#88 with Greg Isenberg (part 2) - Why Plugins Are Big Business

welcome back this is part two of our brainstorm session with greg is we're gonna continue on we talk about a bunch of different topics it's pretty fun greg's is a good guy hope you guys like it so here we go part two let's do it i basically sold a box of air on ebay for like three to seven bucks and it would make money on shipping but i would say like hey you're buying a box of air and people would think it would funny it was funny and they're buying it for somebody else's as a gag or what yeah i think it was mostly a is a gifting thing and then i included for it i got i got some p yeah a little bit was it alright i'll tell you guys something one interesting thing that i'm paying attention to greg are you a car guy i like cars okay there's this guy named doug tomorrow do you guys know who doug tomorrow is he's this really nerdy just like a horribly nerdy guy and he reviews cars and he's really funny he's cool and and he's well loved and he's got two or three million subscribers on youtube and he'll review all types of cars and he's funny and he's like cute and end and he just launched his own car auction it's pretty amazing that he did this because he's a youtuber and you think well like he's probably not that good at doing i mean you know he's he's a youtuber i don't expect him to build a a content thing but two thousand five i accidentally pulled up it's called cars and bids dot com he launched this site it looks amazing and he's already populated the site with hundreds of like fancy cars for sale so the whole point is that it's cars that are vintage or cars that enthusiasts love so like a two thousand thirteen being w n five it's not like a particularly expensive car but people who love being w love this model of car it's amazing that this guy built this and i think that what's interesting to me is that a lot of people i don't know if he's partnered with someone i think that i bet you that's what happened but a lot of people partner with youtubers kinda like what they did with ips and the kardashian lady and this is just the perfect execution of this it just launched two weeks ago i think this is gonna be a huge thing and these car companies are quite interesting these are places this is brilliant i think if you if we take if if you marry the un undo of reddit with the partnerships of influencers yes you're good right just there you go you get the credibility from the influencers put them in put them on the cap table whatever right because look for any for any like a lifestyle trend that you find on reddit like the body weight based fitness thing that sam talking about or vegans or whatever there's gonna be lifestyle influencers that live that same lifestyle that have gotten famous forward on instagram on youtube whoever and if you marry those two together you use reddit as a source for okay which lifestyles are trending okay this the fire movement is trending in the personal finance community cool then i need to go find people who live that lifestyle partner with them for distribution for my product and in this case the influencer did it themselves but more and more people are sort of doing it on a equity basis instead of you know pay for post type of thing which i think is you know has its trade offs as it's pros and cons it's pretty interesting like another what what i would do is i'm i'm quite fascinated with the job board space still don't think anyone has completely nailed the job board space but you could definitely do it where you partner with people and you talk about cool companies because the pay per lead for jobs is quite quite high so did you guys see what what andrew wilkinson another friend of the pod who's coming on i think next week did you see what he posted yesterday on twitter i think this is pretty smart he posted about this this gmail idea sam did you see it i did i did it was a it's a plug in for gmail that i don't know what it does i you basically he took the he replicated the two features that matter in hey and hey dot com like hey you could screen you know new recipients first before they show up in your inbox and also it'll just hide all your newsletter craft in one one spot like better than the core thing i i think that was that was the the crux of his idea but it's like hey do you want those cool features hey without having to like go get this new email service and like go learn this new thing because i was making an add on for gmail and i was like this is why this guy is smart that was like such a simple beautiful idea and i really hope he makes this and not just tweeting about it but i know how he rolls he tweets to like publicly commit to doing something and so i think he's actually gonna get this bill because he definitely got a good response from it but i thought it was a great idea what do you think of that great i love it he got two point four thousand likes and was i right about the summary of what it is yeah so it's basically and i love the way he he actually like communicates it which is also just seems like a magical part of how he operates which is read it out alright i'm working on a fun little gmail plugin inside project dot dot dot new line it's an email firewall colon number one filters out newsletter slash noisy crap emails sign up for you know greg that like beautiful like layman's terms number two screens first time sender similar to hey number three delivers emails a few times a day on a set schedule versus twenty four seven and brackets like the nd who wants the beta test seven hundred and eighty two responses right yeah this is like you know we gotta invest in this little gmail plugin that like that that's how that's how good this this this is like a real idea because it's a if you did these three things productivity would rise significantly in in email which is something that everybody's using and so i think a he's the right type of guy to kinda spear something like this he communicated it well and it's just a simple it's a simple good idea greg do you who else do you know that has do you know any big gmail plugin in or google chrome plugin in businesses i do so i invested in a company called vid q sean you you know rob right dude the guy is a legend and rushing it can you type numbers he's a town the basically he's a tank we gotta say that physically he's a tank he's like the most lovable teddy bear x football player of all time he's in san francisco he raises money from like all the right people he build a start basically like who sweet but for youtubers this isn't in like twenty twelve ish gets you know the top ten biggest video publishers on the platform aol yahoo all these you know big companies realizes that there's no although it like looks cool to work with big companies you can actually make more money if you just work with like little to medium sized video creators ends up doing at this time this is like twenty fourteen maybe like the the the equivalent of nuclear bomb which is number one he like gets rid of most of his team and moves to santa cruz california and becomes like surf every day like four to five hours a day so numb at you know now remote is obviously more of a thing but like back then like no you know and then decides to completely pivot the business and and because he like fundamentally believe like hey like i'm gonna like forget this website i'm gonna con i'm gonna like change this to a chrome extension like imagine writing that email to your like to like mark cuban one of his investors and like how saw did they raise couple million bucks okay this so what happened he moves to santa cruz converts it to a plug in it becomes like i think the most widely used plug in for for video creators he charges for it can't share the numbers but i will say the business is x exploding team size is is is quite big as well big i had to pull up the investor update but somewhere are between you know forty five people i'd i'd say somewhere in that range forty five people full time and like he was just grinding on it like this last time i saw him i was a few years ago when we were all hanging out and it wasn't like clear that this was gonna be this runaway thing but it was clear that this guy never gonna fucking quit like he was like look i'm doing this and it was just wasn't like i woulda quit literally nine times during the process that he just kept going and that's what i admire about this guy i admire that admire are also that he he didn't really listen to anyone like you know i think there's just like a lot of founders like listen to podcast like this and they're like oh i'm gonna do like what they did and and it's oftentimes actually the founders that don't even listen to anyone and who just like take selected tidbits based on their life experience right and like really understand like rob knows video more than in video creators better than anyone in the industry and was just like i he's like he he had a point of view like having a point of view matters like he's like my point of view is that like video creators don't wanna log in to this like website you know and like have another website and like who cares if it's like on built on top of google chrome like who cares as long as i'm like like swiping nine ninety nine a month for thousands of creators the health cares well that's that's a good one who else do you know or what else do you know not i mean in the chrome extension space none is intimately is rob i've have a friend doing something cool my friend stewart is building this thing called i think it's called lust dot ai greg you seen this one no so i don't know how much i'll i'll have to ask him if i can even talk about this but it's pretty cool i think he's out publicly public with it now but basically he had built this company called sla and sla was like crushing it on seo for like when you would search for a product let's say you want a find a pair of headphones he was kinda doing the wire cutter thing but programmatic and or our crowds sourced actually so you would search for headphones and you would get a result was is like this is the best affordable pick this is the medium range pick and this is the high end i want the best thing for the bet you know at a at a high i don't i'm not asking price sensitive pick and and so he was doing that and sla was doing well but he was like he similarly threw the whole thing away pivoted to a chrome extension that works on top of several sites like i use it on top of amazon for example and it'll just say like you know i'm looking for a tv it'll be like by the way here's the best tv worth buying and here's where you can find it at the best price across other other sites so it's kind of honey es but it's really about the the recommendation along with understanding oh the price has dropped over here you should actually get it over here it's like kayak or something where they like aggregate new york times wire cutter and a whole bunch of stuff to get the reviews yeah i don't use kayak but so but it's pretty good and that's it's a cool in the in the thirty seconds that you started explaining this i like added it and i'm on amazon and i'm actually looking for a tv and when it's giving me recommendations so that's why like that's why these rock because how lightweight they are rock keys rock i like it because it's e it's super easy to install it's always present like that's it now i'm an active user right right and you're not gonna churn i'm not gonna churn i mean and number three like i'm a big you know from a thesis perspective a big believer in curation i think like amazon's for for you know great example amazon's is great because it you can get anything but people want curation you know instagram is great for people in creation there's just like demand towards curation and it's a huge opportunity and i like the gmail plug idea like because everybody uses email you you only need to grab such a small fraction of this sort of total base and same thing with like shopping amazon right like so for lester to work they only need such a small number of people who are regularly shopping and i've seen his charts and it's growing really well like i think i think that these i i personally gravitate towards either super niche and you can own that scene or universal product and you can go for the people who care about let's say quality more than the average more than the ninety eight percent of the other people who use that thing those are like the you you wanna kinda polar in one end or the other and not get stuck in the middle one of the greatest companies ever or that i know of personally is grammar if if you're living underneath the rock grammar is a plug that helps you write better it just you people just missed probably just dismiss the business early on saying this is just word or what what's that called word check spell check spell check i mean this is just spell check and it's not it helps you have better grammar and that it kinda just his spell check like is like right like and that's actually okay like it was just spell check but for the internet because spell check was limited to like word documents and you know text messaging but you didn't get spell check in every email you were sending or wherever right like it it didn't even have to be more i mean it became more as it went but like but not much actually just felt it was fucking great it was that was a great thesis right there and i i totally dismissed it yeah i just dismiss it as well and then the founder spoken hustle kinda and he's like yeah we raised a hundred million dollars at a billion dollar valuation and i was like that's crazy and he goes yeah it's pretty awesome all the money went to us because we we make so much so they must make over a hundred million dollars in revenue yeah i think they're like stupidly profitable yeah it's a fucking play on the other hand like as a consumer chrome extensions are a fucking crazy thing to install because they get like read permissions on every website you visit which is just insane that's like handing over the keys to every account your bank account and everything you ever said to anybody so i'm very like due with chrome extension installation most people it appears you know i would say most people don't even know what a chrome extension is but then a lot of people install them when it seems like a huge privacy issue and that's chrome chrome doesn't use one password hate it i usually no company i also hate it but yeah i use it explain explain i wanna hear why just never works yes same use it it's quite it's quite complicated for me like there's the chrome extension there's the app i have on my desktop and then at some point like one of those like just stops like like it'll stop auto filling i'm like fuck and now i always have to do this two step process or i'll get a new computer and i'm like it's like what's your seed i'm like man i don't know i did this like four years ago i need to remember this thing like i i don't know it that's just really hard and then the other thing is like anything that's social or with teams you have to then and sort of get to the team thing and now i get me to get everybody else to adopt one pass and they're usually less tech savvy than me and i'm not even that tech savvy so it ends up being this like failure of like getting other people to adopt it like i wish there was a simpler i wish it always it it always runs into google's password thing right like they hit they hit each other somehow yeah i can't stand it why are you an investor sorry no i listen one password to me is the necessary evil to to to do stuff on the internet like i think that like people who don't have password managers like good luck right you know i think it's worth it i think i think you know i have it as an extension i was just looking at as and my extension i'm like looking at loom i'm looking at one password i actually think that there's an opportunity it you know it's create a better one password but it's probably a difficult problem and i hate difficult problem sometimes i don't is a difficult problem i think you could do the same thing and just brand it better and write better copy and make it more family friendly be like this is called family password and family password helps your family be safe and it's not one password which feels to me like an engineers product built for engineers and all my engineers like at my company oh like yeah it's great and they can't believe i'm not using it i'm like i can't believe you used this fucking thing it's so like difficult to use and like i don't know there's just layers of of annoy with it oh would you you mentioned a really you know smart idea which is basically like how do you take products and just brand them for other audiences right like the the the christian ming effect right it's like right you know match that com basically created this technology if you can call a technology and i guess this technology created some technology some you know basically basic social network being technology and then focused on a bunch of different verticals but it's the same under the only thing that's different is marketing so the question is what are other opportunities where you can just take a thing and to brand it for other verticals do you guys wanna this is a a slight deviation but you guys wanna see the numbers for so i i own a google plugin in yeah yeah see the numbers for it it's twice watch this okay i'm pulling up to skirt right now so the the hustle has a plug in can do you see my screen yeah okay it's thrilling for the audio listeners okay guys well i'm gonna try and tell them okay so if you go to snippets by the hustle it's a plugin that's it says it has five thousand users and all it is is you open your plugin in you open your your desktop a new and a article comes up like a new headline and if you click every new tab every new tab the the default like blank page has a new article yeah and you could hit refresh up here and that will refresh it and give you a new article it's so super simple there's not complicated at all i made it or we made it in two thousand and fifteen i'll check out this check out this we made it one time and we sent one email about it and i never touched it ever again it has check this out okay so i'm i'm going i'm on google analytics i'm going it back to two thousand and fifteen let's see how many page views it's probably gotten twenty million page views so thirty forty million page views it's gotten and it's only had a lifetime of twenty eight thousand users but i promoted it one time literally one time and look at the retention that's crazy right so like this was in what year was this oh i i changed the google analytics but this was i believe was in stealth sixteen but like they suck they stick and and what's interesting is that per session so each time someone opens a new tab on average they click refresh four times that's cool so you're basically hijacking their their attention workflow of what they're gonna do yeah i to go to you know my email oh wait hold on there used to be this chrome extension called momentum that i thought was awesome it was really for so i can simple you would open a new tab and it would just have a beautiful photo and it would say good afternoon sean or whatever time of the day it was and there the lighting would kinda change depending on what time of day it was and would say you know what's your focus for today and i could just type it in and then from from that moment on like would just always say like good evening sean your focus on the day is this and i love that thing and this was so viral i just noticed every time i open my laptop and i'd be doing something somebody like the person over my shoulder would always pause me and be like what's that what's that thing and so like this could be paired with the reddit thing from earlier where you could actually pair a delivery mechanism which is this chrome extension for new tabs with a market segment that's really avid that you found on on a subreddit there's a product idea here i really wanna fund i tried telling my friend jake to do to build this thing but he wasn't super interested just because it's very like front end heavy he's a back end engineer but if there's a front end engineer if there's an engineer who loves good design this is the product i wanna i would invest in to to get built so i don't know if you guys ever seen i think i talked about this one but i i know if ever seen stripe home that you guys ever seen this product so stripe basically did something that's actually several companies do which is they build an internal sort of like homepage for their company and stripe home it's it's un released product i don't know why looks amazing they clearly put like thousands of hours of dev cycles and design cycles into this thing you basically it'll show like hey here's the five new employees we hired here's some company announcements here's like you know some funny quote or whatever and it says there's a really good home homepage agents it's if you start opening a new tab i think that's what you see if you have a stripe image laptop for your company and so i think every company would want this when you give your employee a laptop i think you would wanna have like a branded new tab homepage and so it would be home for whatever your company is and sam i know you kinda had something like this out of rip or something yeah well that's what was about to say the the this is i agree everyone wants this but you'd had to you'd have to attach it to someone's payroll or their hr software i don't think i don't think you do i don't i don't need you do because i think what you do is you just make it where any it's like bottoms up any engineer at the company can like enable this for their company you don't have to really hook into who are the new hires and all that good stuff like there's just some basic information that you can that you that you can show without hooking in and then you can get better like like slack as you integrate more sources of data and so like amazon has a thing called phone tool that does this where you can go to phone tool and it hooked into the data system so you can go look up any employee you can see who they report to you could see where they are in the org chart you can see their level pull and i know that clear bit made this for their company and so they have a a clear bit homepage that they worked on it you know developing so anytime some anytime you see several companies building the same in house system for themselves that's something that you could export out and can be given to any company out of the box as easy to use thing and this is something that literally you just win on design if you go look at when tri home talks about it on twitter there's like hundreds and hundreds of replies on the tweet because people just think it's beautiful and they don't even need the functionality they just like the look of it just like the momentum tab people liked what my new tab look like and i think you could do the same for businesses and you could charge them for it so free idea free idea just tell me if you're doing it because so wanna invest i gotta check out guys i'll talk to you soon greg see you sean yeah so yeah later keep on keep it going craig i got two more things for you and then we could bounce cool first question for you do you think that there's the do you think that there's gonna be sort of a a backlash against tiktok or tiktok will just get banned for being sort of chinese spy wear and should somebody just be you know like trailer or somebody just be positioning themselves as the as a net waiting to catch to all these tiktok users if people revolt against tiktok which is sort of you know chinese company and it had there's been lots of reports it was a big reddit thread recently about how how much data it's pulling off of your phone and how it's basically spy where i think i and i think jason ka has tweeted about this too i think he sees a lot of opportunity you know i think if we look as like the past as a best predictor the future there's been so much anti facebook sentiment and people still use facebook products i think i i don't see a massive opportunity to like wait for for that to be honest i i would agree the only difference here is that i think it might be government base this time like india just banned tiktok in india and tiktok fucking huge in india so somebody's gonna get the benefit that i don't know who it's gonna be but like it i think if the government comes out and does it that's different than like people all sort of there's no way they're all gonna coordinate and decide to care on a given day move networks that that i don't think happens yeah okay two other random ideas i saw there's a company called arr i don't know how you say it arr but this kind of interesting it's called the the website is let's find it it's like arr text messaging courses basically these guys are letting you build a course like teachable just through text message delivery so it's arr dot c and so you can go on i could be like hey i'm gonna teach you how to start businesses like i might do this i might just make one of these just to try this platform out but i can be like hey i can help you i don't know keep business ideas i learn how to start a business and i have a little editor on my side i can create a text drip and people can receive these text messages you know on a daily basis like learning in little nuggets i thought it it's kind of an interesting idea interesting concept what do you think of this i can tell you how good of my idea this is this is like this is like a no brainer to like set up ten courses like you you know what i would do is start like almost like a a little bit of a management company for arr like find like you know you're the idea guy and dating time like data yeah data did like and just and just like okay we're i'm gonna help you like get this out there you do the editing you do the pay to ads on facebook and then it's new so it's interesting the idea around like oh through text it's kind of interesting it's not like another guy pressing a button and get this landing page hey let me tell you this course right easy yeah i think this is kinda i'm gonna try i'm gonna try it right i'm gonna make one actually i don't know how much effort is gonna be if the platform is easy to use i'm gonna try one and we'll we'll see we'll see what happens with this what's the most sort of interesting thing you've seen lately that's outside of the sort of reddit investigation you've been doing either something you've thought of or another product that you you really like right now top of mind there's a app called h h a g which is a app built on top of snap basically is that like the old year book like hack this is that what it stands for yes exactly so it's your book signatures you i think there's tons of opportunity on top of snap kit which is snaps developer platform and h is obviously taking advantage of that you tags if you don't know stands for have a great summer which is what people used to sign off with on your books exactly so you basically post a story like swipe up to sign my my year book and you can it's basically a high school social network and and the entry point is through your books what i love about it number one built on top of snap get tons of opportunity right there go look into that like especially like building they just announced many apps you can create like apps within snap conversations i think i see that being huge so i like that i like their design style like their design like if you you know i think there's so many apps out there that they all just look the same and it's just refreshing to see something new even that the website that you showed with the chrome extension the amazon one that or the product recommendation one like that like i looked at them i'm like yeah i i mean because it's like cool interesting okay yeah it's interesting looking so it's like design something that's interesting hanks does that and it just shot up in the charts and you know it and it's in cool to see so i really like that what else have i've been really liking stadium live is pretty cool i don't know if you've seen that i saw when it got funded it's like a sports fan thing but what's cool about it for it's like basically like again in this sort of like gen z world it's like basically espn for gen z you get assigned of i'm very interested like virtual avatars as an entry point to socialization as covid and this pandemic continues people are gonna be looking for new ways to just connect with one another and avatar is a really good one you gotta signed an avatar you join like a game basically e sports or sports and you know it might be like toronto maple police versus montreal canadians you see it it again connects with snapchat so you get it's your bit mod that you can like edit and you could just see other people there there's like polls and stuff to like keep you entertained and you kinda feel like you're in this like virtual environment so what i'd love about it is like number one virtual environment number two vertical network number three built on top of snap i like that you you know when you said avatars remind me of app i saw this weekend it's actually number one in the charts right now don't know if you've seen it's called trivia royale yeah oh yeah i love it so this was made by the guys who made quiz up i think so sky thor and somebody else they they have this new company called t time games and they made quiz up which was like you know the most popular quiz trivia app at that time kinda went through a rise in a big fall and then they kinda spun out there they're like we're doing it again and so the way this one works you download the app you make a little avatar which is like doesn't sound that great yet but they use face emoji which is cool so it's actually a pretty good high quality one but they they combined the trivia game of like hq or quiz up with battle royale from fortnite so it's start every game starts with a thousand people and you go head to head against somebody and you play you do five questions of trivia and at the end you win or they win and then it goes to like the pool cuts in half another there's five hundred players left than two fifty then one twenty five and just keeps going till the there's one person left standing as the winner winner of trivia royale and it's number one in the charts right now it's beautifully made app just really well done i don't know if it'll have you know the sort of stickiness that you would want but i don't know i like i like it sort of same guy's working on the problem from a different angle which it i always respect yeah i think i i love it beautiful games is always one of those things where you know as you know kind of like is it is it a hit or can they build it sort of as a platform right but i feel like these guys i mean they probably learned a lot from quiz up and they probably got a good shot at it so i'm pretty excited about it game struggle because games are both a hip business and a fad business and people got confuse those too and it's like so hit business hasn't in your game just out the gate could be a flop or hit but even if it's a hit it could then be a fad hit or it could be a long lasting league of legends type of hit which is super sticky and right you know you you really only get the value if you get the hit and it's not a fad or you just do a bunch of fat hits over and over and over again as a studio doing little quick hit and so that's the those are only two models that work in gaming unfortunately which is tough like you don't wanna be on that treadmill exactly right or you do if it's your first time and you got a bunch of energy and you're like yeah yeah this is great i'm gonna do this thing that's really fun and then you know for me at least the further you go you're like hey hell no i don't wanna if it's a treadmill i don't even wanna touch it i don't wanna get new near another like i don't know if you saw it it's me it's me is this is this the dating app or which one is this yeah it's kind of a it's more of like a make friends app but it could be used for dating also avatar so you download the app you tell you you know they ask you like what are you into animals whatever there's some sort of like personalization yeah personality quiz exactly they ask you to create an avatar you create an avatar then you're in this world basically you chat ro that style press a button get connected with someone who they think you would like jive with and basically as you like move your your head your avatar just like tracks facebook yeah exactly it tracks you it's it's cool because you're getting to know someone through your voice plus avatar right does it look kinda of lowers the barrier the friction where lowers the barrier it's not your real face you're not on webcam you don't have to care about how you'd look but you it's higher fidelity than just a still photo and text exactly so what other verticals could you do that in right yeah so many ideas dude okay dude this is great i'm glad you came back on we should wrap it up but let us know what you think if you guys love greg let us know that we have greg on more if you hey greg let us know that we'll never let greg on again have a deal so greg good good times man alright thanks man i appreciate it cool take care see you