#204 - Behind-the-Scenes of Shaan's Power Writing Course

i think when you once you treat your hobby like a job that's like a recipe for failure and that's what happens to a lot of people yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back alright what's going on what's up man so we're gonna get some into some ideas but let me tell you something that i did this week and i cannot give deep i actually have gotten in trouble three different times where someone was like hey we had this conversation and you just went and talked to well i'm like well i don't i just when you and unite the way that you and i talk now is how we talk all the time yeah and yeah and they're so they're right so i'm gonna try and keep this one big i had this dinner and i was with a guy who has eight thousand employees in china as well as many thousand in america wow yeah impressive person like a factory or something else in china tech tech related just like just some huge company you you if i gave you a hundred guesses you likely wouldn't guess it it's just some big company that exists and in the tech world finished and it's impressive but it's not like a mainstream thing okay and there was this other guy there who made a comment where he was like china is gonna crush us in the next five years or something and then a couple other people people love to say that by the way don't people love saying how china's past up america a bunch of other people pounce on that and then this guy it was this guy he lives in china i believe he he he i don't know what ethnicity he was but he looked like i mean he's probably maybe born and raised in china and then there's was other woman there who actually was born and raised in china and this guy with the six thousand chinese employees goes a lot of people say that i do not think that's true and i don't think any of you should ever think that he was just saying he was like americans actually work maybe as hard or harder than a lot of other countries some and and also you talk about this like artificial intelligence and this it's mostly ai that people i mean they talk about china crushing america and a bunch of stuff but ai is like a a hot thing and this guy was like i don't think that would happen and if and what i think we should do is invest all most of your money into american equities i think he because like i'm just so bullish on america and this so it was like an interesting perspective have you ever heard that that's like the one person who probably knows what they're talking about at the table and everybody else who just reads shit on twitter and like reg it alright i'm gonna go with the guy who's got six thousand employees in china that that makes more sense to me that's you know and and that was good i felt great about that and so there was just an interesting perspective but we you you some pro america news yeah well so i'm also just finished reading this really great book do you know who giants stein is no of course you do grapes of wrath no what is that i curious i got a blank shirt wow have you heard a gill mocking bird i have her to kill mocking that's the author oh my god like jive simon i mean it people gonna make fun of you by the way anyway it's just be very potter okay like it lived stop here guy he was born in nineteen o two so he's dead he's died probably died in the seventies but anyway i'm reading this great book about his memoir from driving across the country for three months in america and getting to know america and it's really funny in the nineteen sixty five when he was doing this trip he was complaining about how americans are getting out of touch with and are getting too focused on technology and how there's refrigerators everywhere and there's tvs everywhere and how there's artificial food everywhere it's very funny we've always complained about this stuff but i do love learning about america i think america special i think we have this resilience and i think the yeah anyway i'm i'm very pro america so yes i did like hearing it but you wanna talk about some ideas yeah by the way dan corrected us i don't think he wrote to kill mocking bird but no my or something he he he didn't write to kill mocking bird i'm saying his work is like it's like does it's it's like did he write my cement i know he wrote grips a wrath it's just like a famous like american classic i'm just shocked the fact that you don't know that you wrote of my cement do you know that so the fact that you you done the i know that as in i've have heard those words before that's all i know about that anyways let's let's go into the stuff i do know about because i feel a lot better about that and also bitcoin rally thank you i've been waiting for this bitcoin pump and here we are we're back up life is good because bitcoin is now it like spiked up to almost forty thousand over the last like twenty four hours forty eight hours there was a bit of a short squeeze about a billion dollars of short positions got liquidate and that caused the price to run up because are you familiar with how that works by the way like what of short squeeze is like so no so here's the like non technical non super super like nuance version of it basically when you have a short you're betting against something and if it goes up you are on the hook to pay the the the sort of the price for the for being wrong and so if you think something's gonna keep going up you're better out just closing down your short position just taken the l and saying okay i'll pay i will i will go buy the shares now because i'm you know let's say i i was it's at thirty thousand i think it's going down it goes to thirty two you know what to close out my position i'll go buy the asset at thirty two and i'll eat the loss right but what happens is because all the shorts start worrying that the price is gonna run up they all start trying to close out their positions at the same time so they all start buying so the people who are betting against it all of a sudden add all this buying pressure where they have to to close out their position they have to buy bitcoin which causes the price to go up and up and up and up and so what happened is as it started running up all the shorts had to cover their positions because they were massively leveraged right they're not putting in their own money they're putting in like five to ten percent down and they're taking the they're taking ten x or twenty x leverage on their position so as the price goes up they're very sensitive to it and so i think that's what happened to cause the price to go about ten thousand dollars in the last two days is those shorts had to cover their position this would happened with tesla tesla was the most shorted stock in the stock exchange and then as the price started to go up those shorts you know they're basically are paying a huge price for every every dollar it goes up so they start to close out their positions which put which puts a bunch bunch of buying pressure which is why it becomes a squeeze because the shorts themselves cause the other shorts to like have to cover and it just causes the price to shoot up way above what its earnings is and anything else dude this is funny it's funny because like when you you so we're in this chat group sean and me and all a bunch of other like successful young guys and they talk about like alpha like crushing alpha and i'm like i don't know what that means yeah i got no idea at that base we talk about short squeeze of like this these words don't mean anything to me i don't even know what they mean do you you guys feel like so sophisticated to me yeah alright let's talk about some ideas can we yeah let's do you wanna go you want me to go you go first okay i have one okay here's another one that's crypto related and you're gonna be like what but i'm telling you this is a good idea this is actually ben's idea so first of all ben is visiting me so i'm getting to see ben in person he's sending five feet away from me i wanted to join this but and somebody goddamn him technical difficulty setting up that like i don't know how he i could get it to me where it works but maybe wednesday we'll take an extra hour beforehand and just get it set up for a two person set up but anyways ben we ben we're talking last night he's like you know one we're talking about courses right because and i can share kinda like how what the numbers rent like i just finished my course i can share what the numbers were on that but we're talking about other few other potential courses we could do like what would be fun he's like i don't know like we're not the right people to teach this but i think this course with crush right now so sam told do you know what solidity is if i say oh solidity so when i say writing i thought i thought it was a typo over top severity yeah my solidarity is all so solidity is the programming language that you use to write smart contracts for ethereum so let's say like one of the most promising things about crypto is that you can write a smart contract so think like basic escrow contract i buy a house you're gonna give me the title i'm gonna give you the money i don't wanna give you the money first you don't wanna give me the title first so we use this third party this escrow agent we pay them five thousand dollars basically you hand them the title i hand them the money they say yep they're both here and then they give it to each other right so in the real world we pay these exorbitant middleman fees i i don't know what you paid for your house when you when you bought you just did another real estate transaction i don't know what you're paying for escrow i don't even i didn't even look i mean it was i went four grand to do an escrow transaction was sucked i was like this is just thousand holders for nothing when i sold my business i think the escrow was fifty thousand dollars right crazy they think they is crazy so i and then and they literally do like one ounce of work they literally just oh you hand me the title and you hand me the money great i'm gonna just turn one hand over here and i'll give you the you'll give you this i'll give them that so a smart contract basically says look we don't need this like person in the middle and we don't need to pay them four thousand dollars let's just make a contract with some rules and we'll just instead of writing it like a mo contract we'll write it like a programmer or contract the programmer contract says hey when this wallet has this much money in it person a has fulfilled their obligation and when this wallet has this asset in it person b has fulfilled their obligation and then release the assets to each other and so and instead of paying four thousand dollars you can pay four dollars or forty dollars whatever the gas fees are at the time so that's smart contracts so what what that means is a lot of jobs today that go to lawyers are gonna go to programmers because you're not gonna wanna lawyer to write a contract for something you're gonna wanna programmer but to write it down but you need that contract to like work it needs to be like solid bug proof hack proof and like i needed to do the many things that i need my my transactions to do so there is an extreme shortage right now of smart contract developers of developers who know how to write in this new programming language and write these types of contracts but it's clearly like a big part of the future in my opinion and so one idea here is to create basically a boot camp it takes an existing engineer and says hey cool oh you write javascript or like you know you you're you're a back engineer you're one of like ten million why don't you come over here where there's high demand high shortage of engineers that know how to do this thing i could train you in six weeks to learn how to write like smart contracts and solidity and then go to all the companies that are trying to hire this and basically do a lambda school i think you can do lambda school that's really niche really focus and if i'm an engineer that like i'm a crypto nerd this is a business that i think you could do you could just train other engineers to like learn how to write smart contracts and then get hired and placed in these jobs that you take the placement fee what do you think of that so i'm doing research while you're talking alright oh wow okay no i i agree with a lot that you said except for the last part so there's this company called cor era have you heard cor era of course so they were starting in two thousand twelve and i believe that they were started because the two guys i think they worked at google and they're noticing that we are struggling to hire a particular type of engineer i'm just this is just off memory so i i might be a little bit off here about some of the stuff but anyway they and so they built like these courses and they built it so people can get jobs at google let's maybe over the science or machine learning or something yeah it was some type of data science or machine learning i i forget exactly what it was and they they came out of the gate and they crushed it and then like over the last five years they kinda like went nowhere and kinda like it's like what the hell happened to that company on and they're not really doing that well anymore well over the last year and a half two years with covid and a bunch of us stuff they started crushing it do you know what cor revenue was now no idea so they they went public did you know that no yeah a lot of people didn't know it thought i thought they had like stag and like wasn't going everywhere yeah that's what everyone thought so in two thousand twenty they did about three hundred million dollars or sorry my bad four hundred million dollars in revenue and they're currently publicly traded at a five and a half billion dollar valuation and that yeah crazy right totally if forgot about and what you did with your course what well i don't know if you did this but what a lot of people in like you and me we'll do courses and we'll kinda do these kinda like boot leg things not boot leg but like so are literally yeah and you'll charge like three hundred hundred dollars like that which i've done before and that makes things a little bit and you want like a person to buy and that things makes things a little bit challenging what i would do is i would take the thing that you're describing and with this with bitcoin there's like all these crazy new things that you've gotta learn really quickly i would just copy the cor sarah model and just churn these fucker out and charge like eight thousand dollars and it's like we're gonna like a company needs to buy in order to train their people do so so i think that's for x i would do cor sarah for x okay i think that's fair the thing with the lambda side which is basically i think every time you place one of these engineers that's like a twenty to twenty five thousand dollar fee that you get and so it doesn't take much to be i don't i wouldn't do this as like a venture scale business not not at all this is basically i'm a developer who you have to be the right mold it's like i've been tinkering with smart contracts for last two years anyways i have actually kinda like got up to speed myself i'm a converted back in engineer who now does smart contracts and i could go i i work at like a fan company today i make four hundred thousand dollars but like wouldn't it be great to make like four million dollars a year and i think this is a way to make four million dollars a year as like a two person company basically that's i agree yeah but i would never do it in the lambda so when sean says lambda school he's referring to it's free and you make money by getting like a twenty five thousand dollar referral placement or so or a percentage of their salary i have i know nothing about lambda other than we had austin on this show and i think he's amazing and i love him and you're an investor that's really all i know about it i think my prediction if i had a bet money on it is that it won't work yeah i that's a i mean i think that's a fair prediction about most startups i think that's true yeah but they're not most startups they've raised like a hundred million dollars probably they're not like an early stage startup they're like in the thick of it i think that if they're out of business in two years i wouldn't be surprised right and i would agree with that even as a and then an investor i i would agree with that i think that that okay so here's okay let me do two things first let me share with you a really hilarious story do you know this twitter account greg it's like greg nine five five three zero two like three two six seven eight seven a white guy like like a white old guy it's a white no not not old guy it's a white like nerdy dark guy no i don't know you haven't seen this just google search greg meme greg meme account you'll see it and i bet you've seen this guy so you know like these meme accounts so there's like doc doctor park patel by the way big fan of him i think he's a big fan of us he works for the hustle you know that right doctor park patel works with the hustle yeah just out doctor park patel amazing no no no no no he like him he he's a contractor for us he writes for us sometimes oh my god i love it wow no i not know that yeah yeah yeah so like my brain is racing to figure it out who it is now okay no he's not like like i was a fan of his like dm him and i was like hey wanna you don't know the real identity i do okay you do but it's yeah so you're saying after you saw a dark part so venue you contracted it okay gotcha alright makes way more sense so anyways what he one thing he does is like every time mock tweets he's like the first reply and he's like just says it like like i'm proud of your son or something like that like something like totally non standard so greg does that with like kylie jenner and like other people like that whereas every time she posts something who'll be like babe why did to like you didn't call me or like he be like we're like super audio babe so it's like as if they're dating and so he's this like do looking white guy account and the a real date you know who jose can say is of course ben told me the story so so jose could say the base former baseball where tweets out i need a i need a smart contract developer for a new token a token developer for a a new token i'm gonna launch it's it just like the classic thing for like paris hilton and toys could say these like you know they wouldn't know any good designers has been has been celebrities that are like writing alone launch their own crypto token here we go that what could go wrong so so greg replies and greg's like like whatever like me pick ben what did they saying they wanna do was reply was it just like pick me something like that yeah he goes hey it's greg dm me how can i help and jose replies and goes he goes awesome like are you a token developer and then like are you are you developer or can you not to do token development and then greg just replies new way jose and was like two hundred thousand likes on tweets it's just like one of the most like tweets on twitter uber whatever it was just like so good so dumb but anyways this guy's like crushing it right now like he's got like got in a hundred and something hundred thirty handle well it's the funny thing is you know when you sign up twitter let's say you type sam and be like not unavailable would you like sam eight hundred thousand and six because that's like the next one available so his is greg and then it's like twelve numbers that are like the whatever the default thing would be so it's like you would never think it's gonna go barbara but yeah it's greg one six six seven six whatever like you like ten numbers like so what does it have to do though with okay that was just my smart contract token developer tangent my next idea if you're ready to transition is is un bundling a piece of yc so yc does a few things for founders yc c puts a stamp on you it says this is a l startups all of a sudden your evaluation gonna go up all of up they kinda coach you so they say oh you know coming for office hours tell us about your idea maybe we help you pivot your idea maybe we help you stay focused on growth or you know how to like tweak so you grow faster and they do that for three months and then they start working on your pitch and then there's demo day which is like we're you're gonna get stand in front of investors you gotta give a one minute page picture you're gonna raise money and that works so they have like whatever hundred and twenty start ups a year now or something doing that but another another kinda like course quote unquote unquote i'm very i was brainstorm i was like very interested working backwards from what's a course where the person gets a clear outcome this is part of my learnings of like doing a course which is people don't buy a course for learning they buy some change they buy a transformation for themselves and so like you know for a start up going from un funded to funded or like you know no name to like oh stamp of approval that's like actually a big change and so one one transformation and one change that people would buy is getting their first round of funding it's like i'm not just gonna teach you knowledge that you can may or may not use it's like i'm gonna help you get funded and so was thinking could you like i've raised probably twenty million dollars in my life and i've helped a bunch of founders raise money and i think i'm pretty good at storytelling so i was like i think i could help a founder who's got no no funding today get funding in like a one month period and i think i could basically just sit you down with the deck with your story and then basically say cool like there's a pretty intense workshop of your deck and your story to get that to be as good as it it's gonna be and then there's like a bunch of angel like introductions and like teaching you how to manage your pipelines that you run this like a process like a bidding war unlike what most people do which is they kinda try to date one investor at a time and they go kinda slow and they fear rejection and they don't know how to reach out and all this stuff i could teach you that kinda like the sales process of investing and i think i was like oh you could do this like on a success basis so again like lambda which you don't like but honest you could align your which tells by the way i like lambda i just think the business model is silly i think because the thing with education is that most people will never benefit from what you're telling them right well that's the in some ways that's the beauty of lambda but it's also the bad side of lambda right the beauty of lambda is their incentive is alliance so let's say most courses like let's say for my writing course i don't care if you're good at writing bad at writing and i really don't truly care if you're gonna do it or not because i get paid either way right like i'd love for you to take the course and have a big benefit but the reality is like my financial incentive is not such that if if you don't if you if if you don't hit your goals it doesn't really make a financial difference to me whereas lambda does they have to select people who are gonna be able to succeed and then they only make money when somebody gets what they want which is a high paying job so that's the beauty lambda but it's also the hard part of scaling land what what what were the results from your course so like we that work it went well it so basically okay so here's the kind of like like the learnings from my course alright so i guess can i guess yeah yeah we'll do it on each category so first is let's just start with the most interesting one money how much money do you think i made doing this course and give the context i taught a course on power writing which is basically writing to get a result so like the writing i do which is like if i'm writing an email it's because i want somebody to reply if i'm writing a landing page because i want somebody to click buy button i'm writing tweet storms because i want people to share it and like the stuff you learn in school is not the stuff that that actually works in the real world and so it's like copywriting plus plus that's the that's the of course alright so i do this hundred it pays my guess hundred and fifty thousand very close so i did a hundred and twenty seven thousand of top line sales and then let's just break down the the p and l so so then there's my cost of making the course so i basically had a guy to like custom illustrations and graphics and things like that that'd probably be eight to ten thousand them seventy five hundred and he was amazing and he was really good as i'm like i love that that was that was worth it then there's m fee so maybe the fee is on the top number so i take that ten percent ten percent right so so take out twelve grand roughly from a hundred twenty seven then you take out seventy five hundred of cost production then everything else out then there's payment processing fees that was another four three or four grand and so my net was like one zero i'm i'm doing the math bad here but i think it was like one zero five roughly and then okay so so that's kinda like that's the the money in and so that was off of three hundred and twenty students i charged i the first batch i did at half price so i charged i think four hundred fifty dollars or something like that four hundred dollars maybe it was for the for the course and if i hedge that did you did you do like an mps yes i would bet it was like out of ten out of ten so for those who don't know net net promoter score basically you ask one question to your audience which is how likely are you to refer this to a friend on a scale of one to ten ten being i you know i absolutely will refer i would absolutely refer a friend to this one being no way seven point three nine point one that's amazing but everything is but it's established right because some people didn't reply to the survey i'm assuming the people who really didn't give a shit also didn't reply to the survey so i gave myself a true n mps of probably eight but it was a nine point one on the the stats so do you think people loved it i think people loved it the feedback was kind of amazing and then i did a survey of like what did you like about it and basically it broke into three categories it was like look i can't you know the first one was dude two of those sessions were like like game changers for me was like oh you're cold emailing one like that was great i immediately implemented this and i got you know meetings that i wanted i booked more sales like that one i just i used right away or like the second one would be like you have one about writing inside of a big company how to like stand out with your writing inside of big company that was i didn't even know i wanted that that was a great one and so everybody kinda had two of the i seven sessions everybody had like two sessions that they were like that was the one and the rest was fine you know like the rest was good but like didn't really like those two i got my money's worth the rest was gravy and then i asked people the other question i asked people was on average how much value did you get like you know zero dollars the price of admission like a 1x x return three x five x ten x whatever it was and then the average per the average answer to that was ten x my money i got ten x my value back out of it and i was like okay if for what i don't know if that's like a scientific question because how the hell are they mentioning that i don't really know but okay downsides guess what the biggest downside was because you've done a course before so tell me what you what do you predict was my biggest the the biggest downside of it well does that include logistics like quality so i think they'll probably complain about your camera or your sound or the time yeah timing was the biggest one because i taught it live yeah and so a lot of people you know were like oh you know i could i either the time worked great for me it worked okay for me or it was horrible for me because i'm in australia and that time zone was awful so i only watched the recordings the the but i meant the biggest complaint i had to do the course what was the biggest downside of doing the course talk too fast no no i mean like why what was a pain for me well it's probably just way too much work yes complete underestimated of the work yeah it's no much work i spent probably fifty to a hundred hours like making the content which was way more than i thought i would do i thought it would take work an hour or two per session alright so let's say two hours per that's like fifteen hours of work it was like a full day it was like an eight hour day per per session i made plus like the actual teaching of it and then afterwards what i would do is so i structured my the one the best thing i did by the way was i think i don't think i invented this i'm sure other people do this but i didn't really know what it's called but i basically structured the session like this i was like alright you show up so it's like hey we're gonna be here for an hour the very first thing i do is i say alright the promise is this by the end of this hour you're gonna be able to do this alright so that's my problem that's the magic trick i'm gonna show you today you can't do that or you're bad at it you're gonna be good at it by the end of this hour and then i basically would do i'd say alright let's say it's a cold email i'm not gonna tell you anything about cold email write a cold email right now and i would all have to sit there while i'm sitting there watching them ten fifteen minutes write the thing so it it was called do learn redo so i'd have them do it it got that gives the baseline and they would all share it in the slack channel then i would teach them like not everything about cold i'd be like hey here's the three biggest things you could do to improve your proof gold emails i do some examples i've teach them the theory and then i'd say be like alright last fifteen minutes you're gonna redo it and then they would redo and then they would just have a before and after of their one hour session where it's like a really shitty first attempt and then like a pretty good second attempt and then after the course i would take one hour and i would just go through as many examples as i could of students and just give them like feedback through loom so that was like that worked pretty well but it was like kind of intense for me because i'm basically performing a magic trick live i don't know what they're gonna do and so it was kind of high risk it wasn't like like it could so are you gonna get my wife did it by the way sarah my wife did it and she sold out she made ten thousand and like two weeks maybe and why did she cap it because they told me to cap it and i didn't capitalize she's not like you and me this is her first time doing like a public facing thing right you know you and i have that you know tens of thousands of hours of like r under our belt and like we know how to perform she she's just learning and trying to figure out how to do it by the way one thing you should tell her the best thing i did was i did rehearsal so for each session i would invite four kids who are like kind of like twenty five and under usually who can't afford the course and i just hey you want the course for free in a personal session i need to do a dry run with you and so i did a dry run for each of the sessions and in doing that i would realize five minutes in like oh this is all fucked up like i gotta change this or like wow this is way too hard when i just asked them to answer they're confused like they know we're comedy yeah so i i needed to do those open mics basically to make it work but will you do this do you think this will be a significant income source free in the future or are you gonna quit doing it so i'm doing it one more time and we're gonna see how that goes my my goal was basically i put the price back where the original price so nine fifty so i'm like alright let's see if there's enough demand there at that point price point because below that it's not really worth it for me i don't think because you need a lot of students and a lot of work so i'm doing it one more time in august we'll see if it's like good again i had a lot of fun doing it so we'll see if it's fun again or if it's gets like old for me but then i also have a bunch of other ideas for other courses that i wanna do so i think i'm gonna teach different courses which is more work but i think more fun for me can i tell you okay so now by the way we're talking about m dot com which this is the here's your disclosure we both have incredibly vested interest in this and i want them to make money yeah because we invested but yeah i do think they're gonna have to change i don't think it's gonna work to do live courses i don't think are gonna have it can't be their bread butter it's just gotta be how they get into the market that's that's my prediction but we'll see well i started off being like i'm gonna do it recorded and i started recording the content and i found stuff a few people and i was oh first of all recording good content takes a lot of time too so it's not like it was gonna save it takes saves time when i you know it's scalable later but it takes a lot more time upfront the second thing was people were way less excited about me recorded and i was like no look i'm like it's me i'm like planning this out it's gonna be like as good as i can get it's gonna be edited it's gonna be tight versus me live and they're like no we'd rather just to be you live off the cuff and like not so tight like the perceived value of live is way higher and like okay if it's easier for me to do and it's higher perceived value like that was one pivot i had to make halfway through of like switching to live sorry let me let me pivot to a different topic yeah you maybe told me about this but i had jake research it i i think you did you tell me about swim yes okay so i like to keep a list of things that i thought are horrible ideas and ended up doing like amazingly well i definitely would put bitcoin in that category like if you going back like this the stupidest thing ever heard of ryan hoover told me about product talented davey he was launching it and i was like just quit i i thought it stupid yeah yeah if you have an easy hack to do this whenever i just have a bookmark thing on my chrome so whenever i see a startup website that i'm like oh that's interesting i bookmark either into i think it's gonna work or i think it's not gonna work so i this like then i can go back like a year later i can could just go click and see how many those websites are still like up and like doing something you know and as i have before i could do that i've had this for like five years so if i saw this next company that i'm about to tell you about and and this next idea if i saw that five years ago or a year ago i would be like well like just quit why why are you been doing these stupid games like this is the dumbest thing i've ever heard so it's what's explain dave even stupid it's called swim lee is that peace supposed to be there a typo sw lee let me see is it swim it might be swim no it is swim it's swiftly that's okay so we're looking at a google zach that's that's crazy i thought that i wasn't sure as a typo but he wrote sw lead and my whatever i found this i was just driving and i saw a billboard and it just said swiftly rent a swimming pool near you i was like what and that's what it is so you know with everything going on people are desperate to get out of their homes and they're working from their house and they wanna get out and so they go and they can rent someone else's pool airbnb for pools if you told me about this four years ago i'd be like this is the dumbest thing i've ever done this is right next to like go out and rent a dog for an hour but you're a believer i'm not a believer yet but the numbers definitely show that i'm wrong so they've grown two thousand percent since summertime in a roughly fourth that what's so if you grow four they've grown four thousand percent in a year what's that mean forty x four thousand is forty x yeah okay they just raised a series to be on anything right i can start with one and get to force true but they raised the series a which i'm shocked and who's there's their their they there raised eleven or ten twelve million dollars so so the idea is like i have a pull in my backyard i can set like a fifty dollars an hour rate and somebody who doesn't have a swimming pool in the backyard because that's a big expense can say say cool we'll rent your private we'll rent your pool we're gonna come swim for two hours hundred bucks is four of us it's worth it like we we're gonna have fun doing that are you like kinda clean up your backyard later that's the idea they raise their money the raised their money from like some baller like people who like i think i respect i was knowing what they're doing so i definitely think i was wrong who north northwest ventures there i mean they're like a huge a huge thing right nor yeah generic name come on if you're gonna if you're like the multi billion dollar they're big enough that i assume that they haven't fully you like vet yeah of course okay so their traffic like if you look at their similar web thing it's pretty nuts so like january it's you know fifty thousand visitors and by june it's like hockey sticking to four hundred thousand monthly visitors according to a similar web so similar webs the exact number's is not right but the direction is correct usually and so this thing is like doubling it's like doubled last month doubled the month before that doubled the month before that so four doubled in a row and so i got i was i was interested in the space because i found a company that was raising money and what they were doing and the reason i got interested in this company was we had this guy who i talked about this guy named preston on the podcast his name was a i didn't even remember his last name but preston i think he the company he started was called spacious where they would do short term retail space and rent it out for c working yeah there's this other company that i'll find or i'll say the name in a second and what they're doing is you can rent people's homes just during the day for c working i yeah i've heard that and it starts with the sea what's it called cozy or some i don't know what it is yeah chills i'm just they up names and again that idea i thought was the stupidest thing and then i talked to preston and he's like no these could be legit these could be huge companies it's astounding and so here's a few more companies that that that are interesting so neighbor is a storage marketplace and by the way almost all these i would bet against and i am being proven wrong consistently neighbor is a storage marketplace they just raised a fifty three million dollar series b i move is an electric vehicle subscription service so you can they just raised a bunch of money i'm actually on board with that it's just like leasing ka subscribe your car online casa buy and own a second home with eight others that's just a time share isn't it yeah and then resort rev resort pass you can share day passes to resorts pools and hotels so anyway kind of interesting i this space is always it just to me because i've been the one saying how i think it's really stupid and it's not gonna work but these things are actually are are are beating my our are proving me wrong right by the way a you you just said something like share a thing and we're were talking about courses we had this idea long time ago i still think it's a good idea if somebody wants to do this i'll be you know first customer slash year minority business partner who does nothing besides to give you the idea which is class pass for online courses so i right now would pay like if you said hey i could bring you a student but you're gonna have to you're gonna have to give it to them for fifty percent off but i can get you volume of students and you don't have to worry about getting students i'd take that and if you basically i think you can work out the math where you can basically get let's call it a hundred dollars a month from somebody and then they get access to like your course my course sarah's course you know like ten other courses right now and and get all of them basically like and all you can eat pass i think there's a class pass courses that could work for online courses that's right me could exist let me keep being a hate but there's this company called every every dot what is it called two every dot so or every dot too i think every dot too yeah there's guys doing that for newsletters and the guys running it are great his name's is nathan really cool wonderful guy i know nah is a writer there i like his work there's a bunch of like interesting great writers on there but i think this business model is horrible because dealing with how you're gonna pay the each writer seems like a huge pain in the ass doesn't it yeah if i'm like you're if i'm like a big shop based on who brings in subs so if your stuff brings in a sub you get the bounty of that you give some i'm bringing in subs like go ask yourself i wanna own all of it yeah but you get you so you get the majority bounty on yours so let's say you get fifty percent of those subs you bring in but you're gonna put fifty percent of the pool so you're gonna get fifty percent from everybody else and so it's a but the beauty of it is when you do paid newsletter there's this obligation like shit i gotta write this thing i can't write one a week i gotta write two week it's gotta be good i can't just be like off the cuff you know random stuff they're paying for this it's gotta be better than normal blog content so what the what ever does is say look you just gotta write one good thing a week let's say because the consumer is gonna get act value from eight other writers in the bundle and so that's the that's why this works is for each person they don't have to carry the whole subscription value themselves they have eight other people contributing to that subscription value and do you think they just give away some do you think this is gonna work i don't know if it's going to work i think the can't at least you're i think it can i think it can work i think so basically i think i'm kind of a believer in that that the mock andre entries thing that he's stole from whoever which was basically like most business is just bundling and un bundling and so i think that right now newsletters are all un unbiased and somebody creating a bundle of newsletters it'll be like the cable package and like you'll somebody will say why am i paying for i don't wanna pay for ten individual subscriptions and some of them are goods some are bad and instead if i could just pay a flat fifteen dollars a month and get access to my ten favorite writers like great so i think i think it can work are you getting sick of newsletters no i have fun i like writing my stuff but i'm i do it on my term so i i'm not consistent of this thing i send out every tuesday but like if you subscribe it you're like bullshit you don't send it every tuesday you said that like every other tuesday at best and so yeah because i just like if i'm doing something else that's fun i just don't send it and like you've experienced the pain of my like my like inconsistencies or being late and things like that like it's just kind of like the way i operate on all things and like you know the good the good of it is like when i do it like i've never just going into the motion like i'm always trying to bring it but if i don't have something to bring i don't like do it or like sometimes i'm i don't send the things because i'm doing something interesting but that'll make the next week's letter more interesting because i was doing something interesting so that's my only way of sustaining these other things i think when you once you treat your hobby like a job that's like a recipe for failure and that's what happens to a lot of people they they think it's fun to blog and then they wanna make that their career and then you know they make the grave grave mistake of turning your hobby into a job when it when you weren't you didn't want it as a job really yeah it it's hard it's fucking hard as someone who is not i haven't written them but i have owned a newsletter company that has sent three hundred and sixty five newsletters times four years is very hard by the way i heard a a a another newsletter company that shall not be named say that oh you know our subscriber base is like you know the third largest city in america and i thought that was just a bad ass way of saying like we have whatever two billion subscribers three million subscribers or whatever it is and i think you should steal that and start saying things like that yeah i like that one it's kinda like i think the sci was the one who said the sci said like if we were a morning show we would be the number one most popular morning show right another great way of framing as part of this part of the pirate just like do bullshit can frame it it's a bit bullshit but it is yeah it i it is useful right okay do we want we wanna wrap here to go to one more well let's do one more fun thing do you have one otherwise i can get one you pick one do you wanna pick one off your list maybe do this elon filing a patent thing that sounds good okay so basically i'm working with jake or a researcher to like find different signals and figure out what do those signals mean and so there's something interesting i've always been i've always been interested in gas stations because like i said we said earlier i'm like in into this nerd about america i love like nostalgia middle america stuff and gas stations are interesting to me because we spend a lot of time there like i found men memories of gas stations and many of the biggest top one hundred privately owned businesses in america if you look at one of the biggest privately owned companies in america most not most but a very large percentage are gas stations right and so by revenue gas makes up typically two third of sales for gas stations but it only makes like one third or less of profit the majority of profit comes from buying shit on the inside and elon musk recently filed a trademark for different restaurant services aimed at electric vehicles and and things like that and and for food services basically and so i'm very eager to see what tesla gonna do and also i'm very eager to see how the the modern gas station is gonna change and so far so what are the biggest ones i think the biggest ones are are casey's quick trip there's a few more that are the top ones they're not doing shit right because if you go to a gas station right now for tesla it's still pain the butt the tesla supercharger are way better and so i'm very eager to see and i wanted to know what you think what is gonna happen to gas stations and how are they can continue to making money yes i think there's two big changes that are happening so cars go electric then what the hell happens to gas stations right do they just convert into electric charging stations or is it gonna be different because you're charging at home right like i can't fill up my tank overnight in my garage but i can charge my electric vehicle that way and so maybe those gas stations there's not needed anymore they need to convert some other use of real estate you know it's like blockbuster on the corner store when why would i need that when i could just push a button and stream netflix to my tv the second is self driving cars which is gonna change game for both gas stations and for parking garages so you don't need as much parking when you have self driving cars most of city real estate is parking whether it's street parking or parking garages a huge amount that's just parking and because cars are idle ninety percent the time when cars go self driving they're not gonna be idle ninety this time so cities are gonna have to like renovate basically the the the way they use their land because it's gonna become totally obsolete but let's do gas stations for a second so one theory is gas stations become like entertainment hubs because actually charging a car takes a lot more time than filling up a gas tank i think even supercharger takes like thirty minutes right to to fill up is there basically to recharge your your tesla while you're like on a road trip or whatever and so you know what you what do you do to entertain people during that time maybe they're just sitting on their car using the the in in car entertainment system but maybe there's something else that you do with food and drink tvs and sport maybe it's a sports bar essentially that you turn turn this into the other thing that i think interesting is like oh i'll give my cousin a shout so my cousin rohan has a startup called stable dot auto so check it out yeah you're not gonna fully rocket it from the from the landing page but but i'll just tell you about it so it says company stable spell it just stable like s t a b e like a like a stable of four not what auto a a u t so so he started off what he started off doing was he he he was like a robotics guy from mit so he's like look how do i make it where a a self driving car when it like self driving cars are gonna need they're great because they're gonna drive people around without driver but how are they gonna charge like they have to go to a charging station and then are you just gonna have like attendance there plugging in cars and taking them out like how is it gonna do that and so he was creating like you if you're ever seeing elon tweeted this out once which is a robotic arm that would just find the charging thing and would like plug itself in so it was like a self a self yeah like as i imagine the gasoline pump could go into your car without you having to pick it up and put it in the hole so he built a robotic arm that did that so what my cousin was doing was basically he was just saying oh tesla is doing that but then there's all these companies trying to compete with tesla i'll make the robotic arm for all the other companies so like every other company has a different like charging like kinda like location on the car how would i make machine learning that's gonna find the hole and stick that stick in the hole basically for for that and you started doing that but the problem was and i told him this which was like look like self driving cars are not here so you're building for a future market like you don't know when it's gonna happen like we all know is gonna happen eventually like like that's a little bit difficult and so and so the and you're also building this robotic arms really hard hard to build so he switched to now he switched to something else which is basically like software that basically will it it it basically tells you when you need to when you should go charge your when you should go charge your electric car for so imagine like uber and lyft they have these fleets of electric vehicles that are gonna be out in the roads and that's for sure happening and so when do you go charge if you go wait till you're like almost out you might miss like peak peak traffic time where you're gonna like get a bunch of rides and make a bunch of money you also might go charged when it's really expensive to charge because electricity costs fluctuate throughout the day so what they're building is basically a app that you load into your like this is at least last i heard of it second app for any driver of uber lyft that has an electric vehicle that will say now is the optimal time to charge go over here there's charging station nearby there's a little there's not much traffic for uber rides right now and the price of electricity is low and so it basically that'll work while you have human drivers and then when you have self driving fleets it'll do that whole thing automatically it'll basically say hey let's send to this ten percent of your fleet to go charge right now let's keep ninety percent on the road and it'll optimize it so you're like saving the most money both ways but let's talk about what do you think is gonna happen where's the opportunity right now i i mean the his idea that maybe i i think it's far simpler have you ever heard of buck yes tell people buck so you know what it is buck is basically in texas there's like a a gas station chain that like people love don't just like it they love it it's a tourist destination and it's destination for a couple of reasons i think under never been one even though i lived in texas it has extremely clean bathrooms and they have a bunch of food that people like obsessed with it's basically sugary food but it has a funny logo and they serve like brisket it's just like low quality but fun it became a thing map yeah but it's huge so i think that it's gonna break down in two categories the first categories is just everyday use i think people are gonna keep their shit at home charge at home or they're just gonna charge while they're in the grocery store and that's how they and that's in whole foods is gonna be the winner second thing it's is traveling and i think the way that that's gonna look is buck it's gonna be just like it's gonna be a buck meats museum of ice cream so when i go to buck it's a spectacle i stop there because i'm gonna get like a huge soda i'm gonna get maybe i'm gonna eat but i'm just gonna look at stupid shit like a buck knife or a bucking book bag this dumb tri going a bass pro shop basically it's like going into a bass pro shop or just looking walking around ikea it's just a spectacle it's gonna be like that with a little bit of museum of ice cream where there's gonna be a little bit even more spectacle that are fun to take pictures in front of that is where what's gonna happen i think and i think like the shells of the world or whatever gas station seven eleven seven eleven i actually think could become a buggy because seven eleven has a little bit of nostalgia like seven eleven it's kinda it could be cool it's like subway it could be yeah yeah it could subway could be could be the next version of vans yeah so so i think there there's definitely some people that are gonna go that route right they make it a tourist destination and they have a quirky brand and that works i think some people are gonna go full automation so like in san francisco we had the thing cafe x i did you ever buy coffee from that no it took too long don't you allowing me it takes like a minute right it's just stupid i thought it was dumb cafe is stupid how do you you think that's stupid that's like that's so good so if you nobody knows who look cafe describe it so it's basically okay but here's the thing so like it's basically occurring machine like it's not that fancy but it looks like it's usually like it's a building and it has like this glass around it and it's a massive robot arm that's making a spectacle of like moving the cup the coffee cup around and then pouring the milk in it in reality it could like you don't need that stupid fucking arm it could just be like a coffee vending machine like so that's why it whenever i saw that i'm like when i see these like in warehouses or and stuff it's just like you put two quarters in and you just get like like at the hospital you never been to the hospital when it was like cappuccino machines like i don't need this dumb fucking arm to trick me and act like it's doing something special okay so that's definitely one way of seeing it and i i could see that point of view i think what's the difference between starbucks and that vending machine is it the quality of the coffee or what what's the difference probably not the quality so what is the difference one's a spectacle and one you talk to people no no i'm saying like between the keurig machine and starbucks like why do you even need a starbucks why can starbucks just be a pure that like getting out of the house and seeing people okay so maybe it maybe it's that if that's the case and starbucks is safe the other case is basically that there's some middle ground of like variety and quality that's like above a a coffee machine but more like a starbucks where you have like forty drinks that you want because you want your soy latte with you know you know you want you want almond milk and then you want two pumps of sugar and you want light ice or whatever and like that's how you like your drink and so you know you can't get that out of a at a normal coffee machine either the coffee doesn't taste as good or the drink is not as elaborate and cafe basically says cool what if we could serve coffee faster and cheaper than a starbucks what if we could serve starbucks quality coffee but faster and cheaper than a starbucks why because we have a robot arm that could just like do the thing twenty four seven and never call in sick and never an employee never need never have any employee like issues and by the way i take up one tenth of the square footage of a starbucks because it's like a it's like a giant robot and a hamster ball it like it has everything it needs right there it takes up like ten square feet where it's like start ten bigger and so what they're doing with the idea with cafe i don't think cafe x specifically is gonna succeed but i'd be shocked if there's not a cafe type winner down the road because you can shove these things anywhere you can shove it inside of an apartment building and it can make sense in apartment building whereas like a full service starbucks with staff wouldn't make sense in a in an apartment building and so i think that those are gonna succeed and so i think there's a version of the gas stations that's like that i think there's a version of the gas stations that basically is just all automation the charging is automated and then you go and you push a button and it creates a giant slur for you like seven eleven but it's just a robot arm doing it we'll see we'll see if it works out but i think it's gonna be more like buck at least i hope it will be alright that's the episode i gotta i gotta go get a haircut yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in and like a day's on on a travel never looking back