Best of July

yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days all on a less travel never looking back what's up folks this is jonathan bar shop i work behind the scenes here on m m and today we are delivering yet another best of episode it's the episode that frankly no one asked for but we're delivering it to you anyways because that's what we do here no small boy stuff alright without further ado let's jump into this first clip it's with dha shaw the founder and cto of hubspot and honestly this has been on my favorite clips of the year da and sean breakdown their vin diver for success in its absolute gold let's give a listen okay so imagine let's take a step back i'm on a whiteboard and the whiteboard we it's the universe of all possible people everyone on the planet and he draws a circle with one of your skills so in sean's case let's say we put copy as one of the skills that he's in the top one percent or top five percent whatever number you wanna associate with it and so that's the circle like okay x number of people are at sean's level or better and at copy awesome let's say we draw another circle that's we'll call it crypto knowledge is just how crypto works and that's a group of people awesome rarer skill because it's a newer there's fewer people that know how to do that versus copywriting we can accept that will be a smaller circle what happens though is if you intersect those two circles and turn into a venn diagram the number of people that no copy really well and also know crypto really well is a hundred times smaller than either of those circles combined right and this is we see the same effect like in standardized test if you took the sat or the g e or the gm mat there are people that are really good at english portion of the test there are people that are really good a math portion of the test but the ones that score really really well are the ones that are good at both they don't have seem to best at both because that something that's actually rare is the combination of the evolution of the quan same thing here so now imagine so this what i call it the trillion dollar venn diagram success right i've just made that data so you draw with levels of your skills and say okay well i'm now not like one in a million i'm one in a billion right or we're one in five billion whatever that is and if you can convert that into some kind of monet business thing or whatever that's when magic sort of happens so that's kind of thing number one is like what's your thing what are your skills and what drag one how much value will that intersection create is two things one is how rare is that intersection whether it's two circles or three circles or whatever how rare is it and then the other one is how how much does it kind of reinforce the other skills that you already have so for instance i'm a offer developer that's one of my that's my core skill i've been programming for like thirty years now that's my thing deep down inside my core if i combine that with i'm gonna go off and in which i could never do become a olympic level swim let's say like also very rare the intersection of that is like okay well the opportunity that that reveals because the two things are so unrelated like i don't know how i would take my ability to build a web app and intersect with my like yeah there's something things i could but i know if that would be that huge but software development is applicable to lots of if i was gonna be an academic researcher if i was gonna go into music if i was like other things there's a lot more overlaps to degree that it's like those two you know they they reinforce each other the software helps me do this and that helps me do this and this is one of the reasons so my advice here was as you're picking skills to acquire acquire skills that are both rare but also reinforce things that you're already exceptional at that that will kinda drive that kind of that ra and and that's what drives drives the overall value which kind of brings me to like and so when i think of things that i want to learn it's like okay well this is why i got into copy i was like if i can and copyright is another form of this is communicating its scale is what copywriting it is right like it's like in usually textual form it's like okay well i don't know that many software engineers that can copyright really well like literally other than that have started companies right like they don't exist but very rarely do you get like really really good engineers that went off read six on copywriting in sean's class that that's not a common way would you you are you are a good writing a writer before you got into this no no no all i mean your writing great and by the way sean let's what's you gotta pi it out m dot com slash power writing or just go to m dot com and you see it yeah yeah just go m dot com m a v e n dot com i'm on the homepage starts in two weeks alright so the the what you said is great i would add one more circle to that to your pixar thing by the way the reason you might pull it off is because you have a very weird and unique and related level of skills so yes there are people that are better maybe better creative better animators better entertainment whatever but they don't know crypto maybe that's the thing that unlocks the next trillion dollar company is entertainment intersect with crypto it's the netflix for the blockchain whatever it is right something like that where two things combined that never had been put together in that way before right the the the other circle that i would add that i think people underestimate underestimated so i tweeted this out hour i so people i didn't need to explain what the tweet is the well as i said the next company i build is gonna be like a new new age pixar like the like the next pixar and i think i i i think i would work on that project for thirty plus like thirty thirty plus years i'd i i just keep going with that company i wouldn't be trying to sell it or flip it or get out of it or whatever so that was the tweet and then a bunch of i i had two reactions one reaction was awesome i'm like where can i sign up how do i work for this company that's that sounds awesome i love pixar or you could do it and those are like fans m mfa type of thing or people who themselves had been thinking god that would be awesome to create another like pixar type of company you know because i love pixar then there's the other half of people that were like what makes you think you could do this you know like you know how hard it is to make a movie you know how expensive it is you know how the how unique you know steve jobs and you know whatever las and cat mole like how how rare those talents were when they came together that's a once in a generation company and then other people were like one guy had this amazing burn he was like check aqua hire like green check mark aqua hired power writing core a course podcast next pixar and i was like oh thanks that's that's pretty solid actually and so you know a bunch people were sort of all in the same bucket of like this is so hard this won't work what you you can't do it there's some version of that and so the third circle but one is like i'm really great at x i'm really great at why the third is just i have the courage to go do a thing and like tim ferris once told the story he goes i went to a a business school class a harvard business school class i gave this talk and then the and i go oh by the way guys i'm doing this challenge only for you guys you know whatever i wanna get in touch with either bill clinton jennifer lopez or you know some sports person you know michael jordan or whatever if anybody here can connect me over email with them like you know just reach out to them and if you could hold of them connect me over email i will buy you too around the world plane tickets you know for you could fly business class for a year around the world anywhere on my dime alright guys thank you very much and he told that to one class and and he's like you know i you have thirty days to complete this challenge and then i think i forgot it was it was like he did to two classes but he gave a slightly different message in each the first one he just just said that thirty days go by nobody did it sorry nobody to completely the challenge he's was like oh what happened to you turns out nobody even tried the challenge the perceived difficulty was so high to that nobody did it so in the next one he told that story and i think he added a twist which was whoever gets the closest to it wins mh and and all of a sudden like everybody tries and in fact i think somebody did get in touch and actually successfully completed the challenge and he was like he had this principle which was sort of like you know everybody wants to fish where everybody else is fishing because they think it's so easy to catch fish there he's like in actuality often it's easy to just go go catch a fish where the fish actually he are and you you don't have to base it on how how many people how many other people you think have tried out there how you know what the perceived difficulty is and in fact sometimes the bigger you go the easier something can be because nobody else is even trying to do it and so i would say like you know this picture pixar thing who knows if i'm gonna go do this or something else i tweet things just almost a to my prototype it's like let me say this out loud let me see how that feels if i sleep and to wake up tomorrow do i wanna tweet five more ideas about that or am i over it it was just a passing fleeting moment but but the the corey ingredient i think most people lack is courage to actually go and do the thing and i think that's the the the people put way more emphasis on what skill am my top one percent and they kind of they they under credit themselves one one skill you could just have for free you just gotta go it's like at the santa of the the the deli at the girl at the grocery start go pull the number is yeah i i have the courage to actually go do it like you know i'm i will go do pull the trigger on this thing and not wait for other people to kind of like reinforce that it's a good idea to me yep could not agree more alright this next clip is from our episode of peer levels peter is basically like a greek god in the indie hacker community he runs multiple businesses all by himself that do over three million dollars in revenue per year and in this clip him and sean brainstorm a business idea that he thinks he could scale to a million in revenue by capitalizing on a trend that he's noticing in the travel community called slow what the does that mean let's check out so you tweeted something out there the day that's related to this you go not sure if people realize it but if your app does twenty thousand a month in revenue you're probably already a millionaire twenty thousand dollars per month times twelve months assume you could sell for let's call it four five that's multiple yeah that's a million dollar selling price right you you're sitting on a million dollar asset and when you put it that way i think that sounds and it is way more achievable then this idea of like i gotta build a a million dollar business like don't don't know i don't do i have the big idea whatever but getting something to twenty to thirty thousand a month in revenue right it's approachable and that's kind of awesome i think that's an amazing like just a like you didn't the all you did is you said something that was true out loud and i think if more people heard that that's why i'm kinda of bringing it up here i think if more of you heard that but that is a pathway to a millionaire status that does not require like winning the startup lottery of like yeah inventing the next big thing yeah or working and saving and you know paying your crazy w two taxes for like you know fifteen twenty years to get to the same same outcome yeah i'd exactly yeah i agree yeah and and i think it's it's reachable especially if you think about high automation very high margins so software business you you're not gonna hire a big team of ten people immediately you work with part time contracts like i do and you keep your margins very very high because then you can sell for five x right then your revenue almost your profit so it's the same yeah that it i think twenty days of brainstorm business together that could get to twenty k so what's an idea that you you you're not currently building what you thought of because i'm sure you're an idea guy and you you think you can make a website that does x or you could make no mad for this other niche or you could make yeah you know the the the immigration one for this other thing so what's a business let's brainstorm some our business together what's a business that you think could get somebody to this millionaire status dude i think what's man it's like again this is so personal i've been living like i used to live in hostel right like dorms in two thousand fourteen they didn't have money shared with six people like crazy then i started like private rooms in hotels and their rooms got a little bit more luxurious because i had more money and then i started discovering like apartment hotels and it sounds like bullshit but it works so well with remote work so i mean it's bar hotel right now in europe on the beach and there's a kitchen it's an apartment hotel what does that mean so apartment hotel is essentially hotel so full service furnished nice interior hotel room but you also have a kitchen you have a bedroom you have a living room you have you know it's very big it's pretty much like an airbnb but you pay per a month or per night or what you pay per well you can pay per night you can pay per month it's just like like sean it's like the exciting or whatever yeah it's like sander and it's like all i heard forgot the other one the guy i was supposed to come in the pop cancel us you did one of these in nashville right or something where you're like this is like lima or it's working yeah it's like a it it's basically just an apartment that you can rent for five days and they're pretty cool i do i do them all the time the problem that i've experienced is with in the new york it's like ten grand a month and it's like six hundred square feet so that's why i tend to go airbnb i'm in smaller less expensive cities you can get like a thousand square foot place for like six thousand a month and it's just it's basically an part apartment building that has one floor or all floors dedicated to airbnb yeah the problem of b is that i've noticed is the quality is very very high there's a big range of quality and there's problems there's no daily cleaning it's it feels too much like unexpected like you don't know what's gonna happen the water stuff might break if things break here you just get a new apartment right and i've done this in europe and i've done this in asia too in thailand and i spend about you see two to three k three and half k so it's a lot of money it's more than normal rent but the cool thing is that it it solves a lot of problems you have in your daily life because it's surface and stuff and it's it's a huge thing in asia it's a use thing in in in southeast asia even in korea taiwan stuff so i think that's gonna be bigger because of remote work because you have remote workers even with families with kids and you don't wanna live in hotel remote room is very depressing like i go insane in hotel rooms it's just like a bed and you can barely walk around the bed there's no space i need to cook food i need to buy steak from the local butcher i need to cook it with broccoli and spinach and with my friends and stuff and you can do it in an apartment hotel and i think the if you target it's a high end market i think of remote workers and make a lot of money like two hundred k or a hundred k something if you target them you can make a lot of money because it's serviced furnished and what would you build you actually build in a hotel or you build a digital product it's a big question because i i'm i'm a software guy i don't wanna i don't wanna own stuff i don't wanna have all this i don't even wanna buy land i don't even wanna buy a house i wanna be able to be consumer a customer of these kind of things right but i wanted long term i wanna like be able to rent for like six months you know we're twelve months even i wanna be guaranteed to stay so we my wife and i are are like we're at the point where we're gonna start having kids soon and i live not like you entirely but a little bit where we spend we spend half the year one place half a year at the other place and what we're gonna do next year is just rent do a twelve month month lease in new york and just not be there all the time but i'm looking to rent all of my furniture and i've been looking at of place where i was like alright i just wanna like book this one place and i wanna pay someone like three grand a month but they have to show up before i arrive they've gotta completely set it up yes hundred percent furnished for me and i've been looking at these and there's a few startups in the space that are doing furniture rental and furniture rental is not popular right now and i tell people all the time i'm like i just wanna rent all my furniture i don't wanna own any of it and they they they they think it's nonsense and i think it's crazy but if you run the math it it's significantly like it it's about the same in terms of price but in terms of headache i think it's a thousand times better and a hundred yeah but yes yeah so it's don't it's it's all about the headaches so if you can afford it you can reduce the headaches of ownership and ownership it sounds so privileged though but whatever it ownership is a is a big hassle shit breaks all the time and if you are like if i spend my time my laptop building on these apps it's probably better use of my time than managing all this this this stuff and if a company can specialize in you know managing this stuff and renting into you it's it's much better i think that's a real you're point that's a real business and imagine you can go to a website and you can say like okay you can choose different sets of furniture a different interior stuff paintings things on the wall or whatever and you can just click and arrive and it's already done for you like you said i think that would be really interesting yeah what what what else you think yeah things that you're interested in either kind of niche categories or things in your lifestyle that you're like i do this lifestyle thing differently than people this could be you could build a business around this i think the the the biggest problem with the digital don't know one thing is that there's a maybe it's a good big podcast is to say that there's a perception that people travel really fast and have the data that they don't travel fast they travel like every few months or even i think the average is seven months now it's very slow so the the word digital know is it's a horrible word of course we has so many connotation but it's mostly remote working people who want a little bit of a different life you wanna see different places a little bit you know they have boyfriends girlfriends wives husbands they have kids even this family is doing this as well moving around every week doesn't really work being very slow is big and if people are more aware of dads they can find a lot of products built for this long term slow mat market which most of us are were mostly slow mats and little mad also slow mat yes think about education think about like homeschooling is taken off also cause a remote work if five have kids i i don't know if i wanna put them in a regular school maybe you know elon musk built his own school that's kinda cool but you can do things in a different way and like now it's still very we're still niche like this a remote working it's still niche it's gonna get only bigger there's only gonna be more and more people doing this once physical jobs get automated so if you make products i don't know specific product but if you know if you can build products for those people that's a high end market of like tech workers that are remote for a third and final clip we have just a quick little bits on why sam shawn think you should play business in easy mode alright so this is my why it's okay to be douche disclaimer when we're when me and tame like oh we're doing this thing it's actually been easier like we did this and it just worked and i did five things that worked and like yeah maybe you can do something easier i'm like i make it look easy i say that for three reasons number one it's honest if something is easy i'll tell you it's easy if something's hard i'll tell you it's hard i'm not gonna like say what it's not just because it sounds better or worse and also the first when when we say easy it can mean simple like it's not actually easy but it's like straightforward intellectually i know how to do it i have to put the effort in it's also like for my personal trainer if he sits out on a bench and there's like i don't know whatever two hundred pounds and he could he could bench it it's easy for him because he's put in fifteen years of hard work so that that is now easy for him and similarly i got my ass kicked for like nine straight years from the age of like twenty to twenty nine with a start up failing over and over and over again nothing could have felt harder during that period of time and so that now things are relative like i know relatively feel much easier because i'm better now than i was three four or five years ago when i kind of sucked so that's a that's the first part the second reason that we say it's easy is because this is a podcast and we're trying to be entertaining the third reason that we say it or at least that i say it is i am tired of everybody telling everybody that like shit is so hard and like if you go anywhere on the internet right like we joke about the the multi trillion air mindset like all of the like entrepreneurship content is like how hard it is you know elon musk says starting a company is like chewing glass and looking into the abyss some companies maybe yeah maybe for you bro but like you know i i do a power writing course fine know it's like chewing and bubble gum and looking at the pool like you know it's that's not the same thing so so it's not if if you always hear how hard it is you kinda have to question the source why do they say that hey it makes them look more heroic b it keeps other people from doing it see it kinda justifies as why i got like why it get to be successful rich because i'm paying this huge cost and like i actually subscribe to a different version of entrepreneurship which is the way that me and a lot of our friends do things which is like we do it because it's fun it's like it's genuinely fun to do so it's not like this painful s that doesn't mean it's like no effort no it's pretty high effort just like playing a game or playing like pick a basketball you're gonna end up really sweaty and tired by the end but nobody confuses pick a basketball with like digging in a sand mine to like you provide for your kids so it's like you know there's a difference between like enjoyable effort and painful effort and i would say that for us what we do is enjoyable effort and so i think it's important for people to hear that not everything has to be hard and slow and painful like there is a version of doing a business that is fun and faster and and you know enjoyable and i just wanna present both like that both exist so that you don't like pretend you don't create this fictional story in your mind that like everything has to be hard okay that's my disclaimer did we cross the douche line hard for sure whatever i'm a habit line step on so yeah yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back