Behind-the-Scenes of Shaan's Power Writing Course | My First Million #204

I think when you— once you treat your hobby like a job, that's like a recipe for failure. And that's what happens to a lot of people. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off.

On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right. What's going on?

What's up, man?

So we're going to get into some ideas, but let me tell you something that I did this week, and I cannot give de— I actually got in trouble 3 different times where someone was like, hey, we had this conversation and you just didn't talk to me. Well, I'm like, well, I don't— I just— when you and I— the way that you and I talk now is how we talk all the time.

Yeah.

And yeah, and they're— so they're right. So I'm gonna try to keep this one vague. I had this dinner and I was with a guy who has 8,000 employees in China as well as many thousand in America.

Wow.

Yeah, impressive person.

Like a factory or something else in China?

Tech-related, just like just some huge company. You, if I gave you 100 guesses, you likely wouldn't guess it. It's just some big company that exists and in the tech world.

Fair enough.

And, um, it's impressive, but it's not like a mainstream thing. Okay. And there was this other guy there who made a comment where he was like, China's gonna crush us in the next 5 years or something. And then a couple other people—

people love to say that, by the way. Don't people love saying how China's passed up America?

A bunch of other people pounced on that. And then this guy, it was this guy, he lives in China, um, I believe he, he, he— I don't know what ethnicity he was, but he looked like he— I mean, he's probably maybe born and raised in China. And then there's this other woman there who actually was born and raised in China. And this guy with the 6,000 Chinese employees goes, A lot of people say that. I do not think that's true. And I don't think any of you should ever think that. He was just saying, he was like, Americans actually work maybe as hard or harder than a lot of other countries. Interesting. And also you talk about this like artificial intelligence and this, um, it's mostly AI that people, I mean, they talk about China crushing America and a bunch of stuff, but AI is like a hot thing. And this guy was like, I don't think that would happen. And if, and what I think you should do is invest all your put most of your money into American equities. I think he goes like, I'm just so bullish on America. And so it was like an interesting perspective. Have you ever heard that?

It's like the one person who probably knows what they're talking about at the table and everybody else who just reads shit on Twitter and like regurgitates it. All right, I'm going to go with the guy who's got 6,000 employees in China. That makes more sense to me.

That's, you know, and that was good. I felt great about that. And so it was just an interesting perspective, but We have—

you love you some pro-America news.

Yeah. Well, so I'm also just finished reading this really great book. Do you know who John Steinbeck is?

No.

Of course you do. Grapes of Wrath.

No. What is that? Are you serious? I got a blank here.

Wow. Have you heard of To Kill a Mockingbird?

I have heard of To Kill a Mockingbird. That's the author?

Oh my God. Like, John Steinbeck. I mean, people are going to make fun of you, by the way.

Anyway, it's mostly just read Harry Potter. Okay. Like, let's be clear, this guy, he was born in 1902, so he's dead.

He's died, probably died in the '70s. But anyway, I'm reading this great book about his memoir from driving across the country for 3 months in America and getting to know America. And it's really funny. In 1965, when he was doing this trip, he was complaining about how Americans are getting out of touch with and are getting too focused on technology and how there's refrigerators everywhere and there's TVs everywhere and how there's artificial food everywhere. It's very funny. We've always complained about this stuff, but I do love learning about America. I think America is special. I think we have this resilience. And I think the— yeah, anyway, I'm very pro-America. So yes, I did like hearing it. But you want to talk about some ideas?

Uh, yeah. By the way, Dan corrected us. I don't think he wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, but—

no, he didn't.

Of Mice and Men or something.

He didn't write To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm saying his work is like—

it's like this.

It's, it's like, did he write Of Mice and Men? I know he wrote like Grapes of Wrath. It's just like a famous like American classic. I'm just shocked the fact that you don't know that. He wrote Of Mice and Men, so you know that. So the fact that you, you didn't know—

I know that as in I've heard those words before. That's all I know about that. Anyways, let's, let's go into the stuff I do know about because I feel a lot better about that. And also Bitcoin rally. Thank you. I've been waiting for this Bitcoin pump and here we are. We're back up Life is good because Bitcoin is now— it spiked up to almost $40,000 over the last 24 hours, 48 hours. There was a bit of a short squeeze, about $1 billion of short positions got liquidated, and that caused the price to run up. Because are you familiar with how that works, by the way? Like what a short squeeze is? So no, here's the non-technical, non-super, super nuanced version of it. Basically, when you have a short, you're betting against something, and if it goes up, you are on the hook to pay the sort of the price for that, for being wrong. And so if you think something's going to keep going up, you're better out just closing down your short position, just taking the L and saying, okay, I'll pay. I will go buy the shares now because I'm, you know, let's say I was— it's at $30,000. I think it's going down. It goes to $32,000. You know what? To close out my position, I'll go buy the asset at $32,000 and I'll eat the loss. Right? Um, but what happens is because all the shorts start worrying that the price is going to run up, they all start trying to close out their positions at the same time. So they all start buying. So the people who are betting against it all of a sudden add all this buying pressure where they have to close out their position. They have to buy Bitcoin, which causes the price to go up and up and up and up. And so what happened is as it started running up, all the shorts had to cover their positions because they were massively leveraged, right? They're not putting in own money. They're putting in like 5 to 10% down, and they're taking the— they're taking 10x or 20x leverage on their position. So as the price goes up, they're very sensitive to it. And so I think that's what happened, uh, to cause the price to go up about $10,000 in the last 2 days, is those shorts had to cover their position. This is what happened with Tesla. Tesla was the most shorted stock in the stock exchange, and then as the price started to go up, those those shorts, you know, they basically are paying a huge price for every, every dollar it goes up. So they start to close out their positions, which puts a bunch of buying pressure, which is why it becomes a squeeze, because the shorts themselves cause the other shorts to like have to cover, and it just causes the price to shoot up way above what its earnings is and anything else.

Dude, this is funny. It's funny because like when you, you, so we're in this chat group, Sean and me and a bunch of other like successful young guys, and they talk about like alpha, like crushing alpha. And I'm like, I don't I don't know what that means. Yeah, I got no idea what that means. We talk about short squeeze. I'm like, this— these words don't mean anything to me. I don't even know what they mean. You guys feel like so sophisticated to me.

Yeah.

Um, all right, let's talk about some ideas, can we?

Yeah, let's do it. You want to go or you want me to go?

You go first.

Okay, I have one. Okay, here's another one that's crypto related, and you're gonna be like, what? Uh, but I'm telling you, this is a good idea. This is actually Ben's idea. So first of all, Ben is visiting me, so I'm getting to see Ben in person. He's sitting 5 feet away from me. I wanted to join this, but I had so many goddamn technical difficulties setting up that, like, I don't know how I could get it to be where it works. But maybe Wednesday we'll take an extra hour beforehand and just get it set up for a two-person setup. But anyways, me and Ben were talking last night. He's like, you know, one, we're talking about courses, right? Because— and I could share kind of like how— what the numbers— like, I just finished my course. I can share what the numbers were on that. But we're talking about other, other potential courses we could do. Like, what would be fun? He's like, I don't know. He's like, we're not the right people to teach this, but I think this course would crush right now. So, Sam, tell me, do you know what Solidity is? If I say, oh, Solidity.

So when I saw you writing, I thought, I thought it was a typo for Solidarity.

Solidarity is what we call it. So Solidity is the programming language that you use to write smart contracts. For Ethereum. So let's say, uh, like one of the most promising things about crypto is that you can write a smart contract. So think like a basic escrow contract. I buy a house, you're gonna give me the title, I'm gonna give you the money, but I don't wanna give you the money first. You don't wanna give me the title first. So we use this third party, this escrow agent, we pay them $5,000. Basically you hand them the title, I hand them the money, they say, yep, they're both here. And then they give it to each other, right? So in the real world, we pay these exorbitant middleman fees. I don't know what you paid for your house when you, when you bought it, or you just did another real estate transaction. I don't know what you're paying for escrow.

I don't even— I didn't even look at it.

It was like $4,000 to do an escrow transaction, which sucked. I was like, this is just $4,000 for nothing.

When I sold my business, I think the escrow was $50,000.

Right. Crazy. They think it's crazy. So, and they literally do like 1 ounce of work. They literally just, oh, you hand me the title and you hand me the money. Great. I'm going to just turn one hand over here and I'll give you that. You'll give you this, I'll give them that. So a smart contract basically says, look, we don't need this like person in the middle and we don't need to pay them $4,000. Let's just make a contract with some rules and we'll just, instead of writing it like a lawyer contract, we'll write it like a programmer contract. The programmer contract says, hey, when this wallet has this much money in it, Person A has fulfilled their obligation. And when this wallet has this asset in it, Person B has fulfilled their obligation and then release the assets to each other. Um, and so, and instead of paying $4,000, you can pay $4 or $40, whatever the gas fees are at the time. So that's smart contracts. So what, what that means is a lot of jobs today that go to lawyers are going to go to programmers because you're not going to want a lawyer to write a contract for something. You're going to want a programmer to write it down, but you need that contract to like work. It needs to be like solid, bug-proof, hack-proof, and like I need it to do the many things that I need my transactions to do. So there is an extreme shortage right now of smart contract developers, of developers who know how to write in this new programming language and write these types of contracts. But it's clearly a big part of the future, in my opinion. One idea here is to create basically a bootcamp that takes an existing engineer and says, hey, cool. Oh, you write JavaScript or you're a backend engineer. You're one of like 10 million. Why don't you come over here where there's this high demand, high shortage of engineers that know how to do this thing? I could train you in 6 weeks to learn how to write like smart contracts and Solidity and then go to all the companies that are trying to hire this and basically do a Lambda School. I think you can do Lambda School that's really niche, really focused. And if I'm an engineer that like I'm a crypto nerd, this is a business that I think you could do. You could just train other engineers to like learn how to write smart contracts and then get hired and placed in these jobs, or you take the placement fee. What do you think of that?

So I'm doing research while you're talking. All right. Oh, wow. Okay. No, I, I agree with a lot that you said except for the last part. So there's this company called Coursera. Have you heard of Coursera?

Of course.

So they were started in 2012, and I believe that they were started because the two guys, I think they worked at Google. And they're noticing that we are struggling to hire a particular type of engineer. I'm just, this is just off memory, so I might be a little bit off here about some of this stuff, but anyway, they, uh, and so they built like these courses and they built it so people can get jobs at Google.

Let's say data science or machine learning or something.

Yeah, it was some type of data science or machine learning. I forget exactly what it was. And they, they came out of the gate and they crushed it. And then like over the last 5 years, they kind of like went nowhere and kind of like, it's like, what the hell happened to that company? They're not really doing that well anymore. Well, over the last year and a half, 2 years with COVID and a bunch of other stuff, they started crushing it. Do you know what, uh, Coursera's revenue is now?

No idea.

So they, uh, they went public. Did you know that?

No.

Yeah, a lot of people didn't know it. We didn't talk about it.

They had like stagnated and like wasn't going anywhere.

Yeah, that's what everyone thought. So in 2020, they did about $300 million— or sorry, my bad, $400 million in revenue, and they're currently publicly traded at a $5.5 billion valuation. And yeah, crazy, right? Totally forgot about it. And what you did with your course— well, I don't know if you did this, but what a lot of people like you and me will do courses and we'll kind of do these kind of like bootleg things, not bootleg, but like, yeah, it's like, yeah. And you'll charge like $300 or something like that. Which I've done before, and that makes things a little bit— and you want like a person to buy it and that makes things a little bit challenging. What I would do is I would take the thing that you're describing. And with this, with Bitcoin, there's like all these crazy new things that you've got to learn really quickly. I would just copy the Coursera model and just churn these fuckers out and charge like $8,000. And it's like, we're going to like a company needs to buy it in order to train their people. I would just do— so I think that's Lambda for X. I would do Coursera for X.

Okay. I think that's fair. The thing with the Lambda side, which is basically, I think every time you place one of these engineers, that's like a $20,000 to $25,000 fee that you get. And so it doesn't take much to be— I don't, I wouldn't do this as like a venture scale business. Not, not at all. This is basically, I'm a developer who you have to be the right mold. It's like, I've been tinkering with smart contracts for the last 2 years anyways. I've actually kind of like gotten up to speed myself. I'm a converted backend engineer who now does smart contracts. And I could go— I work at like a FAANG company today. I make $400,000, but like, wouldn't it be great to make like $4 million a year? And I think this is a way to make $4 million a year as like a two-person company, basically. That's just—

I agree, but I would never do it in a Lambda. So when Sean says Lambda School, he's referring to it's free and you make money by getting like a $25,000 referral placement or a percentage of their income salary. I have— I know nothing about Lambda other than we had Austin on this show and I think he's amazing and I love him. And you're an investor. That's really all I know about it. I think my prediction, if I had to bet money on it, is that it won't work.

Yeah, that's a— I mean, I think that's a fair prediction about most startups. I think that's true.

Well, yeah, but they're not most startups. They've raised like $100 million probably. They're not like an early stage startup. They're like in the thick of it. I think that if they're out of business in 2 years, I wouldn't be surprised.

Right. And I would agree with that. Even as a fan and an investor, I would agree with that. I think that— okay, so here's— okay, let me do two things. First, let me share with you a really hilarious story. Do you know this Twitter account?

Greg?

It's like Greg95532678.

Is it a white guy? Like a white old guy?

It's a white— no, not old guy. It's a white, like nerdy dork guy.

No, I don't know it.

You haven't seen this? Just Google search Greg meme. Greg meme account. You'll see it and I bet you've seen this guy. So, you know, like these meme accounts. So there's like Dr. Parikh Patel, by the way, big fan of him. I think he's a big fan of us.

He works for The Hustle. You know that, right?

Dr. Parikh Patel works at The Hustle.

Yeah, we can—

You just outed Dr. Parikh Patel. Amazing.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He like him. He's a contractor for us. He writes for us sometimes.

Oh my God, I love it. Wow. No, I did not know that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So my brain is racing to figure it out who it is now. Okay.

No, he's not like— like I was a fan of his and I DM'd him and I was like, oh, you want to write?

You don't know the real identity?

I do.

Okay, you do.

But it's— yeah.

So you're saying after you saw Darkfire Hotel, then you contracted— okay, gotcha. Makes way more sense. So anyways, what he— one thing he does is like every time Chamath tweets, he's like the first reply and he's like, just says it like, like, I'm proud of you, son, or something like that. Like something like totally non-standard. So Greg does that with like Kylie Jenner and like other people like that, where every time she posts something, he'll be like, babe, why didn't you— like, you didn't call me. Or like, it's like, be like, I'm so proud of you, babe. So it's like as if they're dating. And so he's this like dorky looking white guy account. And, uh, so the other day, do you know who José Conseco is?

Of course.

Ben told me the story. So Jose Canseco, the former baseball player, tweets out, I need a smart contract developer for a new token, a token developer for a new token I'm going to launch. It's just like the classic thing for like Paris Hilton and Jose Canseco.

These like, you know, anyone know any good designers?

Has-been celebrities that are like ready to launch their own crypto token. Here we go. What could go wrong? So Greg replies and Greg's like, like, whatever, like me. Ben, what did he say? What did he— what was his reply? Was it just like, pick me, something like that? Oh yeah. He goes, hey, it's Greg. DM me, how can I help? And Jose replies and goes, he goes, awesome. Like, are you a token developer? And then are you a developer? Do you know how to do token development? And then Greg just replies, no way, Jose. And it has like 200,000 likes on that tweet. It's just like one of the most liked tweets on Twitter. Stupidest shit ever. It's just like so good, so dumb. But anyways, this guy's like crushing it right now. Like he's got like, I don't know, 100 and something, 130. What's his handle? Well, it's the funny thing is, you know, when you sign up for Twitter, let's say you type Sam, it'd be like, Sam's not available. Would you like Sam 800,006? Because that's like the next one available. So his is Greg and then it's like 12 numbers that are like the whatever the default thing would be. So it's like you would never think it's going to go viral. Yeah, it's Greg16676 whatever, like, you know, like 10 numbers long.

So what does this have to do though with—

okay, so that was just my smart contract, uh, token developer, uh, tangent. My next idea, if you're ready to transition, uh, is, is, um, unbundling a piece of YC. So YC does a few things for founders. YC puts a stamp on you. It says this is a YC startup. So all of a sudden your valuation is going to go up, blah, blah, blah. They kind of coach you. So they say, oh, come in for office hours, tell us about your idea. Maybe we help you pivot your idea. Maybe we help you stay focused on growth or how to tweak it so you grow faster. And they do that for 3 months and then they start working on your pitch. And then there's Demo Day, which is like you're going to get to stand in front of investors. You got to give a 1-minute pitch. You're going to raise money. That works. They have like whatever, 120 startups a year now or something doing that. But another kind of like course, quote unquote course, I was brainstorming, I was like very interested in working backwards from what's a course where the person gets a clear outcome. So this is part of my learnings of like doing a course, which is people don't buy a course for learning, they buy some change, they buy a transformation for themselves. And so like, you know, for a startup going from unfunded to funded or like, you know, no name to like, oh, stamp of approval, that's like actually a big change. And so one, one transformation and one change that people would buy is getting their first round of funding. It's like, I'm not just gonna teach you knowledge that you can may or may not use. It's like, I'm gonna help you get funded. And so I was thinking, could you, like, I've raised probably $20 million in my life and I've helped a bunch of founders raise money. And I think I'm pretty good at storytelling. So I was like, I think I could help a founder who's got no, no funding today get funding in like a 1-month period. And I think I could basically just sit you down with the deck, with your story, and then basically say, cool. Like there's a pretty intense workshopping of your deck and your story to get that to be as good as it's going to be. And then there's like a bunch of angel introductions and like teaching you how to manage your pipeline so that you run this like a process, like a bidding war. Unlike what most people do, which is they kind of try to date one investor at a time and they go kind of slow and they fear rejection and they don't know how to reach out and all this stuff. I can teach you that kind of like the sales process of investing. And I was thinking, I was like, oh, you could do this like on a success basis. So again, like Lambda, which you don't like, but, uh, honestly you could align your incentives, which sounds—

by the way, I like Lambda. I just think the business model is silly. I think because the thing with education is that most people would never benefit from what you're telling them.

Right. Well, that's the— in some ways, that's the beauty of Lambda, but it's also the bad side of Lambda, right? The beauty of Lambda is their incentive is aligned. So let's say most courses, like let's say for my writing course, I don't care if you're good at writing, bad at writing, and I really don't truly care if you're going to do it or not because I get paid either way, right? Like, I'd love for you to take the course and have a big benefit. But the reality is like my financial incentive is not such that if you don't, if you, if you don't hit your goals, it doesn't really make a financial difference to me. Whereas for Lambda, it does. They have to select people who are going to be able to succeed, and then they only make money when somebody gets what they want, which is a high-paying job. So that's the beauty of Lambda, but it's also the hard part about scaling Lambda.

What were the results from your course, though? Like, what, didn't that go well?

It went well. So basically, okay, so here's the kind of like the learnings from my course. All right.

So can I guess? Can I guess?

Yeah, we'll do it on each category. So first is, let's just start with the most interesting one, money. How much money do you think I made doing this course? And by the way, let me give the context. I taught a course on power writing, which is basically writing to get a result. So the writing I do, which is like, if I'm writing an email, it's because I want somebody to reply. If I'm writing a landing page, because I want somebody to click buy button. If I'm writing a tweet storm, it's because I want people to share it. And like the stuff you learn in school is not the stuff that actually works in the real world. And so it's like copywriting plus plus. So that's the course. All right. So I do this course.

150 is my guess.

150,000. Very close. So I did 127,000 of top line sales. And then let's just break down the P&L. So then there's my cost of making the course. So I basically had a guy do like custom illustrations and graphics and things like that.

That'd probably be 8 to 10,000.

7,500. Um, and he was amazing and he was really good. And so I'm like, I love that. That was, that was worth it. Then there's Maven's fee. Uh, so Maven's fee is on the top number.

So I should take that out first.

10%, right? So, so take out 12 grand roughly from 127, then you take out 7,500 of cost production, then everything else. Then there's payment processing fees. That was another 4, 3 or 4 grand. And so my net was like 1-0. I'm doing the math bad here, but I think it was like 105 roughly. And then, okay, so that's kind of like, that's the money in. And so that was off of 320 students. I charged the first batch I did at half price. So I charged, I think, $450 or something like that, $400 maybe it was for the course.

And if I had to bet, did you do like an NPS?

Yes.

I would bet it was like out of 10.

Out of 10. So for those who don't know, net promoter score, basically you ask one question to your audience, which is How likely are you to refer this to a friend on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being, you know, I absolutely will refer— I would absolutely refer a friend to this, 1 being no way.

7.3.

9.1.

That's amazing. But you know, everything is biased, right?

Because some people didn't reply to the survey. So I'm assuming the people who really didn't give a shit also didn't reply to the survey. So I gave myself a true NPS of probably 8, but it was a 9.1 on the stats.

So do you think people loved it?

I think people loved it. The feedback was kind of amazing. And then I did a survey of like, what did you like about it? And basically it broke into 3 categories. It was like, look, I can't, you know, the first one was, dude, 2 of those sessions were like, like game changers for me. It's like, oh, your cold emailing one. Like, that was great. I immediately implemented this and I got, you know, meetings that I wanted. I booked more sales. Like that one I just, I used right away. Or the second one would be like, you have one about writing inside of a big company, how to stand out with your writing inside of a big company. I didn't even know I wanted that. That was a great one. And so everybody kind of had two of this. I did 7 sessions. Everybody had like 2 sessions that they were like, that was the one. And the rest was fine. The rest was good, but didn't really like those two. I got my money's worth. The rest was gravy. And then I asked people, the other question I asked people was, on average, How much value did you get? Like, you know, $0, the price of admission, like a 1x return, 3x, 5x, 10x, whatever it was. And then the average per— the average answer to that was 10x my money. I got 10x my value back out of it. And I was like, okay, for what? I don't know if that's like a scientific question because how the hell are they measuring that? I don't really know, but okay. Downsides. Guess what the biggest downside was? Because you've done a course before, so Tell me what do you predict was my biggest, the biggest downside of it?

Well, does that include logistics like quality? So I think they'll probably complain about your camera or your sound or the time.

Yeah, timing was the biggest one because I taught it live.

Yeah.

And so a lot of people were like, oh, you know, I could either— the time worked great for me, it worked okay for me, or it was horrible for me because I'm in Australia and that time zone was awful. So I only watched the recordings. The— I meant the biggest complaint I had in doing the course. What was the biggest downside of doing the course?

Talk too fast?

No, no, I mean, like, why? What was a pain in the ass for me?

Well, it's probably just way too much work.

Yes. Complete underestimation of the work.

Yeah, it's so much work.

I spent probably 50 to 100 hours, like, making the content. Which was way more than I thought I would do.

I thought it would take me like an hour or two per session.

All right, so let's say 2 hours per session. That's like 15 hours of work. It was like a full day. It was like an 8-hour day per session I made, plus like the actual teaching of it. And then afterwards what I would do is, so I structured my, the best thing I did, by the way, was I think, I don't think I invented this. I'm sure other people do this, but I didn't really know what it's called. But I basically structured the session like this. It was like, all right, you show up. So it's like, hey, we're gonna be here for an hour. The very first thing I do is I say, all right, the promise is this, by the end of this hour, you're gonna be able to do this. All right? So that's my promise. That's the magic trick I'm gonna show you today. You can't do that or you're bad at it. You're gonna be good at it by the end of this hour. And then I basically would do, I'd say, all right, let's say it's a cold email. I'm not gonna tell you anything about cold email. Write a cold email right now. And they would all have to sit there while I'm sitting there watching them 10, 15 minutes, write the thing. So it was called Do, Learn, Redo. So I'd have them do it. I got— that gives the baseline and they would all share it in the Slack channel. Then I would teach them like not everything about cold email. I'd be like, hey, here's the 3 biggest things you could do to improve your cold emails. I'd do some examples. I would teach them the theory and then I'd be like, all right, last 15 minutes you're going to redo it. And then they would redo it and then they would just have a before and after of their 1-hour session where it's like a really shitty first attempt. And then like a pretty good second attempt. And then after the course, I would take 1 hour and I would just go through as many examples as I could of students and just give them like feedback through Loom. So that was like, that worked pretty well, but it was like kind of intense for me because I'm basically performing a magic trick live. I don't know what they're going to do. And so it was kind of high risk. It wasn't like, like it could—

So anything could have happened. My wife did it, by the way. Sarah, my wife did it and she sold out. She made $10,000 in like 2 weeks maybe.

And why did she cap it? Because they told me to cap it and I didn't cap mine.

She's not like you and me. This is her first time doing like a public-facing thing, right? Um, you know, you and I have, uh, you know, tens of thousands of hours of like riffing under our belt, and like we know how to perform. She, she's just learning and trying to figure out how to do it.

By the way, one thing you should tell her, best thing I did was I did rehearsals. So for each session, I would invite 4 kids who were like kind of like 25 and under usually who can't afford the course. And I just say, hey, you want the course for free in a personal session? I need to do a dry run with you. And so I did a dry run for each of the sessions. And in doing that, I would realize 5 minutes in, like, oh, this is all fucked up. I got to change this. Or like, wow, this is way too hard. When I just asked them to answer, they're confused.

They don't know what to say. Yeah.

So I needed to do those open mics basically to make it work.

But you do this, do you think this will be a significant income source for you in the future or are you going to quit doing it?

So I'm doing it one more time and we're going to see how that goes. My goal was basically I put the price back where the original price, so $950. So I'm like, all right, let's see if there's enough demand there at that point, price point, because below that it's not really worth it for me, I don't think, because you need a lot of students and it's a lot of work. So I'm doing it one more time in August. We'll see if it's like good again. I had a lot of fun doing it, so we'll see if it's fun again or if it gets like old for me. But then I also have a bunch of other ideas for other courses that I want to do. So I think I'm going to teach different courses, which is more work, but I think more fun for me.

Can I tell you? Okay, so now, by the way, we're talking about Maven.com, which this is— here's your disclosure. We both have incredibly vested interest in this and I want them to make money. Yeah, because we invested in them.

Yeah.

But I do think they're going to have to change. I don't think it's going to work to do live courses. I don't think are going to have— it can't be their bread and butter. It's just got to be how they get into the market. That's, that's my prediction, but we'll see.

Well, I started off being like, I'm going to do it recorded. And I started recording the content and I bounced off a few people and I was like, oh, first of all, recording good content takes a lot of time too. So it's not like it was going to save— it saves you time when I, you know, it's scalable later, but it takes a lot more time up front. The second thing was people were way less excited about me recorded. And I was like, no, no, look, I'm like, it's me. I'm like planning this out. It's going to be like as good as I can get it. It's going to be edited. It's going to be tight versus me live. And they're like, no, we'd rather just to be you live off the cuff and like not so tight. Like the perceived value of live is way higher. And so I was like, okay, if it's easier for me to do and it's higher perceived value, like that was one pivot I had to make halfway through of like Switching to live.

Um, let me, let me pivot to a different topic. You maybe told me about this, but I had Jake research it. I think you, did you tell me about Swimply?

Yes.

Okay. So I like to keep a list of things that I thought are horrible ideas and ended up doing like amazingly well. I definitely would put Bitcoin in that category. Like you've told me Bitcoin, I'm like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Ryan Hoover told me about Product Hunt the day he was launching it and I was like, just quit.

I also thought it was stupid.

Yeah, yeah.

If you have an easy hack to do this, when I just have a bookmark thing on my Chrome, so whenever I see a startup website that I'm like, oh, that's interesting, I bookmark it either into I think it's going to work or I think it's not going to work. So I have this like, then I can go back like a year later, I could just go click and see how many of those websites are still like up and like doing something. Uh, you know, and I have these books. I've had this for like 5 years.

So if I saw this next company that I'm about to tell you about and this next idea, if I saw that 5 years ago or a year ago, I would be like, well, like, just quit. Why, why are you even doing these stupid games? Like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. So it's, the name's even stupid. It's called Swimply. Is that P supposed to be there? Is that a typo?

Uh, Swimply. Hold on, let me see. Is it Swimly? It might be Swimly. No, it is Swimply.

It's Swimply. That's it. Okay, so we're looking at a Google Doc. That's crazy. I thought that— I wasn't sure if that was a typo, but he wrote Swimply.

By the way, the way I found this, I was just driving and I saw a billboard and it just said Swimply, rent a swimming pool near you. And I was like, what?

And that's what it is. So You know, with everything going on, people are desperate to get out of their homes and they're working from their house and they want to get out. And so they go and they can rent someone else's pool. Airbnb for pools. If you told me about this 4 years ago, I'd be like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever done. This is right next to like, go out and rent a dog for an hour.

But you're a believer.

I'm not a believer yet, but the numbers definitely show that I'm wrong. So they've grown 2000% since summertime and roughly 4th. That what's, So if you grow for— they've grown 4,000% in a year. What's that mean? 40x?

4,000 is 40x. Yeah.

Okay.

They just raised a Series A. Yeah, but that could be on anything, right? I could start with 1 and get to 40.

That's true. But they raised a Series A, which I'm shocked. And who's their—

they raised $11 or $12 million. So the idea is like, I have a pool in my backyard. I can set like a $50 an hour rate and somebody who doesn't have a swimming pool in their backyard, because that's a big expense, can say, Cool. We'll rent your private pool. We'll rent your pool. We're going to come swim for 2 hours. $100. There's 4 of us. It's worth it. Like, we're going to have fun doing that. You like kind of clean up your backyard later. That's the idea.

They raise their money from like some ballers, like people who like I think I respect as knowing what they're doing. So I definitely think I was wrong.

Who?

Northwest Ventures. They're, I mean, they're like a huge, a huge thing, right? Northwest.

Yeah, generic name. Come on. If you're going to—

if you're going to have a multi-billion dollar— they're big enough that I assume that they have employees who like vet.

Yeah, of course. Okay. So their traffic, like if you look at their SimilarWeb thing, it's pretty nuts. So like January, it's, you know, 50,000 visitors. And by June, it's like hockey sticking to 400,000 monthly visitors according to SimilarWeb. So SimilarWeb, the exact numbers are not right, but the direction is correct usually. And so this thing is like doubling. It's like doubled last month, doubled the month before that, doubled the month before that. So 4 doubles in a row.

And so I got, I was, I was interested in the space because I found a company that was raising money and what they were doing. And the reason I got interested in this company was we had this guy who I talked about, this guy named Preston on the podcast. His name was, uh, I don't even remember his last name, but Preston, I think he, the company he started was called Spacious where they would, uh, do short-term retail space and rent it out for coworking. Yeah. There's this other company that I'll find, or I'll say the name in a second. And what they're doing is you can rent people's homes just during the day for coworking.

Oh yeah, I've heard of that.

And it starts with a C. What's it called?

Cozy or some shit. I don't know what it is. Yeah. Chill. I'm just making up names.

And again, that idea I thought was the stupidest thing. And then I talked to Preston and he's like, no, these could be legit. These could be huge companies. It's astounding. And so here's a few more companies that, that, that are interesting. So Neighbor is a storage marketplace. And by the way, almost all of these I would bet against, and I am being proven wrong consistently. Neighbor is a storage marketplace. They just raised a $53 million Series B. iMove is an electric vehicle subscription service. So you can, um, uh, they just raised a bunch of money. I'm actually on board with that. It's just like leasing. Kazoo, subscribe to your next car online. Pacasa, buy and own a second home with 8 others. That's just a timeshare, isn't it?

Yeah.

And then Resort Pass, you can share day passes to resorts, pools, and hotels. So anyway, kind of interesting. I— this space has always interested me because I've been the one saying how I think it's really stupid and it's not going to work. But these things are actually are beating my— are proving me wrong.

Right. By the way, you just said something like share a thing and we were talking about courses. We had this idea a long time ago. I still think it's a good idea. If somebody wants to do this, I'll be first customer slash your minority business partner who does nothing besides give you the idea, which is ClassPass for online courses. So I right now would pay— like, if you said, hey, I can bring you a student, but you're going to have to give it to them for 50% off, but I can get you volume of students and you don't have to worry about getting students, I'd take that. And if you basically— I think you can work out the math where you can basically get, let's call it $100 a month from somebody, and then they get access to like your course, my course, Sarah's course, you know, like 10 other courses right now, and get all of them basically like an all-you-can-eat pass. So I think there's a class pass for courses that could work for online courses. That's—

let me—

could exist.

Let me keep being a hater, but there's this company called Every— Every dot— what is it called?

Every dot So, or Everydot2?

I think Everydot2.

Yeah.

Um, there's guys doing that for newsletters and the guys running it are great. Uh, his name's Nathan, really cool, wonderful guy. Uh, I know Nat is a writer there. I like his work. There's a bunch of like interesting, uh, great writers on there, but I think this business model is horrible. Um, because dealing with how you're going to pay each writer, it seems like a huge pain in the ass, doesn't it?

And if I'm like, if I'm like a big shot based on who brings in subs. So if your stuff brings in a sub, you get the bounty of that. You give some to the pool.

I'm bringing in subs like, go fuck yourself. I want to own all of it.

Yeah, but you get it. So you get the majority bounty on yours. So let's say you get 50% of the subs you bring in, but you're going to put 50% of the pool, so you're going to get 50% from everybody else. And so it's a— but the beauty of it is when you do a paid newsletter, there's this obligation like, shit, I got to write this thing. I can't write one a week, I got to write two a week. It's got to be good. It can't just be like off the cuff, you know, random stuff. They're paying for this. It's got to be better than normal blog content. So what they, what Evry does is say, look, you just got to write one good thing a week, let's say, because the consumer is going to get value from 8 other writers in the bundle. And so that's the, that's why this works is for each person, they don't have to carry the whole subscription value themselves. Um, they have 8 other people contributing to that subscription's value. And in return, they just give away some.

You think this is going to work?

I don't know if it's going to work. I think the concept, at least you're, I think it can, I think it can work. I think basically, I think. I'm kind of a believer in that, that the Marc Andreessen thing that he stole from whoever, which was basically like most business is just bundling and unbundling. And so I think that right now newsletters are all unbundled and somebody creating a bundle of newsletters, it'll be like the cable package and somebody will say, ah, why am I paying for, I don't want to pay for 10 individual subscriptions and some of them are good, some are bad. And instead if I could just pay a flat $15 a month and get access to my 10 favorite writers, like, great. So I think, I think it can work.

Are you getting sick of newsletters?

Uh, no, I have fun. I like writing my stuff. Uh, but I'm, I do it on my terms. So like, I'm not consistent. I have this thing I send out every Tuesday, but like, if you subscribe to it, you're like, bullshit, you don't send it every Tuesday. You send it like every other Tuesday at best. And so, yeah, cause I just like, if I'm doing something else that's fun, I just don't send it. And you've experienced the pain of my inconsistencies or being late and things like that. It's just kind of like the way I operate on all things. And the good of it is when I do it, I'm never just going through the motions. I'm always trying to bring it. But if I don't have something to bring, I don't do it. Or sometimes I don't send the thing because I'm doing something interesting, but that'll make the next week's letter more interesting because I was doing something interesting. So that's my only way of sustaining these other things. I think once you treat your hobby like a job, that's like a recipe for failure. And that's what happens to a lot of people. They think it's fun to blog and then they want to make that their career. And then they make the grave, grave mistake of turning your hobby into a job when you didn't want it as a job. Really?

Yeah, it's hard. It's fucking hard. As someone who has not— I haven't written them, but I have owned a newsletter company that has sent 365 newsletters times 4 years. It's very hard. By the way, it's very challenging.

I heard another newsletter company that shall not be named say that, oh, you know, our subscriber base is like, you know, the third largest city in America. And I thought that was just a badass way of saying like, we have whatever, 2 million subscribers, 3 million subscribers or whatever it is. And I think you should steal that and start saying things like that.

Yeah, I like that one. It's kind of like, I think The Skimm was the one who said, um, The Skimm said like, if we were a morning show, we would be the number one most popular morning show.

Right. Um, another great way of framing. That's part of, that's part of the power. It's like, how do you frame it?

It's a bit bullshit, but it is. Yeah, it, I, it is useful.

Right. Um, okay.

Do we want, we want to wrap here? Do you want to go to one more?

Let's do one more fun thing. Do you have one? Otherwise I can pick one.

You pick one.

Uh, do you want to pick one off your list? Maybe, uh, do this Elon filing a patent thing. That sounds good.

Okay. So basically I'm working with Jake, our researcher, to like find different signals and figure out what do those signals mean. And so there's something interesting. I've always been, I've always been interested in gas stations because like we said earlier, I'm like into this nerd about America. I love like nostalgia, uh, middle America stuff. And gas stations are interesting to me because we spend a lot of time there. Like, I have fond memories of gas stations and many of the biggest top 100 privately owned businesses in America. If you look at one of the biggest privately owned companies in America, most, not most, but a very large percentage are gas stations, right? And so by revenue, gas makes up typically two-thirds of sales for gas stations, but it only makes like one-third or less of profit. The majority of profit comes from buying shit on the inside. And Elon Musk recently filed a trademark for different restaurant services aimed at, um, uh, electric vehicles and things like that. And for food services, basically. And so I'm very eager to see what Tesla is going to do. And also I'm very eager to see how the, the modern gas station is going to change. And so far, so what are the biggest ones? I think the biggest ones are, um, R.K.'s, Kwik Trip. There's a few more that are the top ones. They're not doing shit, right? Because if you go to a gas station right now for Tesla, it's still a pain in the butt. The Tesla Superchargers are way better. And so I'm very eager to see, and I wanted to know what you think, what is going to happen to gas stations and how are they going to continue making money?

Yeah, so I think there's two big changes that are happening. So cars go electric. Then what the hell happens to gas stations, right? Um, do they just convert into electric charging stations, or is it going to be different because you're charging at home, right? Like, I can't fill up my tank overnight in my garage, but I can charge my electric vehicle that way. And so maybe those gas stations, they're just not needed anymore, and they need to convert to some other use of real estate. Um, you know, it's like Blockbuster on the corner store when— why would I need that when I can just push a button and stream Netflix to my TV? Um, the second is, oh, self-driving cars, which is going to change the game for both gas stations and for, um, uh, parking garages. So, uh, you don't need as much parking when you have self-driving cars. Most of city real estate is parking, whether it's street parking or parking garages. There's a huge amount that's just parking. And because cars are idle 90% of the time, when cars go self-driving, they're not going to be idle 90% of the time. So cities are going to have to like re- renovate basically the way they use their land because it's going to become totally obsolete. But let's do gas stations for a second. So one theory is gas stations become like entertainment hubs because actually charging a car takes a lot more time than filling up a gas tank. I think even Supercharger takes like 30 minutes, right, to, to fill up, basically to recharge your Tesla while you're like on a road trip or whatever. And so, you know, what do you do to entertain people during that time? Maybe they're just sitting in their car using the in-car entertainment system. But maybe there's something else that you do with food and drink and TVs and sport. Maybe it's a sports bar essentially that you turn this into. The other thing that I think is interesting is, so I'll give my cousin a shout out. So my cousin Rohan has a startup called Stable Auto. So check it out. You're not going to fully grok it from the landing page, but I'll just tell you about it. So it says company Stable.

Spell it.

Stable, like stable, like a stable of horses. Auto, A-U-T-O. So, so he started off— what he started off doing was he, he was like a robotics guy from MIT. So he's like, look, how do I make it where a self-driving car, when it— like, self-driving cars are going to need— they're great because they're going to drive people around without a driver, but how are they going to charge? Like, they have to go to a charging station and then are you just going to have like attendants there plugging in cars and taking them out? Like, how is it going to do that? And so he was creating like, if you ever seen Elon tweeted this out once, which is a robotic arm that would just find the charging thing and would like plug itself in. So it was like a self, a self.

Yeah.

Like imagine the gasoline pump could go into your car without you having to pick it up and put it in the hole. So he built a robotic arm that did that. So what my cousin was doing was basically he was just saying, oh, if Tesla's doing that, but then there's all these companies trying to compete with Tesla, I'll make the robotic arm for all the other companies. So every other company has a different charging location on the car. How do I make machine learning that's going to find the hole and stick the stick in the hole basically for that? And he started doing that. But the problem was, and I told him this, which was like, look, Self-driving cars are not here. So you're building for a future market. You don't know when it's going to happen. We all know it's going to happen eventually, but that's a little bit difficult. And you're also building this robotic arm. It's really hard to build. So now he switched to something else, which is basically like software that basically will— it basically tells you when you should go charge your electric car. For— so imagine like Uber and Lyft, they have these fleets of electric vehicles, uh, that are going to be out on the roads, and that's for sure happening. And so when do you go charge? If you go wait till you're like almost out, you might miss like peak, peak, uh, traffic time where you're gonna like get a bunch of rides and make a bunch of money. Um, you also might go charge when it's really expensive to charge because electricity costs fluctuate throughout the day. So what they're building is basically an app that you load into your, like, this is at least the last I heard of it. It's like an app for any driver of Uber or Lyft that has an electric vehicle that will say, now is the optimal time to charge. Go over here. There's a charging station nearby. There's little, there's not much traffic for Uber rides right now. And the price of electricity is low. And so it basically, that'll work while you have human drivers. And then when you have self-driving fleets, it'll do that whole thing automatically. It'll basically say, hey, let's send this 10% of your fleet to go charge right now. Let's keep 90% on the road, and it'll optimize it so you're like saving the most money both ways.

But let's talk about what do you think is going to happen? Where's the opportunity right now? I, I mean, his idea that maybe— I, I think it's far simpler. Have you ever heard of Buc-ee's?

Yes. Tell people what's Buc-ee's.

Do you know what it is?

Buc-ee's is basically in Texas. There's like a gas station chain that like people love. They don't just like it, they love it. It's a tourist destination, and it's destination for a couple reasons, I think. I've never been to one even though I lived in Texas. It has extremely clean bathrooms, and they have a bunch of food that people are like obsessed with.

It's basically shitty sugary food, but it has a funny logo, and they serve like Brisket. It's just like low quality, but fun.

It became a thing.

Yeah. But it's huge. So I think that it's going to break down in two categories. The first category is just everyday use. I think people are going to keep their shit at home, charge at home, or they're just going to charge while they're in the grocery store. And that's how they— and that's— and Whole Foods is going to be the winner. The second thing is traveling. And I think the way that that's going to look is Buc-ee's. It's going to be Just like it's going to be a Buc-ee's meets Museum of Ice Cream. So when I go to Buc-ee's, it's a spectacle. I stopped there because I'm going to get like a huge soda. I'm going to get maybe something to eat, but I'm just going to look at stupid shit like a Buc-ee knife or a Buc-ee book bag, just dumb trinkets.

Like going into a Bass Pro Shop, basically.

It's like going into a Bass Pro Shop or just looking, walking around IKEA. It's just a spectacle. It's going to be like that with a little bit of Museum of Ice Cream where there's going to be a little bit even more spectacles that are fun to take pictures in front of. That is where what's going to happen, I think. And I think like the Shells of the world or whatever gas station, 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven, I actually think could become a Buc-ee's because 7-Eleven has a little bit of nostalgia. Like 7-Eleven, it's kind of, it could be cool. It's like Subway.

It could be like Vans. Yeah.

Yeah. It could, Subway could be, could be the next version of Vans.

Yeah. So I think there's definitely some people that are going to go that route, right? They make it a tourist destination and they have a quirky brand. And that works. I think some people are going to go full automation. So in San Francisco, we had that thing Cafe X. Did you ever buy coffee from that?

No, it took too long.

Took too long. I mean, it takes like a minute, right?

It was just stupid. I thought it was dumb. Cafe X is stupid.

How could you think that's stupid? That's so good. So if nobody knows what Cafe X is, describe it.

So it's basically— okay, but here's the thing. It's basically a Keurig machine. Like, it's not that fancy, but it looks like— it's usually like it's in a building and it has like this glass around it and it's a massive robot arm that's making a spectacle of like moving the coffee cup around and then pouring the milk in it. In reality, it could like— you don't need that stupid fucking arm. It could just be like a coffee vending machine. Like, so that's why whenever I saw that, I'm like, When I see these like in warehouses and stuff, it's just like you put 2 quarters in and you just get like, like at the hospital. You never been to the hospital and use one of those like cappuccino machines? Like, I don't need this dumb fucking arm to trick me and act like it's doing something special.

Okay, so that's definitely one way of seeing it, and I could see that point of view. I think what's the difference between Starbucks and that vending machine? Is it the quality of the coffee or what's the difference?

Probably not the quality.

So what is the difference?

One's a spectacle and one you talk to people. No, no, no.

So I'm saying like between the Keurig machine and Starbucks, like, why do you even need a Starbucks? Why couldn't Starbucks just be a Keurig?

Because I like getting out of the house and seeing people.

Okay, so maybe, maybe it's that. If that's the case, then Starbucks is safe. The other case is basically that there's some middle ground of like variety and quality that's like above a coffee machine, but more like a Starbucks where you have like 40 drinks that you want because you want your soy latte with, you want almond milk and then you want 2 pumps of sugar and you want light ice or whatever, and that's how you like your drink. And so you can't get that out of a normal coffee machine. Either the coffee doesn't taste as good or the drink is not as elaborate. And CafeX basically says, cool, what if we could serve coffee faster and cheaper than a Starbucks? What if we could serve Starbucks quality coffee but faster and cheaper than a Starbucks? Why? Because we have a robot arm that could just do the thing. 24/7 and never call in sick and never be an employee, never have any employee issues. And by the way, I take up 1/10 of the square footage of a Starbucks because it's like a giant robot in a hamster ball. It has everything it needs right there. It takes up like 10 square feet, whereas Starbucks is much bigger. And so what they're doing with the idea with Cafe— I don't think Cafe X specifically is going to succeed, but I'd be shocked if there's not a a CafeX type winner down the road because you can shove these things anywhere. You can shove it inside of an apartment building and it can make sense in an apartment building, whereas like a full-service Starbucks with staff wouldn't make sense in an apartment building. And so I think that those are going to succeed. And so I think there's a version of the gas stations that's like that. I think there's a version of the gas stations that basically is just all automation. The charging's automated, and then you go and you push a button and it creates a giant Slurpee for you like 7-Eleven. But it's just a robot arm doing it.

We'll see. We'll see if it works out. But I think it's going to be more like Bucky's. At least I hope it will be. All right, that's the episode. I got to— I got to go get a haircut.