#44 - New e-mail clients, Sharing the craigslist office & How to keep your star players

sweet gold shoes dude thank you they are they're women's i gotta women's still locker thank you they're women's size i think they're size fourteen did you have to like convince them to like give them to you well they're like they're like you know those are women's i was like yeah i don't i don't care right who cares give me the it's like when we were buying these chairs we were like give us the red brightest chair you've got and they're like well you sure you don't want this a good looking chair no no no we want the brightest reddish chair in the store not we want two of them and we want them now yeah that's what happened with these shoes okay so we're gonna try we're doing this as a reminder we're doing this you get a hundred thousand listens per rep episode we're doing good the last thirty days have been the most listened ever so here's what i wanna do if you like this podcast or if you don't like it just do this anyway please go to itunes and give us a five star review take a screenshot of you doing that and dm m one of us and we'll give you a surprise i'll take a four star even i'll take a for yeah a four will be five you have us an honest for review that's all i care we have two hundred and fifty or three three hundred reviews let's say if we gonna get to a thousand so leave us a review and we leave at us and where we'll do something we gotta figure out something and follow the hustle and sean and me on socials and we're taking all these videos and turning into the clips and we'll be sharing them and all that shit and all the links for this are gonna be in the notes of the podcast so you'd don't have to remember our handles or whatever alright so leave us a review send a screenshot and we will mail you back a special surprise so let's give the people what they want let's give some good stuff alright i see up here craigslist story yeah so we ended this yesterday and i and i thought that this be a cool story to start things off so when we started our company when i started this company with the first office that i had did you ever go to that one i've been to it okay well well is it the craig crisis yes i'm been there the first office i had we didn't have a lot of money and i moved we i started me and c my friend we we c leased an office in the inner sunset which is a non popular neighborhood in san francisco but it's lovely it just looked like an apartment it was a house that they that was zoned mixed use and when we went to visit it there was a sign that said craigslist nineteen ninety six to two thousand and whenever we moved in fifteen or sixteen or seventeen i forget my portion on the rent was five hundred dollars which was a lot of money at the time and because we had just started the business we only were making thirty create a month and we move in and there was a desk still in one of the rooms and this was like a it wasn't a shitty apartment but it kinda was a shitty apartment yeah it was a three bedroom apartment less than a thousand square feet and i move in and craig from craigslist craig newark he actually left his desk there in his desk was a kitchen table that was his death but it was too heavy to move and so he just kept it there so that's what i used and the landlord i came in his name was emmanuel i i believe he came in and i was like hey so craig it's supposed here he's like yeah craig started the he lived down the street in ko valley he started the company here from ninety six up until recently i go what was that like yeah they're kinda like little celebrities in the neighborhood everyone knew about him and at the time when they moved out they were making something like five or six hundred million dollars a year in revenue and this a whole part my half of the rent was five hundred dollars c was like two thousand so sweet paid one five hundred dollars and it could only see at most twelve people probably and that was a tiny that was the craigslist team and i go well what were they like he's like well they were cool craig told everyone if you if he introduced like if i talked to me and i'd be like what's your job here he would say he owns it or that he's a founder he would say i do customer service for craigslist nice and they were so he said they were so cheap and frugal that in the lease it said something like emmanuel had to give them toilet paper each month and every once in a while he would forget or not bring it on time and they wouldn't pay the rent until like that's the toilet paper yeah if you just close your eyes and imagine the craigslist website and then start to imagine apartment or a house it looked like that it looked like the ui of the site yeah and if google craigslist this office you'll see photos of it they had sign on it it was great and did you ever meet me him yeah so i called the email them craig and we talked back and forth talked to the phone a little bit and i was like hey can you come and take a picture with me at the office and he never made it over but we did talk and i we we correspond every once a little while it was awesome and a lot of people don't know how craig doesn't makes money they make money only from jobs jobs in certain markets and cars all in certain markets yeah and they make everything else free they make like five or six hundred million dollars of a year that way and they've never bought a company they only employ at this point probably thirty people so they just must it must be one of most profitable companies in the world right and if you if you're if you've never seen this there's a diagram float round if you just google like craigslist un bundling yeah there's a diagram that basically takes the the homepage of craigslist when you're in one of the cities and there's like all the different categories and it just draws a line from like let's say share housing and it'll draw a line to like airbnb and it'll be like temporary shared shared housing couch surfing and it basically goes through every category apartment rentals it goes zillow and truly exact sale and so you you can just see how many different businesses just realize that hey if if there was demand for it on craigslist maybe we could build a specialized version for for of just that one feature we could build a whole site of just that one service that it's offering and there are like hundreds that are in this and this has actually happened to canadian dollars in enterprise value yeah exactly and so huge huge number of successful companies that literally did that and companies like airbnb bootstrap off of craigslist so i don't know if you we what when i started my first company being john because you were as we're doing a roommate thing roommate thing we got we would get thousands users there so what you do break it down how did you leverage guys premise john started it and i and then i joined a the premise was in major cities like san francisco new there's young a lot of young people who are moving there who don't know anyone and getting a one bedroom or two bedroom apartments prohibitive expensive and so what we would do is we would holler at people apartments and landlords who had two three four five bedroom apartments and we would throw massive parties for people who are interested in and what we would do is we would take the five bedroom apart apartment that was five grand and post it on room shares for a one thousand dollar per bedroom room and yeah and then with throw these parties with fifty people who all had similar interest and we'd pair them up and grew group of twos threes of four and they would move into a place okay cool idea but it didn't work well and then what happened with craigslist how'd do you guys sort of leverage craigslist what we would do is we would create john was good at photoshop and at the time craigslist will stop doing this case so many people like i use this yeah and we would the ad was just an html file and it looked like this big image and it said click here at this big button to sign up and you would click there and to go straight to our website i'm saying we would get thousands of people a day and then what we did was once they banned that we would just post it without the image and people would email the craigslist address and we had an auto responder that said great apply here right yeah there's a story about the airbnb guys how they got started right because every marketplace you have this chicken and egg problem you have no supply because you don't have supply you don't get demand and you they just sort of it's a chicken and egg problem and so one thing that came out that airbnb they're not very public about this they've actually i think denied in some cases this but you can go out there and you could find this i found the whole description of it in one black hat forum them yeah black hat marketing forum but basically they did two things so what people know about is that they scraped craigslist listing so they said okay if you listed your apartment for for rent on craigslist they would scrape craigslist every day they would take all those listings make a listing forward on airbnb with those say same photos so they they say it's like we would they would just share the supply right and then if somebody came to credit to airbnb and tried to book that it would email the person via craigslist and say hey you got an inquiry come check it out on airbnb and so that's like how they started that part is generally seen as like okay the part that they got a little bit of heat for was went one step further they started creating fake personas linda or cindy or whoever it was and they would go and they would email every listing that was up for for rent on craigslist and they would say hey i'm super interested in this they're like oh great you know here's the details and they was like oh do you guys have a airbnb i i really only wanna rent through airbnb it's much more trustworthy than this and then they'd be like no what's the airbnb he's they're just like here's the link it's pretty awesome i i'd really be interested if you guys would use do this via airbnb otherwise i'm not interested and they would just send this to thousands of people every single day and so all these people were like shit seems like if i use this airbnb this customer would have bought from me and that's how they grew a lot of their awareness love that i'm totally in favor of that a few other services have done similar things and they got sued and put out of business airbnb pulled it off they had be they escaped when we when i was at that office the police would up a couple times a month because they would get subpoena like someone would be murdered or stolen car was sold us sold on craigslist and the police would come to our office like a sheriff thinking you're the craigslist office yeah i was like saw like you know they're not here anymore and and we would mailed cease and desist letters or we would get mailed subpoena we would get mailed letters from people who bought who are emailed messaging craig it was cool was while and so sorry they're not here anymore but are do you guys like news you guys you guys like email yeah we got a newsletter you it was awesome and there on on the science at zappos was started there as well on the floor it was a two story there was a one apartment at up top one apartment up bottom now n dot net which is a trading marketplace for mixed tapes for grateful dead mix tapes no way yeah that's real famous too for people who are into that shit that's hilarious alright what else we got so your buddy has an interesting company so andrew wilkinson you've talked about a couple times on the podcast owns a bunch of different companies dr meta lab blah blah blah one of the companies he has now is podcast cash related actually has two podcast cash related ones one is castro you use castro right yeah big fan of castro i've been using it to listen to i i like true crime podcast podcasts i use it for that and i like they have this feature that allows you to clip and or trim some of the clips and share that on your social feed and with friends and so you were using what before cast to listen to podcast just the podcast app which horrible for searching right and so with castro from what i understand they have two things that are good one is you know when you have the podcast app and you you're like oh i'm interested in the show and just by being like i'm mentioned interested i subscribe it downloads like every episode of theirs whether you're listening to it or not and then like your phone's out of space the next time you go take a photo so so what castro does is like the app the the podcast you listen to a lot of they download they have them right there at your fingertips and the ones you're just kind of dabbling in picking and choosing they don't clutter up your your whole phone with all the episodes from those podcasts yeah which actually i had to help with my mom the other day everyone has to from the going from christmas i had the space she was gonna go buy a thousand dollar new phone and i was like let me see your phone and i looked at it and she had eight it was a sixteen gig phone at eight gigs of podcast podcasts right and then they have this other thing which we're gonna use now which is they have this like promote program so promoted podcast podcasts so we're trying to go this podcast as we said as we said many times podcast has already grown you know six months we got to a million downloads but we're looking at you know five ten x that even more and so what they have is they have a bunch of people who use their app so as a podcast we can submit it to be promoted and if you pay you can actually get your podcast in front of a bunch of the right audience and so we're gonna try this out see if this helps us grow if you wanna promote your podcast go to castro dot fm m slash promote that's castro dot fm m slash promote let's go with okay so something that interests me two years ago i would've have thought this would be a horrible idea totally bought into it now new email clients okay so they're super super is they're base here in san francisco the guy who started at his name is rahul is that a name yep he stuck previously started report of which is now table stakes but at the time was ground right and i remember the first time i used that shit i was like this is magic yeah it it is magic what it does is you could type in anyone's email and it could tell you if it's the right email and it can tell you all their social links yeah like in the sidebar of your gmail it like took over the web page and then the sidebar being pop up a photo of the person's face their twitter their last few tweets their job on linkedin it was like it was like having a great memory or like being a great sort of network without having to do anything you just to caught my stock and talk method it would help stock them then i would and if you needed to guess somebody's email you would just type it in and if report had nothing it's not the email right you try a different variation of like well you should you could put a hundred emails in there and then highlight each one right it was great well got bought by linkedin or something fifteen million bucks i think great outcome for him i i'm friends on facebook so he bought himself fancy lamborghini needs a shit okay so email apps he wants to take called super i think they have about twenty thousand paying subscribers at three hundred dollar thirty dollars a month thirty dollars a month i bought it it's cool yeah i use it as well now there's a new one coming out hey dot com right so two two quick things on superhuman so if you don't know if you already know just skip forward thirty seconds so if you don't know what it's good at it's trying to make you really fast at email so the idea is most business people spend a lot of freaking time in email and so they just made it really fast lots of hot keys little smart little details hard to use you have to literally learn it so what they will not let you use the product you cannot sign up for you cannot give them money unless you go through their onboarding where they call you they video call you and they teach you step by step for thirty or forty minutes all the different tricks all the different little tips that make it faster for you and then every day the founder emails you one more tip of a thing that makes it slightly better than normal email yeah and i would say it is better than normal email but i'm not a big email guy so i'm not really getting the value out of it but you know do you know how many eats it's like having a louis vuitton bag in silicon valley to have a super email account the numbers out out to where there are more email addresses per person in america so everyone has a a roughly two emails yeah so that's just at america let alone everywhere else it seems very plausible that you can get a million people to pay thirty hours a month right a million pro pro users of email so that's superhuman on the other side you have hay so yesterday jason freed who's the founder of thirty seven signals that's a company based in chicago they make stuff like base camp what are some other other big products so they have campfire fire that's campfire fire they shut it down i they they kinda double down on base camp really but they've built stuff they've been around for a long time okay i think they've been around for fifteen years they actually kinda punch above their weight because they're very very smart so first they released a bunch of books on the way they work rework is a phenomenal book i fucking love that book and so rework is one of their books that they launched and that's made a lot of money and got grown awareness of their brand they also just love to pick fights with silicon valley which i don't agree with all the time it does it's a brilliant marketing tactic even if you don't agree with the opinion it's like such a smart thing to do for them yep so they're like oh silicon valley will say you gotta work eighty ninety hours a week that's crazy forty hours more than enough do they just take the weeks in the summer time maybe four day work stay in the summertime they don't have ambitions to take over the world they're like we're not interested in conquering disrupting we just wanna build good business for our customers make our customers happy they just really try to be the anti silicon valley they're tech company but they're an anti silicon valley tech company and because of that they get a lot of flack but really just get a lot of attention you know so it's brilliant marketing and they may believe exactly what they're saying so yesterday jason so he announced his new project hey hey dot com like a ball domain i bet that domain if they had they probably already owned it and they probably owned it for while that could probably cost a quarter of a million to half million dollars easily yeah so they they you came out and they said basically said hey it's just go to the website they kind of explained in a letter what they're trying to do it's a little bit vague because the product's not out yet but basically they're trying to make email they're like look email is great awesome when you get a when you get email from a friend it's awesome when you get a newsletter that really wanted to get but that's like one percent two percent of all the email most people get most people just get a slew of automated shit and it's just made an email really unpleasant experience we're gonna try to make a pleasant again the old thirty seven signals away i'm interested what yeah very interested so i signed up for the beta we'll we'll find out i got it very interested i i think that there's a lot of cool stuff going in the email space another one's is front app yep is it called front front this the woman who started it released a lot of their details like their deck and new kind of reverse you can see there there series a fundraising deck just search front series a and you can read the whole thing it's great yeah and what other email uploaded and what front does a little different fronts like for teams so let's say we for this podcast wanna have a email address where where listeners can email us front says okay you don't need to like make one account and share all the credentials and then everyone's logging in from different devices and you you don't know who's red what so front is email designed for a team so it's good for customer service it's good for marketing it's good for any like shared inbox that five people in your company all need to use pretty smart because that's actually a common thing yeah and then there this actually was shut down recently or a few years ago actually this kind named gen underwood started this thing called mailbox yep they were trying to reinvent email it was acquired before they've even launched a hundred million a hundred million dollars good deal for very nice ui so they were kinda of the first ones to do i think that this is a massive massive massive opportunity yeah i think that there is not even close to enough competitors in the space there is room for everyone to win right are a lot of people to win and the key the reason it works is email is inter the the protocol is not owned by anybody so you can make a new client and unlike a messaging app if i make a new good messaging app i have to convince you to switch off a my imessage message or facebook messenger to come messenger me over here but email doesn't work that way i can use superhuman you can use gmail he can use hotmail and all of our email works we don't need to convince each other move yeah that's why email clients can work as a business so can i tell you what i think is the biggest opportunity here go for okay so i would actually make it a free email client but what i would do is make it so you can purchase products inside the email so the way email works now let's say you send an email to a hundred thousand people you gotta click out if you're lucky you'll get a thirty percent open rate so you have thirty thousand people of those thirty thousand people then maybe five percent so what's five percent of thirty thousand henry what is that six six thousand is that six thousand so is that right last six hundred six hundred the six hundred i think it's six hundred yeah so you'll get six hundred clicks on a hundred thousand cents that's just the way the math works yeah if you could make it to where you can purchase products quickly in email that would be great the reason why you can't now is the way gmail is set up like javascript it things like it doesn't didn't work i'm not technical but our team explains this is it just it physically is impossible so and the only way that you can make email like this work is through through building it from do you think somebody would wanna oh i'm gonna use this new email client so that i can buy things through email like that makes sense if you're the sender no but i think that that that that's an interesting way to monetize though right i think it's an interesting way so it this is a this is not like a weekend project this is a massive project right but i think that like there are other there like if i was super i'd be like man i wanted instead of like charging could i somehow took a cut of merchants right and get massive option i think it's incredibly interesting another thing with email is i've been hacking with this in my brain and we've thought about doing it here is there's a few interesting things you can do with the email the first thing is you can't put movies in sounds and email right but you can put gifs which are basically movies without sound and another thing that you can do is if you tell if you can put a gif in there and say hey refresh this and you could refresh it and you could upload a new image on the back end show shows like part two so i've been hacking around with this i think it'd be cool if you could have actual movies and image images audio that are long in email it's quite interesting i think the what's the i think the size limit email is man i'm gonna sound like an idiot it a hundred and fifty make i forget what it is pixel pixels make yeah i know i think it's small in that because gmail makes you zip stuff went over twenty five so maybe fifteen sorry is it fifteen i don't even wanna i'm some i mean i don't know if i'm talking about here i we are i know that there's a limit though in our tech team notes will do this anyway very interesting stuff with the email right yeah i like i the logic huge project and very hard but very valuable if you can crack it because everybody everybody uses it so i'm i'm pretty i'm pretty into that i'll give you another idea that i i really liked that didn't work which is probably a stupid thing to talk about the podcast but idea i think is dope that got tested that didn't work it was this a company that got sold it was called earn it's sold to to coinbase base it's sold basically because the main guy is like very high profile yeah with apology we should get him on he apparently mark andre calls apologies the most the highest ideas per minute that he's ever seen and name anybody has ever met he said this guy has the highest velocity of ideas this like a good looking indian dude not that you looking but he's in indian dude he looks like at celebrity i wouldn't say so but maybe to you so i know he come about he's alec like he's on twitter he's hell like an image yes like a he's got an cartoon yes exactly so this guy he's really interesting guy big time into crypto so he tried this crypto project which was pretty cool concept it was look we all get too much email and a lot of businesses are always trying to send people email but the incentives are not online because emails free to descent so it's freedom it's free for me to bother you but you don't wanna get bothered and you don't get any value when you respond so he he's he set up a different premise which was if you could just set a price where we said if you pay ten bucks i guarantee i'll reply to your thing yeah so there's another one there's a few of those and the reason i know this is when we send a million emails we have a reply address i look at all time and it says you've gotta pay a dollar to reach a person interesting what do they we do know what they're using it's such as the d i don't i can't remember about the top my head like discord or discourse or is is is a word similar to that okay i remember right off the top of my head facebook messenger tape tested this as well where if you wanted to call message someone you'd have to pay a dollar i do it all the time and would they receive the dollar or facebook gets the dollar facebook right so this is different where this says i will get five i will get if it's ten bucks i get nine the service gets one and the person gets a guaranteed reply yeah and i think that's pretty cool for you know high profile people or important people you know recruiters who wanna reach people is paper reply i think that's interesting it didn't work but maybe there's a v two that will work eventually because the premise makes a lot of sense to me i'm into it cool what else we got let's do the what's the streaming thing streaming payroll okay so this is an idea by buddy fe gave me so he was basically like hey there's an interesting crypto project and i was like what is it and i forgot the name of it now but he bet he basically was describing he's like you know what you know we get payroll like we get paid every two weeks or one you know whatever bi weekly why don't you just get paid per minute like that you work why aren't you just like we stream video and it just you know bit by bit just comes to us instead of having to download a full thing and then watch you know the way video turned into streaming money should become streaming and i should just get paid all every hour i'm working not once every two weeks and since crypto project trying to do this i think this would be awesome if the world could make it work why it does it have to be crypto crypto to make this work it doesn't have to be crypto crypto i'm like i wanna talk to it have to be crypto make it work but you're building basically on new financial rails to do there's a reason we we don't do this in the traditional financial system but in this case you know there's another company that's very successful that doesn't use crypto for for something very similar it's all earn in so what earn does earn is a company they've raised now a hundred ninety million dollars and what earn does you'll see their ads on tiktok this is how you know they're doing something interesting so they basically say if you're a retail worker most most people three fourth of americans our paycheck to paycheck so if there was a two day delay in getting their paycheck they would have problems making rent paying their bills etcetera etcetera and so what earning does is that's a shame you work at this job you've worked there for two years we know you're gonna get paid why don't we front you the paycheck so this has existed like payday loans which are really predatory before but what earning does it pretty cool so you just connect your bank account it scans your bank account and it'll just see oh every two weeks it gets a deposit from the same company every two weeks okay we and that's your paycheck and what they do is they say hey if wanna access your paycheck now and just click this button and it's actually free to do that so they're not taking some aggressive payday loan the way they do it is once you get your thing you can tip so it's whatever you however happy you were with the service you tip so it's all pay it forward and your tip becomes the front for somebody else's paycheck payday loan but basically oh i hate that and so it's doing really really well that shocks to me i hate doing really well based off of tell you another this i'll tell you another the story about donations yeah are you sure this good it's doing really well they're just pay for it i'll just pay five dollars for that so you do you do pay two five dollars for it but you just do it voluntarily i hate that you can hate it it works and so i have another example of this easy to me when i was in the restaurant industry there was a restaurant cameron remember what which one i think it was pane bread pane bread ran an experiment somewhere i think missouri maybe actually oh you know why that's where i'm from because it started in we call it saint louis bread right saying exactly so they went they did a thing there they were like there's a low income area we wanna make this restaurant it's pay pay what you want and they did a pay what you want experiment and i was talking to the guy who ran the experiment and then he said we've done it over a year now he's like the data is crazy he goes i don't know if it's just because it's a novelty thing but if we've gone a year now at what they found was that if the average checkout at the time i think it was like nine dollars at pane at the pay what you want thing it was twelve dollars and they were making they were making more money per customer on the paycheck because you said majority of people will do the recommended and some people are generous and some people are sort of free loader but on average they were making more money per customer in this now that might have been a novelty thing i don't know because like maybe peep the people who go there you know who sort of self select ever lane they do what you know ever lane yeah yeah cool t shirts and shit like that it's all tipping or all donations when they have instead of putting i so they for sure have it i i i think it's instead of sales but they have a a selection of items that are pay what you want right and what they do is there's a baseline like forty dollars and you could easily figure that out just by lowering the thing but it's like what do you wanna pay just pay and if it's below that threshold they don't accept it and so what i do is i just lower to i just find out where that baseline is and that's what i pay right but yeah i i hear what you're saying another example i think it's really stupid another example for you so i'm at twitch right now twitch has two two ways to pay two main ways one is you subscribe you pay five bucks to twitch twitch gives a cut you know half to the to the streamer roughly and you get these benefits in the chat you could to use these special emojis blah blah blah the other thing is you could just donate straight to the streamer you get no perks but a hundred percent of the money goes to the streamer stream labs which is a company where that runs that tipping service they put out a quarterly report every every every every quarter and it's public so you can go read this but there are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the tipping service where you get no benefit me it's crazy to you but i'm telling you there's something to this i have enough data points to believe yes pb you know pbs yeah they've been doing this npr has been doing this and i don't know what their numbers are i'm sure they're public right but shocking to me shocking to me i don't i don't understand it may not be but it is above the bar of not working right i would not wanna run my business that way sure that's so maybe there are what's the phrase rule exceptions to the rule exceptions to the rule maybe i think these are the exceptions could could totally be the case that's mind boggling to me i would not wanna be in position where i have to ask for donations we talk about tit yesterday that's what they did that when they first started though they would do how much does we can wikipedia raise when they do the donations based thanks you know can can can you google how much does wikipedia raise in their donations i'm curious because they're probably the biggest example of a donation based global service web archive i think does it too right but we wikipedia use one of those popular websites on the earth right so that one's gonna be wikipedia custom run twenty or thirty million dollars a year i have no idea i mean it's a lot of bandwidth right there but don't static pages what's up you think they get them for free maybe maybe they maybe they get donations there too okay you wanna talk about with wikipedia real have you gold dot com it's a gold dot com or golden then golden golden yeah golden dot com some of our friends invested in it but trying to compete with wikipedia and jason h what's invested in it rumor has it there's another big round big round that will be discussed soon right like i think a pretty large round so golden dot com what they're trying to do it's very hard for me to actually figure out what they're trying to do i've been watching them for a while i don't get it it's very confusing i like the guy behind it jude i like him a i think he's really smart but golden is almost too smart for me so it's basically like wikipedia but they'll will explain topics that sometimes wikipedia doesn't do a great great job of explaining so like science topics or things about companies stuff that wikipedia doesn't do a great job of it seems like a long slow hard road to build something like that yeah i don't quite understand what they're doing i mean i know what they're trying do but i don't get the angle another person who's trying do the same thing as mock booth for he's rap genius i think he's crazy person i've hung out with him a little bit i these nuts he started rap genius which was like wikipedia for rap yeah now he has this thing and he's been doing for called every is it every pdf or ever pdf here it's i think it's stupid yeah i think it's stupid too but then i thought rap genius was pretty stupid initially but it's not a good business and then i switch i switched because that when they they said the stat which was that two percent of all google searches were for lyrics yeah like az lyric it's just insane and then they grew that thing and then it sort of like crashed because the founders are crazy and it wasn't a great business yeah it's hard to monetize that stuff but they went the media route i don't think that was the right route did they sell to spotify yet it seems like they're just trying to sell spotify they like look like spotify yeah but i think they raised it like a billion dollar valuation like it's like hundred oh that ship sailed now like yeah i think still recovering for think it was north of a hundred million dollar i mean was a lot of money right yeah i don't get that wait what about what wikipedia what's the answer this say there raised we're in the business insider in twenty sixteen there raised eighty two million eighty two million dollars in one year donations yeah wow yeah see and that's the biggest website in the warranty good one i don't i don't i don't think it's great i'm not a fan what's this period so more money than that gets donated to twitch streamers every year which just something wrong in the world wikipedia is great let's do period apps and then number eight and nine you have here okay period so i don't have i i don't have a ton to share here this is very surface level but i saw i i've been tracking this for a while so there's two types of apps that didn't work very well early on when the app store first came out that now there's a bunch of successes for and so the lesson here for an entrepreneur is just because it didn't work then something might have changed now and i think people just got more used to using apps to run their life is this period like time or period like a administration yeah yeah so basically there's two types of apps so you know we just had a baby there's these apps that are about i think one's called what to expect yeah and these apps do phenomenally well oh my god the the downloads the usage the monetization it's all on point and that one's a little bit tough because when you get out of the you know after nine months you sort of churn because you've moved on that's okay but do that nine months you'll buy during that nine months you a have to buy a lot of shit so like you their sponsorships are crazy like dove is going all out and so as hug and all these other guys crazy sponsorships the forums are crazy so what they do is they batch you they say september mommy's you know october twenty nineteen mom whatever and so they batch you by by birth month and the forums in this thing are like i've never seen this level of engagement because the moms wanna know what's going on they wanna share idea they wanna ask questions and this is like the safe place to do the company so that's what to expect then there's the ones that are about generally tracking you know administration cycles fertility and that sort of thing these companies are crushing it so i saw some numbers for a company they're one of the one of the companies as a a a tracking app gonna do thirty million this year annually first year they turned on monetization what's it's money it's insane subscription and in the subscription you get i think probably either access to either more information so there's something like mini courses inside or it's like sort just unlocking more data about yourself so better better tracking around certain things so between fertility men administration tracking you know the birth cycle process these apps i would literally remember when the app store first came out people tried to do these things and they got no traction they they're not pick me and my girlfriend i would do it and so now the these have become like very mainstream the same way that calm sort of took many many years and now boom meditation apps are making you know hundreds of millions of dollars now the same thing has happened with these niche apps if i wanted to make money right off the bat with this would making it a newsletter where i would say tell us where you are in your pregnancy or like are you right just you just got pregnant are you how you know whatever if you're know are you a week you just gave your birth a week ago where are you at and then you could send daily or weekly emails on what to expect i think that's a very smart approach and you make little more shit one time and i think it would work better than the app because i think an app has a whole different problem of like people remembering to check it whereas email just goes to their inbox and so if somebody's doing this or you're interested in doing this talk to me because i wanna partner with you on on the on the specifically around babies either you know pre pre pre birth or after birth i'm very interested in that space yeah i think i would do it in an email you know you what the cool thing about an email is you can make this stuff one time and you'd have to write a lot but you could do it as you go it's like a lesson plan you do it as you go but then you could right continually reuse it and you may it a drip sequence so you can download the convertkit yep mailchimp yep whatever love it sign up it's week one of pregnancy here's what you need now is exactly how what what to expect that's how works you start with that that basis as you're in week one here's everything week two it changes that sort of thing and then you can have a basic ass facebook group where it's thirty dollars a month be part of and it's just says here the top posts from this week of related to people who are in your category right i have a half baked idea around this so last night we went to a class because our baby's is five months old and that's when you start introducing solid foods and so my wife was like oh we need to go to this class they teach us how to this like we don't know how to prepare the foods we don't know what how many times to do it we don't know how to blah blah blah i was like okay so we went to hour class nice lady teaches us and there's just like a bunch of families there all of us with our crying babies crying during the class and i was just sitting there thinking i was like man information like this is actually super critical like i've never paid attention in a class more than i was for like figuring out how to feed my baby and why and like why isn't this like just an online thing why isn't it their life school that just teaches you real life shit with that you need to know our one of i wanna start that i wanna start real life our engineer west goes to one for buying a home so he bought a home and he went to a i think it was a couple weeks where a maintenance class like he learned how to fix a freezer air conditioner all this crap fixing shit learning i have friends that just came into a little bit of money and they're like hey i know i'm supposed to be investing but like i got no clue and everywhere i look i just feel like they're trying to rip me off so i'm just like i left it at my checking account for four years and this is like life school here's how that works here's how a mortgage works life school here's how or you know going through the divorce here's what divorce looks like you know like fuck yeah people just need people just need information that's not selling you the service when i got married we were thinking that we're looking at the enrollment stuff or not the enrollment pre freeing up stuff right i had no idea where i had i had knew nothing about this and that was hard to figure out but so how did you end to figure it out i paid a lawyer yeah but i didn't know who i just went to yelp right but i was overwhelmed you did a pre up we didn't end up doing it didn't end up doing it why not because we both were coming to the table with equal things with some yeah yeah and who who was trying to do were you trying to do it were she trying to it because i've always thought like man that's a awkward conversation with half it wasn't it was not awkward at all and why was that because we're both we have the same values who who brought it up you brought it brought it up because me and sarah my wife is a very successful comes from a very successful family and we were just like we have the same values when we got married was so it starts with love we'd love each other but also the second thing was like this is like sounds weird so almost like an arrangement like it's a team like we are we partnership we're joining forces and is about love but also like a partnership here's the rules that we're gonna yeah i know i mean really what it was i was like alright do you wanna reach your kids like this because if that doesn't fit how i my values and this partnership doesn't work it was very much a partnership it was like alright so what which whom we expect for the next five or ten years right the operating agreement yeah we had an op basically what it was we we we sat down and we said this is how i feel do you agree or not we need to hash this out otherwise we're not gonna get married and so let let me ask you a question if one of you let's say you or her let's just say let's just say for for hypothetical let's say she wasn't come at the table with let's say equal financial means at the time would you still brought it up and do you think it still would've have worked so the logical side of me says yes you have to do it the emotional side of me there's a funny quote from our goal an non entourage and they say like ari telling all of his actor friend to get pre pickups and then what about you he goes i'd kill my wife before we got divorced yeah i and i thought i'm like logan bob gonna like i've been this forever and and and you know we both said that we're like even if we hate each other like because we're both catholic it's like this is this is weird committing you're fucking idiot and it's like libby is it like that too yeah it didn't don't get divorced but for different reasons it's like what we'll society say if we got divorce that's how i thought like if i commit i'm committing forever right and no matter how bad fuck up unless it's like physical abuse like it's forever that's how i felt it's why did you even explore the p map if you feel so strongly because every smart person like all the lawyers that i have out your hand a little bit yeah they're like you should do that and who the fuck no it might come up and bite me in the ass right we had a handshake agreement i think there's also some walls around california that whatever you come into it is already separate i think there should be the thing you were talking about the operating agreement i think there should be like a little quick a questionnaire quiz that couples take before they get married i think this should be an online service that says how do you feel about this do you feel all this and then it compares your answers and it tells you here's where you guys are super overlaps and here's where you guys are most different and maybe you guys should have a conversation and here are some tools that might help you guys so like is this succeed is it in the new york times this guy like came up this list of twenty three questions and they're like how to like get to know someone how to fall in love with someone in five minutes have you heard of this thing nobody in college we made up a similar thing called to get to know you game and they're like if you ask these five questions and this is like when i was single i was like shit i'm gonna do some the first what are some examples of the questions i don't fucking remember it was something like if your parents were dying like what would you tell them like just like it starts off as like high level like simple shit baby each feature mountain let's look look henry look this up look up twenty three love questions or some bullshit like that like yeah look up that and it's like new york times twenty three level left new york times covered it thirty six questions the thirty six what is it what's it called the thirty six questions that leave the love thirty search devices at lead the level can you give me some examples of the questions it starts easing and gets harder so we did that early on nice and yeah we were like an not operating agreement would be great you didn't do this i think everybody does it in some informal way and ad hoc way and incomplete way sat down and hatch ours was incomplete and i feel sarah i'm lucky you know sarah she's very she's pretty business minded like very rational very rational and that's why i love and one of the reasons and when we got married we had to go to the church and you gotta talk to the priest and i was raised catholic but i don't do any of that shit anymore and he was like so why don't didn't even wanna get married and we like well we have similar values we want same things in life we're both really tripping we're both and we said all the shit like that and goes what about love i were like yeah yeah that's it and while we were beating this priest i remember he was like so you guys are catholic he's like it and i was like yeah catholic is shit super catholic and my i i remember i was so nervous because i didn't wanted to turn us down which were not really catholic i remember my phone rang and i go oh fuck and i go i was like oh shit sorry to me the cuss like i was trying to like not get banned right it's so hard but anyway that's we went the whole process what are some questions did you last sing to yourself or someone else so when did you last last thing to yourself that's an easy question but then one of the questions like thirty and twenty five you get to like when did you last crime from another person when did you last cry people and your family who's death would you find disturbing who's of all the people in your family who's death would you find most disturbing yeah these are good questions yeah so if you're single i think these are good things to ask in the first couple of dates yeah i think it's great it's a ice breakers and you can get intimate fast i love it good stuff okay cool what else we got you wanna wrap up with number eight or number nine okay yeah let's do i don't know what either of those i'm gonna do number nine so this is just something i'd noticed alright so this one that i have up here called three reasons versus one reason so i noticed this because in the last twenty four hours i did three different like deals or negotiations and what they are one i definitely cannot say one was at work all business business business related one was at work where guy on my team wanted to leave and go do this other team and he's like our one of our star guys and we were like i was like no you can't leave why do why do you wanna leave and he was giving me his reasons and i was trying to convince him essentially don't leave we you know we need you you're great it's great whatever's is wrong we can fix it and another was a business transaction where i was buying something and negotiating a price and in all cases i noticed this thing which is there's two types of dis there's i'll i'll i'll start at a high level there's two types of disagreements there's a disagreement you you can actually fix them disagreement you can't because you're fundamentally misaligned so let's focus on the ones where how do you figure out which one you're in so in any anytime somebody puts up resistance there's the stated reason and the real reason and i think because i played poker a lot grown up i just now assume that the stated reason is never the real reason it sometimes is but i just always assume it's not and i i've noticed a lot of people that i hire i've teach them this which is whatever they told you that's the stated reason and they're not necessarily lying to your face it's just what they feel is polite or it's what they think is true but they haven't really assessed it themselves but there's a stated reason there's the real reason and if you find the real reason you wanna figure out is it three reasons or is it one when it's three reasons or it's a bunch of different things and they you start to ask why and they're like well there's this and then this and this what you're getting is an emotional reaction they are just emotionally hurt and they want to they want change if you get one reason that's the that's an actual reason that if you just solved it they'll change their mind and so i found this where i'm talking to somebody i'm trying to convince them of something or we're trying to find some common ground and when they give me three reasons and i start to use logic to address those reasons it never works they'll just pop up a fourth reason and a fifth reason and a sixth reason it's because it wasn't a logical problem to begin with it was an emotional problem they weren't feeling the love i just gotta show them the love and then we'll see what happens and when it's one reason if i start to show them the love it doesn't do anything because i gotta actually problem solve the one reason it's actually a rational decision that they're making so it's just an observation if you're talking to somebody to give you resistance first figure out this is the stated reason what's the real reason you do that by probing asking questions and then when they give you the real reason is it one or three if it's one you could probably solve it if it's three it's an emotional problem and you need to show them the love that's cool and that book high output management it discussing subs discusses something similar which is there's when you meet with people employees there's really only one or two three or actually three or four reasons why meetings exist the first one's just to exchange information the second one is they say they have a problem and you solve it and the third one is you just gotta listen mh someone just wants to complain and don't like you know a lot of complaining you don't wanna put up but but everyone's a want people just have they just wanna vet right just gotta just gotta talk about shit and he's gotta sit there and listen and you don't try to solve the problem you just gotta listen to it and that's usually the hardest and that's the hardest but it's you can overcome that shit it's just i make men in particular you you hear you get you get they go i got a problem and you go we're gonna help by doing this we're gonna do this and do this a lot of times they'll be like well no look you're not hearing me well even a problem i'm just trying to get up a even worse you'll say that's not a big deal look let's just do this and this so not only have you minimize the problem you you basically told them they're stupid for thinking it's a problem and you tried to fix it when they didn't want either of those two things yeah no i've i've had a alert you you have an executive coach i i had one that basically taught me phrase this she said are you listening to learn or you listening to fix are you listening to learn or are you listening to fix two different modes yeah and who people typically we'll actually we just want you to listen to learn you're actually listening to understand how they feel and what's what's wrong well not listening to fix we share the same executive coach company torch we gotta talk about them next week they just sent up to sponsor with us yeah i was gonna say we this free sponsorship for them that they're getting yeah no we they and they just sent we just sent a deal with them so we'll actually have maybe they'll actually be like a proper advertiser but we'll talk about them regardless maybe next week cool because this kinda cool i i i really dig that they're they're good like it okay that's all i had today alright please comment and give us a rating on this we're trying to do a hundred thousand go on itunes give us a rating it takes thirty seconds please do it give us an honest review if you do it tweeted it that us or dms and we will hook you up a we thought about charging for this podcast and 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