Sara's List Hostile Takeover and The App that Made $1M In Ten Days
And so Nikita said something in the group message, which he says, I think it'd be an interesting idea to ask myself or to figure out how I—
not doing that. You're, you're making it too soft. I remember exactly how he said it. It's, it was like, oh, so what are you doing? What are you up to nowadays? Oh, Sam, you sold the house. What are you doing? Sean, you sold— what are you doing? Nikita, you're sitting at Facebook. What are you doing? And he's basically, he just said it straight, straight up. He goes, um, I'm just thinking about how I can make $10 million in 3 months. Like, uh, and we're like, what? And he's like, yeah, I want to make an app that generates like $10 million in 90 days.
What's going on? We have a good episode. We talk about an app that's going viral, but this app role is getting written about in a bunch of publications. We actually have the inside story because we kind of saw what was happening behind the scenes early, early on. And so we talk about this guy named Nikita who launched this app that has made $1 million in like 2 weeks or something crazy like that. And we tell you the inside story behind it. What else we got?
And he called his shot, which, you know, we love here. We also talk about a ransom note that we got through email and why this ransom note was one of the best emails that we've ever got. And me and Sam live brainstorm and live negotiate how we are going to deal with this ransom note. So if you wanna see that, that's at the end of the episode. We also talk about the Mailchimp CEO getting canceled and a little debrief of Palmer Luckey. So that's it. Enjoy this episode.
All right, we live.
Nothing. How's it going?
You know, just the usual. Woke up, decided, okay, no small boy stuff today. Got going, immediately started considering some small boy stuff. And then I remembered there will be absolutely none of that today.
What were the— what was it?
I woke up. I was like, I'm a little sore. So I wake up with a complaint. I'm waking up with a complaint on one of the greatest days I've ever had. Wow. This is— this is not how I'm going to start my day.
Wait, why was it one of your greatest days?
Uh, just like, that's just like a general, general attitude I have.
Uh, do you want to start off by recapping Palmer Luckey? Because after talking to him, I feel like he's kind of the greatest guy I've ever talked to. Kind of the man. Yeah, right? Is that how you feel?
I thought he was awesome. Um, okay, let me just say a word that describes Palmer Luckey. I would say, um, like independent-minded. I think, uh, I think I really respected that. He is independently minded. I felt like all his opinions were his own. You know, people like, they write that shit in their Twitter bio, like, opinions are mine, not my employer. Uh, you know, his opinions are really his.
Uh, also when people write contrarian thinker, and it's kind of like, if, if you have to say that you're contrarian thinker, you're maybe not like the most contrarian thinker.
Do you know what I mean? Right. It's like the no offense. I'm not racist, but—
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly what it is. So I— anyway, yeah, I thought that he was an independent thinker. I also thought that he was incredibly enthusiastic, which I liked. Yeah, very enthusiastic.
Dead on the inside. Like, we have We have said no to a bunch of guests just simply because they're like, you know, their intelligence is like cranked up to level 10, their success is cranked up to level 12, but they're like, charisma and ability to convey any sort of enthusiasm about themselves, about the world, about their story is so low. And, um, and so they make for a terrible podcast guest. But for him, it felt not only like he did, he have charisma to tell stories about the past, he seemed really pumped about what he was doing and what the future looked like and why it mattered. And I just felt like this guy, you know, just like springs out of bed every day.
Me too. That's exactly how I felt. I felt like he was incredibly enthusiastic about life and he— yes, that's a great way to explain it. But he did. He was so fascinating. He was one of those guys that I like because I don't like— I can't think of a great word to explain, say, other than like prolific, but also almost like this— I don't think this is over-explaining it or over-grandizing it, but like almost like a Renaissance man where he would say comments like, yeah, I bought this marina because there's going to be new laws about— I don't even understand like what he was explaining about his marina, but he said like something about his marina and like seaport access and how it's changing. And then he made another comment about like—
he's like, I was gonna do this. Well, I mean, seasteading is, is off the table for now. And I was just like, I don't even really know what seasteading is. Exactly. And you just said it like, well, we all know seasteading. Now is not the time. I was like, what are you talking about? What the hell is seasteading?
Yeah. He also, he also like, he'll make another comment. He's like, yeah, I have this house we rented. We had like a workshop and one weekend I was building a jet engine for the water. And we actually discovered that like we should make biodegradable or what did he say? We should make oil-based foods. It's kind of like building a Diet Coke for every food. And I was just like, we could take this over lots of different paths, but it's just so interesting to me that you have that ability.
Yeah, it was like a bunch of like candy being waved at us. He's just like, you know, I have one of the largest samurai sword collections in the world. And that just got me into thinking. And it's like, wait, what? He didn't say that, by the way, but there's at least a 50% chance he has one of the top 10 samurai sword collections in the world.
100%. The guy owns swords. Like, yeah, he definitely owns swords.
All right, so where do you want to go next?
You can drive.
All right, so check this out. I forwarded you an email. Did you see the email I sent from about Sarah's List? Or maybe, maybe she sent this to you too.
What was it?
So a woman named Kristen sends an email. I'm just going to read it to you. We'll show it on the screen, you know, for those on YouTube, because it's, it's kind of amazing looking.
Oh my God.
You open up the email and it says, I am holding Sarah'sList.com hostage. And she goes, you don't know me, but I obviously know you. I purchased SarahsList.com and I've turned it into a bomb-ass website. I am willing to sell it to you for $20,000. This is a steal as I purchased it for $30,000. I'm essentially giving you $10,000. You're welcome. If you'd ever, if you'd ever like to see SarahsList.com again, and then she turned the font small, or for the first time, you know, reply to this message. I'm looking forward to hearing from you, Kristen. And I was just like, this is amazing. I go, who are you? And who is she? So she's this woman, Kristen Kent. So she sends me her story after that. She goes, I've been in tech for 12 years. Regrettably, I chose companies off Kristen's list, which was not as lucrative as if I had chose companies off Sarah's list. So for those who don't know, Sarah's list is this concept. We should explain. We did a full episode about it. Basically, Sam's wife Sarah is, uh, a self-made millionaire and did not do any of the heroic entrepreneurial things you hear about in the media. She just did one really good thing. She just picked companies whose equity was going to like, uh, whose valuation was gonna go up 4 or 5x in a 4-year period. So she worked at Facebook and not early at Facebook, not like she was like employee 4 at Facebook, like, She was like in the thousands of employees, joined as like a middle, middle manager type. Not again, I say this not as disparagement, but because of how amazing it is. Like she didn't do the things that you think you have to do to become like a self-made millionaire. Uh, she joined Airbnb again as employee, I don't know, something hundred. What, what was it? Maybe like 300 or 400?
No, 1,000.
Oh, 1,000. Okay, great. And Airbnb goes public at a valuation that's 4 or 5x. And so, you know, if you're receiving a stock grant for, let's call it $60,000 a year., you know, on top of your, you get, you get some base comp, I'm just gonna use fake numbers. Base compensation, let's say, is $150K and then they give you $50K of stock a year for 4, over 4 years, that's $200K of stock. But now the stock price 4 or 5Xs, you made $1 million during that time period. Um, and you were safe. You didn't have to like work 90-hour weeks. You, uh, got to work at a fun growing company that was gonna like win its category. And you didn't have to have this like amazing lightning in a bottle genius idea. In order to do it. And so she had done that a few times. And so we, we said, oh, this was actually intentional. You and Sarah sat down and you guys like made lists.
We like made lists. Like what's like a 500-person company that has good maternity leave? You know, like these are all like the telltale signs that it's like an interesting startup has, uh, you're in the, you know, top quartile of pay just for off salary. You have, uh, interesting benefits, good healthcare, like all this stuff that a lot of startups that are early don't have, but big companies do, yet they can still 5 or 10x. So yeah, we made that list.
So we made the list and of the— we put 12 companies on that list. This was like a year, year and a half ago now. 12 companies on that list. And I think we did the recap. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think the— in the year, year and a half since then, the average company value is up like 2.5x or something crazy like that. And 11 out of the 12 companies raised a like significant up round since then. So we were like very high hit rate. And if you got in, whatever your stock value would have been at that time, I think on average it's something like 2.5x. Could be wrong. I don't remember the math, but—
and so this lady sets aside, by the way, and I'm looking at it, this is amazing. But her email is— she— so she DM'd me on Twitter. And so whenever people DM me on Twitter, I either ignore them or I just like click the heart emoji, like, thank you, I recognize you, but I don't want to talk. And that's what I did with her. And I just replied and said, I'm an idiot. This is, you're actually, you're, you're different.
Yeah.
Uh, this is a really good one.
So, okay. So then here's what I wanna do. So you go to the website, it's just sarahslist.com. It says 12 startups that can make you a millionaire. It's got a picture of Richie Rich, which is hilarious. And then it goes, who is Sarah? Who are we? And why do we have any business sharing a list like this? And then it tells the story about Sarah, about us, whatever. Selection criteria. It said, it uses our criteria, which is that it's a company that's already valued over $250 million. So it has a low risk profile, meaning it's likely not going to go to zero, a stable work environment, a high salary, great benefits, but still can make you a millionaire because the equity has potential to 5 to 10x. And then it has our list, which was like Flexport and Uniswap and Anduril and Replit and Airtable and Figma. Like Figma got acquired for whatever, $20 billion or something like that, or more than that. Uh, you know, after we, uh, after we mentioned it on this list, when it was, that's like a 10x, I think from where we mentioned it. So anyways, uh, then it says find a friend a job. So you go to the job board and it goes, these are placeholder jobs. You guys should consider syncing this up to one of these websites, but those cost money, which is why. And the last job post says, I'm not doing it. It's hilarious.
And the tagline, so the tagline at the bottom says Sarah's List, get rich in 5 to 10 years, over 50% guaranteed.
Yeah, exactly. So hilarious. So then I started thinking, okay. So I said, let's brainstorm this live here on the podcast. Should we do this deal? And no. And okay, so your opinion is no, and give me why.
No, here's why. It's just a website that would take me 5 minutes or no, it would take me— it's a website that take me 3 hours to copy and a domain name. So for that reason, it's not that valuable. But what's more valuable is this lady, Kristen, who's making it. Yeah, her emails are beautiful. Her copy's beautiful. Her— I just looked at her Twitter. This woman, uh, Kristen, is the exact type of people that I like to be around. She also works at Expa, which, uh, Expa is basically a company founded by the founder of Uber, Garrett, I think. Is it Garrett Camp?
Yeah.
And they basically are a startup studio that launches companies. I don't actually know any of the companies that they've launched, but I imagine a lot of them are really successful. But she works there, which is also a really good like indicator that she's like on to something. Do I think that we should buy this? Absolutely not. Do I think that I want this woman in my life and would love to work with her in some capacity? 100%.
Agree. The real value here is not the domain. It's not the website. It's Kristen Kent. Okay, so here's my— here's my proposal to Kristen Kent. Here's my counteroffer, my public podcast counteroffer to you, Kristen. I'll give you the $20,000. I'll give it to you. In fact, I'll give you the $30,000 that you paid for this, uh, this domain. If you really paid that much for this domain, I mean, that's kind of crazy. And, uh, but it comes with this catch. We're gonna work together on this project. You're gonna do the work on the, on the, um, company side, and I'm gonna do the work on the promotional side, the distribution side. And here's what we're gonna do with Sarah's List. We're gonna turn Sarah's List into a half a million dollar a year. Passive income stream— yeah, passivish I should say. Passive for me, that's a little active for you by the way.
By the way Sean when you say we gotta let's remember this is Sarah's list of which I am 50% of Sarah's list so whatever Sam is on the side right now Sam said no no no no no no no no no moment ago and he's not a part of the counteroffer Sarah herself will get a 1 royalty as we use her name here's what we got to do what what percentage of the of the of dividends would you give, or would you want Kristen to have?
Kristen deserves 50%.
She deserves 50%. I agree. The, the other 50%, split, you and I.
And we will— 90/10, you got it, sir. So the other— share the royalty with Sarah. So here's what we're gonna do. Actually, I don't know if I even want to say this, this deal now that we're having these, uh, this, this intense negotiation. I want to give out my great idea. Okay, I'll give up my great idea. So here's the great idea. Here's how we're going to make this work. So normally a job board, this is like monetized as a job board, right? It would be a list of companies that we are curating saying these companies are great. And let's say we might take it to 24, 25 companies, um, rather than the 12 we have today. And normally on a job board, you pay like $500 a post, um, for, for job posting. So we would need to go reach out to those companies, get them to post, And the other thing, uh, you know, but, but hey, this is maybe premium. It's a curated job board. Maybe we could charge more, maybe $1,000, maybe $2,000 to be, be posting your jobs on here. So if we got people to do that, you know, let's say $2,000 a month, 24 companies, let's say half, half of them actually do it. You know, that's like $24K a month. Not bad. But I think we're gonna be in this kind of constant sales outreach period. So let me put out a different idea.
Here's a different idea.
We're gonna take these companies and we're gonna host a demo day once a quarter. What's that? What's gonna happen at the demo day? We're gonna basically, um, each week we're gonna feature one of these companies. We're gonna create an email list. We're gonna spin off our current email list and we're gonna say, we're gonna feature one of these companies. We're gonna do a deep dive of why this company's a good company to work for. And interested people, you know, high, high quality people in tech might wanna—
well, that needs to be an upsell. That needs to be an upsell. It's where it's like for $25,000, like you get a deep dive.
As a minority owner, I'm not sure you have a say here. So I could barely hear your voice. It was so faint, like your equity ownership in this. So here's what we're going to do.
If we were in the same room, do you think I would have hit you already? Or will that be coming in the next— will that be coming in the next 10 minutes, or would it have already have happened?
I think it would have happened. So, you know, the way you promoted HustleCon where you used to write these kind of blog posts once a week, I think you would, you would feature the speaker of HustleCon and you would tell their story in this awesome infographic. And then you would say, do you like stories like this? You should come to HustleCon. We're going to have 25 badass entrepreneurs, including this person speaking there, and you should attend. And you did that for 12, like 25 weeks and you sold out like 500 tickets to this thing. So what we're going to do is we're going to do that once a week cadence. About these companies, do a little deep dive. That's an email. And then, uh, it's gonna get people to attend the, the hiring day. And hiring day is where the founder of those companies are gonna come and they're gonna give a little 5-minute flash presentation on their company. And it's gonna be a cure and applicants apply to join. And these, you have, you gotta be good to join. So that's why we gotta keep the quality high on the company side and the applicant side. And then we're not charging for a job posting. We take the rec— like the recruiter fee. Cuz when a recruiter places a candidate at one of these companies, they take $20,000 or $30,000. Right away. And so if we could place like 25 candidates in a year at $20,000 a pop, you're talking half a million dollars of, of revenue, which is basically all we have to do is hire a writer. We're gonna hire a ghostwriter who's just gonna write these company deep dives on the companies that we select.
Have you heard of the Daily, uh, it was called the Daily Muse. Now it's called The Muse, themuse.com. Have you ever heard of that company?
Themuse.com? No, I don't think so. Was that, oh, was it like a women's hiring thing?
Was that the, it was called The Muse, I thought.
Yeah.
It was— it's called themuse.com. It's been around now for 10 years, and the woman who started it, I've been actually DMing. I've been wanting her to come on here.
Oh, did Catherine— I think her name is. Yeah. Uh, and so she went to YC. And so I actually originally thought they— that this was a great idea, but they screwed it up by raising a lot of money. And I think they've raised $20, $30, $40, $50— tens of millions. I, I don't know the exact number, but basically what they would do is they would do these deep dives on companies and charge the company some, like, fairly big fee to do a deep dive on the company. And they somehow got tons of traffic. Now they're still getting 8 million people a month coming to their website or 6 million, something like that. And they had tons of people coming to their website from search, which is incredibly valuable. And I thought that they like were just chugging along, but like not doing that great because I hadn't heard about them. I have a feeling they actually might be killing it because they've raised a lot of money and they actually are starting to buy other companies at this point. And they do these deep dives on companies. And another guy who does this is Packy McCormick. And I have no idea what he charges for this anymore, but when the economy was crushing it, I think he was charging $25,000 to $50,000 more per deep dive.
I think it was— how much do you think it was? A little more. I remember he was making $100,000 a month, if I recall correctly, off his deep dives. And I think he might have been doing 1 or 2 a month.
Wow, that's pretty amazing. And so I think you could do something like that.
We do this with the Milk Road, by the way. We do a deep dive thing and it's like, I don't know, I forgot what it would cost. I think it's like, it's like something between $25,000 and $40,000 depending on, on the total, like promotion.
And who do you hire to do that?
Uh, I wrote the first few because, or like we have one of our writers wrote it and I like kind of like changed it big time. But now we are hiring a writer just to do the deep dives.
How much would you pay a writer to do that?
Um, couple grand a month, like $2,000 a month.
No, wait, really?
Because it's just per deep dive. Like I'll pay you $2,000 to write just one article. So this is where the value is not in the writing. The value is in that we have a huge list. And that if we promote something to this huge list, you're gonna get a bunch of, of traction or you're gonna get usage or you're gonna get candidates or whatever it is. So the writer is not bringing the value. The writer just needs to deliver value. But the, the list is what the list size is, why you can charge that much.
Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. I think this is an in really interesting business. I've always said, I mean, I'm the one who even turned you on to job boards, aren't I? So like, you know, and email. Yeah.
I don't even, I wouldn't have even met Sarah. Had you not married her. So actually, I should owe you 1%.
I have introduced you to Liz and Sarah. So, and before me, you weren't even into dot-coms. So like, you're welcome. So, uh, I think kudos to Kristen. I think she's on to something. Well, I think we're on to something, but, uh, she also seems pretty special.
But Kristen, if you want, if you want a side hustle that'll make, I don't know, $250K a year for you, It's there for the taking.
I think that's all you got to do is all the work.
That's all.
Yeah, but we'll promote it here. This is an interesting thing. I don't think this is an event venture-sized business, which is, I guess, why XPA isn't going after it, but it maybe could be.
It may be a business back in the day that went through YC called Developer Auction. Do you remember this?
No, but that sounds a little weird.
That's not a great name. In a great way.
So basically what they did was they were like, no dude, that's not in a good— Auctioning Humans doesn't exactly have the best branding.
That's why it was great. It's a head turner. And, uh, and you know, when you're a small company, you need to be a head turner. And so, um, so these guys basically, they, they realized, they were like, wait, the power dynamic is off. Why is it all about applying to jobs when actually like the developer is like the most valuable, like developer was like gold in Silicon Valley.. And so they said, why don't we just curate like the top developers? So like, who are these quote 10x engineers? And then let's just have them almost like a beauty pageant. They walk down the stage and, and the companies are like raising their paddle. I guess that's not what happened in a beauty pageant, but like an auction where the, the companies were raising the paddle, be like, I'll give him $300,000. I'll give him $400,000. I'll do his laundry. And then someone's like, you know, all suckers, boop. And it's like, you know, that's basically like the companies were like just falling over themselves trying to get this talent.. And so they did one and it was amazing. It was like, you know, 50 engineers or whatever. And all the engineers got this huge pay jump from these top companies. They're like, oh shit, that's awesome. And then it built this little flywheel where they're like, the next batch of really great developers, like, yeah, yeah, do you're gonna do all the work for me to like get me my next job offers? Awesome. All I gotta do is just go and explain how like, yeah, I helped scale Netflix's like video infrastructure so that, you know, we got this latency and this blah, blah, blah. Um, so they would just go explain what they did and then the companies would bid. And it was kind of a great idea. I thought they eventually, but the problem is it wasn't gonna scale up. It was like too almost boutique. And so in order to scale up, they changed the model and then ended up pivoting into something else altogether. But like, if you just kept it boutique, which again, you, you can't do this if you raise a bunch of venture money because then your expectation is to go huge.
Yeah.
But if you're like, if you like making, you know, a million dollars a, you know, a year of like passive income, you could do that with a boutique model like this just by basically creating a demo day. But instead of startups pitching investors, you have, you have companies pitching to, to top talent. And so you could just, if you're good at curating, right? If you're a good curator, right? We, we did a good job curating on the company side. Now you just gotta do a good job curating on the talent side. You could actually create a pretty solid side hustle here.
Do you enjoy working with your wife?
No, I, uh, there are enjoyable things, but there are also some very unenjoyable things.
I—
but I tell her this on everything. If we have to like assemble some like IKEA furniture, I'm like, I hate doing projects with you. And like, because I'm like, we're both— we're both too stubborn. We both want our way. And I'm like, why don't you just listen? And she's like, why don't you just listen? I'm like, because I don't want to listen. And she's like, well, neither do I.
I, uh, So I've been— I'm coming out. I'm going to do the ideation boot camp again. And I was trying to convince Sarah to like quit her job and like do this. And it ain't happening. We like did it. We did a few test trials and dinner together. And yeah, it didn't work out. Like, it just like me talking to her like we're coworkers just, just doesn't work.
Yeah, that's exactly the problem. I talked to her like I would talk to somebody who's like you know, somebody on my team at my startup. And she's just like, why are you speaking to me like this? And I'm like, well, but I'm not in husband mode right now. I mean, like, there's modes. There's modes. Yeah.
It's like, I would be like, look, you're not stupid, but this is stupid. And she'd be like, why are you talking to me like this? I'm like, what do you mean? I'm trying to encourage you. And like, don't you want to like climb up this organization's ladder? Like, don't you want to be great and achieve great things? She's like, just wants to punch me in the stomach and knock the wind out of me. I'm like, yeah, I don't know if this is going to work. I wanted this to work, but I don't think that's going to happen. So I, I don't know how the couples do it, but, uh, it wasn't working for us.
There are many great examples, like, uh, the founders of Eventbrite were— that's a husband and wife couple. Um, the founders of Bebo back in the day, Xochitl and Michael Burts, they're husband and wife couple. They work together just great. And, uh, yeah, but I think it needs like that complementary personalities where one— and also like, I don't have the best bedside manner, you know, shocker. Like, you know, pretty direct and pretty blunt about stuff. Um, and I, you know, I don't have that thing that some people have going for them. I think you have this where you could just be hella blunt and it's like, it's just Sam being Sam. Like, uh, you know, you know, he's got it. He gets, he gets to play by his own rules because that's just the way he is. I have, uh, like, I have too much finesse in my game. Like, if you have, if you have no finesse, people are like, he's got no finesse, it's fine. Like, he's just being blunt, don't take it seriously. But if you have any, then it's like, oh, he could have said that differently, but he chose to say it the wrong way. And you don't get the, you don't get that, like, that, you know, that pass to just like, you know, say things, you know, the wrong way.
Earlier in the episode, we said you would describe Palmer Luckey in one word, and I think, you know, we both said different things. If I had to describe this last 60 Minute episode in one word, I would say exhausting. This was an exhausting— I feel like I just went on like a journey with you and I need to go rest my eyes. Is that how you feel?
No, I'm just getting stronger by the minute.
Dude, that— I believe that's called antifragile. You and I are not the same. Yeah, you and I are absolutely not the same. Where do we go from here? Do we end it here? Do we keep going?
I want to do two little things. One, I just want to have a moment of silence for the Mailchimp CEO.
Ben, who was the CEO, I think, right?
He was. I think he quit when they sold it. So I don't know exactly. Ben Chestnut, who I love.
So, okay. So, so Mailchimp was this like darling. They were bootstrapped. I think they were bootstrapped forever. Then they sold to Intuit for many billions of dollars. Like they did it for like 20 years and they did it out of like Atlanta. So they were like this indie success story, right? Like they're like, you know, like there's like hundreds of indie hackers right now on indiehackers.com.
That, like, by the way, you said Atlanta in a very funny way. It's kind of like I usually say Detroit. You just said Atlanta. You put a, you put a hard A-T on that. Atlanta. I like that. Atlanta.
Oh, okay.
Well, you know, it's like Detroit, Detroit, Atlanta.
But go ahead. So this guy, he had to step down. So he goes, so did you see what he did or what happened? So he sent a So he sent like an email or something like that. Where is it?
Let me pull it up. I see it. Yeah, he basically just said, he basically said, Chestnut said he identified a dangerous trend in his workforce. New hires introducing themselves using their preferred pronouns. This is completely unnecessary for a woman who is clearly a woman to tell us her pronouns as she/her and a man who is clearly a man to tell us that his pronouns are he/him. He wrote in an email to a small group of employees. Instead, Chestnut said he understood the practice's rooting in kindness, but added that in the long run, this approach does more harm than good, forcing people to behave in certain ways that are the opposite of inclusion. Okay, sounds not horrible, but that's a dangerous, dangerous path to go down.
By the way, my recommendation to all of us is to just not comment on this. I think we should just read what happened. And then a moment of silence for, for, for, for this guy for getting fired, basically fired. Oh, I stepped down coincidentally right after this. But, you know, for, for, you know, whether you agree with him or disagree with him, I kind of feel like having to step down is a pretty, like, severe penalty. Having to step down from your own company is a pretty severe penalty for, like, having a point of view on this stuff. But, like, maybe that's like, maybe it's a lot more severe than I think. I don't know.
Like, Well, what's crazy, I think that when you look at— when you think about these things, words aren't just words. You have to look at intentions, right? And his intention, if you— we don't even have to read it, but his intention is not to say that any— his intentions are good. His intentions actually, I think, are rooted in like, I want to make everyone feel included and I want to be productive and I, you know, whatever. And I'm just reading this email a little bit like here's live. And so it doesn't seem like a negative email.
Here's the part where I think it got dicey for him. So he goes, he go in the email, he goes, um, first, there is a tiny number of peeps at Mailchimp. Strange to use peeps. Maybe that's like what they call themselves.
Is that like a chimp word?
Yeah. So there's a very tiny number of peeps at Mailchimp who consider themselves transgender, forcing either with orders or through guilt, the approximately 1,300 other peeps to adopt a new communication paradigm that humanity has never had to use in our 300,000 years of existence. And under 150,000 years of spoken language in order to make things slightly more comfortable for an extremely small group of peeps is completely illogical. And he says that if you're forced to do something illogical, eventually you'll believe and do anything, even if it's vicious. So, okay, that's like a little, like, uh, he says, nowadays everything is incredibly politicized. I'm finding that peeps are no longer motivated by meaningful work. They're motivated to make political statements. They're using company time and company resources to win a game against their opponents in a game that is raging in their minds and on social media. Um, understanding and respecting that people can have different, different views is part of being American, part of being mature adults. Peeps of all different, uh, political leanings are free to vote the way they want, blah, blah, blah, but it's not for the workplace. So that's what he said. Um, I'll leave it to anybody to agree or disagree. My personal opinion is, uh, I understand what he's trying to say. I think he said it in a pretty stupid way, like it's a little too aggressive.
Um, and using the word peeps when you're talking about these things is also like— if I, I, I, I agree with the sentiment here, but I think that if I, if it were a hot button issue, I wouldn't use slang.
Yeah, you can't be like, to the homies that had to use the— yeah, I guess internally maybe they must just always use that, use that like, you know, like Facebook had like whatever, like now has like MetaMates or whatever. Like, dude, it's kind of like— Calling a MetaMate to use a pronoun is un-MetaMate, Frank.
There's two words that I hate using in a serious like argument or discussion. Like if I'm talking to Sarah, my wife, or like someone else about like, look, like, you know, they said this in their tweets. Like if it's ever like the word tweets in an argument, like, well, I tweeted that.
Did you see the tweet?
Did you see their tweets? You know what I mean? Like, I don't— Well, he tweeted it. Like, I don't want to use that word or text. That were texts. Yeah, like when I'm having a serious conversation, I want to talk about something and I got to use, well, he tweeted that. You see his tweets?
Yeah, because it's too much like I tweeted at him and it's like, yeah, it doesn't sound—
I'm not a fan. Strong. But yeah, I mean, I'm gonna add peeps to that list. So yeah, RIP Ben. I like Ben. I don't know him. I'm acting like I do. I've cold emailed him a ton of times and he's never replied to me, but so we kind of know each other.
So, and I was like, so karma. Yeah, I guess he's just one of those peeps. Yeah, it doesn't reply to my emails. You know what happens to those peeps.
Yeah, he's, he's him and his $6 billion can go off and be unhappy by themselves. But, uh, you know, whatever. Uh, I like Ben Chestnut. I love Mailchimp. I think it's a great company.
Yeah. Um, me too. I think Mailchimp is a cool, really cool success story. This data is wrong every freaking time.
Whoa. I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed. HubSpot. Grow better.
Do you— do you want to talk about Nikita?
Yeah, we kind of did, but it seemed like—
I know, but we glossed it over, I think. So at the end of a podcast a few days ago, the Sean Story one, we talked about this guy Nikita Beer, who you and I are both friends with. But we talked about it at the end of like an hour session and I realized this is actually really amazing and deserves significantly more time. And so I'll kind of give— yeah. So Nikita Beer, he's a good friend. We're in a group text message with him and that's actually how I got to know him and everything. I'm going to explain most everything is public information. So this is like through articles and his Twitter feed. So I'm not going to say anything that is confidential. But basically he started an app called TBH. So he went to school in Berkeley, California, started an app called TBH, which was basically some type of like viral high school app that like you could answer questions about your peers, something like that. And it wasn't incredibly significant of an app, but it went viral and got millions of users very quickly after him spending over 2 years trying to create viral apps. And so we kind of felt like he kind of honed in on what works and more importantly, what doesn't work. Facebook eventually buys the app for tens of millions of dollars. Originally, it was said to be like $100 million. I think in a recent article they're like, it was actually like $40 million, which is still a great outcome. And that was about 5 years ago. And so Nikita said something in the group message, which he says, I think it'd be an interesting idea to ask myself or to figure out how I'm not doing that.
You're, you're making it too soft. I remember exactly how he said it. It's, it was like, oh, so what are you doing? What are you up to nowadays? Oh, Sam, you sold the hustle. What are you doing? Sean, you sold people. What are you doing? Nikita, you're sitting at Facebook. What are you doing? And he's basically, he just said it straight. Straight up, he goes, um, I'm just thinking about how I can make $10 million in 3 months. Like, uh, and we're like, what? And he's like, yeah, I want to make an app that generates like $10 million in 90 days.
And we talked about that. Like, that's just crazy. That's outlandish. We brought it up on this podcast, but it was a really interesting— we just thought of it as an interesting thought exercise.
Like, oh, that's actually a really backwards from that dream.
Okay.
If that's— is that possible? Yeah, it is possible. I guess it is possible. So then, all right, I'm a smart guy. Let me find out— find out a way I would do it. It is obviously very challenging.
And so I guess he must have had— I don't actually don't know if this is true or not, but I imagine when you sell a company to Facebook, you have some type of non-compete. Well, typically non-competes are anywhere from 2 to 5 years. The other day, a few months ago, it was the end of the 5-year period since selling TBH. And so I imagine that was the period where he was like, great, I can do that. And so he launches this app about 3 months ago where basically you—
it's the same app as TBH. So what was TBH? TBH was an anonymous polling app or compliments app. So I don't know if you remember, like in high school, they would always pass this thing around at the end of the year, the, the superlatives test. And it would be like, who is most likely to become famous? You know, famous in Hollywood. Oh, this person in our school. Who is most likely to, you know, end up with, with 10 kids or whatever, right? You just come up with these like future looking things. Who's the best? Who's got the best smile? This person wins best smile. And so TBH was that because it was playing on this thing, which is people are very interested in themselves and in the people around them. And so you're like, all right, if I, I'll go through and I'll answer this quiz. And it was using like, so that sounds very simple under the hood. It's gotta be pretty smart, right? Because it's gotta surface in your contacts It's gotta surface the right 4 or 5 names that you actually know. Who do you actually know? So you could pick, you know, your friends and, um, and then it would send them a text message and saying, hey Sam, somebody said that you have, you have the best smile in your school. Download the app to find out who, who said it. And you're like 100%, you're gonna go find out who said I have the best smile, or who said I'm most likely to, who said they have the biggest crush on me. And so, you know, that taps into like something pretty deep in a teenager. And so that's what TBH was. Got acquired. Um, and, and by the way, that same idea had been done many, many times. Our buddy Suli, who was the first episode of the podcast, he had built that same Superlatives idea as a Facebook app when the Facebook app platform launched back in like 2007 or something like that. And it also went viral, also went crazy viral. Like, this is just an idea that goes viral. Um, and you could switch— he did it on the Facebook app platform, Nikita did it on the mobile platform where you would send SMS, uh, you know, invites based off of this. And so it's the same. That was what he did. Then it got acquired immediately, pretty much immediately got shut down. Uh, there wasn't really much retention in it. And so it was like, oh, that's a cool idea. It gets people engaged, goes viral for a short period of time, but there's no engagement. All right. So there's no long-term retention.
Seems like it gave him this, like, this persona of like, I am a, I'm a wunderkind. Like, I know how to make things go viral because A, A, it is partially true, and B, Nikita kind of has this like aura about him that— who knows if it's on purpose or not on purpose— where he like is mysterious and like somewhat silent and only makes sarcastic jokes and everything comes easy to him. Like, that's like his like cool kid demeanor.
Yeah, yeah, he definitely, definitely tries to be a cool kid. All right, so then it's an app you open up, it says who do you have a crush on, who's got the best smile, who's most likely to be whatever, who Who would you trust to bail you out of jail? And you answer and they're all supposed to be, you know, sort of like more positive-ish questions. They're not— it's not like mean. It's not supposed to be bullying. And again, starts to go viral. And so we sat there in this group chat as it was happening. So describe kind of how it played out from your perspective.
He says things like, all right, now we're adding 1,000 people an hour. And I kind of brush that off because like I'm thinking maybe these are just bots. Like, this isn't actually serious.
Well, and there's one little difference. He launches it and we're like, cool, man. How do we download the app? He's like, you have to, it's geofenced to these 3 high schools in Georgia. And we're like, what? And he's like, and we're like, hey. And then he would post like a, like, you know, he'd be like, post his graph. It's like, it's going viral, but it's got like 200 people. We're like, ah, only 200. He's like, there's only like 2,000 people in the school.
This is gonna take over the whole school.
But he'll say like, like right away, but he uses like academic language.
Like it has a K-factor of blank, but we're seeing that user retention stagnates at this thing. And the turn happens at 3%.
Like it was The density competition is blah, blah, blah. We're like, whoa, yeah, that's cool. And then, and then he goes, then he's posted this chart and we're like, oh, sick. Like, I don't like, how come I don't see it when I go to my App Store chart? Like, you know, social free apps. He's like, we put it in the games category under puzzles. He's like, he's like, that way we're going to like stay away from competition until we flip the switch. And we're like, whoa, like, damn, this guy is like, this is like if you want Game of Thrones and they're talking about like, you know, how to invade King's Landing. It's like these guys standing at this giant table moving these chess pieces around, like talking about conquering. That's him. But the chess pieces are like high schools and he's moving them around.
Yeah, it was like, uh, it's like James Bond villain of high school, uh, you know, quizzes, if that's such a thing.
And by the way, there's one key twist to the whole thing. It's TBH again, but he's like, this time we're not trying to be the next Snapchat. We don't care about the retention. We're just going to put an in-app purchase that says pay to see who voted for you. He's like, they're going to pay. And we're like, well, I get— well, will they pay? They're going to pay. And it's like, the thing is a freaking $6.99 weekly subscription. So this is basically $28 a month. This is double the price of Netflix to see who voted for you. And he's like, yep. So if we're converting, you know, whatever, 4% of people, And we take over this state of Georgia. Georgia has this many high schools. Each high school has this many students. And yeah, $1.8 million a month. Okay, good. Yeah, let's go. That's basically like my reenactment of how they're thinking about this.
And at this, with TBH, he had raised a little bit of money. He had raised money from Founders Fund and Greylock. And like, the, the— when you do that, it says, uh, you know, you— I've got to build the next Snapchat. This way, with this new company, he just basically says Dude, I'm self-funded. I've got 4 engineers living in my L.A. house right now. We're just trying to, like, make it big, make it fast. And what do they say on South Park? Like, scale up. No, start up, get big, cash out, bro down. You know, like that. Like, that's exactly what he's trying to do. He's trying to just get in, get the bag, get out, and just maybe—
a tattoo idea for you.
Yeah. Not. And so anyway, about 10 days after launches. I'm just making these numbers up, but it's around a week, maybe 2 weeks. He starts saying like, oh man, people are starting to spread these rumors that this app is being used for human trafficking. And we laughed that off. And he goes, so I changed it to—
no, he was like, he's like, yeah, it's, it's like annoying as, like, as hell. Like, we're getting a bunch of deletion. Okay, oh, it's gonna die. And we were like, what? The thing that, like, you called your shot. You're like, I'm gonna build an app that goes viral, it's gonna make $10 million in like 90 days. And that's a ludicrous thing to say. You spend like 2 years plotting. He went through a bunch of different ideas to think about what it could be. Decides, you know what, it's TBH with a paywall. Launch it, like spends, you know, has these like 7 engineers living in his living room. You know, the place smells like, you know, ramen and Old Spice. And he's like, all right, we build the app. After a few months, we launch this thing in these pockets of Georgia. It goes viral. But then this whole, you know, this hoax starts saying this is for— I don't know what the—
sex trafficking, human sex trafficking, which I didn't even understand, but I didn't even understand.
But I shouldn't even say those words. YouTube's going to like deprioritize this algorithm, like, and we're out of the algorithm now, like, because I said that out loud.
And he says that he's like, well, it's actually— it's just like a couple reviews, but I have a feeling that these couple of reviews are going to like spread. Someone already made a video on TikTok. This is just how things work. And so I'm like, it's whatever. Like, I don't understand that entirely. That sounds like you're just being like neurotic, but Sounds good. So he changes the name to Crush, right?
Yeah. So app starts getting deleted or it gets taken down in the App Store. Apple takes down or something like that. He's like, oh, we're going to petition, blah blah blah. We're going to re-upload as Crush. And he sends us, hey guys, like new brand.
And it looks exactly like— yeah, exactly like Crush the soda. Like, like the grape flavored soda.
He sends it in the text and I got so thirsty. Like, you know, like the Pavlovian dog response. I saw that and I was like, I need orange soda on my tongue right now. And I hadn't had orange soda in like a decade. I saw that thing and I was like, I need that. Relaunches again in like, you know, Alabama this time. He's like, okay, we're going south. And they attack Alabama with their 4 high school launch strategy. They do. They have this like thing set to a tee. And by the way, like he had, he had wrote a memo inside Facebook once about how TBH was launching high schools effectively. He's like, we created basically, his theory is basically for a social app, the most valuable thing you can have is a reliable way to test your app. So like, can you get this into a small network, like, like a high school where most people know each other or know of each other of 1,000 people quickly? Because if you could do that, you could test it in one high school, see what the data says, and then you could tweak the app, launch it in another high school, do it again. He's like, That reliable, like, petri dish to test in is the most valuable thing. So they had come up with this strategy, which was a— but this memo got leaked when he was at Facebook, which was like, they would create Instagram accounts, like, you know, Crush, you know, um, you know, Archipelago High, you know, and it's like, they, they, they take the high school name and they take the, the brand name of the thing and they would make the account private and they would go follow every kid who had like, you know, class of whatever, 2022, um, in that high school, they would follow all of them. So then the kid would see who followed me. Uh, it has my high school name in it. They click it. It's private. To, to find, to see the profile, you gotta follow back. So they would, they would request to follow. So a whole bunch of people requested to follow. He's like, but we would not accept anyone. And it's like, there's like the, you know, the Dennis system on Always Sunny. He's like, you know, first we demonstrate value, then we take it away. And he's like, then at 4:00 PM on the day before launch, which, uh, the day of the launch when everybody gets outta school, you know, we have a guy in a truck watching people leave the school. As soon as they do, we hit accept request. We accept everybody's request. Everybody gets a notification at the same time. And then they go to it. The bio basically says, download the app, see who likes you. You download the app. And then he is like, we would instantly go viral in a high school. So he had this like launch strategy, which was, I thought, pretty, pretty great, pretty tactical. So he's doing that again now with Crush. Crush gonna go, it's gonna launch like that. And it starts to work and we're like, wow, dude, you did it again. Like, the first one wasn't a fluke. You did it again. All of a sudden, it totally attracted a different demographic because of this, like, stupid orange soda logo and the name Crush. And so he's like, oh, God, you know, cut. All right, let's move the scene around, change the name again. And he comes back for act 3, and this time it's called Gas.
And by the way, this whole— so he'd been working on this for many months, maybe more than a year, I don't know. But this whole thing that we're describing takes place over 2 to 3 weeks, and it gets to the point where he starts making up phrases like, we are acquiring new users at this rate per hour. You know, a lot of times we talk about saying like ARR, annual recurring revenue, and what a lot of companies will do is they'll take like their monthly run rate and multiply that by 12 to say this is what they're doing. He was basically doing that at a per-hour basis. So he's like, oh, we're, you know, we're We're acquiring 1,000 users per hour, which means our rate of like new users is like 365 million, whatever.
And yeah, he's like, he's like, if you look dawn day over day, it's like, you're just measuring the period of like the sunrise day over day. What's your— what your numbers are? That's insane.
And so Gas starts like taking off similar to the original one, but this time even even more. And in a matter of like 7 days, I believe he starts tweeting out the results and letting us know. And basically within like 7 days, give or take 5 days, I don't know exactly, it was doing a million daily— it had a million daily users, was adding 30,000 new users an hour. Users were answering 3.2 million polls per hour. In around like 10 days, I believe he's hit $1 million in sales. And are also around 10 days in, it was number 1 in the App Store. And he had been telling us it's going to be number 1 in the next handful of days. It's going to be number 1. And he totally called it. And we're talking number 1, like above TikTok, above Instagram, above Facebook.
Yeah, totally. This is all true. And he said— he tweets out, he goes, ladies and gentlemen, after a 5-year hiatus, I'm no longer a one-hit wonder. Introducing Gas, the number one app in the App Store.
And this is when it turns to the point where it's incredibly hard for us to compliment him and to root for him because clearly this guy has a chip on his shoulder. Clearly, for the last 5 years, he was mad that he sold too soon or didn't become like huge or didn't become wealthier or didn't become whatever his, his target was. But he fell short, it felt like. And now he is proving that he is the man because here's what's— here's what— here's what starts happening. And he gets hilariously cocky about it, which I love.
I love.
I love. It makes me like him even more. But I love it. So like, here's an example. A really popular VC tweets out— his name's Josh Feldman. Momentum growth is a powerful feeling and it could also go away really quickly. I have been surprised. I have been surprised how many things with seemingly unstoppable momentum have slow crawled this past year. Zooming out, growth without deep duration adoption and habits doesn't count. And Nikita replies, just me. And so basically he just starts going around anyone online on Twitter who's a big shot who starts talking about high growth stuff. Nikita just pops in and said, what are you talking about me? And it's hilarious. It is so funny.. And so around this time, though, the rumors start happening again about human trafficking, and he starts tweeting and sharing the craziest stuff. And this gets so big that Ashton Kutcher is retweeting— who, Ashton Kutcher? I didn't entirely know this, but like his whole like philanthropy thing is human trafficking. And so these rumors of human trafficking start happening again, and Ashton Kutcher retweets Nikita and says, No, no, I think like Nikita sends us a screenshot.
It's Ashton Kutcher DMing him and he's like, he just, he's just screenshotting us these like big shot people that are just DMing him like wink face instead of even saying hi. They're just like, it's like, is this how this guy like slides into DMs? That's interesting. That wasn't Ashton Kutcher, but like, uh, then he also retweeted it. I'd love to meet, I'd love to meet you, I'd love to help, you know, uh, this thing is a hoax. Because basically what Nikita is saying is he's like This thing is taking off like you wouldn't believe that, you know, it's going viral. The K-factor is 2. And when the K-factor is 2, what that means is for every person who joins, you know, virally, they invite 2 more, right? So it's like, you know, you thought COVID spread fast, watch how fast the Gas App is gonna spread. It's got an incredibly high, uh, viral coefficient. That just basically means for free, it's gonna take over whatever demographic it is until that, until that coefficient starts to go down because either it's saturated or it hits a new market where it's less viral.. And so it's going viral. Um, as the coach was like, I'll help you try to fight these hoax rumors. Cuz on TikTok, on Snapchat, you just see story after story of somebody saying, guys, uh, delete this Gap app, Gas App. It's sus as hell. I downloaded it and a, a white van started following me around my neighborhood. And, and people are like, oh my God, oh my God, share, share. Just keep it, keep our sis, like our school safe. Uh, and it's like girls, like Girls, do not download Gas App. Like, like, you ever seen the show You on Netflix? Say no more. And it's like, it's like the people are just spreading this thing. And so it's like, what the hell? Like, where is this coming from? And he doesn't know. And he's like, it's got to be a competitor. And we're like, okay, what? Like, what kind of competitor? I mean, you just launched like 2 weeks ago. How are they doing this coordinated, like, social, like, psyops attack on you and your user base? And he's like, then he's like, we've located the source of the hoax, or it originated in China.
Well, here's what he says. Here's what he says. This is the most official tweet ever. It's so funny. He goes, after an investigation, our team found several indications that the Gas App, that the Gas App human trafficking hoax was planted by an entity or person originating in China. Our data shows users connecting from China when the app first began growing. And the fake, fake review, the first fake review were posted that same day. And so basically he's accusing something or someone in China who starts—
he's accusing just the country.
Yeah. And so this is just taking off from I want to make $10 million, I want to get in and get out, to China is trying to actively bring me down.
He just tweeted out, dude, I am calling for a total and complete ban of Chinese goods in entering the United States. No, I'm just joking. But I told him, I was like, dude, you need to go lean in way more because what he's doing in his PR push, he's like, the, the, the hoax, a false hoax is being spread about Gas App human, you know, trafficking, blah, blah, blah. And, um, and I'm like, bro, you need to go full Trump. You need to be like, China, the China virus is trying to take down this American success, Gas App. You know, TikTok is not only stealing your data, they're trying to take us down because we are the number one app for teens. China is doing this. This is anti-China. I was like, you should be leaning in way more to this. I was like, I don't know if this is true, not true, but like, this is your only hope is to get this. Like, you should stop saying your app's name with the words, you know, human trafficking, and you should start saying, uh, you know, why is China trying to, you know, spread fake news about this? That is, that is my, my official recommendation to you.
And it's— and it's totally working. And so this entire story that we just spent 30 minutes on, this entire story, we're talking like 20 days. And this is the roller coaster that we've been in. And he would say—
Yes, but that's my point. He says these things in this group chat. And when it's on your phone, when it's just on this small thing, you think this is just limited to us 6 guys in this thing. This is just no big deal. But then you turn on Fox Business News and— or Fox News Business, and he's on there. You go to Wall Street Journal and he's on there. You go to Business Insider, Bloomberg, all these places, and it's real. I go to TikTok and I open up and there's a video about this app. And basically, as much as I don't like saying this because I like Nikita, but he is so smug. He has 100% called his shot and he hit it. He nailed it. This is, this is one of the most epic stories that I've seen behind the scenes in real time in a very long time. It's been quite amazing to watch this entire thing play out in just 20 days.
Yeah, he's smug as hell. But I, you know, the same reason I find Conor McGregor very entertaining in the UFC, right? This cocky guy who tries to call his shots and then tries to pull it off. Like, I'm thoroughly entertained and I'm here for the entertainment., and like, you know, good for him, made it happen. This, this matters to him. He got really pumped about this and he made it happen. And it's like, I feel like, you know, you know, Bane, when he's like, uh, you know, he sees other people like, you know, I felt like Nikita for like 4 years would see other people try to build social apps and he would just like shit on them. Or he would be like, uh, you know, or people building apps would be like, you know, if your app doesn't let you, you know, flirt with somebody, it's never going to work. You know, like, or he'd be like, unless you built the number one app in the App Store, like, you know, don't talk to me type of attitude. And, um, and I find it, you know, pretty awesome that like, you know, like Bane, when he's like, oh, you know, you know, whatever the line is where he's like, you know, you, uh, you, you trained in the dark. I was born in the dark. Like, that's him with these like teen viral apps. He's like, you know, oh, you're trying to make a social app. I was born in the dark. Born to make social apps. And like, you just keep— the fact that he just relaunched the same app is hilarious to me in so many ways.
Um, he probably had just like a countdown timer to like when the non-compete ends.
No, it wasn't even that, because I talked to him in between and he was considering all these like other ideas. We're considering this one real estate idea, he's considering this other idea, and then it was just like, like, you know, it's sort of all like Harry Potter, the wand chooses the wizard. It's like It's just pulling me back in. Just when I think about, I got to go do this app again. Like, are you fuckers really going to let me just do this again? And he did it again.
Yeah, this is pretty amazing. It also goes to show that it shows a few things. It kind of breaks a lot of narratives, which I actually like, which is a, like, you don't really need like a mission, you know, all the time. Like, and I think that like with us, you don't need a noble mission.
The mission is noble. Mission $10 million in 3 months. That's a great mission.
And I do actually think that maybe there is something where like, oh, it makes teens feel good or whatever. Maybe that's like there. But like, I think what's there really above all else is get big fast because that's exciting and just like play the puzzle. It's just a puzzle. And I think that that's like kind of the dominating factor behind what's driving him.
And I think that that's the funny thing. He goes on Fox News and he's like doing the interview, you know, they have the person talking in the background, they're showing screenshots of the app. And so he's saying, he's like, well, the thing we wanted to do was bring positivity to teens. You know, teens feel really bad from whatever, like, you know, Instagram, whatever.
Positivity.
We wanted an app where there's, you know, it's anonymous, but there's no bullying. There's no, um, there's no like sort of negativity. And the screenshot is a poll question that says, want to steal them from their boyfriend? It's like, who do you want to steal from their boyfriend? He's like, you know, we just want to— he's like, I get messages every day from teens saying, you know, uh, you know, I was gonna do something bad to myself. But this app came out and now, you know, I'm running around in a field full of flowers and it's like, it was just hilarious. The whole thing is like straight Silicon Valley, HBO show. Like, it's so funny to me.
It is so funny and it's so exciting. Another thing is that basically when you're building these apps, like, the really good folks are just like maniacal about these little small numbers and just tweaking them and just just being obsessed with these little small things when most people are carried about or worrying about design or branding or the logo or just these things that don't matter. It's like, dude, all I care about is making this K-factor like more than 1. And so— and when it's not, when it's 0.99, it's we're screwed. We got to totally redo this. And I just thought that it's a really interesting story. And this has been like a roller coaster and one of the coolest things that's happened in a long time. I just love following along this.
Yeah, props to him. Uh, great, great job. Thank you for the— thank you for the entertainment. Um, all right, do you want to do any more or should we save it for the next?
I thought you had one more.
I do have one more, but, um, we should save that one.
It sounds too interesting.
Okay, let's save it. Same for the next one. That's it, we're out of here.