#45 - Drones Washing Windows, Airpod Guided Tours & Mario Kart VR with Furqan Rydhan

fe is here in the house how's it going guys what's up so background who's fe on fe con is my c cofounder or cto at be before we sold and we've been working together i don't know five six years now maybe six seven years yeah it's getting towards seven i think because one of those things where you just keep saying five years or you know no matter how long it's been he has an interesting background before that very good background you wanna give us like the give the highlights alright the the highlights i grew up here in the bay area i got started just programming as a kid and so i the unique experience where i worked at a dot com when i was fifteen and that was kind of like were you growing to high school at the time or did you drop out i was going to high school i had just finished my sophomore year and i was really into computers and my dad was hey i know this guy they need to hire some people they're looking to make like a website at the time they had a router for hotel rooms so it was like hotels wanted to put in dsl and kinda like good internet and they're like oh you gotta you need his interface like the ne links interface for your router now just the html side of yeah and html at the time was really nothing and he was like you could put some stuff and i showed my dad how to make a menu and he was like wow this is like groundbreaking there's no javascript how much were you getting paid at fifteen to do this if i had worked the whole year it would have been about a hundred and twenty k wow pretty were ridiculous so this is doc com boom dot com boom probably because they're hurting fifteen year olds but you know and then that happens then you did a e commerce thing yeah so that company didn't work out obviously you know spending money paying fifteen year olds a hundred twenty k exactly and so i kinda was back at high school and then bored and i'm really into computers and gaming and you know i had this idea that like hey people like to kinda trick out their cars like they like to put lights and know fun things in their car like why don't people do this with the computers people are really passionate about it and so i looked it up and i found some forums online and people were doing this it's just there was nowhere to buy things there's nowhere to do things especially here in the us so i started a e commerce store kind of accidentally i was oh like these things are really expensive if i buy them in pulp i just get them cheaper i'll sell awesome i'll have some more cash in the side and i think we started eight hundred bucks of stuff in the corner of my garage and then within the first year we did a million dollars of revenue wow and it was like how through you oh seventeen holy shit high school at the time and so that was pretty crazy because it went from you know one corner of the garage to full three car garage to living room family room like there's boxes everywhere my parents were super supportive of this obvious and so that was coming the early days would say and and then we'll fast forward because there's there's a lot more to the story but we'll do the highlights so if i'm listening to this you know whenever i asked you over their background really what i'm trying to say is give people a sense of who you are and also it's kinda just like credibility like why should you be interested in what i you're trying to make you're trying to impress people yeah it's like this is the time to to basically brag so i'll brag for you because you're pretty humble guy you don't brag a lot so the the other interesting parts are took a couple of years off played poker professionally kind of in europe traveling around that was fun when you came back did your own startup failed but then the next startup which you started with adam and a couple other guys you guys tried and failed on a bunch of ideas i think probably like nine ideas yeah it was about nine ideas across two or three years that we tried kind of you know one idea what it was real serious we tried that for about nine months and then you're going through like three month chunks of like really bad right ideas and attempts and then and my favorite anecdote to this whole time because i think this is very real very you don't hear people talk about this was sometimes when you guys were in between ideas or you just were it wasn't working what did you you'd come to the office knew what we just play fifa all day i mean literally that's what you guys did at monkey inferno yeah yeah we we were do for like an hour these guys were just like that was the day yeah it was eight hour the people oh man those are a tough day to get back home and kinda get back to it and did you think that was weird like adam and those guys had had success so if part of you was probably like look if if these successful guys think this is alright this can't be too bad but like i would be anxious if we were doing that there was some anxiety but they were super common and collected so that kinda was like well why am i wearing like well so adam was pretty wealthy yeah he previously worked on a couple of ad tech companies and they had grown to be pretty big i would say like you know one was worth maybe fifty million and you know the one before that might have been in that range too and so he had done some stuff john who is the other c cofounder there had worked at like vmware early and he had worked at ad products like that got bought blah and they were self funding the company yeah were self funding and so i cannot believe how i would be like no we're getting the worst self bought buddy and i think we were a part i mean the cool thing was you sat around you talked about things you how many people is we were probably like five or six you've got it so was pretty small it wasn't i mean we had a good office in poland to bigger than we needed but you could tell there they're not worried i shouldn't be worried you sit around for a week you get some ideas then you go and work on him and it all felt pretty natural at that and the outcome of this was what yeah so you cracked the not finally yeah so we had you know they had a previous background in ad tech we had made this product called that was an app where you could see what apps your friends were using so it was like a social network where you're playing candy crush oh it says hey sam's playing candy crush and you should play too we're like wow this is pretty interesting people really convert with this this should just be an ad product and then that kinda drove it and said wait we should just make a real network out of this and then we sat down we built that for a couple months and then it kinda kinda rocket it after that and how big how big is it now they're really massive now it's been a while since i've been over there but you know a couple years back they had big liquidity event over one point four billion so and i think they've probably grown in multiple since then yeah i mean i heard that it sold like only three years after it started yeah it was really fast and it was doing like six or seven hundred million in rev like some crazy number yeah it was magical to see what product market fit really looks like like i always thought oh these things are working no they weren't working and this of what working looked like and it was probably one of the best versions of it so maybe my view is a little skewed on that but the first first month it was like man we just jump up to like ten thousand plus in revenue a day and then you just kinda keep skyrocketing up that and like it's pretty crazy as an engineer too because now your servers are being hammered you're like running around all night like pulling all night just because money's flowing and you gotta kinda keep it up and so that was kind of fun so the the app love story is four million bucks in self funding initially then they raised a small strategic round or or i don't know exactly what the total but about five million bucks total funding right yeah i think that's exactly what it was and then the first liquidity events they sold a a portion of the company to a chinese company for over one point four billion and so that's like massive capital efficiency your you know cto kinda c cofounder there so we met after that we started working together became you know you know really good friends and and have built a bunch of stuff together and what i like about you which is why i wanted you on the podcast is not necessarily not gonna talk too much about love and that's just establish who you are you are like me you're an idea guy you always have a bunch of ideas you see interesting stuff but you're deeply technical but then get the business side and the product side too and there's very few people who do i'm definitely gonna ask about app eleven and a little bit okay before we even get to the ideas let i gotta tell you something real quick because this is related so my best friend started v which was app le competitor they raised sixteen million dollars when they got acquired they had a hundred million cash what did it itself for seven hundred fifty half of what you guys sold for very successful yesterday jack was this was after you left okay so we have to apologize a little bit yesterday lance armstrong popped in and our episode got ruined kind of ruined or or made or made whatever it was hectic and we did this thing it was cool and sean you left yeah jack was here it was me and lance and adam and jack just chilling right here and jack's kinda sa cervantes like he's like real smart but he doesn't pay attention to a lot of things and we were talking about the podcast and i was saying lance how big your podcast he said it's like whatever hundred thousand listeners he goes it took me a long time to build that up you know after i got cut out or cut off and jack was like what cut out what you like what happened like apple shut you down or something he goes no you don't like from the incident that happened seven years ago like i like everything dropped off and he goes jack was like what what do you need and lance look explain it lance look at me he goes he's like is this guy's serious i'm like yeah dude he's like a business ours what happens he doesn't know and he goes this is awesome sam if you gotta hey bring more people like this around me and he goes lance goes jack i basically went from hero to zero overnight like i lost everything yeah and jack was like oh okay pro and and like did get he's like from from you know like it was hilarious that's amazing that's awesome and if you jack did a whole episode and you can kinda tell he's like and the stuff he cares about he's so deep in the rain man and then other stuff he's completely oblivious too which is awesome yeah it was it was so funny so and jack started your guys or maybe there at first i don't know but your competitors so that reminded me of that so what do you wanna do i wanna hear some ideas you said you have story was that the story or you no i'll tell it tomorrow okay cool so we wanna have guests that come in and bring their ideas stuff they find interesting so either little phenomenon they've observed ideas they've been cooking up something off their list that have on their phone whatever it is so do you have stuff like that do you have a a list ideas you does or no i wrote i wrote down some ideas for this oh okay crazy just keep them up here and like you know the important ones make their way out let's talk about the process where do you get a lot of like where do when do ideas come to you usually when i'm not trying to come up with it like in the shower or whatever shower driving just kind of around not really thinking about anything and then something pops up the second one i would say is like when i'm reading online like if you read something interesting you're like well that's cool but it would be cooler if it was and then like that's kind of where my mind wander right i think that the best idea is you just steal right yeah so like it's kinda like that you're like like oh but what if you applied it like the way this restaurant industry is this restaurant is working they should actually apply that to like indian food and it would be way bigger right yeah it's a remix right so like i wanna sample some ideas real quick and then i wanna turn into my own right so once you got what's interesting to you okay so i'll start with one that we went go kart a couple weeks back and so i'm really into kind of ar i mean you know this i've kinda give you an oc just you can you know feel my mind you gave him one yeah yeah i gave him a great gift right that's awesome yeah i was like sean you gotta do this you're never gonna buy one on your own you're gonna be a skeptic forever here you go are you using it yeah okay because he was telling me he's like there's just one thing you're because i was skeptical i was like is there any good games like what am gonna do with this and he's like dude you gotta try this poker stars thing and i was like what it vr poker why do need that it is fucking amazing like have you tried this thing recently well i've done boxing i played all the games but you've gotta try the poker one it's incredible i i'm gonna go buy an oc with supply yeah seriously you should dura a silva it out so that's it's gonna be tough but you know maybe we can get you one too you really can't buy one right now they're out dude they're totally from from christmas they just completely sold out and then they haven't been able to refill it they said it was january in february and now march and then they're talking about all these delays from china that's a good sign for vr yeah i mean they totally it's the first device where i looked at it and i said i can give it to somebody that's not a vr junkie and they would actually get excited about it and i think the program one is great because you actually people wanna build who's really immersed experiences like boxing but actually you don't really want entertainment like that all the time i actually want morris to sit on the couch experience yeah and so you know some of the things i've been thinking about in vr like what can i build while i'm on the couch yeah and so this idea had is not about that but that what's the yeah are but we went go kart and you know when you go kart it's really about how quickly you make these turns how fast are you how kind of a driver are you you know how aggressive are you you know things like that and afterwards we're were just kinda talking about some ideas and i was like dude to it'd be cool if we could you know go to a go kart place but it's like mario kart where you have these ar goggles over your head and it's not about quick turns and it's like a longer track where you can kinda like have some space but i you know would digitally go over this box and i now have a weapon that i could shoot at your car and if i hit you successful your car kinda shuts down for a second and your stuff i think the real life mario important is this like the sandbox thing so this would be like sandbox or like museum of ice cream it'd be a place you go put on this thing and play with bunch of big on your sandbox like laser tag it's like you've better entertain laser tag do you think that sandbox is a big business i think sandbox is fantastic i mean it's hard to see if it's gonna be successful or not because retail has all these problems and having space has all these problems but that's not retail oh yeah it's not retail but they're they kinda have retail spaces right like they wanna be brick and mortar right yeah they wanna be like in a spot where there's a lot of i mean it's just an activity it's just like escape room or something it's like escape room but it escape room i know i know guys who own like two hundred escape rooms are they awesome it's an amazing business because escape rooms are super lightweight you don't do anything you have a room if one person you buy the kit and you just keep like re assembling the room and you have these very small for biggest that company well it's not one company but it's it's like like you can just own a different franchise yeah but like rooms you can own a mcdonald's franchise they still report revenues as one yeah seen this is as private like i've never been in i would i will never go to it in escape that's my fear i don't wanna because like claustrophobic because i'm really claustrophobic i don't like flying i know i will never go in general vr or ar experiences are gonna be i think fantastic and you could see theme parks going to this like i heard about the theme park that has a roller coaster ride in vr where they give you goggles you're in this kind of mechanical thing but then you're actually in a dungeon and there's lava and like it's a totally immersive experience and i think that people are gonna experience it first that and i could totally see you coming up with all kinds of different content types and whether it's mario kart or escape room that's a great point so here here's a cool model of this i have a buddy who worked at this company called two bit circus we ever heard of them no so the guy the guy the founder his dad started chuck cheese as nolan whatever the guy's name is atari guy yeah started atari started chuck cheese now his son started to thing called two bit circus and i love the concept i think the son kind of i don't know the guy but like my read on the situation is just sort of like the e ad wants to do a million things not really like executing on this business as he should but the concept is amazing they go city to city traveling circus like cirque des sole or whatever and they pop up this thing and it's like a weekend thing where parents bring their kids and all the attractions are like digital wonders so it's like vr thing how they saying a hologram thing and they were doing really well every city they were going to they're selling out like crazy but he was also getting distracted and they were doing things like a company would be like hey give you half a million dollars to do our company retreat yeah and then boom the whole company nick the ceo comes in and says hey we had to go do this corporate retreat and the company is like dude we need like one direction okay quick break and i'm gonna tell you a little bit about my saturday morning routines so every saturday i wake up in the morning and you know some people watch cartoons some people read the newspaper some will check the mail some people exercise i go to quiet light brokerage dot com and i check out what's for sale so if you don't know quiet site is a a platform where you can buy and sell online businesses so if you don't wanna start something from scratch or you don't know if your ideas is any good you can go on here and you could see ideas that are already proven they're already working to some extent and you can either sell your business or you can buy a business off here and try to grow it and improve it and so if you've been listening to the podcast you know one of our most popular episodes with ramon ramon van who you know sold his soap opera blog even though he never lost the soap robin in his life he built one the most popular soap proper blogs for nine million in cash on this website he has bought multiple businesses off quite late as well and we had paul on here he sold his fba business for for seven years on quiet light so it is a fantastic place to sell your business it's fantastic place for me to look for businesses like i'm on it right now and i see a kid's monthly subscription box it started in twenty eighteen so it's fairly new asking price is a hundred forty nine thousand dollars so you could buy this on sba loan you don't have to put much money down and you know it makes fifty k year in profit and there's ones that go all the way up to millions of dollars in profit per year so whether you're looking for something smaller something the big quite lights got a great great little selection and it's not just like everything that's for sale they curate and they qualify only certain businesses get in and get on here and when you're interested in something they have all the financials in a folder organized they have interviews with the founders that will tell you you know what how they run their business how many hours a week they put in that sort of thing very good business alright so for any listeners for the podcast they're offering a twenty five point checklist to see how sell is your online business so if you have a business right now that's making money and you're interested you would love to sell it someday check out this thing check out what the twenty five point checklist is to see how sell you're on their businesses to get the free guide it's at quiet light brokerage dot com slash my first million i again again that's quiet light brokerage dot com slash my first million can you look up dave buster revenue and look up chuck e cheeses i bet chuck cheese is owned by private equity chuck cheese probably makes a killing and if you've gone to a chuck e cheese way they went to shit well where i'm from in missouri where they were probably popular it's like where like like trash poor people go i mean it's pretty it's pretty wack like like i wouldn't go there because it was famous for like the parrot fight get truck and fight you'll get divorced yeah like chuck cheese it was like pee wee hockey and chuck cheese that's like where pairs get drunk and fight what's the number david boss three hundred thirty two million and eight hundred ninety six million for annual revenue so dave bus is three thirty million chuck e cheese almost a billion dollars annual revenue but definitely ripe for like doing something new because these things are stale it's chuck e cheese public it just say it's a public company if like in my stock well i wanna see what the income is trying to buy cheese yeah no i'm into this i think that these things are cool i think i'm i'm terribly it when i tried acc i was like i'm gonna quit my company and only do this by way random story i i found this youtube channel once that was talking about all these old brands that are just gone to shit like a check cheese and here's like this guy just short stocks and he was like my short pick of the year it's toot roll and he's like you ever met anyone who likes toot roll i love them he's like people like toot roll are all thirty five and up he's like no kid wants toot roll they go out halloween a public get toot they throw that shit away he goes toot roll has no other products it's just toot year old and their population is dying you go secondly the owner is like some seventy six year old woman who will never sell the company so nobody can turn around nobody can change it that company is just going to your old to is it's another company and so it was like you was short the stock so i watched two minute youtube video i was like yeah i took out a short position that great it's been awesome that's bad ass is it public link over here yeah this guy no they try to go publish in a glass so another thing that i would do i i love this i would also six flags has had a hell of a turnaround a positive so the guy who there's this guy named bob pitt and he was one of the inspiration for me starting the hustle because bob pitt was he created mtv when he was in his twenties and then he went and started the thing called this thing called the pilot group which launched loads of different email newsletters including t which is like a huge thing it's like a billion dollar media thing anyway bob pitt was is now the ceo of i heart media and formerly was also the ceo of six flags and he turned it around and it there it does it's really good it's been around forever you know and it and ebb and flows but it's good yeah i think entertainment can always level up and when you're leaving the house to go do something the more immersed the more exciting it is and like that's what you want like i can get all the rest of the stuff at home but like that's why i think sand sandbox is fantastic right the only negatives i've heard is hey i've gone on to it twice you'll similar content but yeah they're gonna work that out they're gonna keep growing it i think it's gonna be amazing i'd love this the spin off of this idea for the lazy people that i have so i was like okay you gotta go to this place and go go i'm like alright what's the other yeah why can't i stay at home correct if you replace the car to the drones and you let people sit at home on a controller and control these drone real life drone gillette drone are flying around this warehouse and i'm fighting you and again same thing is all digital so i can hit something shoot you your drone just like flies and break you gotta go i'm gonna start over again so there's a pit of people who just go pick up so alright i have i can add to this there's this guy i know i don't know if they're public i won't i won't talk about them yet but anyway he's got what he what they did was in vegas or in nevada where it's really cheap they bought something like a hundred or a thousand a significant amount of claw machines you know claw machines like for or arcade machine yeah yeah and you download the app and you pay a certain amount of money and you can you control the claw machine remotely and test and it picks up the item and drops it down to the things and then you just get huge in japan you just get emailed like give they gift card yeah i don't know if they i i don't know what the system i don't know if you actually get mail that thing or if it's a gift card that you get sent but i saw my friend doing this on his phone i was like what are you playing what game is that he goes oh there's a arcade in japan and i'm controlling the cloth so this like what yeah this is crazy we had talked about it as assumptions okay but here's how my buddy's building this business he's building it to be like like h he's building it to where it's gonna take off and they're gonna capture all the value and it's just gonna slowly die i guess he's a known fad basically it's what you're saying like know knows it's a fad yeah which i love i like that those things right i but that's always i was building it dude it on like wish product because they're so cheap that you could kinda like have right transcription thing where it's like hey you have to get one random wish product right yeah that's what wish should do your browsing wish and after two minutes it's like enter bonus round you have the claw in our our warehouse pick something up i i'm into this i think it's cool alright what else you got okay so have you guys used wait hold on here's what we'll do actually the a days i'll come prepared with some six flags and chuck and cheese numbers okay i'm interested in this i hear these numbers too i wanna know what the startup up costs are of for sandbox vr and i'm curious tweet at us if you like because we nerd out on like how that business does and we go look up the numbers and figure out who this guy is who's bob pitt and how much income do they make i don't know if we're unique in that but if you like that stuff like either in the facebook group just my first million or on twitter tell us if that's like just be like more of that or less of that just be honest yeah that's great you know you can get your listeners tell you what what we'll see what happen yeah because that's the weird thing of podcast podcasts you don't know what they want yeah yeah what else so in general like i look at theme so it's like okay apple releases a bunch of random devices so i'll call them air airpods is not really random but this apple pencil i don't know if you guys seen this i have one it's i yeah it's what's the hundred and twenty five bucks it's expensive and like the app ipad pro is expensive but then i'm like great this new capabilities there what product exists for it and so you know recently i've been kinda playing around a lot with the ipad and i'll kinda try to show you guys this i can help the mic you use a are you one of the like computer you get rid of computer only use ipad i'm i think that's weird i think it's fucking weird it it's i i like this in certain cases like what i'm traveling it's a lot better than me lug around my laptop did work pay for that no this is mine so i just for kinda of like to submit expenses like reimbursement really bad it's like when we sold bib how many un reimbursed things how much dollar amount did you have that is like at the tens of thousands yeah yeah definitely get the five digit range i should be better at that but you know adam did that i had to pay him five grand because he did been like submit shit life has been good to me so i'm not really gonna not stressing anything yeah but let me pull this but the general theme is like new hardware comes out what can i do with this yeah that's the general theme and so one of the things i've been playing with is this app called flow and it's basically like this kinda whiteboard app right and so it's kinda hard to show obviously but the idea for me was you know you sit in a meeting room right and you you love the whiteboard you love getting move yeah he does that shit all the time i don't you like getting like i like to get my steve jobs on well he always has like an analogy over shit he's like we're to build a race car but let's start with bicycle yeah that's what the analogy and so the idea was okay you take this kind of experience with the ipad and pencil but this whiteboard over here should just be digital right so if i wanna show you something i just started on here and it just shows up there you're like no no and you wanna kind of feed of it and like we could just have okay so for those who can't see what you're saying so space saying you got a little ipad in front of you a little tablet you're in a big meeting room if you you should be able to quickly sketch something or write something or draw something and it just use the whiteboard as a display like it's a tv based and then it's remote friendly so everybody can get the same whiteboard experience because i mean what happened if you're remote that happened to me yesterday i was remote conferencing the guy gets up he's like here's what what here's what this really means he drew something on whiteboard i can't see and everyone in the meeting was like oh yeah that makes total sense and you're i'm just the you video conference talked to a bunch of people so do you know this guy named wayne i forget his last name he sold something to twitter yeah they're doing digits now m or is it m i think it's mah anyway i was talking to him he said they're one hundred percent and i was like how do you do that because we're struggling with this whole whiteboard thing and he was like man there's just one app that they never update and that's kinda of what we've hacked together to use this is a problem that yeah i i think people are going to remote work both because there's really good talent elsewhere that you're like man this is a perfect fit but you're not and that's not a good enough reason anymore and then the second thing is just caustic if you're in their city like people they kinda don't like you know they won't pay that much for their house just basically making the whiteboard to work for remote workers yeah and also or even if you're here yeah yeah like i still want a big view of it if i'm here like if we're all here we wanna get that that's badass i'm into it so the pencil and the ipad i think is a good combination set to where people will have that around i think it'll become more common now you can kinda connect all these groups right together so last podcast i was saying meeting tech meetings that makes meetings more effective and efficient because all like so many billions of dollar are spent in people's time in meetings do you know how cheap i mean you're it would cost way less than anything to make this you know that okay this is a screen this is a fifty five inch i think out there we have a sixty five inch tc l four k or no we didn't get the four k ten eighty p you know how much that cost it's like three ninety nine no no no it was like two fifty or one eighty like it's like probably cheaper than this way that's the retail yeah like on amazon i bought it for i think for sure less than three hundred maybe less than two hundred yeah i believe it screens are really cheap and so where else can you put screens and i think you can actually enhance some meetings if somebody puts some slides i wanna write over the slides like i i think you unlock more capabilities than just supplement what you have today and i think that that's where this will become superior than us going to the whiteboard with you know those x expo pins and kind of writing there right so meeting tech yeah meeting tech i didn't get it yesterday i mean i was but now you're getting it you you you didn't have i didn't have a good example at of i'm meeting in a box yeah i was it was it was bad it was bad i let your idea you know the i was trying to get to that but then i i i fumble the initial thing i said meeting in a box and it sounded stupid to medium my truck showed up yeah lance armstrong showed up i felt like a jump it's a meeting in a box that was if i can see like back at the other one i like is everyone has your air airpods on now right and i think airpods did one thing like apple does really well is nobody wanted to walk around with the bluetooth headset right i think we all agree you didn't look cool you look like tacky it was a known douche bag thing yeah yeah it was like having the cell phone on your belt yeah like great analogy perfect and so i was like great people have airpods now and so what else can you build with this get apple's unlocking capabilities and hardware so what software can you build so there's two ideas one's mind want somebody else's but i'll take it as my yeah exactly whoever says it it's theirs yeah by the way apple or airpods what it how much ten million units there's the last x amount of time so what's ten built is that ten billion in sales yeah just multiply by let's say a hundred it's just be a plus in sales right yeah yeah it would be a fortune five hundred company yeah i agree it it's fantastic and so one of the things i was thinking about was great if i have these on all day can i just have this on kinda connected to like my wife or like somebody right so whether you do it for work or for a personal you always have it on there's no audio flowing but then if i'm like hey sean what's up it knows do you have your airpods on if it doesn't it tells me hey he's not there can record a message you'll get it later right but if you're there you will just hear my audio and you still aren't on yet you kind of opted in again to be like y what's up man like like how do you take the phone call away from like that and you're like i'm not gonna give this capability to everybody there's a couple calls people in my life like wife that i'm gonna be like great i just wanna have this on in this capability this darren and so it's like in the office they do this in the tv show yeah jim and pam have everything just constantly this is good because it it's not it's not on when you don't want it so let's say i have my airpods in you have yours in and i'm i'm walking around i'm at lunch i have this idea for the podcast i basically just say y sam what we should do is we should do this and then you basically receive but you're not sending back unless you say whatever the keyword like the you know like how alexa works right like it's like sean or whatever it is and that's way more lightweight than me picking my phone and starting to type or phone call like who wants to do that right now so phone call feel weird a hundred percent right now yeah i i i'm i i'm less bullish on that than the first two okay okay and when we'll do that the the second version of this with air airpods was you know for us so what is guys were oh you're homie one of our friends and we're doing small hack at the house and he's like coming up with this idea again for airpods wait wait wait you're doing a hack at your home like for fun yeah just for fun damn maybe you do this like every week right or like two weeks like so what do you guys do like jake's here jake you did you go to the last one yeah we just kinda sit on a table we're on our laptop we're talking about ideas we come up with something and we just kinda to make it usually you don't end finishing on the first one but then just a second one when you try again the third one he tries any kinda fucking nerd of the jake what'd you build what'd you build it the last one do you want me talk about it yeah yeah so jake jake was making this thing where he was like it'd be cool if you could test your website from like locations around the world but it would like video record what it look like and how it loaded so not only do you get this like technical not a number yeah now you could show people that this is how crappy our website looks like from some random country or in the us and right what it looks like for other people and so that's awesome yeah that's really awesome everyone's kinda testing numbers but mean we're visual yeah what you care about is oh look how long that took to load look how shitty is look have you heard of user test is it user voice user testing testing yeah you know user testing you i'm that's like a hundred and fifty million dollar your business shout out to my mom works at user testing really it's it's that it's huge right to speak it's a it's they're trying to go public you know so that means that they're at that scale where they're doing a hundred hundred million plus yeah and all they do is there's someone in the midwest who's cheap who screen recorders alright well let me look at your website okay i'm scrolling down i don't really know that's more about confusion this is more about performance no but they but they but they there's a there's similar there's similar issues yeah and i think you know today he's looking at it at like a performance tool like how do you kinda make it load well but i think you could totally look at it and apply some machine learning to it where it's like this doesn't seem to work well it's below the fold on these devices right like some of those things when you design it and then you like put it together you're not thinking oh what does it look like on the ipad right and then you kinda just show it like that and then you have a video but also it could detect and say man this is like your main button that's showing up down here and you know you can are you gonna do it with job jake i like that project right here i figured it okay so before you saying this what was the other project so this idea was around cooking and you're like in a kitchen and you're like oh i wanna like hear these recipes and things like that and so again your hands are dirty in the kitchen yeah what do you do you pull out your phone your laptop it doesn't make sense right like and so the idea was you have your airpods on it kinda walks you through the steps and you can go next go back and it's like you know a little recipe on your that you came up with for it but i think you could come up with a better name for it but you know kitchen in a box in a box there you i think you go that kitchen pods or something and i was like god that doesn't right that's sound have you okay so and this guy named andrew mason you know you know what that name he started group on he a few years ago his second act he started this thing d tour d tour there it is they shut it down and he pivoted to script des script a podcast thing look at us look at there we go and anyway d what was the first one d tour it was awesome it was so cool this was before airpods so i explain what it did you do well oh i used to do a mall time but i understand how it wouldn't be huge but i was a powerful product not a great business yeah and so what it was is you know how when you go to a music i mean you have a guided tour her that says like alright when you get to this point press this thing and there and then you press the button and like tell you it you see this painting you see there's a small little a sm that you'll see up left that will happened when we got angry he do whatever so what they do this but they do it for cities so it's guided walking tours but you know you know this american life like you know how it's like really highly produce podcast podcasts where you can like hear noises and they did that but it was gp it was work at your gps and what they would do is they would say alright walk past the street past bus street keep walking and then it would play music and then it would tell when you got and it would say now look down to your right you see that hole that was there that actually came here from this time and and it's it's awesome it's so cool but he shut it down anyway what you're describing is almost like the cooking version of that right the utility version which would be significantly larger than the d two version because the d two because you cook all the time the d tour version i would do it on like when my wife is out of town it does suck to have your hands covered in food and then be like oh let me go to my ipad or my phone and like try to like scroll and click and zoom and like figure out this recipe how many tablespoons was this supposed to has there ever been a big business built around recipes other than an ad based media company not sure there's the problem with a lot of these ideas you start thinking too far ahead you're like i don't wanna go do this is what does it turn into but i think generally the concept if you took guided tours like that concept and you said what else in my life could be guided that's interesting i think there's a couple of very interesting businesses is there or at least interesting products right a totally interesting products maybe interesting businesses too totally interesting product i think there's a workout version of this that's doing alright which is like you go to the gym and it's like in your ears and it's music after you what to do i use it all the time apt you know what that is no i haven't seen it it's similar i use it on base i pay hundred dollars a year for ethan spoke hustle khan tens of millions in subscription revenue it's what you're describing but it's for working out so i think if you have a great product in a space where a lot of people are doing it you can come up with a business plan like a hundred bucks a year that matches some i agree with you so people cook people go to the gym and like what else are they doing day to day like i think guided meditation is another one that oh yeah really there's the model right and so there's probably five others in that space but i think airpods made it different than bluetooth headsets and headphones you know like so here's here's a little guy fire one yeah that's why we really that's why he gets the seat forgot it for meditation a lot of people don't like to say meditate like it that just doesn't do it for them their mind race is all the stuff and like the answer right now is like no that's the point do it and like sure that's that might be true but for a lot of people what it means is like fuck this i'm gonna do something else so there's all these other types of meditation like transit dental whatever where you're chanting it's like a little more active and and there's all kinds of meditation hiking is meditation exercises meditation because it you're controlling your breathing in a certain way you're clearing your mind space and you you know you're freeing your mind and so i'm curious if somebody can do this sort of d tour version that's about walking and you know it's basically got in meditation but it's active not sit down on a pillow and do nothing for thirty minutes or whatever it yeah like when i would do those d tours you did them right i never did one well we we did one i did one where i went to the cash show and it was all about the aids epidemic and i you got to know harvey snow or harvest snow what's it harvey harvey milk you know the gay activist that was like killed whatever he was a gay activist that was murdered and it was during the eighties when the whole aids things was going on and the guy talking he was like now this is the last time that i hugged harvey before he died and and then he's like now this house up here like these guys lived here and on top these guys live here they all died and i was like so emotionally right okay that gets me thinking you know i think this would be not don't think this would work but like you know yesterday a you and lance i'm armstrong were both like the podcast i like best are these true crime ones what if you did a true crime version of the d tour thing where it's murder mystery kinda creeps you the fuck out as you walk around that's cool real crimes from your city yeah or you have to so weed un trans report might get a report on this these app what are those where what are those calls again the yeah you know what i'm talking about give me real no like these serial video app that fucking the lady who started it she sold her thing to song man i gotta remember what it was anyway you you you get it's like choose your own adventure app okay for thriller not watching things okay basically we did a report on it our hypothesis was that actually the erotic novels romance novels is the biggest segment but you're talking about hooked hooked yeah yeah hooked right anyway i think it's i i don't know if it's a great business but okay one they scaled up revenue hooked was doing i think twenty million plus in revenue for i but think churn was stupidly high yeah anyway team what we're describing is and when we did the report it was romance novels and thriller had the highest here's a general print principle though like hooked is the modern day goosebumps so when we were growing up we would read goosebumps books and that was what hooked us as a kid and you love to read and hook said well now every kid's got a phone what if we delivered this through this kinda sms format but it's these like scary stories goosebumps style and and what you were talking about earlier with like you know chuck cheese modern day if you're trying to brainstorm ideas this is one format to think about what did i love as a kid what's the modern day version of that and because that's a great framework people's desires tend to stay the same yeah it's the tools a technology that updates and opens up new opportunity a good framework yeah can can i ask you about app loving yeah i got one right oh go go for it i'll kinda of plug a company invested into so invested in this company called lucid drone i think i told you about it they have they basically created a drone that can window wash big buildings and so instead of sending like a five percent crew and a scaffold and whatnot where did you find that they were yc company so you know yc produces still fantastic companies i like these guys because it was like we got this you know it's not just drone tech and the where but it's like that it's that specific application specific application and then you think about it you're like yeah five people hanging from a building or one guy work in the drone from the bottom and washing it are those legal yeah and so they they're out there in a couple of cities i think there's gonna be small regulations they're gonna have to go this makes sense it's a lot safer and a lot better when did they go come out watch saves you money if you're the building owner safer than having humans up there trying to wash windows sad way to lose alive what a bold idea great idea and what they did is they actually stopped so they tried to go to the building owners and they were like oh man the building owners are like well we have a service like you know just too complicated so they went to the guys who were servicing the building they're like i make your business more efficient so they're sending five guys out per job you could do five more jobs instead of renting this crazy scaffold you use lease our drone and it's like you make their business more valuable you're not taking their business and then you don't have to go to all the building to building oh my god i love it one way of looking at it was we're gonna put those guys out of business instead said no you're my customer correct we make you more efficient exactly and i think that's some of the best tech i see is that it's not about replacing the whole workflow it's like how do we make these people more efficient how do we allow them to have more capabilities and then they can do more they can do a better job that's kinda like i think what i look for in the emerging tech especially lucid drones this the other genius thing about that is if you wanted to do this you would either have to go sell every building and and that's on lot of sales or if you go to the company like you said the company that already does the window washing they might have already fifty clients so now one sale gets you fifty men that's bad we i'm big fans of boring things like window washing i think would that would be right my alley and to add to think to it would be neat it never if you told me that someone had that idea i'd be like not no it's a it's really interesting and so my spin off the remix of their idea was probably you guys i don't know if you got you have a car right yeah i'm car great you guys both have car so i thought maybe none of you guys would have there in the city but i never washed my car i never go to a car wash me there you know if i could just have a little drone that sits in the in my garage that can come up wash my car for me at often or if you're in a place where it snows and how do i pour some water in the windshield i don't got go do that and i can get into the car like that's what i wow that's how you can i like that you know this is like a huge failure cherry but that was humans yeah so that that that this is this is a roomba yeah no i'm not that watches your car totally that that failed car but i looked at like the background of why i was like that so stupid who would une earth think that was a good idea it's a big thing in a lot of different countries that and check this out bringing gas bring cash to you yeah bring gas to you in foreign markets that's like the way that gas works so car washes i say wash funny i always have to or tell people i say it funny get prepared car washing can you not say wash i can't say that it's a midwestern thing wash i like it's easy it's easier car washing i'm giving the disclaimer no i can't say i can't say car i no just can't do this on my mouth though it's like l now you are interview questions cleaning you know car cleaning if somebody says like what's your greatest weakness so like i can't say walk ars rogue ours that just make their way into my words it's it's a bit lesser thing lot people say it anyway that's interesting but i never would've have thought i'm i i that's kinda cool but how on earth could you build a machine that does did i mean that's is it because the drone need to be pretty smart to do that or now you know i i think the thing i like about this technology space right now is a lot of the research work is done and so people have made drones that can fly that can follow you like there's literally sky yep said a thousand bucks the you go running in the woods yesterday like demo video and it follows you if you haven't seen this demo video search sky is that bullshit though it's amazing you literally go you like throw the camera the the that one that other one failed yeah these guys tell they can do it i know this go on youtube and look up the users who are doing this and they're recreating it and you can see it works okay and so like snowboarding and skiing and stuff yes snowboarding is another one i mean gopro was like one step up but now if you got this drone that can call it around i love this shipment drones and vr just we need a drone filming this that's just whoever's talking it just turns to them oh and just does the cut it just picks up the right mic in the right i had one of the first dg dji ones and it fell out a sky at a thousand feet no ruined it that happens but a lot of this technology there's been so much research work done that's moved it forward and i think it's at the spot now where it needs application engineers and not that same you know you don't need to be a phd with computer science and all these math agrees to go create this technology you know you take the work that they've built and they've kind of established and then apply it to these things and so drove flying a drone is trivial now building the drone is trivial now and then the software is easy to program a drone to fly object recognition and computer vision is easy now and so you combine these two let's call it easier technologies now because of all the research work that was done and then you can kind of create this product from it and so i built these small drones or like these little four inch drones they're there the you have yeah yeah i i programmed my own flight controller that one didn't work as well i use a pre program flight controller that worked a lot better but i get really excited about these technologies when i without a college degree without a you know deep technical expertise can go and learn about it and i really just use google like that's my source for everything how old are you i'm thirty five you're one of the more interesting people i've ever met okay great wow that's what i'm wrong yesterday he's blushing look at that he's not interesting he's cool i mean he's interesting but he's well he's what interesting to you he just my interest align with yours but he's more intelligent and more technically savvy and he could actually make the things that i think i wish i could make yeah can you talk about app loving because you said something so the other day i was talking to someone about businesses and i'm like when when it's working do you know it's working what's that feel like and you made a comment earlier like it's the first time i've ever seen we're just this is what working feels like right what what what what was that like it's it's the feeling of like like when you when you're you know slamming your brakes in the car and the car is kinda doing its own thing and you're like i'm not controlling the car it is just flowing on its own it's like it's that feeling where you know you're you build all these products and you apple and we did nine ideas before that i've done this for a long time where i'm just trying to idea after idea like trying to get people to use and you're looking for all these good signals and you're trying to spot it and then when it's really working it's not about spotting it it's so obvious that there's no question that it's working and so it it's all a charge you're flying up but then every day you're not even like man is it working or is it not it's so obviously i gotta do x y and z to solve you know these problems that are coming up kinda day in and day out and so it's definitely a feeling where the pull from the market is so strong that there's no there's no middle ground it's i always thought it was like oh it's i'm gonna kinda realize when i'm close to it but it's actually very binary it's like you're here and it's not working and you're trying to push into the market what you need to do but when it happens it just kinda takes off and you know i just i don't have really good analog where you except for that like it just it's like the loss of control the market is in control almost and you're just like trying to catch up and like you know get into that mindset like okay great this is working we're gonna keep like pushing whatever we need to do to kinda support this case what was the revenue growth i mean you guys read zero and then was it like one month it could have been like twenty grand in the next month it was like a million i mean was it that substantial it wasn't that crazy but i think the interesting thing that i learned was they're you know there were a lot of players in the market where you'd go to this weather app right and the weather app would do like you know you never realize a scale of some of these apps even at that time it's like man this thing is doing two hundred million you know impressions per day and i'm like a weather app like really like why is it so big and then you're like great if we get this customer these things can happen and so i think the weather at the weather app is how many impressions i i think i forgot which weather app it was whether was weather bug or the weather app but it was like two hundred million impressions a day like i was like i was really surprised at some of the scale of some of these apps and like you know yes we had the best ad platform yes we made you know we made all these small tweaks to the product to like make it work better and we made our server scale and we did all these things but i think to me the fascinating was there were all these major players you didn't actually realize how big some of these opportunities were and kinda working at and i was like wait i wanna go do this and like what i left there i was like i'm not like a huge fan of like ad products like naturally it that's not the product that i get excited about love money so i like great it's a fantastic business i like that and i was like oh i'm gonna go make these apps and games that are gonna go do this and actually that's how where i ran tasha sean i think he had checked out one of my games after connect to an angel list was that right yeah i saw my angel list and i was like something doesn't add up either those guy's full of shit because who would leaves this company that's crushing it like most people when you finally hit a grand slam you wanna do the victory lap and people stay for seven years and then they write this cheesy letter about how the great the journey has been and they're finally ready for their next chapter he basically left after three years you're weren't even fully vest in right yeah i left a little bit on the table again i'm not complaining because everything's been fantastic and but it was something counterintuitive i was like why would this guy leave either he got kicked out he got fired he's not good blah blah blah blah i was like or this guy's amazing he really just does love the was like i just love startups i wanna build something that consumers use not really an ad tech platform and he was like i was interested in mobile because i saw how big these mobile apps were on our ad network he locked himself in his bedroom was like i'm gonna learn mobile in the next six months and he just built a bunch of android games and then i saw him on twitter tweeting back with people who played his game and i was like dude none of my developers all the developers i have in my company that are great none of them would ever go tweeted a customer and be like hey you know i'm gonna fix that bug you know i can make this better hey what do you think about this so i was like there's something different about this guy what apps were you shocked at that how big they were why app is two hundred you know the casino game apps i mean that's not shocking is it the size of it was definitely shocking just because y'all also assumed they're big and they're addictive but then that and then candy crush their initial rise was the first time in the industry where i heard like man like dis is a money printing machine it's like you know they would you know and not all of this was at love and it's like once you're an ad tech you're like learning about the industry you're meeting other people and you're like hey these guys are willing this blanket pay eight eight bucks for a user in the us and i'm like well that seems pretty expensive like why are they doing that and like how how much are they make eight dollars what they're spending yeah i think at that time it was like hey if for like a male you know eighteen to thirty five or something it might be eight bucks or something like that and then on the other side i talked to somebody over there and i'm like they're like yeah and we make like twenty bucks on them like in like seven days and i'm like and maybe those numbers are slightly up but like they were making a multiple to where you were like wait so you just have this machine where you just press this button you put in money and the you know seven days later three times more money come out and i'm like wow like how do i get that i i do my bank account every single day to go do that well you guys had that a little bit with love yeah i love it had that i mean i didn't have that right i don't have same mechanic obviously if you're at this company you're vested you have a shared interest in the long run but you know me being me i was like i want that like i want the ability to have that and then the freedom to work on things and i'm really excited about and so i tried that obviously it's a lot harder than just you one person is their bedroom doing it but what did adam love say with he like this just we had no idea or was he at methodical enough to see adam is so fantastic at execution that is just like he's like a machine it's like you know when when thing i really loved about it and the things i learned the most from him whom were like when you wanted to go do something like you know sometimes you're like oh man man this situations isn't work and adam the ceo of love yeah ceo of love and you know you have these situations where it's like i gotta go do x or you really feel like you gotta go make this move this deal is bad maybe this higher was bad or this higher was good or something like that well i you kinda wait on it a little bit after deciding and you kinda create some time what's a good time to do it was like okay well we'll just go do this now like what's stopping us and then you know the other things like that were know i started there as kind of an engineer and very quickly he was oh you could run this team you could manage a whole team i was great we talked and then that's kind of always been my experience like that never really gets communicated and then it feels like oh i'm like the manager but not like i think a lot of people end up in that situation especially in companies and then like the next morning is like a meeting with the whole team he puts the org chart up and then every time we changed it it was the same situation happened he was a little clear and effective with his communication and execution that i was like i really need to be like that like that's what like i think a plus execution looks and feels like day in and day out and it's like it's not emotional it's very logical it's very quick and i think speed in these situations helps create clarity because when you or re the other way around clarity help create speed yeah or both right like you know and i think clarity in the sense that if you delay it your team becomes unclear and then it gets a little muddy and then you're like wait what is what's going on here why is does this guy acting like that and that person not and i think just being very fast and quick in that execute once you decide you should go and execute it and i think that that's that's the thing that i learned is like how quickly can you do that and how effectively can you do that whether it's an email and i and i'm really not good at this is kind one of the reasons i pointed it because i see myself kind of like oh wait on this a little bit or send this email tomorrow i don't wanna open up this kind of work right now like and then it's actually that's the exact opposite of tray just go have a bias for action and and kinda go do that and so from him i learned just just an amazing amount in like how do you operate at this level i mean since i i've left they've grown so much that it feels like i was only at the one percent of it like i feel like i don't know ninety percent ninety nine percent of the story anymore because they've grown well beyond that they've expanded into other areas they're really big now from the revenue side they're really big now from you know what their marketplace is isn't and they're very well known and i kinda get all the benefit from from being there a long time ago which is great for me but you know i'm sure there were more learnings that i missed along the way this whole monologue on app love and that that's gonna be our clip nice that was a good one cool we should wrap for today that was awesome man awesome but for kind of watching me across the street so anytime we wanna do this again we can do so we'll have people we'll put your twitter handle in the buy in the notes of this and so people can get you know follow you get you know tweet to you whenever after this as well and we don't know i've uncertain as to how many listeners we have but i do know that last time i asked for reviews we got a few hundred of them in in a handful of hours maybe twenty four forty eight hours so if you like this one tweet at him you could say you're handle a second and then let us know and we'll we'll figure out what what what next to do yeah yeah my handle f con r on twitter that's f u r q a n r awesome thank you