#208 with Steph Smith - Why You Need a Chief Automation Officer

if you are skilled with either seo email list building you know d customer acquisition this is a business in a box that that you could start i would love to see somebody start this you're gonna do this email me sean at jean i will invest in you advise you whatever yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less travel never looking back well up everybody sean here and no sam we have a a pinch hit but it's gonna be like when tom brady took over for drew bled so i don't know if everyone gets the sports reference basically when the sub comes in and outperform the that's what i'm expecting here so we have steph smith here you work for the hustle you also are just one of the more interesting people out there on twitter in in our our space of business stuff so steph is here you were told me you're nervous are you done being nervous yet i'm a little nervous i feel like it's just the pod has grown so much since i was on a year ago but hopefully i'll live up to the hype it doesn't matter how many people listen it's the same experience either way that's the good news for you because it's just us talking so you did a bunch of you did a bunch of research and i had a bunch of topic ideas because that's kinda your job for the and trends and whatnot and i just see bullet points i wanna just call them out the ones i think are interesting i don't know all the details so what we'll do is i'll look at your notes here i'm just gonna call out a name you introduce it tell me why it's interesting what it is and then we'll react it we'll see what we'll just brainstorm off that so let's start with this one the the fsa store what what is this okay so the fsa store if you're like me and you're not originally from the states you're like what the hell is an fsa and it's a flexible spending account so it's basically a health account there's also hsa where you allocate some amount of money and you allocate that pre tax i believe so you're basically saving tax and allocating this money only to certain products only certain products related to your health these products range from actually seeing a doctor to you getting a covid shot or we're not a shot or i should say a test or band aids there's a whole range of that you can use it on but the interesting part about an fsa that's different from an hsa is that it expires it's basically the only expiring money that i can think of even gift cards you're actually legally not allowed to expire gift cards anymore and use it or lose it with the with fsa exactly and so there's something called the fsa store it's fsa store dot com and if you go to that one it gets millions of page a month which you know you might say it's just millions that's not so many but there's so high intent because basically what happens is at this cutoff period you get millions of people going and saying i have hundreds of dollars you can get up to twenty seven hundred dollars in your fsa per year so that you have a decent amount of money that you're like this is expiring i have to spend it right and done this before i don't know if you have i end buying like ten bottles of sunscreen or something ridiculous and i think there's just there's a couple different opportunities here so the first is there was this really interesting brand called well that i noticed when i was going to splurge on my fsa dollars and all it was we've talked about some of these topics on my first million before where you take a really boring business like band aids and you go okay i see band aid brand and no one's really doing anything interesting around band aids and why don't i just create a really cool d version of band so if you go to get wall dot com you'll just see it and you'll be like okay one this is such a beautiful site and two i'm i'm into band aids you're like i i kinda want some of these band aids and so what i found interesting about this is there's all these other kind of product lanes that you can just like walk down and cvs or something like that and be like oh that's boring that's boring i haven't seen that reinvented and actually one of people have probably heard of eric ryan he's the founder of well but he's also done ollie gum which people are probably familiar with and method soaps so he's basically doing this but i think there's a lot more room for other people to do the exact same thing and use the fsa store as almost this like really interesting acquisition house for if i go to fsa store and i just click shop at the top the number one like the first product is a well pack advantages but it has other things like you know zero tech medicine sunscreen icy hot you know a paragon gun type of thing you know contact solution whatever there's a whole bunch of things you can pay for this so i actually that you just brought up two separate but interesting ideas it they can be combined like this example but let's talk about first i'll talk about the well example so at hu con the guy were talking about airline i think he came and he spoke and he was talking about how i started method soap and he's like alright method soap it's now this big company whatever i forgot how how much he sold it for i think a hundred million dollars or something like that exact numbers don't matter a lot of money and it's like how you create a soap brand and he he described as his method that he's used for methods so for ollie gum and for willy which is he goes walk down any aisle what you're looking for is what i call a sea of same ness and so he put up this photo of the soap aisle and it was just like all a bunch of green bottles was like every bottle well every like house cleaner was green in a bottle and it looked exactly the same and their names were even kind the same the way you're like you know like whatever they're called like wind decks and like spray you know spray fast or whatever right like these kind of a certain type of name and he goes that c of same is your opportunity and so in in a sea of green bottles with boring names and ingredients that are you know crazy chemical names you can't pronounce gonna make a different shaped bottle with a different color with a different name with ingredients you could pronounce and that's what they did with method he's like then you go down walking out knock down another aisle the you know vitamins and supplements they all look the same again they're all so saw that see same as boom came out with ollie gum and did a couple things like instead of saying vitamin c he put like you know like immunity or better sleep on the on the label because that's the benefit you get out of the thing instead of needing to know what why do i want you know omega three fish official oils what is that gonna do for me omega three fish oils not that motivating you know better hair and nails way more motivating and so use that insight made a better bottle better name and and rolled it out by the time he did the third one he already had the to partnership with target lined up because they were target was like oh this guy's is the hit baker so you basically get kind of like a record deal with us whenever you come out with your next thing you're gonna get shell space from day one instead of having to build up to get there and so that's what he did with well band aids because he looked out the band aid aisle was like wow every band aid is the same they all have this like skin color like look that's like it's not actually anyone's skin color but it's like meant to kinda like you know blend in and we're gonna make the most fun looking band aids that are like your your cut your brew your your scar is a a badge of honor and you should have like kind of like a it should be a story worth telling and so let's make it stand out and you know he could tell by the just the way this guy described something as boring as a band aid why he's successful because he's able to see he sees you know the olympics in a in a in a band aid and and that's why he's able to approach it very differently so i think that's one interesting thing you talked about and where else could you do that and we've talked about that before i think one of the last ideas that came out of this was with the founder of david's tease and he said i think it was like like dura flame basically like the the log company like if you could make just sort of like the modern the you know the well band aids of dura flame logs because there's you know quite a large amount of sales of that product but it's like a very sleepy category did you see the one it was like kfc smelling dura flame logs no they like that's hilarious kfc and they're like make your house smell like kentucky fried chicken i know think amazing there is a there is a brand for that i don't know if it's a brand i saw it on walmart so i think they actually just partnered with kfc but i love this idea of actually speaking of david's tea if anyone's listening i know sometimes we talk about like really broad topics but something you could actually start today is this thing called butterfly pt which is basically i i used to drink the stuff every day in thailand and this tea that probably costs like ten cents to actually make and you put it in your tea it makes your tea bright blue and then you're sitting there and it actually tastes pretty good you add a little bit of lemon juice and it turns bright purple and it's just this like kind of quirky viral thing i think someone today could go source a bunch of butterfly pt from thailand or rubber you originally get it create an instagram focused business around this and it would be just like the kfc log where it would just be like this initial thing you get a quick hit and then you build out a tea business around that right yeah this is great i remember back in the day don't know how old you are but we used to do like there was this drink i remember it was called squeeze it or something like that and had the same thing where you could put a little capsule in and it would change colors and so like you know the kid at the lunch table who had the squeeze it thing and it was blue and then he'd put it in and it turned you know crazy pink or red or whatever that was like you know just five seconds of entertainment where everybody's looking to see what is that fizz thing why is it changing colors and so i love this model of basically looking at very instagram products so tiktok instagram what will work well here and then how do i work backwards from that and actually said is there a business here and tea is like high margin high retention if you can do it so i kinda like that idea you said you used to drink this when you're were in thailand is that right yeah i mean when i traveled there was just so many different products that you know you think we're in this completely digital distributed world and you're like okay if something exists here it's obviously an exit over here too and i was just constantly surprised by how many products i would run into in one place that just don't exist in the rest of the world right i can give you another example of just even right now i'm living in california i walked down the alcohol aisle in california and i see beer i see wine i see seltzer you see that everywhere else but in california you also see hard kombucha i got to florida i went home to toronto recently i don't see any hard kombucha and if you actually just go on to google trends you search hard kombucha one you can see the search volume trending up it's a it's a hobby stick but interestingly enough google trend shows you the pockets it shows you where search volume is happening it's only in california it's only in colorado it's only in these kind of right in the expected places that you you would find hard kombucha and i think it's just it's gonna take off of someone in like wyoming go go start a heart kombucha brand i think you're you're gonna kill and you know the next three to five years yeah hard kombucha is a good example there's a whole bunch of others but the there's kind of the principle here is the future is already here it's just not evenly distributed there's a great quote now normally people say that about like very high tech stuff like you know you know somebody's is somebody's using this you know advanced ai technology is just not available for everybody yet and in this case what you're saying is actually there are localized products that have kinda like cult following in a a local area and humans are not that dissimilar to each other so if it if it's working california it's only a matter of time until that spreads throughout the rest of the country then once it's working in the us it'll spread elsewhere and you could be the one who the you get rewarded for being one who is ready as that spreads and helps accelerate that spread exactly i wanted to do one more idea from this fsa store which i think is actually really interesting which is when you go to the fsa store or if you just search how can i use my fsa or can i use my fsa for the gun for example you mentioned you saw that on there there's this whole list of products where the answer is maybe meaning mh you might need a doctor's note you might maybe be able to expense this and it you know a certain type of this product by account there's all this fuzz around it and i think you could create a business that basically it could do one of two things one of them is go work with companies where they're on the fringe they're kind of medical related things like float tanks things like red light therapy and you say you know you have this huge amount of people that could be spending their fsa in ways they probably would rather right i'd rather go to a float tank then buy like ten bottles of sunscreen and say here we're gonna help you get make sure that all your products are included in the fsa store so it's just really easy for you to get this business a second go ahead ahead i was gonna say the second is just you could do the opposite for the consumer right where you could basically say look there's a bunch of these products that you probably would rather buy but you might need a doctor's note or you might need this prerequisite and we're gonna make that really really easy you can spend your twenty seven hundred bucks on stuff you actually want yeah there's basically paperwork as a service and so like do not pay as a good example of that so you could do it for the customer you could also just potentially like it could you just create like a so i a huge amount of this money just doesn't doesn't get used and and so i think you one one thing you could do here is you could actually basically say look most of this money doesn't get used why don't we create a subscription box we're just gonna shove it with cool interesting stuff you don't have to even think or visit the store or try to spend the right amount it's just gonna show up at your door it's just free stuff for you we will spend your account for you if you basically you know i don't know exactly how the the mechanics work of authenticating in and big giving your account so they can spend for you but basically i think somebody could create a subscription box on fsa and provide free stuff to everybody and just take your middleman fee for being the middle old stuffing these boxes i love that because as i was trying to spend mine i was on all these list calls being like takes out yeah interesting like what can i spend my money on and i was just it's so funny it's like expiring money and i'm like what possibly can i get that's worth anything to me and i ended buying just junk right sunscreen these sunglasses i didn't need so yes i think that could absolutely work if someone did the work to find out what are the best things you can spend an fsa on and create some sort of subscription box or business that helps people access that stuff and do you know how much money is in fsa like how much money is available in fsa so the max an individual person put in as like twenty six hundred or something like that but how much what's the total pie here do you know so i was trying to research this before and i couldn't find a number for fsa but i think i found a number around i think there was twenty million hsa and their similar vehicle so imagine that the average contribution is a thousand right you can put up just twenty seven hundred let's imagine the average is a thousand that would mean that there's twenty billion dollars in time capped money every single year will be waiting to be spent yeah that's crazy i'm looking at some article and it basically says workers forfeit as much as four hundred million a year in unused account cash this is pretty good so i i think this is like of many of the ideas that we have on here this is one of the best ones if you are skilled with either seo email list building you know d c customer acquisition this is a business in a box that that you could start i would love to see somebody start you're gonna do this email me sean at jean i will invest in you advise you whatever because this is one i would make time for because i think this is like a a no this is a slam dunk sort of idea here where if you're gonna take a shot this is a type of shot to take a shot on you can build kind of like a local monopoly but it's big it's a niche but it's big enough where you can get big in the in this category it's a not so niche niche yeah exactly alright so you have some more on here let's do the better swag company what do you have in mind here okay so if you're like me vent conferences you go to a conference and you get shitty pens you have like ten water bottles in your cabinet right if all these things that companies give you because they want you to care about their company are you they wanna reward you in some way when you join a company but it's all stuff you never use right and so i imagine a better swag company a better especially conference wide company where you're giving things out that you want people to use and to remember you buy and it's crazy to me that this doesn't exist right there's only a couple different products that you think about when you think about swag again pens notebooks sweaters water bottles and i think someone needs to go out there and figure out what are just like cool things people are stoked to have so even if you think about it a yeti water bottle which a lot of companies are giving out for free is is something like fifty dollars right so it's not cheap right you instead could let's say you get a branded polaroid camera one someone would be spoke stoked to get it they would use it in front of other people and i'm just wondering what those other things are so maybe they could get a pair of like really cool sneakers air jordans if you're really willing to splurge i remember one company i worked at before had just this would cost fifty cents but they had one of those laptop video covers right with their that was brandon with their their logo and people would always be like where'd did you get that the was results they also gave out like screen cleaner so this a little spray that you'd use on your laptop but it's things that you would actually use things that people would be excited to get and i think just someone needs to go create this and the one company i wanted to call out they're kind of doing this but i still don't see them really you know someone should just go hire team to go scout all the really cool products online and say this is stuff people want to build that into a swag company but this company swag up they started in twenty seventeen they did five k their first month three point three million in their first year and today they're on track to do fifty five million in sales and the founder is twenty six years old so i'm bringing this up because i think this is actually just a pretty simple model right it's simple also because these businesses have money to spend right you're doing a this is a b2c operations you just go to hubspot or any of these companies say look i know swag is like tiring for you i know you probably have someone in your company that doesn't wanna do this but is like kind of forced to do this in their role we're gonna do this for you and we're gonna do it so much better yes shout out to michael the founder swag up he also hooked me up on my i needed to swag for my course and he got me my swag and a rush delivery so i appreciate that and you're right so so they do a great job they're pretty awesome platform but that's not the market that we're talking about here we're talking about there are brands that are willing to pay way more for something that's way cooler and way cooler doesn't actually make it way more expensive it just makes it a little bit more expensive so now you get this great trade i will raise my budget a lot for something that's a lot cooler but it only cost you a little more and so things like that like for example we we're at twitch and if you think about the culture like we might wanna a reward let's say our top partners right the top streamers now these streamers they they make good money they kinda have it all and we try to give them the vip treatment same thing with like fan tool or draft kings they wanna give their high rollers vip treatment they wanna give them branded swag but if you give them the pen and the t shirt you know you sort of get lost in the shuffle it feels a little bit cheap why wouldn't they do custom sneakers why wouldn't they do like a jersey of some kind why wouldn't they do like i wouldn't twitch you like a custom kinda like gaming console or case or controller right something that is a branded ps five controller the that would be something that you could do that you could in many cases you're not even making a thing you're just buying the retail thing or buying it wholesale ideally and then you're adding like a vinyl sticker wrap around it so that it becomes a branded thing and so i think you're right that basically if there's somebody out there who has taste and or or if you have some like ad agency that's like you know sort of struggling this is the pivot for you you're tired of you're you're good ad agency but you're tired of client services here's what you do instead right you just keep rotating through unique hot products that you can customize just enough for the company and then you go charge basically five times more right if i'm gonna spend on a t shirt at five dollars a piece i'll spend easily and maybe even ten times i'll spend fifty dollars a piece if you can give me something that's unique gonna stand out be memorable because my business value with these high rollers or my vip is very very high yeah i love that you were like prerequisite is taste for this business it has to be identify these products yeah totally agree yeah and taste is something by the way that like a lot of things need that you nobody talks about because it's like everybody thinks they have it but very few actually do and so it's good to call out one because if you're self aware enough you're like oh that requires taste okay cool i'm maybe not the one for me fsa store no taste required cool swag company yeah that takes that takes some taste and by the way if i did that i would do it like supreme i would do it like limited edition drops so today companies just come up with swag whenever they have their conference but what i would do instead is i would have a real a list of like the key buyers inside all these companies and then every month we would drop one new custom piece and it's like put your orders in now if you want that piece and we're never gonna make that again and then next month is like a new like this is the video game controller next month is the sneakers the next month after that is you know whatever like the the the laptop camera cover thing whatever and so doing that might actually get people to buy more often than just there once a once a year kinda like annual swag purchase because it'll become like shopping for the company the company will start to stockpile cool unique things that they have to get it before it's gone exactly alright you have some other good ones on here let's do okay i heard you say this and i thought it sounded smart but i'm not sure exactly what it would be but you said something like company should have a chief automation officer are you you drew some parallel you said the way they have this today in the future they will or should have chief automation officer what does that mean what did you mean by that tweet yeah so this title is a little silly it's just like you know a neat title that you could assign to someone whose job is something that i don't see enough in company today so you have people who are responsible for setting the goal setting the strategy then you have a bunch of people who are actually focused on going and deploying that strategy what you don't really have in companies is someone who is solely responsible for making sure that we do that effectively as in you know are we automating the right things our people do people have va and others that they can delegate to are we operating this company effectively the same way that you would have a pilot that you know use an airplane to get to a destination you also have someone checking if the machine is working properly right if the airplane is operating as it should be and i think this would you know again the title is a little silly chief automation officer but someone whose sole responsibility is to go find things that can be automated or delegated within a company that should be and then their responsibility maybe they have a a team of you know automation experts or maybe they just do it themselves if it's a small company and they just they just do that and i think you could i think you would see the roi on this role immediately right so so they were easily pay for themselves and more and i think it would be really simple i mean i think maybe in ten years this will be more sophisticated they would just literally shadow people in their role for a day and be like okay so what what are you doing and why are you doing that and they ever thought about doing this and they'd probably just be like oh no i i didn't think of doing that like i just been doing it this way because like that's how i was taught and so i think that could be just like a really simple version and i don't even think you need a chief x officer it can just be someone in your company where that is their sole responsibility is to improve processes right so you have are it already inside companies you have a couple of roles like this that are internal facing they don't face the customer the customer is inside the company so there are like chief people officer and the whole like hr department and the people the people team as they like to call it now then there's it so it basically says great i gotta get you the right the best equipment the right equipment i gotta make sure it works make sure you can access all the internal stuff and they're more like firefighters they just come in when things are broken for the most part they're they're there day one and then they're there on every emergency after that and then you have like data scientists that that wasn't super common before but now you have teams inside companies i say look we're gonna dig through all this data we're gonna organize it we're gonna get analysis and insights and we're gonna hand those to the execs of all that run all these different functions we're gonna say with this data now you can do your job better and what you're saying is it just like there's sort of a data scientist there might be sort of like an automation engineer and the automation engineer might say hey we're not digging through data we're digging through process and when we dig through process we're gonna find repetitive jan processes that are sucking up time that are causing failures and and errors and mistakes and we're gonna is like free up those problems and we know how to do that because we are experts of this like set of tools that exist that can be used so that this thing you're doing with excel should be done on a dashboard this thing you're doing manually that you set at a reminder to do every night at eleven pm that can be automated or whatever right this thing that you're writing this report every day for your boss that can be a zapier command and just update the date data automatically so i totally believe in what you're saying right now it's kind of annoying i like i like it more when we disagree but i totally agree with this one the question is what would you do if you knew this like was gonna be true the what like okay let's say we agree that this should exist how would you like make this exist so do you mean within a company if you were gonna build a business around it either way so you're you're steph smith and let's say i said this is your mission you could do it like inside hubspot maybe that's a good place to start maybe that would be the end of it or you could build a company out of this how would this like come to life so i think if i was gonna do it myself i would do kind of what i just mentioned which is i would go to my boss i would say hey look i've noticed that there are some processes that aren't efficient in my own role in other people's role but no one has the time to actually focus on this they're too busy you know running on the treadmill they don't have enough time to repair their treadmill so i i'd say give me this budget to hire someone part time who just knows a lot about automation let me have them shadow me first let me have them shadow me and then in two weeks time i'll come back to you and i'll tell you all the time that i saved so i can focus on these high you know these high performance projects and then i would say can i do this for another person and then you know just get that buy in to show like oh my gosh look how effective this is and then it would spread if i was gonna build a company around this i would basically create a program i mean this is basically just a course to teach people exactly the most effective ways is to do use things like zapier no code tools maybe a little bit of codes so they know how to implement automation and then i would go to companies and do the same thing similar to what lambda schools is doing lambda school is allowing people to test drive their engineers and just say look we'll give you a month free and right if you like them you know you'll hire them at know you know that month is gonna be free i would do the same thing i would say look we've got these bad asses your company doesn't have enough time to figure out how to make your internal process better so let me give you this person for a week a month whatever it is and i want you to see the returns and then after that this is what we're charging for them so i would do kind of a lambda school s model if i was building business around it right there's also ui path right which is a company that basically created a piece of software that's like i don't know i don't actually know exactly how uipath works you i don't know if you know but here's what i've heard i could be wrong if you're the ceo of uipath i think is based in like romania or something like that you know my apologies but the way i think uipath works is actually they install a program on your computer and all it does is watch what you do and just watch where you move the mouse type watch to type in and it sort of looks for this pattern and it basically says oh okay is called robotic process automation i think rpa and and they're basically the pro the machine will just say cool i figured out how to automate that thing you were doing right like i figured out what you do every day is you wake up and you copy these x these ten rows from this excel file into this other file and then you like add this other piece of information and then you drop the file and drop cool just do that automatically now and and uipath is a very big multi dollar company it works with with big big companies that need more efficiency and so i think uipath is probably like the craziest way to solve this problem and i'm pretty fascinated with this idea of over but it sounds almost too good to be true right like if somebody pitch me this i'd be like nah not how it works like a computer can't just watch what i do on a screen and like automate me and like the reality is apparently it it can and so i would love to actually play with some of these and maybe invest in companies that are doing rpa but i haven't had a chance to do it much myself have you do you know anything about you like that yeah so like you said they went public recently at i think i just checked they're out a thirty two billion dollar valuations this is not you know chu change this is a big company but like you said i think they're they're focused more so on on enterprises right now and figuring out just like the really common things that people do perhaps it's like customer service or something like that i think you know maybe this is just an interim solution but there's always gonna be things that a human can spot more easily by just like literally shadowing someone like sitting this to them for a day on zoom or in person that i think there's still is this gap that rpa there's always gonna be a delta between what rpa can tackle and you know the human exchange there so i think there's still an opportunity for you to go hire like a chief automation officer or have you ever shout someone at their job i have yeah i mean who did you shadow well it was in my first job and i remember it was in like business consulting in the first week they get you to shadow out someone in their role but my favorite part of that is it was like classic business consulting like your whole day is spent in excel and they just go see that mouse over there we're gonna teach you not to use it and i remember thinking at the time like what how am gonna do that but yeah it was it was game changing to just see what someone does because when you're but working on your own you're just like inventing processes and you learned so much by just watching yeah i think that actually there should be more shadowing period i've learned a ton shadowing i did it for products like we made it before we got acquired by twitch we were building for twitch streamers and so i was like well i'm not a twitch streamer i could try to pretend to be one but like the fact is i'm not a twitch streamer with a big community the type of person who we're actually building for and so i arranged with i reached out a bunch of tuition and i said hey i would love to you know just shadow you i'm i'm doing this thing you know if i what i think i'm building is gonna help people like you but you know i bet you've used a bunch of software where you literally look at it and you're like do this person didn't understand what the hell they were supposed to do like this thing doesn't work i wanna avoid that and my way of avoiding that is can i come and just hang out in the room while you stream just wanna watch you for a couple hours i know that sounds weird blah blah blah and i'll give you fifty bucks and he's like fifty bucks okay great why did you say all that other shit and so i went and i would go sit like twitch stream in their bedroom so i'm literally sitting on the dude's bed because there's no other space in the room everything else is like a camera or i'd be on screen so i'm sitting on the bed i'm like t my thumbs and i'm watching them do things and i thought i knew kinda like what it was like and then you see all the nuances you're like oh he literally is peeing in a bottle because he can't stand up because he's gonna lose viewers maybe we could do something maybe we could build a feature that would let him have a restroom break but would keep the viewers entertained right like i would have never thought of that feature if i had didn't see the guy peeing a bottle under the desk and so there's just a whole bunch of things like that that you cannot pick up unless you're there kinda like what they call in institute you're basing in the situation watching it all happen and you'll see both those nuances of the customer but you'll also see stuff that if you just ask them hey what are your biggest pain points and they'll tell you a few things and then you watch them and you're like dude you spend half your day doing this they're like yeah you just gotta do you gotta do what you gotta do you're like no that's you don't have to do that that's it i could solve that you just don't know so you didn't tell me when i asked you but when i watched you i saw something different and so highly recommend shadowing for many things if you wanna know if you wanna do a job you wanna build a better product shadow somebody exactly and i think this is actually why if you had someone shadow you who is focused on automation they would ask you those same questions like why do you do and you'd be like i just do it like this is what it has be done and they'd be like actually no like this can i can eliminate this in thirty minutes and you'll never have to do this again so i think shadowing you're absolutely right just you think there's all this like really intentional process behind what you do and as soon as you just start asking questions like shadow yourself literally all the things that you do in today write them down as if you were leaving the company tomorrow and you had to pass this on to someone i bet you there's gonna be all this stuff that you're gonna uncover where you're like oh actually like i don't know if we should be doing it that way right right right right yeah totally i've been hiring a bunch of people that are like virtual assistance in the philippines basically to just automate a bunch of things in my life as well as in my company and and when you do it you're like okay if this this brand a person who you're paying five dollars six dollars an hour how are they gonna do this task that like i used to pay somebody in the us this much money to do so said well need to write i need to create a script right and the script is basically like you know i'm coding a i'm basically coding a and a google doc for a human to to execute this same thing every day or every week every friday say do this and so you know i can see how you could do that a and software but b doing that process for yourself when you're trying to automate yourself out of something you're right it's like the easiest way to see a bunch of like inefficiency and leaks in your own game is when you try to like write the script for somebody else to do what you do it's like oh either you find out know this can't be delegated because it's like no there's actually just a bunch of intuition and creativity here or you're like oh my god why do i even do this task and why do i do it this this makes no sense totally alright let's do a couple others that i think you're interesting let's do let's do this i actually okay i'll let you i'll let you pick so we can either do the thing or we can do expired patents or we could do the tiktok china factory which one is most interesting to you so either or expired patents let's see tried really quickly i don't think there's too much of a takeaway here but i think it's one of these things that may you know if you're operating a company and this may actually be interesting to you so a lot of the time when you create a product you go and you create a product and then after you think how do i market this product bev try was a really interesting inversion of that so i was in toronto recently i'm at a friend's house and they're like you wanna drink and i'm like yeah sure what do you have and they're like open the fridge and i look and there's just like a dozen plus of different types of drinks but only one of each and i'm like alicia like why do you have like one seltzer or one side right one type of beer and she goes oh it's because a bev try have you heard a best try and i go no and basically a really really simple acquisition tactic you give them your number you give the try your phone number and then they text you you're on some text list where they say hey do you want our next alcohol drop and they literally just show up at your house and give you free alcohol which i was like no like this can't be true are you paying for this or they like selling your data and she goes no they're just like they just give me free alcohol and i'm like how many times have they done this she's like they've done it like four times and basically it's similar to something like a block where you can even work your way up a list if you start referring other users so i think they have this massive list of users the reason i find this one especially interesting is because one i think they actually get the alcohol for free that's why it's all like dis destroyed you're not getting a six pack you're getting one this new drink that some brand is launching but i also think it's really interesting because they have zero product today as in they as a company bev try so far are not selling anything but you can kinda see a little glimpse of of it in the app so if you she opened the app and you know i was like let me see this and you can see that they're gonna add new products it almost looks like one of the super apps that you would find in southeast asia or something right you know they're probably gonna sell you some food they're probably gonna come up with their own alcohol brand who knows what they're gonna do with this but i again thought was really interesting because most of the time you create a product and then you market the hell out of that product and for some companies like uber or hello fresh they're sp so much money on acquiring these users and i just thought this was again a really interesting version where hold up what if we actually just figure out the easiest way to attract a large mass of people then we're gonna figure out the product after so i don't know if you have any thoughts on that but that's the best try story yeah i think there's some good and some bad in that so there's some good is usually there's a lag time while you're like waiting for your product to be built or it takes time to like get your formulations right or you're waiting for the engineer to make the app or whatever it is and like you can either sit on your ass and do nothing or you can actually like go and build your customer list ideally with an experience that is similar to what your product is so they get to kinda sample it manually before it's like available full time so i like that the downside is let's assume i don't would you know what the actual product is going to be for bev tries is it gonna be description for drinks is it gonna be no idea i don't even delivery technically if they know i mean they probably do have some sort of strategy there but so far there's nothing in the app that indicates what they're gonna sell okay fair enough so we don't know we don't know where it is but the risk is you can build a big interested customer list with samples and you know tips and tricks of marketing but the big risk for most startups is that you don't have product market fit meaning you're actually not building some something that somebody wants they're willing to pay for and they're gonna keep using it and and so you're kinda working on the wrong problem in a way you may only need a hundred customers to find out if you put cut product market fit or a thousand customers and you're sitting here trying to build a ten thousand person a hundred thousand person list and you're gonna go to them with the wrong product the other thing is that these lists are perishable so i've had many many wait lists and for every week that the wait list goes by another half of the people on the list forgot what they signed up for and don't care and so you're like we have this i had at one point i had a million person wait list for an app that we were building and because i had this viral video but blah so one million people on the list by the time we actually went and hit them up it's like you know i don't remember what it was but it was something pitiful like you know ten thousand or twenty thousand people who actually like tried the thing and it's like oh ten thousand twenty thousand i could've have just paid ten thousand bucks and got that through direct marketing and they would have actually like been maybe my perfect target market and and so you know the this million person list and actually trying to be that useful i've seen this many times every waitlist list decay and value over time so i would say that's like the downside but in in general you have to decide how your product how you're gonna build your company is it product first is it audience first that's like let's say for me i built an audience first and then i can launch things like the course or a book or whatever it's easy then because i have an audience you could build it community first build the community like you know trans or whatnot and so you have to decide oh you know it could be partnership first yeah you sign some big licensing deal or distribution deal with someone who has big big reach and that's your first move and then after that you go build the product not so bad and so i think all these can work but it's good to be intentional and not try to do all of them if try to do all of them you're gonna split your focus and so you know that that's kinda of my thoughts on that that strategy no i think that's spot on i think you're totally right that these are absolutely gonna decay these types of lists and you don't have the same of like intentional in the way that you're acquiring customers because they want for free alcohol you don't know what else they want on top of that i think one kind of parallel to this which i think probably a lot of people know is just it you're almost doing arbitrage of like let me find a these big companies that have alcohol that they want other people to know about they're gonna give me the alcohol for free i'm gonna use this to acquire customers at basically no cost another parallel business that does this is subscription boxes so a lot of people think subscription boxes are you know you're buying a to product at scale and then you're for you know margin on top of that selling it to other people well actually a lot of subscription boxes just get their products for free yeah because companies wanna be in it so anyway i think that's just a kind of a parallel business approach yeah exactly so it's good to see these patterns because you can figure out how to apply it exactly i wanted to ask you you you make stuff so you make content you make products kind of sometimes you probably invest some of your own money you know whatever i i saw you put something in here about transfer wise a stock and just made me think to stefan this stock and what what a stuff phone what a stuff like to invest so i'm curious give me your kind of like give us the rundown on what do you do so you're building your the stuff you make and then what do you do with your money and then how is that different than what you've heard me or sam do with what we do with how we build and how we invest so i mean i'll start by saying i'm actually a terrible investor so it's funny because early on especially when i was writing for trends i look back on that time and i'm like if i invested and all the things that i wrote about i'd be really wealthy which i didn't i i think the reason i'm a bad investor is because i like other people think i'm smarter than the market and so i make bets and you know and i'm not smarter than the market so i mean not financial advice but the best way to make money right is it's just like index funds that's what sam does but i also i would say that i think in general in the way that i spend my money is that i especially today try not to focus on markets at all meaning that i invest most of my money in just my own projects and like i'd rather bet on myself than anything else and so i know that's kind of a cop out answer but that's my investing strategy today okay so what does that mean like give me an example of you investing in your let's make it real sit because it is kind of a compound answer so the on this podcast we don't list let it go as invest in yourself that's the best we say alright what are you doing what you what did you invest well okay so the idea of investing my in myself is partially like anything i wanna buy education related i buy it we've talked about this with sam before but it's also meaning that i don't spend any time looking at the markets anymore i think last year when everyone was looking at the markets i did the same thing made a bunch of bad bets short the market for the story before and so now i i have my money in indexes or a couple stocks that i like and then i don't touch it at all i don't i never look at the market these days and then i just spend all of my time which i view as like an asset in myself so learning skills and building things online so what are you learning what are you learning what are you investing in building your own skills in right now so most recently i'm invested in i'm taking an automation course so it's just like a python automation course because i believe in this idea of like automating every possible thing in your life that you don't need to be the one doing right also created a course around this topic it's called doing time right which is all about this call it this bicycle framework of how people should think about spending their time and it's just a sequential framework where a lot of people think about how do i move faster on my bike to get to my destination and the course is all about how to first eliminate whatever the hell you should be eliminating then automate then delegate so it's just a sequential framework that teaches people how to do that oh how does it relate to a bike so basically the way that i view it is you know if you're gonna go create some like billion dollar company or just do something really impressive in your life those are things that you look back on your like wow i did it those are like cross country bike journeys and if you wanna cross the country with a bike it's gonna be kinda hard right you know you might not show up every day you might quit it's gonna be pretty grueling what a lot of people do when they're pursuing these really audacious goals is that they just get on their bike and they wonder how do bike faster how do get to this destination faster really what you should be doing is first you lay out your map right this is your strategy these your goals okay where do i wanna go what am gonna run into how do i make it most likely for me to actually get to my destination the second thing is elimination which means that you're on your bike if you just hop on you probably have all the stuff that you just like thought oh yeah i need this and you know maybe you got like a monkey on your back you've got a shitty bike and you're just going on your journey elimination is get rid of all the stuff that's unnecessary that includes all these random d tours where you're like it'd be kind fun to go this petting zoo or it'd be kind of fun to like go see a movie but that's fine every so often but ultimately infinite d tours means you're never getting to your destination the third is automation which means basically getting an an electric bike how much easier is a cross country journey if you have something a machine working on your side to get you still have to hop on the bike you still got a pedal but it's just gonna be a lot easier to get there delegation is kind of like the the like more badass version of automation it's like taking things that again you don't wanna be doing and in in addition to to like automating it with a machine now you have a human right who's who's even more contextual and so that's like upgrading your bike you know getting like just like the best electric bike on the market and then by the end we have these images that we created for the course and by the end there's this image of like someone biking cross journey or cross country and they're like smelling of flower at sunny outside and they're like well this is actually like i want to be on this journey right and so anyway that's kind of the that's the foundation of the course and then we actually show people exactly how to purge their inbox how to zap the hell out of you know they're their project stack and and things like that one interesting little thing that i tweeted about recently from the course that i'll just call out is we came up with all these little frameworks and one of them is expiring to dos we all have this like long list of to do's and some of them are just not that important so you know you you come across an article you're like i should definitely read this later but guys i should definitely listen to this later and then you end up with this never ending to do list and so i came up with this like super simple notion template which expires to dos certain types of to do's after thirty days you could set at seven days you set it to ninety and i think that's actually a product that someone could build a a productivity tool that's just centered around using your psychology for you right so expiring to dos having it so that you can actually see your full to do listen until you get the the number one thing of the day done then you could just kind of think through some of those psychological hacks and implement them into an actual productivity tool gotcha i you don't know this but i hate productivity tools i feel like that's the first thing everyone builds is like a better to do list then they do build better invoicing and then they build better you know time tracking and things like that that's like the the engineers like rite a passage and so as a general business rule i'm like just don't build productivity tools or build things that don't seem like productivity tools but are actually productivity that works but if you build something that's supposed to be a productivity tool i'm like that's this like a death fit i just love to avoid but i do i'm with you i do think productivity matters and you know i just don't like to build tools in that space but okay i like that that's pretty cool and what about what what is it about your philosophy do you have anything in your philosophy around either building or or investing that is different than me or sam or what you've heard us talking about that's a good question anything different than what you and sam have talked about i don't know i think that so i basically take that like investing approach of sam i also think that like one of the things that i've done which maybe i i think you did as well you build the podcast in this way but i don't see enough people doing is a lot of people think that they either need to binary go binary in the sense of like i need to quit my job and build something or i need to just like do my job and know one day i'll build a company i actually think that the hybrid approach is possibly the best approach because you have the complete financial stability through your job right and so you don't need to worry about that which means you can go and be really risky really creative and really authentic with anything that you build on the side because you're not worried about like oh how do convert these people today or wanna make sure i have dinner on the table and so that's what i don't see enough creators doing they think they need to go like full zuckerberg drop out of school and you know scale business right away and when i see a lot of indie hackers that do that they burn out real quick because they're like this isn't even fun anymore and i also like i thought i could make money in three months and i can't right i think maybe that's not different to what you and sam have done but i think that's different to what i see a lot of creators do okay fair enough yeah i actually think on that like i think in general it's better not to take hybrid approaches because hybrid approaches are typically like kinda compromises or have your cake eat two's that you're trying to get and like if you just really said what you wanted the the question is are you doing the hybrid approach because you want to do both things or you're doing the hybrid approach because you're afraid the thing you wanna do won't work or because you're you know basically fear right you have some doubt about the the thing and and i've definitely done both so like the podcast i definitely did while i was was at twitch and then i sense quit twitch and do it now more or less you know full on so i have done that but it it depends i think you could do it with hobbies and i consider investing a hobby i consider podcasting a hobby i don't think you can do it with company building in the same so the same like i wouldn't advise it for that for their company building it's like look you if this works the prize is big in order for this to work commitment is full on you should just go full on with it once you're once you have conviction and like for everybody conviction comes at a different level but i'm the type that's sort like you know just default to conviction quickly and then change my mind once i have evidence that it's that it's not right so i i would say we probably do differ a little bit that i'm not a i'm not a huge believer in the side hustle even though it looks like i have tons of side hustle i actually i think the optimal path is to just know what you want and then go for it and then if you if it doesn't work out you can sort of always fall back to the job and things like that america's is kind of a great place in that sense where you know failure is is rewarded here and unlike any other culture that i've ever seen and so because of that you can use that to your advantage especially in the tech industry like i did a failed startup is like oh good that's like you know solid experience that you have you know screwing it up and i don't think that's true for most industries and most cultures yeah i think there's a couple of examples where i think often people i saw agree with you if you're gonna go create the next like billion trillion even people are talking about company then i think yes you gotta go all in but there are tons of examples where like the google founders like they made sure they've they've finished their phds before actually going all in because they wanted almost like that stability same thing with the bank's founder i think she was i can't remember if it's was her someone else was like selling printers to make sure that she had like the long term vision in order to build span but we can agree to slightly disagree on that one but why don't we do why don't we do one more start to do the expired patents one let's do hold on let me look at this list i think there might be a better one because i think that one we might have talked about for let's talk about this financial the fidelity rule change of what that might mean so talk about the the fidelity thing that you you had here at the bottom yeah so fidelity recently launched trading accounts for thirteen to seventeen year so before i i'm not sure if they just didn't have them or if it was illegal i'm not sure you've talked about how rule changes are game changers and they unlock innovation so basically now teams can open accounts they do need to i i believe that they actually need to have like a parent open the account for them but basically there's this new wave of investors we've seen the same thing with robinhood that are able to trade able to make deposits able to you know buy etfs all of all those things and so i think that you know you have this new huge cohort of people and that'll continue to be true someone needs to create some sort of financial education game for these children because the parents are gonna be way more likely a to allow their children to go you know trade these stocks if right if they've had that also i think you can make it fun right like we've talked before about how education is really boring most of the time and so i think like tiktok generation someone go create a financial education game for these kids yeah there was an idea that on the episode we did with elaine she said that has stuck with me she goes why isn't there fantasy sports for trading and our fantasy football for for trading basically and i was like that's kind of a great idea and this this sort of reminds me of that trend which is there's there's already like you know robinhood kinda like captured this opportunity that was kinda hidden in plain sight which was that more people would trade if you lowered the friction right put it on their phone make it no fees for for every trade and make the ui simpler where you can just like you know see pretty charts and push buttons and and they will give you a free you know share of apple or sheriff of tesla or whatever at the time when you signed up if you referred friends and and all that good stuff so they they kind of gen z did up and and did a good job there but and then now there's this whole wave of like every version of stock trading app it's like a stock trading app social network a stock trading app that's like super hardcore core for options traders and i actually think somebody should go into the other quadrant of the of the chart which is basically like you're not doing it to get rich you're doing it for fun and what does that mean and i i think the fantasy trading game is kind of interesting here where if i could do this with like let's say i had a teenager and it's something that a teenager could do with their friends or with their parents or their family and everybody creates almost like daily fantasy you basically create a monthly stock game and the way it works is everybody gets the same budget and and then you get to allocate that into different stocks and everybody sees whatever invested in and then it sort of plays out over the course of the month and every day there's like trading news so there's kind of like ups and downs as you go there and then you basically create some kind of fantasy sports game around the stock market and i think if you did that you could definitely like fantasy sports i think there's like fifty million plus players of it i think that you could create a fantasy version of trading that may not have fifty million but i think you can get into the millions of people who are participating in this and that would be very valuable those leads would be very valuable because you could upsell them into actually trading because they're gonna have seen their fantasy portfolio crush it and they're gonna think oh my god i should go play the real game so those leads are extremely valuable whether you build it yourself or you sell it off to robinhood or whoever else you partner with them or you can even have like a premium version of this where it's like oh pay extra and you get you get you know whatever some advanced like charged metrics like saved you save your history or whatever it is so what do you think this fantasy sports idea for a stock market no i love it because as i said i think a lot of the time people try to acquire users like you know let me just like do this promo or something and really the the easiest way to acquire users is to make something fun right so you would acquire all these users through this game and the beauty of acquiring you know maybe some people would think this is a little predatory but acquiring users from thirteen to seventeen is that in five years are gonna be eighteen right a job you know yeah exactly to twenty two and and then you know even past that they're just gonna be scaling in net worth and you're acquiring them when they're really cheap and when it's easy to acquire them through things like a game right and so you don't really see many banks stuff like stuff the shark i love it the predatory stuff comes out no more no more nice stuff on twitter this is the the real calculating cold blooded killer why do you think youtube and instagram wanna create versions for kids i mean it's so that they can acquire users easily and then kind of stick with those users for the next five ten twenty fifty years and i think i mean again it's predatory so if someone does this please you know do it well and and do it you know with with good intentions but it it's true that you know this is a rule unlock right where these people are are coming online they they have access to these products and if you can do it in a smart way where parents feel good about your product unlike you know perhaps how parents feel about something like an instagram for kids then i think you're gonna get a huge swath of users that will carry through with you for a long time love it okay great where where should people get more stuff because i think a lot of people are gonna listen to this and be like oh she's amazing how do get more stuff in my life so the place i most active is on twitter my handle there is steph smith io because my website is steph smith dot io and obviously i work on trends so people can go to trends dot c if they're interested in that and then we mentioned the productivity course earlier i know productivity can be a really fuzzy thing but if people are interested that course is at doing time right dot com because my original book was doing content right dot com and i think you're supposed to be helping with the podcast is that right what are you doing for the pod well sam tried to get me to help because you guys are growing so quickly and you you need more help i think you're hiring a growth marketer though oh gotcha okay so you're not helping in the end i mean i'm here to help if you need help but i think i got a couple other projects that hubspot has me on okay alright sounds good i don't know how they could put you on anything but the the most important topic of all hubspot is this podcast so exactly we all know the truth alright steph this is great everybody go follow stuff this is amazing thanks for coming on appreciate you thanks for having me i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back on