How to Reverse Engineer Any Business - From the Archive

So I saw this website, my guy Chris, Chris, who's my apprentice right now for content, he sent this to me and I haven't actually spent a ton of time on it, but go to firstversions.com. Uh, check that out. And I'm pretty fascinated with this. I think you are too. We both are like internet archaeologists. We like to go find the OG thing. What did— I did this blog post that got like tens of thousands of views once, uh, before I had any audience. It just went viral because it was, what did the first web page look like for these 10 big companies? And this is kind of like common to, to do, uh, like Uber's homepage back in the day, Snapchat's homepage back in the day, the first Facebook homepage, the first eBay homepage, first Amazon homepage. And these things look like, you know, so basic and rudimentary and like really just, it makes you realize like, dude, you need to launch. And there's that quote, if you're not embarrassed by V1 of your product, you launched too late. And all these companies definitely like fall into that category. So I thought firstversions.com was a cool little like archive of stuff like this.

I think this is so cool. So I actually just sent you a link to an article that I wrote. I think I wrote this in 2016, years ago. 15, October 15. And I, uh, you could— it probably doesn't even work entirely. But anyway, I— what I love to do, and I've always loved doing this, is I use— there's a few different websites. WebArchive is the easiest. And what I like to do is I will, um, get a Google Doc and a spreadsheet, and I'll map out the, the whole journey of a company. So I'll look at what— when Airbnb started, and then I'll read all about them of like, all right, here's when they announced they had this many users, here where here's where they announced this much funding, here's where they said they had their first 50 employees, and then from 50 they actually went to 1,000 in only 2 years. And then I'll take screenshots of their website, and in doing that you can actually see what, like, how the, the evolution. So progression. Yeah. And I'm just starting, I'm just making this up with Airbnb, but it could be like it started as airbed and breakfast and it was about renting cots inside of a living room, then, oh wow, they actually changed their their positioning to travel like a local and they started taking higher-end pictures. I don't know what it is, but, and when they started actually taking higher-end pictures, that was actually right when they— right before they raised their $100 million funding. And so anyway, you can actually track the progression really nicely by doing this. And I love doing that. I love it. And so you can actually see, oh, Uber, UberCab.com, they were only black car services. Oh, when they raised all this money, they actually got rid of the black car. The black car became secondary. So actually the black car didn't work. Uh, so they switched to this, you know what I mean? And so it's kind of cool.

Yeah, you can totally reverse engineer a lot of the stuff. So some of the tools we use to do this, the Wayback Machine, which is the internet archive. So, uh, just Google Wayback Machine. That lets you put in any domain name and then you go back in time and they took screenshots of what the website looked like on June 12th, 2010. And then that you can go back and you can see Uber's, what did Uber's homepage look like back then? How were they describing themselves? Another one I do is TechCrunch. I go to TechCrunch, I search for a company's name and then I reverse sort it by the earliest mention of it. So like you can go Twitter, you can see the very first article is Mike Arrington being like, the buzz at the party this week was about Twitter spelled without the vowels. Basically it's like the short messaging service was kind of fun. You do this, but cares? You know, people are just tweeting about, or they're just tweeting about their breakfast and it was all through SMS. Like, then you can just kind of see what was going on then. So I like that one. That's, that's a useful one. Another one I'll do is I'll go on Twitter and you can Twitter advanced search. So you can type in anyone's name and you could do things like, uh, Twitter doesn't make this obvious how to do it. There's like a format of how you write these in, but you write like @TheSamPar before 2011. And then you say minimum 300 likes, and I can kind of go see your most popular post at that point in time. What were you talking about? What was working for you? What wasn't? So I've done this with a whole bunch of people, and I kind of like— I really am a big reverse engineer type of guy. And it's not that you can copy it, but it's just data points. It's a way to fast forward experience because experience the hard way is slow. It takes like decades to get good at things and to learn and to like figure out what's normal, what's not, what's fast, what's slow, what's good, what's bad. And a better way to do it is to like download a whole bunch of data points quickly. And it's not perfect experience, but it's better than being blind and just kind of like going off only your personal experience.

I wish they don't even, by the way, what they do is not just internet. Like what we're talking about is homepages. That's like kind of our niche, but they'll be like, this is the, yeah, this is the first version of Tom and Jerry, like the very first pilot. And like last night, I don't know why, for whatever reason, before I went to bed, I was watching the very first pilot episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm before it was even a show. And I was, I just love seeing that OG, OG, the first pilot of Always Sunny in Philadelphia where they're using the handheld camera. I like seeing that because it just, as somebody who is frequently starting things, it's important to go see that your favorite things started with very humble, simple, kind of shitty beginnings. And then you sort of can see how much better they got over time.

This is so good. I love this. I'm going to link something to you. So in 2013, I created this thing I called the CEO Doc. It was a stupid name, But I sent it to you and you could actually see that. It's so funny that you do this. 'Cause I mean, it's so funny that we're similar and we've been doing this for years. So I created, oh wait, is it not working? I created this document where I would take, I think I had a list of 500 people and I would make timelines for each of their lives. And I would say started their, it was broken into apprenticeships, first hit, and then the self-actualization mode. So for example, uh, Jack Dorsey started apprenticeship at age 22. From 22 to 28, he basically was like this poor nobody who worked as a dispatch service for a taxi cab company. 28 to 31, started Twitter at 28, uh, it actually became a pretty big hit really soon at, uh, 29. And so I have timelines and I have average ages average age for each person. And so I love doing that stuff and it works so good for just seeing like what's possible. Right. So we're actually quite similar. I've been doing this as well for a while.

Do you think Pocket is going well? I bet you it's going pretty badly. I bet you that'd be a cool company to buy.

Yeah, I don't think it's going well. It got really big and it raised a bunch of money and then like it's just been around for so long without like an exit that you wonder, did it just get like become obsolete somehow? Um, along the way, but anyways, it was just a way to save articles. Now I actually want something what I'll call business pocket. So I have this bookmark thing in my Chrome that's called Companies to Watch. It's basically like anytime I stumble across a company I find interesting, I've been doing it, it's like this thing is like 10 years old now. I find an interesting company and before it used to be, I want to see if this will be successful or maybe I should, if I was an investor, I would invest in this. So I want to flag this and then I'll come back later in 3 years and I'll see how it turned out, whether I would've made money or lost money on this thing. And so I've just been collecting this for a long time now. In reality, I bookmark it and then I never go back and go recheck those because who's got the time? But I would love a service that's almost like a programmatic newsletter where I can just flag either people or companies that I say, I want to keep a watch. I want to keep watch on this company or this individual and the CEO, or maybe this company, the startup. And then I want it to basically take the 10 that I've flagged and send me anytime there's interesting news about them with some filter. They raised new funding, they got a new job, they announced this thing, they're on TV, whatever. And my 12 that I'm tracking might be different than the 12 that you're tracking, but we might have 3 that are the same. And so this company that's underneath that would just need to set up a programmatic way to watch for the news around certain names and then turn it into an automated newsletter. That was kind of just like a random idea. I don't think it's a business, but I think it would be cool.

I disagree. I think it's a business. When we were getting ready to decide if we wanted to launch Trends or launch something new. I wrote a landing page for this product. I forget what I called it, but something involving the word spy. And I put like, the headline was like, we're your secret spy spies that track your competitors and tell you everything that they do. So, you know, and we deliver it to you via email. And I think this actually could have worked wonderfully. And the reason I came up with this idea was I had a friend who worked at Rocket Internet. Rocket Internet, Google it. It's a, it's a guy, it's 3 brothers named Ollie, Alex, and something else, Sam, where others. And they started this thing called Rocket Internet. And basically the way it works right now, it's a large publicly traded company. They had this like guy named— he was like the chief scientist. And what they would do is they would research fast-growing companies in America, and they would clone them, and they would deploy that company in Africa, in Asia, different parts of Europe, things like that.

Yeah, and they also own the Amazon for Thailand. And they would pick a variety of companies. They would do like the Wayfair for Nigeria or something like that. And they had this guy who's— who was called the chief scientist, and all the clones of the Amazon of this country, that country, that country. There'd probably be like 8 clones and he would send an email every day. This is a story I heard. I don't know if it's true. He would send an email every day and it'd be like, hey everyone, Amazon actually just moved on their homepage. They moved the clothing from 8 or 100 pixels to the left. It probably means that clothing is a little bit more popular now than furniture. So, all right, make sure you move your clothing thing. Or hey, they changed their color of this button from this yellow to this orange. Go ahead and do that. And I thought, that's pretty awesome. I would love to have that. I would love to track my competitors because I would do research on my competitors. I would say, oh, which ads are they using? Oh, I wonder why they're using this ad. Maybe, maybe they're using this ad for this, this reason, that reason, that reason. I'm gonna go and copy it. And I would use a variety of SimilarWeb, Facebook Ad Archive, Ahrefs, and a few other things. And I would just, I would be like, oh, here's where they're succeeding and here's why they're succeeding. I may copy them, I may not copy them. And I just know what's working. And I think that that 100% could be a service that you pay $100 grand a year for and they'll tell you the 5 nearest competitors. And every month you meet with their team and you say, all right, your competitors, they're doing this, they're doing that, they're doing this. Here's what's working, here's what's not working. Here's our hypothesis. Hypothesis as to what all this means. And I think actually you could charge a six-figure annual contract for all of it. And I think it would be a really cool company, right?

Yeah. I told you about my friend who I nudged in this direction to do this for, for e-commerce. I'll give him another shout out here. He said he got a bunch of sales last time I mentioned it, so I'll do it again. shopifysalesdata.com. Basically a way to track your competitors and how much they're selling and what new ads they're running and stuff like that. And just in the niche of e-commerce. And it's, you know, I don't know, $100 a month or something like that. And I pay for it. I'm like, this is great. You know, it's a valuable service. And so you could do it in a niche or you could do it, you know, more broadly. But yeah, I think that's cool.