My First Million: #54 - Atrium Closing Down, B2B Gifting & Curly Girl Hair

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now, HubSpot

just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell, and they break down why these pitches were

winners or losers.

And each company's go-to-market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find another bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

Namaste.

Namaste.

That's our Corona.

Namaste.

People are legit doing the foot handshake.

Like several people have done this to me, be like, all right, yep, Corona.

One of my co-workers, Bobby, on Instagram, he's like, handshakes are discussing right

now.

You have to do other things.

And he put a video of him and another co-worker, Katie, having their feet with their toes

interlocking.

It was so funny.

It just triggers everyone.

Yeah.

He was like, you can't handshake anymore.

You have to do other methods.

Their toes were interlocking.

That's like, that is the best content on social media is these photos that will just trigger

people.

When they see that, there was one where this guy was on a plane and he was barefoot and

he put his foot on the armrest of the person in front of him.

And he got like, I don't know, whatever the max number of Twitter users are that could

share.

That's how many people share this thing.

That's awesome.

We should, I should take that from him and share it on my stuff because I'll steal their

clout.

Last podcast we talked about run the world.

Yeah.

Okay.

So.

Retraction.

Yeah.

Big major retraction.

I signed up.

All right, guys.

It didn't work.

Platform sucks right now.

Platform sucks.

I think that if they're listening, you can get it right, but you missed it this time.

And you tweeted at them.

Do they respond to you?

Yeah.

Good customer service.

And they, I got a, I sent it to you last night.

I couldn't go to bed last night.

Two or three in the morning.

They just screwed up.

So it's just kind of buggy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

That's unfortunate.

We'll figure it out.

We'll figure it out.

We'll try another one at some point.

But we definitely did it.

Unfortunately, it didn't work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Other updates.

How about Henry with the microphone?

Talking to that.

Oh, yeah.

Get that smooth voice, that Barry Mantle of voice on here.

What's up, guys?

I'm Henry.

Oh, man.

Look at that.

New fan favorite.

That's awesome.

Jamie of, uh, from the, from the Joe Rogan experience for this podcast.

Powerful young Henry.

But, but he is leaving.

I know.

But for now, it's powerful young Henry.

I am leaving in a week, but, uh, Alan will be replacing me.

So you'll have a new fresh face.

That's awesome.

So we need to look stuff up and then Henry finds the information because we don't know

what the hell we're talking about.

Now he can say it into the mic, which is great.

Are there any other updates that we have to talk about run the world didn't work?

Henry has a mic.

Uh, no, let's get, um, we asked people to subscribe and unsubscribe and send videos.

I don't think it worked.

Don't think that worked.

Um, but podcast is growing anyways.

So I feel happy.

We're up, I think 55% since last month, which is awesome.

So growth.

If you are listening to this, you don't have to do much.

Just share this with a friend and you could tag either of us on Twitter and we will,

I'll for sure reply.

Sean will say he will and he might, I may or may not reply, but here's the thing.

I was on my way over here today and you know, I like to get in the mood.

Like I like to prime my, I like to prime the pump.

Um, I couldn't, I was like, all right, what should I listen to that's going to get the

ideas flow and get the wheels turning so that when I come in here, my brain is already

firing.

There's no podcast to listen to.

That's like this dude.

I hate to say it.

There's no other podcast that does this where it's like, there's a lot of good podcasts

where it's great storytelling, great interviews, but nobody is playing mental hopscotch with

ideas.

And so I couldn't get anything to get me going.

So that's a good sign.

When I wasn't here, Stu did it and, uh, I listened to it and I loved it and I loved

the notes even more.

Right.

I love the notes.

I love the idea about the whole Christian tithing, uh, business awesome.

And I, that's when I know it's good because I typically hate anything I'm involved in.

And how about a guy who's doing the tithing business?

He like, oh, yes, a guy messaged us, um, it sounds like he was English.

He must be in England.

He's in the UK.

He's basically, so his thing was, we didn't give him the idea.

He said the background.

So the background is we were talking about, uh, me and Stu were talking about, okay, cool,

religious, religion tech, church tech.

And one of the ideas that came up or one of the things I told him, I said, somebody had

reached out and said, give me three months.

I'm going to be on the podcast because I'm going to build this thing.

It's badass.

You guys should know you're talking about church tech.

There's this company that does digital tithing.

It's called push pay.

It's big.

Four billion process, 98 million in revenue.

There's another one called tidely and he's like, but they're not big in the UK or Europe

right now.

I'm going to build it in UK and Europe and in the, uh, the, the Facebook group, which

we'll put the link in the show notes, uh, he's providing these video updates.

So he posted his first video update.

I don't know if you saw it, um, where he's like, I got 23 customers, churches who were

interested in doing this, including one that runs 2000 churches.

And he's young.

And he's a young guy.

He's a smart guy.

And he's like, look, here's how I came up with this idea and I'm doing it.

I'm going to provide video updates every week in this thing.

And uh, I love the war, I love when people share their work.

I love when people work in public.

I think it's a extremely underrated thing to do.

And every time you do it, you get this army of people who are rooting for you and opening

up doors for you as you go.

I took completely agree and it keeps you accountable, which I'm excited to see what he's going

to do.

Hopefully his next video is a little shorter.

Yeah.

This one was like six minutes, eight minutes.

I watched two of the eight, but I joined all two that I watched.

I liked that guy.

Um, so show, I guess we should, we should put a bruise.

Uh, I think that's how you say his name.

Abray you.

Abray you.

Yeah.

Um, we should put his show notes in the, in the description.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

This guy is a listener.

He just makes these great notes.

We don't know him.

I mean, I met him recently.

I was the first met up.

That's what he did.

Just shock you or what?

Well, I met him and he goes, Hey, why don't you follow me on Twitter?

I was like, I don't know.

I'm sorry.

And he goes, just stop being a little bitch and follow me.

That's one of the first things he said when I met him, I was like, nice to meet you.

So, uh, kudos to that guy for whatever you want to give him.

I had this blog post.

I used to try to blog about business back in the day when we were doing our very first

start up right out of college and none of my posts got read by anybody.

We cared, but one post went semi viral and it was called the first to curse advantage.

And basically I was saying how in a meeting, the first person who, uh, who uses a curse

word, uh, sort of establishes themself as the person who just doesn't give a fuck about

the, um, they put themselves in a position of power and it also builds a different level

of rapport because you're obviously using informal language with somebody else.

And you're demonstrating that you're not seeking their approval in a way.

And so I always, in meetings, I do this, I try to be the first to curse, uh, in, in

a meeting.

But can I say, I don't love that.

And I'm like, because you don't like cursing in general or, I mean, I actually, when I

hear myself curse, I'm like, man, I sound kind of trashy.

I agree.

I don't like when I hear myself do it and I think I do it too much, but I've noticed

in meetings it changes the dynamic like instantly and for better or for worse, but I've, but

I think the difference between being crude and for being cursing actually.

So like saying bitch, I, I fucking hate.

Oh my God.

Did you just hear that?

That wasn't a purpose.

So I don't like when people say that, uh, I don't, quick, quick story before we get

into this, I went, I got married in September and I had to go, I got married to Catholic

church and you got to go meet with a priest ahead of time.

And I was really nervous cause I don't, I don't, I'm not practicing.

I don't go to church and, but I wanted, I, the whole wedding was, they have to approve

it and the whole wedding was on the line, right?

So I had to like be a good Catholic or at least appear like one.

And I remember I was sitting there and the guy was asked, the priest was asking me and

my wife, my future wife about like, so do you guys agree on children?

What do you think about birth control?

All this stuff or whatever he was asking.

And I would just say whatever I thought had to be, I was very nervous.

I was like, uh, yes, sir.

Yes.

We go to church, uh, three times.

Like I just said everything.

And then my phone rings and I was so nervous.

I go, uh, I go, Oh fuck, sorry.

I went really loud and then he looked at me and I was like, shit, my bad.

I didn't be the cuss.

And, uh, I thought I was so embarrassed and mortified.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

But he let it go.

He let it go.

Good guy.

Yeah.

He let it go.

I thought I made a joke about how I was asked him at school he went to and he said he had

a lot of student debt and he said, uh, uh, he's like, yeah, but the young guy, young

like his thirties or maybe late thirties and he said, uh, but the church pays for it.

And I made like a joke like, ah, so that's why you joined.

He didn't appreciate that.

He didn't like that.

You want to get into it?

Let's get into it.

Can you, uh, make that bigger curly girl hair?

So you guys in trends did a, uh, post about natural, the natural hair movement.

Yeah.

That's a big, big thing.

And, um, um, mixed race, mixed race and black women.

And so talk a little bit about what was in the report and then I'll tell you, uh, sort

of what I've seen separate from that.

It sounds like you're more interested in that.

You tell me what was in it.

Okay.

All right.

So, so I'll start with, uh, so my sister-in-law got, has super curly hair.

And, um,

And if you've never seen Sean, he's Indian.

I'm Indian and she's Indian and she's got super curly hair and, um, curly hair takes

a lot of maintenance, right?

Like it's humid, boom, it's frizzy and you have like, there's this episode of friends

where Monica's hair is like an afro, uh, that, that happens, or it's flat, or you want to

straighten it or whatever.

It's a lot of maintenance of curly hair.

And so, um, she was telling me, she's like, yeah, I downloaded this, like I joined this

thing.

It's a PDF that's called the curly girl, um, guide or something like that.

And, um, it's his method to like taming your hair and getting, cause I told her, I was

like, your hair looks great nowadays.

Like, what are you even doing?

And I just thought she would say like, oh, I use this other product.

She's like, no, there's like a 12 step process I'm doing every night.

Anybody with curly hair.

Cause my man anywhere else.

So my wife, if you're, uh, well, I guess they would be able to see this.

My wife's black.

She's half white.

She's also not here.

Even if they're watching.

Yeah.

So he's half white and half black.

And so, like, there's a whole thing of like, you know, when you go to sleep, you need to

wrap your hair in a certain way to sort of like whatever the oils, blah, blah, blah.

And so then, uh, and like some basics that you just don't do.

So like she, you know, she had curly hair her whole life, but didn't know, oh, I'm not

supposed to use shampoo in the same way that most people use shampoo.

And so she was telling me about some of these differences.

Anyways, opportunity.

I was like, I like these businesses where you could put out content and information that

just helps people and then, and then sort of on the back end sell the kit, um, that's

like, Oh, by the way, like if you just want to push a button and get the solution, I have

the kit that has all the shit you need.

Cause she spent hours researching all the different products that like, what is the

best version of this oil I'm supposed to have?

What is the best version of the shampoo for me?

And um, so anyways, I think there's an opportunity to do this curly girl hair kit because there's

this huge number of women that have curly hair.

The spend is in the multi billions per year in the U S for, uh, how this gets treated.

And there is this natural hair movement where it's less about doing these really damaging

things like permanently straightening your hair or, um, you know, weaves and whatnot.

Like now there's a sort of a natural hair movement.

And so people need, uh, content like education plus the tools, um, this is sort of the hair

care kit, um, to take care of the hair.

Okay.

I love that.

Henry, can you do me a favor on a new tab?

Type in Reddit curly hair.

So there's a whole sub Reddit.

One of the ways I like to look at validation and ideas for different companies is I like

to look at the engagement and size of a particular subreddit.

How many subscribers does this subreddit have?

I can't read that from here.

Use that, use that mic.

You got Henry.

What are you doing?

337,000.

That's pretty good.

I think actually for a curly hair and particularly because Reddit is, uh, mostly men, right?

And this is a woman's focused curly hair subreddit with exactly.

So great way to sort of validate the demand and then the community, uh, aspect to this

where people are sharing information and recommending products to each other.

The other side of this is it photographs great.

So, you know, before and after, I believe is the best ad that you can do before, which

is a photo after, which is a better photo.

And, um, you don't even need to show your product.

You just need to show whatever I took gave me this outcome.

I was here.

Now I'm there.

So my wife loves this subreddit.

Okay.

So here's further validation.

Um, okay.

So particularly, so I think that the, the, the angle here is you have to go ethnicity

or race specific.

Yeah.

Uh, so whether it's Indian, I have no idea if Asian women suffer from this, but if they

do go do that, I know from firsthand experience that mixed race women are, uh, whether they're

white and black or any other combination suffer from this as well.

And further validation is Fenty Rihanna has that brand, uh, that sold to, uh, the Louis

Vuitton company or what's it called L, L V H M H L V M H, uh, they're, and you could

read about the deal.

I think it was valued at $800 million.

And her, a lot of her thing is towards, uh, yeah, of course.

Mixed races.

Um, and then another idea here, and everyone knows about this woman, but Kayla, it's new.

It seems it's sing it's, it's, what's their thing called sweat or some.

Yeah.

Sweats are app.

This is, I sound like your wife does it.

My wife does it.

Yeah.

I sound like an idiot because I'm a guy and I don't pay attention.

This segment is like bros trying to talk about, you know, products they don't understand,

but I'm fascinated.

I'm interested.

I'm trying and everyone loves to try it.

So Kayla's thing, I heard that's a hundred million dollar a year company.

It is the fitness app itself, which is like crazy.

And it was just built off her Instagram following.

So that's crazy.

I'm into this.

She started with, she started with the same thing, beach, uh, the bikini body guide.

I think was her content that she put out and then it was PDF and the PDF got circulated

everywhere.

And basically she allowed the like paid PDF to get bootlegs and just shared everywhere.

And what that did was it just gave her tons of awareness, tons of marketing.

And, um, and then she launched the app, which you couldn't bootleg and you had to pay for

and then boom.

And the most interesting part about her thing was she, so she's like mainstream popular

and typically when things are mainstream popular, maybe sometimes like people who think they're

cool can think it's kind of lame.

And Sarah's a Ivy League educated New Yorker and she was like, Oh, I love this PDF.

Right.

And so she has access to all types of interesting things and she still uses it.

And I thought that was amazing that people really respected and liked it.

Yeah.

She comes across very well.

If you've ever seen her content, she's not like, um, she's not hateable.

Like she has to come across as hateable.

I know that's cool.

Um, what, oh, and last thing, Diva Curl, have you heard of Diva Curl?

No, no.

Uh, another mixed race shampoo.

Maybe it's for black women, but, or maybe it's, I don't know what the, I forget if

it's black women or mixed race women.

Um, that's what we use for shampoo and, uh, it was acquired for acquired for a quarter

of a billion.

Nice.

And there's some things on the opposite side, like Tristan Walker, who was, I think either

the co-founder or first employee of Foursquare, left to start his own, uh, African American

men's skincare, uh, product company, Walker brands, Walker brands, where it was like,

you know, shaving stuff because, you know, the hair is different course.

It's going to, the traditional shaving gear was causing problems and, uh, didn't work

out, went under.

And that kind of brings me to, I don't know why it went under exactly.

I don't know if it was.

I don't know why they just raised too much money and fucked everything up.

Okay.

So when we started our business, we knew how to create our product and we knew how to get

sales, but I had no idea how to run payroll.

I didn't know anything about healthcare.

I, uh, I didn't know anything about that stuff.

And so when we first started, we used a handful of different, uh, payroll providers, uh, a

couple of different HR providers and none of them were that great.

And so I read about this guy named Parker Conrad who launched this fantastic company

called Rippling a couple of years ago.

And since I read about it, I've been researching it and we finally pulled the trigger and started

using them and they are actually today's sponsor.

So it's called Rippling.

And what it does is when you hire new employees, it makes it stupidly simple in order to onboard

them.

It makes it really easy for your new employees to see your handbook, to see all the software

you use, to get access to that software.

Uh, and it actually makes something that I never even thought was a problem until I experienced

it, which it makes it really easy to track all of your hardware and devices.

You can see which employees use, which computer, what software they're using, and, uh, it's

all one platform.

So you could pay payroll, you can track healthcare, you can track hardware, you can do a bunch

of really interesting things on it.

They're today's sponsor.

They're one of our only sponsors that we've had.

We've been very selective of who we are allowing to sponsor this podcast and we worked with

them this time because I use Rippling personally and I love it.

So give it a shot Rippling.com.

That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G.com.

Atrium Folded.

Yeah.

So Atrium is a company that has raised $70 million.

$75 million.

$75 million.

You made a great comment that I've stolen and I've told everyone, but basically Atrium,

what they did, they never did anything really, unfortunately, they tried to do a bunch of

things.

So at first it was almost like you'd pay a flat fee and get a service done and then

they were like, all right, let's create software so lawyers can contribute with their clients

and you can see what they're doing.

But you said, why didn't they just make a law firm?

Exactly.

So basically, Atrium, if you don't know, started by Justin Kahn, who's the founder of Justin.tv,

which became Twitch and well-known guy in Silicon Valley.

So he raises $75 million pretty much out the gate, like in two rounds, I believe.

But the first round, I think they raised $10 million out of $90 million valuation on just

in saying, hey, I'm going to do a new thing.

And then they raised more money and they raised it all pre-product market fit.

So before they knew what they had and what the market wanted, they raised a ton of money.

And what I call this is the curse of money expectations in people.

And so what does that mean?

The curse of money is when you get too much money before you actually know what you're

doing, that actually decreases your odds of success, doesn't increase your odds of success.

The second is expectations.

Justin Kahn, famous guy, serial entrepreneur, raises a bunch of money at a high valuation.

And now you have the weight of those expectations, which makes you less nimble, less agile, and

less responsive to changing up your own product.

And you know what he told me?

He spoke at HustleCon.

I hung out with him backstage.

One of my secrets of HustleCon is I make everyone come an hour early and I lie to them about

when they have to speak.

It starts at two.

Yep.

So I hang out with him backstage and I meet all these people.

I told one guy, the founder of Zapier, I hung out with that dude all day, wait, doing this

thing.

And what Justin told me was, he goes, I have a chip on my shoulder that Twitch sold for

$1 billion.

This has to be $10 billion or I'm not interested.

And I was like, I don't know if that's a healthy attitude.

I don't know, Justin.

He goes, I have a chip on my shoulder, which I think that is actually healthy.

I'm all for that.

But he told me he's like, here's what the expectations are.

And I was like, that's a little crazy, dude, but whatever.

Yeah, that is a little crazy.

And the last one is the curse of money, expectations of people and people is when you have all

this money and you have all these expectations, you start hiring a bunch of people.

So they laid off like, I don't know, 100 people.

I think 200.

Why did they even have 100 or 200 people?

And they're a lawyer, like lawyer type.

I mean, these people will cost a lot.

And so before you have product market fit, you want to have as few people as possible.

You want to have as sort of lightweight expectations, you want to be extremely nimble and agile.

So they tried to do a hybrid.

Like you said, I went to one.

So one of the things they did really well was Justin leveraged what he had, leverage

your assets.

Right.

So his asset was he's got a name in the tech community.

So here's what he did.

He first, when he raised money, raised from like a bunch of VCs because he knew, well,

they have companies, they're going to send their client, they're going to send their,

those are my future clients.

And I love what you're about to say now.

I think that's even better.

And so I don't know if you know, but so I'm talking about these weekend things he hosted.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So did you go to one?

Nope.

So I went to a few.

So he basically said, cool.

Weekend workshop.

Justin Khan is going to do an atrium academy workshop on the weekend.

And I don't remember what the promise was.

I think it was like how to raise money for your company.

And so I went to one of them because I wanted to see what was up.

And it's a kind of an all day thing at the atrium office and Justin's a very charismatic

magnetic speaker.

Yep.

And so he starts telling the atrium stories.

Like, you know, when we, um, we started this company and he's like, you know, one

of the things about, I always thought he's like, I became involuntary, I became an involuntary

power user of legal services.

I love that phrase.

He's like, because, you know, when we were selling Twitch for a billion dollars, we needed

a bunch of lawyers.

And when I did this other thing we raised money for, I need a bunch of lawyers and I do all

these investments and I need a bunch of lawyers.

So I just realized, man, legal system sucks and everyone's nodding their head and he's

like, you know, it's weird that you don't know the price of something, you know, they

bill you by the hour.

So they're incentivized to spend as much time and bill you as much as they can.

You want it fast and you want to know your price.

We're like, yeah, you're righteous and I do want that.

And he's like, you know, the second thing is like, why, I looked into it.

Why isn't there a competitor?

Uh, no, the second one was like, I was having dinner with my friend who's a lawyer and I

asked her, you know, what do you guys use for project management?

She's like, what do you mean?

He's like, do you use Trello or Sana and she's like, I don't know what those words

are.

He was like, lawyers don't use anything for their project management.

Isn't that crazy?

Or like, yeah, it's crazy.

Last one, he was like, he's like, so then I was like, why doesn't somebody start a

competitor?

He's like, I realized there's some legislation that says you can't start a law firm and I'm

going to butcher what the actual legal problem was, but like, there was a rule, you cannot

start a law firm unless you're a lawyer, unless you've been a lawyer for a certain amount

of time or whatever it was.

He's like, so that's why no outsider has done this.

But luckily we found a loophole that let us start this law firm.

So we're one of the only new law firms that started not by these people.

By the end of it, you're like, do you take my money?

I want, you know, I want to invest in your thing.

Your impression of Justin Kahn is so condescending and so funny.

I don't mean it that way.

I was impressed.

I'm trying to say he told this story and I was eating it up.

And so I was like, this is amazing.

This whole workshop was amazing.

He brought in his friends who were giving advice and they were fucking awesome.

They were so good at giving advice.

And so anyways, by the end of it, and he gives me advice, he was just like, because we were

building on the Twitch platform with like a Twitch sort of like the streaming app thing.

And he was like, yeah, you know, we thought about doing that and we don't think it's valuable.

I don't think everything's going to be valuable and he was pretty much right.

We had to pivot.

And so we, so anyways, by the end of this, I was like, this was an amazing way to acquire

customers.

And that's my like long-winded way of saying he used his assets.

He did these workshops.

It's not a scalable thing.

But man, he won people over.

I think you're so wrong when you say it's not a scalable thing.

First of all, you don't need that many customers for this thing to make a very large of people.

He could have got 100 clients easily within a couple months.

Yeah.

And I hate when people say that, they go, this isn't scalable.

Like they'll talk about agencies and they'll say it's not scalable.

It's like, what are you talking about?

Some agencies have 20,000 people.

That seems like it's scaled to me, like perfectly fine.

I do think those are scalable actually.

It depends, right?

If you're a product that needs thousands and thousands of customers, then doing workshops

with 20 people at a time is not going to get you there.

So it's not scalable in that sense.

So you want to hear a cool story about that?

The founder of Pandora, his name's Tim Westergen.

I went and met with him.

When I went and met with him, we were, we went out to lunch and he's like, oh, I forgot

to do something.

Can you walk with me?

And I walked with him.

And then we go and he goes, I got to get a haircut.

And so I just sit next to him.

And this guy's worth probably $600 million.

We go to Supercuts.

Right.

And he gets a haircut for $12 and we're sitting there in the barbershop.

It's on a Tuesday at one, no one's there.

And he's telling me this story.

I go, what did you used to do?

How'd you go Pandora?

He goes, here's what I would do Monday through Thursday.

He goes, I had a COO who ran the company.

I would go, I would just, he goes, this was before, I think it was a little bit before

social media was around.

He said, I would email people and I would say, I'm going to be at this library in New York

at this time.

Any Pandora users in the area come and talk to me.

And he said he did that for four years and he goes, here's the first one I did and he

showed me a picture of him at a coffee shop.

He goes, two people showed up and he goes, here's the last one I did and he showed me

a picture and it was at the library and there was two or 3000 people there.

He goes, I would do that Monday to Thursday.

I did meetups everywhere.

All I did was travel and I did it for years and it worked out.

He goes, he goes, I was like, did it work?

He goes, every time I did it, he goes, it would take a little while, but after a couple

years of doing it, I would go to the South or go to Atlanta and we would see more advertisers

come.

So it was just like, he goes, it worked out perfectly.

Because I said the same thing.

I go, wow, that's a horrible waste of time.

He goes, no, it worked.

We made a lot of money off of it and I got to connect with users and I would relay the

feedback back to my CEO and they would do it.

So that case, he's not trying to grow Pandora's active user base.

He's taking fans and turning them into diehards and he's generating advertising revenue, which

you can get.

He actually scales enough to where you can get advertisers and he's getting feedback

firsthand, which is great for the product to get better.

That's a dope story.

It's a dope story.

I love that story.

I love that story.

There's a clip.

Related to that, by the way, there's probably like 10 blog posts that matter the most if

you're going to do a startup.

One of them is the Paul Graham essay, Do Things That Don't Scale, where he's talking about

with Airbnb early on.

And if you're kind of in the startup world, just fast forward 30 seconds, but if you're

not, you'll like the story if you haven't heard it.

So Airbnb is in Y Combinator.

They're struggling.

Airbnb is not really working.

They have like, I don't know, 20 customers or something low.

And they go into Paul Graham's office.

He's the advisor from Y Combinator and he's like, okay, so tell me how it's going.

And they're like, well, you know, it's small and not really growing.

And he's like, okay, but tell me what have you learned from your customers?

You've been out there.

What did you learn?

And they're like, well, you know, most of our customers are in New York and they're

putting their apartments up.

He's like, they're in New York?

They're like, yeah.

They're like, most of your customers are in New York?

He's like, yeah.

He's like, what are you doing here?

Like go to New York.

You need to go to New York now.

And like, why are you in San Francisco if your customers are in New York?

So he sent them over there.

And what they did, which is something that nobody else was doing was if you ever saw an

apartment listing before, the photos looked like shit because it would be somebody on

their crappy mobile phone at that time taking a photo of a dirty apartment and listing it

for rent.

And so it was like the worst sales pitch.

And so they started themselves going in.

They said, hey, can we send up, they would tell their customers, hey, we want to do professional

photos of your place increases bookings by 40%, are you open to that?

And then they would show up as the professional photographer and be like, hey, by the way,

I'm the founder.

And they would take photos and that Airbnb listing started to look great.

And everyone told them this won't scale.

And they also thought this won't scale.

And to an extent it did because even now today there's a sort of fleet of photographers that

will come and take photos of your place to list it because it was just that important

and they found a way to make it scale.

I think that's a great story.

Another thing that shocks people is I think even if you have hundreds of thousands of

users, maybe as high as millions, you could really, I've done this with us, I will just

call and talk.

I only need to talk to about 10 people and I can see the pattern that represents tens

of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.

You could just tell.

So like what you could do is A, B test it and wait.

If you're just starting, it's not going to be significant.

And that could work fine.

If you just call 10 people, you really get the information you need.

I was talking to Emmett, so Emmett's the CEO of Twitch where I'm working and being at a

big company has all these different weird things that aren't really related to my core

interests, which is startups.

So I asked Emmett all the time, just tell me about the early days.

And so I asked him, I said, hey, when you guys were pivoting from Justin TV to Twitch,

was that obvious?

He's like, no, dude, at Justin TV, like less than 2% of the watch time was on video games.

It wasn't obvious that this was the thing to do.

He's like, I just liked it.

And I thought there was an option.

And he goes, and then I talked to a bunch of customers.

And I said, do you have your notes from that?

And he's like, yeah, I do.

And so he sent me his notes from the initial conversations he had with all these streamers,

all these customers.

Can we publish this?

No, probably not.

But I was reading through them, and it was fascinating.

So first was just like, first lesson was just go ask the founder or CEO about the early

days.

I bet you they have a bunch of resources that are awesome.

He sent me the old pitch decks and stuff like that.

I think I sent you one slide, which was my favorite slide, the title of the slide, because

it was a progress update for their early investors.

Yeah.

And then he said, we're like a bulldozer in a field full of flowers.

And it was a list of all the shit they got done that month.

And I was like, this attitude, if I said that today at Twitch, it would be like, what is

this maniac saying?

Why is your slide so aggressive?

But that's how they were early on.

So then he had all these notes of his customer conversations.

And he always tells everybody at Twitch, he's like, go talk to people.

By the sixth conversation, you'll hear the same thing over and over again.

It takes six phone calls basically to figure out the pattern.

And by the sixth one, you'll know, and you won't even want to do 50 conversations.

You'll be like, all right, I can predict what this person is going to say before they even

say it after six.

That's awesome.

I think we just got ourselves another clip.

Clip it.

What do you want to want to?

First of all, share that deck with me again and also ask him if we can make that public.

Yeah, I will ask him actually, because it's pretty cool.

What do you want to do?

The one thing I can't share out of that, by the way, he asked three questions, he's like,

I said, you know, oh, customer interviews, is there a whole skill set to learn?

He goes, no, dude, I asked three questions.

I said, what do you like about your current platform?

What do you dislike about your current platform?

And what will it take to get you to switch to Twitch?

And that's what he asked every single customer.

And then he just heard the common things and he would build it and he'd go back to me and

he said, you told me this is what it would take for you to switch.

Two weeks later, here it is.

Are you ready?

And then sometimes they're like, no, still he's like, okay, cool.

What's next?

And he would just like keep doing that.

Three questions.

That's badass.

I would wrap that up if you want to learn about this stuff.

I think the best book I've ever read on this is called The Mom Test.

Yeah, I love that.

Jack recommended me that book.

It's fantastic.

It's the best thing.

Tiny book too.

It's a long blog post.

50 pages.

That book, in terms of your business life, it might change.

Yeah.

The Mom Test.

Okay.

So there was this great write-up in the Trends Facebook group by this guy, Morgan, or Girl

Morgan, I'm not sure exactly, but Morgan Key.

And it was talking about, hey, the founder of Trader Joe's just died.

I think Joe, I don't know how you say the last name, but Joe from Trader Joe's passed

away and, you know, so he dug into the model and said, what is it that makes Trader Joe's

work?

And there's a bunch of really fascinating things where they basically broke all of the

rules.

And I thought it was just like a great example of, of like, you know, when you want to do

something different or you want to like make a splash in the industry, like it pays to

just change a bunch of the rules.

So some of the things that they do differently.

So they go through the rules.

So they, most grocery stores have a ton of SKUs.

They're like, oh, people want all the options.

We got to carry everything that people ask for.

Trader Joe's has on average, I think 4,000 SKUs, an average grocery store will be 40,000.

So one-tenth the number of SKUs.

The next thing that I thought was interesting was they overstaffed, not understaffed.

So every other grocery store's trying to sort of have minimal labor costs and they go the

exact opposite direction and try to provide like an experience for shopping.

They private label basically all of their goods.

So how do you, okay, great, I overstaffed, I overstaffed, but that's like expensive.

So where do they make their money back?

They make their money back by not buying, you know, not by buying wholesale and selling

retail.

They actually just private label their stuff and have a way bigger margin on their items.

So what's an example of that?

So like their tomato sauce, for example, they will have our salsa.

It'll be called Trader Joe's salsa and people will be like, oh, I love Trader Joe's salsa.

And it's actually the same exact salsa that somebody else carries.

They go straight to that supplier or manufacturer and they say, hey, we want our own line of

this.

And so it's usually Trader Joe's isn't making it.

No, they go to the supplier, but they private label that exact item.

Oh, I didn't know that.

They carry it.

They get a much bigger margin because they're cutting out the sort of retailer.

And they have all this pricing power to go to suppliers with and say, hey, we have all

these locations.

So we are already a big customer from day one.

We want you to give us our own brand of popcorn, our own brand of this, our own brand of that.

And then on the other side that makes customers love it because people will get addicted to

this.

And they think, oh, that pretzel, that chocolate cover pretzel I loved, I can only get it at

Trader Joe's.

But that's not the reality because there's no brand on it, but they can actually get

that same thing.

They just don't know the brand and it's from some other brand.

I've felt that exact same way about a lot of the product.

And so there was a few other ones that I thought were interesting.

I'm going to dig it up, but talk for a second while I just so I'll tell you guys a quick

story.

So we were talking about scaling.

I talked to Max Mullen at Hustlecon and you listen to the story.

He told me that when they first started, who's Max Mullen, Max Mullen started Instacart.

He goes, he goes, our first store was Trader Joe's and they wouldn't let us go in there

and they wouldn't give us all their inventory.

He goes, I took, it took, he goes, it cost 25 grand.

I bought everything in the store.

We brought it to our apartment.

Took a photo of it.

It took pictures of every single thing.

I love it.

It was $25,000.

He goes, one of everything was about 25 grand.

And he did that with Whole Foods and then five other stores.

That's amazing.

Okay.

So we got up, so no data collection.

So they're not collecting data on their customers.

They don't ask for your sales coupons, loyalty or advertising.

The biggest expense.

So their marketing is samples in the store.

So they go above and beyond on samples and don't do a whole bunch of other promotional

stuff.

They expanded very slowly.

So they have about 500 locations after 50 years.

And so they really went sort of slow and steady with their growth, sort of like in and out

or whatever.

And are they owned by someone at the moment?

Or are they owned by a private company?

I don't think they got bought by a private company.

I think it's literally like owned by the original, whoever's, there's a couple of people involved.

And so in the end, their price per, sorry, their earnings per square foot in their store.

So they'll earn $2,000 per square foot revenue.

And like Whole Foods would do 1.2K and then, you know, Walmart will do 600K.

So they're way more profitable per square foot because of, sorry, way more revenue per

square foot because of these, these different changes they made to the standard model of

the store.

I dig that.

I, we should, I don't know why we didn't, we should publish that.

I think it's a $10 billion company overall.

I thought they were owned by all these for some reason.

You might be right.

I don't know on that.

But shout out to Morgan.

I thought this was a great breakdown.

Love it.

Do more of that in the groups.

We love this stuff and we'll share the information because yeah, more people need to learn from

this stuff.

So it's really an interesting take, which is what are the interesting components that

make something special?

So we're doing this thing that we're going to publish on Tuesday on hotels.

And I thought that that was really interesting.

And so it's not live yet.

So I haven't been able to read all of it.

But basically a lot of the largest hotel chains, what they do is they don't actually

own the property.

I mean, or sorry, sometimes they own the property, but it's all franchised.

And so 90% of their money is made via franchising, Hilton's, Marriott's, whatever.

Yeah, I had no idea.

And so that's one of the secret sauces, which is you have to do franchising and it's really

expensive.

Like could be $10 million to start a Marriott franchise.

Very expensive.

That's not that expensive.

10,000?

That's cheap for a franchise.

Sorry, I said 10 million.

Oh, 10 million?

Okay.

It could be millions of dollars.

Okay.

Yeah, that's a lot.

It's crazy.

And so what we've been doing on trends and what I've always loved doing, which is what's

like the thing that makes something special?

What makes it tick?

Yeah.

It's just software, typically it's just what makes a great software business is like, I'm

just riffing here, but I don't have to find the exact numbers, but it's like, is the annual

revenue per customer at least $5,000?

Can you make it so churn is only 4% a month?

And then there's probably only one or two more rules, but it's usually churn and can

it be at least five grand a year?

For a Saspis since you're talking about it.

Yeah.

And so I love seeing those like, yeah, you want, so what investors do is they see so many

deals and they talk to so many founders and they do this for a number of years.

They get to see how these play out.

They start to do what they call pattern recognition, which has pros and cons.

The pros is great.

You can recognize a good thing when it's a good thing.

The con is if you're trying to make everything fit your pattern, you'll miss the outliers

and that's a, that's a big issue, but, um, but it's worth, it's still a tool in your

tool belt that you should have.

So I feel like it should, this should not just be investors that do this, this should

be entrepreneurs as well.

So you should be looking at different businesses, industries, breaking them down, listening

to podcasts like this or others and, um, trying to identify the patterns and commonalities

and try to characterize, okay, what made that business tick?

What made this have a different outcome than that?

What are the sort of, uh, minimum requirements on let's say churn or customer, you know,

customer value, um, for a Saspis is to work and start to get these rules of thumb or like

common, common patterns in place in your brain.

Yeah.

And what, what I've been trying to do is figure, figure out those on, on all types of things.

Yeah.

And that's been exciting.

Uh, you want to do one more?

Uh, yeah.

Let's do one more.

So there's this thing called thinks, uh, T H N K S, um, where's that on here?

Oh, it's right in the middle.

Oh, okay.

What's that?

So I saw this in a, um, an Instagram ad or something like that.

I thought it was kind of kind of clever.

So, um, be to be gifting.

So what things does, or I think it's probably thanks that they're trying to do, which is

saying thanks.

That's stupid.

I hate cute spelling.

Yeah.

Cute spelling.

Kind of, kind of tripped them up there.

Um, so what it does is it's like from your phone, you can instantly just send a little

gift to any business acquaintance.

So it's like, you could send, um, you know, a bottle of wine, you can send a box of chocolates,

you can send a Uber ride, you can send $25, you know, Amazon thing, whatever.

So they have a whole bunch of different, um, digital gifts that are, it just looked the

in the, in the ad, it looked frictionless of like how easy this would be to just send

this little, thank you to everyone.

So for someone like you guys, you guys have advertisers, we have guests that come on the

podcast and I know I would love to send them gifts.

I know that I should, I know these little things go a long way, even though it's just

seems like they shouldn't, but I don't take the time to do it.

And so I think if somebody actually made a really good be to be gifting platform that

did both the actual gifting, so being able to send it to your contact, uh, but also they

sort of accounting for it.

So keeping track of it in a spreadsheet and all that stuff, maybe helping you expense

it.

I think that could be a big business.

I think a lot of sales people would use this.

I totally agree.

The way, what, what do you point, did he do that?

Uh, no, there's a company called Alice and they do, uh, artificial intelligence powered

be to be gifting.

It's really cool.

They basically scan your social profile and they figure out what your interests are.

They send you an example of a gift they want to send to you, um, like on behalf of a company

and then you're able to either donate the value of that to a charity of your choice or

pick from the marketplace, um, a gift of similar value.

That's badass.

I like that.

What the, what I would do, uh, one or two things, the first thing that I would do is

I think the way that I would set this up is I would make it pretty heavy on slack or integrate

with Salesforce.

So we've built a couple of Salesforce plugins that we love and other people have asked us

to give it to them.

What's an example of one?

Uh, I'm not involved in our Salesforce thing, but basically, uh, like one example is we've

connected our QuickBooks and our Salesforce really effectively, um, which was a previous,

previously a really hard problem.

I mean, that's really nitty gritty accounting stuff, but it was really, uh, uh, frustrating.

Another thing that we built in Salesforce was so that we, the way that we built our

business is, uh, we can get a line of credit on our invoices and we've synced it all.

We, we've synced it all up.

So our bank knows which invoices we have based off Salesforce and things like that.

Right.

And it's really effective.

But what I would do in this is I would hook it up to Salesforce or Slack and I would

make it so you could send coworkers as well.

And basically the boss puts your credit card down and he allocates it or she allocates

it.

So every employee gets automatically like some number of $10 to $200 a month.

And you have, you can like type in like, send Henry a gift at San Francisco office.

Right.

And like, for example, I buy gift, gift cards for people all the time where someone has

done something really cool or like Edie was saying her cars, I don't know if her cars

messed up.

I'll be like, send Edie $100 Uber gift card.

Right.

That I think that would be fantastic.

And the way that I would build it is that it would remind every employee how much balance

they have left at the end of the month.

So you for sure know it's going to get, right.

Get used.

That's kind of, that's really interesting.

And I would also look at, uh, what's the, what's the fruit baskets that are popular?

Edible arrangements.

Edible arrangements.

Yeah.

I would look at their, I would go, the, I think they're publicly traded.

I would go and read all about how they do it and where they say are the biggest markets

for their B2B clients.

Right.

Is it real estate agents who need to, you know, always be out there?

Is it sales?

Is it, um, you know, I don't know, whatever else.

Uh, so there's some stats that are on here.

I don't know who added these, but great.

89% of nice Alan, shout out to Alan, 89% of C-suite execs believe that gifting brings

people closer together.

Okay.

Love it.

Um, and then after receiving a gesture of appreciation, individuals feel like sort of the, what the

rule of reciprocity.

Yeah.

So 56% more likely to reciprocate.

Um, and I think it's, I think it's great.

Um, I have a friend, Greg Eisenberg, who's all about gifting Ramon is a great gifter

as well.

He's almost obnoxiously good.

Yeah.

And so they, they just are so thoughtful and, uh, by little things that go a long way, it

just makes you love the person.

Yeah.

So another thing I would do to run this company is I would go to, is it, uh, it was, it's

a book called influence by Robert Chowdini.

He's at this thing called the rule of reciprocity.

It's summed up in, uh, basically I can do a favor for Sean and he's going to do a favor

back to me, even if he didn't ask for me to do him a favor and it is likely that he will

repay me back in a disproportionate amount.

So for example, there's been times you could like go up to someone and you could be like,

Hey, uh, you want to, you want to, can I give you a Coke or can I give you a, uh, um, like

the small $10 gift and I could be negotiating with you for selling a car.

And get a deal.

And get a deal.

Right.

Uh, or for example, I could say something like, Hey, can you grab my mail or let me grab

your mail for you when you're out of town.

And then two weeks later, I could be like, Hey, can I borrow your car for five days?

And typically people will do it.

And so I would make the whole tagline of my company, which is like, I would make, I always

think of like in terms of headlines and copywriting for sales pages, I would make the whole headline

all about how you can manipulate, you have to use positive language, but how you can

manipulate people by giving gifts.

I mean, what would your headline be?

I would go to that book, uh, the rule of reciprocity and, uh, I would find it interesting.

Find it.

In fact, maybe that's what the headline would be.

It would be the definition of the rule, like I would make it look like a definition rule

of reciprocity, like noun or something like defined as inadequate or, uh, uh, just proportional

given in response to a gift.

Yeah.

In other words, we help you make more money.

So there's, there's is, I just went to their website, growing business through growing business

with gratitude, build strong business relationships through efficient, personalized and thoughtful

gestures of appreciation.

That's whack.

That's whack.

That sounds like a good company.

By the way, uh, dude, I get every company we mention on here, um, I get a message that's

either the CEO starts listening to it or they were already listening to it.

So like we talked about only fans, the founders listened to this.

No shit.

Uh, we talked about, um, pipe, the founder reached out, you know, Hey, I love it.

I'm listening to you.

I talked about mystery science, uh, I hung out with the founder yesterday and he was

like, we were jamming mystery science is the, uh, amazing business.

It's Bill Nye, the science guy delivered into schools.

Yeah.

Wait, why don't we get those people on here?

Uh, we can.

Yeah.

He was, he was awesome.

And by the, I didn't realize he had, you know, three little exits under his belt and

he was doing this and the business is just spitting off cash.

It's amazing.

It's used by like a crazy number.

You know, the public thing that he told me some other numbers, but I'll say the public

thing he told me, which is that 50% of elementary schools in America are active users of their

product, which is insane, uh, penetration, which that just means one classroom within

the school, but whatever, you got to 50% of schools being active users on a weekly basis.

Um, I love that.

Incredible.

Let's, uh, get those people on here.

Let's go to the questions.

Hey, yeah, let's do some quick ones.

All right.

Uh, so we asked people to do subscribe and unsubscribe and send us a video of them doing

it.

And we would answer a question that they sent.

The truth is, is a lot of the questions were pretty okay.

Yeah.

So we're going to avoid some of the okay ones, like what would you do if you had unlimited

money?

I'm not going to answer that.

I think that's an okay question.

Let's see, but let's see what is a couple of good questions.

Love the podcast.

What's your best SEO hack for a new website from Steven Cintra?

So I know zero about SEO.

So for me, I love marketing.

I love growth, but you sort of specialize in certain sub practices within that SEO is

not one of mine, but met a guy yesterday and he was like, uh, he was telling me he's

grown these content sites.

He's got a pretty repeatable model to grow content sites over a hundred thousand monthly

visits, uh, up to a million monthly uniques like within two months.

And I was, he's done it like 10 times and I was like, okay, well, what's the formula?

Are you a SEO guru or what?

He's like, Oh no, I don't know SEO.

I don't do backlinks.

I don't know what a schema is.

Like, I don't do any of that stuff.

He's like, I'm all content and I just try to rank on quality and relevance.

And he's like, basically he just looks at what questions people search for using a tool

like a hrefs or whatever.

And so he goes and finds what questions are people searching for, looks at the search

result.

And if somebody's like, you know, the 20 best tips for closing a sales meeting, he'll do

the 30 best tips and he'll put in a YouTube video and he'll like add all this value in.

And so he literally just like crushes it on, uh, on those questions.

And some of that, sometimes those questions are like, you know, people Google their deepest

darkest secrets.

They're not like politically correct things.

It'll be like, you know, what's the best way to, you know, like, uh, tell your girlfriend

you're cheating on them or whatever.

And so he'll be like, the best way to tell your girlfriend, you're cheating on them.

Things that companies most sites are not blogging about.

He's like, if there's demand, I will write the best content for it and I will rank over

the course of a couple of months and I'll get my, my website up.

I'll tell you a quick story real quick.

First I would say my answer to this is I've done the same thing of accidentally being

good at it.

I would just use two tools, HA refs and then SEO Moz or is SEO, sorry.

Uh, uh, Yoast, Yoast, it's a plugin for WordPress.

That's the, that those, the, just use those two tools and you'll be fine.

Uh, and when YouTube first started in 2000 from 2010 to 2009 to 2012, I had a YouTube

channel that had millions of tens of millions of views.

Uh, and all I would do is I would find words, people, things that were things people were

searching for.

And I would put a video with that exact same title and then I would make it just a picture

and not actually a video, the click baby is picture and then I would sell space on that

video as background music and I made hundreds of dollars a month when I was a senior in high

school doing that.

And so if you ever want to see a thumbnail video of a guy, the, the, the, my most popular

video, they took it down.

It's called a black guy beats up white guy.

So people were searching for that.

Oh yeah.

Oh man.

And you can just type in the, and what you can do is you can just type in the word white

and it would auto fill or type in the word like, uh, fight and fight videos were popular

or probably still are.

Look at the auto.

And it would auto in all auto complete.

I did that same thing.

And for some reason I learned that those fight videos did great.

Uh, okay.

Another question.

So Robert asks, uh, what big picture, uh, thing should I be looking at for my podcast

to be profitable?

It's a medical podcast where I talk about certain diseases and interview people who have

them and then he shots out the name of it, which is the patient.

We'll see you now.

Uh, all right.

So what should he be, how should he be thinking about making his podcast profitable?

Should we tell him as experts of a not so profitable podcast?

Yeah.

We do not have a profitable podcast.

We don't have a profitable, it's just small relative to like other opportunities we could

be doing.

Uh, it makes money every month.

What, what's your answer?

Uh, I would basically, so not try to go for big, so podcasts, you can either go big audience

ads or you can say my podcast is lead gen for other things that I do.

And, uh, so like I've gotten more value out of businesses and opportunity, investment

opportunities coming from this podcast than the ad revenue we get every month.

And so, uh, similarly, I think here, if you're the people who are going to listen to this

podcast, um, you know, they might be patients with a certain disease, you might be able

to sell some premium ad spot to a, you know, some pharmaceutical company, but you probably

don't have the scale.

And so instead what I would be looking for is I'd say, cool, if I had a podcast with

5,000 doctors listening to it every month, what, what can I do with that community?

What other adjacent opportunities, business opportunities could I create out of that,

that loyal community?

And so I'm a big fan of just build the tribe first, the opportunities for reveal themselves

as you go.

And that's how I would go about it.

I wouldn't try to do ads, uh, for your podcast.

I've got enough to add.

That's a good idea.

Cool.

You want to do one more?

Uh, yeah, let's do one more.

Okay.

First three months of your business, what are your first three steps?

Very generic question.

Is that even useful?

Okay.

Okay.

Let's combine it with best, uh, man, some of these people, they ask the most general

question.

Yeah.

Okay.

Here's some advice.

I have a phrase.

Ask a better question.

Get a better answer.

Um, so ask a specific question.

Don't ask like, you know, in the first three months of a business, what are your first

three steps?

It's like saying like, what art is good?

Right.

Or like, you know, how do you love you?

Like what?

Like I can't tell you what it's like, how do you, how do you do art?

It's like, I don't know, man.

You want to talk about like, uh, oil painting, uh, the Renaissance era, we could, let's talk

about that.

Okay.

Here's, here's a question that I will ask to entertain myself here.

Um, what's your favorite interview question when you're interviewing somebody for a job?

Uh, on a scale of one to 10, how lucky do you think you are?

Nice.

Where'd you get that from?

Uh, when I interviewed at Airbnb, the founder asked me it.

It's the Jeff Bezos question.

He was the, I think the originator of it or made it popular at least.

Uh, they asked Jeff Bezos, what's your favorite question?

He said this and now a bunch of us have stole this Joe at Gebbia asked me it and I told

him a nine or a 10 and he said, why, and I explained to him why, and I go, why did you

ask me that?

He goes, people who, uh, say they're really lucky are the people I want to be around.

Right.

I was like, why do you think that?

And he goes, well, if you're lucky, if you think you're lucky, you must be talented and

things just fall in your place or you actually are lucky.

And I want to surround myself with lucky people.

I don't want to be around other lucky people.

Yeah.

The, the specifically question is, uh, how lucky of a person do you think you are?

One to 10, one, two, three is like, uh, I'm not very lucky.

I don't consider myself a lucky person.

Um, four, five, six is, I think I'm pretty, I think I'm, you know, decently lucky average

and I, you know, I think I know why or sorry, I don't know why just that's just how it is.

And then this, uh, the sort of the eight, nine, 10s are, um, I consider myself a very

lucky person and here's why, and, uh, you want people who are either, you know, if luck

is a thing, you want them around you, just like he said, or if they're not, you want

people who are optimistic and, uh, you know, when you're building a, a young business,

you need optimistic people.

And then the, the why part is interesting too, because some people know how to earn, uh,

engineer serendipity.

They know how to engineer lucky situations for themselves or they're looking out for

situations where they may be getting lucky and pounce on those opportunities and that's

again, somebody you want in an early business.

And then I'm going to ask you the same question.

And I think I know who yours is, but I'm going to say another one that is deadly.

I love this question.

And this is when you back channel on someone and you want to ask about, so let's say I'm

interviewing Henry and you're his old boss and I'll, I'll go, I'll go, Sean, what would

you give Henry out of 10?

Just say a number.

Uh, I'll give Henry a seven.

Okay.

And you're going to give him a seven because you want to, you don't want to completely

shit on him and you, but you also want to be realistic.

And so I would, then I would say, okay, well, what, what can I, what can he do to get the

remaining three points?

What could make him a perfect 10?

That is the only way I've ever found to get critical feedback on a person other than saying,

what are they bad at?

Uh, well, you know, they're pretty good or like, that's, that's what they'll always

say.

Yeah, for sure.

Because people, like I said, want to be polite and then people also don't want to like lie

based on their own experience.

That is the best way I've ever found to get it.

Love it.

Okay.

So that's, that's that specific thing?

Yeah.

I know what it is.

And you should tell it.

I don't, I don't remember what, because I've told the story once, but I don't even remember

what it was.

The founder of Second Life told me once who you are, who you want to be or, oh, this one.

Yeah.

This is a good one.

Yeah.

You know, I love questions like this.

Uh, I asked this in job interviews, um, but I also just asked this in social situations

to be awkward, uh, feeling, I'd say, Hey, we're going to play a little game.

Uh, I want you to fill in the blank.

First thing that comes to mind, first answer, best answer, um, I'm going to say the first

part.

You finish it.

And I'll say, um, life is, all right, let's Allen, let's play.

All right.

So Henry, you have the mic.

So let's play.

First answer, best answer.

Answer as you go.

Uh, life is great.

People are tough.

I am Henry, the middle one was the only good one.

Yeah.

So, and then you use, you use it to sort of have a little bit of a conversation.

You try not to judge people too much off the top of the mind, but, um, I actually just

think this is useful for yourself.

So this is like your core outlook.

It's like, what's life?

And you said life is great.

Cool.

Uh, optimistic, sort of grateful person.

Um, then you said people are tough.

That's interesting.

Why'd you say people are tough?

Uh, are you, do you have a girlfriend?

Are you guys at a good spot?

You dealing with some stuff right now?

You are?

Yeah.

Totally.

That's what I'm saying.

What's a situation where people have been tough, tough to deal with?

I don't know.

I'm not like, like figure out where I'm going and like figure out a job I'm like, I'm ultimately

going to get a career I'm going to do.

And it's just like tough, like just communicating with other people and like getting them to

realize what like you want and like making them like see what you see in yourself.

People are tough to persuade or tough to, to get on your, on your page.

That's a great question.

You totally have, you, like, you can see what he struggles with and values.

Yeah.

And then the last one, which is I am, and you went with Henry, which is the last one.

Henry, which is a very literal answer.

If you were going to do another one, what would it be?

I am.

I don't know.

Like a student.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Okay.

And then the second question I'll kind of ask is, so, so I've usually paused there.

I do the psychoanalysis and then a couple of things happen.

People are like, oh, okay.

And they just like want to leave because they feel so uncomfortable or they'll be like,

what are yours?

Cool.

I like that.

That's a good sign when you ask what are yours.

And then I'll tell them mine and then they'll do the same thing back to me.

And the last question is like, um, I tell them, I said, you know, one thing I did was

I did those answers top of mind and I didn't really like what I said.

And then I just reassessed it.

I was like, what do I think the answer should be for me?

Like what do I want my answers to be?

What do I want my outlook of life, people and myself to be?

Right?

What do I want my mental model to be?

And then I revised it.

And then the best people come back a few days later and they're like, Hey, by the way, I,

you know, I came up with my own and here's mine.

And those are the people I'm like, I'm going to be friends with you for a long, long time

because you're like me.

You like to do this stuff.

Clip.

Cool.

I think we're done.

By the way, I got to call the, the guy from levels.

I got to get my, my glucose monitor installed for the weight loss challenge.

Oh, okay.

We'll do an update on that.

I didn't have to call him.

I think we're supposed to.

Huh.

Okay.

Well, you can join me on this call.

Click share.

Uh, or is that like a, is there a button like share button?

If there is to it, let's help us get more listeners.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Tell the friend.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.