#198 - How to Build a Unicorn Around the NCAA Reg Changes

really heard this a bunch of times which is a lot of times as an entrepreneur you just need to be in the market you need to be in the game and even if your current thing is not working if you are aware of these like inflection points you're the perfect person to just shift over yeah i feel like i could rude to where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never look back right we had a good episode i think we talked about a lot of stuff what do we talked about talked about the zapier for sound we talked about yeah we talked about the opportunity now that college athletes can make money what are the business opportunities around that that just opened up and i think if you're interested in software i think sean you actually gave like one of the one of the better ideas in the last three months that we discussed so that's kind of interesting we talked about a a new company that's creating a search engine for company documents it sounds boring but it's actually could be quite a big business what else we talk about the last thing is we talked about this business model idea of basically go take the r and d that the big companies do and that they make custom software for themselves like the starbucks mobile app or the domino's pizza ordering app and then make that available to all the mom and pops so we did a bunch of examples of of that and where the sure might be alright listen up let us know how and then how you liked it my twitter is the sam par then sean's is sean vp alright what's going on no i'm in new york i i had a hell of a week but i'm here tell the story so i leave so i'm driving so i got this like nice car and i love driving it i and i'm living in new york for a few months i wanted to do that long drive because it fun for me in my car i'm ready i got my dog everything i get fifteen hours into the drive i get out of my hotel room and i have two spare keys on the same ring because you can't leave one of these fancy keys in the car otherwise the car won't shut right so when i go to the hotel i put them on this on on one ring and then when i get in the car i separate them i'm on the phone my mom first thing in the morning just saying what's up put my keys both of them on the roof for a second getting in the car start the car drive off sixty minutes later i stopped for gas and i go shoot the car telling me that i can't start it because the keys aren't here what the heck right where are the keys turns out i left him on the roof sixty miles back drove off and i go back to find him over many hours of searching for them someone ran over both the key fob so you actually found the destroyed team i found the destroyed parts and i had a locked bike my like nice bike was locked to the roof along with my fully like rack was locked in there i find those keys thankfully otherwise i gonna have to call the well there to like weld my bike off and like pop this lock open and i find those keys but my fob my eight hundred dollar i think they're are eight hundred or a thousand they're expensive completely smashed a bits i call mercedes they tow my car this is on a thursday they go we are not gonna get a new key in until thursday so i was week fuck you got you you're supposed to be new you're stuck in tennessee i'm stuck in texas to new york you get stuck in tennessee your car keys get smashed your car just sitting at a gas station and you can't get a new car key for a week and i'm with my dog too who's like eighty pound pip and i'm like dude what do i do and he's like well we could just store here so like well i'm gonna say tennessee for like eight days i tried to get a private flight i tried to fly because you can't fly with the dog eventually i like waited in line for hours to get take so for one of you i get a text message in on group chat that's like how much does a private jet cost what and and i need to get to new york i'm stuck here i can't get on a normal flight because my i have a eighty pound pit with me i don't wanna leave my car but i guess i have to and how am gonna come back and get my car very confusing situation it was a very confusing situation now let me tell you a few things that i learned and this is related to this podcast so i've flown private once or twice i've never paid for it it was just like a rich guy who i went along sure yes what i what i learned was so we have a friend in this group we don't have to say his name i don't know we could gone up but anyway he went to europe and he sent he goes i got a hotel that was three thousand dollars a night for three hundred and fifty dollars and i was like what how and he he sent me he sent us a out of the email and he emailed the general manager of hotel and he goes hey i'm i work at this company i'm gonna be there i don't i mean he said he worked at this company because it's a huge company it's just for clout but it doesn't really mean anything i'm gonna be there with my fiance my budget four hundred dollars a knife if you have anything available i would love it to stay in this room or this room right and he searches for all the five star hotels in that area and he just sends the same thing to all the general managers yes and then every once a while they give him a hotel so he's sitting in a three thousand dollar night hotel for three hundred and fifty dollars and that got me thinking so i googled nashville private airport and i was like look i wanna a private flight either like right now or first thing in the morning my budget is i'm willing to spend seven thousand dollars do you have any airlines or do you have any pilots that want some like quick work and they were like well like it usually really costs fifteen thousand dollars i was like look if you tell me what if you have someone who has work you tell me what's the like because like you think like private airlines like there's no room to h but it's like yeah they're they're just like small businesses and so they get me a quote and that it ended up falling through but i realized that you could they're like you know like they actually got another bid whatever so it didn't work out but i realized you could totally tag with these people it's it was so fascinating yeah the hotel thing's is great because i feel like anybody can do that and and you know if you have a little social media following or whatever i know instagram influencers do this i've never even thought about doing it i probably still won't do it because it it sounds like it's kinda time consuming but i thought that was pretty great that little tech that he uses i thought you know the situation when you got in a pickle you had to get creative and you probably like learned a bunch of stuff that you didn't know you know twenty four hours before that and never really would have paid attention to had you not done that like steve fob you know what to do when you're stranded private jets can you commission a private jet can you hop on to somebody else's thing like what are the other options you know you somebody like somebody from this podcast or the listener was like i'll drive your like hey when you get your key fob i'll drive it to you in new york if you like hang out with me for thirty minutes or something like that yeah i i saw i i don't know what i'm gonna do my it's not gonna be the situation i resolved till tomorrow so i gotta figure out what i gotta do coincidentally i have to be a natural for work august first ish there's like a podcast conference that hubs hubspot wants me to go to right so might fight on there and drop anyway crazy week but can i tell you a few things i noticed when so i've driven and then we'll get some we'll get to ideas but i i've drive cross country a lot i've done it a bunch of times i love doing long road trips in america and it's always fun to get out of our little silicon valley or new york or whatever like fancy tech guy bubble and a few things that like i noticed the first dude the average american eat so poorly and it text you say that well granted i am like on the road but like i i try to like actually go to these small towns but man like just seeing what i i'll just like go to a gas station or go to mcdonald's or i'll go to like a restaurant and i and i'll because i eaten in a parking lot with my dog and i'll just like sit at what and and just look at what people order and like the lines are packed for rallies or sonic man people this whole healthy eating thing that i think is popular amongst like affluent people i don't think it's popular amongst all types of people and that is crazy to me because they're just killing themselves you didn't see a lot of keto and intermittent and fast staying on the shred trip i'm i'm as what what i'm hearing no man just process foods and i'm not like the healthiest i mean i splurge i like diet coke and i'll eat mcdonald's but oh my god you're when you're driving you're gonna see it's like pit stops it's like here you stop here for gasoline you stop here for sugar you stop here for caffeine and then you just repeat that lube gasoline sugar caffeine gasoline sugar caffeine i'm just shocked at the i'm shocked at just how there are very few healthy options yeah it's amazing i just like when i i would go to like a fast food i'm like look dude just give me a grilled chicken breast and like vegetables so that's all i need by the way you had talked about vending machines before and then you're talking about this healthy eating thing i got pitch this company i don't think i'm gonna invest but it's called daily blends and what it is is basically it's a vending machine it's a you know healthy eating vending machine but instead of snacks it's basically just a meal and a jar and you push a button and it basically gives you a jar and the jar has like a ready made meal inside all you gotta do is kinda like put the dressing on top mix it up and then you're ready to go and the thing i think is smart is they are real they're basically doing big corporate partnerships so they're getting into like every hospital so like every hospital needs to be you know should they should a hospital really have a vending machine that's just like twig you know you know candy bars and like you know red bulls or should it actually have like healthy options and so whether it's like big companies big hospitals the sort of thing i can kinda sq my eyes and see like obviously it depends on the food and how that work but you know they're able to charge way more than a typical vending machine because people are getting like a healthy meal out of it and they basically have like a central kitchen they make all the jars and they go stock all their vending machines in that city and i think this is kind of a cool idea i'm not gonna invest but it reminds me a little bit about that that water company you know the like office water company that's done really really well i know if you're familiar like like a billion dollar company i forget starts with a b yeah yeah it's something bev bev is the name of it yeah so bev is like one of these genius things it's like hey does your office want like fancier water fountain good use a bev and they just get planted in every company and then it's just like a recurring charge the guy who qui the guy who came on to talk about vending machines he said that the thing is is that these healthy options like the the the the honey pot is at at we work where you have like a eight dollar sandwich but he's like basically like most of america just wants a monster yeah but i think i think that's fair but i think the one smart thing they're doing is they're going up there's like if you just take hospitals and airports and things like that like they kind of they're sort of inc to have like another option and a kind of a better option even just from optics point of view and so i think you could do pretty well just by getting prime placements through through that but anyways that's random tangent off of what you said about healthy eating on a road trip and then the last thing that i'll mention is i am so bullish on america over the next two years dude every rent a car place that i've gone to sold out like it's so hard to rent a car right i had a friend maybe it was your friend if someone don't know if you're part of the said that they had a hitch hike in hawaii because they couldn't get a rental car they had to just like hold someone we'll pick them up so rental cars are crazy i like to stay at motel sometimes i'll stay at like range from a thirty dollar night place to a two hundred dollar night place just like whatever i'm in the mood for all everything sold out the roads are packed every convenience stores packed i'm so bullish on america and i went and talked to some of my staff and some of my friends who are just like average americans they have saved a significant amount of money over the last years and they're all like i wanna i'm i wanna go buy something i need to i need to i need to spend yeah what was it after like the world war or whatever the roaring twenties it seems like we might have their roaring twenty twenties here where people are ready to travel they're ready to just go like kinda like max out all their experiences after being sheltered in place for you know a year plus sometimes and potentially saving money have you so i like went out and talk to people like like who i know earned between fifty to like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and i was like how much money of have you saved and like more than i've ever saved in in in years was like what you gonna and they're like i'm ready to i wanna buy a rolex or i wanna buy just so they wanna spend right so like my traveling lately when went to miami and everything we saw like it just consistently like i try to buy a accessories for my trip like a like a new rack for my car everything is out and i'm so bullish on america over the next two years so right that's just an interesting insight from travel you wanna talk about ideas yeah let's do it so i think the big one is this nc thing we had touched on this briefly but basically the law changed that allowed college students to make money off their name and likeness so previously your a college athlete sorry i should have said athletes you previously you're an nc athlete if you if you make money you lose your amateur status you can't play your sport anymore and you can have your scholarship sort of like revoked even potentially if you you you you you you've run a file of those laws so that changed and all of a sudden overnight a bunch of opportunities opened up right so this this thing that was just bottled up because of regulations and rules all of a sudden the court got taken out of the bottle and you get to see what was gonna happen and so i don't know if you've paid attention to this but i think we should do like a mini brainstorm on just what we see that's interesting or what you saw people doing yeah so can you explain the rule because i think that there's some stuff around it like you can't actually can you not make the money yet is it like put like you can't access the funds is is there anything weird like that i don't know about that i think they they they they definitely started getting like signing contracts and getting paid i don't know what the i don't know what the nuances of the the fine print of the law is i i didn't look into that so i had this sweet mate in college so if you google pure sweat have you heard a pure sweat basketball pure sweat so this guy named drew handler he's from my hometown drew like yeah he's the a trainer like on instagram that you always see whatever every and nba yeah so that i've known him since i was a kid and he was my suite mate in college so new high school and then we went to college together and i was i was a track and field athlete he was a basketball player in college and he was my sweet mate so we i got to know him quite well and he'd be working on this thing called pure sweat it started out just as like a binder of like paper binder full of workouts that he would sell like fifty dollars to kids in the neighborhood and then eventually he like made a website and an app and i don't know how successful it is but he was always working at night and the thing he didn't drink or he didn't party and was always working on pure sweat and he eventually after college started training what's that guy like the greek creek or whatever and then not like yeah brandon deal bradley deal because he's from saint louis david lady zach levin jordan yeah like trains all these guys and i have i've always i i'm i wasn't close enough to ask him but i was like i wonder how much that pays but anyway he has his app that's like a hundred dollars a year and in college i like we i was a college at visual college athlete i wasn't like a even remotely a big deal but they make you sit to these seminars on how you are are allowed and are are not allowed to use your image or your name and he was in that office all the time because he was he was wanted to make sure he was following the rules because he had this business pure sweat so he couldn't sit like he i think he was allowed to say like this is true handling from belmont university or whatever but anyway this guy crush it i bet i bet she makes five to ten dollars a year off little business and i have a feeling and by the way do you know that like these like summer camps for basketball programs that's the money maker yeah my i have friends at run these that's the money maker and these guys my friends they were they paid by the hour i think but i think they were getting paid like fifty to a hundred dollars an hour like something crazy in the program makes so much money from these cans so what i think what what i what i think is an easy opportunity is you're gonna see loads a little pure sweats which is like a a really simple app that just has basketball workouts that you pay a hundred or two hundred dollars a month or a a year four i i have to imagine you're gonna see loads of that that's just such an easy low hanging fruit my best friend trevor he was a kid from wyoming sort of like a five foot nine on a good day white kid who when i got to duke i had found out oh the roommate i got randomly matched with he's trying to walk onto to the basketball team so i'm expecting this like six eight black dude to show up and instead of this five nine white guy shows up from wyoming and i'm like no no my roommate is trying not for the basketball team i don't know who you are but he's like no that's me and you know this guy was kinda like a drew han type of guy super hard worker amazing shooter you know like whatever you would expect so he was like the best high school basketball player in wyoming comes to duke and tries to walk on ended up long story short didn't end up making the team he was like the last guy cut and then you know stayed on a sort of like water boy hoping for his like rudy moment and then like that never came out like some the a a spot opened up and then they took some other guy because his dad is like super rich and he's a booster of the school and they put him on the team instead and he was like fuck this but anyways in the summers what he would do is he would go back to wyoming and people knew him there they were like oh you you went to do you're you're you were like a legend high school basketball here and he would run these camps in every single day he would have basically like three camps running simultaneously each kid just pays a hundred dollars he was under pricing at like crazy and you would make his whole year's worth of money in like a two and a half month period and then he spent the other nine months out of the year just traveling around learning stuff and then come back and do it again the next summer because he had that brand affinity the way that you're talking about that local brand affinity so i wanted to go over a couple things i saw happening so the first thing is cameo was a winner so winners and losers so so cameo is a winner all of a sudden every athlete just put themselves up on cameo and if you go to cameo i like nc page you'll see you know they already cameo already has an nc page they already have an nc page they're we're ready to go and this is like you know one of the easy way celebrities make money there's like you know seventeen pages of of of people available on the nc page like yeah that's so funny and they're also cheap it's like twenty five dollars yes right because they're like oh sweet that's you know three meals from me on campus here okay so the second is did you see what bar stool did yeah so bar stool sponsored an athlete for gambling right so so dave fortnite i i don't know the exact story but i saw i was just sort of following this on social media he goes he's like emergency press conference he goes on online and he just says i'm announcing bars tool athlete what is that i have no idea and like that was like basically as an emergency thing and so then somebody so some athlete message i was like i'll be the first parcel athlete and he's like okay great we got this you know like whatever some some volleyball player girl from this college she's our first parcel athlete somebody he tweets it out you know then more people start rolling and he's like i i even say what this is yet and so then he goes he goes on on for a second video and he goes listen a lot of you asking how do a couple of bars stool athlete if you play division one sports and you blink at me i will sign you send you a t shirt you want pizza you want camp i don't know what's gonna happen here we may just become the most powerful agency in the world here and so i actually think that like that that legitimately could happen because now the athletes can have lawyers they can have agents that are helping them with their brand deals and boris stool is just their they're ready to take advantage of this they have that brand that's super loved amongst college you know athletes and so i think they're gonna do really well out this so i would say they're another winner that's that that we talked about the four levels of luck that's level four luck where your reputation is such that luck finds you so that's what's gonna happen the best athletes are gonna wanna work with bar stool just because of their reputation it's almost boring to discuss the ideas this because it's obvious so you just look at what i mean it it's just they're they're now professional athletes almost that anyone has but what i think is interesting is this idea of inflection so like there's these cultural things that happen well it's not sometimes it's cultural sometimes it's political sometimes there's techno technology driven but mike maple who we have in the podcast actually has a blog post where he talks about inflection because i look for inflection so it could be everyone has an iphone so now gps is possible or we were able to build this technology to making gps possible so that's a a cultural inflection or like you know being gay is cool now or not cool but it's accepted so now like having like a gay dating app or whatever you know like that's like a cultural shift or weed is no longer frowned upon that's a cultural inflection now what there's also regulation in political inflection one of them being about two years ago when telemedicine the law change although it's changing back that provided a huge gap this is a perfect example of a regulation slash political inflection and that that big businesses are built in times like this i'm not gonna be the one because i don't care about this but this is the type of inflection that we're gonna look back same with sports gambling you know yep what would those guys have been at for years and years and years and it and it was pretty horrible businesses i believe for a long time something changed boom they took off same with u they weren't allowed in new york they weren't allowed here something changed boom they're allowed this is one of those moments that we'll look back on in twenty years and be like think of all the businesses that came from that one ruling yeah there's a couple examples of this so with you know gdpr this is the like kind of like privacy this the thing where you go to website and that says we're want we wanna you know use cookies to enhance your experience you you're like okay except cookies and so this is a you know a law change that happen and then you saw companies come out of this that were like i think pretty pretty big companies so one of them is one trust so i think one trust is like over two hundred million in annual recurring revenue it's probably fastest growing enterprise saas company in the last ten years and it's basically it's gdpr compliance as a service hey big company you are not set the way you set things up are is not compliant with the new laws you can get smashed for not being compliant here it's gonna spend your it's gonna take your team of lawyers and engineers in your company like weeks if not months to just understand the laws then make the changes so that you're compliant like we can do this for you and so one trust you know already had a five billion dollar valuation in less than i don't even know when gdpr came out that's like i know five years ago or something yeah so so that's kind of like an exact great example asana was another one this a company i wanted to invest in in that same space because that regulation change made that happen another one united health so when obamacare kicked in companies like i think oscar and united health i don't know too much about this space but what i do know is if you go look at the stock chart for united health it's like flat flat flat flat flat oh something happened at like two thousand and like nine ten range what happened oh you know like as the as obamacare kicked in the stock price went from like twenty four dollars a share to four hundred dollars a share now and so you know that was a better investment than amazon google netflix whatever during the same period of time because they were well positioned to take advantage of the new law changes so one of the law changes that i think you could take advantage of here is there's the obvious ideas which is great you're an agency for nt athletes like what we're talking about var or your cameo right you're a platform where they can go on and monetize their their name and face another one is these athletes have to report the deals that they're doing to their school so you can't just do like anything you have to report it i can tell you what most of these athletes are not gonna do a good job of keeping track of all their deals how much i paid what the date was what the terms were and all the collateral they're gonna need to report this and the schools are gonna need it to report it to the nc or somebody who builds that back office sort of reporting tool that underlying infrastructure layer that's gonna become incredibly valuable a way to think about that is like carta or or angel list like these underlying platforms that sit underneath the the the entrepreneur and so that's one that's one opportunity that i could see taking off i think that's the best idea that we you've had in a long time alright i'll stop there i won't give you more i don't know what like the total addressable market is for that but like i mean it's enough well just i mean what's happening right now by the way diversity just just spend tens of thousands a year for your software like that's it's there's enough and you'll be sticking right and you'll become the system of record for all these things they're not gonna wanna switch two years in because this other system of record has a new feature so if whoever gets plugged in as the system of record has the opportunity to like own that data your you're entrenched in all these universities we're not looking to take a bunch of risk and then you could build on all the add on services so you could build on other things that allow you know whether it's banking or it's contracts or it's marketplace for deals whatever you could build all that on top of the data record record book you know what i just realized now this company that uni and i invested in there's actually a lot of competitors but we invested in this company called stan yes i don't even know the url it's like stand with dot me stand with dot me and basically what it is is you you put a link in your twitter bio or your linkedin bio you click that link and it's like link tree where you see like five different pages you can click off too but it says like book a call with me sell you this thing it's it's basically for commerce you know like giving you money for an exchange for some type of whether it's time or document perhaps we'll see those type although i don't necessarily believe that that will be the case but this thing might like impact that business but so i think there's a bunch of cool inflection here and this whole like idea of inflection i think there's a lot to learn from i was just reading about thomas edison and basically he was like look i just invented this light bulb it's gonna work it's amazing but there was no power at the time and he's like well we can power it by putting up these these wires i go from house to house to a house and the government was like no we're not doing this and so one day he hosts a dinner and he goes i want all you guys to come to this dinner and they come up to the dinner and there's no lamps so it's pitch black and they're sitting there they're like what the hell are we doing and then he just flips the switch and boom his lights come on automatically and there's waiters there ready to greet them and they're like and he's like this is how people are gonna live from now on and they go oh great okay fine well we we will allow you to put electricity throughout manhattan in the smaller area to test it out and so this idea of an and and that is by the way i got chills while you're telling that story i love that and that is how ge came to be eventually was in a bunch of these companies that thomas edison had on you know he was involved in a little bit of everything and so anyway not i you tweet something that thomas edison invented at the word hello yeah so basically before edison people would say greetings or good afternoon like hello wasn't even a word in fact the word hello it it was pronounced a little bit differently it was like hello or like something silly like that and when he invented the phone he was actually partially deaf and also the phones weren't very good so he would call like an operator in order to set this up and they would have to think of a word to say to be like the greeting on the phone and he was like well the word hello i can actually stream that pretty easily and so i'm gonna start saying hello like it was hello it was like originally it was meant to like as a as a word to like say oh you surprised me hello you surprised me you know and so that's how he started saying it and then once people started using the phone they started saying it and the phone got better and then it just became a hello wow and that's that's how the word hello came to be and then anyway this idea of inflection are actually really interesting so there's all types of moments where these things are capable and and i think that this nc i thing it's interesting the idea you said is interesting but the concept here of inflection is actually more important because we're actually seeing it happen right now and by the way i hear this so often two two two examples come combined one i was talking to this guy jesse p who we should have on the podcast know him he lives in saint louis it's right and he was telling me his story you know oh how how'd you build your company he built company am and it was like this digital marketing agency that was working with dol shave club at blue apron and all the big brands and so and they eventually sold it and so one of the things he had says he's like yeah you know we were just doing this other thing and was kind of wasn't working and then that's when you know like that's when whatever the facebook platform launched or facebook announced you know on news feed or google launched adwords or whatever there's all these like moments where new thing comes into existence he's like well like this thing we're doing is not working so like let me go jump on that and and the same story is true for for our friend su who he was like yeah i quit my job at microsoft i wanted to go be an entrepreneur i didn't know what i was gonna do so i i moved back to my parents house and like that day that i moved in i was you know just browsing the internet i saw that facebook launched this new platform app platform so i was like okay cool like let me try to build an app today and he's like i didn't know if it was gonna be a thing but like he was one of the first app developers on there built a simple dumb app and like immediately started to like go to fly on facebook because facebook was that good of a like platform and it was so new that people wanted to play with the new thing on the platform and so that was like their start and i've really heard this a bunch of times which is a lot of times as an entrepreneur you just need to be in the market you need to be in the game and even if your current thing's not working if you are aware of these like inflection points these shifts these platforms shifts or or big changes either in law or technology or open platforms things like that you you're the perfect person to just shift over because you're kind of like already jogging you're not at like a cold start you're not like at a job where you gotta decide if i quit or not and and you weren't so successful at your current thing that you're that you were married to it so you hop on over and i've just heard this many many times over this same same model of like yeah i was doing this thing i wasn't really working that great and then boom i saw that facebook ad platform launched so i made an ad for t shirts and i started selling like crazy and then i started you know then you know those are the glory days and it's it's all a downhill from there but and we are seeing start we're seeing these actually constantly so like there's a thousand examples that we could just give that just happened in the last five or ten years i mean you said facebook you said google you said there you could say the same snapchat club house likely won't pan out but that was definitely an opportunity to have one nc double thing the medical thing where now doctors could practice remotely because covid i mean by working remotely i mean there's just it happened constantly what i like to do is i'd like to read political po political is a cool site that tells you on regulation updates that's a great way to learn about these but there's like loads of different inflection and they happen consistently and you you could be an insider to have to see some of so like you know if you're not working in tech you're not gonna see like the the power of facebook early on but like a lot of them are actually like the the information is oftentimes blatantly obvious it's not obvious that this is gonna be the one but it's blatantly obvious like alright this could be inflection right yeah and it goes back to that same two by two matrix this athlete thing is is basically it's new problem like like all of a sudden a whole bunch of people have a new problem these athletes have to keep track of the records they wanna make money they can now do this and there's gonna be old you know you can take some old solution and repurpose it for for this new opportunity there's new problem that that exists in the world and so alright let's move on let's do another one do you have one or you want me to do so i just found this company and i actually heard of it for a while i'll tell you two interesting companies that i i discovered the first was it was it's called n dot com before this it was called fyi i think yes so the reason why i came i i found this do you know who heat and shi i know he yeah i invested in europe by the way oh you did yeah oh sick alright well we could talk about it so heat and shot so there's this guy named neil patel who's like the face and if you are probably a little bit younger than me then you probably don't know who he is but if you're about my age or older you probably know who who neil patel he had this amazing blog called quick sprout and this was like if you wanted to learn anything about search or google his blog for somehow i don't know how he managed this covered pretty much everything and he built a huge blog for seo and it became a huge business and he launched loads of different software products on top of it well he and shah was his right hand man and probably the operator behind and the brains behind us he just launched this new business a while ago and i had i looked at my old messages i had dm him two years ago when we first launched it but i didn't have any money at the time and i was like dude this is amazing and so he changed name to n and it's really simple what it is is basically if you are a company like hubspot so you have thirty or three thousand employees or the hustle when we had just ten employees even when you have ten employees my current gmail has a hundred gigs full yeah let's say you do times ten that's a thousand gigs that's like a terabyte i believe of of data that's like hundreds of thousands of documents and images and whatever it's really hard to find all of those images but also it's hard to know who has access to all these things so for example you have this document called salaries and you must have like accidentally said like shared to everyone who has access to this to this folder you don't fucking see that or if someone quits you they still have access to yeah this document called passwords like stupid stuff yep well heat built this software that i didn't even realize this was a problem and i mean i have had this problem but i'm like oh this is actually a great thing that you could sell it was where blind spot you're just like oh this is just the way the world is you know it's just like a problem you live with until somebody says by the way you know we you can you could stop that right and like and so he's been working about but here's so so anyway it's the the the product is is interesting but that's not even what i care about it's basically just a search engine for an entire company's documents well that okay so that's what it originally was that's the that's what fyi was which was like a quick way you just type in you don't need to know that the doc is in like normally you wanna find a doc you think oh that's in in google drive or that's in dropbox or maybe it's an asana so i need to go find this thing so what he made was just like one search bar to go find the document across all your cloud and i think you know after a bunch of trial and error and customer development you found out that that's not the problem we're solving the problem we're solving is that second part you talked about which is the security if you go to neuro dot com it just it just says protect your company documents from unauthorized access which is exactly what it said like says and that's the problem you were talking about right like i just brought somebody on board and they were showing me you know like a spreadsheet from a previous company that they worked at and i was like who you still have access to this and he's was like yeah i don't know like i'm not obviously i'm not doing anything bad with it but like yeah so fucked up you shouldn't have that you know that's like they're kpis and i i'm guilty of this too like you said like you share one thing with a e with a group or a list and now they have a bunch of stuff or somebody leaves and they shouldn't have it or you're sharing it with some vendor and like they vendor has access and it's it it is impossible to go through all your documents that are in the cloud and make sure that who has the right thing and so n solving that problem by creating like one interface so i think that's kind of a like a pretty genius problem like a problem that they identified that's where solving i think every this is a every company problem as far as i'm concerned and all growing i wanna explain why first of all how how'd you hear about this because your friends are heat he holler at you yeah loosely he if we're not buds but he's like we're cool with each other and then i saw this i was like that's dope how did you see how are you know of us friends with them and he like i how we talk for chat with him and so i saw he was talking about there oh my god that's so funny you're you're in on everything he but there's a few things that's interesting first of all like i i'm pretty positive this has i mean he could screwed it up and and i mean like there there's execution risk risk here but i think like it's gonna be pretty big like if as long as i just have c plus execution but what is interesting to me is and this is out of my world you know you and i do stuff that we come up with an idea and we can make money off of it in five days but it can also like go away pretty easily k he's been working on this for two years before he's getting any customers with like ten employees because in order to sell these enterprise contracts especially to the it department where everyone's like up tight as they should be you have to everything's gotta be buttoned up and it's really cool that i get intel or insight into that because i normally don't ever see that you have to have so much patience to build these saas tools and so i don't think i'm cut out for it but i thought it was really interesting specific the the enterprise ones right there's two types of saas there's like bottoms up where it's just like kinda like consumer like oh you just have this cool product a developer hears about you pm here's about you they just sign up themselves and you're hoping it kinda spreads viral throughout the the company because the product is so it's product driven growth and then there's enterprise sales enterprise sales is basically saying i need to go be able to knock on knock on the doors of people at the right people at at the top of a company i need to be able to sell a product for over a hundred thousand dollars a year eventually and and that's my that's my game and i'm gonna the sales cycle might be six to eighteen months and i'm gonna do what i can to accelerate that but in reality that's just the way these companies move and i'm with you that that is not the dna i have that's not where i would be that's not where i would be strong but other people you know they who do it obviously enterprise sales is like extremely valuable when you can when you can do it yeah so i just wanted to bring this up because it was interesting to like talk to him and like yeah we've we're working for two years doing this our roadmap is this and that is just not really what we talk about a lot of like this like epic planning and like really like alright in three years hopefully we'll be here right next in two quarters we'll be at this and i actually think that that's good i i wish i were like that a little bit i'm not but i thought it was a crazy fascinating to see how you have to sweat the details so much before even get a customer and you just spend so much money right you know ten twenty engineers to do this so i just wanted to bring that you wanna do another one yeah let's do one i think i said this once before on the pod i wanna do i'll i'll do it quickly you tell me if we've already talked about it but it's this idea of zapier for sounds have i talk do you know which idea i have here you didn't bring it up last time but i i've heard this phrase before from zoom i don't think you the one who kind of really highlighted zapier to me right i was using it i zapier for all i knew might have just been like two dudes you know who built this as a side project and they're kind of and they're on hackers dot com bootstrapping and they're at you know eight eight thousand a month of mr no zapier is like a billion dollar company multi billion dollar multi billion dollar company that was largely bootstrap i think i think they they got there is a million dollar in funding and use that million dollar in funding to get to a billion dollar status right so so pretty free and impressive and when you go to the product it's took a very simple things zapier api just lets you say hey i was just it's like a pipe it's so it just connects two different services so you might say hey whenever somebody signs up for my on my website for my mailing list put them into this spreadsheet or like send me an email and so you're just connecting like gmail and your your your website or you're connecting like whatever shopify and slack so you just connect you you just create these little formulas if this happens then do this and so that's what zapier is and zapier has become very very successful obviously because people want that they they wanna say okay they wanna basically nobody wants to build anything it's like there's a million to there's a tool for everything but they don't speak to each other so the zapier is like a connector between tools anyways zapier for sounds what is it so my friend sami your had this idea and sami ba and he was gonna do it and then he like found a better opportunity like there's a fast growing startup and he joined as like a exec there instead and i was like dude i love this idea i i agreed for like i put like a one and a half year embargo on talking about this idea because i thought he might do it at this point i'm pretty confident he's not gonna do it but the what vi outline was pretty damn good he goes every team every company has something in there some event that happens in their company that they celebrate for the hustle it might be getting an email subscriber maybe it's getting a new advertiser to come on board or selling a trend subscription and but like wouldn't it be great if there was just a sound right the old kind of like in the most offices there's like a gong you i bet you guys had a gong or your sales off yeah you have a gong you have a gong you walk literally you go you make a sale or you stand up you walk to the gong you grab the thing and you hit it in everybody knows boom the good thing has happened and in our office we used to manually wire this up we we built a charity product and every time somebody donated it would go chi ching on the like speakers in the office you would do that until it gets too annoying and then you kinda turn it off if it if it gets like too frequent and so i really like this idea of basically taking any service you have maybe it's stripe maybe it's your email list maybe it's your your your bank account whatever and and anytime the good you just basically create these formula you say if this good thing happens play this sound play it on my phone as like i essentially like a ringtone and you know or play it on my sonos speakers or whatever in in my office and so the cool thing that you could do with this is i think that's a pretty simple problem and i think people would like that they'll be able to hook it up but it actually gets pretty sophisticated because you can't what you can't do is you can't say like hey you know what at the beginning notify me about everything and then as it gets more mature what you really want is to say hey when we get if we had a hundred subscribers today play that out i wanna know when we hit a hundred for the day right because everyone now it's too annoying it's too frequent so let me set this better rule so there's nothing that lets you set those rules so i think there's a very simple company to build here that's zapier for sounds that could be a saas company that you know i think it could do few million dollars a year but maybe it's more like zapier maybe this is a bigger problem than i would have otherwise expected and could get into the tens of millions or even a hundred million dollars of revenue just celebrations as a service what do you think alright what my reply is gonna sound like a tangent but it is not so again i'm on this edison kick i'm reading all about and in the biography when he created the pho photograph so basically a record player people are like why are you wasting your time on this stupid toy like this is not interesting this is not gonna help anyone this is so dumb this looks jan and obviously it wasn't right it changed the world and it was the first time that anyone had ever heard someone's voice before besides you know just talking and a lot of really cool ideas that great people have or or ideas that turn out to be amazing whether it's airbnb uber they sound like these stupid dumb things you're actually particularly good at finding things that are toys or silly on the surface and making the case for why this guy actually be huge and big and you're because you kinda default to optimism what is your default to optimism on how this could be big because my default is this is such a silly i i'm i'm i recognize that i default that but i and although i'm trying not to my default is this is just a what like what that's such a small silly thing tell me everything yeah i think it probably is a small silly thing but i like things that for sure can win at the small scale and there's a hey who knows path that you can go down because i think most things that end up quite big they typically will start with what looks like a kinda humble humble level of ambition right facebook it's a college network for harvard and then oh maybe it's a it's a social network for all colleges and then it becomes now you know they literally just are building this like internet pipe in africa to basically bring bring internet to more people in africa some more people can use facebook right like their ambition was progressively growing there's interviews of z early on when they're like oh are you gonna expand to high schools he's like nah i don't know i mean like does it have to it could just be a cool college thing right that was z then and z now is like you know let me take over the the the universe and so i think i like ideas like this that that will start small the thing that gives me hope that this might be big bigger than you think is every single company i know wants to celebrate their wins and morale goes up when you celebrate your wins and so if you can come up with simpler ways to celebrate progress i think it'll make happier companies and i think that managers will want that want that option or want to be able to configure that option so that yeah everybody feels a sense of progress everybody feels a sense of of a boost as you know like you used to say every emails we're a pirate ship and every email subscriber is a little bit of wind in our in our sales right so how do you make it actually feel like that versus just sitting in every day in the office and only focusing on all the problems and all the things that are broken i actually think that there's a a great lesson here i didn't use to think about this way when i was a little bit younger and now i'm i'm changing but why i remember when i first started creating stuff and i see a lot of people who are early in their career of creating stuff they think like the market's like too saturated like no one buys courses or you know there's already like clicks ads no one clicks ads but what you actually just did was interesting is you looked at the macro like the the high level like human beings do want this so you so the way that you just described it you goes you go everyone i know all companies wanna celebrate a win like we all know celebrating a win is first there is great we also know that a lot of them celebrate a win with a sound therefore it actually is plausible that this could be interesting and i think that that's far more productive and helpful than starting the other way around so for example i would justify a course like we all know that people wanna learn how to do this we also know that a lot of people buy stuff so like it's pretty just that if i execute well people will buy this and that's like an easy way to like back yourself into like of course this can succeed that can succeed a lot i don't know but and i think that that's actually a really interesting way that you tend to look at things and that's cool that's cool alright let's do one more one more idea right now do you have one or do you want me to do one i could tell you one and i don't wanna make this all about stuff that i'm investing in but so i i will disclose i am investing in this but i actually i'm not entirely sold on the idea i'll say that so click that website state dot rent k i'm on it so let me just tell you what i see first reaction it says cash back for rentals is here pay your rent and get cash back at a home or office that offers steak okay so what does that mean okay so there's this guy i don't even know his name i barely talked to him but he created the rewards program for am and a couple other airlines and so these reward programs they give you stuff in order to make you happier so you wanna stay with am so discounts to stuff to in order to you know when you sign up for am you you get discount for movie tickets or on your insurance and so he was thinking and this guy knows nothing about real estate i don't i don't think so and he was like we should you actually do this for rent when you think about it a lot of actually renters or or or landlords actually do this so they say i'm gonna give you a months free or two months free have you seen signs for that yeah it's it's especially to start your lease yeah yeah so it's very common so they're already doing that and he was like you know if you give someone one month free that's eight point three percent of annual rent that you're giving someone a year right if instead you made it so you get three or four or five percent cash back every month that you pay your rent on time that's actually kind of an interesting way to build loyalty amongst the renter and in it's like a smaller you know it's like a gold start like sometimes sean might be happier if i give him a gold star versus like giving them a hundred dollars right you know what i mean okay that's interesting and so the math i mean three percent every month would add up to more than eight for the year so how does the math work is it like more like one percent cash back basically or what yeah it it it it it's a smaller fee i i don't know what the what the exact fee but you it's usually less than let's like less than six percent a year gotcha and so it's something like twenty dollars a month but it and they get that money if they pay their rent on time and basically they're proving to the landlord hey look if i give if i help your renter if i if your renter feels like i'm getting a bonus for paying my rent on time every month i will lower the the i will lower your your sort of defaults and your late payments on rent by side just a little bit yeah if they can show that one behavior then they can go to every landlord and say the same thing that's the idea exactly and i thought that was kind of interesting and the reason why i thought was interesting is there's actually a few things i don't look i don't care about the state that rent whatever who who cares what there's a few things interesting here one what i like is a guy with no experience in real estate but experience with human behavior being around loyalty and looking at different places to apply that that ent me i lost my train of thought but but that's really interesting to me oh and the second thing is when i heard this idea i'm like well is like this doesn't seem like a groundbreaking idea like this seems shockingly obvious and easy to pull off why isn't anyone doing this part of me was like well if no one's doing it there's a reason why no one has done it right yeah like that's one side of things the other side of things is like maybe there's isn't the right outsider so i thought this was like an interesting idea do you think that this this can work yeah i think this could work i i i think it's hard because if you it depends on your worldview like the first time i heard about what called lay away you know you know about lay away and this and it doesn't really exist much anymore it sound like privileged i think it exists i think it exists in a big way still so i think at like you know i i think it was more popular years and years and years ago like when i my dad you spent me all time when was a kid he would do lay away right so so basically lay away i i didn't know about this but basically let's say you go to a walmart and and you go walmart you wanna buy something you don't you don't have the money to pay the whole thing you basically say i wanna put this on lay away and you it's what i thought was gonna happen is it's more like those you know buy out pay later type of things where it's like think a bit if yeah like it's like a firm or something like that where you you buy the thing and instead of paying the whole hundred dollars upfront you make four payments of twenty five bucks and you you pay it over time but you get your thing from day one with lay away from what understand is the exact opposite lay away you just put the thing on hold there and then you come back every month and start making your payments until you own the thing so it's like kind of like it's like doing a chore in a way right it's like it's like telling your parent hey if like i will i will work hard for four straight months in order to get this thing and so this is apparently like a very big i shoulda looked this up i know we're gonna talk about it but lay is actually like a pretty huge part of like the economy especially in in re in like kind of like lower end retail like walmart and stuff and so so i thought that was kind of interesting and and it got me thinking about like all these little like incentive structures around paying for things so what you're talking about is incentive structure for rent there's other incentives around rent like i don't know if you've seen have you seen rhino it's like a rent service basically you pay your rent and you build your credit by paying my i love those i i i wanted to do one of it so it's say rhino dot com i wanted to use one of them because for years my credit was only okay because i didn't have credit but i'm like it's bullshit that your rent doesn't count as credit yeah so so i don't know if that's what ryan does but some people do that then then what rhino is doing is they're basically like they looked at what most people when you go rent a place you put the first or the first and second month's rent down as a deposit and they're like dude that means there's like x hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that are just deposits that are just locked away and so and so in so basically what they created i think was like an insurance product that said hey you don't have to pay you don't have to pay your you don't have to put a thousand dollars down as your deposit instead you pay five dollars a month as an insurance policy and we will we will cover the landlord if the deposit ever kicks in and you get to keep your money instead of putting down thousands of dollars as a deposit and having that dead money just locked away for a while and i thought that was a i think that's what ryan does now but there's always like little interesting things around either real estate incentives another one i wanna tell you about is smile dot io o have you ever seen this probably not it's more of a e commerce thing but i'm right now i'm in the process of designing like a loyalty program and so when you when you said this thing about the guy who did it for am that's interesting i was just researching am is loyalty like the psychology of these programs if i let me let me read it so yes smile dot io o turn your hard earned sales to repeat customers maximize your customer acquisition efforts and turn transactional sales into passionate brand i don't really know what that means so do this instead go to this website and just look at the bottom left where it says where it says give ten get ten give ten percent get ten dollars well i see three for forty at the bottom left see see there's a little pop that says good ten get ten so in this is too things so this is powered by smile dot io so basically what smile that i o is they're going to e commerce stores and they say hey you should have a loyalty program you should have a referral program just like starbucks and am and these companies that spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours fine tuning and designing this thing we'll just make it like a shopify app for you and so what does the shopify app do so basically you go on and it's like you wanna referral program cool here's the thing that will be on your site so any customer comes in they know that if i share this a friend i get discount and they get a discount so created a two way reward system the second thing is if you scroll down there's like a little like points program in this case it's called bubbles but but a the points program basically says here's how you earn points you follow us on instagram you like our stuff you buy you for every dollar you spend in the store you get five points tell us your birthday well if you if you create a birthday we'll give you five hundred points right a review you get two hundred points so they incentivize all these behaviors that you know leads to a stickier customer and in doing so they get points that they can redeem for free shit in the store like store credit basically and so all of that like reward system magic they just make available and easy for any e commerce store right so then it sounds a bit like info but the really the i don't i have no skin in the game here i just think it's a sick product but i love the idea of basically taking like what the big brands do and what the big brands have spent millions of dollars developing for themselves and then just turning that into an app that any little mom and pop can just plug into their store and have that same user experience and so i've i've seen this as a trend as a business like kinda like model blueprint i i told you about that company i invested in joe c they did the same thing they took the starbucks mobile app which was like super slick made it easy to order on your phone you earn stars for everything that you buy and they basically give any mom and pop coffee shop a white labeled version of that same app called joe coffee it's a now you can have order ahead you can have loyalty points you can have push notification marketing you have all the things that starbucks put like probably tens of millions of dollars into building they just made for and they said good we're gonna arm the rebels we're gonna give this to all of the indy indy coffee shops instead of just what just starbucks having it because they can afford the r and d this sick i yeah this is sick i'm looking at it now does this work have you implemented this like when i see these rewards programs or or things like that like when i go to a lot of e com sites there's like a wheel that you spin and if you enter in your email you get with something like there's always these like tricks and we we put we went from normal and pretty looking thing that says hey you know give us your email for a discount code to the wheel it tripled conversion rate tripled so have you implemented this club tub or yes just i just i just started working on this last night to to implement but i'm like i'm figuring out what are the perks because you have to find the balance right if you give too much value away eats all your margins and if you make it too shitty then nobody's motivated to do anything you wasted your time you gotta find a sweet spot where it's like compelling enough to them and it doesn't either away your margins and that's the sort of like that's the the art of this of of doing it but i love that i can do this without knowing how to code i think that's kind of like you know a a great business model an idea and so i i would do that if i wanted to to think of other ideas like this i would just go look at what do the top retailers like would go to starbucks go lulu lam i would go to you know whoever macy's nordstrom and i would walk around i would use their online shop i would walk around their store and i would say what have they built that's custom and awesome for them and then how can i make the white labeled version of that and offer to every other retailer that's competing with them there's this great thing i wanna bring up basically i don't know where i heard about it but at facebook cha or someone early on discovered that there's like the magic number of seven basically if you create a facebook account we need you to add seven friends right away and if you add seven friends you're likely to become a facebook user forever or for a long period what i'm talking about yes basically they they they said the a aha moment meaning aha moment when we talk about in product building is just like a user comes your site they don't know what the fuck is going on they're kinda confused they're trying to sign up and finally there's an aj moment where they get actual value from the product they're like oh you know like if i go to mint dot com the aha moment is seeing all my financials you know like laid out in front of me in my budget in a pie chart oh wow automatically that's the a aha moment for mint gotta do a whole bunch of shit connect a whole bunch of big accounts of credit cards to get to that but when you're there you're sticky for facebook what they found was seven friends and ten days was the aj aha moment so once you saw seven different friends on your feed and if you could do that within ten days you were like super super sticky so at the hustle we found i i don't remember the numbers off the top of my head but we found like if you open five about a seven days right off in the first seven five times the first seven you're gonna be with us and we're gonna call you a gold person right and so whatever and we have this new thing called snippets where we're trying to automate a lot of the email content and you sign up for the hustle and you tell us what type of news you care about and we automatically like give you a customized email and what we're seeing is that the people who fill that information in and it's like a relatively long flow they are like three or four times more engaged than other people right and a debate that i have and i'm bringing this back to what we're what we're talking about is that i actually think the question is like were those people more likely to become power users anyway and they are filling that out or are they becoming power users because they fill that out and i would argue it was the second one so like if someone's gonna give what's this tub whatever this would become it's whatever what we're talking about yeah if are they going to become are they power users already and so they're more likely to give you your email and like you on instagram i would actually say no because you are there going through this little small ind destination process they are now becoming power you users it's like what are you are you confident therefore you're gonna flex your muscles or do you flex your muscles and then be feel like you are confident right right and so i actually think that making users do this stuff you are turning them into power users yeah i you know what mean true too i think there's element of both i think that the people who are already power users are gonna be like oh my god my favorite thing has more value i can go get like let me go do it and then there's a whole bunch of other people that are potential power users if the circumstances were right if they followed you so then they would see your updates if they gave you their email so that you could show them the new stuff blah blah blah blah then then you're gonna get more you're gonna hire likelihood of turning that casual person into a hardcore person and so i think i think both do happen do you wanna save this do you wanna wrap up now and save some of the stuff for next week yeah actually i just wanna say two more examples of the same trend so the same the the same trend if you go and look at the hustle emails you guys have at the bottom like a a survey thing it's like were you happy medium or sad from the ceo you have an ambassador program and a lot of those were like things you either you got off the shelf and modified or you just built homegrown and so if you're a newsletter if you're if you wanna build something for the newsletter industry go look at what the hustle go look at what you know ax axiom or what these guys are all using and be like cool how do i give every newsletter the ability to just have this feature without without having to build it themselves because clearly it's working and they're competing with groups like the hustle that are like years ahead have employees have money to be able to spend on this type of stuff yeah and we did have to build a lot of that by the way and it was horrible and it breaks all the time and like it's i would way of right like a lot of people a a lot of people who there's this whole there's a large contingency of people who say let's build our own stuff a lot of people who have been there done that will say the exact opposite which is never build anything if you don't have to always use off the shelf right i found into that category yeah and i wish i i wish a lot of this stuff had existed i'd rather pay a software fee than an engineer and you talked about this once you're were talking about payroll software you're like yeah i'm in the media business and like the best sites have really good smart payroll is that convert and then the rest of us are using this kinda like crappy version of that like why don't we all list us pretend and say the new york times that's the best pay flow that's causing highest conversion rates somebody should take that and just say do you want the new york times payroll on your site great here here's times pay as a service an example another example in this trend is slice so basically domino's had the best pizza ordering experience it's like you would order the pizza on your phone then it would show you the progress bar it's like oh you know like you know john has put it in the oven you twenty minutes oh it's out of the oven we're just putting the toppings on top oh it's in the car it's almost near you hey it's at your door and so like you know they spent a lot of money doing that because they're domino's they can afford that and what slice did was slice went to every indie pop indie pizza shop and basically gave them an app that was the domino's mobile ordering experience and hey now you can compete against that so let's just compete on the basis of who's pizza the best rather than well they made it so easy and fund to order and mine still is like call me and i'll write it down a piece paper and they became a billion dollar company doing that in that space so it's the same model that when you see three or four versions of these that's the pattern recognition to say okay that's a that's a blueprint i can follow to get a a new business idea i agree you move wanna wrap up there yeah let's wrap up this one and then yeah alright right we that's the episode holler yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back