#89 - The Man Who Gamed Uber

okay everyone we're gonna have a a little bit of a special episode this first segment is twenty minutes and then after that twenty minutes it's gonna be normal but this first segment i found this guy a couple years ago who runs this service that frankly i thought is kind of a scam and we sean and i debated our friend andrew was like hey shouldn't have scammers on there and i kind of agree with him but this guy story is incredibly fascinating and don't wanna tell you too much about it just listen to it but we found this guy in india and he talked to us at midnight his time in india and frankly i'm inspired by this guy and i don't know if i agree with him or disagree with him but i completely love the hustle and i think that you guys should just give us a listen because it's super fascinating let us know what you think tweet at me the sam par tweet at sean i don't actually know sean handle but search sean perry s h a a n space p u r i and let us know what you think yeah what's up what's going on you got a guest here with us sam i'll be shake is here how are you doing man i'm great and and intended it so we've been talking about something you built we've mentioned it on the last couple episodes i'm glad you're here so you can you can tell people about what you've built and what what it does and we can debate a little bit about it so obviously say could you give us the one minute version of what it is that you built so we are using a reference referral system to give customers the credits which they can use to their rides or their eat orders now now that each order are is available so that they they'll get discount on their every order like up to that fifty percent up the order out value okay so about two years ago or three years ago i forget when you started i got an email from a friend of mine who knows everything he follows all the latest interesting stuff and he loves like hackers and he goes there's this guy you're in india right yesterday he said there's this guy in india and i don't know how it works but somehow he's accumulated hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of uber credits and you can buy credits from him and ultimately get uber rides for half off so you know how uber ride uber gives people ten dollars off their first ride and gives the referral person another ten dollars in credit this guy somehow accumulated massive amounts of ten dollar credits and you could buy his ten dollar credits for five dollars now the thing that sean and i debated was like is this ethical is this wrong is this right who knows and i don't i think sean was like i think it's fine but regardless i think it's incredibly interesting because and i want maybe you could explain how this works but from my perspective it seems like you've got a crew of like hundreds or thousands of people taking rides and you're either you're buying are you buying their credits from them what do you do explain explain how it works it's a basic like arbitrage in india yeah address in in anyways they used to give like ten dollar twenty dollar fl value in india they used to be hundred rupees two hundred rupees c hundred rupees in rupees and in india one right cost it starts from fifty rupees also so if you will me the twenty five rupees if you're convert to dollars it will be like thirty cents forty cents to fifty cents max so we are taking ride using that fifty cents and in intern uber is giving us ten dollars in us so the if us account is the is the refer so i refer indian rider indian writer takes a thirty cent ride and i get a ten dollar credit because i'm a us customer and i get a us credit rates that's an idea yeah and so for listeners a hundred a hundred rub equals one point four dollars right right but that doesn't it that's the easy part sean the hard part is how are you getting all of these credits yeah who are your writers no initially i was not running for this i agree started a blog just to promote the bus service when they came in india about six years ago they launched in india and i was just curious as how it's working how it's not working so i was sharing among our friends and at the time they were giving around ten dollars in indian well about six hundred rupees they were giving but my right cost was around a hundred to pay a hundred one fifty rupees from my flight to office right so i was using for to use that money for myself i started differing others then i started accumulating more value more six thousand rupees ten thousand twenty thousand then i was not able to use all the credits for myself right and let and doing this just by giving your link to your friends yeah i i started with with my friends then i started a blog and blog got little popular and because nobody are sharing that think that thing was totally new so it was popular and for blogging i started blogging like curious back for around ten years back so all the learning i how to make do seo and other thing how to make it popular a blog i use those skills to make it popular make this uber thing popular and started getting reference referrals then i initially i was not selling to anyone i but i asked all my friends to give me their referral code so that i can give your credits them for free because i was not able to use all that i did from myself so everybody was giving getting credits and in like hundreds of rides that they were getting have basically because uber like kind of they quickly they're in moving quickly they they just they translated a ten dollars worth of credit to india even though the rides were ten times cheaper and so that was the initial reason you were able to stack up so many credits but yeah it was very high value that's the when did you start selling the credits or when did you start making this service when like my all the all of my friend got credits they were not able to use themselves and over he started banning their account because was thing like they are getting credits like buy some or something so i was not able to fill their accounts also so i was having extra credit so i asked on my blog also if somebody wants this then they can pay me like some twenty rupees thirty rupees also like mine them is small thing because it was for me for free it was going for to me for free so they started coming to me then i started selling for just small thirty cents forty cents and then slowly i kept increasing my rate because there were mood people asking me those edits then suddenly in india they reduced that the value to the minimum to like fifty rupees so i was selling for fifty rupees and they were getting only fifty case so nobody was buying in india right then i started exploring who can buy then i i found out that this referral works across countries like all over the world so i do remember the day you do you remember the day you realize that like was it just you're sitting in your boxer at night and you're looking at it you're like holy shit this actually i can i can get ten us dollars for this i don't remember but i don't even just just happened i think three years back something yeah it feels back hey yeah i one of my friend was also working with this and there is another provider ola here so we are selling for that also ola ola also and my friend was mostly into ola and i was in uber so we were not competing with each other just we are helping each other to promote this so he also well he was also searching for some users buyers in us but ola is not available in the us uber is available so he suggested me a few friends like few customers and i from my blog also a few people came slowly slowly i got so how how do you actually sell the credit so your account has credits how are you actually transferring those to the buyer i'm i don't have any credits for me you get my you get the referral code from the person you you earned them credit yes yes let's say it's your account if could give me your code i will be on behalf of you i'll refer some some people and they'll take right they'll take uber like they'll place any order and then you'll get the button are you still doing it okay so first of all how much traffic was your blog getting and did you do i guess did you rank for like india uber sign up referral hi it was coming i went first place on a second place and i guess thought that keyword anything how many people would they income your site or were at the peak and not many i guess but a thousand people max okay thousand so you were getting these referral credits initially from your friends but at some point you must have run out of new friends to to bring to uber so at what point did you find a new way to get writers in india how did you do that once i was getting constant purchased like orders then i was asked i asked my friends like other bloggers how they do it then there is a like in facebook groups are there so few people who are also they are having similar idea of like as me they're also selling the i like talk to them and explore like how they are doing how that they then i said okay i'll give you somebody if you just manage it with among your friends someone among your blog among your facebook groups so somebody had said oh he's got a bunch of kids who will ride uber rides all day like you know you go to a school and you say hey hey kid you you know told your old kid go ride this for one mile please thank you very much here's here's fifty rupees is that what was happening or it really was nice thoughts once because i i you could see the pick you guys listening i i bought this and a bunch of my fred did and what happens is you get ten dollar credits and by the way and i talked to you i talked to you about this when you log in to your site it's super sketchy or it seems like that because english isn't in your native language and so it was you know it was clear that like you were i didn't buy because i got scared i was like yeah what the hell is is i was like it's clear this guy like it's are he's trying to and and so it looks quite sketchy and i told you this but when you and i did it and it worked it worked wonderfully and i did it because i talked to you but when you sign up i see all these kids like they seem like young boys like pop up or kids who are these yeah i'm like this guy go to a high school or something these getting these kids to pick rides i i have few people who work for me kind of and they manage those kids like they they've signed up many accounts from there because in india uber doesn't require credit cards they require so india you just need to have a number to create account so few people like create account so that other people other kits they take right and you get bonus i see so you just need a phone number a new a new phone number hey it's a new writer yeah it's new number is available and there are several websites they still just number in right number you need just ot p this enter number you'll get ot ticket and account is created then right take a right and entry file is available so for you so it was in fact like hand to hand combat kids like you were getting people signed up it wasn't from the blog initially first from blog then you to compete with the others and others other people are there who were also selling to the business my you need did you have or demand so did you have more rides or more buyers depending on time to time because the both keeps changing their policy and sometimes it it stops everything doesn't work then yeah buyers are there but no supplies there right and then it starts supplies is available but no bad so has changing it did uber ever contact you do they ever say hey what the hell going on no uber didn't connect it we i contact uber easily i treated them like if you give me a hundred rupees per referral i i'll give you so many accounts so that you can show those number of accounts to someone like to get funding or something like that but that never replied to me then i was not able to use myself to started selling no there otherwise i was going to sell to them only like give me some money market for you that's it so they you you're you're forgetting a major part or you're not forgetting you haven't mentioned a major part of this and this is a huge thing that i i was a red flag to me but i still did it was a you offer a discount if you pay with bitcoin and b you have to change if you're in america you which i imagined a lot of your customers are you have to change your account to where was it what's the code maldives so yeah if you're in america you have to change you gotta change your account to say that you are in the maldives now because i i don't know why that's i i don't know why you i'll explain those were some at tricks you can say work around in us they're they're did in us also they're reducing referral value initially it was twenty dollars than ten dollars and five dollars then when it came to five dollars nobody are buying from us so we're looking for how can how we can increase it so we like somehow we like luckily we found like if you change country your will go to ten dollars maybe ten dollars did set default value in the uber system like if there is no country said it will be set to like ten dollars okay so you pick some other country and you just get the ten bucks as your default yeah so somewhere where uber is not running so initially we tried si but after the they are like uber is operating in si lanka also the lanka reference value is set to lanka value like some hundred du rupees or something lanka value then we found maldives and then any other country you can set where uber is not there was not operating then it was setting before value to ten dollars but ten dollars is good value for everyone to buy so they were buying i all that you obviously talking about this yes i'm smiling like i've never seen him smile before i'll tell you why i'm gi about this but first is it i wanna make sure i say your name correctly sorry i'll shake yesterday i i'm gi about this because i don't i don't know if i agree with the ethics of it i i i don't know i i i'll i'll but i what i think is amazing is how hard you hustle to do something and i think the people like you who come up with these intricate even if even let and i'm not saying i feel this way but let's say that a listener says this is a scam and you're a scammer but even the balls that it took to do this and the operation that you built around this i find incredibly fascinating and i think the people who build amazing things often start out this way and i think that i just think that you're frankly inspiring i think it's amazing hundred percent i think we had we had greg on yesterday and i think he was talking about like one of his earliest businesses was he i think it was great you sold a box of air on ebay and people just found it funny so they bought the box of air and ebay thousands was it's like learning how to learning how to connect the dots learning how to make money on the internet learning how to tap into people's you know psychology and give them what they want you know those are sort of core underlying business skills and so you know the very first thing you said was this is a basic arbitrage this could have been with uber credits it could've have been with airline miles it could've have been with any any system that's out there if you discover a price discrepancy or a a sort of a loophole in the way that the system is set up you know that that's a that's an opportunity that that you can take advantage of now some people will say hey this isn't right so you know i my brain goes down this checklist first i say is this morally or ethically wrong to me and you know is anybody being harmed by this for my understanding nobody's being harmed by this was is that correct or is that you know are you sort of exploiting these high school kids and then sending him on rides to the mountains and then they have to walk back or something no no no they're getting pockets pocket money in a pocket expense right anyway and then the second thing is like is this illegal no this is not illegal is this against the terms of service of uber maybe but it's on them to sort of enforce that if they're gonna if they're gonna allow this it sounds like you literally reached out to them you started this with a pure intent which was to promote the uber service right if i take you at face value then i then i i see nothing wrong with this myself personally but we'll let other people be the judge i think i'm on board with this i think i'm on board with this i just think that because you're not a native english speaker the site admittedly didn't come across wonderfully but it it's crazy and i tried to help you with it i think i you right i go hey bad your site looks like like you're not using the right words and and i i even rewrote something for him yes just i keep i keep updating it but yeah obviously so what are you doing now you said that this is gonna end soon or something like that what makes you say that and then what's next and know but keeps changing the policy like two days back they said like now rafael referral rub ride referral stopped totally all over world june twenty nine so it's stuff now we i need to look for some now i'm basically paying engineers so i'll find some other things to do did you how how old are you i'm thirty five did you how much is your apartment cost to rent a month in us dollars you know in us dollars yeah i think few dollars or something yeah yeah something three hundred and it in in service three fifty yeah how much three fifty dollars and we thirty us dollars and you at your peak were doing twenty twenty k month yeah it was remind not the all the problems yeah but was it close to fifty percent drop yeah so close to fifty percent plus yeah so you doing ballpark of twenty your fifth fifty times your monthly rent right got that right anyway a lot i i don't know if did that math right but anyway why did you grow up poor well kind of low middle glass and do you consider it what are you what are you now it's still the same not i'm not spending any much i don't have a car i don't have apartment like it's rented apartment you're you're wearing a apple watch i think you your apartment looks pretty cool you know i i would say you're doing alright you just fa me man i i would wonder are you are you gonna do i'm not i would call this illegitimate what you did because it is a i i don't think it's wrong but it is like a short term thing are you gonna build something why don't you build something that's huge like something that can last because you're you're pretty you're fucking awesome yeah do what when you think about what's next for you do you think you'll try to do something similar or do you think you'll try to do something that's different in some way like you know your own service at different you know something that's has more enduring long term value yeah definitely different from this because yeah in this field it's keep getting like it's depending on someone else business if they're not doing good i'm not doing good it's depending on something so trying to separate from something with the last platform risk okay so obviously here's what i want you to do man we're gonna wrap this one up but i want you to keep in touch with me and sam let us know what you get working on next we'd love to support you and help you you know help make that whatever that next thing is successful and my hope is that you come back on in six months or a year and you say hey remember me on the uber uber pro guy okay here's what i did next and it's even bigger and better than what you've already done and the website is uber pro dot i n right yeah right k great uber dot i n yeah people and like that it's like yeah it's cam side due to the dot i ian n it's dot com then it they thing like it's right legitimate website kind of it it looks a lot better i just went to the website right now it looks a lot better your your your translation it has gotten significantly better it it looks great it just you're a fascinating guy man you're cool thanks for coming on thanks for telling your story okay thanks yeah have a good day thank you alright yep we're gotta say your night it's midnight over there you a yeah night sweet trans dude you're awesome i appreciate you coming thank you alright alright that guy's is crazy i love it such a such a great little story i just enjoy hearing those anytime i hear something like that i love it i have a feeling that little segment is gonna be very very popular i would love to hear what people think i think that that was fascinating i people can't see me but i'm am smiling a lot yeah it's like sam's wedding day over there you just need to send it a photographer he's ready to go alright what else what else do you wanna talk to me hold on i wanna wrap this up this guy i here's why this is fascinating to me this guy i love these guys come from nothing and just do all types of crazy stuff to like build cool interesting stuff even if it is maybe unethical i'm like i'm gus over this guy i love these types of people okay you wanna move on yeah okay first thing i wanna talk about people fleeing cities i posted about this in the trends group i posted about this on twitter i've gotten roughly two to three hundred replies i put my thirty day notice to my apartment and i'm located in san francisco people a report was released for june numbers san francisco rent is down another eleven percent sean do you think that cities are going to change or like some of the major expensive cities so new york san francisco i don't know what else do you think that they're gonna change forever forever a long time it's hard to say but i would say that like you you sort of have to ask okay what would get it to return to bigger and better heights than it was and i think what was driving the san francisco value sort of originally was the like kinda culture and the like you know the ec mix of people that lived san francisco this was like you know sort of early days of san francisco that went away as the core reason people came to the city and then it got replaced with tech and it's pretty clear that the tech movement has migrated away from silicon valley not just because cook coronavirus but in general you know cost of living getting higher and nay higher as well as just winners coming out of sweden and israel and other places it became clear like look you don't have to be based out of silicon valley to a raise money or b be successful new york's york has had winners la had winners and you know a bunch european countries have had winners at at atlas and in australia you know can and australia so i think already that was happening and then this was just a turbo this was an amplifier so no i don't think that san francisco for example is gonna be the hub for is gonna be a bigger hub than it was in the past you know few years i think it'll still probably be the biggest tech hub there is it's just it will be smaller in size some of its weight will have gotten distributed out to austin and new york and la and other places that are benefiting from this i believe that the numbers are being under reported at the moment and i it's strictly what's it what's it called though when you just hear stories anecdotal yeah because i posted in this group and i had james alt replied and he goes half my buildings vacant another person said two thirds of my thing is vacant when i try to book a moving company they're packed they they're they're packed were you the one who posted like you called a moving company about moved from california to florida was that you or was that someone else not i think it was either dave gross or or you or i don't forgot who it was maybe was my friend kumar somebody posted they had talked to somebody about they talked to a moving company about moving from moves from california to florida all that and you know normal volume was let's say fifty in a month and now they're doing five hundred a month and they can't keep up with they're turning people away because you just can't handle as many moves you that are migrating you know to to greener or pastures and so you know these are these leading signals that you see and it it makes sense like i i myself moved out of the city i i know tons of people that are either already moved considering moving or or or not planning on planting roots in the same way that they were six months ago which is kinda wild because that's a very short amount of time for such a big migration yeah it's pretty nice so let's talk let me talk about a few opportunities there are which is first of all when i'm moving i'm i'm now i'm trying to figure out my tax situation which state do i am i gonna call home and i got i to it's all about your intent and there's a bunch of things that you could do for example getting a mailbox in a different state so virtual mailbox mailboxes are are kind of intriguing to me at the moment the second thing is you have to declare to the state of california or whatever state you're leaving that you are no longer a resident and there's a ton of manual things you have to do like contacting the dmv there's a few more things whatever sure and that's pretty interesting and and i'm curious what's gonna happen with that did i show you this the founder of ship is it shipped it's a it's that thing that sold a target for five hundred thou million dollars it was like a i'm not familiar okay so the it's called s h i p he okay so it was basically like insta car but for the south name was bill smith he sold it for four or five hundred million dollars huge win and he has a new company let me it's called landing and what landing does is they have a network of apartments across the country and they're all pretty similar and you pay a fee and you get access to all the apartments and so if you go to their website now you can go to landing yeah landing so it's it dive been let's see i typed in hello landing hello landing dot com okay so you go it's pretty fascinating it's super interesting so they're clearly appealing to these twenty thirty year old young people who have a little bit of money you can sign up they've got thirteen major cities you pay two hundred dollars for it the yearly membership and then you select a variety of furnished apartments and then you get like a slight discount on staying there for a month at a time so for example they have a three thousand dollar two bedroom apartment that's available in july second in austin and then you could spend a little bit more money and go to dc things like that super interesting yeah this is cool so this is basically corporate housing because you're getting furnished turnkey apartments but it's without the corporate it's like they just put the power in the hand of the individual who may or may not be doing this as part of a corporate relocation they might just this might just be a lifestyle relocation like you're you're doing right now so you're gonna use this well i at the moment because of corona i don't wanna be in an apartment i only wanna be in the home a house yep so an apartment with a private entrance but like you can rent a place in la a one bedroom for twenty five hundred dollars a right now on this website and it's all furnished mh very fascinating now there's a lot of holes in this model but this is something that is very attractive to me and very interesting and saunders is kinda similar right yeah but they're not doing so hot because they were corporate travel and there's rumors i think they've laid off a ton of people there's rumors that they're gonna go to business yeah that's crazy and then there's another one called guild started by a friend of mine maybe the guild or guild and they do the same thing but it's also for corporate travel whereas this is more so for nomadic y type of people right very fascinating what do you think about those yeah i like the idea i think it's kind of one of those ideas that's either gonna seem obvious in retrospect or you never hear about it again so so so i think that it makes sense that more people are gonna be doing this the question is is it enough i like the membership model right like i think that's kind of a core difference from you know okay well i'm if i'm gonna move i'll just go and do my search whatever but like once i'm in this network then i'm just gonna keep picking apartments in this network but and and you know i think you're trying to move like whatever every month most people are probably not trying to do that i'm not gonna do that for a long time right so so i think you know the question is like what is the like length of stay and are they are they pricing these above what it would be if i did a year long lease and they're making more off it per month due to the flexibility okay i could believe that but then it's you know it's it's questionable if the economics are gonna work right because you're gonna have vacancies where you know there's gaps of renting and have you you know do the economics work based on how many people are trying to do this at all times you know it's one of those it's one of those situations unlike airbnb where for airbnb they don't pay to lease all the places so when demand goes down sure their revenue goes down but their cost basis also goes down whereas for these guys their costs are gonna be fixed essentially because they're gonna be locked into all these leases so they can't withstand kind of the normal demand fluctuations that other that airbnb type site can do yeah i'm interested i agree with everything you've said we'll see what do you got okay let me tell you about some things that i found kind of interesting so you wanted to talk a little bit about levels and we've mentioned it before tell me what's interesting about levels so levels for for those who are either new or you don't remember at one point in time me and sam did this one month weight loss challenge where we installed a continuous glucose monitor on our arm and it measured you know how is your glucose spiking based on what you eat and the way this challenge was organized by but it's got justin mayors was if your glucose level stays below a certain level meaning you're not eating sugary carb foods he will essentially returned a deposit we made a deposit like eight hundred dollars at the beginning of the month every day that we ate right he would sent v west money back and i was a cool idea it was a fun challenge wasn't super well run but it was also both of us walked away being like yeah well this is the future i'm gonna have a device implanted on my body that tells me how my body doing in real time and so levels is a company that's trying to product that so what did you find interesting here what why why'd you put levels back on yeah this app is not in the app store it's oh test flight yeah it's in test flight at levels health dot com so the the background here is so people who have diabetes have either have to prick themselves every certain amount of time hours or days i don't know and test their blood glucose and there are there's a company it's it's like the huge health company i forgot what's called probably p does it i mean whatever the the the huge conglomerate are they have this machine called the freestyle libre abbot this add that's the one it's a huge conglomerate it's just a big thing and it's this thing that you put into your arm and it tracks your blood glucose like with a thirty second delay and for two weeks for two weeks and if you have diabetes people use this all the time now the problem is is if you're just a nerd like me and you just wanna test this and you don't have diabetes you actually have to get a doctor's prescription you can't buy this i don't know why that's the case i maybe there's some great behind it i'm not educated on it but what levels is trying to do is to clarify i think you can buy it you just aren't subsidized by insurance so it's more expensive right but maybe you can buy it from one of those like penis enlargement pills websites or like something like that but i i don't think that you can go on to abbott dot com and buy it or freestyle sell libre dot com or at libre dot com and buy i i i'm almost positive you can't and i don't know why it's so hard but it is and so what levels is doing is they're doing two things one they're giving you an app that you can make it easy to track your levels your blood levels and they're trying to eventually create the hardware for it and i think this is just incredibly fascinating i i i'm i i think these guys are raising money now and i think it might be something to bet on it i don't know yet though but it's really cool so if it reminds me of like if you had just told me the idea it would have been like oh my god i gotta i invest in this after doing it for two weeks first of all at the time now maybe it was just early on their app kinda sucked it wasn't like the the normal the out of the box freestyle libre app was just better to use totally first you had to use it because that's how the scanner works and so this was like first scan it in this app and then open the levels app to like see it in a prettier chart and i didn't find it prettier nor useful at all i think the dream for them is it's a great visualization it gives you tips as you go and you do your food tracking your meal logging in but the meal logging was super clunky when we used it so i've never logged my meals in it because i was like this is too cumbersome so i was uni impressed by the actual thing at the time but i think this idea is amazing i think that it's gonna have really high retention for the people that opt into this lifestyle and and so i'm i'm a believer in the in the concept behind this business i would build a business like this myself i'm like that much of a believer in it and it also reminds me like there's a a company that just sold for five hundred million yesterday i think called mirror did you see this you are you familiar with mirror so it's a very it's this thing you put on your wall it's an actual mirror that's sort of like a home gym that you plant on the wall and there's two of these that are out there that i know tonal is one and mirrors the other so mirror got bought by lulu eleven yesterday five hundred million dollars and you know on the surface is like one of those really hard businesses it's like hardware new behavior for customers really expensive and so you could see all these different ways that it was gonna fail and this this female founder who who did it and the vcs who backed it it paid off and they got bought by lulu lemon for a really great exit and i think that something like levels has the potential to be that if they can build the really awesome consumer kinda like the health conscious consumer what they want that's more than a fitbit that's more than an apple watch it's actually tracking their glucose levels i think they could end up getting bought right back by an a company like abbott or by one of the the sort of big you know either health or fitness companies that are out there so i think it's a good bet as a business i wasn't in love with the product i agree on everything you said i think think that what the problem it's solving is two fold for me the first thing is nutritional information and calorie information on a lot of packaged foods and normal foods do you realize how wildly the inaccurate that is like it can be like twenty percent or thirty percent off like it's it's pretty off like if you go i remember casey and i said did this thing where he took a big mac he took like five different big macs and he's like alright it says on the package that this is how much calories isn't in it and then he actually you know a calorie is one calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat up i believe a gram of water one celsius and temperature yep and yeah so they like did that test and like oh wow these are off by like ten or twenty percent and it was pretty interesting i think that that's an interesting thing to look into i also think that carbohydrates and protein and and of your different macros and nutrition nutrient information it impacts people differently like right and i think that that's interesting to see what fits you best right what what triggers your responses versus not yeah yeah and i i think in general anytime you can take something that has a really long feedback loop and give people an immediate feedback loop that's a the foundation of a great product like that's if that's the only thing your product did you can win and that's what this does it gives you a really fast feedback loop on how what you eat affects your body and i think that's both really important and i think it'll be really compelling if it can get product now maybe these guys will do it or maybe they'll make thirty percent of the way progress but like to me this is inevitable but there will be a company like this it will be uber successful this will be very normal for people to have on their body at all times in some form factor whether it's a patch on your arm or it's a you know a ring or a watch or something like that but and i think specifically the glucose monitoring to me is more interesting than sleep tracking step counting you know temperature you know all that other stuff that's that's potential like for you to track because it's related to eating and if you can affect the way that people eat you can change their whole life man what do you got here's one thing that i found interesting alt data so what is alt data so there's this market that i didn't really know existed but it made sense when i heard it which is alternative data that people buy so the alt data market is like two to three billion a year right now and what this means is let's say you're a a trader you're on wall street or you're a hedge fund manager you are constantly looking for an edge you're looking for alpha as they say so how do you have an edge on the market so that you can get better returns than the average right because you're charging fees to your customer to manage their money so you have to beat the sort of passive indexing that they could just get by being in the market as a whole so turns out there's a huge market for alt data and where people are buying you know one of the following it could be satellite imagery so for example you can look at crop yields in different countries and you can know how the commodity prices are gonna be affected and how that affects starbucks because they require these beans over here you can look at mobility data that's what's happening right now for people who are betting on the economy to recover so google and apple have these charts that show how much people are using google maps which shows how much they're moving around right now and that's a key indicator of like commerce activity so a lot of the people who bet on who are betting on the economy they're trying to figure out alright are we about to go into shelter in place two point o or are people getting out and about many economy's about to recover it's really financially important to know that so they're buying mobility data they're buying you know other other sources of data which is like robinhood their one of their core business models is they sell the i forgot what it's called like flow data or whatever basically they they sell the transaction data of what people are trying to buy on robinhood to these quan funds who will then front run the market in many ways they'll they'll see that okay a bunch of retail traders that are gonna going to buy tesla cool let's go by tesla faster than they can and we'll get the uplift of this retail traffic that's coming in so there's all these different alt data sources and i just thought this is really interesting business to do one of two things either a you could build a alt data market where a marketplace where basically people could put their source of data and buyers could come and browse the different satellite providers the different mobility providers like who at whatever and you can sort of pitch what your thing does and they could pay to get in contact with you to vet your stuff and then they could do reputation market around it the other thing that i thought was interesting was just what other alt data sources could exist that you could bring to market and monetize in a way that's not being monetized yet so i think some of this is new right like cell phones unlocked a whole bunch of passive data sources is that the passive data that that didn't exist before because now you have everybody with a gps and a microphone and and other you know tools on them so i'm curious what other alt data sources might exist that could could tip people off to to make better financial decisions or you know at least for for wall street because that's where the big books are that's pretty interesting and so sometimes at the hustle people like crazy people will email me and they're like oh you're selling my data and i'm like i'm not selling your data because i literally don't even know how to do that like i'm like could i would well like i'm like maybe be like a selling data selling data inherently isn't wrong mean i mean like someone on your email list is that what you mean well they'll think they'll get like spam and they'll think that somehow i sold their email address which not even a chance never did that which i know how to do that i know how to sell an email list but i don't know how to like sell insights or data i mean i don't even know who would i i don't even know if it's valuable i know nothing right but that's in that's cool that's a great great like a great one is second measure which basically takes credit card data and so people know okay door is beating uber eats because they can look at this the second measure data and they can see you know who's doing more credit card transactions out of those those different companies so vcs are using this you know for example i think one that would be awesome that's not public is cloud usage so whose aws bills are going up and if you somehow knew who's whose whose web traffic is going up or whose bandwidth is going up or whose consumption is going up on on aws i think that would be a really interesting signal to use to invest in companies or sectors as a whole so i'm i'm just trying to think of what are some different alt data sources and i don't have a ton you know but but i think that this is interesting and and the way these are used are different like you you had told me your dad's in the like kind of produce farming market sort of yeah and they do and he's he's got like a a a a meet a small medium sized business and so they're not using significant data but they definitely use the weather and they use some future features and things like that but yeah and so i think that there's a lot that's in agriculture where people are selling what whether specific weather data like more specific than the sort of general weather data and and also just general yield data that's that they have across the agriculture market for for individuals in in that in that space and so i think that's kind of interesting too so i'm curious i i know that in for example in sports there's synergy sports which measures all the court movement of basketball players on the court now this is a i think it's available or it's bought by every single nba team because no nba team can just afford to like not have the data when the other twenty nine teams are doing it and so these guys literally just by installing cameras on the back board in all thirty arenas they now have something this proprietary that they can sell for millions of dollars to nba teams just to say hey here's here's a data that you can go and hopefully make better scouting decisions or game plan decisions based off i'm looking at this now this is crazy synergy sports yeah this is awesome it's owned by a company called an atrium sports company what is atrium sports i have no idea fuck that's amazing i never ever would have thought it looks like it might be a public company i never would have thought this wasn't fitting and i love simple ideas like that where you know it's not rocket science i think they get exclusive partnerships and also the teams don't want multiple cameras having to be installed in their space or whatever and so and then they have like tremendous pricing power over the teams once they have the data and so and and the the richer their dataset set like the longer they're installed the worse the switching costs are if they ever wanna use another provider right because okay we could use this other provider but then we lose the last ten years of historical data that we might use to find patterns or make better decisions and so i think a a company like synergy sports is a simple company that's very well positioned in this market so synergy sports was either owned or c owned by mark cuban and he sold it and the company sold it to atrium sports for ninety million dollars interesting i think it's worth a lot more now because this is sort of a more recent trend okay another thing to follow up on that sort of sports related so we had talked about jack's idea of a of a a baseball card sort of fort knox and you know a place to store and trade baseball cards without it ever having move hands and then a whole bunch of people reached out after the podcast which is great love it when they do that to be like hey you ever heard of free ports and i was like well no never heard of that shit what is it and basically what free ports are this is my like very brief googling afterwards but i was like i should i should mention this i should close the loop on this so a free port is is an art storage warehouse so they so basically people do this for art so it does two core things you buy a piece of art it gets stored a free port and this hint they handle like sort of the whole storage process of your doesn't get damaged doesn't get stolen it's like you know state of the art security that sort of thing but the main benefit the reason people do this is because art can't be when you buy a painting for eighty million dollars which people do believe it or not they you have to pay sales tax you have to buy you to pay tax on that on that purchase and so that could be you know four or five million bucks and so how do you avoid paying that tax well you only owe tax once it's landed in your destination so a free port is considered to be in transit for an indefinite amount of time so so what they do is you buy a piece of art it goes to the free port it's in transit for twenty thirty years so it's a way to preserve wealth across like decades and not have to pay the tax until you sort of want the tax to be due and then you could actually just sell it to somebody else who will keep it in the free report and then you sort of move on without ever having to like use the art as like get the art out and so i thought this was really interesting i never heard about this i bet there's either software you could build around this or marketplaces for these or you know some kind of you know sharing economy version of free ports it's like i don't know enough about it but it definitely made my ears perk up and if somebody out there wants to go do a bunch of research on free ports i would love for you to come in our facebook group and post what you found because i think this is very interesting okay so i'm looking up this is awesome love love this so there's a one called geneva free port the economist has a bunch of really cool articles about it the headlines are very clickable it's like the largest art collection for the uber rich that you'll never see right it's in geneva i'm ignorant switzerland right geneva switzerland thanks so and this free port company free port geneva free port it it had the two hundred fifty employees and it had sales of seventy million i don't know what that is is that swiss frank i don't know what i think that's what that is are saying yes so that's a seventy million frank i don't know what what the conversion is right and it's sold recently for a lot of money fascinating yeah so so so i think there's more to be more more needs to be looked into into that okay one last thing i wanted to bring up because we got five minutes left unless you have one if you have one you should go oh i'm obsessed with free ports now set free report par alright so the last thing is i had this conversation yesterday i just wanted to share this i put this in our facebook group but yeah i wasn't sure if you're were able to talk about that i it's gonna be kind of a a tease so sorry but whatever i still think there's some lessons to be learned so i'm talking to somebody yesterday very credible person they sold their last company for over eighty million dollars and they were talking about what's next and and they said something you know we were talking about how we're thinking about you know what what the next chapter looks like and he goes yeah you know i find myself i asked myself this question which is how do i build something in two weeks that's gonna make me five million dollars in the next two months and literally the other people that were there just start laughing because they're like what like that's not a thing and he's like no i think i think it is a thing and he's like you know i didn't know the answer but like asked myself the question i believe that it was possible he was like and so i can't i got a bunch of idea ideas he started rattling off the ideas the very first idea i was like holy fuck sk actually gonna work like i would i would actually bet that that the idea he said it would work which is crazy because like even if that idea had a ten percent chance of working it would be totally worth if it have one percent chance it'd be worth doing it i think this idea has like a fifty percent chance of working and after it happens i will come back on here and i will be like that was the idea that i was referencing but i can't talk about the idea i can't tell say who it was but i will say i think there's something very powerful to asking yourself this question you know what one of my like kind of sean ism is ask a better question get a better answer and so instead of saying oh what do i wanna do with my life which my career be what i wanna work on ask a better question and so his better question was what can i build in two weeks oh and also it was with no code so what kind of two weeks with only using only no code tools that will make me five million dollars in two months and so he first started hunting down what are examples of things that are making five million dollars you know across a two month time span and he found a bunch of examples and then he worked off of those to figure out what can he build that's not that but similar has similar properties alex too who's the guy who created million dollar homepage did the same thing he was eighteen years old and he asked himself a question how do i make a million dollars i think it was think he also said in a month like how do i make how do become a millionaire in a month and the idea that he that came to him was million dollar home homepage and actually worked he actually pulled it off in the next like two months so what do you think of this and do you ever ask yourself questions like this or am i just crazy a little bit i i asked myself i i think of like what my long term goals are and i'm like how do get this done just like this year right i do that this a ten year plan how do i do it in one yeah i asked myself that all the time but i i think that most people are shocked that the silly questions can be have true answers right and there's many examples of this happening so for example the sam brother the sam brothers they own rocket internet they cloned ebay but in germany and sold it back to ebay in ninety days for fifty million dollars right and i think that if someone wanted to say i'm going to abandon in my family i'm going to abandon my health i'm going to abandon my friends and i'm only gonna do something for six months i think they'd be shocked at what can happen now they're gonna pay the price you you you you gotta pay a price for what you for what what what you get but i think it is great that's a great question and i'm gonna tell my company that so guys we done a version of this like on the podcast once which was if you had to make a thousand dollars like either today or like in the next forty eight hours how would you make a thousand dollars and you can't use any like you only have like a whatever a hundred dollar budget i think you were like i would buy bottled waters i would go to a place and i would sell you know every bottle of water that i'm buying for whatever twenty cents for three dollars and i would just go in front of a hot area and i i know i could make a thousand dollars i've done it before right that was like your answer to that yeah i i i and by the way i made five grand this weekend and i didn't make five grand because i i sold all my gym equipment there you go and i sold a bunch of used clothing but the the gym equipment we sold because i bought a lot of it used and there's a huge demand i got three or four hundred replies on craigslist from so i i made five i i profit a couple grand gross five yeah and gary these was talking about this like okay go you know go hunt free craigslist and facebook marketplace and thrift shop or whatever and then go list everything on ebay and like you can make two you know two hundred fifty dollars a day doing that and like gosh show me your hustle and he like does this whole fucking hustle hard ass work yeah it's hard ass work like the first question why do you get five million of thirty days yeah exactly again you're probably gonna work the same same level of difficulty just with the bigger price okay so let's let's play the game let's say you need to generate you need to make a million dollars in the next month what do you do and you can't use any of your existing assets to do it also so if i had give a budget of ten grand if i had to use an existing asset i would for sure do a course on how to start a news that would i would bet my life i would do it you can use your brain sure but you can't use your like hustle email list for example i would have i would have to use that i don't know ma'am that's a hard ask question can you answer yours first because you already discussed this well no i just thought of it just now but we was both brainstorm on the spot i think that's the sort of real way to do it so okay so what are some things that i would do i think partially like this guy i would look at things that are already generating that amount and i would see okay is there a r on this that i can use to to make that happen so for example is there is there something in the you know oh i like for example i know a guy who's making a lot of money in crypto right now what he's doing is sort of arbitrage between exchanges and liquidity pools to to make money there okay can that scale up tickets to the million bucks okay maybe maybe not is that's really complicated is there an app that i could use oh is there an app that i could build right like you know the the weather app and the alarm clock app like some stupid simple app that i could do a meditation app that i you know a sleep sound app that i could build that could that could generate that type of revenue in that short amount of time well i think i'd probably have to pay too much for the marketing of it so in my ten grand budget i can't do it so the constraint really is the ten grand budget okay how do i do that i could i think you have to make something that a business will buy from you like they would buy the asset so like as a customer you mean not like acquire it a acquisition will take too long well yeah but well what is like an immediate need so like if someone's like i need more customers it's like hey i built this database that there's i think there might be some customers here but like if you had to use no code you'd have to like i you don't have to use no code do use just ten ten thousand dollars that's i would have to because i can't get quote right fuck that's hard you can recruit someone you can convince someone i mean i guess you could do real estate and try to like fin like a contract on something but i don't know how to do that so i wanna be i wanna so so that's one way so what you could do is you can find a you could you could go hunt for a property that is sort of distressed in some way you could get the right to buy it and not you know you you you get it under contract without putting your money down yet and then you can simultaneously find a buyer for that property that's because they're not marketing it the right way and you could basically do the buy sell in the same day without ever putting the money into the deal whole i you corrected you it's called whole that's called whole properties yeah yeah whole real estate you just flip the contract it's flipping any of the work yeah exactly so you you know you could do something like that but that's not what what i would what what would i actually do i would try to design something that goes viral right because for ten thousand dollars i'm not gonna be able to get distribution through any paid me so i need something that's gonna spread viral and then net me some money at the end so gotta be a digital good though can't be you can't be selling like deodorant yeah exactly so so what could go viral that's gonna be a digital thing you know maybe there's a variant of the million dollar homepage type of idea that you could do maybe you could actually maybe you could do a physical product so maybe you could do a physical product that you don't you actually don't make it you just pre sell it so so that would still fit within the the bounds but you'd have it have to be a viral product that would spread without you doing paid marketing so you you could do like a kickstarter type of project and pre sell a million bucks and use the ten grand just to make the video of the product that you're gonna make so i'd have to have a i'd have to come up with a product like that dude maybe this free porting thing would get that okay here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna come into the next episode and i'm gonna have my answer to this question i'm gonna have a great answer i'm gonna have an answer that if i listen to it i'd be like fuck i should go do that and so i'm i'm gonna make that my homework for for this thing i'm gonna give myself the weekend basically to come up with my answer for it and i think you should do it too and a bring would be such a fun experiment to do i haven't we should do it well yeah i have admittedly an unfair advantage like we did a course and i don't know if i wanna do courses ever again but it was like wildly profitable and people loved it but that for sure it would work yeah but i think we have to do it without using the assets i think that's the real that's the real sort of creative test because otherwise it doesn't really apply to most people because they don't have the unfair advantage you have to begin with which is like whenever millions of people who read your emails so i think you need to to do it without it i get that but if i were to do this i would absolutely use that because i'm like this works okay break bra you with a good idea okay so you create a campaign called one million masks and you are gonna give away masks for free to people who need it to prevent coronavirus and you convince the brands to put their logo on it and pay for the masks and let's say the mask is fifty cents you charge a dollar for the mask to the brand or a dollar fifty you pocket at the dollar and you need to you need to get a million masks paid for by brands in the meantime to do it so you tap into something timely where brands are looking to to put their stamp on something and be a part of them like contribute to the cause this is such an interesting thing alright are you down to to come back with your answer to this and also pray are you down that was my answer it's a good one alright but i'm giving you extra time if that's the best answer you come over it you just come back and say it again but if you come up with a better answer by our next recording then you gotta put you gotta stay it on here alright got you alright cool that's that's how this podcast can viral by the way we just put our money where our mouth is we say hey we did this brainstorm and by the way for the next month every episode is just the progress of doing that thing and reaching the million this just so much but i'm down i'm i'm very interested there's a prize you can make a million dollars this month it's not work for nothing are you do you consider yourself lazy yes same to the point of like it being and negative same i'm like ugh so much work i i remember i applied when i when i moved to silicon valley i was applied to the job at monkey inferno for the idea lab and i had made like a resume like a website resume i i basically went all in for them i made a website it was my resume it was about them tailored to them and one of the sections was i've made it like a video game where i was like here's my attributes like if you go madden or whatever it's like speed ninety nine this whatever ninety two and so i had did it for all my business attributes and work ethic was my lowest attribute it was like five out of ten or whatever it was like a you know fifty five out of a hundred and during the interview the guy i was like this was this whole website i think was great like but why did you say your work i think was bad like i've never seen somebody come into an interview and say i'm not that hard of a worker like i'm honest about i was like yeah i'm honest like that i'm not i'm just not i was like there's other people who are but like you know that's not what i do i don't try to work the hardest i do try to work the smartest but i i i definitely i actively try not to work the hardest there's this like quote where bill gates he says something i'm like yeah like the best hackers are super lazy and that's why they invent stuff it's because they don't wanna do the same thing over and over again right yeah they they find the the quickest packs of the solution well let's wrap it up tweet out us let us know what you think give me your answers i'm coming back monday with great answers alright so yeah and let let us know what what you guys think about this first segment i think that i'm inspired by this guy to be honest i love meeting people like that that was inspiring to me that was a good scheme that that one almost almost pulled it off for him actually yeah cool alright i gotta