinda interesting people like that one a lot but now that we have like these viral video people oh we on a whole at level now yeah should we ask her to yeah because that's like a that's like a pretty viral thing sorry go we'll do that one event and the other one i really liked was fantasy football for stocks so basically creating a little game like so let's say we could create a game meet you andrew whoever and we each get our a budget we we allocated it into a portfolio that you you you get to change and i know every month or so and then we see whose portfolio would worn the best so like fantasy football where you get points based on the you know the the ups and downs of the stock so a very social you're not actually investing it does doesn't have to be real money a very social way to be gambling or betting on on stocks what you think of that one sam i used to do that as a kid didn't we do that as a kid in like class there was a thing back in like seventh grade i think everybody did this one fantasy portfolio for like a month at school and but it hasn't it was it was pretty rudimentary then and it never made its way out so i think somebody who worked at yahoo fantasy football it should just basically fork everything they learned about how to make yahoo fantasy football viral and be like cool i'm gonna do that except instead of you know the patriots it's gonna be you know amazon and tesla and whatnot did you folks have you guys used i is it called the they one of our sponsors was it wee what's the israel israeli coinbase based competitor israeli coinbase based israeli yeah they're one of the is wrong coinbase it's an exchange crypto yeah yeah it's like a ryan for both coinbase baseball the what was it we fund is that what you're talking about or the it like people it's like crowdfunding funding but they i think it's wee but they have this feature so basically it's like a stock investing cloud i know about we bull like b l yes is it wei yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah is that the one but anyway they have this feature where they have this thing where you can sign up and you can choose to share your portfolio with anyone and people can copy you and i thought that was kind of amazing it's kinda like turns and you'd be like invest in their fund and i don't even think they make any money off of it it just extra one of bunch of these that came out in the last i don't know two years elaine you you've probably seen all of them public came out as like one of the robinhood hood competitors where it's like a social network a social feed where you could see what people are vetting in then there's the more extreme version like what you're talking about like doj i think is one of them and in doj i create kind like my little basket of stocks and i call it you know the sean index and you could just straight up by the sean index and you can invest in all my stocks and i get kind of like it's like my index becomes more popular because you've invested in it and you trust me in it like shows that you follow it or you invested in it well in twenty seventeen so eric v who was the guy that created shape shift he actually created sent satoshi dies he was super super early in the crypto space he launched something that never got out of private beta called prism and you could create a basket of tokens this is when all the alt coin started popping up on ethereum and you could show so it could be you know sean's basket of tokens and sam's and you could watch and i could follow you and i could just invest in your basket of tokens but it was a competition too and i thought it was such a great idea i'm not sure why it never got off the ground but it was cool i dig it can i ask you elaine what is signal fire i'm on your website like your landing page is i want whatever you're selling but i'm still a little confused as to what it is so we do that a little bit on purpose we are a venture capital firm but we're actually structured and operate a lot more like a technology company so if you look at our team we're about a third engineers and data scientists building products we're about a third people on our platform these are like the in house business people doing p recruiting growth and then we have investment and we you know we essentially monetize via the investment vehicle and we're currently investing on our fund three which is five hundred million dollars but you know we're not we don't have capital in the name we don't have ventures in the name we definitely try to be a little bit more start than the traditional vc so but are you using like on your web page on the landing page it's like you guys use some type of data to spot trends is that is that so we buy scrape or you know aggregate every data signal you could possibly imagine and our engineers have proprietary algorithms that use that data to do one of two things one we have different systems that are alerting systems for us on the investment side so they pull in all these signals they try to show us at seed at series a and at series b who are the cool companies what should we be looking at and also trends around markets and things like that fundraising and trends and then we have a bunch of products for the portfolio around talent migration talent movement who who's good who's in market from a hiring perspective competitive intel c analysis market intel all that kind of stuff do you use it so like when a lot of people like when sean and i probably have both started our things which like granted are by the way way by the way first unicorn and officially today want my one my age investments officially raised at over a billion dollars although i gotta say it's not super exciting because it's a company i was trying to invest in from the seed but at this point i wasn't like a and i was running my company i wasn't like i was i only wanted to invest i thought it was a great idea and i like the founder but i like forgot to follow up and then like oh i followed he's like dude we closed that like two months ago sorry i'll get you in into a and then when the a came around it was like dude it's super competitive sorry i'm not gonna be able get you in so finally he messaged me was like hey man i'm gonna make sure i get you in this time i'm so i feel like i i fucked you over you know once you missed it the first time we're definitely gonna get you in here in in the i don't know b yeah the b round at a two hundred million dollar valuation i was like pro two hundred million i've i knew you with you were a a baby here this was this is way too high alright fuck i'm in and so that company is not worth over going i don't know if i could i well we'll say i might i might it out well and you have to tell we may believe it out because you may not have announced it yet but it's a company called deal and they do my husband and i were talking about that one this morning yeah okay what were you guys talking about my first unicorn because i appreciate that yes the joke is this is essentially a company i wanted to build three years ago and i started seeing every startup up that had ten employees was starting to hire internationally and they had to treat them as contractors and there was no way to manage it and if i looked under the hood most companies were using shield geo as the pe and everyone hated it super old school so i was like okay somebody needs to go and build a better shield geo under the hood do kind of the flat model of building the nitty gritty going into each country that people in the us higher remotely with and build out the you know infrastructure go and just find every startup up and say hey we're gonna handle all the hiring the payroll compliance everything for your remote people i love it i think it's such a good idea wait so what sorry how do you spell it sean d e e l i think the url is let's deal dot com unless they change dot deal dot com also now oh different for that cool so i i actually use it that's how i pay kind of like any contractors that i work with even if they're in the us i'm like oh this is just way easier because i just type in their name i say what the contract is out every month i'm gonna pay them this at the first of the month it's like would you like an nda with that i'm like we're not let's add on an nda they're like great would you like to add a milestone based payment like you know what that's a good idea i do like milestone based payments that that's that outlines our incentives it's like boom here's a contract we've sent it to them when they'll sign it it'll be kept in your records automatically for you we took care of all the the compliance and tax issues that you're gonna have deal with based on where they live and we'll connect to your bank and then it'll auto pay every month for for you and send you an invoice when you're done i was like oh wow that's great you just eliminated the need for me to have like a person who does that whole thing by the way it's on their page that they've just raised money at a billion dollar value it so your their biggest competitors so there's two big ones papaya global and remote dot com and deal started out a little bit differently the other two said hey we're gonna really focus on full time employment right internationally they focused on contractors and they've had to shift from my understanding a little bit because in reality you don't just have contractors for the most part and you want one stock shop that wanna go and have different solutions for the different types of employees right so i think they now have everything exactly they every everything they also let you like pay and crypto and pay in every currency and like yeah they're do they're doing all those kinda gnarly problems which is great i almost invested in remote dot com also so i i really like that guy his his name is job the guy who's like this founder i think it's pronounced some like slightly different but is j o b and i just like i love that whenever it's like you saying bolt is the fastest man in in in the world i'm like this guy named job is is creating the platform for hiring remote workers like okay i mean i'm interested and he was like doing this in this company deal as soon as i heard the idea i was like oh yeah that's a pain point like that's a real pain point and i don't know how people solve it but if like i went to their website i saw it was like this real sim similar i'm not less sophisticated right it's like yes this is a real problem then i go to your website and i'm like oh you're one of the easy to use products which is like just kind of the standard best practices of design and like clear like good colors good font clear copy two clicks in you're done and i was like yeah this is gonna win and so then i started hitting up the founder and i met with them and was oh this is amazing let's let's do something and then like unfortunately you know this would have been a a much much bigger return had i just been like a little bit more proactive about following up before but you know i feel like i learned that less than thirty times you invested ten thousand dollars and then let's say would that mean that it's worth like what five times more well at the current valuation yeah on paper on paper marked up but if i had done it at the seed it would have been you know maybe i think the seed was probably like ten fifteen million coming out of l and so you know that's that's taking ten million turning it into a billion in terms of the multiple plus dilution blah blah not that interesting more importantly i can now say i invested in any unicorn so that's just a stamp that i needed to collect here awesome appreciate your honesty that you invested at the b because so many people will come in at later rounds and be like i amid all these unicorns and they invested in the the previous round what i wanted to ask though was elaine so when i started my company i just was like this seemed like it could work and it's fun and i'm good at it i'm bet sean kinda did the same at bet where it's like yeah my it might work signal fire seemed far more analytical my question is in reality do you actually think that that matters like if i'm trying to start something do you actually think that the likelihood that i'm gonna succeed by but if i just said elaine give me three things to start versus i'm just gonna do whatever is do you think that you would let me give you an example here of like the honesty so when i started my rolling fund the marketing was i have this big podcast that's gonna help me get deal flow and podcast well okay if you have a podcast that does five million downloads a year in the business of start niche it's like okay that's a unique asset i see how you're different than the other funds in reality most of my deals don't come from podcast listener are sending me stuff or reaching out to me most of the deals are from the same five friends who email me when they see something cool and like that would have been much less sexy to talk about like oh i have five great friends who will email me cool stuff and i email them cool stuff but in reality that's how the best deals happen and or just like i'm bored on twitter a lot when i see something cool i reach out again does doesn't sound that great for my fund marketing but is closer to to reality so the question is basically how often are your deals because you're like computer programs like do this company undervalued growing fast nobody's heard of it versus another fund share something with you or you guys are interested in the space and you see something a cool on product under whatever you reach out and then that's how happens so can you give us the truth well so in general venture capital i have the most comm asset you can imagine that i'm selling i'm selling money and so in terms of differentiation you're talking about having this podcast having a different model and differentiation does go a long way but if i break up venture capital into five stages it's sourcing so how i find people diligent picking winning and then supporting and so we try to leverage data in probably four of the five different categories on the sourcing side we've definitely done deals that were completely from our our alerting system in addition we just do a ton more outbound than the average firm because we'll go in these meetings and we'll triage based off of oh this looks interesting and oh elaine is connected to the founder or elaine knows about this industry you go follow up so we do a lot more of that outbound than traditional is it the majority of our ideals no on the d side really trying to understand how good are these people so giving people you know talent scores understanding hiring patterns mobile app downloads alexa score trends a lot of the stuff you guys look at in you know similar web or a so that kind of stuff we're just doing on a different level but i would say where we have the most value wait hold on but does that level actually map so you you basically said that you you must listen because we i talk about a reps all the time we talked about similar webs all the time that's like anyone could do that for either free or for a hundred dollars a month and it's like i can just skim it and i kinda have an idea you kind of implied that you do that times ten or whatever it is is that way actually better than our way i think in our industry it does actually move the needle for us so get give us an example like you know if i'm watching billions and i'm like oh shit bobby actually you know he gets satellite data and he can see you know how many trucks are leaving the factory every day and that's how you know blah blah i've seen some things in vc where it's like you know everything's kinda got app annie or whatever like something to look at app growth but you know i don't know second measure where you get credit card spending data i aggregated it that can be more interesting or like you know if you're plugged in with pipe or somebody you could see recurring revenue businesses that are growing in some way before maybe others do so i'm curious what's a cool data source that give me an example like oh we have this one data source that helped us spot this cool company can you get tell a story like that so it's not the one data source piece it's the fact that we buy or have access to all of them and then we combine them in unique ways so it's really about the joining of the data and what that surfaces is for us and that could be again on the you know we we look at things like business filings and then we combine that with data on okay well what is their website what are their app downloads what you mean business fine like incorporation or what what do you mean yeah so exactly so i can understand that you know somebody is a founder based in san francisco they just incorporated their company as a delaware c corp i can then know when they filed for corporation i know who the person is i can put them through our talent ranking score or our founder ranking score i can then see who are they working with how good are those people what is the business category how interesting is that for us how invest is the timing so we have a kinda timing learning system to those things combined will then give it a score and saying okay this one you should look at versus this one you shouldn't based off of the aggregate score and that's the piece that i think actually helps not the single dataset or the single piece of info you had a score can you give me my founder score what where am i i could but i don't think i'm a lot to do oh what come on what's going on here this is the best marketing ever for sign iron i know we do we actually do score we give people ranks it's a you know one is like the number one person we think in our list right now and then it only goes down so it's it's like a chest ranking it's like you know oh it's like a like el score basically or something where you everybody is actually ranked one to one million or whatever pretty much yeah exactly and it changes it one or what's what's going on no because it's for us like we only invest c series a and series b so i don't care about people in those other categories i wanna know who are the best people starting companies right now that are actively looking for funding gotcha that's the timelines is actually really important but the thing that's also really cool about what we can do so i'll give you a really concrete example we have a company that is in the shopify commerce infrastructure ecosystem and they were looking to say hey we wanna go and target i'm gonna make these numbers up but we wanna target every merchant who has between ten and a hundred million dollars in revenue in these four categories and here are three buyer titles oh and like here here's where they need to be located we can go and pull all that data we match it up to the people at the company so we say hear their email addresses hear the people you should go after to after and we create this kind of custom lead list for them and so being able to do that really really important that's on the support the company side and you guys sell access this platform right like this is a product now yeah that's what i i was gonna ask you because why i mean i bet you can make like fifty dollars to a hundred million dollars a year in bernie told me that you guys are spinning this out or considering spinning this out as a product we do not sell it and we don't spend it out that's part of our whole selling point is that this is within the family so if you come and take our money and become part of the signal fire family you get access to all this stuff so we don't actually give it out outside of it interesting okay who who came up with this so our founding partner at chris farmer has a long history in the vc world and he kinda got frustrated saying why are we investing in these bleeding edge tech companies and we're literally doing deals by talking to our friends kinda what sean was alluding to yeah and so he's like look we have access to all this data why are we not leveraging it and so he had kinda spun this out in his last firm and then created an entire fund cycle around it a firm around it i'm gonna say i still think it's fifty percent marketing a fifty percent useful but that's higher than it was in my head an hour ago where i would've have said it's ninety percent just marketing and ten percent useful so you've done a good job you've moved right away forty percent say that again is he right in terms of what it is i would say more useful than not for sure especially i think the two areas i would say it's on the barbell it's definitely useful on the flagging sourcing companies that we would never have seen and it's very very useful on the supporting side and honestly we're as i mentioned before you know we kind of like say we're a start up we do o okay ours we measure n p score we kinda treat ourselves like a text startup in terms of how we operate and so for us we care so much about our n mps we care so much about are we moving the needle for founders so if we can be you know if that's the only place that it's really valuable that's that's enough you know that's that's really enough if you ever hear about cha eight ball yeah yeah this is sort of reminds me of that yeah i don't get this is this is gonna be a clip i tel go for it yeah so so cha who was you know founder of social capital is the founder of social capital at one point in time was like look we he came from facebook super data driven growth team he was like leading the growth team helped to grow it from whatever a hundred million users to a billion users and he was like well why don't we have that same level of analytical rigor when it comes to our companies and sort of the as that thought evolved it came down to something really simple he goes let's make capital as a service instead of you know software as a service capital as a service so here's how it goes it's self serve you come and you plug in your analytics our little algorithm will run a formula and it'll basically tell you two things it'll say here's how you rank relative to other saas companies that are your size your age in your kind of like price point or your demographic and then so you'll know if you're above the benchmark if your retention is way better or way worse than other companies and then secondly they're like this is our money ball formula to basically figure out if we should invest in you or not and and so that that they hyped it and as a founder a little bit scary right you're gonna go are i gonna give them off like all my data basically like pipe right into our database and just say hey here you go and it feeds their system right because whether they invest in us or not they've just downloaded hey at this point in time here's how this company was doing and then they take your historical data as well so it's like they sucked in all this data so that if they looked at the hustle they'll know whether they should invest in the hustle but also morning brew and the skim and any other company like the hustle they'll be able to compare in contrast and as a founder it's useful because you wanna compare contrast but you've just you know you've opened up your blouse to tit off and i i think that was for me a little bit scary but i think some people really liked it and ultimately i think it was more marketing than than substance i don't know elaine what what's the word on the street but like i don't see see them using it maybe anymore i know that the group of people that spun off of come off like ar june and those guys from tribe try cap i they still do that or that's a big piece of it they don't maybe brand it that way but i don't know alain was was that like was that legit was it as secret sauce as they as they try to make it sound or was it a little height i was never on the inside so i have no idea i know that it was polarizing in terms of what you were saying some founders loved it some founders hated it in my opinion it only works at certain stages and in certain categories this does not work at all at the stage you're betting on people for the most part and you're betting on the growth of a category there's no data there's no that's gonna get other world startups don't have their data structured enough or in a way or they can actually like run these types of apples to apples analysis until you're your bank clear bank makes sense to me because you're literally saying hook into my facebook and google data shop there's nothing that i could be yeah and there's nothing i can be fudge around that i'm gonna go analyze it and say you put in ten dollars facebook you get out fifteen i'm gonna give you a short term high interest loan it works for everybody we win people are now doing this for amazon sellers and to your point shopify so on amazon it's much much more around working capital yep so people are constantly these manufacturing cycles where cash flow negative so they're like okay well i can hook into your amazon seller portal i can see exactly what your you know inflow and outflow of money is i can hook into your bank account i should be able to do dynamic loans so i'm never at peak you know peak exposure from a loan perspective for very long i'm kinda of like constantly pulling it in and pulling it out that makes a ton of question to me yesterday i invested in a c stage company and i pretty much only did it because sean did it i basically i was like i think this is kelly are you in he goes i'm in i and and if you don't wanna go in and ask him if i could have your your i was like i love it and he's like yeah i don't know i think i hate it i was like puts there to head it's amazing and then he's like yeah it's so good that i kinda hate just popular things it seems so good don't like this is the stupidest thing ever heard i said you you don't want it give me your share and because i was asking about it was hype it was hype it's got all the cool kids in it and i'm like oh all the cool kids are doing it i don't wanna do it but sean was like well i'm doing it and i talked to the guy and the guy seemed wonderful and i really don't even know like can you talk about the company now or do we need to talk about it next episode so that there's a little distance between this coma and that yeah we yeah i guess okay it's called synthesis do you know this one no what do they do oh the algorithm didn't spot it but a yeah the five friends did did did did spot this alright so this is a cool company so the the story of this is have you heard of ad astra which is like elon musk's personal school that was inside spacex so for those of no elon musk you know he's ceo of space ceo of tesla to kind of like multi multi billion dollar companies and his kids were going to school he basically needed to have his kids be in school and he kinda was like you know the traditional school systems is not so great why don't we build a school inside spacex that's done the way we think and his his big kind of like theory was in schools they teach you like here's this tool right like let's say calculus or algebra right like here's algebra go learn algebra but they don't tell you kinda like why you need to know algebra right like maybe they should be teaching you how to you know run a lemonade stand in in order to calculate how many lemons you're gonna need per day boom will teach you algebra that's a tool to help you do this thing you wanted to do so his his big thing was why don't we teach kids how engines work rather than how what what a wrench is as like a basic analogy and so he creates this the school or he he wants to have the school and he creates it and there's a guy i think josh his name he runs a school at spacex it's great it's kind of like well known and the the kind of the fundamental premise was kids were learning by by really about like playing games and so have you guys seen the movie end game yes so in in end game you basically your small teams of kind of kids and then you go to one like simulation area where you're gonna you know your team team fights against team b and c and the game always has like some kind of like arbitrary set of rules but it teaches you like strategy and teamwork and communication and like all the different things you need do to to win the game and so kids love it because they play it's it's competitive it's like doing not just sitting there listening to a lecture and so anyways those are the same principles they took into this so let's say they they'll create a game that's like i don't know it's about art right so instead of telling you okay here we're gonna talk about art so sit down and read these three chapters about you know the renaissance period of italy and memorize it no instead they'll create like a map it's like okay where do you wanna explore and then you pick you're like japan you go to japan and you find this artifact and then you have to bid on it and the other teams are bidding on it too and you trying to decide should we been on this well let's go look at it let's go look at italy let's see what they have there and the team goes and you're all these kids are playing this together on zoom anyway so it's it's this really cool totally different alternative like form of education and so what ended up happening was the guy who created this at spacex for elon and his kids the game system was called synthesis what he did was they spun it out with elon blessing elon was like hey go for it like yeah this mortgage should have access to this and he paired up with this guy who was like the number one engineer at class dojo so we had been working on an anti tech signal fire is an invest does our portfolio company and they got together they created this this company synthesis and they okay i guess can't share too much of their numbers but they have this amazing traction so far you know business is only six to eight months old they spend zero dollars on paid marketing all the attention has come because of free press and people who are reading about elon school and just sort of click the links and find them and greatest headline ever which is like elon musk spinning off school right and think the phone was very honest he was like you know honestly like we had a big question like does this only work if it's rocket scientist kids right because like maybe they are willing to like really engage in this material and figuring it out and play these things like but is this successful if your dad is not at you know a rocket scientist as spacex your mom is not like know data scientist or her wherever and so but they found that you know it does and so they have like super high retention amazing revenue already in six months you know doing multiple millions of dollars year in revenue with zero dollars paid marketing and it what seems like the perfect team it's the guy who created the school at lo thing and this guy from class dojo and so i was like what's not to love great impact super cool product i wanna send my own kids there great traction in a very short amount of time and like tons of room to grow because they haven't even started marketing yet and so i was like i love it and sam was like yeah like it seems really great but i'm skeptical of real things that every every everything's seems expensive it was expensive well can i pitch you a spin on this that i wrote about recently and you can you can give this to the guys because it might be interesting for them so i wrote about a concept of doing this but on top of roblox and the reason being robots already has the eyeballs and the attention of kids seventy five percent of kids between nine and fifteen i think or on robots and today you know anybody can go and build these games but why can't you go and build games i was focusing more on life skills right so things like financial literacy which you never learn mental health which you never learn all the things that you'd want either a younger kid or a teenager to learn ga i but build it where they're already there right and also enable the kids to become the builders so partner with some people like these two people doing synthesis bring in some kids to make it actually appropriate and age appropriate and then let them have some of the upside and let them spin off the games and bring in their millions of followers but i think there's something to be done on top of roblox yeah i i love that i think that works for two reasons one is you can if you okay teaching kids through games not a new idea like when i was a kid i was playing math blaster and what you know whatever else these little games on whatever you know like a computer room at my house and i used to go there and get to play an hour a day and so you know teaching kids their games obviously been around for a while but now the games are already built with tons of love kids already know the controls i fortnite or roblox already know how to play they're already super familiar with they already love the game and so and they also have now created roadblocks and fortnite have these like kind of open field open world systems where you can go build whatever the hell you want and just share the link and so it makes total sense to me to borrow the millions of dollars they poured into their game engine and the marketing and the distribution where they already have kids with accounts to just say yeah now all we have to build is the learning experience and and and so i think that is a a a great idea can i they might be able to port it over you know they can port some of these games to roblox can i ask you about something you wrote about on z so you have elena as a subs sec z is it what's z dot subs sec dot com three things it's just my last name it's it's cool it's a long with this podcast you basically put out three kind of business ideas a right is that the idea exactly i write about three requests for startups ups or opportunities i see to build big businesses and like how i would do it how i would monetize it and why now great so obviously everyone to go sign up for that because it's it's right up this our alley i think i've seen you because you've linked to us a couple points or twice and i like track traffic back alright so you have this thing called start up saas bundle and i wanted to bring this up because i think that most everyone listening is in the world where they can actually go out and start this i think that i've actually investigated this time so i i have or i don't own it anymore but we own the thing called the hustle so we have like two million subscribers of many of which are like these business folks and i'm like oh we should make this and sell it there's actually a lot of reasons i think why this can't work at a huge scale i think there's a bunch of reasons why it could work at like a like i think you could build a five to ten million dollar year company in like three to four years pretty straightforward can you can you talk about your ideas here and and you could actually tell me if you think i'm wrong or right yeah and i'll tell you why i think it's way bigger than that right so the idea here is if you look at the average series a company they're using i think the status is thirty four different saas applications and what happened was we used to have these model which are sap and oracle and i used to joke like bring back sap and i don't really mean that but what i mean is i am so sick of now having to deal with thirty four vendors thirty four ui thirty four logins and passwords you know thirty four different bills and renewal cycles and all that kind of stuff it just makes no sense and if you think about what core business software runs a start up it's very consistent you have things like you mean g suite or office three sixty five you need some kind of communication tool you need something for payroll for hr for accounting for recruiting for like crm marketing project management issue tracking and help desk like those to me that is the core of business software and of course they're best in breed for all these things at the s smb level the mid market level the enterprise level but in reality if you're a startup up that is seed series a probably even getting into series b you need like not the eighty twenty rule but like sixty percent of the functionality and that's the easier stuff to build the additional bells and whistles are the harder pieces and those aren't even utilized by these early companies so the idea is look okay if you wanted to build a bundle and get people to migrate over if they've already bought eight different pieces of software that's nearly impossible but if you catch people when they have nothing yeah you're gonna say hey we have this out of the box bundle you can start with three modules but as you go and you wanna a crm because you didn't have a sales team before just add on the crm module it already hooks in it's super seamless it has a same user experience no new login no new vendor relationship and you kinda continue to add to the bundle as your needs evolve and think down though is you said something important that we have to go back to you said something you said it won't work if you already are using something yes and can you explain why because that's actually a really big deal yes ripping and replacing software is so painful and it's incredibly hard to get people to do it you've already trained your team on it it has all of your information and data sitting in that system it's just really hard to rip something out when it's there which is why things like salesforce are gazillion dollar companies even though people complain about it all the time it's that is your system of record for that thing sale so i think that the vendor won't give you well let's call us alain company a alain a alain bundle company they're not gonna give a lane bundle company a referral fee i think for correct and the whole way this makes money no i mean guess there's two way a subscription or a referral fee their salesforce is gonna say no these customers already use us we're not gonna like give you any more discount or we're not gonna give you well let me clarify so so you're not saying it's not class pass it's not saying pay me x and then you get discounts across all your thirty four what you're saying is now make a beginner version of the yeah core eight things as a as an actual bundled thing not the single player apps our single function apps and do the eighty twenty and just do the core functionality don't get the the the long tail of like edge case features that you need and offer it to somebody out of the box is like hey here's the simple thing so you don't need to sign up for twelve different services yes and when you look at the volume of companies at the early stage versus the later stage which need enterprise functionality the volume is like a thousand x at the early stages so in terms of your ability to capture those people and capture them early where they are gonna be sticky and they're gonna grow with you to a point will people outgrow this maybe but the number of people that ever get to that scale are so few and far between that i just don't think it matters right and i think you acquire those customers early on we work with a lot of people who advertise with the hustle and all their whole like we're one of them is called just works do what just morrison yes these is basically a i'm gonna kinda dumb it down really dumb but it's basically a payroll software but because of the way that they operate you have to sign up with them pretty much from the beginning like right need to start a company and i have a feeling that they're struggling because they can't get it's really hard to get a lot of those people to sign up for you so challenging in the same way in the same way it's hard for sign fire in order to find companies who are just starting it's really really hard for these folks well so here's my hack and i learned this so back in the days when i was first getting into start i got really into into road hacking back in like twenty thirteen when it was a really hot topic and i started my own side hustle consulting gig working with seed in series a founders on growth and i learned really quickly that if i partnered with the vcs they would just send me unlimited number of customers i never did any business development because they're constantly investing in net new seed in series a companies and they're trying to be helpful and their companies one hundred percent of companies are needing help with growth hundred percent and so they're like okay who should we send them to send them to elaine so the hack here is you start with all the vcs so they're getting i get asked a dozen times a week what software should i buy for this what tools should i use for that so that's my hack to get started then you start to get some viral word mouth going among founders because founders have their groups online they have their communities they talk they're saying oh dude you have to get this like that's the best software you can use for all your stuff so that's how i would go to tomorrow but even then like where you were growth hacker growth comes right after growth comes after you have a team have a product you have something like you start to talk about growth whereas yeah even when you talk to vc you've already done something you usually are not like there is pre seed where it's like just you know two people in that idea but it is still hard to catch you before you've even started with slack and g suite and you know three of those eight eight modules you know my whole thing around so the one thing everyone will have is either a g suite or office three sixty five that i'm not trying to build right that you do you do g suite and this hooks into that i'm not trying to kind of take that down you know slack yes probably that one is a little bit easier in my opinion to rip out but if i look at our seed portfolio and when they graduate to series a that is the time when they're starting to think about getting a crm help marketing automation system and that's i think there's probably three different pieces of software that are the right insertion points after you get g suite the next thing is probably payroll and if you look gust is kinda like the only thing most people use today been around for a long time it does fine i don't think it's a particularly super super complex piece of software so can you go and say cool if you're under forty employees we offer the exact same functionality as gust but we also offer why z and you know fill the same you a bunch of ideas let's talk to another idea that you have give us like give us your top three ideas and we'll pick which one to go into so just give us the one so someone should start this i i them that's cool if you think that's gonna be huge i think it would won't be huge doesn't be mild but i think one of us could be wrong but either otherwise win yes agreed i think it could be huge but even if it's not it will definitely not be a it will not be a bad outcome right oh man where to start okay one that i really like that i also really want somebody to build is an adult vault is this something yeah what does that mean what's an adult vault so by the time you're out of college you have a bunch of things in your life that are like okay i have a credit card i need to get my first apartment so i'm paying rent i have to think about insurance i need to have all my monthly bills paid and subscription options i now have internet and utilities and all these things are desperate and there's no one place where kind of all of my adult responsibilities live and if i compare this to a product that's existed in the past mint dot com which i think launched back in two thousand seven was kind of the first thing that said hey your financial life and financial picture is sitting all over the place can i aggregate it in a really simple app to give you that one stop shop and i wanna do that for literally everything in your adult world and as you get older and as you have kids and a mortgage at a car and all these other things you have so many different places where you know your insurance policies live your bills live your financial products live you're investing accounts live and nothing is accurate that and i also want to suggest things that i'm missing so it's like hey you might wanna think about life insurance here are the best life insurance policies for somebody that fits your description so you monetize via referral and you know via affiliate but it also can let you know of like hey this is coming up for renewal make sure you pay this bill and you can auto pay and stuff like that can i niche this down even a little bit more so sure do you own a house i condo so i just bought i know sean did i just bought my home recently is the first time i've done it i didn't know anything about anything i still don't but they gave me so basically what you do is for anyone who doesn't own a home right before you agree to by it and then someone you hire inspector in texas i paid this because guy only five hundred dollars it was pretty crazy he comes through and he poke his head in the closets and he goes all the electrical things work this thing it looks like there's a little mold here yada yada yada and i got a booklet that was pretty thick about a fifty page to a hundred page booklet and i'm like oh okay that's kinda cool but even two months after they did this thing i'm like wait what is this light switch this slight switch doesn't turn anything on what is this doing and in the booklet this guy has actually already addressed this but i don't wanna search this like p this like actually printed out booklet i almost switched so you're almost talking like a life manual i would niche that down even further i'm like someone much should just create a house manual so i can just do control f bedroom back corner light switch what is that where is that what's that doing i almost wish i had this just for a home and then you could layer shit on top of that like what's the best home insurance which i'm was trying to figure out what's the you know similar to that so yeah i'm with you alain on on the adult thing i have two ways to contribute to this idea one is how do you get customers i'm a big fan of quizzes quizzes i think are extremely overlooked i i remember michael birch who was my investor from a previous company and he was the original founder of bib he he basically had soul he created a social network he sold it to take which was a quiz company and tickle was like a hundred million dollar company that was just doing quizzes like what breed of dog are you what you know what city would you be if you were a city that sort of thing like fun little quizzes and then they had some quizzes that were career quizzes that would help you get jobs and that's like where they made some money and then when he left there he was like i'm gonna start another social network and he's like i know i'm gonna seed it i'm gonna make a quiz and he created the best friends quiz which was how well do you know me and and so i would create a quiz i answer a bunch of questions about me and i'm sending it to my friends and say see to take this quiz see how well you know me and then the results were posted on my profile and he got a million members in nine days off this quiz oh and their profiles were filled because they filled in a ten twenty question and fill a questionnaire about themselves so now they had a full profile and they had the friends and it was crazy and so i've started to pay attention to quizzes i think you could create the adult quiz and go viral like kind of now of like you know what percent adult are you because i think most people in our generation kind of admit and acknowledge and laugh at the fact that we're like totally not adults even though our age technically class us as one and and so i think you could i think you use a quiz to get a bunch of people to just see like you know do you have life insurance like yes no i don't fucking know i you know like what is life insurance right like yeah exactly what is life insurance exactly and at the end of it you basically give them this little infographic that's like nine squares and the nine squares are like cool you have like enough savings for like three months of life if you needed it good you've checked that box of adult you don't have like health insurance you know you are an x year click here and we can help you figure out like why you need this how much it cost how you should do it depending on who you are and so i think you could kinda give people a report card and then let them click into like solve that problem for themselves and give them the you know education referrals that they need from there i love that idea also you hit on an interesting stat that i heard before which was validated by a couple companies as i was looking at that the longer the quiz the more likely people actually continue to answer revert one hundred percent crazy data points to kind of when people so for the hustle we get like ten thousand sign up today and we would ask them like question after they sign up and we would do like i'll would put two questions in and then and inevitably everyone the company was like oh that's already too many i'm like no no no put five and put five and then we put ten and i'm actually we had like thirty questions and it had like a ninety eight percent completion rate yeah the the more and not only that they actually interact with you more after they answer this which is really counterintuitive and a lot of like other people are like oh you know i wanna be too aggressive yada i'm like no well here here's how it works i've done this many i've tested the same thing many times because anyways i'll skip the story part but there's an entertaining also bib story for michael birch where he was like he put a red button i'm not skipping the story part i'm telling the story he put a red button on the site for one out of one thousand visitors i imagine going to facebook and just seeing a shiny red button in the corner for the first time and you click it and then the whole screen just went clear and it was like here's a cat click the cat and you click the it's like this is a bowl of pasta don't click the bowl of pasta you clicked it and and then it's like the cat's dead we told you not to click the bowl of pasta alright click the cat bring them back to life it was just a stupid thing that he had a hundred steps and what he learned just he didn't said this for fun just to mess around and what he learned was like the first the first button you know people will usually click out of curiosity but you'll lose like thirty percent of people who just don't click it because they're busy they just go do something else and then the second one you lose another maybe like twenty ish percent and then after that the people who get to step three like ninety eight percent of them will go all the way to the end because they wanna know how this ends and then we did the same thing for a charity project where we're raising money it was the exact same step thirty percent lost on the first one twenty percent lost the second one and then ninety eight percent finish the rest and so i've seen this several times and everybody in your team will tell you dude this is too long we shouldn't ask too many things wrong it works get as much as you can because once they get to step three question three they're gonna finish no matter how many questions are in the thing one nuance here that is a hundred percent accurate for consumer and a hundred percent inaccurate for b2b for anything enterprise shorter is better but i think on the consumer side i think there's two psychological things at play one people love talking about themselves and that's why we do all the quizzes but the second which i think sam was sitting on is if i've answered thirty questions i think what i'm gonna get after that is gonna be super valuable right because you know me now so whatever it's gonna be personalized it's gonna be valuable and it totally works what do you do at signal fire i i saw your title is it just venture partner i'm a partner so i invest but i also spend about thirty percent of my time leaving all the growth and go to market programs for the portfolio so it's kinda just me getting to exercise that muscle still sometimes i parachute in parachute out help them with some of the growth needs i have an entire network of freelancers contractors agencies for everything like hey i need a seo content writer or i need a tiktok video producer and so i can match make on stuff like that and we run a bunch of events and teach people how to do the stuff and are there like two or three partners and you're one of them basically means you're you're one of the owners you're you're you're one of the shot callers i i have investment power we'll put it that way yes i think there are five partners at signal fire absolutely let's do idea ideas sam no nobody cares about vc alright well no right but with this compliment which is you're like i'm looking me through these ideas you're like you're very amazing i've every one of these ideas is interesting i wanna go through all of them and they'll have me back on we'll do all of them it'll be creating let's do what kind let's do sn for adults what's this one i know what the sn is because i have baby sam doesn't sam do you what the sn is no okay i'll i'll explain the new so there's a company called the happiest baby and it produces a smart bassinet and what it does it's rocks the baby it has noise it can sense all this stuff and people swear by this sean did you guys use the like my kid is in it right now while i do the podcast so yeah the only reason i could do the podcast because the snow is basically babysitting sitting my kids so like you see this app and it'll basically saying like oh banks is calm it's like he's sleeping in there he's not crying if he cries it'll go to level two it'll rock more to try to get him to like chill out so it saves you the step of going in and like soothing the baby them or it's a same then it's a brand that will make noise and rock like a human and it's safe because there's a big like problem with something called sids but it's this it's a new a a a a category or a brand it's a brand it's a brand it's a brand and these things are incredibly expensive and you can only use them for a really short window of time and so there's a whole secondary rental market and resale market for these things but parents swear by this so okay let's apply this to the broad population of human adults we suck at sleeping and nobody has ever re thought sleeping from a first principles perspective i mean first off it kinda makes no sense that we sleep with another human in the bed quite frankly like i rollover over i grind my teeth you know i we have a dog in our bed too that kinda of makes no sense second i want something that is temperature controlled that rocks me and like knows is my my behavior that removes all light that removes my phone so i can't go and scroll on buzzfeed stupid quizzes at two in the morning why has nobody rebuilt the bed for humans and i think we have enough sensors we have enough smart connected home products today to do this so i would have been i would buy this i would have been skeptical about this but for three reasons a i've used the sn and i'm like oh i wish i had this like this is great b you've seen a rise in these like expensive at home equipment whether it's peloton mirror tonal like there's all these things that cost like eight sleep bed you know like things that cost thousands of dollars that you buy to improve one small aspect of your life whereas if you actually like if you told me there was genuinely a sleep pod that i could go into that would improve my sleep by even like twenty percent what's not really worth to me right like of course this is kind of a first world problem high class you know high class like product okay whatever yeah it is but i think that's worth at least five to ten grand right because that's it's eight hours a night every single night getting better which is making me healthier or happier you know like more productive the next day so i actually now believe that a product like this could exist i never used one of those google nap nap pods but like i feel like that's what this those were trying to be i think i would totally buy it you're spot on it's a first world problem but for all the people that are buying three thousand dollar bikes or like the five thousand dollar treadmill from peloton right that's the demographic here so i want somebody to build it that's what i will absolutely to do honestly like because they're not gonna find another bike like even the treadmill they're not gonna find another treadmill there's only so many of these like places to expand they should go straight to the bed and and create a the bed with a sleep subscription that's like the calm sleep stories layered on top of this well make a wellness brand out of it health is only one piece sleep is a huge component of wellness i totally agree with that can you talk a little bit about subscription running shoes because that i mean that interests me and i i have a few opinions but what what what is this so i'm a huge runner i think you are too sam and i also have an apple watch most people who are runners have some kind of connected device it's tracking all your steps and things like that and you're supposed to change your running shoes every three hundred to five hundred miles i have no freaking clue when my shoes have had three hundred to five hundred miles i can't even tell you when i ordered them also for runners you have a brand and a style of shoes you typically stick with i don't know any people my running friends who mix and match so i'm a brooks runner i use brooks adrenaline in eight and a half narrow every time i want brooks to create a subscription for me it hooks into my watch and my smart my smart device it says hey we're just gonna auto order you new shoes every time you hit like you can pick four hundred you know four hundred miles or x number of months and it gives me a discount because it knows i'm gonna be a customer for my lt tv just went up a hundred x because it knows i'm gonna continually order so a they're gonna get me to order more frequently i'm gonna be a super happy customer because i just get it in the mail they can start partnering with other companies and doing these bundled subscription products but to me this is such an obvious product that no brands done you can also partner with some celebrities and make it really cool don't know why this doesn't me you the low tech version of this yep yeah here's how you do this without the apple watch yeah you know like toothbrushes have the little strip the what the the the little blue strip that's like this is this toothbrushes is like you know been used way too much and like i like baby diapers have this do the blue little streak which tells you they peed this what you need on the bottom of the shoe the just bottom of the shoe needs to change colors as it gets worn out and then as so so you basically have a visual indicator that you have out worn this shoe it's time to order another and if i could put the promo code for your next order under the under the space what it wears away it's like it's time to reorder here's your code get your next shoe here's the problem with that though i know when my shoes are worn out my friends know when their shoes are worn out it's the fact that i have to go and be proactive and reorder that's the sticking point i just want it to happen i mean it's like the whole amazon button that they were trying to launch it's a q code you just hold your phone up to the shoe bottom and then it orders you the next suit that i like anything to remove friction i i want all friction removed i would love to do package show up how would this make money i mean because like if you're when i when i hear this i'm like yeah okay cool sounds great but as an outsider i'm like don't think i can make money doing this i telling no brooks like brooks weren't aren't you doing this this is for brooks this is not i don't think this it's an out of tell i was excited about this i thought triangle angle here here's is an idea you can offer this brand doing this right like correct you can start i mean if you look start brand i think is like on the on the upper five percentile of horrible ideas i get targeted on social media by and maybe i must've have clicked on one at some point but every variation of your all birds type shoes so like semi athletic i mean i've probably seen fifty so it can't be that hard to make the only way i think you do this as an independent company is you provide the picks and shovel infrastructure for every brand to do it so you go and sell to the brooks to the nike of the deed to the re i think that's doable right okay let's see we'll looked at one more idea that you have on here what's the best one that you sent in that we haven't talked about yet that you're most excited about this will be another fun fun one that's kinda on the consumer side so i had this concept called the punch and i kinda need to give the back here because this is actually funny and involves running so there's a nice tie in so like a year and a half ago right before the pandemic i was running in the mission in san francisco at like six in the morning and it was an area where there was no people i'm just kinda going and i have a green light i'm running through the middle of the street in the intersection and this dude in a super beat up jan car comes and turns right and like cuts me off and comes really close to hitting me and i kinda jump away and gave him the like what are you doing dude look and he rolls down his window and start screaming out and this is i don't know if you wanna leave this but he's like get out of the street you stupid fucking bitch and i was like holy shit and i'm not an aggressive person normally but i had a rough week and i was kinda on edge anyways and normally i just turned my head and run away but i had to take every ounce of restraint not to go and just kick the back of his car i was so pissed i just wanted to punch something and as i finally got smart and ran away i was thinking to myself there's something going on here which made me wanna go and punch his car or kick car and i was you know everyone always tells you to go meditate go download call go sit in a quiet room like great that's fine i need to punch something and so i wanted to go punch something and then metadata so the concept here and i think now is an interesting time because there's so much vacant real estate to is you buy up a rage there's so much rage rage so much don't forget that part so much rage high demand well there's also an established concept of these raid rooms smash rooms break rooms the problem with these are it's very dangerous you have to put on a suit you can hurt yourself there's a lot of liability and also there's a lot of cleanup so this is the exact like low tech version it's a padded room with padded walls punching bags things to like rip and pop imagine like stuffed animals you could tear the heads off and you go and you connect to a spotify rage playlist and there's a bunch you can choose from you go in for fifteen minutes into one of these things and if you guys have ever done boxing fifteen minutes you'll be exhausted yeah so you just get it all out for fifteen minutes and then they take you to the zen zone for thirty minutes where they have guided meditations and they have you know spa water and you can sit and meditate so you go and get it out then you center yourself and then you go back to work sam you're our resident ranger so how do you feel about this no that would make me way too met like i'd be like motherfucker don't i'm time to go this fucking thing i wanna smash your shit right now as i like i smashed stuff i i i like like i i do break what's the lowest thing you've thrown or broken out of rage well cell phone i mean i mean everyone does that do you tell my phone here everyone does not do brakes now i haven't done that my screen is is currently shattered i mean i'll just get angry and all and i and i do that as well but i i like and a lot of people tell you not to do that i think it's great like you're just like pathetic yeah you're just breaking a little thing that you could replace with some money and like not hurting i'll give you a a quick spin on this idea because i also think that the the timelines is like i don't wanna book and reserve the room by then it's all dissipate and now it's a task i don't wanna get it so yeah i'm i'm with sam that you need the instantaneous release so so the other thing i found interesting is there's a whole bunch of these like alternative alternative therapy things that i find interesting cryo when you go in and your your neck is out of it but your body is in this like kind of like i don't even know how low the temperature goes but it's like this very cold like kinda like liquid nitrogen gas that's put against your body supposed to be great for recovery there's the float franchise which is all about floating in this like saltwater bath where your weight list and you're in this light you know deprived pod and like an hour goes by and you like hall or whatever the hell else i don't know joe rogan talks about it and i have a friend who gave me a pass to go do this once and so they're awesome the flip foot team in the lane u never yeah have you heard of it yeah yeah there's one in the mission actually i walked by it all the time i have been to that one many times and so there's and then there's basically like there's a set of these kind of like alternative things and i wonder if you could create the equivalent of a gym membership that basically says okay instead of coming to this like a gym membership is a giant box that has all the heavy equipment you're not gonna buy for yourself but you can come here and you can use it and i wonder if you could do the same if you bundled these together where you bundled the different therapies together sauna steam cryo therapy float tank whatever and it's a gym with no weights and it's a gym basically for the brain to recover and to to relax and and you you you put up a whole bunch of these things together and maybe you create a different type of wellness like category would you ever do them back to back just thinking about what those all are would you go i'm gonna spend two hours intense i like what about what about a class pass for that kind of stuff because they're pretty niche today and they're expensive and it's also not like a gym membership where class pass had so many problems i could go into that but i was one of the earliest users and they lost so much money on me but ultimately they were hoping the vendors were hoping that you become a subscriber but for these things how often are you gonna go to a float tank or cryo as far or whatever so if it's more of a one off thing and you wanna try a bunch of stuff they could actually end up making money on that i actually started going quite regularly i think the difference between san francisco and where i live in so live in san francisco for eight years right around the mission is it's like kind of a pain to get from a to b you know because you have to make a an uber or a bus bike or bike although i hated it by han san francisco now that i live in austin ike i'll was just like it's no big deal able to like lee work at three and then go do the thing and come back by and be back by five we get some more stuff done and i do these cryo therapy which i to get think does anything but it's fun i do the float tank i love all that stuff i do think that can actually people would do that more regularly than new thing yeah if there's people go somewhat regularly or like smoothies or something i feel like that might work on a side note it i've looked into the economics of these things before very briefly but maybe we should do kind of a deep dive these cryo like places and float tanks places these guys do actually pretty well like if you just kinda wanted to if you wanted to buy essentially a high paying job for yourself you can you can get a location you basically buy one of these machines for three thousand dollars five thousand dollars and no no they print money i think they're right more i i looked at the cryo the cryo stuff and also the second one is these d scan places i love they it's just such it's like literally it's one employee and online booking contact those payments all this stuff so you basically have one person who's usually it's their it's their place sometimes they have kind of a junior person who watches it while they while they leave for half the day but it's very low labor and it's just the same machine that pays itself off in the first x uses and x can be you know might take one month might take three months might take six months max but these businesses are are pretty simple and can do quite well have you heard of that business called dex fit the one they're like guys in a van yeah they come to you yeah can do the next in front of like company buildings usually they're like hey come see how fat you are and then yeah you pay eighty bucks and you go get scammed or fifty bucks you go get they're the best i go i but i like for three months i leverage three bucks save i would like like a ten turn pass or something like that it was maybe fifty bucks a turn and you see progress they are so awesome it's i would imagine it's a pretty expensive machine maybe a hundred grand per van they're really amazing i would love to see what the revenue is and eventually they bought a they had a place right across the street from the twitch studio or where you know the studio sean that we would go to and it was like a crappy lobby with just like a cat scan and you would sit down in there and then you're out a few minutes i love that business i would i'm curious as to how they do elena you never seen this i i think i know what you're talking about i've never done it i'm curious with it isn't it telling you information you don't know when you do it the first time i get that that's a novelty but if you're doing it every three months do you not know how your body has been behaving for those three months it tells your body fat percentage right but like don't you know if it like what up this month well that's something that you wanna measure the progress right so like for example i'm working out right now my actual weight stays the same because i'm adding muscle losing fat and so i'm like fuck this doesn't i i want my score to show the progress i can see it in the mirror and my trainers i dude do you need this you just look in the mirror it's fine and like yeah that's true but i like the science of it too i'm like four i it's forty five bucks to go get dex can and so me my brother law's we kinda made a habit it out it and like we're just like okay we're gonna go get in every three months that how we measure our progress and like you know great we're down three percent body fat like let's do it again company that we're referring to it's called body spec so the worst body and then s sp c body spec and sam just so you know it looks like the price of these range from between sixteen thousand and forty five thousand dollars so that yeah not that bad and they like they're in like like a mercedes sprinter and they have like the car wrap so maybe a hundred grand total i think this is cool i love this company i don't know anything about their numbers but i think it it sounds so neat it's so simple the basis is also good because they can partner with gyms so they partner with crossfit they partner with you know trainers and they're basically like hey you send it a client you know you get twenty bucks out of the fifty bucks like like scan you know for the for every first time customer that you send in and so they have like kind of a built in referral system that makes some lot of sense i'm actually shocked to that you're not like bullish on this because when i go i sounds like sean and i are the same when i it's so rewarding like i'm pretty much working my ass off for literally just to go for like twenty percent body fat till like nineteen point five percent like i just think about that number of concept i think i'm just not the target demographic at all because i've always been extremely into fitness but i'm intrinsically motivated so i'm not that person cute you know what i was gonna say though a partnership opportunity for them is future fit because they're already charging people two hundred dollars a month for literally a digital subscription to a virtual trainer and you can bundle in a lot of these other services and things like that that to me feels like the demographic because the people i know that do future fit are the people that care about this stuff they wanna see incremental progress they wanna know their score constantly and they'll pay i use feature fit so there you go good job you're everyone keeps trying to get me to use it i'm like i don't need this like i i i just i'm very very competitive with myself i have a peloton which you can see in the back and i've always been a huge runner and my mom actually won this like four years ago and at the beginning i didn't use it a lot and now i've been doing a lot more cycling during the pandemic because i hate running with a mask and i've gotten so much better at the peloton i'm always trying to beat my own score i don't need to know i i remove the leader board and stuff i don't care about that but it's it's my own my own score one of your portfolio companies is called tempo sean have you tried the tempo it's awesome it so awesome it is so awesome of and you not tried this i haven't tried it you showed me the videos if you had in your garage you still haven't i bought one okay so a late they sponsored so i got paid money nice smooth their machine and then i moved and they freaking took it back i'm so mad at i'm like just sleep let me have they took it back after i used it and i was like on the number one i was at the time very very fit into that hit hit up and i was in shape and i was like number one of the category and i kept working my butt off to to do it and i just bought one the other day i think i paid eighteen hundred dollars it took eight weeks to get delivered and this for the listener is called tempo fitness or something just google tempo fit and it's basically like peloton but for weight lifting and for high intensity interval training it is so awesome so addict i like am building my work workout team strictly around tempo i it has it's like a mirror like the the mirror thing so it's freestanding it's not like tonal where have to wall mount it and it has i think a hundred and eighty five or close to two hundred pounds of weights and it's got these amazing instructors that do all kinds of these hit workouts we had one of the original beta units in our office and i was pretty much the only one that used it but i used it all the time i don't have room for it now but sean when our office reopen you'll have to come in and try love too that it sounds pretty good i remember sam the video looked cool i would say that the actual design of the box i don't know if you had like kind of a earlier version of what it wasn't as slick as like what a peloton or mirror and what whatnot looks like it's not entirely slick but i actually think they're making in there but but it has a sensor on it so it like try i could tell if you're lifting the weights and accounts for you so it's kinda of hard to cheat that's great but but it's like a cabinet where they store the weights and i think a lot of people actually already have the so wish they would tell it to me just so i don't have to use their weights well it uses computer vision to not only count the reps but it checks your form so let's say you're doing a curl and you're only going eighty percent up it'll call that out if you're doing a lung and your knee is going over your ankle and so part of the weight counting involves their own weights but all the other stuff it's essentially creating up like a dot matrix of your body so it's an but it can tell exactly what your form is so it's like a real time personal trainer there plus this celebrity trainer who's doing the class for you it's pretty freaking cool you gotta get one sean they're good it's it's it's worth it but there is another downside it's fifty dollars a month for a subscription subscription right they all are though i think that's crazy yeah so expensive and it's so expensive believe that i think it's a way too expensive for than a gym membership yeah i know you do that logic yeah yada yada you're you got my money i'm a paying for it but i feel like a scam not for the price of a cup of coffee a day you could transform your body yeah lip just by the way it's ten bucks a month so well but think okay think about the value you get from that verse essentially in my opinion future fit is paying for accountability so you're paying two hundred dollars a month for a person on the other end to like sort of care about you i get it but like i know what this cost them i know like i i already bought this two thousand dollar machine and and like give me a year's for at least they don't make a ton of money on the hardware part they're making money on the subscription well look i'd stop using logic on me and it just let me the angry that currency is not accepted we're like a vending shall as as long as he keep smiling in back out as long as you keep paying for it i'm okay i'm okay with a removing logic no i'm paying for another great one that you guys should look at is gotta you guys know we're too famous now we only use free shit that people give us we don't pay for anything anymore you you know how it works the more popular in richie git the less you pay for anything so i at this point i i don't pay for anything actually stop giving out my address because i was getting so much free shit and i was like wait maybe i shouldn't give out my home address to these like strangers on twitter so now i'm like i'm like no thank you i'm gonna get one of those celebrity youtuber po boxes it'd be like you know just send it to my manager and i send it to my po box say like hey out i would love to send you x y and z and you say yeah i i just gave him ben's address you're in like hey we share right right i just give him ben's address now i'm like give ben all the free shit and they're like well you're not in brooklyn i'm like yeah yeah i have a house of brooklyn you can send me all the stuff you don't want to especially if anybody wants like women to test stuff send it to me i'll take it i'm sure you're you got you i've seen your portfolio companies are bad at have so much great stuff yeah no follow me at z dot subs dot com z e l b y it's called three things every sunday i published three business ideas and they're i would say somewhat well researched and thought through but they're all fun and they cover pretty much every topic you can imagine and then also if you like un sexy businesses i do a podcast called un sexy and i just talked to founder is building in super random niches like chemical marketplaces or companies are growing the growth media for lab grown meat just super random stuff but i find it's fascinating like our sister from another mother you're honestly when i heard the podcast really early days i was like oh my god these are my people yeah you're you're great thank you for coming on alright see everyone yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a go less travel ever looking back