#106 - The Q&A Special: We Answer Your Questions Live

What's up guys, Sean here. Sam is still out with his kidney problem and we're wishing him a speedy recovery. It's scary stuff. Hopefully, hopefully it turns out not to be anything too serious. This week, in the meantime, we're going to try to fill in as best as we can with a few different guests. You know, big shoes to fill, but we're going to do our best. Today's episode is actually a Q&A we did for Trends subscribers a couple months ago. And so in the Trends community, it's pretty awesome. They bring in different speakers and you know, you can do a Q&A with a small group of people. And so they asked us questions like, how do you find interesting businesses? Um, what are your contrarian opinions? What's something you were completely wrong about? You know, how would you validate this idea I have for a mental health app? What news do you consume? Uh, what other businesses do you own? How do you make great connections? Like, how do you build a network in the digital era where you're not meeting face to face? Uh, and then business questions like, you know, what are some big opportunities in the work from home world? What are your biggest failures in business? How would you build a newsletter from scratch? And then book recommendations and some other fun stuff. So hope you guys enjoy this Q&A episode. Let's do it.

Okay, we will get going. We're at 70 people now. I think there's gonna be 200 people here. We'll get going. Okay, today is one year anniversary of— one year anniversary of Trends, and Steph asked that Sean and I come here and just answer questions. We don't have much of an agenda today, but for those of you who don't know Sean, who you can't see— I don't think you can see him now, but he's visible once he talks. Sean and I have been very close friends since probably 2013, no, 2014. And we have this podcast called My First Million that Sean created, and now I was brought on as a co-host. And Sean and I have an interesting perspective. First of all, I run this business, or I don't run it, everything about it, but I started it. And so I have a lot of insight to advertising businesses and subscription businesses, and we're like an 8-figure company or whatever you want to call it. And so anyway, I've got that insight, but what makes Shawn and I kind of unique is we have this massive network of people who are significantly more successful than we are, and we also have this massive network of people who are way less successful than we are but are more likely than not going to be way more successful. And so we're able to see all these interesting things and behind the scenes of all these, uh, interesting stuff. And when Shawn started the podcast, he basically just interviewed people, so he's got all these other insights and Anyway, we just see probably more things than you guys do, just because it's our job. So it's kind of a lucky job. And so what we can do today is answer questions on patterns or trends we see on— what else, Sean? What can we talk about?

Yeah, I mean, really, it's whatever, whatever people are interested in. So we obviously on the podcast, we're always brainstorming new ideas, new opportunities, trends that we're seeing, or we'll break down a business and say, hey, have you heard of this thing? They are crushing it. Here's their model. So that's what we like to nerd out about. But, you know, this is a sort of a community giveback. So, hey, you know, we're here for an hour, whatever you guys want to talk about, we'll talk about. It's structured as a Q&A. And there's two ways to do it. So you can either submit a question in the Q&A portion of Zoom. So you can, you can type out your question if you prefer. Or if you actually want to ask a question live on, on audio or video and hop in, we can do that as well. So just type in the chat, hey, I'd love to ask a question about you know, whatever, my, you know, get feedback on my pitch, or I'd love to ask a question about how you guys, you know, do your hair, whatever it is. So, so there's two ways to do it. Either type it in or say I want to call in. Either way works for us.

And, um, it doesn't look like anyone has asked anything. So what you do is, uh, I think on the bottom left, like, we see like those three dots, and maybe it might say the word more. Click Q&A and, uh, ask a question. So we got to— we got one or two coming in. We will let a few come in. What do you want to do, Sean?

What do you want to do? Yeah, we can answer this first one.

I'm just going to say you can also upvote questions. So if you see a question, you're like, wow, I'd really love Sam and Sean to answer this, make sure to upvote it so we get to the best ones.

So, okay, I'll ask the question for Alex. Alex asked a question which was to Sam, how do you do research? And I think this is a good question because like normally if I saw this in a Q&A, I'd be like, how do you do research? What does that mean?, but Sam, you actually have a knack for finding information and distilling information that most people don't have.

Well, I think we both do. I definitely think we both do.

You're definitely better at it than me. Like, you've taught me a lot by being like, yeah, actually, here, you know, have you heard of this company? Here's what I know. Here's how I found it. Here's where the signals I look for, which, you know, is kind of interesting. So talk about your process, or I think rather than generically, if you just What's something you researched recently and then talk about the rabbit hole you went down?

So you said SimilarWeb, that tells you the traffic. Uh, you can use App Annie, that'll tell you downloads. Uh, if you go to the Google Play Store and you search an app, you scroll down to the bottom, it'll tell you how many installs the app has. These really easy, simple heuristics to figure out how big something is. Another thing you could do, contact ex-employees. I've done this before. I call them, I say, hey, an ex-employee doesn't really have anything to lose at this point for that company, so I'll say Hey, I saw you ran BD for this company. You know, we'd love to learn what you found, you know, what worked for you, what didn't. I get on the phone with them for 30 minutes and in that conversation I'll ask something like, so like, you know, ballpark, how big was this? Was it like $10 million in revenue or $100? I have no way to tell. And then I ask a question like that to triangulate answers from ex-employees.

I'll also, you know, I do it all the time or I'll be like, it said here you guys did X. That's right. That's bullshit, right?

And they'll say, Yeah, no way. We did this yesterday on our podcast with this guy. We were like, there's no way your margin's more than 30%, right? And you could say something like that, and they don't want— if you ask, what is your margin, you'll never get an answer.

But they'll be like, they'll be like, you know, we wish. And then you know that it's not even close. Or they'll say like, that would be horrible if our margin was that bad. And then you go, it's way higher, right?

So, but long story short, the point is, is that you're just looking for little tidbits of information and then there's thousands of tactics that you can do to dig deeper. Sean, what's a— someone asked us, what's an opinion that you hold that is a contrary opinion? I hate this. I don't like this question because it's just asking to be controversial. But why don't you answer it?

Yeah, why don't you answer this shit question? No, it's a, it's a good question, but it's a hard question. So the idea here is what's a contrarian opinion you hold? So what's something you believe that few other—

let's make it business related or in that, in that sphere.

And you, so you can buy a business for $1.2 million. So it's about a 2-year payback period, just slightly over 2 years. And that's, and so you push a button that says I'm interested in this business. They tell you everything about this business. So you're just getting an MBA first. Secondly, you don't have to put out $1 million, right? You SBA, you get an SBA loan because this business has existing cash flow. So how would you buy this business? You would put down about 10 to 15% as a down payment. That's about $100,000 to $150,000. You can either put that yourself from your savings or you can borrow money from friends, family to buy this business that is already proven to be successful. And then you get a loan on the rest. It's an SBA loan. It is personally guaranteed, but you're buying businesses that are mature, that have existing cash flows, and you should do your diligence to make sure this is durable. It's not a flash in the pan. You're not buying a lemon. But you're gonna buy a business that's doing $2 million a year in revenue, $500,000 in, you know, SDE, which is the seller's discretionary earnings, and you're gonna be able to pay every month that you're paying off your loan, you're actually profiting. You have more net profits from month 1 than you would if you did your own business from scratch or you went and got a job. And so I just think that so few people, you know, the people who are doing this, they're like, it's obvious. I see some people in the chat like, hey, here's a great book on this, I agree with this. This is such an obvious path that is so underpopulated. It's like the best city in America that nobody's living in right now. There's like 100 people there and they're like, this is fantastic, don't tell anyone.

I'll say two, and one of them is the opposite of what Sean said. The first one is I used to think that the best product would win. That's not true. It's the best— whoever has the best sales and marketing process, I think, will win. And if your product happens to be good, That just makes sales and marketing a lot easier. And the second thing is I loved banking and finance and all that stuff. I think that shit is just, uh, it is like siphons out all the soul of anything interesting. Um, I think that like starting stuff and making stuff, um, from a place of like act, like just simply going after an opportunity because it makes money, I think I just can't stand it. And, um, I think it just sucks the life out of my— of me, and I— it's so hard for me to do. So that's a little bit different than what Sean said, but it doesn't have to be different.

Um, cool. So if I had one more contrarian opinion, it's probably not that controversial in this group, but I would say in mainstream society this would be contrarian, which is that, um, college— if you're a smart kid who wants to be successful, you shouldn't go to college.

Um, going— oh, I so disagree with you, Sean. I think if you can get into a top 20 university, you 100% should go.

I went to a top 20 university and I disagree. Uh, so that's why it's a contrarian opinion, right? Because I think most people would disagree with me, and that's why it's one of my contrarian opinions.

Then what if you can't get in the top 20? Do you still think you should go?

I think you should go to a state school, but you should not go into debt. Or you should go to community school, or you should just take 2 years off and just fuck around. I, I guess what I mean is I think that between 18 and 22 you should have the freedom and the ability to just be an idiot and be a fool and learn about yourself and sexuality and get drunk and have sex with people and try new jobs and do all that great stuff, but you shouldn't spend $30 grand a year to do it unless you can— unless you're like— like my wife went to Penn and she's an academic, she's a thinker, an academic. We need women like her., but I went to a school that cost $30 grand a year. It was a private school. That was a total waste.

Cool. Next question, or where do you want to go?

Uh, okay, let's, uh, I don't want to talk about research, uh, Gustavo. We'll talk about that in a minute. We already answered that, or we talked similar.

We'll come back to that though because it's highly, uh, does anyone want to call in? I'd love to actually just—

there was a couple people in the chat. There was, uh, Sean McKay has a mental hat health app idea. So Sean, if you want to, if you want to talk, just raise your hand, um, in Zoom. We'll get you on live. Adam Haston also pinged us. He's a full-time real estate investor. He might want to come on live.

Okay, but your questions have to be, uh, fast, short. Um, okay, and while you're pulling that person up, somebody asked for a broker like where you find companies. I think Sean does this as well. We use Quiet Light Brokerage, which is pretty helpful.

Yeah, there's several, you know, Quiet Light is good for curated, smaller number of high quality ones, but you don't always get the best value there because, you know, you don't get the diamonds in the rough there. And also other people are fishing in that same pond. And so honestly, the best businesses are not for sale. Yeah. So I like to go find a business that's doing well, contact the owner, and get them to see if they, you know, or sorry, not get them to sell, but ask if they would be open to selling. And now you're bidding against nobody.

Nice. Okay, so we've got— not other— Sean, actually. Okay, I'm gonna— Sean, I'm gonna allow you to talk. Not sure if that worked. Here we go. There's Sean. Sean, feel free to go.

Hey guys.

Yeah, hey guys, how you doing? Nice to hear from you.

Great name. Uh, yeah, spelling.

That is how they grow, unless you're Sam Harris, then you also have your normal audience to grow through. But the thing I would say is like, okay, cool. You know, that's a worthy problem. So it's like, it's a problem worthy of your time. It is a real problem. So you're not trying to validate that part. You need to validate. So the question is, what are you trying to validate? And really what you're trying to validate is, Can I acquire customers at a profitable rate? And then secondly, you know, do I actually have a way to deliver this value? How do I— do I have a way to deliver anxiety relief, stress relief to the customer, right? So like, you know, what is my product? Is it actually— does it actually work? And then secondly, can I acquire customers profitably?

All right, today's episode is brought to you by Tempo, tempo.fit. Fit is the website. I actually use this. I've used this for a few months now, and it's this machine that has a touchscreen and this 3D sensor. And what it does is they give you weights, like 115 pounds in weights, and it's for strength training. So what it is, is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting. It sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in, what your heart rate is. It's pretty amazing. And then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift, how many to lift, what workout to do, whether you want to do a 20-minute, 10-minute 50-minute workout. It's pretty amazing, but the best part is the leaderboard. The other stuff, all the features that they have, that's cool, but I'm obsessed with the leaderboard because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing, and you can compete with other people who have taken the same class. So it's made me want to work harder, lift more weight, or have more endurance. It's just pretty freaking fun. And the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that will make you live longer, and this product Tempo, it checks that box for me. So they're our sponsor today. If you use the code tempo hustle, you'll get $100 off. So tempo.fit is the URL, and tempo hustle, one word, you'll get $100 off. So check it out. I use it. If you look me up on Twitter, you'll see I'm always filming videos where I'm talking to that company saying I'm trying to crush their employees on the leaderboard because I actually love this thing and I use it all the time. So check it out.

And, um, so, you know, that's where you would— that's where I would focus all my energy. Uh, it's not about saying, is this a good idea or a bad idea? You have to zoom in and say, what part of this do I not know that I need to know to be successful? And in this case, I believe it's, can I acquire customers profitably? And if I can, yeah, I'm gonna grow this.

I completely agree. It's not a question of do people want this. You already have that. It's like, that's already back in the day. That's already validated.

You already— I was gonna say, I wanted to make a dating app.

Clarify, I'm not talking about an app that de-stresses and, you know, reduces your anxiety and calms you down and all that. I'm talking about going the other direction and kind of—

motivation.

Great. So let's say all those are positive things. Fantastic. Same idea, which is worthy cause. I believe you could do it. You know, maybe there's open space in the market. That's all great. I guess that it comes down to, do you have a growth machine where you'd be able to acquire a customer for a dollar and make $2.50 or $3 off them so that you could plow $2 back into buying the next customers? That's really how these businesses work.

Yeah, I would also just add that it's, it's about whether people are willing to pay for— everyone wants to be more productive, everyone wants to be more mindful. Are people willing to put their money where their mouth is? In some industries it's obvious. In some industries it's taken a lot of time for people to be like, oh, I absolutely should spend $30 on my mindfulness this month. And I do see a change in that, but you need to validate that people actually are willing to put money behind productivity.

Yeah, actually, even on that front, I wouldn't worry about that personally. I've failed to see any apps that people use regularly that don't monetize well. So if you get enough scale, then the sort of, you know, the way mobile apps work, it's not like you're getting 50 or 100% of people typically to pay. You know, usually these apps are freemium models. Games are really extreme where all the revenue comes from 1% or even less than 1% of the revenue, the whales. And apps like Calm are a little bit different because they put a paywall up right in front and they sort of have just like the 7 days of free Calm or whatever. But I guess like I used to do this with my earlier startups. I would try to validate, I try to prove everything. And some great advice I got was like, when you step back, which one of these do you really doubt is true? And it's like, you know, some things you need to prove because you need to do them and actually show it's not just a thought.. But as an entrepreneur, you want to focus most of your energy on the things you actually don't know is true or not. And so that's where I would focus the majority of my energy, which in this case is acquiring customers. One little pilot prototype of this. So a couple of months ago, I put out a podcast that's called the 9 Minute Morning Routine because I do this 9-minute morning routine. It helps me with the things you talked about— motivation, clarity of thought, all those things. Helps me be basically more successful. So I put it out as a podcast. I think podcast is a very cheap way to pilot an idea and build an audience that's not an app, because for an app you gotta get a developer and build a mobile app. That's a whole like set of work that maybe you don't want to do right now. And another example to look at that's like this, I talked to these guys who build the sleep app. I forgot what it's called.

Yeah, this shit's amazing. And they started out just by having a podcast where they would read sleep Stories.

Actually, I think it's the opposite. They started with a website, I'm sorry, with an app and the app's gotten really popular and the app does, you know, a few million bucks in revenue and has millions of users. And now they're actually doing more podcasting. They started doing podcasts to sell the app, to basically grow the app, but the podcast, they got way more users quickly. And so now he's like, dude, I love this. I don't even have to bother maintaining an app. Maybe I could just build this whole business on the podcast.— and I never really heard anything like that, but that sort of leads me to believe that might be an interesting prototype for you is put the content on the— on as a podcast, drive customers to that, and see if you can get a huge base of hooked subscribers. And you're not monetizing them yet, that's okay, maybe through ads or whatever, but— and then you could transfer that audience to an app if you needed to later. That's one way I would consider approaching this.

Thank you, Sean. Awesome.

Thank you so much for your input.

See you. Can we— can I answer one of these questions?

Yeah, absolutely.

Tom Schmidt asked, what's one thing in biz that you believed ended up— what's one thing that you 100% believe ended up opposite of what was expected? I'm reading that funny. You guys get what I mean? Yeah, I'll say a few. I was with Ryan Hoover the day before he launched Product Hunt, and he told me what it is, and I was like That is so stupid. You're wasting your time. The second thing is, I, when I started my business, I thought that like, I was gonna like, I'm gonna be this operational powerhouse and lead it every single day, just like Jeff Bezos. That didn't happen. And I think that that doesn't happen with most people. The third thing is charge more money than you think for stuff. And people actually are happier that way.

Those are good. I like those. I was also totally wrong on Product Hunt. In fact, Ryan had interviewed for a job at my company the week before he started Product Hunt, and we didn't bring him on board. I really liked him, but my team wasn't sold. And then he was like, okay, next week, he's like, I launched this thing. So I'm user 15 of Product Hunt. And I remember showing my team, be like, hey, that guy we interviewed, here's what he's doing. And we all just sort of laughed and were like, this is silly. I've been wrong many, many times on apps like that. My Snapchat username still has the word test in it because I thought this app's going nowhere, this is just a test account just to see what this dumb thing is that'll be gone in 2 months. And here we are, like 7 years, 8 years later, whatever it is. So I've been wrong many times on that. I was also wrong in some things I believed would happen in the future. So I'll give you an example. I thought that the way everybody, the way all these you know, when the web got popular, these services like Squarespace and Wix and all that, they let anybody build their own website. And I was convinced this is going to happen for mobile apps. And maybe I'm right, but on a way slower time scale. Um, but I thought people are going to want to— like, you're going to have no-code people, basically you're going to have non-coders building apps just like non-coders build websites. And I also thought the way I have, you know, seanperry.com, people have their own personal websites, I thought, oh, it'd be great if Tim Ferriss just had the Tim Ferriss app and he could directly connect with his audience and he could push notify them when he has a new blog post. And I just thought that would be great. And it turned out I was totally wrong on that. That's just like one specific example of things that I thought the future would be that it doesn't seem like it's played out that way.

Great.

Nice.

Should we bring someone else on live? Yeah. So Jackie, Jackie says he bought the largest towing directory in the US. I'll let him speak. But it sounds like something super interesting. Jackie, go ahead.

Hey guys, how's it going?

What up? I know who you are.

Yeah, I think I messaged you a couple of weeks back. You too, Steph. Nice to meet you, Sean. Yeah, so I actually stumbled across one of these directories. My background's in SEO, so I managed to rank for like towing company near me, et cetera, et cetera. So what we're doing right now is like we're essentially selling ad space in each city for like a flat $1K a month, for example. But now that I'm listening to some of these calls, I realize like the customer experience is so bad. And like these guys have no idea how to run a company. And I was wondering if there's like some, some way to disrupt this industry. It's one of these like really boring but I would say pretty lucrative industries. Um, so what I have is a bunch of traffic. So essentially people looking for towing but no one to fulfill it. And how would I rule it out in the US when I'm based in like Germany?

Does it make good money as is with the lead gen?

Uh, I mean, I bought it last month at like $200 and it makes $200 a month last month. This month we're gonna hit like $2-3K and it's just pure profit because it's just It's a website, right?

Wait, so what are you trying to do? Sell leads to tow truck companies?

So right now that's what we're doing. I'm running Facebook ads and we're offering like 30 days for free, just free calls. We're tracking everything. But what I want to do, like the $50 million, $100 million idea is be like the next AAA.

So I have a friend who built exactly that. He tried to build the next AAA. It's called Swoop. I think he got bought like maybe $50 million, something like that, um, by an existing tow trucking company. So if you actually want to do this, I can connect you with him and he could tell you everything about the tow trucking industry, why it's hard to disrupt and where it still can be disrupted. He was telling me and I was just getting bored, but like, uh, you know, it's obviously highly relevant for you, so I'll hook you up with him. Just DM me on Twitter after this. Um, the other thing that I would say is like, uh, the lead gen revenue just seems really, really low for that business. I'm guessing that a tow job is like, I don't know, hundreds of dollars at least, right? What's the average job, like $600?

No, actually it's depending on what they need. So a flat tire is like $50, actual tow is like $100-something.

Well, so, but that's definitely, there's definitely enough of that in America to build a big business.

Yeah, so I would definitely try to like, just, I would first ask myself, How big should this lead gen business be? And I would do a back of the envelope and figure out, is that $2K or $3K a month, or is it $30K a month, or is it $300K a month?

Um, it's $2 million a month.

I mean, it can definitely be up to— I calculated if we sign up one person in each city, I mean, major, at least $50K a month. Uh, we're just getting to the sales side of it. Uh, building the funnel is like everything's from scratch. I'm using some like janky SEO reselling platform right now.

Um, but Jackie, you're talking about that's not if you did something disruptive, that's just the lead gen business, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

But like the disruption is like rolling out in cities and offering actually like becoming a tow truck company.

My advice— sorry, go ahead, Sam.

Hmm. Yeah.

Okay.

We can sort of wrap it up, but I guess what I would say is personally, I would just try to get the lead gen revenue to $50K a month and I would move on. I would take that revenue and I would take the profits and I would invest it into other things. Unless you're really saying the next 5 years, I wanna build a tow trucking company. That's like the top thing you're most excited about.

If you're not, I completely— I 100% agree.

Don't, don't, um, don't turn, you know, something that's awesome into something that's shitty by trying to reach for scale and, you know, doing 90% more work, um, for, you know, some potential return. It sounds like for a little, a little additional work over the next 6 to 12 months, you can get this thing to be a cash cow that nobody knows about, and you don't hire anyone, and you, uh, just milk it. That's what I would do.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, I was looking for that $50 million idea. I guess I'll just settle for like an exit.

It's not really about settling. It's sort of like if you were— if this is really the $50 million idea you want, great, go for it. But it sounds like this is an amazing $50K a month idea. And with, you know, you have a clear line of sight to that, it sounds like. And I would do that. Maybe when you get there, you'll reassess and you will be able to overcome the problem Sam's talking about. Or maybe you don't and you're like, you know what, this is actually a great cash cow and my $50 million business idea is this other thing I'm really passionate about that I'm gonna use, you know, my SEO skills to go do.

One of my favorite companies right now, Flexport, that's exactly how they started. They had the software that was neat and then they go, eh, probably won't, let's not fuck this up, but let's just go start something new.

Yeah, also one thing that didn't add up in what you were saying was that was like a really low ticket price. And you said you could do a lot of money through lead gen and that just didn't add up. So I would go check those numbers and be like, all right, do I really believe this can do $50K and walk through step by step for that and get a second pair of eyes to look at it. All right. Next question.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, CEO. Steph, can we rapidly go through some of these other questions?

Yeah, the Q&A. I was going to say there's 36 questions in the Q&A. If people could go and upvote them so we get the best ones to the top.

Well, let's rapidly go through some of these, Sean. I'll say my answer in 2 sentences and you say yours in 2 sentences. How to make new connections— wait, fuck, where'd it go? How to— oh, how to make great connections in the, in the, in a digital era. Uh, Twitter.

Twitter and writing. Yeah, blogging and writing and email list, blogging or Twitter. Like, you can get famous in 6 months, uh, from this. It won't be— you don't need a huge audience, you just need like 1,000 really smart people to think you're smart, and that's actually trivial to do if you are smart.

Yeah, I would say Twitter. How about, okay, if you're trying to launch a popular blog, should you start wide or narrow? Narrow.

Narrow. Next question. You have a great blog post on this. I think it's called Niches Get Riches or something like that.

Go Google that. Yeah, you always go narrow. Someone said, Sam, for the Hustle newsletter, was the first iteration newsletter, blog, or anything? It was a blog and then a newsletter. Newsletter's way better. Sean and Sam, what other businesses do you currently own? I don't know if Sean wants to answer that, does he?

Yeah, I can't talk about it right now. So yeah, can't talk about that.

I own the majority of The Hustle. I have partnered with my friend Ramon, and I'm a minority owner of a software company. Both Sean and I are advisors to a few things that we have shareholders in. I wouldn't say we're owners, but we owned equity, we own little pieces of, um, I have angel invested in not many companies, 5, right? Uh, so we own, partially own those. Uh, anything else? I've got, uh, like maybe 3 or 4 things that pay bills, like it, I make money from each month, but they're all like tiny.

Uh, great. What media and entrepreneurship organizations Let's, uh, okay, so media for me, I'm not gonna say anything I'm associated with. I consume Business Insider and Hacker News every single day. Um, I also go to Tech Meme, and, uh, that's it.

The only media I really consume is social media. Uh, I don't read any news. Um, I do listen to sports stuff just to kind of—

me too—

you know, escape, kill mindless stuff. Um, or entrepreneurship organizations I pay attention to anything that Y Combinator does. I pay attention to anything that something— a group called NFX does. And I pay attention to what's going on in India because I think there's a lot of really interesting things there. And I have a whole bunch of people who feed me information about the startup scene in India. That's where I'm— and I also have private groups. So I have several private groups that are either just chat, like messaging groups, or we meet up once a month, um, that are full of other founders. And, um, those are my favorite entrepreneurship groups, and that's where I learn from. I don't listen to the news or read anything. I don't read TechCrunch or any of that shit.

Sean, what are some of the ideas that you've seen in India that you're surprised haven't happened in North America yet?

Hold that up, hold that up. Let me read that. Yeah, let's make this a section in the Trends email each week where we like list 4 things in non-American countries that are doing stuff interestingly. Sean, we had Nike reach out to us and ask us to pay us money to build this corporate like paid information thing, and all we do is talk about shit going on in different countries.

Yeah, I think it's great. Um, and so I'm, I'm super interested about this.

Hold that up. I want to see how he writes it.

All right, let me show you. So he's got little emojis next to certain things. I don't know if you could see it.

Oh my God.

And then it's just like, oh wait, where'd he go? And then he has like at the bottom, he has like a little screencast where he walks me through the app. Oh my God, I love this. Like, this is business school. This is why you don't need college, because you could do this. This guy does this in, you know, one week, and I'm learning from it. So Anyway, it's a lot— infinite ways to learn if you're motivated.

He just does this for fun, the guy.

I don't know why he does it. He, he loves the podcast. He reached out and he, he was like, how can I help? And I was like, hey, I want this. And then he did such a good job of it that I'm like, okay, we're going to turn this into a thing so that you can— like, more people should read this. It should not be locked in my DMs. Like, more people should benefit from this information. Yeah, people are saying they'd love to see it in the chat, so This is the problem. I always end up competing with the hustle here. Now you guys are going to do it. This poor guy is going to get ripped off.

Well, hey, no, there's a newsletter called Stenocism, I think it's called. And all they do is talk about this type of shit, but in China. And I bet you that guy makes $1 million a year doing that. Yeah. So I think that if you like could, we wouldn't analyze this crap. I mean, maybe we would, but like one person could do like a weekly newsletter just on the landscape of India, but for an American. And a lot of people would buy that.

Yep. Okay, what else we got?

Uh, let's say, uh, I want to find something that is different.

Here's one in the, in the chat. Um, I know you guys talked about the RX Bar in the past, so someone, someone did a test with their friend to imitate the RX Bar in Europe. Um, how would you approach differentiation and protein in the protein bar market when there's already so many products that are super similar?

We want to talk about what we talked about yesterday, Sean?

Go for it, you do it.

No, you're better than me at it.

Okay, so we, did this podcast get released? Did, I don't know if our podcast from yesterday— No, tomorrow. No, it gets out tomorrow. So we did a podcast with the founder of Liquid Death, and which is a water, a canned water drink that's taken a totally different brand. And he was like, you know, this whole business for us is about branding because clearly, you know, people don't buy water really because they, you know, if you did a blind taste test of 10 bottled waters, people wouldn't be able to tell which one is which, which one's better than the other. So really you're working on form factor, you know, the bottle and the brand. And so they have a new form factor, cans. RXBAR did the same thing. Their packaging is very, very distinct and unique. And then the second thing is like brand. What do we stand for, right? Who are we speaking to? What do we stand for? For his thing, he was like, you know, the water brands all try to speak to like yoga moms, purity. It's a picture of a mountain, you know, crystal geyser, like all that.

There's a luxury.

It's luxury, all that stuff. And he's like, you know, he himself was a punk rocker and was on tour, and they used to, you know, be promoted by Monster Energy. And he talked about how on the Monster can, you know, they would be chugging these things. He's like, dude, the tour schedule is brutal. How are you out here in 100-degree heat drinking Monsters? Like, and they're like, oh, this is water inside. It's called— on the bottom of the can it says Monster Tour, like, tour beverage or something like that. And tour beverage means water in a Monster can. And you know, so what he was just trying to think of, like, you know, it's true, there's no water brand that speaks to fun, and there's no water brand that speaks to these different demographics who don't necessarily want to be holding the sort of purity, clean, you know, brand water things.

Like he said, he said like, we want to be like water that when you're smoking weed, like, go ahead, do it, like smoke weed or get drunk or do drugs, like do something that maybe isn't always physically healthy for you, but it's exciting. And also drink our water, right?

I wanna— we have 43 open questions. We're not gonna get all these, but I definitely want to try. How, how can we do that, Steph?

Let's just power through them.

Do people want rapid fire or do they want in-depth of a few questions? I don't know. Okay, we'll try this one from Justin.

Wait, hold on, let's look at the chat. Let's— we— you— Sean asked a question. Sean said, do you guys want rapid fire?

Rapid fire.

Okay, people are rapid fire. There we go.

Okay, uh, Steph, you want to read this question that we just rapid fire? Sam, you can go first on each one.

Yeah, okay. So with work from home becoming more prominent after COVID, what are your thoughts on the work from home economy? Um, they seem to think there will be a market for benefits, company benefits at home.

Uh, the big market I think is going to be in helping set up different entities in different states. It's still very hard. We have a full-time woman who works at our company named Edie who helps us with this.

It's hard.

Uh, totally agree. There's a big economy. I don't think it's around benefits. I think it's around things like teleconferencing, work collaboration tools, software like that, things like you talked about, HR things to deal with this new world. Or I advise this company called Firstbase, which is providing actual like hardware to your home office. Like the company needs to give you a computer, a desk, and a monitor and a webcam so that you can actually work from home. And companies don't know how to do that. They don't want to deal with the logistics of that. These guys are doing it for them, and I think that's an awesome business too.

Facebook going remote with 20,000 people, the hardest thing is, I think, is going to be taxes. That's how to handle the taxes. That's so hard.

Yeah, okay, cool. So another question: any advice to 1 to 4 years just out of college young ambitious people who are affected by COVID, either furloughed or laid off? Is it worth trying to intern, or should they focus on finding a full-time job? What do you recommend people?

All right, I'll answer first. If I was in that position Man, it's so fucking weird right now. I kind of was in that position and I moved to San Francisco and it worked out well. The second thing that I did, and it also worked out really well, is I learned a skill. Most college kids don't have a skill. I learned the skill of copywriting, which means I was always able to have a job. So I would learn a skill set and I 100% would intern.

I think there's two answers. There's one, if you're in the top 5% of people and your goal is to be sort of entrepreneurial, or if your goal is to get on the career track, then go get a job or get an internship. And start climbing that ladder. And so if your goal is more entrepreneurial, which I'm assuming it is if you're in this community right now, then I would learn how to make money on the internet. I think that's an incredible skill that's gonna be useful for a long time, and I think it takes a lot of trial and error. And I would be like, okay, I'm gonna live like a cockroach, very cheap, and I'm gonna find a way to just cover my bills every month, and I'm gonna learn how to make money on the internet. It might take me 2 years to figure that out, but I'm gonna find every model of how people are doing it, and I'm gonna learn how to make money on the internet.

Cool. Um, someone's asking, Sam, you said yesterday that you'd like to use research coming out of trends to eventually launch a business. How far would you deviate from the hustle or trends model? Basically, like, how far would you deviate from media, which we're in right now?

Well, we're going to have this business. We do trends and hustle, and that will be— it's one thing. And then we will invest in stuff. Our company has not invested in anything. I, Sam Parr, personally have invested in some stuff. That we've discovered. And I think that's what I want to do, is either have a fund underneath our company arm or use our profits to invest in that. And we would invest in anything. We just— me and some guy built this hotel that Sean and I were riffing on the other day, and I need to see if the economics of that are as good as he— as good as it looks. But like, something like that I totally would invest in, and I have. I've invested $50,000 or $70,000 collectively in interesting stuff like that.

Sam, where'd you get your shirt?

Somebody wants to know. Uh, so I have, uh, uh, uh, I don't even want to reveal too much. Anyway, I got it from Target.

Uh, yeah. Okay, great.

What's next? Cool. Um, so someone's asking about second, third order effects of COVID and obviously the protests. Uh, what do you see in terms of business opportunities given where we are?

I think cities with, uh, good living, but typically we're like C-level cities like Denver or Charlotte, are gonna just fucking explode. And San Francisco and New York are gonna crash.

Yeah, this is too, uh, too hard to do rapid fire, but we talked about this on the podcast, I believe, and there's a great PDF somebody put out there of second-order, third-order effects. Uh, someone in the community found it after we talked about it. And we look at that, and there's a bunch of ideas in there.

Yeah, the guy's name was Emmett.

Okay, another question. So Sean, you mentioned on Facebook group angel investing, and now you're talking about buying businesses. What platforms would you recommend people find internet businesses?

We talked about this a little earlier. Quiet Light Brokerage is where I would start.

All right, um, so George is asking, can you guys This isn't a quick one either, but talk about some of your biggest failures, what you learned from them.

I'll just say this, I haven't had many failures because I've not really probably swung as hard as I should.

I'm the opposite. I feel like I failed on everything. You know, the last— even the company that we just sold, in all reality, was a failed company. Like, our ambition was to be, you know, the next Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, etc. And then instead we ended up selling to Twitch and You know, it wasn't like some mega, mega home run, you know, F you money type of exit or anything like that. So from my perspective, I feel like my capability is here and my results are here, and I'm trying to bridge that gap. And I would say like every business is that way. Your capability is here and here's your reality. Every person is usually that way. And you should be trying to, you should be trying to figure out how to climb up that gap. You know, the first thing I did was this restaurant business. You know, it failed. You know, the second business I did got a bunch of progress and a bunch of funding from a strategic person. I left and it failed later. I did Idea Lab for 5 years where we were swinging for the fences to build the next big social thing. We— I do not own the next big social thing, so in that sense I failed. I want this podcast to be the biggest podcast in the world. In that sense I failed. You know, like my goals are here and my results are here, and that's The good news is my goals are so much higher than the average person that even when I'm failing, my results are so much higher than the average person.

And I completely agree with that. I've never failed though, because I've failed in that there is still that gap, but I've never had like a run out of money failure because I played it safe.

Cool. Someone is launching a D2C product, will be in the market in beta in a couple of days. They're wondering if they should do Kickstarter, and their concern specifically is whether people might steal their idea or basically launch it faster than them if they choose to do a Kickstarter.

I'm not going to talk about that. You can go ahead, Sean. I don't know anything about that.

Uh, it sounds like if your product's ready to go to market, uh, you don't need a Kickstarter, or you don't need to raise capital. You already, you already got to the starting line. You use Kickstarter to get to the starting line, like, hey, I need some money to build the thing so I can get to market. Sounds like you're already there, so just start selling it, see how it goes. If it's going well, people will wanna invest. If it's not going well, a Kickstarter's not gonna save you either. So it sounds like you're already at the start line. It's time to go.

Cool. I'm gonna go through some of these just like rapid-fire ideas. You guys let me know what you think of them. So one of them, Hotel Living. Team of cleaners come every day to do small things, make your bed, take your trash out, fresh towels, to give you that quote unquote hotel feeling. What do you guys think?

Love it. Don't think you can make the economics work.

Yeah, I don't think the economics work. Unless you can get an entire neighborhood to do it.

All right. What's your take on whether companies will or should start to move away from gig and 1099s and move to W-2?

I don't have an opinion on that. I don't feel like I'm educated.

Yeah, I agree. I don't have a real opinion on it. I would just say generally, I think the world— forget those labels. I think the world as a whole is moving more towards freelance and free agency. Than full-time one company. Like, we already broke the paradigm of work for one company for 40 years and retiring on your, you know, sort of retirement plan with that company. That's gone. Um, your average tenure in, in any high-growth industry is like, you know, 2 years or less. So that paradigm already broke. The next paradigm is breaking is working from an office. When you're not working from an office, you're not going to have the same sort of identity and tie to one company at a time. So full-time employment with one company is probably going to go away too. I think the ideal world is where you're paid for output and production, and you can be working for one or more companies at any time. You can be one person, or you can be a gang of 4 people who are known to be awesome at doing X, and you're more like an agency. So I think the world moves more towards, uh, on-demand, uh, you know, gigs, and you get paid based on merits and output.

Nice.

Okay, we have to answer a few faster.

Okay, next idea: apartment rentals by auction.

I don't know.

Okay, cool. Um, Sam, what's your advice for building a newsletter from scratch?

Um, start, uh, figure, uh, fuck, I don't know. Uh, advice, uh, pick a professional-related topic. So for example, something that employees use, not something that is like sports or for fun, because you'll make more money that way and start very, very, very niche. So like people who are—

Have any sports newsletters worked?

To become huge? Yeah.

Are there any really big sports daily newsletters?

Well, maybe Barstool started that way.

Okay. That I know of, no, but Thrillist is a $500 million company and they started out as like newsletters for like men's clothing. So you definitely can do some of these fun stuff, but if you wanna make more money and make it faster, do B2B.

Okay. Rob is asking about sourcing manufacturers, whether it be in China or North America. Seems like it's a blur to him to actually get past that step. I've heard that a lot from other people.

I can't talk about that, Sean.

You can't speak to that at all?

Yeah, I've been through that process. It's hard. I think it's good that it's hard. Otherwise there would be so much more competition. You know, so if you're in the game, you want that barrier because only the few who climb over that wall will figure it out. I actually think that the bigger opportunity is to break down that wall. So if I was somebody, rather than trying to start a product company like that, I would say, oh my God, it's so hard to get through this manufacturing process and all the uncertainty. And, you know, like yesterday I wired $50 grand to China. You know how hard it is to wire $50 grand to China? It's like not easy to do these types of things. So, you know, there's so many pain points. Finding a supplier, knowing if they're good, getting samples made, wiring money to them and trusting that you're gonna get your product back, figuring out how the hell shipping works. Like all of that stuff is super complicated. I think somebody should create, there probably are already, but like Sourcify is one of them, but you should create more companies that help people not need to know how to do that. Just like I can launch a website, I don't need to know how to code. AWS made it so I don't need to know how servers work. I can just get to my end goal. So I would do— I would focus on that rather than building one. If I really wanted to go big, that's what I would focus on.

Someone in the Facebook group asked why I don't like the course business. They said I hate it. I don't actually mean that. I don't truly hate it. I have very, very, very little experience with it. I just hate the idea that someone's paying me money for something and they're only paying me one time versus providing value and getting paid all the time.

All right. There's still a lot of questions in the chat. But why don't you take a second to scan through, Sam and Sean, see if there's any that you want to answer, because we only got a little bit of time left.

Yeah, and if we can just grab these questions, we could even do a podcast episode answering the spillover ones.

Yeah, I can send these to you guys after.

All right, I'm gonna scroll, I'm gonna try to find a good one.

What opportunities do guys and gals see between community and law enforcement right now? Fuck.

That's a good one.

That's a good question. I don't have an answer. I'm sick to my stomach every single night watching the news.

How many police officers are there in the country? Let's just Google real quick. How many?

Let me guess. I think in New York there's 20,000.

Yeah, so there's 17,000 agencies. So I wonder if there's like a messaging app or some kind of like secure messaging app that you could build for that industry, like Discord. Built a messaging app for gamers, and there's enterprise messaging apps like Slack. Um, but I wonder, I just would never want to—

I would never want to sell to a government. That would be a pain in the ass. Not because I'm pro or anti-government, but so much bureaucracy. Oh my God.

Fuck. So I have an idea I'm going to talk about on the podcast, uh, next, next episode, which is around things like this, which is this model where really hard sales cycle to get in, get in, then you never get out. Exactly. George said this in the chat. They're sticky. So there's a class of businesses like this. I've always resisted them because I'm impatient and I can't imagine dealing with the sort of bureaucracy and the sales cycle there. But then on the other hand, the reality is that stickiness and durability and the moat is what makes your business valuable over time. So I'm going to share a couple of examples of businesses that have done this well on the next podcast.

Great. Let's talk about recommended book recommendations. If I had to recommend one, To me, it's a biography of John Rockefeller. It's called Titan. The reason why I like him is he was a ruthless businessman, yet he was a wonderful father and a wonderful husband. And my issue when reading about biographies— I typically read about men because I'm a man, I identify with them more— and they are either, uh, a good businessman— they're rarely— are they good at business and great at being family? And he was that. That's why I like it.

Nice. I'll give you 3 quick quick ones. The Happiness Hypothesis, good book. Storyworthy, great book if you want to become a better storyteller. And the last one, um, is The Game. I think The Game taught me more about people and psychology than any other book.

I bet Steph, have you read The Game?

I haven't.

Oh my gosh, it seems like something you would read. It's so fun.

Yeah, have you, have you read Ender's Game?

That's like, uh, I've read Ender's Game too.

Yes, is that also about like two very different books?

Ender's Game is sci-fi.

The game is about this like underground world of pickup artists.

Oh, interesting. No, I have not read that.

It's so fascinating.

Mary has asked this a couple times and I want to make sure we get to her question. What's the best way to validate a healthcare-related business specifically geared towards users aged 50 to 75? And she's basically, she's asked a couple times like, how do you target that user base? What's the best way to do that?

Well, Facebook advertising., but I don't know, like the legal, like if I'm just selling like bullshit online that is not like FDA approved or won't kill you or something, I just create landing pages, even if the product doesn't exist and I accept payment for it. That's what I did with Trends. It didn't exist. I accepted payment forms and then I returned the money and I called them and I asked them why they bought. And I would do this. But when you say health-related, I don't know, like you can't like pre-sell certain medicines, but Facebook, You can find them all on Facebook.

Yeah, Facebook is basically the best way to reach most people on Earth.

And that demographic— did she say women between 50 and 70? That's probably like—

certainly women, just—

oh, just people. That, that is the best place to reach that demographic.

All right, um, how are you guys doing for time? I know we're a little bit over.

Uh, I can spill over. I have a thing.

I could spill over a little bit. How about this one? 15 minutes. I can go— yeah, I can do it about that. How do you start becoming an advisor, paid or equity, to companies? Somebody asked me and Sean this the other day. Uh, we got lucky, start a podcast and people email you, and I say no to most every single one, even people who pay me money.

Yeah, I don't know if the question is, is how do you become it. Um, you know, if you want to become an advisor, you got to have like done something. So like in this case Both me and Sam have built companies that are, you know, Sam's still running his company. It's worth tens of millions of dollars. I sold mine for tens of millions of dollars. So, you know, do something that shows that you probably know what you're talking about or know you're a level above wherever they're at in terms of, you know, if this was martial arts, you wanna be a brown belt or a black belt. That's how you get the opportunity. And then the real question is like, is it something you wanna do or not?

Have you heard of these expert networks? Are you an expert in it? I'm part of these, one of these expert networks. It's called like GLG. They give you $1,000 an hour or $500 an hour to talk to like a banker. I used to do that and it's so funny, even though like that's a lot of money, I'm like, oh my God, I don't wanna do that. It kills me.

Yeah, those are great. They've reached out, but then it's never come through. So I never got paid on 'em yet. We'll see.

This is an interesting one. Ray says that he's created decent and engaged following on Instagram sharing do-it-yourself healthy baby food recipes. Recipes. He's not sure what product he can launch. He thought maybe an app with a baby meal, with baby meal plans. But there's a lot of those already in the App Store, potentially also recipe books. But those aren't very profitable. So any thoughts there?

Unless you can throw money at the problem and you're like willing to burn through tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, like, like a Tesla or something.

Well, let's get, uh, Nassim has been— hasn't— he's had his hand raised for a for like an hour. He's in the hospitality business, seems to be hit hard by COVID. Naseem, feel free to talk to us live. Just gotta unmute yourself. Oh, well, I can read out Naseem's comment in the chat instead. So he said, we're in the hospitality business, invested in a web mobile platform. We were getting ready to raise money, but now with COVID all hospitality is, you know, not going so well. Many venture-backed hospitality startups are going through rough times. We made $2 million in annual revenue, but now with COVID we're down— I'm not sure how much they're down, but they're just doing okay in the last 3 months. Thinking of pivoting, can you talk to how you might grow the user base and customers for a marketplace such as this?

That's a really specific question. We need to know more about what what you act— what value you actually provide in the hospitality space.

Yeah, I don't even want to touch that. All right, well, it's just, it's, it's, it's— I, I don't ever— I'm thankful people listened to some of our advice. I would be very, uh, nervous about saying something and someone believing it.

Yeah, we just need more context to even ask questions there, so that's a longer discussion.

One time Gary Vaynerchuk said something in like some fucking thing, and I really admire him, and I like thought that that was like, and I like built a business, like I did like something, like I based a lot of my life on there, and like bet money on there, and then when I was on his podcast this year, I asked him about that, and he was like, what? I go, yeah, yeah, remember this thing? He goes, I don't know, dude, I was probably just shooting the shit, I don't know, I was just saying shit. And I was like, fuck! And so I don't wanna, I'm always nervous of doing that same thing with other people.

All right, looks like Edgar's got his hand raised. He has a question about the—

Sorry, it's in Spanish, by the way, but hopefully you get it.

Hi, hello, can y'all hear me?

Yep. Hey.

Okay, hey, how are you? Everything well?

Yeah, sure, what's up?

Awesome, awesome. Hey, um, so I've been, I've been watching you all for a while. I appreciate what you do. This is super sick that you guys have these conversations. Hola, I'm in San Diego. I'm 21 years old. I run a family business. We have 2 restaurants. So of course, you know, we've had restrictions, and so we're only doing carryout as of now. But I understand how, you know, or I guess I'm really intrigued on how psychology works, and people are gonna stay home more often. We hear about a lot of companies shifting to, you know, to people staying at home and working from home. So I know that, for example, Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash, all these delivery applications, they charge a high commission for a lot of these restaurants, especially, you know, these are mom-and-pop restaurants. So I was thinking, you know, how can we, I guess, bring that to more of a, I guess, how can we support small businesses per se in the delivery form? So how can we bring power back to the small businesses so they can, I believe it would be some type of a platform that allows the community to connect to that certain business. Does that make sense or?

I understand what you're saying. Uh, so, so I definitely understand what you're saying. Uh, just to rephrase, you're basically saying, hey, restaurants need to, uh, adjust due to COVID. We're trying to do delivery. The current delivery platforms take such a huge rake, it's not great for the restaurants. They're still struggling.

By the way, is that the sentiment, is that restaurants are angry at Uber?

Um, I'm not— I wouldn't say that we're angry, but The restaurant industry is pretty hit by the commissions these delivery apps are charging, especially, you know, the average food margin for a lot of restaurants is around anywhere between 25 to 30%. Uber and DoorDash, you know, at the end of the month are taking around maybe a 30, 40% commission, you know, total. So it's, it is a, it is a big, a bigger hit for them. So what I'm trying to propose is an idea for a platform where actual businesses, actual restaurants can begin to create a, I guess, to collect per se different addresses, phone numbers of people who would want their food to be delivered to a home, right?

No, no, look, so I understand what you're saying, And I think that what you're saying, you're saying the problem is, is that restaurants are upset with Uber. Then what you're really saying is restaurants are hurt and they need to make more money. And I actually don't think that the solution that you're saying is actually the right solution to the problem. And I don't, I'm not in the restaurant industry, so it sounds like you are. I would actually want to know, has anyone ever made you happy as a restaurant owner? Are you ever happy at Yelp? Are you happy at Groupon? Are you happy at Uber? Like, who has done something that has made you happy? Because that's what I would be curious about. What solutions do make restaurant owners happy? Because whenever someone talks about Groupon, my belief is that they hate it. My belief is that restaurants hate Yelp. My belief is that restaurants don't like Uber. But what— who do they like?

Yeah, I agree with him. I think we should, we should move to the next question, but I think, I think Sam said the right thing, which is The solution you're proposing, I think, has a lot of problems. I don't want to sort of go into each one of them right now, but it's true the aggregators in the middle, DoorDash, etc., they have a lot of power. They're going to continue to have a lot of power. There's not really much the restaurants can do against that, but you should try to figure out, instead of trying to create a new platform with one millionth of the resources that they have and, you know, no head start, instead just figure out what's something we could do to make money as a restaurant. What assets do we have that we can leverage to create value, and I would focus on that. So that's kind of my—

That's my point, Edgar, which is I do not think the solution is to take 10% instead of 30%. I think the solution is— what, to me, it's like you're obsessed with the solution. You're not obsessed with the— you might be, but you are also obsessed with the solution, and you are also obsessed with the problem. Fuck that. Only care about the problem. And I think you need to come up with a creative way Groupon has one way to do that, but that doesn't make people happy, it seems like. Yelp has one way to do that. So find some other way that like, maybe like someone's already kind of in that industry and it's kind of making them happy. And I would definitely like, you get out of this lane. You got to get out of that lane a little. Yeah, by the way, Uber Eats is a shit business, I believe.

Um, one, one last quick question before, before I let y'all leave. Um, what If I do want to go into the wholesale industry, like the food wholesale industry, I would like to put, I guess, one of my recipes, you know, on— it would probably be some type of like beans that we have that are really, really good. How would I take steps to start going into that lane? Do you know?

I actually couldn't hear what you said, Edgar, but why don't you just email me or DM me and we can go further there, but I want to make sure that we're able to talk to more people. Questions.

I understand. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Heather. All right, I think a lot of people on this call would find this one, your answers to this one, interesting. So it's targeted specifically at trends, Sam, but I think we can expand it to like how you guys think about ideas for the podcast. So the question is, what's on your radar for upcoming research reports, and specifically what inspires you to basically say like this topic is worthy of researching? We're sharing on Trends, and similarly for the podcast.

I— Sean and I have a doc called MBD, and we just fill it out. Like, I just think that people are overestimating, are overestimating how little of a seed of an idea will come across, and then we'll just put it in there and then just go down this rabbit hole. I don't think people realize how much information you can get on Wikipedia or off of a tweet. Like, I would just see a tweet and like go to Wikipedia and then Google it. Like, so I think people are actually overestimating our skill set. Something on the docket is something Sean and I have talked about a lot is JD Power and this business model of like licensing like your, your approval for trends. I'm trying to get Trung to write about that for the brainstorming sessions. Sean He has this whole idea about business or sales channels that are really hard to go into, but once you get in, they're the best. He already said that earlier.

Yeah, yeah, basically if you want to be interesting, be interested. So get into whatever you're interested in or something that catches your curiosity where you're like, huh, that's interesting, I never heard about that, or wow, it makes that much. Anything that sort of evokes that type of reaction Boom, write it down and then start researching it. That's how I do it, but I think Steph does most of the research anyways for trends. So, you know, that's your answer.

I don't fucking touch it. I read it the day it comes live.

My answer for trends is basically like, if you see something and you think, if I shared this with 10 random people, if any less than 2 people would already know that, then it's interesting and it's worthy of trends or potentially my first million. But just think about like, if I shared this with someone, how many people would already know this? If it's like more than 50%, it's probably not that interesting. Because most people already know it. One question from Ellis. How could you imagine, this is an opinion question, but how could you imagine one of the FAANG companies being unseated? And specifically, which one do you think is most likely to be unseated if that were to happen?

Happen? Right now, Facebook. The amount of frustration people have towards them is quite high. The angle that I think someone's going to take them is going to be two different angles. The first is I think there's going to be an extreme version of saying everything, all free speech is OK. Anyone can come on this platform. That's going to attract one group of people. And then the other end, it's going to— someone's going to create a version where it's going to be like, we don't notify you too much. We, um, we curate your feed so you're not overwhelmed. It's more intimate. I think something like that will happen. Um, I would not be surprised if DuckDuckGo gets huge. I'm very fascinated with DuckDuckGo. I think privacy is very important to people, to normal, to normal people in America now, whereas before it wasn't.

Uh, yeah, I actually don't think any of them will be unseated.

Uh, oh yeah, me too, by the way. I don't think any of them will be.

I think these companies, they already sort of got disrupted 3 or 4 times and survived. You know, mobile was a huge shift. Google buys Android. Facebook pivots the whole company and puts it in lockdown mode to get its mobile apps up. You know, social networking gets disrupted by, you know, photo sharing and messaging. Facebook spends $23 billion acquiring companies in that space, right?

Like, these companies— Facebook's gonna be like Ford. They're going to be around for 100 years, I think.

Yeah, and I would also say that a lot of the, like, all the FAANG companies are way more diversified than I think we give them credit for. They're making like a ton of acquisitions every single month, especially during COVID when prices are down. And so you might think of Facebook as just like the, the community product that it is, but it does, it's invested in way more than that. So VR takes off, they own Oculus. If, you know, like, they own Instagram, they own WhatsApp. So they're not just Facebook. And so even though I do think there's concerns obviously with that company, they're not just the platform that many people imagine them to be.

My computer's on 1%, guys. I'm gonna have to jack.

Yeah, I think we're at time anyway. Thanks so much for staying over, Sam, Sean. Thanks for doing the podcast every week. I listen to it every time. I'm sure everyone on here does too. Um, so yeah, thanks everyone.

Do you feel like you know me even more because I'm in your ears?

Yeah.

We've had like people come up to it. I had this one kid come up to us and call me a little bitch, and I was like, dude, I don't know you. And I forgot that he thought he knew me, that we are friends, and he called me a bitch.

That's funny. All right, well, thanks everyone for joining. Uh, see you next time.