Sara's List Hostile Takeover and The App that Made $1M In Ten Days

and so nikita said something in the group message which he says i think it'd be an interesting idea to ask myself or to figure out how not doing that you're you're making it too soft i remember exactly how he said it it's it's like so what are you doing doing what are you up to nowadays today so was sam you sold the hospital are you doing sean you so be what are you gonna doing nike nikita you're sitting at facebook what are you doing and he's basically he just said it straight straight up he goes i'm just thinking about how i can make ten million dollars in three months like i we're like what and he's like yeah i wanna make an app that generates like ten million dollars in ninety days what's going on we have a good episode we talk about an app that's going viral but this app is getting written about in a bunch of publications so we actually have the inside story because we kinda saw what was happening behind the scenes early early on so we talk about this guy named nikita who launches this app that has made a million dollars in like two weeks or something crazy like that and we tell you the inside story behind it what else we got and he called his shot which you know we love here we also talk about a ransom note that we got through email and why this ransom note was one of the best emails that we've ever got and me and sam live brainstorm and live negotiate how we are going to deal with this ransom notes so if you wanna see that that's at the end of the episode we also talk about the mailchimp ceo getting canceled and a little debrief of palmer lucky so that's it enjoy this episode alright we live sam paul what's up nothing how's it going you know just the usual woke up decided okay no small boy stuff today got going immediately started considering some small boy stuff and then i remembered there will be absolutely none of that today what we're what what what was it i woke up i was like i'm a little sore sore i'm wake up with a complaint i'm waking up with a complaint on one of the greatest days i've ever had wow this is this is not how i'm gonna start my day wait why was it one of your greatest days just like that's just like a general general attitude i have do you wanna start off by recap palmer lucky because after talking to him i feel like he's kind of the greatest guy of every time of the man yeah right is that how you feel i thought he was awesome okay let me just say a word that describes palmer lucky i would say like independent minded i think i think i really respected that he is independently minded i felt like all his opinions were his own you know people like when they write that shit in their twitter bio like opinions are mine not my employer you know his opinions are really his also when people write contra and thinker and it's kind of like if if you have to say that you're contra thinker you're maybe not like the most contra thinker you know what i mean right it's like the no offense yeah yeah racist butt yeah yeah yeah that's exactly what it is so i anyway yeah i i i thought that he was an independent thinker i also thought that he was incredibly enthusiastic which i like yeah very enthusiastic dead on the inside like we have we have said no to a bunch of guests just simply because they're like you know their intelligence is like cranked up to level ten their success is cranked up to level twelve but their like charisma and ability to convey any sort of enthusiasm about themselves about the world about their story is so low and and so they they make for terrible podcast but for him it felt not only like did he have charisma to tell stories about the past he seemed really pumped about what he was doing and what the future looked like and why it mattered and i just felt like this guy you know just like springs out a bed every day me too that's exactly how i felt i felt like he was incredibly enthusiastic about life and he yes that that's a great way to explain it but he dude he was so fascinating he was one of those guys that i like because i don't like i i can't think of a great word to explain say other than like prolific but also almost like this i don't think this is over explaining it or over it but like almost like a renaissance man where he would say comments like yeah i bought this marina because there's gonna be new laws about i don't even understand like what he was explaining about his marina but he said like something about his marina and like sea pour access and how it's changing and then he made another comment was like he's like i was gonna do this i mean c s is is off the table for now and i was just like i don't even really know what c s is exactly and you were just said it like well we all know c standing not now is not the time i was be boy what you talking about what the hell yeah he also he also like he'll make another comment he's was like yeah i have this house we merchant we have like a a workshop in one week and i was building a a jet engine for the water and we actually discovered that like we should make bio or what did these say we should make oil based foods it's like building a diet coke for every food and i was just like we could take this over lots of different paths but it's just so interesting to me that you have that ability yeah it was like a bunch of like candy being waved at us he's just like you know i've one of the largest samurai sword collections in the world and that just got me into thinking and it's segue quite what he didn't say that by the way but there's at least a fifty percent chance he has one of the top ten samurai sword collections of the world and one hundred percent the guy owned swords like yeah he definitely owned sorts alright so where do you wanna go next you can drive alright so check this out i forwarded you an email did you see the email i sent from about about sarah's list or maybe maybe she sent this to you too what was it so a woman named kristen sends a an email i'm just gonna read it you we'll show it on the screen you know for those on youtube because it's it's kind of amazing looking oh my god you open up the email and it says i am holding sarah dot com hostage and she goes you don't know me but i obviously know you i purchased ce list dot com i've turned it into a bomb ass website i am willing to sell it to you for twenty thousand dollars this is a steal as i purchased it for thirty thousand dollars i'm essentially giving you ten thousand dollars you're welcome if you'd never if you'd ever like to see sales dot com again and then in she turned the font small or for the first time you know replied to this message i'm looking forward to hearing from you kristen i was just like this is a amazing angle who are you and who it who is she so she's this is this is woman kristen kent so she says very story after that she goes i've been in twelve tech for twelve years you know regret i chose companies off kristen list which was not as lucrative as if i had chose companies off upstairs so for those who don't know sarah's is this concept i wish should explained we did a full episode about it basically sam's wife sarah is a self made millionaire and did not do any of the heroic entrepreneurial things you hear about in the media she just did one really good thing she just picked companies whose equity was going to like whose valuation was gonna go up four or five x in a four year period so she worked at facebook and not early at facebook not like she was like employee for at facebook like she was like in the thousands employees joined as like a middle middle manager type again i say this not as dis dispersion because of how amazing it is so like she didn't do the things that you think you have to do to become like a self made millionaire she joined airbnb again as employee i don't know something hundred what what was it maybe like three or or four hundred no a thousand oh thousand okay great and airbnb goes public at a evaluation of this four five x and so you know if you're receiving a stock grant for let's call it sixty thousand dollars a year you know on top of your you get you get some base comps i'm gonna use fake numbers base compensation let's say is one fifty and then they give you fifty k of stock a year for four over four years that's two hundred k of stock but now the stock price four or five x's you made a million dollars during that time period and you were safe you didn't have to like work ninety hour weeks you got to work at a fun growing company that was gonna like when it's category and you didn't have to have this like amazing lightning and a bottle genius idea in order to do it and so she had done that a few times and so we we said oh this was actually intentional you and sarah sat down you guys like made lists we're like made list like what's like a five hundred person company that has good maternity leave you know like these are all like the telltale signs that it's like an interesting start of has you're in the you know top quartile of pay just for off salary you have interesting benefits good health care like all this stuff that a lot of startups that are early don't have but big companies do yet they can still five or ten x so yeah we made that list so we made a list and of the we put twelve companies on that list this was like a year or year and a half ago now twelve companies on that list and i think we did the with the recap i don't remember the exact numbers but i think the in the year year and a half since then the average company values up like two and a half or something crazy like that and an eleven out of the twelve companies raised a like significant round since then so we were like very high hit rate and if you got in whatever your stock value would have been at that time i think on an average it's something like two and a half could be wrong i i don't remember the math but and so this lady sits site by the way and i'm looking at it this is amazing but the her email is a she so she dm me on twitter so whenever people deem me dm me on twitter i either ignore them or i just like clicked the heart emoji like thank you i recognize you but i don't wanna talk and that's what i did with her and i just replied it said i'm an idiot this is you're actually you're you're different yeah this is a really good one so okay so then here's what i wanted do so you go to the website it's just sara dot com it says twelve startups so that can make you a millionaire it's got a picture of rich which is hilarious and then it goes who is sarah who are we and why do we have any business sharing a list like this and then it tells the story about sarah about us whatever selection criteria it's it uses our criteria which is that it's a company that's already valued over two hundred fifty million dollars so it has a low risk profile it's likely not gonna go to zero a stable work environment a high salary great benefits but still can make you a millionaire because the the equity has potential to five to ten x and then it has our list which was like flex port and uni swap and and rep and air table and fig like fig got acquired for whatever twenty billion or something like that or more than that you know after we after we mentioned it on this list when it was that's like a ten x i think from where we mentioned it so anyways then it says find a friend a job so you go to the job board and it goes these are placeholder jobs you guys should consider syncing this up to one of these websites but those cost money which is why and the last job says i'm not doing it and the tagline so the tagline at the bottom says sarah's list get rich in five to ten years over fifty percent guaranteed yeah exactly so hilarious so then i started thinking okay so i said let's brainstorm this live here on the podcast should we do this deal and no it's okay so you your opinion is no and give me one no here's why it's just a a a website that would take me five minutes or no it would take me oh it's a website that take me three hours to copy and a domain name so for that reason it's not that valuable but what's more valuable is this lady kristen who's making it yeah her email our are beautiful her copies beautiful her i just look at her twitter this woman kristen is the exact type of people that i like to be around she also works at ex at which is basically a company founded by the founder of uber garrett i think is a character gary camp yeah and they basically are a startup up studio that launches companies i don't actually know any of the that they've launched but imagine a lot of them are really successful but she works there which is also a really good like indicator that she's like onto something do i think that we should buy this absolutely not do i think that i want this woman in my life and would love to work with her in some capacity one hundred percent agree the real value here is not the domain it's not the website it's kristen kent okay so here's my here's my proposal to kristen kent here's my counter offer my public podcast counter offer to you chris i'll give you the twenty thousand dollars i'm give it to you in fact i'll give you the thirty thousand dollars that you paid for this this domain if you really paid that much of this domain i mean that's kinda crazy and but it comes with this catch we're gonna work together on this project you're gonna do the work on the on the company side and i'm gonna do the work on the promotional side the distribution side and here's what we're gonna do with sarah's list we're gonna turn sales list into a half a million dollar a year passive income stream passive ish i should say passive it for me a little active for you by the way by the way sean what do you say we we got well let's remember this is sarah's list of which i am fifty percent of sarah's list so whatever this is he's on the side right now so sam said no no got the record no a moment ago and he's not a part of the account offer sarah herself will get a one percent royalty as we use her name not understand wait here's what we gotta do what what what percentage of the of the of the dividends would you give or would you want kristen to have chris kristen deserves fifty percent she fifty percent i agree the the other fifty percent split you and i split and ten you got it sir so the share the royalty with sarah so so here's what we're gonna do actually i don't know if i you wanna say this this deal now that we're having these the this this intense negotiation i wanna give out my great idea okay i'll give up my great idea so here's the great idea here's how we're gonna make this work so normally a job this is like monetized as a job board right it would be a list of companies that we are c saying these companies are great and let's say we might take it to twenty four or twenty five companies rather than the twelve we have today and normally on a job board you pay like five hundred dollars a post for for a job posting so we would need to go reach out to those companies get them to post the other thing you know but but hey this is maybe premium it's a curated job board maybe we could charge more maybe a thousand maybe two thousand dollars to be be posting your jobs on here so if we got people to do that you know let's say two thousand dollars a month twenty four companies let's say half half of them actually do it you know that's like twenty four k a month not bad but i think we're gonna be in this kind of constant sales outreach period so let me put out a different idea here's a different idea we're gonna take these companies and we're gonna host a demo day once a quarter what's that what's gonna happen at the demo day we're gonna basically each week we're gonna feature one of these companies we're gonna create an email list we're gonna spin off our current email list and we're gonna say we're gonna feature one of these companies we're gonna do deep dive but why these company is a good company to work for and interested people you know high high quality people in tech might well that needs to be an upsell that needs to be an upsell where it's like for twenty five doll of twenty five thousand like you get a deep dive as a minority owner i'm not sure you have a say here so i could barely hear your voice it was so faint like your equity ownership in this so so you're we're in the same room do you think i would have hit you already or or or will be coming in the next will that be coming in the next ten minutes or would it have already have happened so so you know the way you promoted hustle con where you used to write these kind of blog posts once a week i think you would you would feature the speaker of hustle con and you would tell their story in this awesome infographic and then you would say daylight you like stories like this you should come to hustle khan we're gonna have twenty five bad ass entrepreneurs including this person speaking there and you should attend and you did that for like twenty five weeks and you sold out like five hundred tickets to this thing so what we're gonna do is we're gonna do that once a week cadence about these companies do a little deep dive that's the email and then the it's gonna get people to attend the the hiring day and hiring days where the founder of those companies is gonna come and they're gonna give a little five minute flash presentation on the company and it's gonna be a cure end applicants apply to join and these have you gotta be good to join that's why we gotta to keep the quality high on the company's side and the applicant side and then we're not charging for a job posting we take the like the recruiter fee because when a recruiter places a candidate one of these companies they take twenty or thirty thousand dollars right away and so if we can place like twenty five candidates in a year at twenty thousand dollars a pop you're talking half a million dollars of of revenue which is basically all we have to do is hire a writer we're gonna hire a ghost writer who's just gonna write these company deep dives on the companies that we select have you heard of the daily it was called the daily muse now it's called the muse the muse dot com have you ever heard of that company the muse dot com no i don't think so was that alright like a women's hiring thing was that the yeah the thought yeah it was it's called the muse dot com it's been around now for ten years and the woman who started i've been actually dm i've wanted to come on here yeah she went to duke too oh did catherine and take her name yeah and so she went to yc and so i actually originally thought they that this was a great idea but they screwed it up by raising a lot of money and i think they've raised twenty thirty forty fifty tens of millions i i don't know the exact number but basically the what they would do is they would do these deep dives on companies and charge the company some like fairly big fee to do a deep dive on the company and they somehow got tons of traffic now they're still getting eight million people a month coming to their website or six million something like that and they had tons of people coming to their website from search which is incredibly valuable and i thought that they like were just chugging it along but like not doing that great because i hadn't heard about them i have a feeling and they actually might be killing it because they raised a lot of money and they actually are starting to buy other companies at this point and they do these deep dives on companies and another guy who does this as packing mccormick and i have no idea what he charges for this anymore but when the economy was crushing it i think he was charging twenty five to fifty thousand dollars more per deep dive think it was you think it was a little more i remember he was making a hundred thousand a month if i recall correctly off his deep dives and i think he might have been doing one or two a month wow that that's pretty amazing and so i think you could do something like that the no crowd by the way we do a deep dive thing and it's like i don't know i forgot it what cost i think it's like it's like something between twenty five and forty k depending on on the total like promotion and who do you hire to do that i wrote the first few like we have one of our writers wrote it and then i like kinda like changed it big time but now we are hiring a writer just to do the deep dives how much would you pay a writer to do that couple grand a month like two grand a month no no really just per deep dive like i'll pay two thousand two one article so this the value is not in the writing the value is in that we have a huge list and that if we promote something to this huge list you're gonna get a bunch of of traction or you're gonna get usage or you're gonna get candidates or whatever it is so the writer is not bringing the value the writer just needs to deliver value but the the list is what the list size is why you can charge that much yeah it's pretty fascinating i think this is an really interesting business i've always i mean i'm the one who even turned you on to job boards aren't i so like you know in yeah i don't even i wouldn't have imagine met sarah out of yeah so actually i percent i introduced you a list hand sarah so and before me you weren't even into dot com so like you're welcome so i think kudos to kristen i think she's on something well i think we're on to something but but she also it seems pretty specific said if you want if you want a side hustle that'll make i don't know two fifty k a year for you it's there for the taking i think that's a gotta do is all the work that's yeah but we'll we'll promote it here this is an interesting thing i don't think this is an event adventure sized business which is i i guess why but isn't going after it but it maybe could be it was business back of the day that went through yc called developer auction do you remember this no but that sounds a little weird that's sound weird in a great way so basically what they did was they were like no dude that's not in a good auction humans doesn't it exactly have the best branding that's why it was great k guys a head turner and you know when you're a small company you need to be a head turner and so so these guys basically they they realized they were like wait the power dynamic is off why is it all about applying to jobs when actually like the developer is like the most valuable like developer who was like gold in silicon valley and so they said why don't we just curate like the top developers that's so like who are these quote ten x engineers and then let's just have them almost like a beauty pageant they walk down the stage and and the companies are like raising their panel i guess that's not what happened to beauty pageant but like an auction where the the companies were raising the pad like i'll give them three hundred thousand i'll give them four hundred thousand i'll do his laundry and then someone one's like you know i'll fuck poop and it's like you know that's basically like the were like just falling over themselves trying to get this talent and so they did one and it was amazing it was like you know fifty engineers or whatever and all the engineers got this huge page jump from these top companies that are like oh shit that's awesome and then it it built a little flywheel where they're like the next batch of really great developers like yeah yeah you're gonna do all the work for me to like get me my next job offers awesome all i gotta do is just go and explain how like yeah i helped scale netflix is like video infrastructure so that you know we got this latency in this blah blah blah so they would just go explain what they did and then the companies would bid and it was kind of a great idea i thought they eventually it but the problem is it wasn't gonna scale up it was like two almost boutique and so in order to scale up they changed the model and then ended up pivoting into something else altogether but like if you just kept it boutique which again you you can't do this if you raise a bunch of venture money because then your expectations is to go huge yeah but if you're like if you like making you know a million dollars a you know a year of like passive income you could do that with a boutique model like this just by basically creating a demo day but instead of startups pitching investors you have you have companies pitching to top talent and so you could just if you're good at c right if you're a good curator right we we did a good job c on the company side now you just gotta do a good job c on the talent side you could actually create a pretty solid side hustle here do you enjoy working with your wife no i there are enjoyable things but there are also some very unbelievable things but i tell you this on everything if we have to like assemble some like ikea furniture i'm like i hate doing projects with you and like they're like we're both we're both too stubborn we both want our way and i'm like why don't you just listen and she since she's like why don't you just listen i'm like because i don't wanna listen and she's like when me other wanna do i so i've been i've i'm i'm coming out i'm gonna do the idea boot camp again and i was trying to commit sarah like quit her job and like do this and it ain't happen we like did it we did a few test trials and dinner her together and yeah it it didn't work out like it it just like me talking to her like where coworkers just just doesn't work yes yeah that's exactly the problem i talked to her like i would talk to somebody who's like you know somebody you know on my team at my startup and she's just like why are you speaking to be like this and i'm like well the i'm not in his mode right now i'm mean like his modes his modes yeah she's just like like i would be like look you're not stupid but this is stupid and she'll be like why are you talking to me like this i'm like what do you mean i'm i'm i'm trying to encourage you and like don't you wanna like climb up this organization's ladder like don't you wanna be great at achieve great day and she's like just wants to punch me the stomach act the way not me i'm like yeah i don't know if this is gonna work i i wanted this to work but i i don't think this gonna happen so i don't i i don't know how the couples do it but wasn't working for us there are many great examples like the founders of event right were that's a husband and wife couple the founders of of be back in the days and michael burst they've husband wife couple they work together just great and yeah but i think it needs like that complimentary personalities where one and also like i don't have the best bedside manner you know a shocker like you know pretty direct and pretty blunt about stuff and i you know i don't have that thing that some people have going for them i think you have this where you could just be hell blunt and it's like sam being and sam like you know you know he's gotta he gets he gets to play by his own rules because that's just the way he is i have like i have too much finesse in my game like if you have if you have no finesse people are like he's got no finesse it's fine like he's just being blunt don't take it seriously but if you have any then it's like oh he could have said that differently but he chose to say it the wrong way and you don't get the you don't get that like that you know that pass to just like you know say things you know the the wrong way earlier in the episode we said you would describe palmer lucky in one word and you i think you know we both said different things if i had describe the this last sixty minute episode in one word i would say exhausting this was an exhausting i i feel like i just went on like a journey with you and i need to go rest my eyes does how you feel i know that's i'm just getting stronger by the minute dude that that i believe that's called anti fragile you and i are not the say i'm about time yeah you and i are absolutely not the same where do we go from here do we end it here do we keep go i wanna do two little things one alright i just wanna have a moment of silence for the mailchimp ceo what happened he like wait the mailchimp ceo or the founder ben ben who was happened i think right he was i think he quit when they sold it so i don't know exactly ben chest ben shuts down who i love so okay so so mailchimp was this like darling they were bootstrap i think they're boots up forever then they sold to intuit it for many billions of dollars they did it for like twenty years and they did it out of like atlanta so they were like this indie success story right like they're like you know like there's like hundreds of indie hackers right now on hackers dot com that like by the way you said atlanta on a very funny way it's kinda like i usually say detroit you just said atlanta you put you put a hard at on that i atlanta i like that atlanta okay well you know it's like d detroit detroit atlanta but so this guy he he had a step down so he goes so did you see what what are you did or what happened so he sent a so he he sent like an email he looks like that where where his little pull i see it yeah he basically just said he's he basically said chestnut said he identified a dangerous trend in his workforce new hires introducing themselves using their preferred pronouns this is completely unnecessary for a woman who is clearly a woman to tell us her pronouns as she her and a man who was clearly a man to tell us that his pronouns are he him he wrote in an email to a small group of employees instead chestnut said he understood the practice rooting kindness but added that in the long run this approach just more harm than good forcing people to behave in certain ways that are the opposite of inclusion okay sounds not horrible but at the dangerous dangerous path to go down by the way my recommendation to all of us is to just not comment on this i think we should just read it what happened and then a moment of silence for for for for this guy for getting fired basically fired here oh i stepped down coincidentally right after this but you know for for you know whether you agree with them or disagree with them i kinda feel like having to step down is a pretty like severe panel having a step down from your own company and a pretty severe penalty for like having a point of view on this stuff but like maybe that's like maybe it's a lot more severe than i think i don't know like well what's great i think that when you look at when you think about these things words aren't just words you have to look at intentions right and his intention if you we don't even have to read it but his intention is not to say that i his intentions are good his intent intentions actually i think are rooted and like i wanna make everyone feel included and i wanna be productive and i'd you know whatever and i'm just reading this email a little bit like here's live and so it it doesn't seem like a negative email here's the part where i think it got dicey form so he goes he goes in the email he goes first there is a tiny number of peeps at mailchimp strange to use peeps maybe that's like what they call themselves is that like a chip word yeah so there's a very tiny number of peeps at mailchimp who consider themselves transgender forcing either with orders or through guilt the approximately thirteen hundred other peeps to adopt a new communication paradigm that humanity has never had to use in our three hundred thousand years of existence and under a hundred fifty thousand years of spoken language in order to make things slightly more comfortable for an extremely small group of pee is completely illogical and he says that if you're forced to do something illogical eventually you will believe and do anything even if it's vicious so okay that's like a little like he says now nowadays everything is incredibly politicized i'm finding that peeps are no longer motivated by meaningful work they're motivated to make political statements they're using company time and company resources to win a game again against their opponents in a game that is raging in their minds and on social media understanding and respecting that people can have different different views is part of being american part of being mature adults peeps of all different political leaning are free to vote the way they want blah blah blah but it's not for the workplace so that's what he said i'll leave it to anybody to agree or disagree my personal opinion is i understand what he's trying to say i think he said it in a pretty stupid way like it's a little too aggressive and using the word peeps when you're talking about these things is also like if i i i i i agree with the sentiment here but i think that if i if it were a hot button issue i wouldn't use slang yeah you can't be like to the homie that had to use the p i was like like i guess internally may they must just always use that use that like you know like facebook had like when like and now has like meta made so i'm like dude it's causing my to use a pronoun is un meta like there's two words that i hate using in a serious like argument or discussion like if i'm talking to sarah and my wife or like someone else about like look like you know they said this in their tweets like if it's ever like the word tweets and it argument meant like well i tweeted did you see the tweet do you see their tweets you know what like i don't well she tweeted it like i i don't wanna use that word or text that was text yeah like when i'm having a serious conversation i wanna talk about something and gotta use well he tweeted that you see his tweets yeah because it's too tutor adam them and it's like yeah it doesn't sound i'm not a fan sorry yeah i i'm gonna add peeps to that list so yeah r alright ben i like ben i don't know him i'm acting like i do i've called he emailed him with ton of times and he's never replied to me but so we kinda know each so and seems like so karma yeah i guess he just one of those peeps yeah he doesn't apply my emails he can see what happens his those peeps yeah he's he's him in a six billion can go off and be unhappy by themselves but you know whatever i like ben chestnut touch chestnut i love mailchimp i think it's a great company yeah me too i think is a cool really cool success story this data is wrong freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow better do you do you wanna talk about nikita yeah we kinda did but it seems like i know we lost it over i think so okay at the end of a podcast a few days ago the sean's story one we talked about this guy in nikita beer who you and i are both friends with but we talked about it at the end of like an hour session and i realized this is actually really amazing and deserves a significantly more time and so i'll start give yeah so nikki nikita bi he's our good friend we're in a group text message with him it's that's actually how i got to know and everything i'm gonna explain most everything is public information so this is like through articles and this twitter so i'm not gonna say anything that is confidential but basically he started an app called tb h so i went to school in berkeley california start an app called tb h which was basically some type of like viral high school app that like you could answer questions about your peers something like that it it wasn't incredibly significant of an app but it went viral and got millions of users very quickly after him spending over two years trying to create viral apps and so we kinda felt like he kinda honed in on what works and more importantly what doesn't work facebook eventually buys the app for tens of millions of dollars originally it was said to be like a hundred million i think in a recent article they're like it was actually like forty million which is still a great outcome and that was about five years ago and so nikita said something in the group message which you says i think it'd be an interesting idea to ask myself or to figure out how doing that you're you're you're making it too soft i remember exactly how he said it it's it's like so what are you doing doing what are you up to nowadays today so was sam you sold the hospital what you doing sean you still be what are you gonna doing nike nikita you're sitting at facebook what are you doing and he's basically he just said it straight straight up he goes i'm just thinking about how i can make ten million dollars in three months like i and we're like what he's like yeah i wanna make an app that generates like ten million dollars in ninety days so and we talked about that like that's just crazy that's how outlandish we brought it up on this podcast but it was a really interesting we just thought of it as an interesting thought exercise like oh that's actually a really accurate from that dream okay if that's is that possible yeah it is possible i guess it is possible so then i i'm a smart guy let me find it i find out a way i would do it is obviously very challenging and so i guess he must have had i don't actually don't know if this is true or not but i imagine when you sell a company to facebook you have some type of non compete well typically not competes are anywhere from two to five years the other day a few months ago it was the end of a the five year periods since selling tb and so i imagine that was the period where he was like great i can do that and so he launches this app about three months ago where basically you you it's the same app as tb so what was tb tb h was a anonymous polling app or compliments app so you i don't know if you remember like in high school you they would always pass this thing around the end of the year the the super test and it would be like who is most likely to become a famous you know famous in hollywood oh this person in our school who is most likely to you know end up with with ten kids or whatever right you just come up with these like future looking things who's the best who's got the best smile this person wins best mile and so tb h was that because he was playing on this thing which is people are very interested in them themselves and and the people around them and so you're like alright if i i'll go through and i'll answer this quiz and it was using like so that sounds very simple under the hood it's gotta be pretty smart right because it's got a surface in your contacts it's gotta surface the right four or five names that you actually know who do you actually know so you could pick you know your friends and and then it would send them a text message and saying hey sam somebody said that you have you have the best smile in your school download the app to find out who who said it and you're like hundred percent you're gonna go find out said i have the best mile or who said i'm most likely it is who said that have the biggest crush on me and so you know that taps into like something pretty deep at a teenager and so that's what tb was got acquired and and by the way that same idea had been done many many times our buddy sue was the first episode of the podcast he had built that same super lit idea as a facebook app when the facebook app platform launched back in like two thousand and seven or something it it also went by also went crazy viral like this is an idea that goes viral and you could switch he did it on the facebook app platform nike nikita did it on the mobile platform where you would send sms you know in invites based off of this and so it's the same that was what he did then it got acquired it maybe pretty much immediately got shut down there wasn't really much retention in it and so it was like oh that's a cool idea it gets people engaged goes viral for a short period of time but there's no engagement alright sorry there's no long term retention seems it gave it it gave him this like this persona of like i am a i'm a wonder kid like i know how to make things go viral because a it is partially true and b make nikita kinda has this like aura about him that who knows if it's on purpose or not on purpose where he like is mysterious and like somewhat silent and only makes sarcastic jokes and everything comes easy to him like that's like it's like cool kid demeanor yeah yeah definitely definitely tries me a cool kid alright so then it's a app you open up it says who do you have a crush on who's got the best mile who's most likely be whatever who you trust to bail you out of jail and you you answer and they're all supposed to you know sort of like pop more positive ish questions or not it's not like mean it's not supposed to be bullying and again starts to go viral and so we sat there in this group chat as it was happening so describe kind of how it played out from your perspective he says things like alright now we're adding a thousand people an hour and i kinda brush that off because like they could baby these are just bots like this isn't actually serious well there's one little difference he launches it and we're like cool man how do we download the app he's like you have it's geo fence to these three high schools in georgia and we're like what and he's like and we're like hey and then he would post like a like you know he'd be like post his graft to it's going viral but it's got like two hundred people were like only two hundred he's like there's only like two thousand people in the school this is gonna take a like like right away but it uses like academic language like it has a k factor of blank but we're seeing that user retention stag nate at this thing and the turn happens at three percent like it was the revolution is blah we're like whoa yeah yeah that's cool and then and then he goes then he's supposed this chart and we're like oh sick like i don't like how come i don't see it when i go to my app store chart like you know social free apps he's like we put it in the games category under puzzles he's like he's like that way we're gonna like stay away from competition till we flip the switch and we're like whoa like damn this guy is like this is like if you had game of thrones and they're talking about like you know how to invade king's landing it's like these guy guys standing at this giant table moving these chess pieces around like talking about conquering that's him but the chess pieces are like high schools and he's been have been yeah it was like it's like james bond villain of high school you know quizzes if that's such a by the way there's one key twist to the whole thing it's tb again but he's like this time we're not trying to be the next snapchat we don't care about the attention we're just gonna put a in app purchase that says pay to see who voted for you but he's like they're gonna pay and we're like well i get well with a pay they're gonna pay and it's like the thing is a freaking six ninety nine weekly subscription so this is basically twenty eight dollars a month this is double the price of netflix to see who voted for you and he's like yep so we're converting you know whatever four percent of people and we would take over this state of georgia georgia has this many high school high school has this many students and yeah one point eight million dollars a month okay yeah yeah let's go basically like my of how they're thinking about this and at this with tb he had raised a little bit of money he had raised money from founders front fun and gray lock and like the the when you do that it says you know you i've gotta build the next snapchat this way with this new company he just basically says dude i i'm self funded i've got four engineers living in my la house right now we're just trying to like make it big make it fast and what do they say on soft park like a scale up no startup up get big cash out bro down you know like that like that's exactly what was trying to do trying to just get in get the bag get out and just maybe out idea for you yeah not and so anyway about ten days after it launches i'm just making these numbers up but i it's around a week maybe two weeks he starts saying like oh man people are starting to spread these rumors that this app is being used for human trafficking and we laughed that off and he goes so i changed it to no he was like he's like yeah it's it's like annoying like as hell like we're getting a bunch of like oh it's gonna die and we were like what the thing that like you called your shot you're like i'm gonna build an app that goes viral it's gonna make ten million dollars in like ninety days and that's a ludicrous thing to say you spend like two years plotting he went through a bunch of different ideas to think about what it could be decides you know what tb with a pay launch it like spends you know has these like seven engineers living in his living room you know the place smells like you know ramen and old spice and he's like alright we build the app after a few months we launched this thing in these pockets of georgia goes viral but then this hoc you know this host starts saying this is for i don't even know what the sex trafficking human sex trafficking human i even understand but i didn't even understand but i those words youtube's is gonna like d prioritize this algorithm like we're out of the algorithm now because i said that out loud and he says that he's like well it's actually it's just like a couple reviews but i have a feeling that these couple of reviews are gonna like spread so someone already made a video on tiktok this is just how things work and so i'm like it's whatever like that i don't understand that entirely that sounds like you're just being like neurologist but sounds good so he changes the name to crush right yeah so app starts getting deleted it or no it gets taken it down in the app store apple takes down or something like that i like we're gonna petition but while we're gonna re upload as crush and he sends us hey guys like new brand and it looks exactly like yeah exactly like crush the soda like like the great flavor like soda it sends it in the text and i if i got so thirsty like you know like the pe dog response i saw that and i was like i need orange soda on my tongue right now and i hadn't had orange soda like a decade and i saw that thing and i was like i need that relaunch again in like you know alabama this time he's like okay we're going south and they attack alabama with their four high school launch strategy they they have this like thing set to a tee and by the way like he had he had wrote of memo inside facebook ones about how tb h was launching high schools effectively like we created basically his theory is basically for a social app the most valuable thing you can have is a reliable way to test your app so like can you get this into a a a small network like like a high school where most people know each other or know of each other of a thousand people quickly because if you could do that you could test it in one high school see what the data says and then you could tweak the app launch in another high school we'll do it again he's like that reliable like petri dish to test in is the most valuable thing so they had come up with this strategy which was a this memo got leaked when he was at facebook which was like they would create instagram accounts like you know crush you know you know arch archipelago high you know and it's like they they they take the high school name and they take the the brand name of the thing and they would make the account private and they will go follow every kid who had like you know class of whatever twenty twenty two in that high school they would follow all of them so then the kid was who followed me it has my high school name it the click it it's private to to find to see the profile you gotta follow back so they would they would request to follow so whole bunch people request to follow he's like that we would not accept anyone and it's like this is like that you the dentist system on all the sudden he's like you know first we demonstrate value then we take it away and he's like then at four pm on the day before launch which out the day of the launch when everybody gets out of school you know we have a guy at a truck watching people leave the school as soon as they do we hit except request we accept everybody's request everybody gets a notification at the same time and then they go to it the bio basically says download the app see who likes you you download the app and then he's like we would instantly go viral in a high school so you this like launch strategy which was i thought pretty pretty great pretty tactical so he's doing that again now with crush crush gonna go it's gonna launch like that and it starts to work and we're like wow dude you did it again like the first one wasn't a fluke you did it again all of a sudden like it totally attracted a different demographic because of this like stupid orange soda logo and the name crush and so he's like oh god you know cut alright let's move the scene around change the name again and it comes back for act three and this time it's called gas and by the way this whole so he'd been working on this for many months maybe more than a year i don't know but this whole thing that we're describing takes place over two to three weeks and it gets to the point where he starts making up phrases like we are acquiring new users at this rate per hour you know a lot of times we talk about saying like arr annual recurring revenue and what a lot of companies will do is they'll take like their monthly run rate and multiply that by twelve to say they're this is what they're doing he was basically doing that at a per hour basis so he's like oh work you know we're we're acquiring a thousand users per hour which means our our rate of like a new users is like three hundred and sixty five million whatever and yeah he's he was like he's like if you look dawn day day it's like you're measuring the period of like the sunrise day over day at what your what your numbers are that's insane and so gas starts like taking off similar to the original one but this time even even more and in a matter of like seven days i believe he starts tweeting out the results and letting us know and basically within like seven days give or take five days i don't know exactly it was doing a million daily it had a million daily users was adding thirty thousand new users an hour users were answering three point two million polls per hour in a brown like ten days i believe he's hit a million dollars in sales and are also around ten days in it was number one in the app store and he had been telling us it's gonna be number one in the next handful of days it's gonna be number one and he totally called it and we're talking number one like above tiktok above instagram above facebook yeah totally this is all true and he said he tweets out he goes ladies and gentlemen after a five year hiatus i'm no longer a one hit wonder interesting introducing gas the number one app in the app store and this is when it turns to the point where it's incredibly hard for us to compliment him and a root for him because clearly this guy has a chip on his shoulder clearly for the last five years he was mad that he sold too soon or didn't become like huge or didn't become wealthier or didn't become whatever his his target was but he fell short it felt like and now he's proving that he is the man because here's what's here's what here's what starts happening and he gets hilariously cocky about it which i i i love i love i love it makes me like it even more but i love and so like here's an example a really popular vc tweets out his name name's is josh sc momentum growth is a powerful feeling and they could also go away really quickly i have been surprised i have been surprised how many things with seemingly unstoppable momentum have slow crawl this past year zooming out growth without deep duration adoption in the habits doesn't count and nikita replies just at me and so basically he's just starts going around anyone online on twitter who's a big shot who starts talking about height growth stuff nikita just pops said it said what are he talking about me and it's hilarious it is so funny and so around this time though the rumors start happening again about chi trafficking and he starts tweeting and sharing the craziest stuff and this gets so big that ashton k is re tweeting who ashton k k i didn't entirely know this but like his whole like phil thing is human trafficking and so these rumors of human trafficking start happening and and ashton butcher re tweets nikita and says not nothing like said this a screenshot it's ashley k dm him and he's like he just he's just screenshot to us these like big shot people that are just dm him like wink face instead of even saying hi they're just like it's like is this how this guy like slides into dms that's interesting not that wasn't an ashton creature but like then when also retweeted it i'd love to i'd love to meet you i'd love to help you know this thing's a hoax because basically what nike nikita is saying is he's like the thing is taking off like you wouldn't believe that you know it's going viral the k factor too and one k factors too what that means is for every person who joins you know viral they invite two more right so it's like you know you thought covid spread fast watch how fast the gas app is gonna spread it's gotta incredibly high viral efficient that just basically means for free it's gonna take over whatever demographic it is until that until that coefficient starts to go down because either it's saturated or hits a new market where it's less viral and so it's going viral is like i'll help you try to fight these hoax trimmer because on tiktok on snapchat you just see story after story of somebody saying guys delete this gap at gas app it's su as hell i downloaded it and a a white van started following me around my neighborhood and and people are like oh my god oh my god share share to keep it keep our sis like our school safe and it's like girls like girls do not download gas app like like you ever seen the show you on netflix say no more and it's like it's like people are just spreading this thing and so it's like what the hell like where is this coming from and he doesn't know and he's like it's gotta be a competitor and we're like okay what like what kind of come i mean you've just launched like two weeks so how are they doing this coordinated like social like si ops attack on you and your user base and he's like then he's like we've we've located the source of the hoax or or it originated in china well here's what he says here's what he says it's this is the most official tweet ever it's so funny he goes after an investigation our team found several indications that the gas app that the gas app human trafficking hoax was planted by an entity or person originating in china our data shows users connecting from china when the app first began growing and the fake fake review the first fake review were posted at that same day and so basically he's accusing something or someone in china who starts spread he's accusing the country yeah and so this is just taken it off from i wanna make million dollars i wanna get in and get out to china is trying to actively bring me down he tweeted out dude i am calling for a total and complete ban of chinese goods in entering the united not just joking but i told him i was like dude you need to go lean in way more because what he's doing in his p push he's like the the the the hoax we're a false hoax is being spread about jazz app humans you know trafficking blah blah blah and and i'm like bro you need to go full trump you need to be like china the china virus is trying to take down this american success gas gas app you know tiktok is not only stealing your data they're trying to take us down because we are the number one at for teens china is doing this this is anti china i was like you should be leaning in way more to this i was i don't know if is true not true but like this is your only hope is to get this like you should stop saying your apps name with the words you know human trafficking and you should start saying you know why is china trying to you know spread fake news about this that is that is my my my official recommendation to you and it's and it's totally working and so this entire story that we just spent thirty minutes on this entire story we're talking like twenty days and this is the roller coaster that we bid in and he's all sad he's on fox today that's my point he says these things in this group chat and when it's on your phone when it's just on this small thing you think this is just limited to us six guys in this thing this is just no big deal but then you turn on fox business news and our fox news business and he's on there you go to wall street journal and he's on there you go to business insider bloomberg all these places and it's real i go to tiktok and i open up and there's a video about this app and basically as much as i don't like saying this because i like nikita but he is so sm he has one hundred percent called his shot and he hit it he nailed it this is this is one of the most epic stories that i've seen behind the scenes in real time in a very long time it's been quite amazing to watch this entire thing play out in just twenty days yeah he's sm as hell but i you know the same reason i find conor mcgregor very entertaining the e c right this cocky guy who tries to call his shots and i tries to pull it off like i i'm thoroughly entertained and i'm here for the entertainment and like you know good for him made it happen this this matters to him he got really pumped about this and he made it happen and it's like i feel like you know you know bane when he's like you know he sees other people like you i i feel like nikita for like four years would see other people try to build social apps and he would just like shit on them or he would be like you know or people building apps be like you know if your app doesn't let you you know flirt with somebody it's never gonna work you know like or be like unless you built the number one app in the app store like you know don't talk to me type type of attitude and and i find it you know pretty awesome that like you know like bane when he's like oh you know you know you whatever the line is he's like you know you you you trained in the dark i was born in the dark like that's him with these like teen viral apps he's like you know oh you're trying to make a social lap i was born to make social apps and like it just deep the fact that he just relaunch the save app is hilarious to me in seventy ways he probably had just like a countdown timer to like when the non compete ends and wasn't that the because i talked him in between and he was considering all these like other ideas you're considering this one real estate idea is considered other idea and then it was just like like you know it's sort of all like harry potter or the wand chooses the wizard it's like hey it's just pulling me back in just when i think about i gotta go and do this afghan again like are are you fucker really gonna let me just do this again and he did it again yeah this is pretty amazing it also goes to show that it shows a few things it kind of breaks a lot of narratives which i actually like which is a like you don't really need like a mission you know all the time like and i think that like with us he's don't need a verbal mission the michelin is normal a million dollars to three months that's a great mission issue and i do actually think that maybe there is something we're like oh it makes teens feel good or whatever maybe that's like there but like i think what's there are really above all else is get big fast because that's exciting and just like play the puzzle it's just a puzzle and i think that that's like kind of the dominating factor behind what's driving him and i think that that's the funny thing he goes on fox news and he's like doing the you know they they have the person talking and then the background they're showing screenshots of the app and so he's saying he's like well the thing we wanted to do was bring positivity to teens you know teens feel really bad from whatever like you know instagram positivity do doing app where there's you know it's anonymous but there's no bullying there's no there's no like sort of negativity and the screenshot is a poll question that says want to steal them from their boyfriend he's like steal from the he's like he's like you know we just wanted he's like i get messages every day from teens saying you know yeah i was gonna do something bad to myself but this app came out and now you know i'm running around in in a field full of flowers and it's like it was this hilarious the whole thing is is like straight silicon valley hbo show like it's so funny to me it is so funny and it's so exciting another thing is that basically when you're building these apps like the really good folks are just like man about these little small numbers and just tweaking them and just just being obsessed with these little small things when most people are carried about we're worrying about design or branding or the logo or just these things that don't matter like dude all i care about is making this k factor like more than one and so and when it's not but it's point nine nine it's we're screwed we gotta totally redo this and i just thought that it's a really interesting story and this has been like a roller coaster and one of the coolest things that's happened in a long time i just love following along this yeah props to him great great job thank you for the thank you for the entertainment but alright do you wanna do anymore or should we save it for the next one more i do have one more but we should save that one it sounds too interesting okay let's save it same for the next one that's it we're out of here