AMA with Sam Parr & Ryan Holmes

Welcome, welcome to everybody. We're just checking in with Ryan and Sam. Apologies about the delay. We had a bit of traffic for Sam getting on board. Sam, do you want to open up with a bit of a story?

I didn't have traffic. I was running an errand that I thought was going to allow me to be home in time, and I got a flat tire, and I'm out in the middle of the country, and it took forever. But it's all good. I'm just gonna have to do this from my car, so excuse me wearing a dirty white t-shirt and in a car.

Nice job, Sam. It's great to have you.

Ryan, what's going on, man? Nice to see you again. How are you?

Yeah, things are good. Things are good. Yeah, looking forward to this and things. Yeah, no complaints. I'm up in Whistler right now. We're getting the last of the snow in and it's sunny, bluebird days. So life is good.

Good.

Yeah, excited for today. We've got a pretty good lineup. How many, uh, how many companies do we have that we're talking about, Joel?

We've got about, uh, 20 or 30 people that submitted pitches. We had to, to bring it to some judges to get that to a top 7, but everybody watching below should be able to see the pitch decks and the startup ideas, so it'll be about 7.

Great.

Okay, how many people are here right now? I can't see it. Do you see it?

Yeah, so we're in the back end right now, and then the public feed should have close to 400 RSVPs. So, uh, not as many as, as people that, that listen to MFM Podcast every month, but we're getting there.

But that's all right, it's not a competition.

Oh, we lost your audio, Sam.

I said hello everyone and thank you for being here. I, uh, I have the chat here and I just like looking at the chat and see what people are saying.

Yeah, awesome.

So maybe we'll get the ball rolling for the first half. We're going to do just a little AMA between Ryan and Sam. Uh, people watching, if you want to let us know where you're tuning in from— SF, Vancouver, New York— let us know in the comments. And then we have a couple pre-asked questions to run by Ryan and Sam, and then if you have a question feel free to put it in the chat. We'll flag it for Ryan and Sam, and then they can just kind of give their own answer input. But the first 20 minutes will be AMA style, and then we're going to bring up those 7 pitches. They're 90-second pitches for Ryan and Sam. And then Ryan and Sam, you're going to give your input on what you like about it, what you don't like about it, and maybe what you would do in their shoes as the founder. Does that sound okay?

Awesome.

Okay, let's do it. Um, first up, question from the audience: Ryan and Sam, how did you first get to know each other? What's the, the origin story?

I think I cold emailed Ryan a bunch of times, and maybe he ignored me a bunch, but then, uh, because I was like a little pipsqueak. But then we got a little bit closer when I was selling my company. Ryan was awesome kind of, uh, mentor to me where you kind of helped me, uh, just make some decisions.

Yeah, I got a couple emails. I, I think I got out to— I got out to a HustleCon once and, uh, maybe a quick high five there. And then yeah, I was, I was honored to help you through your process and, and see how you were thinking about your, your exit and, uh, all the cool stuff you're up to now.

And Ryan, what kind of caught your eye about Sam in the early days? Like, was it, was it a trait? Was it a characteristic?

Oh, hustle baby. I mean, Sam, Sam is, uh, you know, he, every, everybody on the, on the channel right now I'm sure listens to My First Million. And, you know, his, his thinking on businesses, his, his, uh, you know, finger on the pulse of what's going on, the zeitgeist, and, and, you know, just being really at the front of, of a lot of interesting concepts and how he and, you know, the folks he's talking with, they're thinking about building businesses. And I think that's, you know, something that's, that's so exciting, you know, something where, uh, you know, Kernel's been really helpful with and what we're doing at LOI. And, and so love seeing entrepreneurs building businesses, and Sam really is— has built a brand around that.

And maybe a question for, for Sam and Ryan: what's given you life these days personally and then in the work world for projects?

You go, Sam.

I had a kid and that's really the only thing I care about at the moment. I care about my little 5-month-old and work-wise, I have a company that's 18 months old called Hampton. And so I work on my podcast, I work on Hampton and I work on being a good dad and that's it.

That's so great. I've got a 2.5 and a 5-year-old, Sam, and I've loved just spending a lot more time and focus with them. And so it's a real privilege to be able to get in and, you know, do a lot with them. So loving that. And also, you know, the focus you've got around just doing 2 projects because after you sell a business, I migrated from Hootsuite and It was really challenging to not get back to that capacity and overfill your cup again. And so trying to deliberately not take on projects. So for me—

I'm probably still making that mistake at the moment right now. Even though I look at my schedule, I'm like, I'm doing too much. It makes me angry. I do the podcast and a company. I'm like, I only got to do one thing.

Yeah, my wife gave me a little reminder on that. She's like, you wanted to spend more time with the kids, and I was like launching something and launching the fund and do something else. And I was like, this is just the eye of the needle. Once we get through the other side of this, it's gonna calm down. So I've been like keeping it manageable with, you know, LOI and some help with Colonel. And then, but what I'm super excited about right now is it just like AI is so freaking cool. And I actually started coding again, which was— is like cracking out a little, little, uh, coding. And, um, it's so incredible what you can be building and doing with this. And, and like the, the skill level is going down. So I'm thinking the reason I want to do that also is just to like think about what this is going to mean to like the world of software and startup and SaaS and all of that. It's gonna it's gonna change a lot of things real fast.

I'm curious to ask, you know, Sam, you kind of earned your scars, so to speak, building The Hustle and building My First Million pod. Ryan, you kind of earned your scars and scale up with Hootsuite. With the new projects you guys are doing now, you know, Sam with your Hampton Group and then Ryan with the fund, What are you guys doing differently as more mature founders that maybe your younger selves wouldn't have known to do?

I can go. Mine's easy. Having a much longer time horizon. I think my strategy with the hustle was to make a certain amount of money by 30 years old because I just read a book and it said that a guy I respected said that is cool and it helps relieve pressure, so I was happy to do that. At this point, I think there's a huge competitive advantage, and also there's like— it feels better on my soul to have long-term plans, 20 or 30 or 40 years long. And so my outlook is like in decades a little bit more, as opposed to, uh, like with the Hustle House, like get in, get out, make it happen. And so having a much longer term plan and having more patience is way different than before. Um, and also, frankly, once you've sold a company and you have some financial security, mistakes don't bother you as much. And so I'm a lot more calm and less defensive and far more offensive.

Nice. I think, uh, yeah, I love, I love that, Sam. That's a great one. I think thinking long term Absolutely. I think also realizing the cyclical nature of everything. Like there are different flavors on things, but things are so cyclical when you kind of sit back and think about what we've seen over the past few years with like the dot-com boom of the early 2000s and then Web2 with social media, mobile, and the boom that happened there. And now, yet another with AI and all of the ideas that are going to flourish out of all of these waves. And so sitting back and just trying to— I've had the great honor of meeting and talking with a lot of CEOs, Fortune companies, and so many of them are historians. And I think that understanding history, because it truly does repeat itself, and understanding trends and waves is really important because you can apply that. Thinking to what's coming ahead.

We've got a couple questions funneling in from the chat. This one's from Ari. Question for Sam: How much was Sam's List inspired by kind of CB Insights, and what's your goal with that business?

So Ryan doesn't even know this exists. I don't know how this person who commented even knows this exists. I shared it with a very small group of people. Ryan, I had a little nights and weekends project, so like my kid goes to bed at like 7, so like 7 to 10, I've got free time and I like, I don't consider it a business because I don't care if it succeeds or not. It's just a project. But I created this website called Sam's List. You guys can see it at samslist.co. And if you're in Canada, I don't know if this even applies to you guys, but it's a Yelp for accountants. And, um, because I needed to find an accountant, I was at the airport about 4 or 5 weeks ago and I tweeted out, who has an accountant that they love? Because finding an accountant is so freaking hard. Like, it's a word of mouth thing. You can't like Google like, what's a good accountant? And I got like 300 replies. And so what I did was I listed all of them on this website called Sam's List that I built on Bubble. And then I called all of them and I just said, tell me how much you charge. Tell me who's a good customer, who's a bad customer. What services you provide, and I put it on this website called Sam's List. And so now I've got this database of all these cool things. And then I went and built— this is going to come live in a few days— a calendar so the accountant can put their calendar there and someone could just book a call with them. And I was thinking about it and I'm like, huh, this actually might be a real business. And so I have to figure out if I'm gonna— it might— when I say me, it's always me and my partner Joe. I have to figure out if we're we're actually going to turn it into a thing, of which case I'm never going to run it. But maybe I would like fund it with like $50 grand and like hire this one woman we've been working with and being like, see if you can turn it into a business and like charge like $200 or $300 per phone call that you set up for an accountant. Um, did I answer that question? Sorry.

I, I think that was great. I'm curious what Ryan's take is. Do you like the idea? What would you do if you're, you know, seeing that website? Would you try and grow it? Like, I'm curious what you do with it.

I love it.

This is not a fundable thing in my opinion. This is a lead gen website that could probably make $2 to $3 million a month that would not have a lot of value to sell as a company. So there, Ryan, before you make fun of me there, you can—

oh no, no, no, I, I think it's great. I love, I love cash cow, you know. I, I don't, I don't love the lifestyle business moniker, but I, I love like cash cow businesses like this. You, yeah, you shouldn't need to raise a lot because it should be profitable out of the gates. I like that it's going after um, you know, a group of people that want to spend money, all right? Like, and, and if you think about how Craigslist monetizes, it monetizes off of, you know, two different posting areas. This is a pretty great posting area, uh, if you kind of are taking that framework and just like solving that problem. I think it's great. My, my big question is, is going to be like, are, are bookkeepers relevant in 5 years? Um, that is a—

that is number one. Which is like, do they even matter? And number 2 is the way that this would get traffic is I would share it online. And I think I can get 100,000 visits a month doing that. But then the other way you share this and get traffic is through search. Now that is the second point, which is, is search even important in 5 years? I don't know. So that's why I'm like, I don't even know if this can be a thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, also AI bookkeeping, like if I can, if I can write apps, through AI right now, the, the jump to like AI bookkeeping. I mean, there's like probably 5, 10 startups doing AI bookkeeping right now, which is going to be real interesting. Uh, you know, there's going to be more opportunities to get created at this, so who knows. But I like this as a business. I think you've got like a few years with it, and I think you could make a, make a bunch of, uh, a bunch of bucks.

And I love you building up. You said you're excited about AI. Here's basically my strategy. Yeah, for the next 5 years, I'm just going to stash away as much cash as possible because when AI takes over, it's just like, do I have enough to like hold me out for this storm of which I'm going to get annihilated in? Like my strategy, which is just prepare like I'm preparing for a hurricane.

I, I just feel like there's going to be a ton of, a ton of, ton of jobs that are threatened by this. I think we're gonna have to go to universal basic income. I think that, yeah, there's gonna be— you're just not gonna— I don't know. They say that every industrial revolution there's been like an equivalent or greater number of jobs on the other side. With what's going on with robotics and the combination of robotics and AI, I don't know. It's going after white-collar jobs, it's going after blue-collar jobs. This is, this is going to be a big one. So, uh, yeah, we'll see. Um, you know, I don't know if you saw, uh, Sora, the video. You must have seen it, like all the videos created out of that. Like, next, uh, Wes Anderson is going to be— is living right now and he's going to be doing the whole production by himself just with command line and, and like prompting. And that's, that's pretty wild.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Uh, question in the chat about new projects and how to validate them. Um, Sam, kind of curious about the Moneywise podcast. In that one you said it's a test, we'll see if anybody likes it. Um, how do you and Ryan validate kind of these ideas that come up in your head versus, uh, ones that should be on the back burner versus ones that actually you may build after the kids go to bed sort of thing?

So the Moneywise thing is a podcast that we did for Hampton. I don't want to host another podcast, but I just thought I would be the first host to get it started. And, um, that, that's a content thing. And so we validated that. I spent 7 grand to make the— or no, I spent a lot, 20 grand to hire an agency to make the first episode. It ended up getting 50,000 downloads and we got a bunch of customers from it. So it was like, okay, this makes sense, let's keep doing it. Um, when it comes to validating ideas, um, that accept money, dude, I call people like constantly. I'm on the phone. I call it zebra calendar. Like when I'm validating an idea, I have like 20-minute calls all day on my calendar. And so it's like 20-minute call, 5-minute break, 20-minute call, 5-minute break. When we started Hampton, I did like fucking 300 of them. Um, and I just like, I cold call people like crazy. Or not cold call, but I put like a form out there and collect people's phone numbers and call them. And I, I use this book called The Mom Test. Um, it's a book on how to have those customer, uh, discovery calls. I use that like crazy. And then I say, all right, you want this? Um, it's going to cost, let's say, $10,000 a year. Um, but for you, because you're early, we're gonna do $2,500 a year and I'll grandfather you in. And if you hate it at any point, just tell me and you're out and you get your money back. Um, interesting or not interesting? And if— and that's how I validate it when I collect the money. Yeah, yeah.

Ryan?

I think that's something that too many founders don't do is talk to a lot of customers and potential customers. Like they have an idea and it's dear to them and they maybe don't even want to hear somebody give them a differing opinion because it's their pet project and their love. So, you know, definitely people need to be doing that. And I love charging too. If you're selling enterprise software, I love getting, it's basically an intent on your software. Like if you build software X, we would, Would you potentially pay Y? And that really just getting like 20 of those businesses that, you know, potential customers that say they will, it's not binding, but they just say, yeah, I'd pay $10,000 a year for this. And, you know, when we're talking to founders and they want to like raise some money, if they come in with like a boatload of these kind of intent contracts, yeah, you've got really got something there. And that's like cheap and cheerful way to do it.

Is that what you did at Hootsuite? Hootsuite?

No, we did everything you shouldn't do. We did scratch our own itch. We didn't talk to enough people, but we scratched our own itch. We had an agency, Invoke, in Vancouver, and we were building out products for customers, and we also were building out a social media team, and our team needed it. So we scratched our own itch. We didn't talk to enough other people, but luckily we hit it. We dialed in with what the market needed because we were using it and we were our own customer. Um, but you know, that one was, it had inherent virality and just blew up in a big way. How did you get 50,000 listeners to your, or downloads to your pocket? 40, 50,000, you said? What was the big hack there? You use your channels or what did you do?

Yeah, so look, I have 250 or 280,000 something followers on Twitter, but you know what's funny is that's not what I did. Um, I, on my personal YouTube channel, I had 500 subscribers. I don't know why they subscribed. I would post home videos on there every once in a while, and I guess they just looked up my name. And I put the— I put the— I thought I set the MoneyWise podcast on private, but I really had it on listed. It was in fact listed, and that got 10,000 views in like 5 hours. So it was 100% like those 500 people Somehow it got into their algorithm and then I, and then I even said on there, like, I did not mean to make this live. They thought I was lying. People thought I was joking. And then I shared it on Twitter and that got the other 40,000. So I have an unfair advantage because I have an audience.

Great.

We got a question from the chat, maybe one or two more, and then we'll jump to the pitches. Want to be, uh, honoring of Sam's iPhone battery in case it, uh—

no, I'm plugged in, dude.

I'm plugged into the Tesla. He's got the biggest battery ever.

Phone for hours. Um, this is a question about Hampton's, uh, brand. This is from Ryan. Uh, Sam, Hampton exudes luxury and exclusivity, but there's a saying that building a high door invites destruction. How do you ensure that Hampton's brand remains protected?

I'll tell you how. First of all, thank you for thinking your brain is good. All I did was I found 1960s Land Rover and Porsche ads and Rolex ads, and I hired an agency, $15,000, and I was like, I love this aesthetic. Uh, the color is British Racing Green. It's a, it's a car company, uh, it's a car color. And I just said, let's do something like that. And it's called Hampton because I grew up on Hampton Avenue in St. Louis, Missouri, not because of the, the Hamptons. Uh, and so it kind of got lucky that it sounds luxurious. So here's how I think— so, so first of all, we might totally screw it up and our brain is gonna just die in 10 years. I think it could last 50 to 100 years though. And the way that we're doing it now is, um, we have like, oh, you know, over 1,000 members. And me and Joe, my partner, we watch 100% of the people who interview to join, and we're the ones who approve and deny. And we intend to do that for the next 1,000 or so members as well, to create the culture, um, for the community. Um, and so like, we watch a shit ton of interviews. So in order to get in, you have to interview. We watch all of them. Um, so that's how. Um, but that phrase I've never heard before. That could happen, but I mean, I feel like it's easier to create a higher— I think, I just think it's easier to have a higher-end brand than a lower-end brand. I can always go lower, right? I mean, if Louis Vuitton came out with a $100 product, everyone's gonna buy that. So I guess they could do that if it sucks.

And Ryan, how did you think about pricing or kind of branding in the Hootsuite days? Was it build for everybody and see who picks it up, or was it focusing on just CMOs or heads of marketing at the Fortune 500 to start?

Yeah, no, we had a pretty, um, so I think about our model, we launched with a freemium model. We wanted to make it really accessible and just have no barrier to objection. So we started with freemium. At that time, like Basecamp was one of the biggest SaaSes out there. And so I like that model, we applied to kind of, you know, free pro enterprise model. As our customers matured and the industry matured and we saw more seats happening, we started to open up an enterprise product. I would say to people that that is a very challenging breadth to run all the way from free through to, you know, small business self-serve all the way through to enterprise paying 7 figures annually. And I would suggest to people to probably Narrow that focus down to like a swim lane because most industries evolve into swim lanes. You've got your prosumer product, your SMB product, your mid-market product, and your enterprise product. And usually you have a competitor in each lane and they sell against each other pretty successfully against competitors that are in a different swim lane. We were able to bridge those different tiers, but it's a challenge. And so make your life easy and go after a specific lane.

And by the way, Ryan, you mentioned Basecamp. I just had Jason Fried on the pod yesterday.

Yeah.

Man, you guys wanna talk about branding? He's really good at branding. If you guys go look at hey.com, once.com, they're very good at branding.

Yeah, yeah, it's that, that, yeah, you know, I think they were out of an agency back in the day and that's why they created Basecamp and they, they were, yeah, excellent at that and have done a really good job on, on creating branding and also creating their own community and channel and, and, uh, you know, that they market into.

All right, well, we're gonna take a break from the questions. We're gonna jump to pitches. Um, we've got them lined up, we've got people in the chat that are listening, uh, that have done the pitches. So the ground rules are going to be we're going to show a video, it's 90 seconds, pre-submitted by the founder, and we basically just want to get Ryan and Sam's live reaction. Do you like it? Would you invest? Would you use it? Have you heard of this model before? That's going to kind of be the ground rules. Any questions?

Are all these people raising money, or the intention is they want to raise raise money or the intention is they just want to be picked apart or to be encouraged?

Great question. 100% of them are looking for feedback to improve the idea. And then I'd say 90% of them are looking for funding. They're looking at that pre-seed, seed round. Um, and I would say revenue zones look like $300K to some of them a million. Um, and so yeah, they've, they've got traction. It's more than a napkin startup idea, but it's not a Hustle, it's not a Hootsuite yet. They're looking for that, that refinery magic from, from Sam and Ryan. Okay.

All right, let's go.

All right, so you guys are the ones with the checkbook.

You better— hopefully you'll be making some checks. Yeah, yeah.

I, I haven't sold the company to HubSpot, so I know you got some savings.

We'll see.

Um, so, so those of you watching, there's gonna be a startup page that comes up if you like the idea during the video pitch. You can also, uh, request to meet that founder or invest in them yourself if you're a VC or angel listening. And so, um, that's why we're not hosting this on Zoom. We're hoping to create a spot where you can meet these founders and join them or work with them. So First video up is Mr. Andrew from No Story Lost. Here we go.

Guys, so you've both heard of my business before. It's called No Story Lost. We interview your parent and turn their life story into a beautiful coffee table book. So we interview, transcribe, write, add photos, add color, and then print and ship a beautiful book. We measure our success based on families crying happy tears when they open the book together. We've existed for 4 years and I just went full-time last year, and we took a minority investment from Andrew Wilkinson and Tiny. Projects cost $1,500 US and we have 55% gross margins, so we're paying our salaries and breaking even. Families love the product and random people will buy it online without ever talking to us, and there's a massive and growing market for this, so we've got something here, but we're stuck growing slowly. Here's some stuff that we've tried that hasn't really worked profitably. We've tried paid ads. We're on our third agency. Uh, B2B affiliate sales. So we have 40 referring partner businesses. Repeat and referral customers is 20% of our business, but the flywheel turns pretty slowly. We've given projects to influencers. We've sent direct mail to wealthy neighborhoods. We even threw up a 25-foot banner on my cousin's house next to the highway. Until it got taken down by bylaw officers. We've tried a ton of things and inputs just aren't creating the outputs that I'm used to in business. So I'm curious to hear how you would grow this business, or if you think we're missing something.

So what do we think?

I know that business well. So, um, there's a company called Storyworth Wait, Storyworthy? Storyworth, uh, started by this guy named Nick. He started it in my, uh, in the office that I worked out of in 2013 or '14, and I used it. And what they did was they would send your family member an email once a day, they answer it, and then you get a book at the end. I thought it was awesome. Um, I think that if I'm that entrepreneur, I would not raise funding. I think this is a company that can make millions of dollars in profit and you'll be very wealthy. I think that it cannot provide a venture return. And that sounds like I'm dissing someone. I'm not. This is a sick company. I think, um, I also think he said something that irks me, which is that he's on his third agency. Dude, I think hiring a paid agency 9 out of 10 times will not work. Paid marketing, which by the way, paid marketing for a lot of people, I think it's stupid. I rarely think, maybe I'm wrong, Ryan. I think that if that's, if paid marketing is gonna be a core competency, like the company's basically sales slash marketing and like product and like, and then recruiting and like if paid marketing is something that you're hiring an agency for, I think that they will never give a shit. Like you will give a shit and you should, if maybe you can do it once you're bigger and you like know what works, but I would never hire an agency to do this. I think the founder, assuming you're a small team, you need to go and do it. In one month of spending your own money, you'll know more than an agency a lot of times.

Hmm. I, I like paid. I like it because it's like instant, nimble, you know, for a small startup. And I, I agree with you. You're like agencies until you're spending like a good chunk, it's hard to get their attention. Like I actually, we used to deploy paid for customers And when you're deploying like $1,000, it just, you can't even put an hour against it as an agency. There's not enough like margin there. So you just don't get the time and the attention unless you got a huge budget. And I think that's a challenging one. I like the, I do like they've tried a lot of things, right? Like that is your job as a founder is to be out there trying all these different creative things, stuffing banners, brochures, like just all the stops. And I think you're right, this might not be a venture business, it might just be a great, you know, grower. I would also think about like how you really like incent that word of mouth, like getting your customers to be your advocates on like getting the next story done and like really drilling into like who could use this service, you're happy with it. Because once you kind of crack that like word of mouth referral, you know, it might just be an inside sales team that's like, you you know, just hitting up everybody, kind of like a customer success group. Those are some things I would think about.

And I think that there's like this weird no man's land in pricing. Ryan, you would know way more than I do, but my small amount of experience, I think that like there's like— you can, you could like, uh, have an ad and probably buy something profitably for like, if your price point is like $900— or sorry, like $50 to like $150 or $200, And then like there's kind of no man's land from like $200 to like $2,000 or whatever. The, the upper end of that is like you can hire a salesperson. I don't know what that number would be. You'd have to do the math on like how many salespeople or how many, uh, closes your salesperson could do to make it profitable. If I'm this person, I would come up with an automated offering that's $99, so it's an impulse buy. And the way I would do it is probably we just send your family like 30 emails, they answer it, and then you turn it into a book. And then after you collect that $900 right off the bat, right up front, you, um, you say like, for an additional $1,400, we'll do this, this, and this. Um, I would probably do that type of offering. There's a lot of newsletter businesses that I've run or own or, or been part of or know of, and they— the pricing is oftentimes $900 for the front. We call it the, um, the front offering and then $2,000 for the back offering. And it's a lot easier to acquire a customer at breakeven at $99 than it is at $2,000. But you can get them in the door at $99. And so the way I would make their— your landing page is I would make it a landing page that explains what it is. If you're interested, enter your email. Awesome, you're interested. And then you sell them on the $99 one thing, the, the $99 thing. Or they could also buy the $2,000, but some of the $99— after they do the $99, then it's an upsell to the 2,000, but you, if you have to first collect their email on page 1 and then you could constantly remarket to them and then potentially you could actually, uh, uh, decrease your CAC because now you have an email list of users who you didn't capture on day 1. Yeah. Or on first touch.

I, I love that. I'd also think about you do intent on like offering, you can, you can run like a carousel of for different, you know, every third user gets a different offer so you can offer 30%, a $99, a $500, and $1,000. And then you just extrapolate, you know, we landed 100 people on each of the pages, and when we offered at $99, it results in this. You can extrapolate out and you just see where your sweet spot is for pricing and volume and multiply the two.

$1,500 is a weird price. Like, I've like looked into this, and I'm not a price expert. Patrick Campbell, if you look him up, he's got a whole blog on it. He's like an expert on price. $1,500, like, it's kind of no man's land because if someone's gonna pay $1,500, they'll also pay $1,000. And what I have found is someone's going to pay $40, they're probably also willing to spend $100. And so you got to find like where these weird bands are, and then you exploit those bands to your advantage. Because what this guy did, I bet he did what I used to do, is you just fucking made it up.

Well, Andrew in the public chat says this is awesome, appreciate this, guys. And, uh, he's hit the 30 upvotes on the Kernel feed, so that means 30 people want to use it, pay for it, or would invest in it. So nice work, Andrew.

We'll jump to, uh, and by the way, look at the Facebook ad library for that company that I mentioned. It's either called Storyworth or Storyworthy. They're running tons of ads on Facebook, and he's a bootstrapped company, which means he's running ads profitably. So figure out what he's doing and definitely copy, like, the idea.

Love it. Okay. Idea number 2 coming up is Millie building the Generalist community. Here is the pitch.

This is awesome.

Hey, I'm Millie, and since 2022, I have been shoulder barging my way onto the global stage with my company, Generalist World. I'm a seasoned founder with loads of failures, scars, and lessons under my belt and a really weird founding story. Work is changing faster than Sam can say, "No small boy stuff," and there's more uncertainty than when Ryan decided to drop out of college and start a pizza shop. My spiky take is that the future belongs to generalists. This is coined by our resident neuroscientist and artist, Erica Warp, but is best summed up as being, "We're the thread that ties everything together." I built from a gorgeous remote island in the Scottish Highlands, and I bootstrapped my way to our first $25,000 month. I've built the whole company transparently in public, or in Harry Dry's words, I've actually built a cult. We've made over £90,000 and this is the first year that I make my first million.

Yeah.

Hey Sam. Our proven revenue streams are community, sponsorships, and recruitment. We have 600 paying members, had LSE knocking at our door, thrown events all over the globe, and I even got to present to Scottish Parliament. And when I'm done, I have built the generalist workforce that solves the future's most ambiguous and thorny problems. I'm not raising investment. I have one question and one CTA. Sam, what is one non-obvious way you would grow if you were in my shoes? And everyone, if you like what you hear, please give us a share. Thanks.

Dude, Millie's the best.

Was Millie a robot?

I don't know.

Was that a real person there?

She's real.

She's real.

She's real. All right. Could you go on your laptop on what's the product? It's a paid community.

Yeah, I'll put it in the chat. Uh, it's called The Generalist.

And the one— sorry, I can't click off.

Uh, yeah, yeah, we'll keep you on your phone. So the one-liner is called Rise the Generalist. When someone asks me what I do, I squirm a little. And it's basically the thought of building a community, um, I believe on, on Slack or like a paid Circle.so community where you're basically empowering people to be generalists. Um, Millie's listening in the chat, so I'm gonna hear if I butchered that or not, and then I'll, I'll see how much it costs. I think it's, I want to say $100 a month, but, uh, up front, uh, in the chat she says, I'm not a robot, I'm dying, this is amazing. Uh, and what was your question?

In the best of ways, Millie.

So it's $100 a month. Does she charge monthly or, or upfront?

I think I, I was checking it out and I think the first month or two is free, and then I think you sign on for either monthly or, um, like a yearly fee. So probably $1,000 a year.

Um, okay, so this is, this is a community for generalist employees looking for employment?

Yes.

Okay, so, so non-specialist employees, generalist workforce that solves world's foremost existential problems.

Is it, uh, did she say that it's— is it like a, uh, who's the demographic? Is this men and women? Is it mostly women, mostly men? And it's people looking for jobs?

I'm on the— I'm on the website right now. And so what they're doing is helping people future-proof their careers by being a generalist. You're future-proof because you're not like a niche specialist that gets replaced. So it makes you a little more resilient in your career. And so it's a membership site around being a generalist employee.

All right, this is awesome. Millie's gonna make like $10 million a year in revenue and like 5 of it in profit. I think this is cool.

Uh, love it.

So like put yourself in Millie's shoes.

What would you do to scale this to $10 million?

Millie needs to become famous. Um, basically every, you know, and she said that she's a cult, not a clique. Uh, yeah, what's— what a cult has a cult leader. Uh, so Millie needs to get herself out there and be famous. She— I, I don't know what she looks like, but she speaks like she's got a lot of charisma. Hopefully she looks cool as well. Um, but you know, Millie needs to be famous and needs to be a content creator.

I know she posted a tweet about this event, uh, pitching YouTube, and I think it got 50 or 100 likes. So I know she's great at the social media game. What do you think she has to do to take her brand to the next level? What did you do?

I think that she needs to pick one platform and go super hard on it and make that the platform that she gets popular on first. And then once she reaches some type of critical mass, which is an arbitrary thing, then extend to other platforms, but focus only on one platform first and make that her place where she kills it. I think this is funny. This is opposite of a generalist, but I think you have to specialize in one platform. Um, in order to just— I think it's just easier. Um, and then I think that she has to rile people up of like— I mean, she's got a good shtick. Like, that's a really— that's a really compelling, yeah, uh, version of the future she's painting. Um, but Millie needs to become a big deal, and in order to become a big deal, she just has to have high output. And like, people always say, well, is it quantity or quality? It's like, dude, fucking both. You got to do both, and you gotta— you gotta do good shit, and you gotta do it a lot. I think she's got to create, um, uh, get popular on a channel that has virality, which means not podcasts. It definitely means like maybe LinkedIn, maybe—

yeah, LinkedIn makes a ton of sense for this. You know, people are on their job searching and she— they should also like just be able to hack LinkedIn, right? Like thinking about when they pop up for people, even ads on, on LinkedIn. It'll be interesting.

And LinkedIn has a huge discrepancy right now of supply and demand. There's a lot lot of, uh, demand of eyeballs there, but there's a lack of supply of content. And so it's quite easy to hack that at the moment. Um, same with, uh, I think TikTok. I think they are inflate early users in order to make you get popular fast to get you addicted. But if I'm Millie, I'm probably focusing on LinkedIn and I'm posting like 1 to 3 times a day and just getting huge there. Um, and then she should use this thing that we started using called Riverside. What is it called?

If you look up—

yeah, the meetup platform, like MFM. If you look up like My First Million meetups, I forget the URL, but these fans are like organizing meetups. She should do that and encourage outsiders to go collect their emails and then go and pitch them on joining the community. Um, I wouldn't do free for the first 2 months, by the way. Uh, Millie, make people pay up.

I think I got that wrong. She said no free in the chat, so I'm down at a point. Ryan, what would you say You're, you're humble, but you've got almost 2 million followers on LinkedIn. What did you do in the early days? Did you build a team around you? What should Millie do?

Yeah, so I mean, for LinkedIn, I had a bit of an advantage. I got in early and went in super hard. And so if you can get on the front of the wave, so if, if like a new social network for employment came up, I would tell her to go super hard at the new one versus LinkedIn, because now you're fighting a lot of noise and a lot of, you know, established people. But, uh, and there's going to be things coming up, so I'd keep my eyes peeled. But I love LinkedIn for what she's doing. LinkedIn knows when somebody's loose in the saddle at their current job, and they know when they've left their role. And so perfect time to hit them up, right? And, and people are looking for, for advice. I'd also try an influencer strategy. I think like there's a lot of workplace influencers out there, um, that, that could be interesting, and it's worth a play around on that to see if she can get some traction with that as well. But yeah, love the, love the become a celebrity, create a newsletter, create, you know, whatever else, and and get her name out there.

Nice.

Yeah, I mean, ultimately it is kind of culty, which is cool, uh, and a cult needs a cult leader.

Yeah. And also referral, community referral. If you're building a community, how do you get your community to be referring their friends who are also thinking about generalism and, you know, whatever else? Like what we're talking about with the trends in, in AI coming up, like everybody should be really thinking about this and like what how their employment is hardened. And so I think it could be a really growing area for her to be working in.

Love it.

So she's got over 90 likes. So big on the reception from the audience. We'll jump to pitch 3.

He's going to open up like a little round for Sam and I to join, I think, right?

Oh yeah. No, Millie should own the whole thing, man. She's going to get rich.

She should. She should. I love it.

but reach out to Sam. It sounds like he's interested in maybe something. So who knows? We'll hit up pitch 3. Here we go.

Sam, Ryan, this is Qiu from Airstrike Copy, and we're here to make generative AI easy to use for normal people. Our approach is simple: professionals building workflow templates so that anyone can use them in one click. Here's how it works. Let's say I want to build a newsletter from scratch. I'll head over to find the Raven News, select a material, and choose an output format. In this case, newsletter in Milkrow style. All I have to do is one click. But then again, maybe you want to build something more complicated, an Instagram post with images and multilingual formats as an output. I can copy the same flow, Instagram post. Select a template and do it in one click. And there you have it. On the right-hand side, you have the sources, and on the left-hand side, you have the newsletter written in Milkrow style. What about the Instagram post? Image designed on the left-hand side, Underneath you have the multilingual outputs, and this is thanks to our foundational technology, which is to turn any source data into any output formats you want in text, image, and video, converting in between. We can build millions of templates based on this technology.

What do we think, Ryan, if Hootsuite's definitely doing AI, but could Hootsuite just be like, hey, that was cool, we're gonna do that?

Yeah, I mean, Hootsuite's doing a bit of that right now already. We're, we're already providing suggestions around, uh, brands and AI suggestions. And so it's not to say there's not room, uh, but it's, it's a challenge, it's a challenging one. All of the dashboards, like social dashboards like ourselves, all of our competitors, everybody's got a, uh, an AI component. So I— then the newsletter thing's interesting. I'm not as deep as you are in the world of newsletter, but, um, that there may be something there. But then, you know, how long until Beehive and, and like all the other newsletter providers start to do that, do this similar thing as well? Um, yeah, I'm not sure.

Yeah, I would get nervous if this, I would get nervous betting on this business because I think that it's Hootsuite, HubSpot, whatever. They'll just be like, cool, uh, give us a week, bye. You know what I mean? I think that they could just copy these because people are already using their platform. Maybe I'm, maybe I'm crazy, Ryan, but, or I can't tell if my emotional side is winning versus my logical side. I actually think that popular content creators are going to have more soul and will need more heart. Uh, versus like an AI-written thing. Um, I think that— but I can't tell if it's like if I'm just an old man wishing this doesn't happen.

I, I'm trying to think of where this goes, Sam, because like, you know the saying about a million monkeys, a million typewriters, and infinity, and everything is written? And like, there is going to be a sea of content that's getting created because the, the barriers to entry on creating content are going down. It's getting so easy and everybody can deploy. So I don't know how, like, good content's going to get surfaced and how interesting content is going to get surfaced because there's going to be so many people enabled and empowered with this. So that's the next piece that I think is an interesting problem to solve.

Well, yeah, I think, um, I read this Morgan Stanley Report, and they said something that changed my opinion because I was looking at all investing in all these AI companies, and they were like, the majority of value in AI is not going to come from, uh, new startups. It's going to come from the HootSuites and HubSpots of the world who are just gonna like make their software better and have AI features, and that's where the majority of the value is going to come from. And I tend to agree with that sentiment, although I'm totally novice with AI. Um, I think a business like this, um, could maybe work, but I think that if, like, Ryan has probably— his company probably already has this as a feature.

We, we do a lot of this already. The other thing is like just, you know, beating out a HubSpot and a Hootsuite at this point on, you know, getting a customer to come into your product. I mean, we're seeing millions of visits per month and that's through so many strategies of paid user acquisition, organic, et cetera, et cetera. It's just, there's a lot of, and multiply that by every one of our competitors at scale. So coming in as a new incumbent is gonna be a real challenge. I think if you're gonna do this, maybe get a little bit more nichey. Think about how you're helping influencers or how you're helping, like some, niche category. But yeah, I think it's gonna be a challenging one, and to your point, I don't know that it's just gonna get solved in where people live right now on Hootsuite and in HubSpot and others.

I hate being negative during these things, so I will just say that to— I forget his name—

Quincy.

Quincy, you seem very smart. If this doesn't work, You're going to be fine. If you're capable of building this, you're capable of many, many, many things.

And Hampton may be hiring, so keep your eyes open. Or Hootsuite.

No, this fucking kid should not take a job.

One thing to finish on before we jump to our next pitch. He is checking in from Hong Kong at 4:00 AM. So Quincy is—

Quincy.

Yes, we love to see that.

But Quincy is a winner. I'm not sure if this product is the winner, but he is a winner.

And this is like the most exciting time to be an entrepreneur there's ever been. I mean, there's just so much innovation that's going to be happening over the next while and disruption. Um, so smart people thinking in, in this area can do well.

Okay, let's jump to the next pitch. This one is an e-commerce company by Harrison and Paige.

Hey Sam, hey Ryan, my name is Harrison. I'm one of the co-founders of Couch House. We're actually in the space just getting ready to paint the walls. Anyways, we make customizing furniture easy and accessible for Canadians. So you can basically think of Couch House as the Build-A-Bear of furniture companies. The main problems we see: it doesn't fit the space, the furniture shopping is overwhelming, it costs so much to customize, or it's not going to last. So our ethos here is custom-made, not pre-made. So this is the Comfy Couch. It's our main product. You can choose your modules, build endless configurations, choose your seat depth, It's made to measure and tailored to your space. There's countless fabrics and colors to choose from. You can make additional upgrades, add cushions. So really unlimited possibilities. Here's an example of all the fun couches that we've built for our customers here. So in terms of traction, we've seen over 1,000 customers, $5 million in revenue, all bootstrapped with an average order value of $3,600. Here's some amazing customer reviews. The way that our business model works is we get customers online and then we activate them in person. We're really rethinking the way that the fast furniture industry is paced by including sustainability in our branding. So we plant 100 trees per sofa, we do carbon-neutral delivery and furniture donation, we make delivery a hassle-free experience. We do have some competitors, but they're not quite as personalized as us. In terms of the living room furniture market, there's about $78 billion in TAM and $45 billion in SOM. The future roadmap is looking like opening a flagship store like this, expanding our product line, and then expanding into the US as we only sell in Canada. So that's what we're all about. Thank you so much for listening to this pitch, guys.

This is sick. I want to buy one.

But there you go.

Expand in the US? Are they not in America?

I think just Canada right now.

Oh, this is awesome. I almost bought a LoveSac, but I think they're so expensive, and I have a modular couch. I love that stuff.

Yeah. We've got the Cloud. This looks like the Cloud Classic Restoration Hardware, one in one of our rooms. It's, it's like such a comfy couch, and I, I know this is a great product they're putting together here. Looks killer.

What are we even supposed to say? It's working.

Go get those greenbacks. If you're a Canadian company, go get the US. Like, you, you can like do nothing and all of a sudden you get a 30% increase in, in dollars. You just charge the same amount in America as you do in Canada and you get 30% more, go get that.

I think the question, question he's wondering about is, uh, they're just opening a flagship store in Vancouver, uh, which is in Canada, Sam, if you don't know. And then they have Toronto coming up. What do you think about them just being totally virtual online versus do they need to have flagship stores where they're meeting customers in person?

Dude, I think flagship stores for a lot of these e-com brands could be profitable on a per-door basis, right?

Yep. I sat on the board of Aritzia, and, and like, omnichannel is a great way to go. They found that like the brick and mortar actually pushed the e-com more, and the e-com pushed the brick and mortar. So it's very synergistic. I think, uh, people, you know, certain buyers like going and touching and feeling. It's a, it's, you know, a decent, uh, purchase price. So I think people are going to want to go, you know, often go to the store to kind of like, if they don't see it at their friend's house, they want to go see it in a store often, right? And so, yeah, I think that that could really help accelerate and they're going to be able to see that. And if they can do it, you know, in a smart way, do it nimbly, great, go at it.

And why, why wait 2 years to come to America? I mean, how many people live in Canada? 25 million?

Yeah, there's a market.

Yeah, I mean, you're 10 or 13 or 15 times more people down here.

And, and between all of us here, like, the U.S. buyers are just way more— they're way better consumers than Canadians are. Like, Canadians are very thoughtful. They'll go shop and like, you know, look at something 20 times and kick the tires and like call their uncle. And like, like, in America, people just buy. They make decisions and go. It's a faster consumer economy.

Yeah, this guy, it looks like he's doing it right. I, I love this company. I think it's cool, and I think it's cool that he bootstrapped it. I think, uh, if you can bootstrap your e-commerce business, particularly with a couch, because when you order a couch sometimes it's like a 6-month wait and that's considered acceptable. And so if I've got to pay up front and you get that cash, that's like e-com gold.

Yep, very true.

Well, they're just passing, I think, 40 likes on the platform, so Well received from the audience. We'll jump to the next. Sam and Ryan wanted to double check. We got 2 more pitches. How do you 2 look for time?

Let's go. Love it.

Let's roll.

Pitch number 5.

Here we go.

Estimated that artificial intelligence will replace some 85 million jobs by 2025. ChatGPT now has over 100 million weekly active users, and yet only 3.8% of small to medium-sized businesses report using AI to produce goods or services. Subscription fees, technicalities, and a better understanding of how to maximize AI to aid in business growth or scale productivity remains a barrier. Enter LaunchLemonade. We make it possible for absolutely anyone to launch an AI-enabled business in minutes, and we make it as easy as setting up a Twitter account. Whether you're a professional declutterer or an accountant or a chef, from simply describing what you want your Copilot to do to marketing and setting up a pricing plans and even launching it as a mobile app, all in one single platform. We can also contextualize audio, text, and images and generate responses fit for creators' purposes, whether it's for their cooking assistance or to help them with with the recruitment processes, or even with the financial modeling. It's pretty much ChatGPT but better. Hi, my name is Shen, and I've operated in fintech space here in London. I've worked for a couple of unicorn startups, trained chatbots, deployed decisioning, fraud, credit models. And together with my co-founder Tanvir, a Forex executive founder and a thought leader in the no-code space, we have built an AI platform that's built for everyone.

Is it live?

I believe it's live. I'm just figuring out the URL. What do we think of the concept?

I'm clicking it here too. Launch Lemonade. Turn your ideas to apps in 2 minutes. Okay, your AI business is one weekend away. Kickstart your business. How much we try? Oh, you got sign up right now.

Come on, I can't do this right now.

This is cool though.

So it's basically like, uh, a app builder. It's sort of like Bubble meets AI.

It is, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, if you could pull that off, that's great.

Yeah, I'm, I'm not sure if it's a website builder or an app builder or a business builder, which something— just James Cliff's, uh, one, Joel. Oh, uh, James, what's it up, James?

Ryan, did you see Devin get launched recently? Yes. Do you think that, um, this industry is going to be like the website builders where a Squarespace, Wix, WordPress can all thrive because there's so many people? Or do you think it's going to be like a ChatGPT where—

or Google where everyone goes to it because it's Well, ChatGPT and Google can't seed the SMB create an app space. You know, they, they're gonna buy somebody, probably won't build it. Maybe they'll build it with Gemini quick enough. But I think, I think, uh, so it's a business builder, it's Shopify for AI tools. Interesting.

Okay.

Um, I, I think that, uh, you know, Google, Google, like, they acquired, they brought a lot of stuff into the constellation around like the, the site builder world. They'll probably be a combo like websites, right? You got app builders. I don't know. I think about like devs when you talk about that product of like an app builder. I'm like wondering where the hell this goes like with Devin for actual like coders. And, you know, everybody's thing for years was to go and like learn how to code. I think that's going to be a challenged industry, right? Um, it, it, you know, devs, I think it's going to be, it's going to be an interesting one. Anyways, off track here. Business Builder, thoughts on, on kind of scaling this or validating it further?

What would you two do?

Dude, I think that if this thing— to me, there's like two types of businesses. There's like like, um, you make it and can you get customers? And then there's like, well, if you can make this, everyone's going to want it. So like an example is like, uh, like, uh, like what Figure is doing with robots, where it's like, man, if we could just pull this off, like we don't have to worry about marketing because I know everyone wants it. I kind of think that ideas like this are partially in that category where it's like, if we can pull it— like it's a tech problem, not a demand problem. And so like to to me, a pitch like this, it's like, yeah, if you could pull this off, yeah, this will work.

Devin is on a closed beta list because everybody wants to get into like, you know, the, the promises. You put in a prompt and it's going to build your app for you. Like, yes, everybody will want that. They'll pay for it. They'll subscribe to it and pay monthly because the cost of doing that versus paying a development team of 10 people to go build out your app, it's going to change venture in a really big way. It's going to change business in a really big way.

And so if this woman— what was her name?

Sien and Tanvir.

Sien. If Sien is, uh, capable, which she seems capable, uh, this is the type of business where it's like you should probably go and raise a lot of money and shoot for the stars. And agreed, yeah, like it's either gonna— it's gonna become huge, it's gonna go bankrupt.

Yeah, Devin got I think $28 million and they're in— they're in closed beta right now. But Peter Thiel, like a bunch of A-list investors. It'll be super capital intensive because this is an area you're going to need like some real brain power. And like everybody wants to hire AI people right now, so you're going to be paying like, you know, big, big salaries for a lot of really smart people to get this going. And yeah, I agree, this is like, this is venture. You're gonna need the venture dollars to make this happen and go fast, otherwise you're gonna get buried under.

Yeah, but if I'm this person, I'm locking myself in my apartment for the next this year and I'm just gonna say everything's on hold in life and I'm gonna do it. I think, uh, the reward of this is quite large. The question is, can you actually pull this off? Uh, I'm not well-versed enough to know if what's— what's possible, but I, I know how to make some money and I know this would make a lot of money.

Yeah, I, I think, I think video, like, just if you've got— if you really do have the goods on this just start pushing out video of like, oh yeah, here's our builder. Here's, here's like, I would love to have seen a demo of like a 30-second demo of you building a business for me or building a business app for me would be very compelling.

And people will go crazy for that type of thing, which is how Devin got traction.

Yep.

In the public chat, Sien says, I haven't slept since January. So I think she, she's in the right, uh, mindset.

And, uh, happy that crazy people like her exist, and I'm not one of them.

There you go.

Happy that you can do a sprint of it, but you can't do a marathon of it, right? Like, this is a sprinty window right now for her, what she's doing, and I get it. But long term, it's not advised, right?

Yeah, I'm happy that she's going to build her future and I get to participate on it from, uh, for the outside, from the Tesla.

That's right. Well, um, let's jump to our next pitch. Uh, there is a demo on their site if people want to check it out. Somebody said that.

I'm gonna get over there after.

This one is Monty.

Here we go.

Hey Ryan and Sam, I'm Monty, the founder of Katena. I was born and raised in the Philippines for the first 18 years of my life before moving to Wharton for college and post that founding a venture-backed company and investing into deep tech startups over the past 2 years. While meeting hundreds of founders over the past 2 years, I realized that most of them didn't really know how to hire, um, top overseas talent. A lot of them thought, hey, let me go hire someone from a big American company in the past, like a Cigna, T-Mobile, or Aetna. But those are actually not going to be the smartest, sharpest hires you can make on the market. A lot of the sharpest folks, like a lot of my high school classmates for example, would work for local companies and startups, and because of that, be really hard to find on any of these onlinejobs.ph or other type of websites that most people would use. And that's where I stepped in and We came in and helped a lot of founders hire top operational talent that otherwise would not be online, and poached a lot of these folks from around the world. I now help companies that have been backed by Sequoia, Andreessen, General Catalyst. We've helped out a few unicorns scale out their operations, customer success teams, and are now doing more than 6 figures in revenue monthly. And so there's a huge opportunity here that a lot of people don't realize, where most people think, hey, just, it's just a staffing business. But one of the biggest players, for example, in our industry, TaskUs, started off doing fractional VAs in 2008, moved into full-on executive assistants, moved to enterprise, and are now doing, they did $920 million in revenue last year. I'd love to get in touch and see how I can collaborate on getting in front of more folks with the both of you guys.

So what's this? What's— is it Katena? What's the service?

It's essentially an EA sourcing service for, um, North American founders. So finding EA talent in the Philippines and pairing them with, um, founders in North America.

So I, I do—

I'm on the website. I don't know if it's purely EA. It looks like it's a little more high-end talent like BDA, content writers, customer success, data entry, marketing manager. There is EA in there too, but yeah, it's more broad than just that, man.

I just saw one of these companies, I won't say which one it is, they're 3 years old and now they're doing $50 million a year in revenue. Um, they can be monsters. Um, I, everyone, I mean, I have 4 friends doing them right now and I know their, uh, financials and they're doing great. Uh, this is another thing where it's like you build the process and it doesn't seem that hard. It seems like hard work but doesn't seem like intellectually like a problem to solve. It seems— well, like you just laid the pipes, you're not like inventing the pipes. Um, and, uh, the key is, uh, having, um, uh, an easy way to acquire customers. And what a lot of people are doing is partnering with— I'm— I, I don't want to do it, but people like me or who have a big audience and they tweet it out. And because there's such a demand for it, because you say, hey, you're paying $100 grand a year, just pay $40 grand a year and you get the same quality. It's like, yeah, no brainer. You just need a large audience or partner with someone with a large audience in order to sell them on them. And I have a lot of friends that have been the partners, like people have big followings, are making a lot of money doing it. So it's a really good business.

Hmm.

Yeah. Maybe question for Ryan. If he's got a couple competitors, he knows about them. How does he pace his startup with the competitors and/or kind of stand out from the crowd?

Well, I think you need to figure out if you want to build a venture business or you want to build an incredible cash flow business. I think you could go both, like Taskus, who you mentioned. I know the founders there. Their value prop was on demand, basically. Amazon AWS for talent. And so you can just spin up and spin down teams and make it very easy and fast. And that was a, and it was like, go get venture and go super fast on building this out. And so they took money and they did that. You kind of have to know which one you're going for. And if you wanna go and build that and swing for the fences, like great, you go and get venture and you do that. If you wanna build like just an incredible business that's spinning off millions of dollars a year and you can just, like keep, keep your profits, then that's a kind of different strategy and you approach it in a different way. Um, I think it's a, I think it's a solid business and I think they should, you know, like as, as Sam said, there's, there's like a real clear path to, to doing well in this. And, and, you know, just it's, it's being patient and growing a business. Um, and I think he's got competitors obviously, but it's everything from TaskUs, you know, down the line. So I mean, every— you're in a terrible business if you don't have competitors. You're in a terrible category because good ideas always come at the same time. There's always 3, 4, 5 people doing something.

If it's a market— huge. Yeah, like, he could win. One suggestion, um, uh, Katena, uh, I don't know what that word means. I would highly recommend doing a more, uh, uh, uh, like, uh, I, I think he said he's from the Philippines, so he's not a native English English speaker, uh, doing something a little bit more that, uh, is easier to say for an American or a Canadian who is a dumb idiot and like me and doesn't speak another language.

Very true. Yeah, maybe, uh, time-wise, let's jump to the last picture.

Uh, one piece of advice for this guy: I know how much some of these influencers are making promoting businesses like this. It's a lot of money. I would never do it because my partner in crime is one of these promoters, so I would never want to compete with him. But if he were not doing it and you approached me with an audience and you said, I'll give you 10% of profit if you promote this, or something like that, I would be like, no-brainer. Let me test it for a month to see if you're any good, and that is a no-brainer. It is a— this is a very easy sale to someone in my position who has an audience.

Yeah, good advice. Okay, last one up is Ravina.

Hi Ryan, my name is Raveena O'Broy and I'm the CEO of Just Cakes Bake Shop and The Jar Bar vending. When was the last time you enjoyed a cake from a jar? Better yet, when was the last time you enjoyed cake from a jar straight from a vending machine? Well, now you can with The Jar Bar, North America's first ever cake in a jar vending machine. Rewind to 2014, a time when everything was in mason jars. That's when my company Just Cakes Bake Shop introduced our cake in a in-a-jar product, a convenient way to indulge in delicious gourmet cake on the go. The product became an instant hit, and upon opening my bakery, it became our best-selling item. Now let's fast forward to COVID-19. Like many other businesses, we had to pivot. We saw a surge in our cake jar sales during this time, and making the bold decision to do something different, do something innovative, we decided to put our cake jars into a vending machine. We had our first 10-day pop-up in a local mall and generated over $18,000 in sales. From then, we've had the Jar Bar pop-up in several malls, campuses, and buildings, and we've seen similar success. The process is simple: the customer approaches the machine, selects the flavor of their choice, makes their payment, and the machine does its magic. And you can watch the, the cake jar dispense. The Jar Bar not only allows for the scalability of a traditional brick-and-mortar style bakery business but also places quality and technology at the forefront, ensuring more cake reaches dessert-loving individuals. So who says you can't have your cake and eat it too, even on the go? With the Jar Bar's unique cake-indulging experience, enjoying a gourmet dessert has never been easier and more convenient.

Let them eat cake. So what was the question?

Yeah, what's the It sounds great.

I think she's, she's ready to scale. She wants to scale. She's got a huge presence in her hometown. How does she take this to the next level?

So is it vending machine? Does she have vending machines now or is that like—

Yeah, she's got a couple of vending machines set up at, I think, university campuses and headquarters of offices. And so I think I remember hearing a couple MFM pods about the vending machine craze. How do you think she should approach that model versus, you know, maybe e-commerce, I guess, and avoiding vending machines? What would you say?

This looks like— I wonder, in America we have this thing called Melissa's Cupcakes and they have good outcomes. I think they franchise them though. Do they franchise them? I don't know. I don't think you can franchise a vending machine. Maybe, maybe you can. I don't think so. Um, is that what you would do, Ryan? I, I don't know.

I think, I think you've got a lot of vending machine guys out there, guys and girls, right, that like have their own owned vending machines and they, they just go and restock them and stuff like that. I think you might have a model where you, you kind of franchise it, Sam, and you basically, you deliver the cakes to them on a Monday, they go and feed all their machines and get it going, and they take care of the machine and on-the-ground distribution, and then you just like pump them into cities and you light up a city. And it should be easily to track down because all the vending machines everywhere, they all have a little sticker of who owns it and a phone number. You track down the owner and you just like go after a city and city by city.

The way that— if I was in her position, the way I would want to unlock it is unlock growth is not like one-to-one hand-to-hand combat. I would be like, what can I do that can get 50 locations or 10 locations. I don't know what's big for her, but like, like with a lot of these, uh, franchise or, or things like this, it like, it just seems if you go at the top, like, uh, start from the top down, meaning you like go after someone who owns a vending machine company or is a franchiser who has 50 franchise franchises where it's like, how can I go from like 2 locations to 50? Versus 1-to-1-to-1-to-1-to-1. And I would, that's probably how I would think about it. Yeah. That said, I don't really know much about this, so I don't, I don't know if my advice is worth listening to.

Different perspectives though, it helps, it helps. We, you know, when we're in our businesses, we just get, you know, like it's sometimes hard to get a fresh perspective. And that's why it's some, you know, applaud people that are, you know, talking about it, pitching it. I'm sure if, if we don't have the answer, there's somebody you know, today that's got thoughts on this that are clever.

So the good news is that businesses like this already exist. And what I love to do is I just love copying other people, like, not like in an unethical sense, but it's like, I just will reverse engineer someone who's like, where do I want to go? Who's there? I'm gonna go to Web Archive and I'm gonna watch all this, look at all their old web pages and see how it evolved. And I'm gonna reverse engineer it. I'm gonna see who's in their photos. Of their company page. I'm gonna cold call those people. I'm gonna get them to tell me how they did it, and then I'm just gonna reverse engineer, and then now I have my playbook. I'm just gonna copy that.

Yep, it's a great way of doing it. And I mean, everybody gets inspiration. I mean, when we were building Hootsuite, there were, you know, a bunch of other products. We got inspiration from them, and then tons of people built off of what we were doing as well. It's about execution, right? It's about how you market and sell and go to market. Really over the product in many ways.

Well, that's our pitches. What was the favorite, uh, kind of pitch of the day?

Dude, I like the couch. The couch company is great. I want to buy one. What was it called?

Couchhouse.com.

Yeah, Couch House. I love Couch House. I like that one. Uh, what was the first one?

The first one was No Story Lost, the family book idea. Something to remember your grandparents.

I think I worked with Launch Lemonade. I think that's interesting. I also like Sam's List. That was a cool one.

Yeah, that's a fun one. If I was gonna invest in one, it would be Launch Lemonade. If I wanted to own one, it would maybe be Millie. Or e-commerce has so many headaches, but there's something really cool about art and sofas. I, I think that would be a fun business to own. Ryan, what about you?

One own and one invest.

Okay, well, yeah, I think I gotta, I gotta dig into Launch Lemonade and see a little bit more what's going on, uh, but that one I think has, has really good venture potential and could be a, you know, massive swing for the fences. Um, and, and then, uh, you know, I think, I think all the other businesses, they, they're gonna, they're gonna be paid if they're patient and they're working hard. They're gonna great businesses. Um, I, you know, I, I want to eat some cake on my Couch House couch. How about that?

Love that.

Well, um, thanks to you two for carving out time to join. Uh, for everybody watching, thanks for tuning in and listening to the pitches. We did have 30 pitches submitted, so there is more below if, uh, since we couldn't get to all of them with our time. So be sure to check them out. Ryan and Sam, last question for you. You two are both inspiring founders, would love to get a hold of you. If they did have a question, what's the best way to follow you or stay in touch?

sampar@samparr.com.

Bold one with the email, Sam.

Bold one.

I thought you were going to give some, you know, Twitter.

That's not my personal email. That is an email that me and my assistant use. News, and I check regularly.

All right, great. Yeah, well, uh, you know, hit up Joel, Joel Hansen, uh, to get a hold of me. Yeah, I'm on, I'm on, I'm on, uh, the Twitters and, and Instagram and LinkedIn and all, all the social channels, Invoker. Um, and, uh, yeah, there's, there's, you know, love to, love to talk to people, so hit me up there.

Love it.

And if you love the event and you're watching, if we get 100 tweets about this, Sam said we'll do another one and bring on another guest. So that's the challenge, uh, gentlemen's agreement. And, uh, I think we can close off there.

Thank you.

Excellent.

Awesome. Ryan, can I ask you a question after this?

Yeah, let's go.

Are we still live?

Oh, I'll shut it down now.

We'll see ya.

Can't see you, Joe.

We—

are we