#54 - Atrium Closing Down, B2B Gifting & Curly Girl Hair

not almost that's our corona now i a people are legit doing the foot handshake like several people have done this to me like alright yep corona one of our title by coworkers bobby put he on on instagram he's like hands handshakes are just are discussing right now you have to do other things and he put a video of him in in another coke katie having their feet with their toes cedar locking so triggers everyone he was like you can't a hitch handshake anymore after to other their methods and their toes are in locking that's like that that is the best content on on social media is these photos that will just trigger people when they see that there was one where this guy was on a plane and he was barefoot foot and he put his foot on the armrest of the of the person in front of them and it got like i don't know whatever the max number of twitter users are that could share that's how many people that's awesome we should i should take that from him and share shared it on my stuff because i'll i'll get some of there their i'll steal their clout last podcast we talked about run the world yeah okay so retract yeah big major retract i signed up me and alan did it sorry guys it didn't work platform sucks right now platform sucks i think that if they're listening you can get it right you missed it this time and you tweeted at them did they respond to you yeah good customer service and they i got a i sent to you us i couldn't go to bed last night at two or three in the morning they just screwed up so i was just kinda buggy right yeah yep alright that's a portion we'll figure it out figure it out we'll try another one at some point but we definitely did it unfortunately didn't work yeah is there any okay so we can get other updates how about henry with the microphone talking to that oh get that get that smooth voice that barry man of voice on here guys i'm henry oh man look at that on the pod do new fan favorite that's awesome jamie of from the from the joe rogan experience for this podcast powerful young henry but but he is leaving i know but for now it's powerful young henry i am leaving in a week but alan will be replacing me so you'll have a a new fresh face that's awesome so now when we need to look stuff up and then henry finds the information because we don't know what the hell we're talking about now he can say it into the mic which is great are there any other updates have to talk about run the world didn't work henry is a mic no let's get we asked people to subscribe and unsubscribe and send videos i don't think it worked don't think that worked but podcast podcasts is growing anyways so i feel happy we're up i think fifty five percent since last month which is awesome growth if you are listening to this you don't have to do much just share this with a friend and you could tag either of us on twitter and we will offer for sure with reply sean will right if you say he will and he might i may or may not reply but here's the thing i was on my way over here today and you know i like to get in the mood like i like to prime i i like to prime the pump i could i was like what should i listen to that's gonna get the ideas flow and get the wheels turning so that when i come in here my brain is already firing there's no podcast to listen to if like this dude i hate to say it there's no other podcast that does this where it's like there's a lot of good podcast podcasts where it's great storytelling great interviews but nobody is playing mental hops scotch with ideas and so i couldn't get anything to get me going so but that's a good sign for when i wasn't here stu did it and i listened to it and i loved it and i loved the notes even more right i love the notes i i no idea about the whole christian typing business awesome and i that's what i know it's good because i typically hate anything i'm involved in and how about a guy who's doing the typing business he like oh yes a a guy messaged us it sounds like he was english he must be in was in the uk he's basically so his thing was we didn't give him the idea he said the background so the background is we were talking about i means and sue were talking about okay cool religious real religion tech church tech and one of the ideas that came up or one of the things i told him i said somebody had reached out and said give me three months i'm gonna be on the podcast podcasts because i'm gonna build this thing it's badass you guys should know you're talking about church tech there's this company that has digital tit it's called push pay it's big four billion process ninety eight million in revenue there's another one called tide and he's like but they're not big in the uk or europe right now i'm gonna build in the uk and europe and in the the the facebook group which will put the link in the show notes he's providing these video updates so he i posted his first video up i don't if you saw it where he's like i got twenty three customers churches who are interested in doing this including one that runs two thousand churches and he's young and he's a young guy he's a smart guy and he's like look here's how i came up with this idea and i'm doing it i'm gonna provide video updates every week in this thing and i love the i love even people share their work i love when people work in public i think it's a extremely underrated thing to do and every time you do you get this army of people were rooting for you and opening up doors for you as you go i completely and it keeps you accountable which i'm excited to see what he's gonna do hopefully his next video is a little shorter this one's was like six minutes eight minutes i i i watch two of the they but i i join all too that i watched i like that guy so so i guess we we should put ib brew i think that's how you his name bra bra you yeah yeah we should put his show notes in the in the description yeah yeah absolutely this guy is a listener he just makes these great notes we don't know him i mean i met him recently he called me a little bitch when first bet up that's what he did just a shock or what well i met him and he goes hey why don't you follow me on twitter i was like i don't know i'm sorry and he goes just stop me a little bitch and follow me that's one of the first thing she said when i bet i was like nice to meet you so kudos to that guy for whatever you wanna give me my heads blog post i used to try to blog about business back in the day when were doing a very first start right out of college and none of my post got read by anybody nobody cared but one post went semi viral and it was called the first cursed advantage and basically i was saying how in a meeting the first person who who uses a curse word bit sort of establishes himself as the person who just doesn't give a fuck about the there they put themselves in a position of power and it also builds a different to level of rapport because you're obviously using informal language with somebody else and you're demonstrating that you're not seeking their approval in a way and so i always in meetings i do this i try to be the first occurs in in a meeting and can i say i don't love that and i'm like because you don't like cursing in general or i mean i i actually when i hear myself curse i'm like man i sound kinda trash i agree i don't like when i hear myself do it and i think i do it too much but i've noticed in meetings it changes the dynamic like instantly and for better for worse but i've but i think is difference between being crude and freaking being cursing actually so like saying bitch i i fucking hate right my god did you just hear that that wasn't on purpose so i don't like when people say that i i don't quick quick story before we get into this i went i got married in september yeah and i had to go i got married catholic church and you gotta go meet with the priest ahead of time and i was really nervous because i don't i don't i'm not practicing i don't go to church and but i wanted i the whole wedding was they had to approve it and the whole wedding was on the line right so i had like be a good cap like an or at least pier like one and i remember i was that sitting there and the guy was asked the priest was asking me and my wife my future wife about like so do you guys agree on children what do think about birth control all this stuff or whatever was asking and i would just say whatever i thought had to be the right out i was very nervous i was like yes sir yes we go to church three times like i just said all everything edit my phone rings and i was so nervous i go i go oh fuck sorry it went really loud and that he looked at and i was like shit my bad i didn't be because and i i was so embarrassed and mortified that's amazing yeah but he let it go he let it go good guy yeah he let it go i thought made a joke about how i was asking what school he went to and he said he had lost student debt and he said he's like yeah but the church young guy a young like in his thirties so maybe late thirties and he said but the church pays for it and made like a joke like so that's why you joined and he didn't didn't appreciate that he didn't like that you wanna get it let's get into can you make that bigger curly girl hair so you guys and trends did a post about nap the natural hair movement yeah that's a big big thing and mixed race mixed race and black women and so talk a little bit about what was in the report and then i'll tell you sort of what i've seen separate from that it sounds like you're more interested in it you tell me what okay alright so so i'll start with so my sister law got a super curly hair and and if you've never seen shawn he's indian i'm indian and she's indian and she's got super curly hair and curly here hair takes a lot of maintenance right like it's humid boom it's f and you have like there's is episode of friends where monica his hair like an a that that happens or it's flat or you wanna straighten it or whatever it's lot of maintenance of curly hair and so she was telling me she's like yeah i downloaded this like i joined this thing i bought this pdf that's called the curly girl guide or something like that and it's his method to like tam your hair and getting because i told her i was like your hair looks great nowadays like what you've been doing and i just thought she would say like oh i use this other product she's like no there's like a twelve step processor just anybody with curly hair because my man anywhere else so my wife if you're well i guess they won't be able to see this my wife's black she's half she's also not here even if they're watching yeah so she's half white and half black and she bites a lot of this stuff as well right and so like there's a whole thing like you know when you go to sleep you need to wrap your hair in a certain way to sort of like whatever the oils blah blah and so then and like some basics that you just don't do so like she you know she she'd curly hair her whole life but didn't know oh i'm not supposed to use shampoo in the same way that most people use shampoo and so she was telling me about some of these differences anyways opportunity i was like i like these businesses where you could put out content and information that just helps people and it and then sort of on the back end sell the kit that's like oh by the way like if you just wanna push a button and get the solution i have the kit that has all the shit you need because she spent hours researching all the different products that like what is the best version of this oil i'm supposed to have what is the best version of the shampoo for me and so anyways i think there's an opportunity to do this curly girl hair kit because there's this huge number of women that have curly hair the spend is in the multi billions per year in the us for how this gets treated and there is this natural hair movement where it's less about doing these really damaging things like permanently straighten your hair or you know weaves and whatnot like now there's a sort of a natural hair movement and so people need content or like education plus the tools this sort of the hair care kit to take care of the hair okay i love that henry can you give me a favor on a new tab type in red curly hair so there's a whole subreddit one of the ways i like to look at validation and ideas for different companies is i like to look at the engagement and size of a particular subreddit how many subscribers does this subreddit to have i can't read that from here use that use that mic you got henry what you doing three hundred thirty seven thousand that's pretty good i think actually for a curly hair and and particularly because reddit is mostly men right and this is a woman's focused curly hair subreddit it with exactly so great way to sort of validate the demand and and the community aspect to this where people are sharing information recommending products to each other the other side of this is it photographs great so you know before and after i believe is the best ad that you can do before which is a photo after which is better photo and you don't even need to show your product you just need to show whatever i took gave me this outcome i was here now i'm there so my wife loves this subreddit okay so here's for validation okay so particularly so i think that the the the angle here is you have to go ethnicity or race specific yeah so whether it's indian i have no idea if asian women suffer from this but if they do go do that i know from first firsthand experience that mix race women or whether they're white and black or any other combination suffer from this as well right and further validation is fe rihanna has that brand right that sold to the louis vuitton company or what's it called l l v h mh h l they and you could read about the deal i think it was valued at eight hundred million dollars mh and her a lot of her thing is towards yeah mixed races and then another idea here and everyone knows about this woman but kayla it's new it seems this thing it's it's seems what's their thing called it's main or some yeah sweater app hey this is where's i sound like your wife doesn't why i it yeah sound like an idiot because a guy i don't pay attention this whole segment is like bros trying to talk about you know products they don't understand but i'm fascinated i'm interested i'm trying and everyone loves a try so kayla thing i heard that's a hundred million dollar of your company it is the fitness app it's self which was like crazy and it was was built off her instagram following so that's crazy i'm in started with she started with the same thing beach the bikini body guide i think was her content that she just put out and it was pdf and the pdf got circulated everywhere and basically she allowed their like paid pdf to get boot leg and just shared it everywhere and what that did was it just gave her tons of awareness tons of marketing and and then she launched the app which you couldn't boot leg and you had to pay for and then boom and the most interesting part about her thing was she so she's like mainstream popular and typically when things are mainstream popular maybe sometimes like people who think they're cool can think it's kinda lame and sarah's a ivy league educated new yorker and she was like i love this pdf right and so she has access to all types of interesting things and she still use it and i and i thought that was amazing that people really respected and liked it yeah she comes across very well if you've ever seen her content she's not like she's not hate like she's come across is hate i that's cool what oh and last thing diva curl there have you heard a diva girl not no another mixed race shampoo maybe it's for black women but or maybe it's i don't know what the i forget if it's black women or mix so that's what we use for shampoo and it was quiet for acquired for a quote of a billion nice and there's some things on the opposite side like tristan walker who was i think either the cofounder or first employee of fours square left to start his own african air african american men's skincare product company walker brands walker brands where it was like you know shaving stuff because you know the hair is different course it's gonna the traditional shaving gear was causing problems and didn't work out win under and that kinda brings me to i don't know why it went under exactly i don't know if it was fundamentals they just raised too much money and fucked everything up okay so when we started our business we knew how to create our product and we knew how to get sales but i had no idea how to run payroll i didn't know anything about health care i i didn't know anything about that stuff and so when we first started we used a handful of different payroll providers a couple of different hr providers and none of them were that great and so i read about this guy named parker conrad who launched a fantastic company called rip a couple years ago and since i read about it i've been researching it and we finally pulled the trigger and started using them and they are actually today's sponsor so it's called rip and what it does is when you hire new employees it makes it stupidly simple in order to onboard them it makes it really easy for your new employees to see your handbook to see all the software you use to get access to that software and it actually makes something that i never even thought was a problem until i experienced it which it makes it really easy to track all of your hardware and devices you can see which employees use which computer what software they're using and it's all one platform so you could pay payroll you can track health you can track hardware you could do a bunch of really interesting things on it they're today's sponsor they're one of our only sponsors that we've had we've been very selective of who we are allowing to sponsor this podcast and we worked with them this time because i use rip personally and i love it so give it a shot rip dot com that's our i p p l i n g dot com atrium folded yeah so atrium is a company that has raised seventy million dollars seventy five million seventy five million dollars you made a great comment that i've stolen and i've told everyone but basically atria what they did they never did anything really unfortunately they tried to do a bunch of things so at first it was almost like a you'd pay a a flat fee and get a service done and then they were like alright let's create software so lawyers can contribute with their clients and you could see what they're doing right but you said why didn't they just make a law firm exactly so basically atrium if you don't know started by justin khan who is the founder of just justin dot tv which became twitch and you know well known guy in silicon valley so he raised seventy five million pretty much out the gate like in two rounds i believe but the first round you know i think they raised ten million bucks for out of ninety million dollar valuation on just justin saying hey i'm gonna do a new thing and then they raise more money and they raise it all pre product market fit so before they knew what they had and what the pro what the market wanted they raise a ton of money and what i call this is the curse of money expectations and people and so what does that mean the curse of money is when you get too much money before you actually know what you're doing you that actually decreases your odds of success doesn't increase your odds of success right the second is expectations justin con famous guy serial entrepreneur raises a bunch of money at a high valuation now you have the weight of those patients which makes you less nimble less agile and less responsive to you know changing up your own and he nobody what told me he spoke at hustle kinda i hung out with them backstage one of my secrets of a hustle kinda is i make everyone coming an hour early right and i lied them about when they have to speak so it starts at too yep so i hang out with them backstage and meet all these people i told one guy the founder is zapier i hung not with that dude all day wade doing this thing and what justin told me was he goes i have a chip on my shoulder that twitch sold for one billion dollars this has to be ten billion or i'm not interested and i was like i don't know if that's a healthy healthy attitude i justin he goes i have a triple my shoulder which i think that is actually healthy i all for that but he told me he's like here's what the expectations are and i was like that's a little crazy dude but whatever yeah that is a little crazy and the last one is so the curse of money expectations of people and people is when you have all this money and you have these expectations to start hiring a bunch of people they laid off like i don't know a hundred people think two hundred why do they even have a hundred of two hundred people and they a lawyer like lawyer type i mean these people will cost a lot right and so before you have product market fit you wanna have as few people as possible you wanna have as you know sort of lightweight expectations you wanna be extremely nimble and agile so they try to do a hybrid like you said i went to one so one of thing they did really well was justin leveraged what he had leverage your assets right so his asset was he's got a name in the tech community so here's what he did he first when he raised money he raised from like a bunch of vcs because he knew well they have companies they're gonna send their client they're gonna send their those aren't my future clients and i love what what you're about to say now i think that's even better and so i don't know if you know but so i'm talking about these weekend things he hosted yeah so did you go to one nope so i went a for you so he basically said cool weekend workshop justin khan is gonna do an atrium academy workshop on the weekend and i don't remember what the promise was i think it was like how to raise money for your company and so i went to one them because i wanted to see what was up and it's a kind of an all day thing and at the at the atrium office and justin's a very charismatic magnetic speaker yep and so he starts telling the atrium stories like you know when we we started this company and he's like you know one of things about i always thought he's like i became involuntary i became an involuntary power user of legal services i love that phrase he's like because you know when we were selling twitch for a billion dollars we needed a bunch of lawyers and when i did this other thing we raised money for i needed a bunch of lawyers i do doing win all these investments and i need a bunch of lawyers so i just realized man legal system sucks and everyone's nodding in their head and he's like you know it's weird that you don't know the price of something you know they bill you by the hour so they're incentivized to spend as much time and bill you as much as they can you want it fast and you wanna know your price we're like yeah you're righteous us and i do want that and he's like you know the second thing is he's like why i looked it why isn't there a competitor no no the second one was was i was having dinner with my friend was a lawyer and i asked her you know what do you guys use for project management she's like what do you mean like do you use trello or asana and she's was like i don't know what those words are he's was like lawyers don't use anything for their project management isn't that crazy or like yeah crazy last one he's like he's like so then i was like why doesn't somebody start a competitors he's like i realized there's some legislation that says you can't start a law firm and i'm gonna butcher what the actual legal problem was but like there was a rule you cannot start a law firm unless you're a lawyer and and unless you've been a lawyer for a certain amount of time or whatever it was he's like that's why no outsider has done this but luckily we found a loophole that let us start this law firms so we're one of the only new law firms that started not by these people and by the end of it you're like do you take my money i want you know i want to invest in your thing your impression of justin khan is the is so kinda condescending and so funny i don't eat it that way i was impressed i'm trying to say he told this story and i was eating it up and and so i was like this is amazing this this whole workshop was amazing he brought in his friends who were giving advice and they were fucking awesome they were so good at giving advice and so anyways by the end of it and he gives me advice he was just like because we were building on the twitch platform with like a twitch sort of like the streaming app thing and he was like yeah you know we thought about doing that and we don't think it's valuable i just don't don't think anything's gonna be valuable and he was pretty much right we had to pivot and so we so anyways by the end of this i was like this was an amazing way to acquire customers yeah i that's my like long winded way of saying he used his assets he did these workshops it's not a scalable thing but man he i don't like one people over you're i think you're so wrong what do you say that's not scalable thing first of all you don't need that many customers for this thing to make a very large he could've have got a hundred clients easily within a couple months yeah and what i hate when people say that they go this isn't scalable like they'll talk about agencies and they'll say it's not scalable like what we talking about some agencies have twenty thousand people that seems like it's scaled to me like perfectly fine i do think those are scalable actually it depends right if you're a product that needs thousands and thousands of customers then doing workshops with twenty people out a time is not gonna get you there so it's not scalable in that sense so you wanna hear a cool story about that the founder of pandora his name's tim west i went and met with him when i went and met with him we were we went out to lunch and he's like oh i forgot to do something like you can you walk me and i walk with them and then we go he goes i gotta get a haircut and so i just sit next to him and this guy's worth probably six hundred million dollars go super cuts right and he gets a haircut for twelve dollars and we're sitting there in the barber shop it's on a tuesday at one no one's there and he's telling me story i go what did you use to how'd did you go pandora he goes here's what i would do monday through thursday he goes i had a coo who ran the company i would go i would just he goes this was i think it was a little bit poor social media was around he said i would email people and i would say i'm gonna be at this library in new york at this time and pandora users in the area come and talk to me and he said he did that for four years and he goes here's the first one i did and he showed me a picture of him at a coffee shop because was two people showed up and he was here's the last one did and he showed me a and it was added of the library and there was two or three thousand people there he goes i would do that monday to thursday i did meet everywhere all i did was travel and i did it for years and it worked out if he goes he goes i was like did it work he goes every time i did it like he goes like it would take a little while but after a couple years of doing it i would go to the south or i go to atlanta and we would see more advertisers come so it was just like he goes it worked out perfectly right and because i said the same thing i go wow that's a horrible waste of time he goes no at it worked we made a lot of money off of it and i got to connect with users and i would relay the feedback back to this right my my ceo and they would do it yeah you you so that case he's not trying to grow pandora active user base he's taking fans and turning them into die hard and he's he's generating advertising revenue which you can get that actually scales enough to where you can get advertisers and he's getting feedback firsthand which is like great for the product to get better that's a dope story it's a i love i love i love that story there's your there's a clip related to that by the way there's a you know there's probably like ten blog posts that matter the most if you're gonna do a startup one of them is the program essay do things that don't scale where he's talking about with airbnb early on and if you're kind of in the start of world just fast forward thirty seconds but if you're not you'll like the story if you haven't heard it so airbnb is in y comb they're struggling airbnb is not really working they have like i don't know twenty customers or something low and they go into paul office he's the the adviser from y comb and he's like okay so tell me how it's going and they're like well you know it's small and not really growing and he's like go but tell me what what have you learned from your customers you've been out there what what'd you learn and they're like well you know most our cuss you know most our customers are are in new york and they're putting their apartments up he's like they're in new york they're yeah like most of your customers in new york he's yeah he's like what are you doing here like go to new york you need to go to new york now and like why are you in san francisco if your customers in new so he sent them over there and what they did which is something that nobody else was doing was if you ever saw an apartment listing before the photos look like shit because it would be somebody on their crappy mobile phone at that time taking a photo of a dirty apartment and listing it for rent and so it was like the worst sales pitch and so they started themselves going in they said hey can we send up they would tell their customers hey we wanna do professional photos of your place increases bookings by forty percent are you open to and then they would show up as the professional photographer and be like hey by the way i'm the founder and they would take photos and that that airbnb listing started to look great and everyone told them this won't scale and they've also thought this won't scale and to an extent it did because even now today there's a sort of fleet of photographers that would come and take photos of your place to list it because it was just that important and they found a way to make it scale i think that's a great story another thing that shocks people i think even if you have hundreds of thousands of users maybe as high as millions you could really i i've done this with us i will just call and talk only need to talk to about ten people right and i can see the pattern that represents tens of thousands or hundreds of of people right i could you could just tell you so like what you could do is a b test it and wait if you're just starting you're not gonna it's not gonna be significant and that could work fine if you just call ten people you really get the information need totally i was talking to emmett so it's the ceo of twitch where i'm working and and one you know being at a big company has all these different weird things that aren't really related to my core interest which is startups so i ask emmett at all the time just tell me about the early days and so i asked him i said hey when you guys were pivoting from justin tv to twitch was that obvious he's like no dude at justin tv like less than two percent of the watch time was on video games it wasn't obvious that this was the thing to do he's like i just liked it and i thought there was an option and he goes and then i talked to a bunch of customers and i said do you have your notes from that and he's like yeah do and so he sent me his notes from the initial conversations he had with all these streamers all these customers and we published no i i don't probably not but i i was reading through them and it was fascinating so first was just like first of last i was just go ask the founder ceo about the early days i bet you they have a bunch of resources that are awesome he sent me the old pitch decks and stuff like that i think i sent you one slide which was my favorite slide the title of the slide because he it was a progress update for their early investors yeah and it just said we're like a bull in a field full of flowers and he just and then it was a list of all the shit that got done that month and i was like this attitude like if i said that today at twitch it would be like what does this man act saying like why is your slides so aggressive but that's how they were early on so then he had all these notes of his customer conversations and he always tells everybody at twitch he's like go talk to people by the sixth conversation you'll hear the same thing over and over again it takes six phone calls basically to figure out the pattern and by the by the sixth one you'll know and you'll you won't even want do fifty conversations you'll be like alright i i can predict what this person's gonna say before they even say it after six that's awesome i think we could just got ourselves another clip clip it what do you wanna wanna first of all share that deck with me again and also ask ask them him if we can make that i will ask him actually because it's pretty cool what do you wanna what do you wanna do the one thing i can share out of that by the way he asked three he's like i said you know the oh customer interviews is there a whole skill set to learn he goes no dude i asked three questions i said what do you like about your current platform what do you dislike about your current platform and what will it take to get you to switch to twitch and that's what he asked every single customer and then he just heard the common things and he would build it and go back to me and said you told me this is what it would take for you to switch two weeks later here it is are you ready and then sometimes they're like no still he's like okay what's next and he would just like keep doing that three questions that's badass just to wrap that up if you wanna learn about this stuff i think the best book i've ever read on this is called the mom test yeah i love that jack recommended me that book yep it's fantastic it's the best thing tiny book too like that's a long blog post fifty pages that book in terms of your business life it might change yeah the mom test okay so there was a great write up in the trends facebook group by guy morgan or girl morgan i'm not sure exactly but morgan key and i was talking about hey the founder of trader joe's just died i think joe i don't know how you say the last name but joe from trader joe's passed away and you know so we dug into the model and said what is it that makes trader joe's work and there's a bunch of really fascinating things where they basically broke all of the rules and i thought it was just like a great example of of like you know when you wanna do something different or you wanna like make a splash in the industry like it pays to just change a bunch of the rules so some of the things that they do differently so they go through the rules so they most grocery stores have a ton of skus they're like people want all the options we gotta carry everything that people ask for trader joe's has on average i think four thousand skus and average score will be forty thousand so one tenth the number of skews the next thing that i thought was interesting was they overs staff not under staff so every other grocery trying to sort of have minimal labor costs and they go the exact opposite direction and try to provide like an experience for shopping they private label basically all of their goods so how do you okay great i overs staff possible i overs staff but that's like expensive so where do they make their money back yeah they make their money back by not buying you know not not by buying wholesale and selling retail they actually just private label their stuff and have a way bigger margin on their items so what's an example of that that's the so like their tomato sauce for example they will have or salsa it'll be called trader joe's salsa and people will be like oh i love trader joe salsa and it's actually the same exact salsa that somebody else carries they go straight to that supplier or manufacturer and they say hey we want our own line of this and so it's usually trader joe's isn't making it no they they they go to supply but they private label the that that exact item oh i didn't know carry it they they get a much bigger margin because they're cutting out the sort of retailer and they have all this pricing power to go to suppliers with and say hey we have all these locations so we are already a big customer from day one we want you to give us our own brand popcorn our own brand of this or own brand of that and then on the other side that makes customers love it because people will get addicted to this and they think oh that pretzel that chocolate cover pets i loved i can only get it at trader joe's but that's not the reality because there's no brand on it but they can actually get that same thing they just don't know the brand and it's from some other parts felt that exact same way about a lot of product and so there was a there's was a few other ones that i thought were interesting i'm gonna dig it up but talk for a second while i just i show you guys a quick stories so we're talking about scaling i talked to maximal mu at hustle khan he listen to the story he told me that when they first started who's maximal max mu started insta out okay he goes he goes our first store was trader joe's and they wouldn't let us go in there and they wouldn't give us all their inventory he goes i took it took he goes it cost twenty five grand i bought everything in the store we brought it to apartment took a photo over took the pictures of every single thing i love it was twenty five thousand dollars she goes one of everything was about twenty five grand and he did that with whole foods and then five other stores that's amazing okay a couple of other points that morgan brought up so no data collection so they're not collecting data on their customers they don't ask for they don't do sales coupons loyalty or or advertising the biggest expense so their marketing is samples in the store so they go above and beyond on samples and don't do a whole bunch of other promotional stuff they expanded very slowly so they have about five hundred locations after fifty years and so they really went sort of slow and steady with their growth sort of like a in and out or whatever and are they owned by someone at the moment private company i don't think they got bought by a private i think it's literally like owned by the original whoever's there's a couple people involved and so in in the end their price per or sorry their earnings per square foot in their stores so they'll earn two thousand dollars per square foot revenue and like whole foods would do one point two k and then you know walmart will do six hundred k so they're way more profitable per square foot because of our sort way more revenue per square foot because of these these different changes they made to the to the standard model of i did that i we we should i don't know why we didn't we should publish out i think it's a ten billion dollar company overall i i thought they were owned by aldi these for some reason you might be right i don't know on that but shout to morgan i thought there's is a great breakdown love it do more of that in the groups we love the stuff and we'll share the information because yeah more people need to learn from this stuff so that's actually an interesting take which is what are the interesting components that makes something special so we're doing this thing that we're gonna publish on tuesday on hotels and i thought that was really interesting and so it's not live yet so i haven't been able to read all of it but basically a lot of the largest hotel chains what they do is they don't actually own the property i mean or sorry sometimes i own the property but it's all franchise yeah and so ninety percent of their money is made via franchising hilton marriott whatever yeah i had no idea yeah and so that's one of like the secret sauces which is you have to do franchising and it's really expensive like could be ten million dollars start a marriott franchise right very expensive that's not that expensive ten thousand that's cheap for sorry i said ten million oh ten million dollars like eighty million dollars okay yeah that's a lot it's crazy and so what what we've been doing on trends and what i i've always loved doing which is what's like what's like the the thing that makes something special what makes it tick yeah so for example what software typically it's just what makes a great software business is like there's i'm i'm just r here but i'd have to find the exact numbers but it's like our is the annual revenue per customer at least five thousand dollars can you make it so churn is only four percent a month and then there's probably only one or two more rules but it's usually churn and can it be at least five grand a year for a saas business since time and so i love seeing those like yeah you want so what investors do is they see so many deals and they talk to so many founders and they do this for a number of years they get to see how these play out they start to do what they call pattern recognition which has pros and cons the pros is great you can recognize a good thing when it's a good thing the con is if you trying to make everything fit your pattern you'll miss the outliers and that's a that's a big issue but but it's worth it's still a a a tool in your tool belt that you should have so i feel like it should this should not just be investors that through do this this should be entrepreneurs as well so you should be looking at different businesses industries breaking them down listening to podcast like this or others and trying to identify the patterns of commonalities and try to characterize okay what made that business tick what made this have a different outcome than that what are the sort of minimum requirements on let's say churn or customer you know customer value for a saas business to work and start to get these rules of thumb or like kind a common patterns in place in your brain yeah and what what i've been trying to do is figure figure out those on on all types of things yeah and that's been exciting you wanna do one more yeah let's do one more so there's this thing called bin t h n k s right where is that on here just right in the middle oh okay what's that so i saw this in a an instagram add like that that was kinda kinda clever so b to b gifting so what thinks does or i think probably thanks that they're trying to do which is saying thanks oh that's stupid i hate cute spelling yeah cute spelling kinda kinda tripped them up there so what it does is it's like from your phone you can instantly just send a little gift to any business acquaintance so it's like you could send you know a a bottle of wine you can send a box of chocolates you could send a uber ride you can send twenty five dollar you know amazon thing whatever so they have a whole bunch of different digital gifts that are it just looked the in the in the ad it looked frictionless of like how easy this would be to just send this little thank you to everyone so for someone like you guys you guys have advertisers we have guests that come on the podcast and i know i would love to send them gifts i know that i should i know these little things go a long way even though it just seems like they shouldn't but i don't take the time to do it and so i think if somebody actually made a really good b to b gifting platform that did both the actual gifting so being able to send it to your contact but also they sort of accounting for it so keeping track of it in a spreadsheet and all that stuff maybe helping you expense it i think that could be a big business i think a lot of salespeople would use i totally agree the way what what do you point did he do that no there's a company called alice and they do artificial intelligence powered b b gifting it's really cool they basically scan your social profile and they figure out what your interests are they send you an example of a gift they wanna send to you like on behalf of a company and then you're able to either donate the value of that to a charity of your choice or pick from the marketplace a gift of similar value that's badass i like that what the what i would do one or two things the first thing that i would do is i think the way that i would set this up is i would make it pretty heavy on slack or integrate with salesforce yeah we've built a couple salesforce plugins ins that we love and other people i have asked us to give it to them what's an example of one i'm not involved in our salesforce thing but basically like one example is we've connected our quickbooks and our salesforce really effectively which was a previous previously a really hard problem i mean that's really nitty gritty accounting stuff gotcha but it was really frustrating another thing that we built in salesforce was so that we the way that we built our business is we can get a line of credit on our invoices and we've synced it all we we've we've synced it all up so our bank knows which invoices we have based off salesforce and things like that right and it's really effective but what i would do in this is i would hook it up to to salesforce our slack and i would make it so you could send coworkers as well and basically the boss puts your credit card down and he allocate it or she allocated it so every employee gets automatically like some number of ten dollars to two hundred dollars a month right and you have you can like type in like send henry a gift at san francisco office right and like for example i buy gift gift cards for people all the time where someone has done something really cool or like edi was saying her cars or i don't know if if her cars messed up i'd be like send eighty hundred dollar uber gift card right that i think that would be fantastic and the way that i would build it is that it would remind every employee how much balance they have left at the end of the month so you for sure know it's gonna get right used that's kinda that's really interesting and i would also look at what's the what's the fruit baskets that are popular edible arrangements yeah i would look at their i would go the i rush yeah i i think they're publicly traded yeah i would go and read all about how they do and where they say are the biggest markets for their b is it real estate agents who need to you know yeah must be out there is it sales is it you know i don't know whatever else so there's some stats that are on here i don't know who out these but great eighty nine percent needed i nice allan chat talent eighty nine percent of c suite execs believe that gifting brings people closer together okay love it and then after receiving a gesture of appreciation individuals feel like sort of the what the the rule of reciprocity yeah so fifty six percent more likely to reciprocate and and i think it's i think it's great i have a friend greg is who's all about gifting ramon is a great gift as well he's almost obnoxious good yeah and so they they just are so thoughtful and by little things that go a long way it just makes you love the person yeah so another thing i would do to run this company is i would go to is it it was it's a book called influence by robert chow he's at this thing called the rule reciprocity it's summed up in basically i can do a favor for sean and he gonna do a favor back to me even if he didn't ask for me to do him a favor and it is likely that he will repay me back in a disproportionate amount so for example there's been times or you could like go up to someone and you could be like hey you wanna you wanna can i give you a coke or can i give you like this small ten dollar gift and i could be negotiating with you for selling a car and get a deal and get a deal right or for example i could say something like hey can you grab my mail or let me grab your mail you when you're out of town and then two weeks later i could be like hey can i borrow your car for five days and typically people will do it and so i would make the whole tagline line of my company which is like i would make i always think of like in terms of headlines and copywriting for sales pages i would make the whole headline all about how you can you have to use pod positive language but how you can manipulate people by giving gifts i mean that i i would would older it headline i would go to that book the rule and i would find find to create in fact maybe that's what the headline would be it would be the definition of the rule like i would make it look like a definition rule reciprocity like yeah down or something like right defined as it inadequate or disproportionately given in response to a gift yeah in other words we help you make more money so so there's theirs is i just went to their website growing business through growing business with gratitude build strong business relationships through efficient personalized and thoughtful gestures of appreciation that's whack that's wack that sounds like by the way company dude i get every company we mentioned on here i get a message that either the ceo starts listening to it or they were already listening to it like we talked about only fans the founders into this no shit we talked about pipe the founder reach out just you know hey i love i'm i don't they reach out to me i talked about mystery science i hung out with the founder yesterday and he was like we're jam mystery science mystery science is the amazing business it's bill nye of the science guy delivered into schools yeah wait why don't we get those people on here we can yeah he was a he was awesome and by the didn't realize he had you know three little exits under his belt and he was doing this and the business is just spitting off cash it's amazing it's used by like a crazy number you know public thing that he told me some other numbers but i'll say the public thing you told me which is that fifty percent of elementary schools in america are active users of their product which is insane penetration which and that just means one classroom within the school but whatever you got to fifty percent of school being active users on a weekly basis are the product i love that incredible let's get those people on here let's go to questions hey yeah let's do some quick ones alright so we ask people to do subscribe and unsubscribe and send us a video of them doing it and we would answer a question that they sent the truth is is a lot of the questions we're pretty okay yeah so we're gonna avoid some of the okay ones like what would you do if you had unlimited money i'm not gonna answer that i think that's you know okay question let's see but let's see what is a a couple good questions i love the podcast what's your best seo hack for a new website from steven sin so i i know zero about seo so for me i love marketing i love growth but you sort of specialize in certain practices within that seo was not one of mine but met guy yesterday and he was like he was telling me he's growing these content sites he's got a pretty repeatable model to grow content sites over a hundred thousand monthly visits up to a million monthly unique like within two months and i was he's done it like ten times and i was like okay well what's the formula are you seo guru or what he's like oh no i don't know seo i don't do backlinks i don't know what a sc is like i don't do any of that stuff he's like i'm all content and i just try to rank on quality and relevance and he's like basically he just looks at what questions people search for using a tool like aa ahrefs or whatever and so he goes and finds what questions are people searching for looks at the search result and if somebody's like you know the twenty best tips for closing the sales meeting he'll do the thirty best tips and he'll put in a youtube video and he'll like add all this value in and so he'd literally just like crush it on on those questions and some of that sometimes there's questions are like you know people googled their deepest darkest secrets they're not like politically correct things they'll be like you know what's the best way to you know like tell your girlfriend you're cheating on them or whatever and so he'll be like the best way to tell you you're girlfriend you're cheating on them things that companies most sites are not blogging about he's like if there's demand i will write the best content for it and i will rank over the course of a couple months and i'll get my my website up i'll tell you a quick story real quick first i would say my answer to this is i've been the same thing i've accidentally been good at it i would just use two tools h a reps and then seo m or is seo sorry yoast yoast it's a plug in for wordpress that's okay the the those the just use those two tools and you'll be fine and when youtube first start in in two thousand from two thousand ten to two nine two thousand twelve i had a youtube channel that had millions of tens of millions of views and all i would do is i would find words people things that were things people were searching for and i would put a video with that exact same title and then i would make it just a picture and not actually a video the click picture and then i would sell space on that video as background music and i made hundreds of dollars a month when i was a senior in high school of doing that and so if you ever wanna see a thumbnail video of a guy the the my most popular video it they took down it's called black guy beats up white guy so people were searching for that oh yeah oh man and you could just type in and what you could do is you can just type in the word white and it would autofill fill or type in the word like fight and fight videos were popular or still look at the pin would auto in it all auto complete i did that same thing and for some reason i i learned that those fight videos did great okay the another question so robert asks what big picture thing should i be looking at for my podcast to be profitable it's a medical podcast where i talk about certain diseases and interview people who have them and then he shots at the name of it which is the patient will see you now alright so what should he how should he be thinking about making his podcast profitable should we do them as the expert of not so profitable podcast we did not have a profitable podcast we don't have it's profitable it's just small relative to like other opportunities we could be doing it makes money every month what what's your answer i would basically so not try to go for big so podcast you can either go big audience ads or you can say my podcast is lead gen for other things that i do and so like i've gotten more value out of businesses and investment opportunities coming from this podcast than the ad revenue we every month and so similarly i think here if you're the people who are gonna listen to this podcast you know they might be patients with a certain disease and you might be able to sell some premium ad spot to you know some pharmaceutical company but you probably don't have the scale and so what instead what would be looking for is i'd say cool if i had a podcast with five thousand doctors listening to it every month what what can i do with that community what other adjacent opportunities business opportunities could i create out of that that loyal community and so i'm a big fan of just build the tribe first the opportunities revealed themselves as you go and that's how i would go about it i wouldn't try to do ads for your podcast i want to add thanks it's a good idea cool i'm wanna do one more yeah let's do one more okay first three months of your business what are your first three steps very generic question is that even useful okay okay let's combine it with best man some of these people they ask the most general question yeah okay here's some advice i have a phrase ask a better question get a better answer so ask a specific question don't ask like you know in the first three months of a business what are your first three saying like what art is good right or like you know how do love you like what like i can't tell you what it's like how do you how do you do art i don't know man do you wanna talk about like oil painting of right the renaissance arrow we could let's talk about that okay here here's here's a question that i will ask to entertain myself here what's your favorite interview question when you're interviewing somebody for a job on a scale one ten how lucky do you think you are nice where where'd did you get that from when i interviewed at airbnb the founder asked me it it's the jeff bezos question he he was the i think the origin of it or made it popular at least they asked bezos what's your favorite question he said this and now bunch of us have stole this joe debbie asked me it and i told him a nine or ten and he said why and i explained to him why and i go why don't you ask me that he goes people who say they're really lucky and the people i wanna be around i was like why do you think that and he goes as well if you're lucky if you think you're lucky you must be talented and things just fall in your place or you actually are lucky and i wanna surround myself with lucky people i don't wanna be around lucky people yeah the the specifically of the question is how lucky of your person do you think you are one to ten one two three is like i'm not very lucky i don't consider myself a lucky person four five six is i think pretty i think i'm you know decently lucky average and i you know i think i know why or sorry i don't know why just that's just how it is and then this the sort of eight nine tens are i consider myself a very lucky person and here's why and you want people who are either you know if luck is a thing you want them around you just like he said or if they're not you want people who optimistic and you know when you're building a a young business you need optimistic people and then the the wide part is interesting too because some people know how to earn engineer serendipity they know how to engineer lucky situations for themselves or they're looking out for situations where they may be getting lucky and pounce on those opportunities and that's again somebody you want in our early business and then i'm gonna ask you the same question and i think i know yours but i'm gonna say another one that is deadly i love this question and this is when you back channel on someone and you wanna ask about so let's say i'm interviewing henry you're his old boss and i reference check i'll go i'll go sean what would you give henry out of ten just say a number i'll give henry a seven okay and you're gonna give him a seven because you wanna you don't wanna completely shit on them and you but you also wanna be realistic and so i then i would say okay well what what can i what can he do to get the remaining three points can make them of a perfect ten that is the only way i've ever to get feedback critical cool feedback on a person other than saying what are they bad at well you know they're pretty good or like that's that's what they'll always say yeah for sure because people like i said wanna be polite and then people also don't wanna like lie it's on their own is the best way i've ever found to get it love it okay your good reference check question for that specific thing yeah i know what it is and you should tell it i don't i don't remember what because i've told a story once but i don't remember what it was it's this the founder of second life told me once who you are who you wanna be or oh oh this one yeah this is a good one yeah you know i love questions like this i asked this in job interviews but i also just asked this in social situations to be awkward fill i say hey we're gonna play a little game i want you to fill in the blank first thing that comes to mind first answer best answer i'm gonna say the first part you finish it and i'll say life is alright let's allen let's play alright sorry henry do you have the mic so let's play first answer best answer answer as you go life is great people are i am henry okay in the middle one was the only good one yeah so and then use you use it to sort of have a little bit of conversation you to try not to judge people too much off the top of the mind but i actually just think this is useful for yourself so this is like your core outlook it's like what's life and you said life is great cool optimistic sort of grateful person then you said people are tough that's interesting why do you say people are tough are you you a do you have a girlfriend yeah are you guys at a get spot dealing with some stuff right now you are yeah yeah totally that's what i what's a situation where people have been tough tough to deal with i don't know right now i'm trying to like like figure out where i'm going and like figure out a job i was like in both a in career i'm gonna do and it's just like tough like just communicating with other people i'm like getting them to realize what like you want and like making them like see what you see in yourself people are tough to persuade or tough to to get on your on your page that's a great question you totally have you've like you could see what he struggles with in values yeah and then the the last one which is i am and you went with henry which is a wave little literal answer if you're gonna do another one what would be i am i don't know i student don't know okay and then the the second question i'll kinda ask is so i've usually paused i do the cycle analysis and then there's a couple things happen people are like oh okay they just like wanna leave because they feel so uncomfortable or they'll be like what are yours cool i like that that's a good sign when you ask what are yours and then i'll tell them mind and then they'll do the same thing back to me and the last question is like i tell them him i said you know one thing i did was i i did those answers top of mind and i didn't really like what i said and then i just reassess it i was what do i think the answer should be for me like what do i want my answers to be what do i want my outlook of life people and myself to be right what do i want my mental model to and then i revised it and then the best people come back a few days later and they're like hey by the way i i came up with my own and here's mine and those are the people i'm like i'm gonna be friends with you for a long long time because you're like me you you like to do the stuff clip cool i think we're done by the way i gotta call the the guy from levels i gotta get my my glucose monitor installed for the weight loss challenge oh okay we'll do an update on that i didn't have to call them i think we're supposed to okay well you could join me on this call call share or is that like a is there a button like a share button if there is do it let's help let's get more listeners thank you yeah tell the friend bye