How to Reverse Engineer Any Business - From the Archive

hey mind for milling fans this is producer ben we're bringing you one from the archives today and i think this is a really high value episode now what this one is about is sam sean talking about their process for how they reverse engineer a business so if they find a business that they really like how do they figure out its history where it's been and how it works and so they go through some of their tools i think you guys will really like it so please enjoy this episode from the archives on how to reverse engineer any business here it is yeah i feel like i could rude to where i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days off on a travel never looking back what what if that saw this website my guy chris chris who's my apprentice right now for content he sent this to me and i even actually spend a ton of time it but go to first versions dot com check that out and i'm pretty fascinated with this i think you are too we both are like internet archaeologist we like to go find the og thing what did i did this blog post i got like ten to thousands of views once before i had any audience it just went viral because it was what did the first web page look like for these ten big companies and this is kinda like some comment to to do like uber homepage back in the day snapchat home homepage back in of the day the first facebook homepage the first ebay home homepage first amazon home homepage and these things look like you know so basic and rudimentary and then like really just it makes you realize like dude you you need to launch and there's that quote if you're not embarrassed by v one of your product you launch too late and all these companies definitely like fall into that category so wow i thought first version dot com was a cool little like archive of stuff like this i think this is so cool so i actually just sent you a link to an article that i wrote i think i wrote this in sixteen thousand sixteen years ago fifteen october fifteen and i you could the it probably doesn't even work entirely but anyway i what i love to do and i've always loved doing this is i use there's a few different websites web archives is the easiest and what i like to do is i will get a a google doc and a spreadsheet and i'll map out the the whole journey of a company so i'll look at what air where an airbnb started and then i'll read all the bottom of like alright here's when they announced it this many users here where they here's where they announced this much funding here's where they said they had up their first fifty employees and then from fifty they actually went to a thousand in only two years and then i'll take screenshots of their website and in doing that you can actually see what like how the the evolution so aggression yeah and i'm just starting i'm just making this up with airbnb but it could be like it started as air bed breakfast and it was about renting cuts inside of a living room and then oh wow they actually changed their their positioning to travel like a local and they started taking higher end pictures i i don't know what it is but and and and when they start actually taking higher end pictures that was actually right when they right before they raised their hundred million dollar funding and so anyway you can actually track the progression really nicely by doing this and i love doing that i love it and so you can actually see oh uber uber cab dot com they were only black car services oh when they raised all this money they actually got rid of the black car the black car became secondary so actually the black card didn't work so i switched to this you know what i mean so it's kinda cool yeah you can totally reverse engineer a lot of this stuff so some of the tools we used to this the way back machine which is the internet archive so just google the way back machine that lets you put in any domain name and then you go back in time and they took screenshots of what the website look like on june twelve twenty yeah twenty ten and then that you can go back you could see uber what and who uber home homepage it look like back how are they describing themselves another one i do is tech crunch i go to tech crunch i search for a company's name and then i reverse sort it by the earliest mention of so like you can go twitter you can see the very first article is you know mike arr being like you know the buzz at the party this week was about twitter spelled without the you know without the vowels basically it's like the short messaging service who's kinda fun you do to do this but you know who cares it you people are just tweeting about there they're just tweeting about their breakfast and it was all through sms like then you can just kinda see what was going on then so i like that one that's a that's a useful one another one i'll do is i'll go on twitter and you can twitter advanced search so you can type in anyone's name and you could do things like twitter doesn't make this obvious how to it there's like a format of how you write these in but you write like at the sam par before two thousand and eleven yeah and then you say minimum three hundred likes and i can kinda go see your most popular post at that point in time what were you talking about what was working for you what wasn't so i've done this with a whole bunch of people and i kinda like i really am a big reverse engineer type of guidance it's not that you could copy it but it's just data points it's a way to fast forward experience because experience the hard way is slow it takes like decades to get good at things and to learn and to like figure out what's normal what's not what's fast what's slow what's good what's bad and a better way to do it is to like download a whole bunch of data points quickly and it's not perfect experience but it's better than being blind and and just kind of like going off only your personal so i some ways i would actually go as far to say you can copy it you you can you actually can copy a lot of stuff and i think you should sometimes so for example this first by the way first versions dot com this is a wonderful website this is such a good website i this is so cool i wish they don't even by the way what they do it is not just internet like well like what we're talking about home homepage just because that's i cannot me but they'll be like this is the yeah this is the first version of tom and jerry like the very first pilot and like last night i don't know why for whatever reason before i went to bed i was watching the very first pilot episode of curb your enthusiasm before was even a show and i was i just love seeing that og g og the first pilot of always sunny in philadelphia where they're using the handheld camera like i like seeing that because it just as somebody who is frequently starting things it's important to go see that your favorite things started with very humble simple kinda shitty beginnings and and then you know you sort of you can see how much better they got over time this is so good i love this i'm gonna link to you some link something to you so in two thousand and thirteen i created this thing i called the ceo doc it was a stupid name but i i sent it to you and you could actually see that it's so funny that you do this because i mean it where it's it's so funny that we're similar and we've been doing this for years so i created oh is it not working i created this document where i would take i think i had a list of five hundred people and i would make timelines for each of their lives and i would say started there it was broken into apprenticeship first hit and then the self actual virtualization mode so for example jack do started a apprenticeship at age twenty two from twenty two to twenty eight he basically was like this poor nobody who worked as a dispatch service for a taxi cat company twenty eight to thirty one started twitter at twenty eight it actually became a pretty big hit really soon at twenty nine and so i have timelines and then i have average age is a average age for each person and so i love doing that stuff and it works so good for for just seeing like what's possible right so we're we're actually quite similar i've been doing this as well for a while yeah it's great to nerd out about this kind of stuff okay so first version is cool i have another kinda cool thing okay here's a here's a idea i would say this is not a business it's probably a very bad idea maybe this is something that this is you reminded me of it because this thing that we're doing is like the thing we're talking about is extremely nerdy and probably most people don't don't do what we're describing like kind of like go back and map out the evolution of companies or people or whatever it is so similarly i i i want a tool that i'm calling business pocket so pocket is this chrome extensions this app or service where you like if you see an article you like but you're on time to read it you just hit pocket and it's like you put it in your pocket for later do you think that i think it used to be called read it later do you think pocket is going well i bet you it's going pretty badly i bet you that'd be a cool company to buy yeah i don't think it's going well it got really big and it raised a bunch of money and then like it's just been around for so long without like an exit that you wonder did it just get like become obsolete somehow along the way but anyways it was just a way to save articles now i actually want something what i'll call business pocket so i have this bookmark thing in my chrome that's called cup companies to watch it's basically like anytime i stumble across a company i find interesting i'm gonna doing that it's like this thing is like ten years old now i find an interesting company and before it used to be i wanna see if this will be successful or maybe i should if i was an investor i would invest this so i wanna like flag this and then i'll come back later in three years and i'll see how it turned out whether whether i would have made money or lost money on this thing and so i've just been collecting this for a long time now in reality i hit at bookmark and then i like never go back and go recheck those because who's got the time but i would love a service that's almost like a programmatic news newsletter it where i can just flag either people or companies that i say i wanna keep a watch i wanna keep watch on this company or this this this individual and like the ceo or maybe this company the startup and then i wanted to like basically take the ten that i've flagged and send me anytime there's interesting news about them with some filter like you know they raised new funding they got a new job they they did they announced this thing they're on tv whatever and and you know my twelve that i'm tracking might be different than the twelve that you're tracking but like we might have three that are the same and so this company that's underneath that would just need to set up like a kinda like a programmatic way to like watch for the news around certain names and then turn it into an automated newsletter those kinda just like a random idea i don't think it's a business but i think it would be i i think it's a business when we were getting ready to decide if we wanted to launch trends or watch watch something new i wrote a landing page for this product i forget when i called it but something involving the word spy and i put like the headline was like where are your secret spy spies that trap your competitors and tell you everything that they do so you know and we delivered to you via email and i think this actually could have worked wonderfully and the reason i came up with this idea was i had a friend who worked at rocket internet rocket internet google it you it's a it's a guy it's three brothers named ali alex and something else sam brothers and they started this thing called rocket internet and basically the way it works right now it's a large publicly traded company they had this like guy named he was like the chief scientist and what they would do is they would research fast growing companies in america and they would clone them and they would deploy that company in africa in asia different parts of europe things like that brazil brazil and so they cloned uber but in mexico they cloned pinterest but for germany they cloned zappos but for germany they did amazon for they don't like the amazon for brazil i think yeah and they also owned the amazon for thailand and they would pick a variety of companies they would do like the way fair for nigeria or something like that and they had this guy who's who was called the chief scientist and all the clones of the amazon of this country that country that would probably be like eight clones and he would send an email every day this is this is the story i heard i don't know if it's true he would send an email every and it'd be like everyone amazon actually just moved on their homepage they moved the clothing from eight or a hundred pixels to the left it probably means that a clothing is a little bit more popular now than furniture hey so alright make sure you move your clothing thing or hey they they're changed their color of this button from this yellow to this orange go ahead and do that and i thought that's pretty awesome i would love to have that i would love to track my competitors because i would do a research on my competitors i would say oh which ads are they using oh i wonder why they're using this ad maybe maybe they're using this ad for this this reason that reason that reason i'm gonna go and copy it and i would use a variety of similar web facebook ad archive a reps and a few other things and i would i would just i would like oh here's where they're succeeding and here's why they're succeeding i may copy them i may not copy them and i just i just know what's working and i think that that one hundred percent could be a service that you pay a hundred grand a year for and you get and you and they'll tell you the five nearest competitors and every month you meet with their team and you say alright your competitors they're doing this they're doing that they're doing this here's what's working here's what's not working like here's a higher pot hypothesis hypothesis as to what all this means and i think actually you could charge a six figure annual contract for all of it and i think it it'd be a really cool company right yeah i told you about my friend who i i i nudge in this direction to do this for for e commerce i'll give them another shout out here he said got a bunch of sales last time i i mentioned it's all do it again shopify sales data dot com basically a a way to track your competitors who and how much they're selling and what you ads they're running and and stuff like that and just in the niche of e commerce and it's you know i don't know hundred bucks a month or something like that and i pay for it i'm like this is great you know it's a it's a valuable service and so you you could do it in a niche or you could do it you know more broadly but yeah i think that's cool yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back