My First Million: Greatest Hits of 2021 (Vol. 2)

Hubspot Podcast Network Hubspot Podcast Network 1/14/22 - 42m - PDF Transcript

Hey guys, welcome to My First Million.

This is Producer Ben, here with another best of episode.

On this one we compiled some of the best guest moments of the past year.

On this first clip, we have the one that only the world-famous Rob Dyrdek.

Rob is a famous state-border celebrity TV show actor, host and producer, and now he's

a really great entrepreneur with a number of different businesses.

In this clip, he's explaining exactly how he manages his time and how he has managed

to become, as he says, human optimization.

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 Manch 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.

I've mastered time, energy and capacity, right?

So I live this extraordinarily balanced life by design, where I only dedicate 30% of my

time to podcasts and my shooting television and building my businesses.

I spend 30% sleeping, 10% on my health, never compromised, and then 30% with my family.

How much is 30% for you?

How many hours?

Are you looking at 30% of a 40-hour work week, or 30% of your waking?

He's saying I'm a dad.

Of my entire life.

All hours.

It's eight hours, basically, right?

No, all life.

So 24 hours in a day, I sleep 30%, so seven hours, right, like I work seven hours.

I'm with my family seven hours, and I spend three hours on my health, on average, right,

when you look at the overall balance.

And then I could show you this because I track it every day, and it pumps all of it into

this beautiful dashboard.

Because what I've done over time, because to give you an idea, I shot 250 episodes of

television this year, it's exactly 4% of my total time.

That's how highly optimized it's become, right, because you basically have a certain level

of human capacity, and in order to scale it, you either hire or automate it.

So I live this deeply automated life that hires people in to add capacity, and at the

end of the day, I just live super balanced and happy.

That's it.

So give us an example.

What software are you using to track all that time, that dashboard?

I created, I had a programmer write me a script that goes inside Google, the Google Calendar.

It's an app on your phone, or it's just on like a spreadsheet, basically?

It's inside Google Calendar, and then it populates a Google spreadsheet, right, and then the

beauty of it is, is I qualitative data and quantitative data is what I live my life off

of, right.

So every day for the last five years, I wrote down how I feel about my life, work, and health

zero to ten.

And so I could show you by the qualitative numbers how I'm living a higher quality and

happier life, and the result of that is based off the optimization that I've done on my

quantitative stuff.

My quantitative stuff is, did I get up before five?

Did I brain train?

Did I get in the gym?

Did I meditate?

Did I have a clean diet?

Did I not drink?

I could show you by my quantitative numbers that I have done all of those almost every

single day of this entire year, about 87% of those quantitative things that have just

driven those qualitative numbers, how I feel about my life, my work, and my health higher

and higher.

So by the numbers, I could tell you what a high quality life that I'm living compared

to just five years ago.

You're saying so many amazing things, I've been to each one.

So you just said something, did I brain train?

What's that mean?

I use the luminosity app, where it's just adding flexibility and just letting your mind

do all of these things that are different than just getting in and reading your emails

and just going through your rhythm is really what I do that for.

And you wake up at five, what's the morning routine like?

Sounds like you're pretty optimized.

Yeah, look, I have to get up before five, but depending on what time I go to bed, I'll

get up at four or 4.32, right, and then to me, I always have that coffee pre-made so

I can get up and get cooking.

And then I track all my numbers from the previous day, fill in all my time if I missed any time

to make sure that all my data is there.

On your phone or on your computer?

On the computer, right, and then I try to just organize and knock out sort of my more

executional work before the kids get up and all that.

Then at 6 o'clock, I brain train, 6.30, I meditate.

When I jump out of meditation, actually at 5.15, I bring my wife a coffee and I send

her an email of every single thing that I'm doing that day, what it means to me with a

love quote on top, right?

Again, this is- What do you mean what it means to me?

Like each thing you're doing?

Just like what you're doing?

Yeah, in my- One of the pulls of our relationship was like, I do so much stuff that she would-

I'd just be talking to someone to be the first time she ever heard of it.

And so she would just like, I would do so much stuff in a day, she just would feel disconnected.

So I just started giving her an email every day of like, what I'm doing, what it means

with a nice love quote, right?

And that then settled down the energy of feeling disconnected from everything that I'm doing.

Bring her a coffee at 5.15, God bless her.

She started doing 5.30 calls for her business, which means she's going to be tired earlier.

That means we can go to bed by 9.30, right?

Which is another sort of blessing.

And this is happening in LA, right?

This is your- Yeah, yeah.

And then, you know, I pop out of meditation at 7, wake the kids up, get them both down

to breakfast at 7.30, my trainer doctor comes to the house, 7.30 to 8.30, training and then

take the kids to school at 8.30, right?

And then the day, depending on what the week is, you know, sometimes I go to breakfast

dates with my wife.

Sometimes it's, you know, on Mondays, you know, I basically run a flat organization,

right?

So I have, you know, 10 core divisions that are ran by an executive and I just spend

Monday fully organizing from when I get up 4 o'clock into my chief of staff for an hour,

into my president and COO for an hour and then half hours for every single person that

runs that division so that we can just be highly organized and then plan the rest of

the week, which of course is inside Thursday night, date nights and Friday night, sushi

night with my wife and picking my kids up and all of, you know, I've designed balance

and then I only work within the structure of balance.

And then depending on how I feel, depending on how my wife feels, then I'll even adjust

that to lean in to making sure that my family is feeling priority above business always.

You, you, you are like, yeah, you're, you're like, you know, like people make fun of Silicon

Valley people because it'll like, like, here's my calendar, I've got it adjusted like this,

this and this, but I'm sitting here looking at you.

I think it looks like you're wearing a black blazer with a black sweater and you got these

slick air pods and you are more Silicon Valley techie in tune with this than like the stereotypes

of it.

And I, I love it.

I think this is awesome.

And look, I'm, I am human optimization and optimized to, to be what though, to just be

happy.

You know what I mean?

Like at the end of the day, that's why you're playing the game and you've got to figure

out yourself to understand what truly makes you happy because your goal is to not be happy

in pockets.

Your goal is to be happy every single hour of every single day of your life.

Right.

And that's really what I've accomplished.

And I'll tell you something, if you think about how you live, right, you can live in

two places that'll get you nowhere.

It's dwelling and being negative, right?

Or it's being hopeful and like wishing, right?

Either of get you nowhere, but real, where life is lived is you're either problem solving,

you're either creating the future or you're experiencing the present, right?

And the truth is, whatever you're experiencing the present is based off of the decisions

you've made in the past.

And it's your choice to create whatever you, your reality is that you're going to eventually

experience or God forbid something hits you rather than dwelling on it or hoping it didn't

happen.

If you problem solve and handle it, you're not going to, you can basically live a life

with no negative thoughts if you learn to live in a state of either experiencing, creating

or problem solving in your entire life, right?

But it's on you to understand what that is, to be able to live in that state.

I'm FlavverGassett, Sean.

For this next clip, we're going to be listening to the world famous comedian Hassan Minhaj

and he explains how he prepares for his shows.

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What's the system you've developed to get on stage and have that switch flipped?

When you came on within two seconds, it's like this guy's in a state of mind.

He's in a state, as we say, of, like, he's here to perform.

He knows what he's here to do.

There's no tiptoeing into it.

So I was wondering, what do you do the five, 10 minutes before or an hour before?

I don't know what your warm-up routine is.

Yeah.

I think you're ready.

The listeners want to know this?

I'm sure.

I don't know.

Really?

This is your personal curiosity.

I want to know it.

My trainer has this great phrase.

He goes, who are my customers?

The people that love what I do.

Because he's like, people always ask, oh, who are your customers?

Some demographic, some like marketing intellectual answer.

He's like, easiest way in the world is the people who love, your customers are the people

who love what you do.

Yeah.

So just do what you do.

Yeah.

You will naturally attract the people who love that.

Yeah.

You will repel the people who aren't interested.

Yeah.

And you will never have to guess what the heck people want because you just do what you

want.

And so that's the approach I take to the pod.

Yeah.

No, I love it, man.

I love talking to a shop like this.

For me, it's actually, it's the three hours before.

So what I try to do before any show, I try to make sure that I exercise in some capacity

because, and I don't know if you feel this way, maybe it's within our community, it's

so funny to go back to what you were talking about where you're like, oh, it seems like

a guy who works really hard.

It's just funny.

I was doing Mark Marin's podcast and Marin said the same thing about me.

He's like, yeah, you seem like really put together and he's like, why aren't you unraveling

like the way other comics are, right?

And I'm like, yeah, I'm just philosophically not from that camp.

I'm not from the tortured artist camp.

I'm more from the place of like, I'm creating from a place of passion and love.

And actually real talk, it's about emptying the tank.

I just want to put it all out on the court, right?

You know, and this court happens to be the stage, right?

And I want to do my best.

I want to be like, I put everything into picking out this outfit.

I put everything into picking out these jokes, these tags, the stage design, the lighting

design, like this is it.

And I want to know when I go to sleep here at night, when I put my head down on the pillow,

I did everything I could.

Like living a life without regret and only you can answer that is the best.

Everybody's talking about chasing happiness.

To me, it's about chasing satisfaction, like that self-satisfaction.

And you know what it is.

You know what it is.

And you know when you sold out, you got a good result, but you kind of didn't do it

the right way.

Yeah.

That sticks with you.

And some people just like let that stick with them.

Yeah.

Other people say, all right, even if I won, I'm not going to win on those terms again.

Yeah.

And if I lost, I can lose on these terms and be good at night.

Yep.

And I'm sure there's listeners to the pod that spend their time retweeting the right

things and quote tweeting and dunking on VC people.

And you know, they say the right things, they'll regurgitate the right opinions, but they

know when they put their head down at night, hey, you're supposed to train, you jerked

off instead.

Right.

You were supposed to do this.

You didn't.

That's all you want.

For me, what that stage represents is like, no, I'm putting myself in a high level of

accountability in front of 3400 people.

I'm putting it all out here.

And if you don't think I'm good, if you think I'm corny, if you think I'm whatever, hey,

it is what it is.

But I stood here.

Right.

And I did it.

I did me.

And on my terms, and I did my best.

So you're saying three hours before you...

Three hours before, what I do is I like to do some form of exercise and I try to get

out of my head.

I get to workout, workout, or you're just trying to break a sweat.

What are you...

I'm trying to do...

On tour, it's just about body maintenance.

So I'll do running, I'll do some pull-ups, some core stuff, just stuff to get my body

going and start breaking a sweat.

And what I love about, like right around a minute, 30 to 45, is I'll get out of my head

and into my body.

And so much of life right now is getting out of your head.

And it's funny.

I called you randomly.

I appreciate you picking up the phone the other day.

We had a long conversation, we can get into that later.

But so much of, I think what you do and what you put out in the world, and I call it like,

tech Twitter talk, it's all in your head.

Intellectual.

It's all just heady, anxiety-inducing stuff, theorems up, Solana's this.

It's like, it's all head shit.

It's not a body-feeling thing.

Like grounding yourself two feet on the ground, I'm here in this moment.

What do I do?

And so much of performance, and to be great at it, the best Chappelle, the best performers,

they're not in their head, they're in their body.

They're really there.

Somebody screams, somebody says something, somebody heckles, they're in their body.

When you watch Steph Curry play, when I watch Devon Booker play, these guys are so in their

body.

Right.

Luca's the best at this.

He's in his body.

He's in flow.

Right.

Because Luca's like a kid, and kids do this well.

Yeah.

Kids do this pretty naturally.

I love that.

Yeah.

Or how do you get?

Which is, you gotta fight that.

Yeah.

You gotta fight that, right?

And so that's a great way to get out of my head, get into my body.

Then I'll probably, I eat something.

I take a shower, and then I put on the outfit.

And for me, it's like being on stage and putting on that, it feels like a uniform.

And like for me, it feels like, I want it to feel like a show.

Like from the watch to the jacket to the pants, I'm like, there's a level of confidence

that you have when you move into a room and you're like, hey, from my heels all the way

up to my head, I'm wearing my armor.

Right.

Like I'm coming correct.

Right.

And you just, you carry yourself with a little bop.

You're like, no, I feel better about myself.

My shit isn't slouching.

There's no stains on my stuff.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Like the moment I saw you today, you walked in, you're wearing your tech pants.

I could tell you washed them a few times, but there's some stains on the backside.

You know what I'm saying?

But that feeling of like, no man, when I'm coming in here, I'm gonna be fresher than

Sean.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna be fresh.

That already gives me a feeling of like confidence.

I know what I'm doing.

You know, and, and by the way, the opener, Marcella, like Marcella was just like dressed

to the nines.

You know, it's a feeling.

Then I get to the show, I finish eating, I'll meditate.

So meditation for 10 to 15 minutes will allow me to just again get out of my head and drop

into my body and something simple, just headspace, like I'm not getting too crazy about it.

And what I love about headspace specifically is so much of it is just basic breathing,

establishing a level of intention.

I'll meditate, then I'll pray.

And for me, like prayer is really important because it's got to be about something bigger

than just myself and my corporal being.

I'm like, what am I doing this for?

And just in establishing an intention and for me, the intention is like love, let me

give joy to people.

And I want the seed of everything that I'm doing to come from that, not be like, not

be petty energy, angry energy, I'm going to prove you wrong energy, like I'm in the

laughter business, like I'm here to make you feel joy, right?

In that warm feeling.

So establishing an intention there, I get to the, I'll get to the venue about an hour

before I'll have a double shot of espresso, I'll let my bowels do what they do.

You always get those jitters like you got to pee, you got to do what you got to do.

And then about like 30 to 45 minutes before I like to be loose, just with the, with the

staff, right?

Let them know, like, hey, what's up?

How are you?

Door guy, security guy, openers, right?

You know what I mean?

Another way to get out of your head, by the way, yeah, be with others, be there, serving

others and then about a half an hour before I'll go to my green room.

I usually write it down.

I'll write down.

Be on hotel, notepad, paper, hey, what are a couple new tags that I'm working on tonight?

Just move the ball forward a little bit, remind myself, y'all, I'm going to do this.

For example, last night, one of the things I talk about an act, one of the show is fertility.

And a new joke that I did was like, you know what it's like being infertile as a man?

I felt like Woody in Toy Story when his arm got ripped off.

That was a, that was just one line.

And I was like, hey, make sure you do the Woody Toy Story line.

You know, and every show I try to add a few of these extra moments and you add that up

over the course of like a year, two years, three years, you start to see what works and

what doesn't work.

And I'll have a thousand, three thousand different variations of that, right?

And then I get on stage.

And by the time I get on stage, there's just this feeling of like, now it's just pure play.

Whatever happens, happens.

And when I'm on stage, what I try to do is I try to remember when, when I'm opening in

front of my crowd, they're like really hot.

And one of the things I try to remember is don't yell, don't scream.

Try to actually bring them to you, like set the tempo of the game.

Don't get like too excited or too hot.

Like you can whip them up, but then like sit down at the stool, bring them to you.

For this next clip, we have a longtime guest, Steph Smith, and she talks about companies

with only one employee that are able to make millions of dollars.

So let's talk about companies of one.

So we're you have a list of like 10 or seven companies that are run by one person that

are shockingly big.

Let's go through some of them and talk about them.

Yeah.

So I think you called out two before, so I'm going to just call out those two quickly.

You called out built with before, which is the site that basically can tell what a site

is built with.

Is it built with WordPress or Squarespace or what plugins is it is a site using?

And that one at the time when you found it was, I think, doing around 14 million.

And then you've also covered Nomad List and Remote OK by Peter Lovells.

And those two, I think, together are doing around a million a year.

And those two, I think, are both completely solo founders.

I know Peter certainly is, but there are a couple others.

So have you heard of Ugmonk?

Well, hold on.

So built with.

I don't know.

Built with is like maybe one of the most impressive ones here, but not the, but one of.

Built with is like, it's like a, I think they have a plugin as well, but it's a website

you go to builtwith.com, you enter in the hustle.co.

Let's say you want to, you see something on our website that you like and you want to

copy and you're like, how do they build that?

What plugins do they use?

What whatever you use built with and they make money because what do they do?

Do they like sell people's data or something?

I'm not sure.

Let me look this up because I know they get a crazy amount of traffic, but they've got

plans on their site.

So they've got a basic plan.

I don't know what you get with it, but it's $295.

Oh, I know what you get.

You get basically, I believe you sign up and it tells you people's.

So it crawls all these websites and it tells you what type of features they have on their

website and what type of plugins.

And I think you pay money and it'll say, we have the emails or contact information of

all types of people who use blank plugin and you sell a plugin that is complimentary to

that.

Therefore pay money and you could now target them and advertise against them or things like

that.

Yeah.

They charge.

So their basic plan is $3,000 a year.

Their pro is $5,000.

Their team is $10,000.

There's a cool little trick they have on their pricing page.

If you go to it and you hover over, they have like technologies, keywords, and they have

these little gifs that they're actually like showing what you would get with the product.

I've never actually seen that before, so that's a cute little hack.

And it's built by basically one guy in Australia.

All right.

So what are some of the other companies?

Okay.

So I was going to call it Ugmonk.

So this one's not as big.

I actually don't know exactly how much they're making, but it's a really simple e-commerce

store.

They started just selling really nice t-shirts, which sounds like, okay, like there's enough

t-shirt stores out there.

But this guy, Jeff Sheldon, he focused on just really high quality shirts.

And then now he's moved into almost like productivity stuff.

If you, are you in the dock?

I'm looking at Ugmonk.

So when I go to Ugmonk, I see like a pen holder and I see like a to-do list.

It's like cute, well-designed like pen holders, but it doesn't sound neat, but honestly, it

looks pretty sick.

Yeah.

It looks surprisingly sick.

If you go to, let me, if you click in the dock where it says, look at this, if you click

that, that is his setup and he, he's like one of those builders who I think has built

a little Twitter following as well.

And he just has this beautiful desk setup, which is like the perfect ad.

And I-

Oh, I've seen this.

It looks awesome.

I never thought I'd want to go and buy like a $100 to-do list, but I, I think I'm gonna

buy one.

Yeah.

I, it's just like cute, easy to use, like mid-century modern stuff.

Yeah.

I'm on board.

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure he does several million a year.

He gets over 200,000 page views a month and he's been going at this for several years.

So I know he makes enough to have left his full-time job several years ago and he's grown

a lot since then.

So I'd probably say a couple of mil.

Wow.

That's crazy.

All right.

That's a, that's a good find.

It's just one guy.

He's the only employee.

I think so.

I mean, he certainly, he probably has some staff now that he's been growing, but I'm pretty

sure he doesn't have a big team.

All right.

What's next?

The card is actually one guy.

He might have contractors, but card, C, A, R, R, D. I've built sites with card.

People probably recognize card or they've almost certainly been on a site built by card

and it's built by this guy, AJ, and it's doing $1 million a year AR.

I think he actually just raised money now.

So I think he's kind of going for, did he really just raise money?

I would love to invest in this.

Yeah.

You raised money earlier this year.

He was like big in the indie hacker community.

And then I think he posted on indie hackers this year, like, look, I'm, I'm going to raise

money.

I'm going to, you know, really go for it, but he, it's kind of crazy.

2.5 million sites have been built on card and yeah, I hit like a million AR.

So it's a free platform for building simply for building simple, fully responsive one

page websites that can do anything.

I actually think so there was this company called, you remember about me?

No.

What is that?

About.me.

So go to about.me.

That's the URL.

You don't remember that.

You're, I'm just a little bit older than you, which, which is like, then that few years

probably makes a difference because about.me when I was just getting started was considered

like the preeminent builder in this space.

And they made it, it was a one page website where you can explain stuff about you.

And it was started by this guy named Tony Conrad.

I believe his name is, and he's this cool looking dude who is also an investor now.

And he sold it after only two years to AOL for like $40 million and it was bootstrapped.

You see about.me.

You see how it's like basically the same thing.

Yeah.

It reminds me of, you've heard of unsplash, right?

I love unsplash.

So, or sorry, I'm not thinking of unsplash, I'm talking about unfold.

Unfold is this app that basically for Instagrammers, it adds different, like it allows you to

kind of piece together pictures for your Instagram story, but they also started these like one

pagers were basically cause all these Instagrammers, they're like, Oh, I need my Lincoln bio Lincoln

bio is also a site like that.

But unfold was sold to Squarespace.

I think like last year or something.

I don't know for how much though, man, I think that these one page website builders are actually

really cool.

So there's this other business I almost invested in.

I think it's called the media kits.com or.co.

I believe it's just called media kit and all they did was built a really slick website

builder where you could create your media kit kit and send it to people.

So, and, uh, whether you're the hustle or you're just an Instagram person, you just

had the hustle.co slash media kit or like, you know, Steph Smith.com slash media kit.

And it was that your media kit was on there.

And that sounds like not that important, but it's kind of like doc send.

So doc send, if you don't know what doc send is, doc send is basically all it is, is PowerPoint

in the cloud, but email gated.

So you have to enter your email and then you get all types of information.

So you use it when you are creating a pitch deck and you want to send it to investors.

So you know who has it and who views it and how long they've used it.

And it's basically that.

So anyway, card is pretty bad ass.

That actually might be one of the highest potential businesses you have here, I think.

Yeah.

And I mean, he actually runs card as a subscription business.

So that's one million ARR.

And I think it's probably way past that today.

I think you're going to like the next one though.

Go to this next episode.net.

I think it's actually next dash episode.net.

It's such an old site.

I think the guy's been running it for 15 years.

And if you just open it up, you'll, you'll get a sense about the UI hasn't caught up

to where we are today, but it's amazing because this guy's been running it for 15 years.

Guess how much traffic this thing gets.

I'm looking at it on similar web.

This is crazy.

So what is this called?

So next dash episode.net.

What is this?

Yeah.

It's a site where basically like there's no way I would think that a site like this would

still exist, but people use it that basically helps you track your TV shows and it's a little

bit of a community.

So I think I've never used it, but you know, people watch The Bachelor, they hang out on

this site and they find other people who watch The Bachelor and they talk about it.

But it's kind of crazy how much traffic this site gets.

This is awesome.

And so here's why, you know, this is a big business.

So if you go to similar web and you look at the traffic, the estimated monthly traffic

is 3.6 million uniques a month.

That's decent, that's not like the best, but it's like really good, particularly for one

person.

But if you go to traffic source, it says that 80% is coming from direct traffic, which basically

means that there's a lot of people that are just typing in this URL and going there on

a consistent basis.

And if you do that, you probably can have a huge business and it looks like they have

got a premium, which is only $2 a month.

But how big is this?

So I don't know exactly how big it is, but he's been running it for 15 years.

And I know he's definitely, I found him on Hacker News, one of those posts that was like,

hey, like who's a solopreneur who's doing this thing on their own.

And he's like, I've worked on this entirely on my own for the last 15 years.

So.

What?

This is crazy.

Good find.

I can't wait.

So what's this person's name?

Do you know?

Let me send you.

Here he is.

I found him.

Nico.

Nicolet.

Yeah.

Wow.

This is a good find.

How much revenue do you think he does on this?

I don't know about today, but I'm assuming like if he's getting that many million pages

and he's been working on it for 15 years, I'd say like maybe a million a year.

What do you think?

Yeah.

I would agree with that.

And it's probably mostly all profit.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, he's literally the only one who works on it in one of the posts on Hacker

News.

He's like, yeah, I started it for myself because I couldn't find such a tool back in the day.

And basically he's like avoided hiring other people because he doesn't want to like scale

through hiring.

All right.

What else have we got?

There's a ton on here.

There's one called Hostify by a guy named Riley who basically, you know, has scaled

that to like a million a month and a year or two.

There's some good stories from back in the day where apparently SurveyMonkey was doing

$19 million in revenue with 12 employees, so not a one person thing, but plenty of fish

is another example where they were doing apparently $10 million and the guy was by himself.

You might have even been part-time, so that's kind of a crazy story from back in the day

too.

How did, how do you know this about SurveyMonkey?

So it was posted.

It was actually you posted about Built With a while ago, I think.

And then I went through all of the comments of you basically, you were like, can anyone

tell me something more efficient than that?

And this guy named Trip posted, yeah, SurveyMonkey was doing $19 million with 12 employees and

you asked him if this was documented and basically someone else commented and was like, yeah,

Trip's too modest to say this, but he actually invested in SurveyMonkey in 2009, so he probably

knows the numbers.

Wow, this is amazing.

I've heard rumors about SurveyMonkey doing this.

This is crazy.

This is so cool.

Okay, from a million dollar businesses, we're moving to billion dollar businesses.

On this next clip, we have Jack Abraham.

He's the founder of multiple great startups and he's currently leading tons of successful

investments at Atomic.

In this clip, he tells us the frameworks that he uses to recognize opportunities for billion

dollar companies.

Go to the patterns.

I'd be curious to what those are.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, so some patterns that I think are kind of tried and true that are really interesting

to think about.

One pattern is if you take things that rich people have access to or rich companies have

access to and you figure out how to democratize them, so you make them more accessible, distributable,

cheaper, and accessible to everyone, that is a winning formula for creating a really

good company.

Part of the reason for that, from a philosophical perspective, this is actually something I learned

from Mark Andreessen.

He has this belief that human desire is infinite, which is an interesting concept.

If you believe that, then people with a lot of resources and companies with a lot of resources

are willing to spend on the outer limit of human desire.

They're poking around, they're figuring out all of these things of what's the next thing

on the human desire bubble that could be discovered.

They might discover something, and if something there really takes hold that you can then

take and give to everyone, everyone might want that, and it might be ready for everyone.

Uber was a classic example of this, right?

People had private drivers, now everybody can push a button and have a private driver

pick them up.

Yeah, private driver with Uber, private chef with DoorDash, private shopper with Instacart.

Those are all really good examples.

You could even argue second home, Airbnb, it's kind of like having access to a second

home in a much cheaper way.

I think that that's a really interesting pattern that people can look into that is an interesting

one and is pretty tried and true.

What's an idea in that space?

What are some other things that you've seen that either very wealthy people or very wealthy

companies have that the rest of us don't?

What are some other examples in there that haven't looked into it, but might be interesting?

Well, I think that there seems to be some kind of a renaissance happening in fintech

partially because the wealthy seem to have access to financial planning, financial resources

around planning, access to the markets.

There's this whole 99% versus the 1% and people have kind of figured that out.

I think that's why you're seeing this boom of new companies.

If you can give the 99% what the 1% has access to and the ability to generate wealth, I think

that that's actually really interesting.

I think there are a lot of interesting startup ideas that are being formed there.

You're starting one or two that we think can help empower people in that area, for example.

That would be one example of an area that...

Are you going to do anything in the wealth advisor space?

We are kind of tangentially doing things there.

I think that there's probably a lot more to do there.

Wealth advisory is a compounded issue where even the wealthy, when they have access to

wealth advisory, it's not great.

It's not great.

Have you heard of ADPAR, Sean?

No.

I bet you have, Jack, right?

ADPAR?

Yeah.

ADPAR, sorry.

ADPAR was started by Joe Lansdale, I think.

I only know the Wikipedia version, but basically it's kind of like Mint.com, but for really

wealthy people.

But billionaire wealthy people.

I actually don't know what features necessarily it has that something a little bit...

Jack, what's it have that's more robust, do you know?

Sorry, can you repeat that?

What does ADPAR have that's more robust?

It basically has tracking of everything.

Every fund, everywhere in the world, every wealth manager, all of your assets.

But they tend to work more with wealth managers instead of individuals.

But Joe and that company has a big vision for where that can go, and you might be able

to work with it as an individual now, but that's kind of along the lines.

So I could disrupt that.

So I work with some of these folks, and they send me the jankiest stuff ever.

And they're a login, so like Morgan Stanley, the login to look at your investments.

It's horrible.

And I was like, you guys, this is just absolutely awful, like I'm just using spreadsheets on

my own.

This is really bad.

I've heard of this ADPAR thing, and they're like, well, you know, you can't use that unless

you're worth $500 million or like a billion dollars.

It's really, really expensive.

Like it's crazy high.

And I'm like, are you kidding me?

Just like give me a mitt.com login or something, and you guys like become the admin and just

like, let's share this.

You can just tell me because this is dog shit.

And so I think that I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in that space.

But to go back to your point about distribution, I think selling to those people can be quite

challenging because they're very old school and they're very conservative.

But I was bringing this up to ask you if that's a space that has been interesting to you lately

because I know you're being a little cryptic because you like to be stealth until you go

live.

But so I was trying to, I'm trying to get something out of you.

Yeah.

I think it's a really interesting space.

I would encourage people to look into it.

I think that there is a lot that can be done there.

I think there's dissatisfaction amongst everyone basically in that space.

It's pretty universal, a lot of room for improvement.

Cool, so that's one pattern for great ideas.

So what are the wealthy companies that people have that can be democratized and if a few

people have that desire and they've pushed out to that limit, other people would want

it if you can make it accessible, cheaper and more available to them.

That's an amazing one.

I think there's tons of great ideas there.

What's another framework or sort of pattern you've seen for great ideas?

Yeah, so one that I think is pretty interesting, that's also I would put in the tried and true

bucket, is if you take something that people consistently do and they have to do and they

feel like they have to do it, but it takes a lot of steps and or time and you dramatically

simplify it and you make it a lot faster to accomplish the same thing that they feel like

they have to do.

So some good examples of this would be, for example, booking online travel, it used to

be so hard to do, you'd have to go to so many different sites, the Kayak founders had the

vision of let's just pull it all into Kayak.com, you go to one site, you see it all in one

place, they made it really easy.

I think this once, which was anytime there's somebody has 14 tabs open to do this, to do

one task, that's a business opportunity, is that right?

That's a business opportunity, yeah, I mean, just watch for that.

If you ever see that, people are doing a lot of research, there are tons of tabs open,

it's really arduous, that's an opportunity.

Another example of that, that we kind of found with Hymns and Hers and other telemedicine

companies that we've started, is going to the doctor's office.

People need to go to the doctor's office, think of that process.

You're calling the doctor's office, you're scheduling an appointment, you're whipping

out your calendar, you're putting it on your calendar, you're going to the waiting room,

you're sitting there, you're getting prescribed something, you're going to Walgreens, you're

waiting in line for half an hour, going around the store, going home, this is a big process.

As a result, the next generation kind of doesn't even really engage with the healthcare system.

Close to nine out of 10 of them don't even know who their doctor is, or they haven't

even gone.

Telemedicine takes that process and makes it a five minute process where you can do

it on your phone and go through and get treated for whatever condition that you have.

I think another interesting example of that is selling your house.

People need to sell their house, right?

And it's a really hard, long, arduous process, fraught with a lot of anxiety and things

like that.

Open Door came along and said, hey, come to this website, tell us what your house is,

and we'll make you an offer to buy it.

And you can sell it right now, and not everyone has to do that, and not everyone does do that,

but enough people do it, that it created a really, really big company that's doing really

well.

So those are some interesting...

And you guys are doing that now with Open Store, right?

Which I gotta say, is a truly great idea.

I remember when I first started it, I texted my friend and I said, I didn't even say how

great this idea is, I just only said, why are we not doing this?

Because I was like, this is that good of an idea.

Selling your company, selling your e-commerce store in this case, takes so much effort,

so much work, and the data is all there, right?

Like I'm assuming, I don't actually know how it works, I'm assuming it's sort of like

Clear Bank or whatever where you can plug into their Shopify, you can plug into their

Facebook Ad account, you can plug into their bank or whatever.

And with those three sources of data, you can get basically like a health score and

a value of this shop and make them an offer, and they don't have to go, most of them don't

even know.

Like at least with a house, it's painful, but you kind of know what you're supposed

to do to do it.

At 9 out of 10 friends I talked to who have an e-commerce store, don't even know what

you would do if you wanted to sell.

They don't even know, who's door do I knock on, what do I need to have ready, and so therefore

I just, I'm just not gonna do it.

And it's like the Open Door thing where not everybody's gonna do this, but sure, if Open

Door captures, I don't know what they modeled out, but 1%, 3%, 5% of all house sales, like

a multi-billion dollar company, same thing for Open Source.

So I'm super, super bullish to the point where I was like, what am I doing with my life that

I'm not doing this idea?

This makes total sense.

Oh man.

Well, thanks for saying that.

I don't worry, I'm not gonna copy you, but I did want to.

Keith and I are having a ton of fun, a ton of fun building out that company here in Miami.

That's been a blast building a great team, a huge team.

And yeah, it solves this pain point in a market where it's really hard to sell your company

and all you need to do is come to a website.

We give you a price and you can sell your company.

And it's really interesting.

We have an amazing data science team.

We're hiring really aggressively.

If anyone wants to join, anyone who joins that team, it's such an unbelievable team.

I think it's gonna create this almost Miami mafia, so to speak, around here of amazing

people.

I think it's an exceptional opportunity and scaling really quickly.

So that's been a lot of fun.

Thanks for saying that.

Okay, that's it.

Thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

On this episode, we bring you some of the best and most popular moments from My First Million in 2021. This episode specifically highlights some of our best guest moments. Let us know how you like the episode and if we should do greatest hits in the future!
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* Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel.
* Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter.
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Show Notes:
(00:40) - Rob Dyrdek masters time
(12:45) - How Hasan Minhaj prepares for his shows
(17:50) - Steph Smith talks about one-person companies making millions
(29:05) - Jack Abraham talks about frameworks for billion dollar companies
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Links:
* Episode 224 with Rob Dyrdek
* Episode 244 with Hasan Minhaj
* Episode 248 with Steph Smith
* Episode 225 with Jack Abraham
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Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.
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Additional episodes you might enjoy:
• #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits
• #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future
• #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto
#169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett
• ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates
• Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More
• How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More