My First Million: #78 - 10 Startup Ideas I Had This Year

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.

This episode is brought to you by Superside.

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What's up, guys?

Sean here.

Sam is driving for some Memorial Day weekend thing, so it's just me flying solo today,

but got some good stuff to talk about.

First, it's been almost exactly a year since I had this idea for the podcast, so I'm looking

at my messages right now to Sam, so 5.13.2019, so this is May 13th, a year ago.

I messaged him, yo, I got a proposition for you.

He says, yes.

I said, I'm starting a podcast.

It's like how I built this.

Good quality, good guests, and I sent him a list of guests that I had in mind.

I said, I want the hustle to be the publisher.

All to all the work.

You included it in the email in this new episode.

If you start monetizing, let's share the economics.

Sam says, okay, deal.

I said, cool, I'll send you the first episode to preview at the end of this week, and then

we go back and forth a little bit, and then we started.

The first thing I did was I went and found somebody who could edit a podcast by going

on Twitter and writing podcast editor in the search, and I'm looking for people who wrote

that in their bio, and then I found Ishan, who is an editor for other people's podcasts.

We made a cover art, we figured out a name.

I'm looking at the messages here, the original name that I was thinking was, because I was

basing it off of how I built this, so the name was How I Got Rich, which I decided was

way too, you know, I don't know, crude or something, it could have been a good name.

It's at least sort of, I don't know, gets your attention, but I knew I'd have trouble

getting guests on with that name, and in fact, My First Million also had trouble getting

guests on because a lot of people who were successful don't want to come talk about

money, and they don't want to seem like a rich asshole, but it worked out anyways.

My First Millions got off the ground, we shifted off of interviews and started doing more casual

brainstorm type episodes, and that's what people resonated with.

They liked listening to something where, you know, it gets the wheels turning in your head.

It gets you to learn about a new space or a new business model or a new product that

you hadn't heard of, and people like to hear two people scheming and thinking up, you know,

new ideas and dreaming about what could be, because there's not very many podcasts to

do that, and so that's what I learned along the way.

I'm looking at our stats now.

We have reached over two million downloads, so we did about a million downloads in the

first six months and a little more than that in the second half, and, dude, I could have

never imagined that we would hit two million downloads in year one.

That's kind of amazing.

I'm like in shock even right now, just sort of looking at it, because I don't really

check, you know, I don't really pay too much attention to it, because I'm not doing this

really for the listeners.

In fact, when I started this, I told Sam, I said, he asked me, why are you doing this?

And I said, well, our company's getting acquired.

We're in the due diligence phase right now, and it's a lot of either lawyers or security

people looking at our code, things like that.

I was like, it's really boring.

I want to do something.

I can't start a company, but I can start a podcast during this time.

And so I had the itch to start something, and this was my something.

And I'd always wanted to do a podcast, because I like to talk, and I figured this would just

be a great little networking hack.

You know, when I actually started the podcast, I didn't think anybody would listen to it.

My plan was there's all these interesting people here in San Francisco.

I want to meet them.

Instead of just saying, hey, my name's Sean, I'm a founder of this company.

You want to get some coffee, which is annoying.

I hate when people ask me, hey, can I have some of your time?

Do you want to get a coffee?

Do you want to do a call?

Would love to chat.

I'm like, what's in it for me?

This is awful.

I don't want to.

I don't even drink coffee.

So fuck that.

But if somebody invites me on a podcast or invites me to speak at a conference, I'm like,

okay, cool.

Tell me more.

And I usually say yes.

And it's weird because it doesn't matter how many people are listening to the podcast

or it could be an event that has 100 people, but still it feels good to sort of be on stage.

And I knew that other people liked that too.

So my goal was, this is a great way to meet interesting people and have an excuse to connect

with them.

And I thought, nobody will listen to this except from my mom, but I'll build a cool

network of people through the podcast.

That was my evil plan.

And then I got greedy once it started growing and now it's, now I kicked off all the guests

and now it's just me and Sam talking, but yeah, my perspective changed.

I think that's a good lesson too in general.

So I had one decisive reason to do it, which was this will be a great way to meet other

cool people.

I got that out of it and I did, you know, 30 episodes with different guests with built

awesome companies.

And then, you know, I discovered a different opportunity as I was doing it, which was,

hey, a lot of people are actually listening to this.

Okay.

Instead of making this about meeting the guests, what if I made this about giving the audience

content that they like and being, you know, being somebody that they listened to on a

regular basis and I've, you know, sort of pivoted, pivoted from there.

But anyways, it's been amazing one year, one year since having the idea.

And that's, that's pretty bizarre.

I think I'll probably be podcasting for like 10 years.

That's my guess because I like this a lot and it's been cool.

There's all these different things that have come from it.

And I think, you know, if you're somebody out there who doesn't create content today,

it is where I would start if I was somebody who wants to have a non-traditional career.

If you don't want to just have a job or hell, even if you want a job, but you just want

a better job, this is what I would do right off the bat.

I would start creating content about a topic I like, either interviewing guests and networking

that way or talking about a subject, researching and talking about a subject that you're interested

in learning more about and just publishing and just publishing regularly because you'd

be surprised who listens.

Pretty badass people listen to this podcast and then they reach out and then opportunities

come my way or investments come my way or whatever.

It builds trust in people.

And the beauty of it is that it's low effort, right?

I record once for one hour, but each episode gets listened to for thousands and thousands

of hours by other people.

So, you know, my one hour yields tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of listened to hours.

And that's amazing leverage, right?

I'm getting a multiplier of let's call it 100,000 to one on my effort in time, which

is kind of amazing.

That's why I would produce content and I would, it also forces you to think about content

as a product, right?

So you got to make content that people want, you got to figure out how to distribute it

to them.

You got to figure out how to monetize it.

So it's a great little mini business in and of itself without any cost, really.

You just got to, you know, buy a microphone.

That's kind of the extent of it.

It's not much more beyond that.

Anyways, I wanted to, because I'm flying solo today, I wanted to actually look back and

look at some of the different ideas that we've brainstormed and I want to give you my top

10 half-baked business ideas that we've talked about on the podcast.

So as we've been riffing and brainstorming and just kind of shooting the shit, these

are my 10 favorite ideas that we've talked about on the podcast.

I don't know if they're the best 10 ideas, they're my favorites, which means I find them

interesting either because I think they would work or I think there's a nugget of something

interesting there.

And if somebody really kind of remixed it or riffed on it or sort of built it up, flushed

it out, they could build a great business around it.

So I'll give you my top 10 and this will be kind of a recap episode.

We'll keep it short.

All right.

So number one, or I'll actually start with number 10.

Number 10.

First of dibs.

Okay.

What's first dibs?

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.