#77 with Greg Isenberg - WeWork's Head of Product is an Idea Machine

this episode is brought to you by super side they're an always on design company that delivers great design at scale fast afford and within twenty four hours go to super side dot com slash m m m as in my first million some super side dot com slash m m to check them out what's up can sean here sam is out today but we got my friend greg is filling in greg is a great dude you guys will like him a lot he's been a founder of a couple companies sold two of them one to stumble upon one to we work he's at we work now he said investor in companies he's a he's a cool guy you you guys like them a lot he's got a real brain for designing products so anytime there's like a social or consumer product he's one of the best thinkers around and i think you guys will see that we spend the first half of the conversation talking a little bit about his background and then the second half is we go through a bunch of random ideas he has on his you know notes app on his phone just for fun so i think you guys will like it tweet at me sean vp tweeted greg let us know what you think about the episode as always enjoy hope everybody's doing great out there in the quarantine keep hustling building stuff keep yourself busy with with good things alright take care enjoy the episode okay so i should introduce you so greg is on the podcast greg is a homie from i don't how long i've done a few years at least we you know i guess the world probably now knows you for your haircut website right sure explain what that is what what is the url you probably need a haircut is that it you probably need a haircut dot com yeah we're the the busiest virtual barber shop on the internet dude that so what happened okay so people are in quarantine they need haircut and how does this idea go from a little germ a little little sperm in your head too and a real idea out there i mean you got me i like you know i get sort of excited about stuff that goes viral and i was talking about buddy mine he's a stylist out of work couldn't pay his rent i was like i need a haircut i like to look good you know built the mvp and then just through it on product hunt and before i knew it it went is on the today show abc d and basically the way it works is it's pretty simple like for people who need haircuts they book an appointment they get connected to a virtual stylist and they could either cut their own hair or they can have a friend and cut cut their hair for you and so this is a dope i did when it came out i like who's behind this i know i feel like i know the person behind i didn't know was you but i was like i feel like it's either you it's alex too alright it's like you know one of you sort of viral meme of products yeah i feel like actually general i've spent hours brainstorm with you before i feel like for you to get excited about building something it's gotta start with some emotion like either you think of something that makes you laugh and you're just giggling and but you're serious about it once you start laughing or if something like really sad story and you're like okay this is an injustice in the world i don't wanna go solve but is that a fair is that a fair characterization of you yeah i mean i do like things that kind of go high and like for me you probably need a haircut i mean i was i i told my girlfriend i was like i'm a hundred percent this is gonna go viral and she's like how do you know how do you know and i was like well like the name and and kind of you know where at and it was the timing like you just see it with a couple of journalists and you know throw it up on product hunt and like before you know it like i don't know we probably had a hundred and fifty thousand unique in the first twenty four hours how many actual haircuts probably more probably over a thousand at this point yeah yeah definitely actually more than because we have one stylus you did two hundred so yeah more without any public speaking thing where they're like hey can you send me like your bio this absolutely needs to be the first thing you know i you know conducted over i'm responsible for over a hundred thousand aircraft so internet and the crazy thing is that people like actually look good like well the crazy like i you don't have a haircut right now you're growing it out the greatest tried booking a haircut right like this week weekend you can if the the site is busy you know i'm an entrepreneur entrepreneurial i'm i'm out here i gotta i gotta make it happier for the people i love it i there's a reason i have this hat on because you know you boy butcher himself with his own two am haircut with his own clippers without using your website and right you can't see my hair so that's fine alright so let's give people background and then we're gonna shoot the shit as we do alright greg first do you remember when you became a millionaire do you remember the day of course you always remember the day tell about but i actually like you know where i started actually and i've never publicly said where where i started and i think you might know this where i started to actually make a little bit of money was really is the teenager doing affiliate marketing oh affiliate and like the under undervalued of the internet yes and you know not people not a lot of people talk about you know there's a lot of actually great entrepreneurs who who actually come came from that area area i think julian smith you know is also was in that area era as well but i actually remember two thousand eight it was my i think it was my eighteenth birthday and i was doing affiliate marketing basically i was doing deals with you know the e harmon the mashed dot com that in and z who were like they were willing to pay you three four or five six bucks for every install you generated for them and back then there was this arbor i mean there's still arbitrage now but there is this arbitrage where if you could you know create a landing page and cost you one dollar to to get someone to it to install that game or get that lead to e arm they would pay you five bucks right so i would just figure out like kind of just some innovative ways to do it you know one one thing i did which you know which i invented was the auto playing video pop under ad which ruin the internet where you're desperately trying to find which stab is playing the sound well we did it for a poker company and yeah that's it and basically you know we we i remember getting like one two percent conversions on it this is a pop ad it cut cost like a fraction of a penny but you know from that whole experience of like as a teenager kind of working in affiliate marketing it really just taught me like what do people want yes because know i i didn't grow up poor or anything but like my parents weren't giving me money to like go and a lot of money to like go and by the things that i wanted so i was like okay i'm gonna have to go right there and do it myself and i ended up building you know i'd put it like okay a hundred dollars a month on this landing page a thousand and it sort of grew and you really pay attention if it's your own money you really do pay attention and and you know if the difference between like a one percent conversion rate on one point two percent conversion rate is if you make dollars a day or lose a hundred dollars a day or at bigger scales lose a hundred thousand dollars a day or gain a hundred thousand dollars a day and if you realize it's it's around just subtle details like having a woman with red hair or have the eyes look at look at you in the landing page or certain copy all these little nuance things add up to the to getting people to do things on the internet totally me and i think you know fe on the the cto yeah had him my start up we used to literally look for hire for can we find anyone who's who's done affiliate marketing because we were like yep the people who understand those arbitrage they actually understand how the internet works you understand what makes people click what drives them to actually take action how the economics of the internet works how to move traffic around and that's probably it's not a great long term path but it is like a great place to sharpen your sword so that then you can do damage with like products that actually matter or like more sustainable businesses versus these kinda like you know moment in time arbitrage yeah i was i tweeted the other day actually i was like the people i i wanna hire are if i'm building a consumer internet thing is like x game developers or game product people are game marketers or ex affiliate marketers like those are the people that understand game dynamics mechanics social mechanics had to how to build like you know game game companies have very sophisticated marketing funnels and understand the flow very well and the same with affiliate marketers like those are the people that have been there done that that are that are probably undervalued in the market yeah and then you you went on you did a bunch other things you did an agency that was kind of like building websites for big big brand bigger brands yes then you decide the way we had james alt on the last one he said he did the same thing basically it was because kinda his first hit was like making american express dot com or like whatever those websites well yeah after after i the affiliate marketing i mean no no one's lower the tote pole in terms of status and reputation and then domain and affiliate marketers so i was just like how do i gain credibility so got into the agency game and said i would only work with the top clients which is all status all status like one hundred percent set so and did you have like status symbols do you have like dope car or anything like that did you do anything to play the status game i mean not not i mean i feel like for us like internet entrepreneurs like that's not even like the status like the status isn't dope cars or dope like houses this i feel like it's you know it's more about do you have a club house invite or not yeah exactly that's what you know it what whatever is cool at the moment so yeah i ended up start you know doing this agency it was called stress on the design we ended up doing like high profile projects like the tech runs redesign which was like in two thousand ten which was like a big deal and that spawned a lot of business and then like i think you had andrew wilkinson from tiny on on the show we had a similar model where we took a percentage of our revenue and we built our own startups and the start is was all really all around this idea around building mostly community so like we built like start a vertical so we did like star cooking dot com which was like at the time the largest video cooking set on the internet things in the finance space a company called wall street survivor which became the most popular financial education and stock market simulator on the internet and just like how do you look at a vertical and build something that they really want and then wrap around community yeah so did that and then i realized i wanted to go do something i want to do the whole san francisco kind of like i was living in montreal canada at the time i'm like i wanna go do the whole like this is like post social network yeah right around then probably when it came out of twenty twelve maybe and what what did you think was hot shit back then were you like reading certain blogs was it twitter was it the social network the movie what what was hot because i literally twenty twelve was when i moved to san francisco too and my journey was like i i was starting like a restaurant started i trying to start the chipotle of sushi at the time which ended up becoming this like cloud kitchen and then some you know mona mentor gave me the book the lien startup and i was like oh shit yes we should test if there's demand before we pour everything into this signed personal guarantees for this lease and that led me to paul graham essays and i was like oh this guy this paul graham guy this is the shit i know why website it looks like this but this is amazing and so then i started to like you know drink the ko silicon valley and i was just i picked up and move from australia just off of the ko i changed my phone number i was like here's a san francisco phone number that means i'm in i'm i'm committed and then i moved so what were you what got you hooked i mean i'm i'm like a product designer so like for me it was really and i love social apps and so for me it was really like the pat like path you know that was like so cool back then you know was pat yeah so yeah for those of you don't remember it was like kind of a you know it's based on this idea around dunbar bars number which is like a person only really has a hundred and fifty relationships so like what if you designed a social network around a hundred fifty people like private and it was just super well designed and beautiful and then but they kinda were like way ahead of it their time like danny trent and meant like reactions and stuff like that right and i just like remember looking at a a lot of like those people like the dig guys the stumble upon guys and just being like i mean you needed to be there you needed to be there and then you know even if you took quick trips it just didn't feel that there was something special going on in that era so came down down you're speaking past tense you still think that's that's true or that's not true anymore i mean i think it's for me i think like bay area is like very much i mean let listen it's a wonderful place but i think for most people it's very much like i look at it like college experience like if you're not from there it's like you go there four six eight ten years you do your stint build as much as possible you build your network and then you bring it to wherever you're from or whatever major city that you live near i you still when i say where do you live now no i live in new york city now okay nice yeah did you sell your place here or what yeah it's gone on you know greg had this bad house here in san francisco it was awesome it was a great great little flight place i mean that was a crazy step that was like a like it wasn't even like it was my place but like it was like a community like i you know we threw so many events there and it was you came to some and you like a working space if instead of working you just party there it was like a c parting space it was wonderful it was awesome i do miss it so yeah i think like you know that's what drew me to san francisco and i started something called five buy which basically took a look at all you know integrated with all the video popular you know apps like youtube and vimeo and all these sort of sources and we've built like a beautiful curation layer on top of it so that when you press the funny button you'd actually get videos that would make your laugh yep and we sold that to stumble upon which is garrett ka company which at the time was one of the largest social apps by referring traffic so you ended up being within reach of being able to invest in uber right because you do you knew garrett and then would you remember the first time you heard that he was doing this uber thing i mean i don't remember exactly but i remember when i met him you know uber was you know it was a thing it wasn't obviously what it is today but yeah you know i definitely i definitely wasn't like hey like take my money right you know i think but you know i guess he live in anywhere if you live in i i'm a friend who who you know garrett pitched him and he was in new york this is you know one of the smartest guys i know and garrett pitch him on the seed around of uber and and this is in you know in manhattan he was just like garrett like i don't know what you're thinking about man like people aren't gonna like press a button like and like a car is gonna come just you know you you raise your hand look at me i you raises his hand car watch this watch this bam you know like it's about creating ten x better product this is ten x quote unquote yeah this in new york it actually wasn't right it's just wasn't whole bunch of other places it was right it's like people that with crypto they're like oh watch this credit card boom paid for coffee i'm done you know look at this bank you know don't need to worry about my money it's like well yeah but that's not the experience for most people in most of the world and so maybe this doesn't solve your problem but it's gonna solve somebody's buddies exactly so we know sold crypto guy i'm my crypto guy i i have some crypto i not enough crypto to have some crypto i dabble that i mean my whole thing is like everyone should have two to five percent of their net worth in crypto as a hedge right i calculated the other day i think i'm at nine percent because i was like am going a little too crazy with this but i was like no it's okay it's at nine percent that's that's accept that's in the acceptable range i'm at seven point five percent so you're those rows right so yeah as it grows and the thing is are you gonna sell off no no so yeah not not gonna not gonna sell off oh yeah we'll see if this ages well this podcast the other year exactly the other thing is like pay to learn in a way right it's like dude okay this is interesting i need to get in the game i need to get a little bit of skin in the game just to like b b you know if not like sort of driving things in that that space but at least i'm in the passenger seat or the back seat or the trunk like i'm involved in the journey of where that's going by putting a little bit of skin in the answer highly recommend that too because that's been my approach with a lot of things now is just pay to learn right yeah i think like for me like i learned best when i'm just like pushed into the ground just like pushed me into the arena and like listen like i've like i've lost a lot of opportunity and i've learned a lot of things and you just have to assume that you're in after the long long game and like life is long hopefully and that you have enough at it's all about at bat like getting at that trying different things you know build good relationships in the end you'll be fine if if you if you learn and if you have a lot of that alright this episode is brought to you by super side alright so here's the deal i'm incredibly impatient like horribly horribly impatient and if i get an idea at midnight by eight am the next day i want it done you know but that's really hard because if something needs to be designed where am i gonna find designer at midnight to try to make the thing to bring to life so you know i don't think i'm alone other startups even huge companies need design help fast and they just don't have the internal resources or expertise to get it done so how do you get reliable design done without dealing with expensive agencies and lots of freelancers you use super side that's our sponsor this week just go to super side dot com slash m f m and tell them what you want they have a team of designers that can get it done fast you know they are twenty times faster than hiring a designer and fifty percent more affordable than a traditional agency so if you need high quality design done fast try super side lots of faster growing teams that are stretched are using them already check them out super side dot com slash m m i've using them before i love them check it out so we sold the business to stumble upon ran as an independent unit sort of helped out stumble upon as well left grew that to like one of the fastest growing video discovery apps at the time left in twenty fifteen ish and started islands which was based on the thesis around group chat is the new social network and it was gonna vertical and that you'd have a place to talk with your workplace friends that became slack a place to talk with your gamer friends that became places like discord and we focused on just the college market so raised a couple million bucks on the idea and way we went and then what's your story on how that ended up so the story is we sold the business to we work in may twenty nineteen and i would have loved to have continued building it out it you know it it had a amazing it had a lot of really good metrics like the daily active users would send between thirty and fifty messages every single day weekly active users would open the app app forty seven times per week the average user would invite two point one people it was a beautiful product people loved it so it had like engagement it had and retention was fifty percent forty five day so like that's too you know it's like pretty damn good for a social app above above what you'd normally see but like when i went out in the market to raise money i wanted to raise a lot of money and the reason i wanted to raise it is because we were seeing saying five to twenty five percent penetration in every school we launched at within a couple weeks and we had all these metrics so it was just like hey give us money so we can scale this to every call of the united states but at the time this is around facebook antitrust type stuff twitter wasn't really like you know innovating that much or they had a lot of like kind of like health of the health of the product that they were doing snapchat the stock was at five dollars and ninety cents like social was kind of like and and house party was flat you know social was kind of like no one wanted to look at it you know and i could have raised two three four million bucks to continue it but like i i was kind of like i'm very much and you are too like very much like a go big or go home yeah and i just figured yeah let's find a good home for it you went home i know okay gotcha alright so tell me tell me what's it got your interest now so what are you doing day to day basis nowadays so i am the head of product that we work which is awesome an interesting place to be i i'm am a c cofounder of a product studio called late checkout okay which spun up the you probably need a haircut idea and among other ideas which is kind of a rein of what we had at stress limit it's part agency part part product studio i've been an adviser for the last year and a half or two years for tiktok which has been amazing to see because they've obviously grown tremendously and so i've been keeping busy yeah okay nice so people when they listen to this what they like to hear about it is they like to meet interesting people so i i think that's check then the second part is the people who are listening are either current entrepreneurs in the market doing something or there are people who have a job are thinking about making the shift or their college student thinking about making the leap and you know one of the things that we do a lot of is we sort of you know just in check or or sort of on oh you know why don't somebody solve this problem or wouldn't it be cool if you did this or hey that thing's working what if you applied it in this other way and so i'm curious do you have i don't know do you have like in your phone do you like a notes app of like startup up by ideas have big start up ideas yeah i have probably there's probably over a hundred ideas here i thought one might be fun because you mentioned that just before or you're like hey like they have any ideas i have a notes file i could literally just like yeah let's do i can play we can play a game where i just go like this and it's in the wheel in the wheel yeah let's do it alright pulling it up alright alright okay some of them are like you had a couple of glasses of wine not i understand i understand alright men mu for millennials okay well meta does one it's re hydrating or it's like diarrhea or what fiber fiber fiber okay so i think the the genesis of this one was you know i think i'd love subscription based businesses i love businesses that are like repeatable right people who take meta mu take it every day mh mostly to get their routine yeah kind of in chat routine yeah a lot of brands right now are just being kind of like re thought of with like obviously is d to with like kind of a nice brand like i don't connect with meta i'll take you that at all yes you know maybe it just so it's like that's like a no brainer yeah i like that one in fact when i i did i i i did a podcast with the guy from who created soy and he was like yeah like you know part of the original thesis was kind of like the you know i forgot what the other shake is called ensure it's like ensure for millennials and right they don't they don't market it that way but they were thinking about it that way early on and so money is another one alright i like it i give that a a solid nine and a ten actually i you came out hot with that one alright it's spin again yes second opinion dot com when you need a second opinion on literally anything okay these are experts giving you opinions or what i don't know man like being an ad is hard right and we have to deal with it and sometimes we need relationship advice sometimes we need i don't know how to fix something like you know what i've learned from you probably need a haircut actually is that people are actually open to getting help and they'll pay for it right and so it's like imagine you're having like a big fight with your girlfriend and you wanna tell someone but you want an unbiased opinion you need a second opinion based on the text you're gonna say right second opinion dot com here to help great domain if you could get it okay i like this what what vertical would be the best that's kinda where this gets interesting to me because like where would you start and you know maybe you actually just end there because it's it's yeah you specialize but if if nothing else you start with one where people really want this or people really have this problems so so where could it where gonna it be hot so a good framework for thinking about like how to think about consumer like internet products is like what is the thing that's gonna get a lot of media attention because you want free customers and you also yeah you want free customers and also word is the best customer anyways so like what's something like why don't you just reverse engineer what would be a good p story like that's just one way to look at like mvp right it's like with the minimal viable press release or so somebody was doing this like for dating profiles so which especially as tinder got hot that was the time where somebody was like oh my god there's tinder coaches they'll they'll give you an you know objective opinion on your profile and how you're coming across and you pay for it and that's like actually a thing and that worked and that worked when there's like kind of the wave of hot internet you know tinder itself was kind of news worthy and you could piggyback off that and the way that you guys sort of piggyback off of you know all the sort of quarantine woes with the you probably get a haircut so you'd probably wanna find something that is people are already talking about and then you sort of you offer the second opinion around that space exactly so you know maybe yeah so one idea is like maybe you start with like relationship like relationship advice because that's like evergreen that that's always and but then you launch like the viral piece of it should i get divorce dot com or i was even thinking more on top like you have to answer the why now and the why now is like a lot of like single people are like should i go on a date with this person like an person date less than six feet let's say or should i make out with johnny and then you press the button and it's like no or something like that like so i think like that's where it comes down to like yeah like building little games building little like nuance things that like surprise people the like people people wanna write about okay love it spin again or this is kind of like i'm gonna give that one six kinda half out of ten yeah this is maybe even a a three and a half and a ten but like we're picking random ones here yeah text me a secret dot com and this is i i didn't do a full spin so i guess it was related to second opinion dot com but like we all have secrets and a lot of the time we wanna like talk about those you get them all our chest get him off heart chat chess so this is a service that does that here's another one well i like that idea so so here's here's how what i'm imagining yep i get matched with someone and it tells me a little bit about them twenty nine years old male san francisco rich and then he basically but evan i don't know more than that and then they open up and you can open up or you can sort of ro way to get to the next person it's a secret network of of telling secrets to each other yeah man bottle is blackmail it's genius we'll make millions don't make millions i'm doing the money burns you know evil your evil hands next idea which is a bit more the the opposite of this idea more you know nice for the world is a wash and fold for low income families so i a a lot of people especially in new york city but you know everywhere in the world and cities spent a lot of time in laundromat mats mh and if you're a working mom or working dad like you know sitting for two or three hours of the laundromat is is like take is a lot of unproductive time that you could either be spending with your children or you could be like doing a side hustle or whatever it is right so like how do you like do wash and pull and just take that out of the equation so that they can focus on what it is they wanna be doing and so this is just philanthropic it's like it will be taken care of for you you're we're gonna give back hours of productivity to the people who people who need it yes absolutely okay here's right here's another one spotify but for work in progress it's called watercolors so the whole idea here is okay life is messy and there's a reason why there's an eraser at the end of of a a pencil but like when you go on spotify it's all these like highly curated like i've produced this piece of content for the last six years and this is you know here to here it is right what if what if what what if artist can put like just like little pieces of work that are like unfinished and create almost like a sound cloud type website or at and and it's called yeah would i call it watercolors i don't know why i called the watercolors but i the idea so for the unfinished would it be like a dr where it's like a shot it's like it's like yeah ten seconds of the song it's not the whole thing roll it's a snippet that you like yeah it could be whatever whatever the artist decides so if the artist decides they wanna do a like ten second thing great this is like here check this r but i just think that there's a whole dimension of music that we're not exploring and i also think that it's just kind of like i wanna see more apps and i wanna see more websites where it's fine to put on finished work i think that's a part of the creative process yeah and i think that it's a good message that we should be spreading yeah and i i think stories is an awesome format for unfinished things like just like stories got people to share little raw moments of their life because they're like like it gets it's gone after twenty four hours i feel like if you can make it a ep than more peep the question really is why don't people share more unfinished work and then you wouldn't work backwards from that like well but here's my objection here's my hesitation here's what i'm worried about and then you could figure out product design that will solve those problems well yeah i think like to talk to to speak to that i think you know artists and i include myself as an artist because i'm a product designer is like we don't we we like to show our best work right so like putting unfinished work is in quote unquote our best work so i think like a part of this is like you know that's a big challenge with this one but i think like educating the artist around like it's okay like you it's cool like and in fact like if you're like an artist hundreds of thousands of followers or even like like if you just have like a thousand really engaged people like they wanna interact like i i i i know this one artist is two thousand followers but like he posts on stories like little unfinished things and i'm like post more of this right yeah i'm with you we i used to call it working in public and then somebody sent me this link i think jessica livingston or somebody who was calling it working with the garage door open i don't don't know who who i was reading but they were saying like imagine your startup you know you're starting in the garage but what if you have the garage world open and like what are the sort of ser benefits you could have of putting your work out there in public mh another you want one we want a couple more yes yes like get we can literally do four hours this is just the concept so like i just wrote you know what are cool ideas that take something free and then you charge for them like and then they put ig water like water bottles if you think of water bottles like no one was charging for water until some someone was like hey wouldn't to be cool if like you can transport this water and like we would sell it and then we can have like a luxury brand like you can have e and it's gonna be from france and then there's this whole new category like new categories the founder of gum tweeted the other day he was just like you wanna make ten dollars an hour do you see that tweet no i you wanna make you wanna make like ten dollars an hour like go work for some someone you wanna make a hundred dollars an hour like charge companies or something like that i'm butchering it here but if you wanna make a thousand like a thousand dollars an hour the the point is it was like you only make ten thousand dollars an hour create create a new category and be like the leader of the new category and i think like i'm always interested in like new categories like virtual you know barber shop new category like yeah it may not work but it might work and if it works it's gonna work big uber new category like it's really just like a new on demand like using technology to bring a car to you like new category like boom yeah for sure so what what's something that's free that could be could be charged for so for example water is a good example you know when you first said that my brain was like oh air but actually air is also charged for air purifier diffuse things like that humidifier there's pe there's ways that people have found a way to essentially charge for air in a way they're process processing it but they're doing it what else is free that could be charged for so content is or or put another way like what are the things that we take for granted as human beings that we can charge for and that opens up like a whole other set of products and services and so hard because those are blind spots right you have to actually think hard because they are just embedded in the world you you don't even realize that they're sticking out because they're you you take them for granted by definition absolutely and that's why like i had i was before we were chatting i actually someone called me and and i was like greg where do you where do you see like the consumer internet going and i was like it's the this stuff comes out of nowhere the stuff literally comes out of nowhere there's like you can look back in hindsight and be like oh yeah like we can connect the dots for these reasons but i think like the dots are actually pretty messy to connect if we actually look at it and i think like the best actually consumer businesses are kind of like somewhat random there's somewhat random it's based on like an entrepreneur and just like being obsessed with like like i i ben rubin for example the founder of house party he's an architect he thinks of you know how his part yours is these rooms sort of physical space you know digital representations of these physical spaces the guy like spent years being you know studying to be an architect and ob accessing his like entire teenage years about like presence right and what that means so like it's not because then in like twenty sixteen or whatever twenty fifteen like the live video is like important why you know it was like no the guy's literally been like thinking about it forever and he's like the expert in the world on it have you ever seen there's this video of evan speaking from snapchat he's in a kitchen and he's explaining snapchat on like you know like a note just a note notepad of paper and he's got like you know he flips it three times and it's like those are his slides essentially have you seen this video i have it's actually everyone to watch that everybody should watch this video because it's he's taking when you go through that it's he like i've never met him but he's such a like you just realize that he's amazing because he's able to just still a really quote unquote complicated sort of like he just makes it so simple and i i think the beauty of it is like everyone on his team could look at and like oh yeah then they they repeat its to other people yeah what snapchat oh it's so hard to use no actually it's so simple right exactly yeah the video the video was amazing even like i just remember one detail in it on the product design he's like yeah so he he explains first you know why why you know it opens up to the camera you could take a photo and it's meant to be he's like basically photos today are thought of his memories you take a photo and you're stash it away for essentially your your your keeps he's like but we use photos for communication we just think if you send somebody to a photo a great way to communicate you know what you're doing how you're feeling if you've taken photo of your face it's you know it's better than typing in anyway so he's like first snapchat is just using photos and videos for communication not for memories it's like boom insight one insight too he's like and then we created this thing called stories and he's like for stories you know what we wanted to do is he's like every social network is reverse chronological so you open up your feed and you see sort of the latest thing first he's like but that's not how our brains are really wired you know we communicate through story and that's what we remember and so you know when you click on a snapchat story it starts from beginning then it goes middle and end and it sounds like obviously duh but that was counterintuitive twitter was reverse chronological instagram was reverse chronological facebook was reverse chronological your email was reverse cri and so that was the you know when stories he's like when you we do it beginning middle end you can you know your put when somebody clicks your thing they're gonna experience it the way you are wanting to tell that story and i was like oh okay guys a genius like that's what that is it's taking complicated things making them simple or taking things that seem simple on the surface in show and showing how much is actually below the surface how much thought went into crafting that simple experience yeah i think what i like about that is like he starts with the key insight oh it's a you know pictures worth a thousand words is one way of looking at it so yeah communicating through photos is a richer way of communicating through then through text or calling somebody right and so yeah great and people do do this and that's sort of like the immediate haters is well i can just i can go to imessage i can upload a photo and then i can hit send and i can send that to you and then so so the first inside is people use photos for memories they should use it for the you know it would it's a really effective way to communicate that's the insight and then he changed the how which was like well what if we reduce the friction to zero so like yeah you could open up imessage click your friend's name click the camera button click the gallery button find the photo then hit send and then they get it and like then they view it or you open up our app the camera's already open you push you know you take the photo then he sent it to as many friends as you want one to many and like boom or was done and so they changed to how lower the friction of getting people to do what they already wanted to do right so i think it starts with the it starts with the key insight next it goes to like what is who who what is the community that has a burning need for this like instead of like a a a lot you know a mistake a lot of people make is they create software and then they find the community versus like finding the community and then building the software right so like you know with this particular key insight the way it relates to the community i mean snapchat started off in high schools in los angeles at like prep prep prep prep you know fifty thousand dollar a year high schools and these people were sending you know their kids they're sending like naked pictures or sending pictures of drugs or sending things that their parents don't want them to see or just like making are just basically things that their parents don't wanna see so actually obviously they should change one the unique insight wasn't just that the user for communication it's that when photos stick around forever people you know it's so hesitant to share it sucks and so there's a whole bunch of things we wanna share that we don't want to stick around forever and so that reality was the was sort of the key mechanic so second second piece burning you know what is the burning need for the community and then third i think is like okay how like what is the okay now you you wanna build software now explain to me how that ladders up to one and two and why this is the most beautiful and the fastest and you know and then if you have those three like forget decks forget like business plans like just show me one two and three and if you show me one two and three two and three like the market for you know when people looked at uber and them initially people were like on demand black cars san francisco come on right small market what are you talking about i know i know people have don't who did that and it's like yeah like but sometimes small markets you can always pick up really big markets sometimes those small markets actually expand to be new categories in really big markets right so i think you gotta play the field i think you gotta also you gotta look at small if you gotta look at medium and and look at large and i don't think that if the market is small you should be like i can't do this right and i guess if we're being honest with snapchat they didn't realize the high school was the community that they that would need this the most because i think what ended up happening was they had it they built it while they're in school summer hit usage was pretty flat they were thinking like oh college kids will wanna do this which ended up being true college kids did wanna use it to send photos from parties and whatnot photos you don't wanna stick around forever and then somebody you know introduced it to their niece or something that something like that and basically in not in the school i think they were using it am am i right on ipads to send sort of in classroom ipads to send you know messages to each other across classrooms or whatever and the teachers couldn't catch it basically because the message destroyed burn after reading essentially is that and do i have history correctly yeah that's it that's it then with uber same thing where i think they also probably thought it was a small market because neither garrett nor travis ran the company initially right they hired a guy hey you know guy off twitter wants to run this thing sure coming over and he became a billionaire you know but like i think if they knew what uber becomes they probably run it from day one themselves i think they sort of observed over time holy shit there's a lot of poll here and then this could go even further and so you know it progressively stacked up from there i agree and i think like for for the people listening i think it's important to like when you're thinking about what do you wanna spend your time doing think about like what have you spent your time doing like what would have you spend your life doing and why why do you have like this unique advantage or these you know what are some key insights that you can have about the world that that you could so what what's the answer for you for i mean i have a lot i've had you know i think every person has had unique insights like for example like or unique backgrounds like my my family used to own like store you know stores in quebec for i don't know a hundred years and i grew and because of that like every saturday my mom would drop me off at the mall where my dad store was and i spent a lot of time in a mall frankly because that's my mom was there my dad was there and my dad was working so i kinda like walked around i got to know them all really well and i've learned i have a unique perspective on the world in terms of like commerce in terms of like what is the mall even represent as like a meeting point for people to like you know young people and old people and why are they there and like what what are the types of restaurants there why is there a restaurant why is the food court here like why are things you know how are things merchandise you know i think one of the big reasons i became a product designer was because i saw that you know if you put like a product by like i remember like yeah basically like if you put products like near you know the lineup up like people will buy them and i was like wow like the ui ux you know the interface user experience of the physical world is a real thing and that just led me to digital right yeah for for sure so i i like that basically there's one one school of thought i think this is the paul graham school of thought i this is where i encrypt this idea from but he he basically says if you wanna invent the future just live in the future and then invent what's missing and it's not sort of this crazy thing it's like back to this there's some quote it's like if you wanna paint the perfect painting become perfect and then just paint but the idea is like if you already do something in your lifestyle that is unusual that is sort of forward thinking in some way maybe you're somebody who doesn't own your house you you rent and you rent your car and you rent everything then the sharing economy is quite obvious to you right if you go and do couch surfing and you think that's normal airbnb is normal is a normal idea for you even though it's abnormal to others but to you you're like no i live in this future where this is true right i push button and my groceries appear not everybody does that today but i live in that future where that that exists and i'm going to sort of enable that for more people right and so one way of looking at is what what are things that are normal to you it's normal to me to record something and have hundreds of thousands of people i've never met listen to me in their ear balls every morning while they commute to work and they feel like they know me that's a normal thing for me but not for most but like maybe there's something that i could sort of make that make that make my normal normal for others so that's one one way of thing about it and what you said is of the the the counter to that or the like complement to that which is you know don't try to get interested in sort of new things to try to create a company look at what you're already interested in the life you've already lived and there's embedded insights and domain expertise and nuance that you understand because you live that way and then think how do i how do i start something that leverages those insights and that experience that i've already had yeah and and and be be mindful of the fact like oh hey like why why am i so why do i love this p like why do i love spending time at them all or like why do i love looking at like how things are merchandise and stuff like that i'm being like wow like i i have an eye for that and let your imagination go wild and be like oh you know it would be cool if you could do this you know like what if you could do that and then then that's when you start like oh yeah wouldn't to be cool if you can like create that right something and that's when a business is created to fill that void and what what are some of the most interesting either products or startups ups you've seen invested in your noticed existing things what are some of the most interesting things that have caught your eye lately so i'm trying like pull up my phone there's an app have you i was playing with it today it's called it's me do you know it's me no this an app yes okay i think i had it before but i i i forgot what it is yeah so it started it recently started to kind of take off but the way it works is you log in with snapchat it pulls your bim mod and you say your age if you wanna meet with like girls or guys or both and it chat style like you press a button it connects you to someone it so it says a bit about the like where they're from who they are and you see your the avatar talk so you like you're like you're you're talking but you see itself as an avatar yep and i think what i find you know like what is the key insight there is that like man like being you know for a lot of people like being in a physical form be it even on like a zoom or a facetime or you know literally physical is tough for people yeah and having that like wall is nice as like an ice breaker to eventually get you to meet in person etcetera i like that let me connect that to the last idea so when i first started working in this kinda twitch ecosystem the live from me ecosystem i saw this get one guy his name's manny i think his his handles like the one man or something like that and manny it streams on twitch but he's is a dog he's not actually a dog he's a guy but his avatar is a dog and so he's one of the few twitch people who their little webcam area is not themselves it's a it's a dog that he uses this you know obscure app or it got i think it might have got bought by now is called face rig at the time so face rig was this obscure app you have to have a windows machine go on steam download face rig pay twenty bucks for face rig then you get the dog and the dog will mimic your head movements and your mouth movements while you're streaming and so for him he was like oh yeah this is way more comfortable for me than putting my own real face out there as the like kind of the show and and so i saw that and then i tried it and i was like wow that really does make me feel way less anxious about kinda like performing if i if i can just have this little you know goofy looking dog as me instead of me and so that's another one where it's like okay it took today it took a lot of extra work you to go find this app download it pay money blah blah blah blah set it up on a pc but once you've experienced the magic at the end of that you're like okay my magic is here now can i make this way less friction i've i've lived in the future i've i saw with life as like and now i'm gonna bring that back to the present and make it accessible to more people and it sounds like these guys were or guys and gals were building this app might have done that they might have made it way simpler for somebody to have that same experience yeah absolutely and it and it's simple it's fast and magical and i think what i'd like about it and i like about your story actually is that like that dude was like he was unique and he was like yeah i'm gonna do this i don't care what people think like this is what i'm gonna do and he like pushed the envelope and did something weird and it turns out like weird things are actually like head turner right and like head turner are actually create word and word mouth actually creates audience and creates buzz and creates all these things so like same with snapchat right like that at and it's obvious now that like a message would disappear a photo would disappear a video would disappear but at the time like no one that didn't exist it's a new concept so like people like you know listeners is like tap into that like uniqueness about yourself and don't be afraid to do it because who knows you might be on the verge of a snapchat or something like that and people will doubt it there's a reason my snapchat handle is still sv test because i was like this happened going nowhere like i have to worry about it making a real handle here i'll just do this test account because i just wanna try this silly fad and then you know this will be gone in a month and of course a famous last words yeah absolutely let me give you let me give you an idea that's sorta like that okay so my friend damien he's the founder of a company called due have you ever heard this i haven't it's like a british based company due deal as in due diligence so basically they they surface private company information in a way that's i think the eu has different laws of what you need to disclose so he can provide like you know revenue information employee information so you can get a lot more information about companies there so he built this platform it's like fintech guy doing fintech things it's a super at the super valuable company i think it might be a billion dollar company and say anyways he did that and so the other day i see him on facebook and he post like hey you know you know i you know i've left and i was thinking about my next thing so i come up with this new thing called patel and i was like shit what's patel is this like some mi bank is this you know what is this new fintech product he's like is not fintech it's a remote sleep school for parents and basically he's like i met this woman and what she does is she teaches parents put their baby to sleep and you know so they get a good night's sleep and the parents aren't up all night feeding every two hours and whatnot and she doesn't use what's called the cry out method which is the the normal way you do this but it's like really hard on the parents to to fight through and and let their kid cry out she's like she doesn't use the cry out method and she's you know she's like the dog whisperer it's amazing i watched her work her magic on two hundred families and i thought okay i'm gonna help this woman scale her her you know magic to you know as many families as i can and so he created this remote sleep school it's basically cost a thousand bucks but you're gonna teach your kid's gonna get a good sleeping program so it's like you know what's that worth to you and like i don't i don't know if know this i a kid eight months ago so now i'm in that position and so i was like oh dude i'll be able to test this now because you know i'm going on three hours of sleep right now and damn i would love if i could you know do this and so i think that there's these fringe sort of weird things where it's like would people really pay a thousand dollars for this woman to zoom call you and and teach you how to put your kid to sleep like you know but i think that that's one of these products that is just weird enough solves a real problem and like adds a lot of real value and it's is charging for something that normally this advice is just like a free mommy blog telling you hey try this and instead it's like no here's a super high end version of that but we're gonna guarantee the result in a in a better way than a average blog would do do you think of that idea i think it's i i actually really like it i think like i'm a big believer in you know come for the tool stay for the network but like the way i look at it is like come for the tool stay for the vertical network where the vertical here would be parents yes like the fact that he's capturing such a high like you're just in the your beginning stages my friend and like you're you're about to buy a whole lot of products and services for your child and maybe even more children if you have so like the fact that like here's the thing here's one thing i'll tell you if if they help you with this problem you're definitely gonna be wow that was amazing trust that one of them will be like one thousand points you know right so that's what it is it's like when you're looking at like building a vertical something in a vertical it's all about like what is the trust quotient you can have with the vertical and i i like that this particular of their task will give you a lot of a lot you know a lot of cr for this business and yeah man i think like that's the other thing is like it could i could see it being like a million dollar year business but i can also somehow see it being a billion dollar right business and so it's worth the shot yeah and that you know the the math i think works where he has both options where it's like you know thousand people paying a thousand bucks a month or sorry a thousand bucks for the program i that's a million bucks and can you find a thousand parents to do this i'm very confident just through facebook so i think he could bootstrap to a million dollars in revenue very quickly with sort of like thirty forty percent margins on that and to and just pocket that so i think very low tech easy to start bootstrap into the single digit millions let's call it between one and nine million or what you said which is like cool if you thinks about this bigger like how do i now that i have trust with these parents and i've solved one problem for them the problem they had during their first seven months of of their baby how do i help them with their next phase in the next phase in the next phase and you know could go good go bigger from there so i like i like having those options on the table where it starts with sort of those humble beginnings and it might just be a great cash flow business or goes for the sort of home run yeah man tell me to keep going i will well i don't think he need i don't think he use my my encouragement to keep going that's the best entrepreneurs entrepreneurial don't need any advice or encouragement it's true i've remember i invested in this invested in lambda school and afterwards was talking to my friend we we did it together and i was like here's three reasons you know here's what i want out of this investment so i know if this will make us money or not but you know i wanna learn about like the this idea of this trade schooling for education i wanna hang out with the founder you know monthly and be helping solve problems i think he'll be really interesting and you know lastly you know i hope we we get a return on this and he replied he was like oh all i care about is the return don't give shit about the rest but hey they each of their own and on my end i was like and ironically the return is gonna be there but for the first two like austin doesn't need my help doesn't ask for my help the you know if i text him something i'm actually just taking up his time is and it reminds me of kinda what an investor told me which is the best companies don't need us that's the reality of the value add services is that the best companies rarely need your help and the worst companies you can't save anyways and so you know it's there's some in the middle where you can help influence their trajectory but this idea of investors really helping out or encouraging entrepreneurs or whatever else is sort of over overblown marketing i i totally agreed i think i actually last week there's a founder he's just like literally he crashes it like for years he's done ten percent year over year growth and sorry month over month growth and i responded to his investor update keep it up and then he just responds right away he's like as if i wasn't gonna keep it up stop that got are game like things bro yeah yeah exactly like that's amazing i just took a picture of myself smiling and sent it back then that's so good oh that's great alright we should wrap up kinda wait over time but yeah anything else we do one last spin of the one last a idea will let's do let's get one more than we're out here we'll do it first throw it notes boom okay so this one is a quarantine ish idea but it could last beyond quarantine it's an idea that basically i called the chef's table and it's this idea that like i don't know if you saw car then the the restaurant new york city is not doing they're just doing one meal per night and then it sells out so it's kind of like a drop yep which builds a lot of buzz and demand and it sells out every night this idea is that like it's it's it's a drop for a restaurant but you have a live stream with the chef telling you about like if it comes with wine or or the meal it's like this is how i did it and it's more of an experience okay last name is after you order or it's before before you order so everyone the way it would work is you would you would order it everyone which is everyone would get the meal at the same time i don't care if you wanna add seven thirty you're getting me essex this is this is an idea yeah it's an idea not enough time to talk about how we were do right get the i'm roughly around this you know same amount of time and then chef comes and he's like listen like i you know pick these these you know carrots myself in hudson valley and he he's explaining and i think like that's what i miss most about sort of restaurants i guess is like the the stories behind right and and this the experience of behind it which you don't really get if you're just like frying up some eggs in the morning for sure okay so here's a twist on this idea you're high end restaurant your business is gone right now like you're a michelin star restaurant what do you what are you doing you can't do anything and so here's your your pivot you go live on instagram before the drop so you go live before and you're showing the prep it's you know you're in the chef's kitchen they're talking about it they're drinking wine they're and you're seeing it being prepared and people i think like to see as the show chef's table has shown people like to watch high end food get made real skilled you know that that sort of thing as long as you have a personality with it and and then basically by the end of the the twenty minutes the the the meal is ready for the drop the drop goes live and it's you know it uses the new facebook shopping that came out yesterday you'll push the button and it orders it basically and this is like a hundred dollar meal and it's you know it's the stuff you don't find on post meats or gru hub or whatever which are all kinda like the bottom of the barrel so you come in at the very top end of those and it's like the delivery experience is gonna be you know the packaging is gonna be amazing and whatnot but you're gonna get what you just saw on the ig live and so you do these like hundred or a hundred fifty dollar drops you know on for high end stuff through the through the delivery network but you go live before to build up that that anticipation with q but for high end cooking i i like it i think we kinda merge the ideas that's why it's nice to have c cofounder okay good i'll incorporate it and we'll we'll get this off the ground so sweet alright greg where should people find you if they like your your style they wanna hear more of you if you wanna hear more me check me out on twitter my name is zach greg ge g r e g i s e n b e r g check and just holler her cool we'll put it in the show notes too alright alright greg gotta a run but this been good good catching up yeah you too take care alright man see you bye