My First Million: Best of This Week: March 11th

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.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of My First Million, best of the week edition.

This is Ben Wilson.

Best of the week brings you some of the best moments from this week's past episodes, no

new content.

Just revisiting the hits.

This week, we've got some great ones for you.

First off, we've got Steph Smith joining Sam and Sean to discuss something that Sean

calls the A-B-Z framework and why you should just get started on whatever project you

want to work on instead of over-analyzing.

Give it a listen.

Sam, I think you do this really well when people, like I've seen people come to you,

and they're like, Sam, I'm thinking of starting this business and I want to cover this topic

and I want to blog and all this stuff, and you're like, all right, what's your first

step?

Or you'll be just right.

Or something like that, which just simplifies to the idiot Jedi, just do the thing, not

over-analyzing the 50 startup articles this person has put online.

It's when Sam says dog.

Dog.

You just need to do the thing.

He goes, Randy Jackson on him.

Well, I just get frustrated because I think that it's good.

So if building a business is step zero to 10 and 10 is like, you're this billionaire

or your vision has been achieved, you own all this property, whatever it is, it's good

to have number 10.

And then a lot of people are like, all right, that's step number 10.

And then steps three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, I got to figure those out.

In my mind, I'm like, no, the only thing that's important is 10 and one.

And after you get done with one, you'll figure out number two.

But until you get to number two, don't even think about worrying about number three.

It's not important.

I have the same exact thing.

I call it A, B, Z, literally like word for word, your thing.

And I went on Jack's to Jack's community.

He asked me to give a talk to his like, visualize value community.

And I, this was the one thing I told him, I go, you, you have, you're at A, that's where

you are.

Z is the vision.

That's the dream.

It's good to have that.

It's good to know what that is, right?

That's like the North Star.

And like, without that, you know, you don't really have the motivation or really understand

like what the hell you're trying to do.

But wherever it gets paralyzed is they think they need to know a step B, C, D, E, F, G,

H, I, J, and it's like, and then they get paralyzed or they start thinking about step

D when they haven't even done, you know, A to B yet.

And so I go, A, B, Z, it's all you ever need.

It's like where you are.

You got to know that accurately.

The next thing you need to do, you need to know that.

And then you need to know the end vision and everything else is irrelevant.

Like just do that.

And so you just literally said the same thing with your own, like with numbers basically

instead.

That's, that's awesome.

Great minds thing alike.

I mean, that's exactly how I feel because every time I've ever had any bit of success

or even when I've like done something and it didn't work out, I just think that like

if you just start and you're going to see so many things that you didn't even expect

or realize were an opportunity and, or that weren't an opportunity, you're like, Oh, I

thought this, it's actually way different, but that's cool.

Or that's not cool.

We got to quit.

You know what I mean?

And you just, that's why you just have to do something.

I get really frustrated with inaction.

All right.

So next up, we've got a segment from our drunk ideas episode on this one.

Sean is talking about an idea that he calls the very long distance girlfriend.

All right.

First idea is called very long distance girlfriend.

Okay.

So I had this idea because I realized like I'm sitting there and me and my wife, we

like to watch all these dating shows, right?

So we watch the love is blind.

We watch the bachelor and you watch these shows and it's sort of like, it's like the

honeymoon period.

And I like, I would say most people's homes are like ours.

It's like, the scene is this on screen, you see like two usually beautiful people living

some kind of fairy tale date.

And then like one person's kind of like, you know, there's some drama, one person's

being dramatic or one person's unsure and the other person's really good or whatever.

And then you, and then if you, if you zoomed out off the TV, you'd see a couch with usually

a couple sitting like six feet apart from each other because they're so sick of each

other.

And you know, there's like, you know, in their sweats, not dressed up with their, you know,

double chin eating their popcorn and Cheetos and being like pointing at the screen and

be like, ah, she's not even that hot or like, you know, he's, you know, he's such a jerk

and it's like judging these relationships, right?

But like there's something to this of why we like it, right?

We like seeing these other relationships, but I also think it's like when we do that,

we do that with UFC.

It'd be like, oh, he shouldn't have tapped out.

Yeah, dude.

He's such a pussy.

He's so weak, he looks scared.

Yeah.

Dude, he's so scared.

That's why I like him.

Cause he's scared.

It's like, yeah.

It's not confident.

Oh my God.

There's a spider in my room.

So, so, so yeah, there's definitely like a judgey, there's a fun in judging it, but

I would also say there's a fun in the sort of fairy tale.

Like I think everybody, when you're watching these shows, you sort of put yourself in the

shoes of either the person pursuing or the person being pursued.

You know, you're the, you're the damsel or you're the prince, whatever it is.

So the idea behind very long distance girlfriend is as follows.

It's a service or app.

I think it's just a service.

I think it's just a text message.

This is a phone number you put in your address book and we give you the perfect boyfriend

or girlfriend.

You're never going to meet with this person.

It's not even the intention.

It's just somebody who's going to treat you perfectly because they're paid to do it.

And so, so it's like prostitution.

It's like a prostitute, a prostitute is somebody who's paid to love, to love you, right?

To make love to you.

But that's a lot.

I don't want to cross that line.

That's a lot of work.

So this is like, you know, how Tinder made dating easier because you don't have to like

go date everybody.

You just sort of swipe left and right easily on your phone.

It kind of gave you this like flirting hit, but you didn't have to go out, put in a lot

of effort.

So here's what you would get if you, if you sign up for very long, very long distance

girlfriend.

There's, there's going to be a person that pretends to be your girlfriend.

They're going to text you.

They're going to ask how you're doing.

They're going to be emotionally there for you.

They're going to text you baby photos of themselves.

They're going to say that they want you.

You're going to be like, Oh my God, I'm, I'm this person wants me.

They're never going to nag you.

They're never going to get mad at you.

They're never going to get jealous.

They're never going to do any of the things that real human beings do that are the downsides

of relationships.

Only the upside, none of the downside.

So for girls, you're going to get Prince Charming on the other side.

He's going to be complimentary.

He's going to be thoughtful.

He's going to be there for you.

And for guys, you're going to get sort of what you want as the perfect girlfriend.

We're just going to hire call centers of just dudes and they're going to behave as your

very long distance boyfriend or girlfriend.

All right, give me your, give me your ratings.

I'm going to start with Sam.

I give that a 10.

I think that, uh, I think that's great to be honest.

I think that surely that like if we went to adultfriendfinder.com or something like that,

is that what they do?

What is adult friend finder?

What is that?

Like webcam or you're asking the wrong guy.

I don't follow these questions.

I have no idea.

Um, yeah.

I mean, this is brilliant.

How many friends do you have who you've only met via texting and you've like, I've got

like a bunch of friends who have only ever texted.

Yeah, exactly.

I have now most of my life is people I only text with.

Maybe I knew them before.

There's a bunch of people that like, I don't know, just through Twitter or through, you

know, the podcast or through friends of friends, we get in a group chat together.

I know their personality.

They're cool.

Like that's my actual friend, even though I never met them or even heard their voice

or talked to them like through voice.

And in fact, I have no desire to really meet them.

Like I don't want to go out of my way to go like hang out with them.

I'm getting all the benefits that I want out of just the texts.

Yeah.

So anyway, I have a lot of friends like that and I consider them to be really close friends.

I, I, I can't tell you how tall they are or what their voice sounds like, but I love

them.

And so because of that, I'm in.

What do you think, Ben?

I give it a one.

It sounds diabolical.

It sounds evil.

A one, zero or just a one, a one, zero.

It sounds a big, a big slow roll for a 10.

There's this genre of idea of Sean business idea that essentially is I went and watched

an episode of black mirror and said, actually, that's a good idea.

And this is one of those.

All, all that's a great idea though.

Our good ideas.

Yeah.

Where do you think they're getting their ideas?

They go to the great idea pile and then they take a great idea and they say, okay, let's

put this to a logical extreme where it actually turns bad.

Yeah.

And like, have you met, remember that, remember that TV show in Disney called smart home where

the, the, the, it's like a smart home.

It's like Alexa.

Basically.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the smart home ended up being the mom and the wife.

So it kind of is like what we're describing now.

So I think the like.

Yeah.

I haven't watched her.

I think her is something like this.

It's like a voice assistant that he kind of falls in love with.

I haven't seen that.

But again, it's not even a fall in love.

It's just, dude, it's fun to get certain types of text messages, right?

It's fun to get a funny chat text from a friend.

It's fun to get something interesting texted to you.

That's kind of what the hustle does.

The hustle just sends me some interesting stuff every morning and the milk road tries

to do that.

Here's some interesting crypto stuff, right?

Where your friend, but I'm not really your friend.

I'm just sending you some cool stuff.

You like getting that message, but that's for the work part of our life.

What about the personal side, Ben, are you telling me you would, I mean, I know what

you're going to say.

You're going to say no, but let me just put it out there anyways.

I should be telling you, but you would not want to be getting texts from a woman who's

so into you and it's not cheating.

You're never going to do anything.

It's not even a real person.

You're never going to see him, nothing like that, especially if you're single, right?

Like I'm not talking about, like we're all, I think we're all married, Ben, right?

So it's not for us.

This is for a 25 year old me, not 30, I don't know how old I am, 34 year old me.

Yeah.

I obviously, we're not the target demographic, all of us because we're all married.

But having said that, like, even if it was just like as a friend type of thing, I like,

I already have actual friends that I don't text back.

The last thing I need is another thing that's literally just a person to not text back.

I don't need another one of those in my life, but, okay, fair enough, maybe it's a bad idea.

But no, no, no, as a business idea, of course it's a good idea.

Of course it's like, this has money making potential as a thing that is good for humans,

you know, that's, that's why I gave it a one.

I'm not, I'm not in the good for humans.

I just felt like I had to be conscious here.

I had one person had to be like, Sean, you know, this is okay, okay.

It's good.

You know, I'm the devil.

You're the angel on the shoulders.

We have to be there, yin and yang.

That's how it works.

That's good.

Yeah.

You know, if you want good things, you should, you know, go eat your vegetables, work out,

you know, wake up and pray, do all the things, right?

Like that's cool.

Don't invest in Russian companies.

Yeah.

Don't invest in Russian companies.

Don't have the very long distance girlfriend service for $19.99 a month.

Don't, you know, don't use TikTok.

Don't do any of the things that you do, probably.

All right.

And last up, we're throwing it back over to Steph Smith, who talks about using secret

puzzles to recruit top talent from the CIA to the NSA to Google and other top tech companies.

It's an interesting strategy and one that Sean actually has some experience with.

Give it a listen.

I guess related to companies hiring, so you guys know Mischief, right?

It's this like company that does these crazy stunts.

They're on, I think, stunt number 70 and their latest stunt, I thought, was really interesting

and relates to this idea of just like creative hiring.

So if you scroll down.

Tell me about what Mischief is.

I don't entirely get it because they raised funding.

But when you explain what they are, I'm like, who, what grown adult would trust this child

with money?

It's like South Park or Saturday Night Live.

It's a weekly show.

It's like a weekly sketch of what it's just done through code.

They make a website instead of like a video making a joke.

They make a website.

That's a joke.

Yeah.

But is it?

Exactly.

Does it make money?

I think it does.

I don't know how much they've made.

They've raised three and a half million dollars.

So I don't know, like you're saying, I don't know who those investors are, what they're

looking from Mischief.

But just to give like two examples, so one of them recently was, I think it's like called

Tantin, I don't know why it's called that, but basically it's called the game of death

online, which you sign up, you get an account and you pay $10 to join the game.

And all you have to do is log in daily to stay alive.

And the last person who stays alive gets all the money.

So it's just kind of like these silly quirky games.

But the last one they did was they also do like commentary through their game.

So it was a commentary on, in this case, the MSAT.

So they got people to pay $50 to take the MSAT and the highest score won.

It's basically like their version of the SATs.

And the person who got the highest score won the entire pot.

So they didn't actually, that many people did it, they had 500 people who did it.

But it reminded me of something you guys talk about on the pod or have talked about on the

pod, which is, you know, the power of like crowdsourcing things, like SpaceX, if they

want to develop some new technology, they put out some competition.

And that tends to attract more interesting people than, you know, if they hire a bunch

of recruiters to go, you know, find the people in theory they're looking for.

The example, the example I think you're thinking about is they were trying to figure out some

like, were they trying to like decode some protein or something that helped with this

AIDS medication and they like turned it into a video game and they'd spent 10 years trying

to solve it and then like a bunch of video gamers got it done in like three weeks.

Yeah.

Well, there's the SpaceX, what's the SpaceX challenge?

The one that everyone knows.

About XPRIZE?

It's just like they're, that's not from SpaceX.

Yeah.

But there's also, yeah, that's like a version of that where they basically just put out

the bounty and then let people, let anybody sort of enter to try to win.

Okay.

There's it.

I feel like there's another one that SpaceX does, but in any case, like what I'm getting

at is all of, I mean, we work for HubSpot, there's all these companies that are trying

to attract like quote unquote top talent and they're doing it in a way that in most cases

like true top talent, like, are you going to want to be like DM'd on LinkedIn and go

through like a traditional interview process like in most cases, no.

And so my question is, why isn't there like a really like mischief style recruiting agency

that puts out these challenges that the smartest people on the internet are like stoked to solve

just out of like sheer pride that they then can funnel potentially into these companies.

Maybe it's the case that these people just like would never want to work for these larger

companies.

But I just wonder why there isn't a more creative route to recruiting.

I have something for you.

So this is one of the very first articles the Hustle ever wrote.

I don't even know if you can Google it anymore.

It was literally like, we wrote it like two weeks after starting and it was about my friend

named Max.

And if you Google Ben, the Hustle Google interview or the Hustle secret Google interview.

So my friend Max was teaching himself some time.

I got to remember all the details.

This was like six years ago.

He was learning some type of coding, some type of language.

It was and it was like a rare language.

And he was typing in all these things on Google.

Like what does blank mean?

How do you do blank?

And after a while his Chrome browser like went like looked like the matrix and it said,

you look like you might belong to one of us.

And he says, we've noticed that you've been Googling a lot about this type of language

and we are hiring for that.

Would you be interested in applying here?

That's amazing.

And very few people ever saw this, but we wrote an article about this.

This article got seen by millions of people.

What's it say Ben?

What was the language?

Google has a secret interview process and it landed me a job.

That's the headline.

And he ended up working there and it worked.

It worked.

And it was wild.

That's dope.

And only Google could do that because they owned the browser and the search engine.

But what if you were just like, what if there was just like an app that just sat on your

computer that basically just tracked everything you did?

I know sounds great, but like gave you job opportunities based on what you do on your

computer.

Right.

Like if it knows that stuff is in all these different like subreddits and it's like and

she's like looking at Google trends and all this stuff, that's like a signal for what

type of person you are.

Like it's actually like a much higher quality signal in theory than any job interview you

could do where you're just trying to like present yourself as a certain way versus what

you actually do on the internet.

Right.

Like, oh, you spent a lot of time in Excel or what you actually do on your computer.

It's like, you spent a lot of time in Excel, you know, so we've seen we've seen what your

capabilities are.

Okay.

So you could probably qualify for certain types of jobs and so I wonder if there's like

a thing you could do like for college students, it's like, hey, put this on your computer

and like, do you want your first job out of college?

Like we'll help figure out what that job should be.

We'll help get you like a job opportunity just by putting this like tracker on your computer.

Sounds very non-evolved.

Yeah.

I mean, though.

Yeah.

I mean, I know it's always like a, oh tracking everything on your computer thing, but the

reason I thought of this is because I watched the QAnon documentary and in it they have

like, have you guys heard of like Cicada 3301?

No.

No.

No.

It's, they covered it in the documentary, but basically it was like the epitome of these

like crazy online puzzles.

I think there's been three of them.

The first two were solved.

The third one still has not been solved and they are like, you know, there's, there's

like a picture online and there's like a message and encrypted in that message.

There's a bunch of numbers and then you have to know to like go to another website and

put it in.

The second is a lot of people thought that this was actually a recruitment tool for like

either the NSA or the CIA.

And so I was like, man, there should be something maybe not that crazy, but something like that

online for companies.

Did you guys ever do one of those?

I did this in college.

We found this website and it was like, you know, it said some like vague thing.

It was like, the game has only begun, but have you realized that it's begun yet?

And it's like, you have to like right click, view source and in the source code, there's

a URL.

You go to that URL and then it downloads an audio file.

You listen to the audio file.

Sounds like nothing.

You listen to it backwards.

All of a sudden it gives you coordinates.

You go to those coordinates on a map, the map, the religion, and it was like a 50 part

game, like mystery game.

And me and all my friends got totally obsessed with this.

We spent like hours and hours and hours, I don't remember what the name this is back

in college.

It was like 15 years ago, but like the, I remember at the end, the last puzzle we could

never solve.

And I think the guy just made an unsolvable puzzle.

Like I just think there was no solution.

And his name was Mr. Wiggles or Mr. Squiggles or some shit like that.

And he, he had this puzzle that was like the unsolvable thing at the end, but it was so

much fun.

And actually, now that I think about it, that is actually a great like filter and barometer

for who might be good at certain times of types of work.

Like the person that would do that for fun and solve that problem.

I would love to hire that person, right?

Because I know what.

Well, could you, could you be like, uh, there's this, like, if you're that game maker, Mr.

Wiggles or whatever, like, could you like do that as a service for a variety of companies

and like make these games like, Hey, we're going to try and find you.

But I bet it's like, Hey, I bet we're going to do this thing, this and this thing.

And I bet you we're going to get you 20 new applicants every month.

Yeah.

To these silly games, but they're going to be high, high quality applicants totally.

I also think there's an element where like, as I said, as if you're top talent, you're

getting a DM from someone on LinkedIn, you're like, I'm just going to ignore this.

But if you played a game and at the end of that game, it's like, you are part of the

like 0.001% that solve this game.

Like I feel like that would be so much more compelling and maybe they still are like,

nah, I'm never going to work for an enterprise.

Okay.

That's it for this week.

Thanks so much for listening.

We'll see you all next week.

Bye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.