Brainstorming Million Dollar Ideas with Elaine Zelby | My First Million Ep. #175

By the way, by the way, first unicorn officially today. One of my angel investments officially raised at over $1 billion. Yeah, 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 everyone, we have a great episode, but first, before we get into it, I've got a huge favor Um, there's this new feature in the iTunes store. Um, so go, I wanna show it to you. I wanna be one of the first to use it. So go type in My First Million, or hopefully you already are. If you're not, if you're on an Android, you can ignore this for now. Or you got, no, matter of fact, you can do this for Spotify. So go to your iTunes store right now, um, or your podcast app. My apologies, podcast app. Type in My First Million and find our podcast. And then you're gonna see a button. It should be blue on, uh, podcast and it says Subscribe, click that button and something really amazing is going to happen. And I want you to tweet at me, @TheSamParr, with a picture of that. And we're going to— you're going to see this brand new feature that Apple just launched. It's a really cool hack that we just discovered. So click that button and tell us what's happened.

This is what they were talking about in the keynote yesterday, right?

Yeah, it's like a big deal. Only a few people got access to it. I knew a guy and I got access to it. So go ahead and click that subscribe button. And if you're in Spotify, I talked to Daniel Elk. He actually, they're releasing something too. Click the button that says follow.

Daniel Elk, the cousin of Daniel Ek, the actual founder of Spotify, right?

It's their cousin. It's a Norwegian thing or, you know, Swedish thing, whatever he is. It's a Scandinavian thing. Anyway, today we've got a great episode. Sean, who do we have?

We had Elaine Zelby on. She's a VC at SignalFire and more importantly, she is an idea woman. So she has a Substack that's 3 new ideas every week. Very much like what we do. She also does this thing called— I don't know what it's called, but it's a podcast about boring businesses.

Like, unsexy. It's called Unsexy.

Unsexy. It's about like, you know, oh, you run a chemical plant, tell me about that. You know, so things like that. So very much in line with what we do. We had a bunch of— we brainstormed a bunch of ideas. So we talked about ideas. The Adulting Vault, we'll tell you what that is. The Snoo sleep bed for adults. Therapunch was one of the ideas. A subscription shoe company idea. And, um, and then we also—

the, the startup SaaS bundle, that was the best startup SaaS bundle.

And also she kind of gave us a peek under the hood of it. SignalFire has this thing that's like a— this data machine that spits out like, you know, great investments using all the 27 different data signals. And we kind of asked her like, hey, is that bullshit? Is that just marketing? Seems like it's just marketing. Is that bullshit? And, uh, she gave a pretty good response. So we kind of talked about that as well.

All right, we're going to get to the episode, but first, remember, go to the podcast store, click that button that says subscribe, and then you have to send me a picture on Twitter, @TheSamParr, and you're going to see this new feature that Apple released. I promise it's going to be worth it. So make sure everyone does it right now. Thank you. So Elaine, hey, what's going on? I'm Sam Parr. We haven't met. I think you were on the podcast before when I was sick. Yes.

So Sam, last time she was on, she had one idea that— well, two ideas. One that went kind of like semi-viral. That was the milk bombs. Idea of like a functional milk bomb. Uh, I don't know if you even know what that means. Like, yeah, you get the, you get that, the picture. Basically you dunk a little, like a bath bomb, you dunk it into your milk and it sort of has a little fizzy color, whatever experience, and you're adding some, uh, adaptogen or nootropic or whatever to your, to your milk. Because I thought that was kind of interesting. People like that one a lot.

But now that we have like these viral video people—

oh, it would be on a whole nother level now.

Yeah, should we ask her to— yeah, because that's like a That's like a pretty virally thing, but sorry, go ahead.

We'll do that one at the end. And the other one I really liked was fantasy football for stocks. So basically creating a little game. Like, let's say we could create a game, me, you, Andrew, whoever, and we each get our budget, we allocate it into a portfolio that you get to change it, I don't know, every month or so. And then we see whose portfolio would have performed the best. So like fantasy football where you get points based on the ups and downs of the stock. So a very social, you're not actually investing, it doesn't have to be real money, a very social way to be gambling or betting on stocks. What did you think of that one, Sam?

I used to do that as a kid. Didn't we do that as a kid in like class?

There was a thing back in like 7th grade, I think everybody did this one fantasy portfolio for like a month at school. And, but it hasn't, it was pretty rudimentary then and it never made its way out. So I think somebody who worked at Yahoo Fantasy Football, it should just basically, fork everything they learned about how to make Yahoo Fantasy Football viral and be like, cool, I'm going to do that. Except instead of, you know, the Patriots, it's going to be, you know, Amazon and Tesla and whatnot.

Did you folks, um, have you guys used, uh, is it called the— they were one of our sponsors, uh, was it Webull? What's the Israeli Coinbase competitor?

Israeli Coinbase?

Israeli?

Yeah, they're—

yeah, I think one of those words is wrong. Uh, Coinbase, it's an exchange, crypto.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's like a Robinhood, both Coinbase.

Well, they—

what was the difference?

WeFunder, is that what you're talking about? Or like—

it was like WeBull.

That's like crowdfunding.

But they, um, I think it's WeBull. Um, but they have this feature, so basically it's like a stock investing platform.

Oh, I know what you're about. WeBull, like B-U-L-L. Yes.

Is it WeBull?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Is that the one But anyway, they have this feature where they have this thing where you can sign up and you can choose to share your portfolio with anyone and people can copy you. And I thought that that was kind of amazing. It kind of like turns and you can like invest in their fund and I don't even think they make any money off of it, but it's just like a point of pride.

There's a bunch of these that came out in the last, I don't know, 2 years, Elaine, you've probably seen all of them. Public came out as like one of the Robinhood competitors where it's like a social network, a social feed where you could see what people are investing in. Then there's the more extreme versions like what you're talking about, like Doge, I think is one of them. And in Doge, I create kind of like my little basket of stocks and I call it, you know, the Sean Index. And then you could just straight up buy the Sean Index and you can invest in all my stocks. And I get kind of like, it's like my index becomes more popular because you've invested in it and you trust me and it like shows that you follow it or you invested in it.

Well, in 2017, so Eric Voorhees, who was the guy that created Shapeshift, he actually created Satoshi Dice. He was super, super early in the crypto space. He launched something thing that never got out of private beta called Prism, and you could create a basket of tokens. This is when all the altcoins started popping up on Ethereum, and you could show— so it could be, you know, Sean's basket of tokens and Sam's, and you could watch, and I could follow you, and I could just invest in your basket of tokens. But it was a competition too, and I thought it was such a great idea. I'm not sure why it never got off the ground, but it was cool. I digged it.

Can I ask you, Elaine, what is SignalFire? I'm on your website, um, Like, your landing page is, I want whatever you're selling, but I'm still a little confused as to what it is.

So we do that a little bit on purpose. We are a venture capital firm, but we're actually structured and operate a lot more like a technology company. So if you look at our team, we're about a third engineers and data scientists building products. We're about a third people on our platform. These are the in-house business people doing PR, recruiting, growth. And then we have investment and we You know, we essentially monetize via the investment vehicle, and we're currently investing on our Fund 3, which is $500 million. But, you know, we're not— we don't have capital in the name, we don't have ventures in the name. We definitely try to be a little bit more startupy than the traditional VC.

So, but are you using, like, on your web page, on the landing page, it's like you guys use some type of data to spot trends? Is that— is that—

so we buy, scrape, or, you know, aggregate every data signal you could possibly imagine. And our engineers have proprietary algorithms that use that data to do one of two things. One, we have different systems that are alerting systems for us on the investment side. So, they pull in all these signals and they try to show us at seed, at Series A, and at Series B, who are the cool companies? What should we be looking at? And also trends around markets and things like that, fundraising trends. And then we have a bunch of products for the portfolio around talent migration, talent movement, who's good, who's in market from a hiring perspective, competitive intel, co-spend analysis, market intel, all that kind of stuff.

Do you— so like when a lot of people, like when Sean and I probably have both started our things, um, which like, granted, our—

by the way, by the way, first unicorn officially today. My, one of my angel investments officially raised at over a billion dollars. Although I got to say, it's not super exciting because it's a company I was trying to invest in from the seed, but at this point I wasn't like a— I was running my company. I wasn't like I only wanted to invest because I thought it was a great idea and I liked the founder, but I like forgot to follow up. And then like, oh, I followed up. He's like, ah, dude, we closed that like 2 months ago. Sorry, I'll get you in the A. And then when the A came around, it was like, ah, dude, it's super competitive. Sorry, I'm not gonna be able to get you in. So finally he messaged me. He was like, hey man, I'm gonna make sure I get you in this time. I feel like I fucked you over, you know, once you missed it the first time. We're definitely gonna get you in here in the, I don't know, B, yeah, the B round at a $200 million valuation. I was like, bro, $200 million? I knew you when you were a baby here. This was, this is way too high. All right, fuck it, I'm in. And so, uh, that company is now worth over $1 billion. Um, I don't know if I could— I, well, we'll say I might, I might bleep it out.

Come on, you have to tell.

We may have to bleep it out because you may not have announced it yet, but it's a company called Deal, uh, and they do, uh—

Ah, my husband and I were talking about that one this morning.

Yeah, okay, what were you guys talking about? My first unicorn, because I appreciate that.

Yes, the joke is this is essentially a company I wanted to build 3 years ago, and I started seeing every startup that had 10 employees was starting to hire internationally, and they had to treat them as contractors, and there was no way to manage it. And if I looked under the hood, most companies were using ShieldGeo as the PEO, and everyone hated it, super old school. So I was like, okay, somebody needs to go and build a better ShieldGeo under the hood, do kind of the Plaid model of building the nitty-gritty, going into each country that people in the US hire remotely with and build out the, you know, infrastructure, go and find every startup and say, hey, we're going to handle all the hiring, the payroll, compliance, everything for your remote people. I love it. I think it's such a good idea.

Wait, so what— sorry, how do you spell it, Sean?

D-E-E-L.

I think the URL is letsdeal.com unless they change.

I think they got deal.com also now.

Oh, cool.

So I actually use it. Uh, that's how I pay kind of like any contractors that I work with. Even if they're in the US, I'm like, oh, this is way easier because I just type in their name. I say what the contract is. Every month I'm going to pay them this at the first of the month. It's like, would you like an NDA with that? I'm like, yeah, why not? Let's add on an NDA. They're like, great. Would you like to add a milestone-based payment? Like, you know what? That's a good idea. I do like milestone-based payments. That aligns our incentives. It's like, boom, here's a contract. We've sent it to them. When they'll sign it, it'll be kept in your records automatically for you. We took care of all the compliance and tax issues that you're going to deal with based on where they live. And we'll connect to your bank and then it'll autopay every month for you and send you an invoice when you're done. And I was like, oh wow, that's great. You just eliminated the need for me to have like a person who does that whole thing.

By the way, it's on their page that they've just raised money at a billion dollar valuation. Okay, perfect.

So their biggest competitors, there's two big ones, Papaya Global and Remote.com. And Deal started out a little bit differently. The other two said, hey, we're going to really focus on full-time employment internationally. They focused on contractors and they've had to shift from my understanding a little bit because in reality you don't just have contractors for the most part and you want one-stop shop. You don't want to go and have different solutions for the different types of employees.

Right.

So I think they now have everything.

Exactly. They now do everything. They also let you like pay in crypto and pay in every currency and like, you know, they're doing, they're doing all those kind of gnarly problems, which is great. Uh, I almost invested in Remote.com also. I really like that guy. Uh, his, his name is Job. The guy who's like the founder, I think it's pronounced like slightly different, but it's J-O-B. And I just like, I love that whenever it's like Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world, I'm like, this guy named Job is creating the platform for hiring remote workers. Like, okay, I'm in, I'm interested. And he was like, what made you interested in this company deal? As soon as I heard the idea, I was like, oh yeah, that's a pain point. Like, that's a real pain point. And I don't know how people solve it, but if I went to their website, I saw it was like it's real simple. I'm not that sophisticated, right? It's like, yes, this is a real problem. Then I go to your website and I'm like, oh, you're one of the easy-to-use products, which is like just kind of the standard best practices of design and like clear, like good colors, good font, clear copy, 2 clicks and you're done. And I was like, oh yeah, this is going to win. And so then I started hitting up the founder and I met with them and I was like, oh, this is amazing. Let's, let's do something. And then like, unfortunately, you know, this would have been a much, much bigger return had I just been like a little bit more proactive about following up before. But, you know, I feel like I've learned that lesson 30 times.

You invested $10,000 in them, let's say. Um, would that mean that it's worth like, what, 5 times more?

Well, at the current valuation, yeah. Um, on paper, on paper, yeah, marked up. Um, but if I had done it at the seed, it would have been, you know, maybe— I think the seed was probably like $10-15 million, um, coming out of YC. And so, you know, that's, that's taking $10 million, turning it into a billion in terms of the multiple, uh, plus dilution, blah blah blah. Not interesting. More importantly, I can now say I invested in a unicorn, so that's just a stamp that I needed to collect here.

Also, I appreciate your honesty that you invested at the B, because so many people will come in at later rounds and be like, I'm in all these unicorns, and they invested in the previous round.

What I wanted to ask though was, Elaine, so when I started my company, I just was like, this seems like it could work, and it's fun, and I'm good at it. I bet Sean kind of did the same, I bet, where it's like Oh yeah, it might work. SignalFire seems far more analytical. My question is, in reality, do you actually think that that matters? Like, if I'm trying to start something, do you actually think that the likelihood that I'm going to succeed by— if I just said, Elaine, give me 3 things to start versus I'm just going to go do whatever— is, do you think that you would—

Let me give you an example here of like the honesty. So when I started my rolling fund, The marketing was, I have this big podcast that's going to help me get deal flow and podcast. Well, okay, if you have a podcast that does 5 million downloads a year in the business niche or startup niche, it's like, okay, that's a unique asset. I see how you're different than the other funds. In reality, most of my deals don't come from podcast listeners sending me stuff or reaching out to me. Most of the deals are from the same 5 friends who email me when they see something cool. And like, that would have been much less sexy to talk about, like, oh, I have 5 great friends who will email me cool stuff and I email them cool stuff. But in reality, that's how the best deals happen. And or just like I'm bored on Twitter a lot and when I see something cool, I reach out. Again, doesn't sound that great for my fund marketing, but is closer to reality. So the question is basically how often are your deals because you're like computer programs, like doot doot doot, this company undervalued, growing fast, nobody's heard of it versus another fund shares something with you or you guys are interested in a space and you see something cool on Product Hunt or whatever and you reach out. And then that's how it happens. So can you give us the truth?

Well, so in general, venture capital— I have the most commoditized asset you can imagine that I'm selling. I'm selling money. And so in terms of differentiation, you talking about having this podcast, having a different model and differentiation does go a long way. But if I break up venture capital into 5 stages, it's sourcing— so how do I find people— diligencing, picking, winning, and then supporting. And so we try to leverage data in probably 4 of the 5 different categories. On the sourcing side, we've definitely done deals that were completely from our alerting system. In addition, we just do a ton more outbound than the average firm because we'll go in these meetings and we'll triage based off of, oh, this looks interesting, and oh, Elaine is connected to the founder, or Elaine knows about this industry, you go follow up.

Right.

So, we do a lot more of that outbound than traditional. Is it the majority of our deals? No. On the diligencing side, really trying to understand how good are these people, So giving people, you know, talent scores, understanding hiring patterns, mobile app downloads, Alexa score trends, a lot of the stuff you guys look at in, you know, SimilarWeb or Ahrefs or that kind of stuff, we're just doing on a different level. But I would say where we have the most value—

wait, hold on. Does that level actually matter? So you basically said that you must listen because we— I talk about Ahrefs all the time. We talk about SimilarWeb all the time. That's like anyone could do that for either free or for $100 a month. And it's like I can just skim it and I kind of have an idea. You kind of implied that you do that times 10 or whatever it is. Is that way actually better than our way?

I think in our industry it does actually move the needle for us.

So give us an example. Like, you know, if I'm watching Billions and I'm like, oh shit, Bobby Axelrod, you know, he gets satellite data and he can see, you know, how many trucks are leaving the factory every day. And that's how, you know, blah, blah, blah. I've seen some things in VC where it's like, you know, everybody's kind of got App Annie or whatever, like something to look at app growth. But, you know, I don't know, Second Measure where you get credit card spending data aggregated, that can be more interesting. Or like, you know, if you're plugged in with Pipe or somebody, you could see recurring revenue businesses that are growing in some way before maybe others do. So I'm curious, what's a cool data source that— give me an example, like, oh, we have this one data source that helped us spot this cool company. Can you tell a story like that?

So it's not the one data source piece. It's the fact that we buy or have access to all of them, and then we combine them in unique ways. So it's really about the joining of the data and what that surfaces for us. And that could be, again, on the— we look at things like business filings, and then we combine that with data on, OK, well, what is their website? What are their app downloads?

What do you mean business filings? Like incorporation, or what do you mean?

Yeah, so exactly. So I can understand that somebody is a founder, based in San Francisco. They just incorporated their company as a Delaware C-Corp. I can then know when they filed for incorporation. I know who the person is. I can put them through our talent ranking score or our founder ranking score. I can then see who are they working with, how good are those people, what is the business category, how interesting is that for us, how investible is the timing. So, we have a kind of timing alerting system too. Those things combined will then give it a score and say, okay, this one you should look at versus this one you shouldn't based off of the aggregate score. And that's the piece that I think actually helps, not the single dataset or the single piece of info.

You guys have a score?

Can you give me my founder score? What am I?

I could, but I don't think I'm allowed to.

Oh, come on. What's going on here? This is the best marketing ever for Signifier.

Yes, I know. We do, we actually do score. We give people ranks. It's, you know, 1 is like the number 1 person we think in our list right now, and then it kind of goes down from there.

It's like a chess ranking. It's like, you know, it's like an Elo score basically or something where everybody is actually ranked 1 to 1 million or whatever.

Pretty much, yeah, exactly. And it changes.

Why, Elon is 1 or what's going on?

No, because it's for us, like we only invest seed, Series A, and Series B. So I don't care about people in those other categories. I want to know who are the best people starting companies right now that are actively looking for funding.

Gotcha.

And that's the timeliness is actually really important. But the thing that's also really cool about what we can do, so I'll give you a really concrete example. We have a company that is in the Shopify ecommerce infrastructure ecosystem. And they were looking to say, hey, we want to go and target— I'm going to make these numbers up, but we want to target every merchant who has between $10 and $100 million in revenue in these 4 categories. And here are 3 buyer titles. Oh, and like, here's where they need to be located. We can go and pull all that data. We match that up to the people at the company. So we say, here are their email addresses. Here are the people you should go after. And we create this kind of custom lead list for them. And so being able to do that really, really, really is important.

That's on the support, the company side. So, and you guys sell access to this platform, right? Like, this is a product?

No. Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to ask you, because why? I mean, I bet you can make, uh, like $50 to $100 million a year in, um, a birdie told me that you guys are spinning this out or considering spinning this out as a product.

We do not sell it and we don't spin it out. That's part of our whole selling point is that this is within the family. So if you come and take our money and become part of the SignalFire family, you get access to all this stuff. So we We don't actually give it out outside of it.

Interesting. Okay.

Who, uh, who came up with this?

So our founding partner, Chris Farmer, has a long history in the VC world, and he kind of got frustrated saying, why are we investing in these bleeding-edge tech companies and we're literally doing deals by talking to our friends? Kind of what Sean was alluding to. And so he's like, look, we have access to all this data, why are we not leveraging it? And so he had kind of spun this out in his last firm and then created an entire fund cycle around it and a firm around it.

Yeah, I'm gonna say I still think it's 50% marketing and 50% useful, but that's higher than it was in my head an hour ago where I would've said it's 90% just marketing and 10% useful. So you've done a good job.

You've moved it up 40 points.

Do you think he's right, Elaine?

Like, say that again.

Is he right?

In terms of what it is? I would say more useful than not for sure. Especially, I think the two areas I would say it's on the barbells, it's definitely useful on the flagging sourcing companies that we would never have seen. And it's very, very useful on the supporting side. And honestly, we are, As I mentioned before, you know, we kind of like say we're a startup. We do OKRs, we measure NPS score, we kind of treat ourselves like a tech startup in terms of how we operate. And so for us, we care so much about our NPS, we care so much about are we moving the needle for founders. So if we can be, you know, if that's the only place that it's really valuable, that's, that's enough, you know, that's, that's really enough.

Did you ever hear about Chamath's, uh, 8-ball? Yeah, yeah, this sort of reminds me of that.

Yeah, go, this is, this is going to be a clip, I can tell. Go for it.

Uh, yeah, so, so Chamath, who was, you know, founder of Social Capital, or is the founder of Social Capital, at one point in time was like, look, we— he came from Facebook, super data-driven growth team. He was like leading the growth team, helped grow it from whatever, 100 million users to a billion users. And he was like, well, why don't we have that same level of analytical rigor when it comes to our companies? And sort of as that thought evolved, it came down to something really simple. He goes, let's make capital as a service instead of, you know, software as a service, capital as a service. So here's how it goes. It's self-serve. You come and you plug in your analytics. Our little algorithm will run a formula and it'll basically tell you two things. It'll say, here's how you rank relative to other SaaS companies that are your size, your age, in your kind of like price point or your demographic. And then, so you'll know if you're above the benchmark, if your retention is way better or way worse than other companies. And then secondly, they were like, this is our moneyball formula to basically figure out if we should invest in you or not. And so they hyped it. And as a founder, it was a little bit scary, right? You're going to go, Am I going to give Chamath all my data, basically pipe right into our database and just say, hey, here you go, and it feeds their system, right? Because whether they invest in us or not, they've just downloaded, hey, at this point in time, here's how this company was doing. And then they take your historical data as well. So it's like they sucked in all this data so that if they looked at The Hustle, they'll know whether they should invest in The Hustle, but also Morning Brew and The Skimm and any other company like The Hustle, they'll be able to compare and contrast. And as a founder, it's useful because you want to compare and contrast, but you've just, you know, you've opened up your blouse to Chamath. And I think that that was for me a little bit scary, but I think some people really liked it. And ultimately, I think it was more marketing than substance. I don't know, Elaine, what's the word on the street? But like, I don't see them using it anymore. I know that the group of people that spun off of Chamath, like Arjun and those guys from Tribe Capital, I think they still do that, or that's a big piece of it. They don't maybe brand it that way, but Um, I don't know, Elaine, what was that like? Was that legit? Was it as secret saucy as they, as they tried to make it sound, or was it a little overhyped?

I was never on the inside, so I have no idea. I know that it was very polarizing in terms of what you were saying. Some founders loved it, some founders hated it. In my opinion, it only works at certain stages and in certain categories. This does not work at all at the seed stage. You're betting on people for the most part, and you're betting on the growth of a category. There's no data, there's nothing that's going to give you—

also, by the way, most startups don't have their data structured enough or in a way that you can actually like run these types apples-to-apples analysis until you're much—

ClearBank, ClearBank makes sense to me because you're literally saying, hook into my Facebook and Google data. There's nothing that I could be— yeah, and there's nothing I can be fudging around that. I'm going to go analyze it and say, you put in $10 to Facebook, you get out $15. I'm going to give you a short-term, high-interest loan. It works for everybody. We win. People are now doing this for Amazon sellers and, to your point, Shopify. So on Amazon, it's much more around working capital. So, people are constantly in these manufacturing cycles where they're cash flow negative. So, they're like, "Okay, well, I can hook into your Amazon seller portal. I can see exactly what your inflow and outflow of money is. I can hook into your bank account. I should be able to do dynamic loans." So, I'm never at peak exposure from a loan perspective for very long. I'm kind of like constantly pulling it in and pulling it out. That makes a ton of sense to me. Right.

Yesterday, I invested in a seed stage company and I pretty much only did it because Sean did it. I basically, I was like, I think this is silly. Are you in? He goes, I'm in. If you don't want to go in, ask him if I could have your, your—

I was like, I love it. And he's like, yeah, I don't know, I think I hate it. I was like, what's there to hate? It's amazing. And then he's like, yeah, it's so good that I kind of hate just popular things. It seems so good. And I was like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I said, you don't want it? Give me your share. And I— because I was asking the founder for more.

It was hypey. It was hypey. It's got all the cool kids in it. I'm like, oh, all the cool kids are doing it. I don't want to do but Sean was like, well, I'm doing it. And I talked to the guy and the guy seemed wonderful. And I really don't even know—

can we talk about the company now or do we need to talk about it next episode so that there's a little distance between this convo and that?

Uh, yeah, yeah, I guess. Okay, it's called Synthesis.

Do you know this one, Elaine?

No, what do they do?

Ah, the algorithm didn't spot it, but there you go, the, uh, 5 friends did, did, did, uh, did spot this. All right, so this is a cool company. So the The story of this is, have you heard of Ad Astra, which is Elon Musk's personal school that was inside SpaceX? So for those that don't know, Elon Musk, he's CEO of SpaceX, he's CEO of Tesla, two kind of multi, multi-billion dollar companies. And his kids were going to school. He basically needed to have his kids be in school and he kind of was like, the traditional school system's not so great. Why don't we build a school inside SpaceX that's done the way we think? And his big kind of theory was, In schools, they teach you, like, here's this tool, right? Like, let's say calculus or algebra, right? Like, here's algebra, go learn algebra. But they don't tell you kind of like why you need to know algebra, right? Like maybe they should be teaching you how to run a lemonade stand. And in order to calculate how many lemons you're going to need per day, boom, we'll teach you algebra. That's a tool to help you do this thing you wanted to do. So his big thing was, why don't we teach kids how engines work rather than what a wrench is, as like a basic analogy. And so he creates this school, or he wants to have the school and he creates it. And there's a guy, I think Josh is his name, he runs a school at SpaceX. It's great. It's kind of well-known. And the fundamental premise was kids were learning by really playing games. And so have you guys seen the movie Ender's Game?

Yes.

So in Ender's Game, basically you're in small teams of kids and then you go into this one simulation area where your team A fights against team B and C. And the game always has some kind of arbitrary set of rules, but it teaches you strategy and teamwork and communication and all the different things you need to do to win the game. And so kids love it because they play, it's competitive, it's doing, not just sitting there listening to a lecture. And so anyways, those are the same principles they took into this. So let's say they'll create a game that's like, I don't know, It's about art, right? So instead of telling you, okay, here we're going to talk about art, so sit down and read these 3 chapters about the Renaissance period of Italy and memorize it. No, instead they'll create like a map. It's like, okay, where do you want to explore? And then you pick, you're like, Japan. You go to Japan and you find this artifact and then you have to bid on it. And the other teams are bidding on it too. And you're trying to decide, should we bid on this? Well, let's go look at it. Let's go look at Italy and let's see what they have there. And the team goes and all these kids are playing this together on Zoom anyway. So it's It's this really cool, totally different alternative form of education. And so what ended up happening was the guy who created this at SpaceX for Elon and his kids, the game system was called Synthesis. And what he did was they spun it out with Elon's blessing. Elon was like, hey, go for it. Yeah, more kids should have access to this. And he paired up with this guy who was like the number one engineer at ClassDojo. So he had been working at an edtech company.

SignalFire is an investor. Exactly.

That is our portfolio company.

And so they got together and they created this company Synthesis. I guess I can't share too much of their numbers, but they have this amazing traction so far. Business is only 6 to 8 months old. They spent $0 on paid marketing. All the attention has come because of free press and people who are reading about Elon's school and just sort of click the links and find them.

And they've got the greatest headline ever, which is like Elon Musk spinning off school, right?

The founder was very honest. He was like, you know, honestly, like, we had a big question, like, does this only work if it's rocket scientists kids, right? Because maybe they are willing to really engage in this material and figure it out and play these things. But is this accessible if your dad is not a rocket scientist at SpaceX or your mom is not a data scientist over at wherever? But they found that it does. And so they have super high retention, amazing revenue already in 6 months, doing multiple millions of dollars a year in revenue with $0 in paid marketing and what seems like the perfect team. It's the guy who created the school, at Elon's thing and this guy from ClassDojo. So I was like, what's not to love? Great impact, super cool product. I want to send my own kids there. Great traction in a very short amount of time and tons of room to grow because they haven't even started marketing yet. And so I was like, I love it. And Sam was like, yeah, seems really great, but I'm skeptical of things that everything seems great.

It's expensive. It was expensive.

Well, can I pitch you a spin on this that I wrote about recently? And you can give this to the guys because it might be interesting for them. So I wrote about a concept of doing this but on top of Roblox. And the reason being Roblox already has the eyeballs and the attention of kids. 75% of kids between 9 and 15, I think, are on Roblox. And today, anybody can go and build these games. But why can't you go and build games? I was focusing more on life skills. So things like financial literacy, which you never learn, mental health, which you never learn, all the things that you'd want either a younger kid or a teenager to learn, gamify it, but build it where they're already there. And also enable the kids to become the builders. So partner with some people like these two people doing Synthesis. Bring in some kids to make it actually appropriate and age-appropriate, and then let them have some of the upside and let them spin off the games and bring in their millions of followers. But I think there's something to be done on top of Roblox.

Yeah, I love that. I think, um, that works for two reasons. One is you can— if you— okay, teaching kids through games, not a new idea. Like, when I was a kid, I was playing Math Blaster and what, you know, whatever else, these little games on whatever, you know, like we had a computer room at my house and I used to go there and get to play an hour a day. And, um, Teaching kids through games has obviously been around for a while, but now the games are already built with tons of love. Kids already know the controls, like in Fortnite or Roblox. They already know how to play. They're already super familiar with it. They already love the game. They also have now created— Roblox and Fortnite have these open field, open world systems where you can go build whatever the hell you want and just share the link. So it makes total sense to me to borrow the millions of dollars they've poured into their game engine and the marketing and the distribution where they already have kids with accounts to just say, now all we have to build is the learning experience. And, um, and so I think that is a, a great idea.

Can I—

they might be able to port it over, you know, they can port some of these games to Roblox.

Can I ask you about something you wrote about them? So you have— Elaine has a Substack, uh, uh, Zel— is it what, zelby.substack.com? Three things.

It's just my last name.

Um, It's, it's cool. It's a lot like this podcast.

You basically put out 3 kind of business ideas a week, right? Is that the idea?

Exactly. I write about 3 requests for startups or opportunities I see to build big businesses and like how I would do it, how I would monetize it, and why now.

Great. So obviously everyone should go sign up for that because it's, it's right up our alley. I think I've seen you because you've linked to us once or twice and I've like tracked the traffic back. All right. So you have this thing called Startup SaaS Bundle. And I wanted to bring this up because I think that most everyone listening is in the world where they can actually go out and start this. I think that I've actually investigated this a ton. So I have, or I don't own it anymore, but we used to own this thing called The Hustle. So we had like 2 million subscribers, many of which are like these businessy folks. And I'm like, oh, we should make this and sell it. There's actually a lot of reasons I think why this can't work at a huge scale, but I think there's a bunch of reasons why it could work at like a, like I think you could build a $5 to $10 million a year company. In like 3 to 4 years, pretty straightforward. Can you talk about your ideas here? And you could actually tell me if you think I'm wrong or right.

Yeah. And I'll tell you why I think it's way bigger than that.

Great.

So the idea here is if you look at the average Series A company, they're using, I think the stat is 34 different SaaS applications. And what happened was we used to have these monoliths, which are SAP and Oracle, and I used to joke like bring back SAP and I don't really mean that. But what I mean is I am so sick of now having to deal with 34 vendors. 34 UIs, 34 logins and passwords, 34 different bills and renewal cycles and all that kind of stuff. It just makes no sense. And if you think about what core business software runs a startup, it's very consistent. You have things like you need G Suite or Office 365. You need some kind of communication tool. You need something for payroll, for HR, for accounting, for recruiting, for CRM. Marketing, project management, issue tracking, and help desk. Like those to me, that is the core of business software. And of course, they're best in breed for all these things at the SMB level, the mid-market level, the enterprise level. But in reality, if you're a startup that is seed, Series A, probably even getting into Series B, you need like not the 80/20 rule, but like 60% of the functionality. And that's the easier stuff to build. The additional bells and whistles are the harder pieces. And those aren't even utilized by these early companies. So the idea is, look, okay, if you wanted to build a bundle and get people to migrate over, if they've already bought 8 different pieces of software, that's nearly impossible. But if you catch people when they have nothing, and you're going to say, hey, we have this out-of-the-box bundle, you can start with 3 modules. But as you go and you want a CRM because you didn't have a sales team before, just add on the CRM module. It already hooks in, it's super seamless, it has the same user experience, no new login, no new vendor relationship. And you kind of continue to add to the bundle as your needs evolve.

And I think— And to break this down though, is you said something important that we have to go back to. You said something, you said it won't work if you already are using something. Yes. And can you explain why? Because that's actually a really big deal.

Yes. Ripping and replacing software is so painful and it's incredibly hard to get people to do it. You've already trained your team on it. It has all of your information and data sitting in that system. It's just really hard to rip something out when it's there, which is why things like Salesforce are gazillion-dollar companies, even though people complain complain about it all the time. It's— that is your system of record for that thing.

And so I think that the vendor won't give you— well, let's call this Elaine Company, Elaine Bundle Company. They're not going to give Elaine Bundle Company a referral fee, I think.

Correct.

And the whole way this makes money— I mean, I guess there's two ways: a subscription or a referral fee. Salesforce is going to say, uh, no, these customers already use us. We're not going to like give you any more discount, or we're not going to give you a cut.

Let me clarify. So, so you're not saying It's not ClassPass. It's not saying pay me X and then you get discounts across all your 34 apps. What you're saying is make a beginner version of the core 8 things as an actual bundled thing, not these single-player apps or single-function apps, and do the 80/20 and just do the core functionality. Don't get the long tail of edge case features that you need and offer it to somebody out of the box as like, hey, here's the simple thing. So you don't need to sign up for 12 different services.

Yes. And when you look at the volume of companies at the early stage versus the later stage, which need enterprise functionality, the volume is like 1,000x at the early stages. So in terms of your ability to capture those people and capture them early where they are going to be sticky and they're going to grow with you to a point, will people outgrow this? Maybe. But the number of people that ever get to that scale are so few and far between that I just don't think it matters. Right.

But it's so hard to acquire those customers early on. We work with a lot of people who advertise with The Hustle and all their whole— like, we're— one of them is called Justworks. You know what Justworks is?

Yes, I've used that.

Justworks is basically a— I'm going to kind of dumb it down really dumb, but it's basically a payroll software. But because of the way that they operate, you have to sign up with them pretty much from the beginning, like right when you start a company. And I have a feeling that they're struggling because they can't get— it's really hard to get a lot of those people to sign up for you. So challenging. in the same way, in the same way it's hard for SignalFire in order to find companies who are just starting, it's really, really hard for these folks.

Well, so here's my hack, and I learned this. So back in the days when I was first getting into startups, I got really into growth hacking back in like 2013 when it was a really hot topic. And I started my own side hustle consulting gig working with seed and Series A founders on growth. And I learned really quickly that if I partnered with the VCs they would just send me unlimited number of customers. I never did any business development because they're constantly investing in net new seed and Series A companies, and they're trying to be helpful. And their companies, 100% of companies are needing help with growth, 100%. And so they're like, okay, who should we send them to? Send them to Elaine. So the hack here is you start with all the VCs. So they're getting— I get asked a dozen times a week, what software should I buy for this? What tools should I use for that? So that's my hack to get started. Then you start to get some viral word mouth going among founders because founders have their groups online, they have their communities, they talk, they're saying, oh dude, you have to get this, like, that's the best software you can use for all your stuff. So that's how I would go to market.

But even then, like, where you were growth hacker, growth comes right after— growth comes after you have a team, you have a product, you have something, right? You start to talk about growth. Whereas even when you talk to a VC, you've already done something. You usually are not like— there is pre-seed where it's like just you know, 2 people and an idea, but it is still hard to catch you before you've even started with Slack and G Suite and, you know, 3 of those 8 modules, you know?

My whole thing around— so the one thing everyone will have is either G Suite or Office 365. That I'm not trying to build.

Right.

That you do. You do G Suite and this hooks into that. I'm not trying to kind of take that down. You know, Slack, yes, probably. That one is a little bit easier, in my opinion, to rip out. But if I look at our seed portfolio and when they graduate to Series A, that is the time when they're starting to think about getting a CRM, a marketing automation system. And that's— I think there's probably 3 different pieces of software that are the right insertion points. After you get G Suite, the next thing is probably payroll. And if you look, Gusto is kind of like the only thing most people use today. It's been around for a long time. It does fine. I don't think it's a particularly super, super complex piece of software. So can you go and say, cool, if you're under 40 employees, we offer the exact same functionality as Gusto, but we also offer XYZ and, you know, a zillion more sense.

You have a bunch of ideas. Let's hop to another idea, um, that you have. Give us like, give us your top 3 ideas and we'll pick which one to go into. So just give us the one-liner.

Wrap this up. Someone should start this. I, I, yeah, that's cool if you think that's going to be huge. I think it won't be huge. I think it'd be mild, but I think one of us could be wrong. But either way, it's a win.

Yes, agreed. I think it could be huge, but even if it's not, it will definitely not be, uh, it will not be a bad outcome, right? Oh man, where to start? Okay, uh, one that I really like that I also really want somebody to build is an adulting vault. Is this one—

yeah, what does that mean? What's an adulting vault?

So by the time you're out of college, you have a bunch of things in your life that are like, okay, I have a credit card, I need to get my first apartment, so I'm paying rent, I have to think about insurance, I need to have all my monthly bills paid and subscriptions, I now have internet and utilities, and all these things are disparate and there's no one place where kind of all of my adulting responsibilities live. And if I compare this to a product that's existed in the past, mint.com, which I think launched back in 2007, was kind of the first thing that said, hey, your financial life and financial picture is sitting all over the place. Can I aggregate it in a really simple app to give you that one-stop shop? And I want to do that for literally everything in your adulting world. And as you get older, and as you have kids, and a mortgage, and a car, and all these other things, you have so many different places where, you know, your insurance policies live, your bills live, your financial products live, your investing accounts live, and nothing is aggregated that. And I also want it to suggest things that I'm missing. So it's like, hey, you might want to think about life insurance. Here are the best life insurance policies for somebody that fits your description. So you monetize via referral and, you know, via affiliate. But it also can let you know of like, hey, this is coming up for renewal, make sure you pay this bill and you can autopay and stuff like that.

Can I niche this down even a little bit more? So sure. Do you own a house?

I own a condo.

Um, so I just bought, uh, I know Sean did, I just bought my home recently. It was the first time I've done it. I didn't know anything about anything. I probably still don't, but they gave me— so basically what you do is, for anyone who doesn't own a home, uh, right before you agree to buy it, and then someone you hire an inspector in Texas. I paid this guy only $500. It was pretty crazy. He comes through and he pokes his head in the closets and he goes, all right, all the electrical things work. This thing looks like there's a little mold here, yada yada and I got a booklet that was pretty thick, about a 50-page to 100-page booklet. And I'm like, okay, that's kind of cool. But even 2 months after they did this thing, I'm like, wait, what is this light switch? This light switch doesn't turn anything on. What is this doing? And in the booklet, this guy has actually already addressed this, but I don't want to search this, like, this, like, actually printed out booklet. I almost switched. So you're almost talking like a life manual I would niche that down even further. I'm like, someone should just create a house manual so I can just do Ctrl+F, uh, bedroom back corner light switch. What is that? Where is that? What's that doing? Um, I almost wish I had this just for a home, and then you could layer shit on top of that, like, uh, what's the best home insurance, which I was trying to figure out. What's the best, you know, similar to that.

So I, I'm with you, uh, Elaine, on, on the adulting thing. I have two ways to contribute to this idea. One is, how do you get customers I'm a big fan of quizzes. Quizzes, I think, are extremely overlooked. I remember Michael Birch, who was my investor in my previous company, and he was the original founder of Bebo. And he basically had sold— he created a social network, he sold it to Tickle, which was a quiz company. And Tickle was like a $100 million company that was just doing quizzes like, what breed of dog are you? What city would you be if you were a city? That sort of thing. Like fun little quizzes. And then they had some quizzes that were career quizzes that would help you get jobs. And that's like where they made some money. And then when he left there, he was like, all right, I'm going to start another social network. And he's like, I know how I'm going to seed it. I'm going to make a quiz. And he created the Best Friends quiz, which was how well do you know me? And, and so I would create a quiz. I would answer a bunch of questions about me, then I would send it to my friends and say, see, take this quiz, see how well you know me. And then the results were posted on my profile and he got 1 million members in 9 days off this quiz. Oh, and their profiles were filled because because they filled in a 10-20 question, you know, questionnaire about themselves. So now they had a full profile and they had the friends. It was crazy. And so I've started to pay attention to quizzes. I think you could create the Adulting Quiz and go viral like kind of now of like, you know, what percent adult are you? Because I think most people in our generation kind of admit and acknowledge and laugh at the fact that we're like totally not adults, even though our age technically classifies us as one. And, um, and so I think you could— I think you use a quiz to get a bunch of people to just see, like, you know, do you have life insurance? Like, yes, no, I don't fucking know.

Um, you know, like, what is life insurance, right?

Like, yeah, exactly. What is life insurance? Exactly. And at the end of it, you basically give them this little infographic that's like 9 squares, and the 9 squares are like, cool, you have like enough savings for like 3 months of life if you needed it. Uh, good, you've checked that box of adulting. Um, you don't have health insurance. You know, you are an X here, click here and we can help you figure out like why you need this, how much it costs, how you should do it depending on who you are. And so I think you could kind of give people a report card and then let them click in to like solve that problem for themselves and give them the, you know, education or referrals that they need from there.

I love that idea. Also, you hit on an interesting stat that I heard before, which was validated by a couple companies I was looking at, that the longer the quiz, the more likely people will actually continue to answer and convert.

100%.

It's crazy.

I have a data point here.

Kind of when people— so for The Hustle, we get like 10,000 signups a day, and we would ask them like a question after they sign up. And we would do like, I would put 2 questions in, and then inevitably everyone at the company was like, oh, that's already too many. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, put 5. And we put 5, and then we put 10, and eventually we had like 30 questions, and it had like a 98% completion rate. Um, the, the more qu— and not only that, they actually interact with you more after they've answered the this, which is really counterintuitive. And a lot of like, particularly startup people, are like, oh, you know, I don't want to be too aggressive, yada yada yada. I'm like, no.

Well, here, here's how it works. I've done this many times. I've tested the same thing many times because, uh, anyways, I'll skip the story part, but there's an entertaining also Bebo story from Michael Birch where he was like, he put a red— I'm not skipping the story part, I'm telling the story. He put a red button on the site for 1 out of every 1,000, uh, visitors. So imagine going to Facebook and just seeing a shiny red button in the corner for the first time. And you click it. And then the whole screen just went clear and it was like, here's a cat, click the cat. And you click the cat. It's like, this is a bowl of pasta. Don't click the bowl of pasta. You clicked it. And then it's like, the cat's dead. We told you not to click the bowl of pasta. All right, click the cat, bring him back to life. It was just a stupid thing that he had 100 steps. And what he learned, he just did this for fun just to mess around. And what he learned was like, the first button, people usually click out of curiosity, but you'll lose like 30% of people who just don't click it because they're busy. They just go do something else. And then the second one, you lose another maybe like 20-ish percent. And then after that, the people who get to step 3, like 98% of them will go all the way to the end because they want to know how this ends. And then we did the same thing for a charity project where we were raising money. It was the exact same step. 30% lost on the first one, 20% lost the second one, and then 98% finished the rest. And so I've seen this several times, and everybody in your team will tell you, dude, this is too long. We shouldn't ask too many Wrong. It works. Get as much as you can because once they get to step 3, question 3, they're going to finish no matter how many questions are in the thing.

One nuance here that is 100% accurate for consumer and 100% inaccurate for B2B. For anything enterprise, shorter is better. But I think on the consumer side, I think there's two psychological things at play. One, people love talking about themselves and that's why we do all the quizzes. But the second, which I think Sam Parr was hitting on, is if I've answered 30 questions, I think what I'm going to get after that is going to be super valuable.

Right.

Because you know me now. So whatever, it's going to be personalized, can be valuable, and it totally works.

What do you do at SignalFire? I saw your title. Is it just venture partner?

I'm a partner, so I invest, but I also spend about 30% of my time leading all the growth and go-to-market programs for the portfolio. So it's kind of just me getting to exercise that muscle still. Sometimes I parachute in, parachute out, help them with some of the growth needs. I have an entire network of freelancers, contractors, agencies for everything like, hey, I need an I need an SEO content writer, or I need a TikTok video producer. And so I can matchmake on stuff like that. And we run a bunch of events and teach people how to do this stuff.

And are there like 2 or 3 partners and you're one of them? Basically, a partner just means you're one of the owners. You're one of the shot callers.

I have investment power, we'll put it that way. Yes, I think there are 5 partners at SignalFire.

So let's do ideas, Sam. Nobody cares about VC.

All right, well, no, wait, are you going somewhere with this? You're like— I'm looking through these ideas, you're like, you're very amazing. Uh, every one of these ideas is interesting. I want to go through all of them.

Um, and then have me back on, we'll do all of them, it'll be great.

Let's do one right now. Let's do Snoo for adults. What's this one? I know what the Snoo is because I have a baby. Sam doesn't. Sam, do you know what the Snoo is?

No.

Okay, I'll, I'll explain the Snoo. So there's a company called The Happiest Baby and it produces a smart bassinet Snoo is a net. And what it does is rocks the baby. It has noise. It can sense all this stuff. And people swear by this. Sean, did you guys use this thing?

Yeah, like my kid is in it right now while I do the podcast. So, you know, the only reason I could do the podcast is because the Snoo is basically babysitting my kid. So like you see this app and it'll basically say like, "Oh, Banks is calm." It's like he's sleeping in there. He's not crying. If he cries, it'll go to level 2. It'll rock more to try to get him to like chill out. So it saves you the step of going in soothing the baby.

It's a bed.

It's a bed that will make noise and rock like a human. And it's safe because there's a big problem with something called SIDS.

But is a Snoo a category or a brand?

It's a brand.

It's a brand. It's a brand. And these things are incredibly expensive. And you can only use them for a really short window of time. And so there's a whole secondary rental market and resale market for these things. But parents swear by this. So, OK, let's apply this to the broad population of human adults. We suck at sleeping, and nobody has ever rethought sleeping from a first principles perspective. I mean, first off, it kind of makes no sense that we sleep with another human in the bed, quite frankly. Like, I roll over. I grind my teeth. We have a dog in our bed, too. That kind of makes no sense. Second, I want something that is temperature controlled, that rocks me and knows my behavior, that removes all light, that removes my phone so I can't go and scroll on BuzzFeed stupid quizzes at 2 in the morning. Why has nobody rebuilt the bed for humans? And I think we have enough sensors, we have enough smart connected home products today to do this.

So I, I would have been—

I would buy this.

I would have been skeptical about this, but for 3 reasons. A, uh, I've used the Snoo and I'm like, oh, I wish I had this, like, this is great. Um, B, um, you've seen a rise in these like expensive at-home equipment, whether it's Peloton, Mirror, Tonal, like there's all these things that cost like like 8 Sleep bed, you know, like things that cost thousands of dollars that you buy to improve one small aspect of your life. Whereas if you actually, like, if you told me there was genuinely a sleep pod that I could go into that would improve my sleep by even like 20%, what's that really worth to me, right? Like, of course, this is kind of a first world problem, high class, you know, high class like product. Okay, whatever. Yeah, it is. But I think that's worth at least 5 to 10 grand, right? Because That's— it's 8 hours a night, every single night getting better, which is making me healthier, happier, you know, like more productive the next day. So I actually now believe that a product like this could exist. I never used one of those Google Nap Pods, but like, I feel like that's what those are trying to be.

I think I would totally buy it. You're spot on. It's a first world problem. But for all the people that are buying $3,000 bikes or like the $5,000 treadmill from Peloton, Right. That's the demographic here. So I want somebody to build it.

That's what Peloton should do, honestly. Like, because they're not going to find another bike. Like, even the treadmill, they're not going to find another treadmill. There's only so many of these, like, places to expand. They should go straight to the bed and, uh, and create the bed with a sleep subscription that's like the Calm sleep stories, uh, layered on top of this.

Well, make a wellness brand out of it. Health is only one piece. Sleep is a huge component of wellness. I totally agree with that.

Can you talk a little bit about subscription running shoes? Because, um, that, I mean, that interests me and I have a few opinions, but what is this?

So I'm a huge runner. I think you are too, Sam. And I also have an Apple Watch. Most people who are runners have some kind of connected device that's tracking all your steps and things like that. And you're supposed to change your running shoes every 300 to 500 miles. I have no freaking clue when my shoes have had 300 to 500 miles. I can't even tell you when I ordered them. Also, for runners, you have a brand and a style of shoe that you typically stick stick with. I don't know any people, my running friends, who mix and match. So I'm a Brooks runner, I use Brooks Adrenaline 8.5 narrow every time. I want Brooks to create a subscription for me. It hooks into my watch and my smart, my smart device. It says, hey, we're just gonna auto-order you new shoes every time you hit— like, you can pick 400, you know, 400 miles or X number of months. And it gives me a discount because it knows I'm going to be a customer for— my LTV just went up 100x because it knows I'm going to continually order. So A, they're going to get me to order more frequently. I'm going to be a super happy customer because I just get it in the mail. They can start partnering with other companies and doing these bundled subscription products. But to me, this is such an obvious product that no brand's done. You could also partner with some celebrities and make it really cool. I don't know why this doesn't exist.

Let me give you the low-tech version of this. Um, here's how you do this without the Apple Watch. Yeah, you know, like toothbrushes have the little strip, the, the little blue strip that's like, this is— this toothbrush is like been used way too much. And like, I like baby diapers have this too, the blue little streak, which tells you they peed. This is what you need on the bottom of the shoe. The bottom of the shoe needs to change colors as it gets worn out. And then so you basically have a visual indicator that you have outworn this shoe. It's time to order another. And fuck it, put the promo code for your next order under the thing. So when it wears away, it's like, it's time to reorder. Here's your code. Get your next shoe.

Here's the problem with that though. I know when my shoes are worn out. My friends know when their shoes are worn out. It's the fact that I have to go and be proactive and reorder that's the sticking point. I just want it to happen. I mean, it's like the whole Amazon button that they were trying to launch.

It's a QR code. You just hold your phone up to the shoe bottom and then it orders you the next shoe.

That I like. Anything to remove friction. I, I want all friction removed. I would love to have a package show up.

How would this make money? I mean, because like, if you're— when I hear this, I'm like, yeah, okay, cool, sounds great. But as an outsider, I'm like, I don't think I can make money doing this. Like, Brooks, why aren't you doing this?

This is for Brooks. This is not— I don't think this is an independent company.

I was excited about this. I thought you had an angle here.

Here's an idea.

You can offer this brand doing this, right? Like, correct.

You can start—

I mean, if you look, starting a shoe brand I think is like on the, on upper 5 percentile of horrible ideas.

I get targeted on social media by— and maybe I must have clicked on one at some point— but every variation of your Allbirds-type shoes. So like semi-athletic. I mean, I've probably seen 50, so it can't be that hard to make. The only way I think you do this as an independent company is you provide the picks and shovels infrastructure for every brand to do it. So you go and sell to the Brooks, to the Nikes, to the Adidas, to the Reebok. I think that's doable.

Right. Okay, let's see. Let's pick one more idea that you have on here. What's the best one that you sent in that we haven't talked about yet that you're most excited about?

This will be another fun, fun one that's kind of on the consumer side. So I have this concept called Therapunch, and I kind of need to give the backstory here because this is actually funny and involves running. So there's a nice tie-in. So like a year and a half ago, right before the pandemic, I was running in the Mission in San Francisco at like 6 in the morning, and it was an area where there was no people. I'm just kind of going and I have a green light.

Light.

I'm running through the middle of the street in the intersection. And this dude in a super beat-up, janky car comes and turns right and cuts me off and comes really close to hitting me. And I kind of jump away and gave him the, like, what are you doing, dude, look. And he rolls down his window and starts screaming out. And this is— I don't know if you want to believe this, but he's like, get out of the street, you stupid fucking bitch. And I was like, holy shit. And I'm not an aggressive person normally. But I had had a rough week. And I was kind of on edge anyways. And normally, I just turn my head and run away. But I had to take every ounce of restraint not to go and just kick the back of his car. I was so pissed. I just wanted to punch something. And as I finally got smart and ran away, I was thinking to myself, there's something going on here which made me want to go and punch his car or kick his car. And I was like, you know, everyone always tells you to go meditate, go download Calm, go sit in a quiet room. I'm like, great, that's fine. I need to punch something. And so I wanted to go punch something and then meditate. So the concept here— and I think now is an interesting time because there's so much vacant real estate is you buy up a land—

and rage. There's so much rage.

Rage. So much rage.

Don't forget that part.

So much rage.

High demand.

Well, there's also an established concept of these rage rooms, smash rooms, break rooms. The problem with these are it's very dangerous. You have to put on a suit. You can hurt yourself. There's a lot of liability. And also, there's a lot of cleanup. So this is the exact low-tech version. It's a padded room with padded walls. Punching bags, things to rip and pop. Imagine stuffed animals you could tear the heads off. And you go and you connect to a Spotify rage playlist. And there's a bunch you can choose from. You go in for 15 minutes into one of these things. And if you guys have ever done boxing, 15 minutes, you'll be exhausted.

Yeah.

So you just get it all out for 15 minutes. And then they take you to the Zen Zone for 30 minutes where they have guided meditations. And they have spa water. And you can sit and meditate. State. So you go and get it out, then you center yourself, and then you go back to work.

Sam, you're our resident, uh, rager. So, uh, how do you feel about this?

No, that would make me way too mad. Like, I'd be like, motherfucker, I don't have time to go to this fucking thing, I just want to smash this shit right now. It's— I like— I smash stuff. I, I, I like— like, I, I do break stuff.

What's the last thing you've thrown or broken out of rage?

Well, cell phone. I mean, I mean, everyone does that. Do I have my phone here?

Everyone does not do that.

I have a I've had that.

My screen is, is currently shattered. I mean, I just get angry and I'll— and I do that as well. But I, I like— and a lot of people tell you not to do that. I think it's great. Like, you're just like—

it's cathartic.

Yeah, you're just breaking a little thing that you could replace with some money and like, you're not hurting anyone.

I'll give you a quick spin on this idea because I also think that the, the timeliness— like, I don't want to book and reserve the room. By then it's all dissipated and now it's a task. I don't want to go there. So yeah, I'm with Sam that you need the instantaneous release. So the other thing I found interesting is there's a whole bunch of these alternative therapy things that I find interesting. Cryotherapy, where you go in and your neck is out of it, but your body is in this kind of like— I don't even know how low the temperature goes, but it's like this very cold, kind of like liquid nitrogen gas that's put against your body. It's supposed to be great for recovery. There's the Float franchise, which is all about floating in this saltwater bath where you're weightless and you're in this light-deprived pod and an hour goes by and you hallucinate or whatever the hell else. I don't know. Joe Rogan talks about it. I have a friend who gave me a pass to go do this once.

They're awesome. They're float tanks.

Uh-uh. Never.

Have you heard of it?

Yeah, yeah. There's one in the Mission, actually. I walk by it all the time.

I have been to that one many times.

And then there's basically a set of these kind of alternative things. And I wonder if you could create the equivalent of a gym membership that basically says, okay, instead of coming to this— like, a gym membership is a giant box that has all the heavy equipment you're not going to buy for yourself, but you can come here and you can use it. And, uh, I wonder if you could do the same if you bundled these together, where you bundled the different therapies together— sauna, steam, cryotherapy, float tank, whatever— and it's a gym with no weights, and it's a gym basically for the brain to recover, um, and to, to relax. And, uh, and you, you, you put a whole bunch of these things together, and maybe you create a different type of, uh, wellness like category.

Would you ever do them back to back? Just thinking about what those all are, would you ever go and be like, I'm gonna spend 2 hours?

Sounds intense.

I like that. What about, what about a ClassPass for that kind of stuff? Because they're pretty niche today and they're expensive. And it's also not like a gym membership where ClassPass had so many problems. I could go into that, but I was one of the earliest users and they lost so much money on me. But ultimately they were hoping, the vendors were hoping that you'd become a subscriber. But for these things, how often are you going to go to a float tank or cryo spa or whatever. So if it's more of a one-off thing and you want to try a bunch of stuff, they could actually end up making money on that.

I actually started going quite regularly. I think the difference between San Francisco and where I live now— so I lived in San Francisco for 8 years, right around the Mission— is it's like kind of a pain to get from A to B, you know, because you have to take, uh, an Uber or a bus or bike, um, although I hated biking in San Francisco. Um, now that I live in Austin, I, I'll just like— it's no big deal to like leave work at 3 and then go do the thing and come back by— and be back by 5 to get some more stuff done. Um, and I do these, uh, cryotherapy, which I don't even think does anything, but it's fun. I do the float tank. I love all that stuff. So I do think that could actually— people would do that more regularly than you think.

Yeah, if there's food, I think people go somewhat regularly, or like smoothies or something. I feel like that might work. On a side note, it's— I've looked into the economics of these things before very briefly, but maybe we should do kind of a deep dive. Uh, these cryotherapy like places and float tanks places— these guys do actually pretty well. Like if you just kind of wanted to buy essentially a high-paying job for yourself, you can get a location. You basically buy one of these machines for $3,000, $5,000, and then they print money out. I looked at the cryo stuff, and also the second one is these DEXA scan places.

Um, I love them!

They such— it's literally 1 employee and online booking, contactless payments, all this stuff. So you basically have one person who's usually— it's their place. Sometimes they have kind of a junior person who watches it while they leave for half the day. But it's very low labor, and it's just the same machine that pays itself off in the first X uses. And X can be, you know, might take 1 month, might take 3 months, might take 6 months max. But these businesses are pretty simple and can do quite well.

Have you heard of that business called Dexafit? The one— they're like guys in a van scan.

Yes, they come to you.

Yes, they park in front of like company buildings usually, and they're like, hey, come see, you know, how fat you are. And then, you know, you pay $80 and you go get scanned, or $50, you go get—

they're the best. I go, I go every 3 months. I will go every 3 months. Same. I would buy like a 10-turn pass or something like that. It was maybe $50 a turn, and you see progress. They are so awesome. It's a— I would imagine it's a pretty expensive machine, maybe $100 grand per They're really amazing. I would love to see what the revenue is. And eventually they bought a— they had a place right across the street from the Twitch studio or, you know, the studio, Sean, that we would go to. And it was like a crappy lobby with just like a CAT scan and you would sit down in there and then you're out a few minutes. I love that business. I would— I'm curious as to how they do. Elaine, you've never seen this?

I think I know what you're talking about. I've never done it. I'm curious with it. Is it telling you information you don't know? When you do it the first time, I get that that's a novelty. But if you're doing it every 3 months, 3 months, do you not know how your body has been behaving over those 3 months?

It tells you your body fat percentage, right?

But like, don't you know if it like went up this month?

Well, that's something you want to measure the progress, right? So like, for example, uh, I'm working out right now. My actual weight stays the same because I'm adding muscle, I'm losing fat. And so I'm like, fuck, this doesn't— I want my score to show the progress. I can see it in the mirror. And my trainer's like, dude, do you need this? You just look in the mirror, it's fine.

Fine.

And I'm like, yeah, that's true, but I like the science of it too. I'm like, it's $40, I think it's $45 to go get DEXA scan. And so me and my brother-in-law, we kind of made a habit out of it. And like, we're just like, okay, we're gonna go get scanned every 3 months. That's how we measure our progress. And like, you know, great, we're down 3% body fat. Like, let's do it again.

The company that we're referring to is called BodySpec. So the word body and then S-P-E-C, BodySpec.

And Sam, just so you know, it looks like the price of these range from between $16,000 and $45,000.

$50,000.

So that's not that bad.

And they're in like a Mercedes Sprinter and they have like the car wrap. So maybe $100,000 total. I think this is cool. I love this company. I don't know anything about their numbers, but I think it sounds so neat. It's so simple.

The distribution for this is also good because they can partner with gyms. So they partner with CrossFit, they partner with trainers, and they're basically like, hey, you send us a client, you know, you get $20 out of the $50 like, like scan, um, you know, for the— for every first-time customer that you send in. And so they have like kind of a built-in referral system that makes a lot of sense.

I'm actually shocked, Elaine, that you're not like bullish on this, because when I go— it sounds like Sean and I are the same— when I— it's so rewarding. Like, I'm pretty much working my ass off, literally, just to go from like 20% body fat to like 19.5%. Like, I just think about that number constantly.

I think I'm just not the target demographic at all, because I've always been extremely into fitness, but I'm intrinsically motivated.

So I don't—

I'm not that person. You know what I was going to say though? A partnership opportunity for them is FutureFit because they're already charging people $200 a month for literally a digital subscription to a virtual trainer. And you can bundle in a lot of these other services and things like that. That to me feels like the demographic because the people I know that do FutureFit are the people that care about this stuff. They want to see incremental progress.

They want to know their score constantly, and they'll I used FutureFit, so there you go. Good job.

Everyone keeps trying to get me to use it. I'm like, I don't need this. Like, I, I just— I'm very, very competitive with myself. I have a Peloton, which you can see in the back, and I've always been a huge runner. And my mom actually won this like 4 years ago, and at the beginning I didn't use it a lot. And now I've been doing a lot more cycling during the pandemic because I hate running with a mask, and I've gotten so much better at the Peloton. But I'm always trying to beat my own score. I don't need to know— I, I remove the leaderboard and stuff. I care about that, but it's, it's my own, my own score.

One of your portfolio companies is called Tempo. Sean, have you tried the Tempo?

It's awesome.

It is so awesome. It is so awesome. Have you not tried this?

I haven't tried it. You showed me the videos of you had it in your garage. You still have it?

I bought one. Okay, so they sponsored us, so I got paid money to use their machine, and then I moved and they freaking took it back. I was so mad at them. I'm like, yeah, just leave it, let me have it. They took it back after I used it, and I was like on the number one. I was at the time very, very fit into that hit stuff and I was in shape and I was like number 1 in the category and I kept working my butt off to do it. And I just bought one the other day. I think I paid $1,800. It took 8 weeks to get delivered. And this is for the listeners, it's called Tempo Fitness or something. Just Google Tempo Fit. And it's basically like Peloton but for weightlifting and for high-intensity interval training. It is so awesome, so addicting. I am building my workout routine strictly around Tempo. It has—

it's like a mirror, like the, the mirror thing. So it's freestanding, it's not like Tonal where you have to wall mount it. And it has, I think, 185 or close to 200 pounds of weights. And it's got these amazing instructors that do all kinds of these HIIT workouts. We had one of the original beta units in our office, and I was pretty much the only one that used it, but I used it all the time. I don't have room for it now, but, uh, Sean, when our office reopens, you'll have to come in and try it.

I'd love to. It sounds pretty dope. I remember Sam, uh, the video looked look cool. I would say that the actual design of the box— I don't know if you had like kind of an earlier version or what— it wasn't as slick as like what a Peloton or Mirror and whatnot looks like.

It's not entirely slick, but I actually think they're making an error. But, but it has a sensor on it, so it like track— it could tell if you're lifting the weights and it counts it for you. So it's kind of hard to cheat.

That's great.

But, but it's like a cabinet where they store the weights, and I think a lot of people actually already have the weights. So I wish they would sell it to me just so I don't have to their weights?

Well, it uses computer vision to not only count the reps, but it checks your form. So let's say you're doing a curl and you're only going 80% up, it'll call that out. Or if you're doing a lunge and your knee is going over your ankle. And so part of the weight counting involves their own weights, but all the other stuff, it's essentially creating a, like, a dot matrix of your body. So it's anonymized, but it can tell exactly what your form is. So it's like a real-time personal trainer there, plus this celebrity trainer who's doing the class for you. It's pretty freaking cool.

You gotta get one, Sean. They're good. It's, it's worth it. But there is another downside. It's $50 a month for a subscription, right?

They all are though.

I think that's crazy. That's so expensive. That is so expensive. I cannot believe that. I think it's way too expensive.

It's cheaper than a gym membership.

Yeah, I know you do that logic, yada yada yada. You got my money. I mean, I'm paying for it, but I still think it's nonsense.

For the price of a cup of coffee a day, you could transform your body.

Yeah, by the way, it's $10 a month.

So think, okay, think about the value you get from that versus essentially, in my opinion, FutureFit is paying for accountability. So you're paying $200 a month for a person on the other end to like sort of care about you.

I get it, but like, I know what this costs them. I know, like, I, I already bought this $2,000 machine, and, and like, give me a year free at least.

Um, they don't make a ton of money on the hardware part. They're making money on the subscription.

Well, look, stop using logic on me and just let me be angry.

That currency is not accepted here. We're like a vending machine.

You, you As long as you keep buying it, as long as you keep paying for it, I'm okay. I'm okay with removing logic.

No, I'm paying for it. Another great one that you guys should look at is Argata.

You guys know we're too famous now, we only use free shit that people give us. We don't pay for anything anymore. You know how it works, the more popular and rich you get, the less you pay for anything. So I, at this point, I don't pay for anything. I actually stopped giving out my address because I was getting so much free shit and I was like I was like, wait, maybe I shouldn't give out my home address to these like strangers on Twitter. So now I'm like, I'm like, no thank you. I'm gonna get one of those celebrity YouTuber PO boxes and be like, you know, just send it to my manager. Send it to my PO box.

Oh, they always say like, hey, I would love to send you X, Y, and Z, and you say yeah.

I just give them Ben's address.

Like, hey, will you share?

Right, right. I just give them Ben's address now. I'm like, give Ben all the free shit. And they're like, well, you're not in Brooklyn? I'm like, yeah, yeah, I have a house in Brooklyn.

You can send me all this stuff you don't want to, especially if anybody wants like women to test stuff. Send it to me, I'll take it.

I'm sure you're— you've got— you— I've seen your portfolio companies, they're badass. You probably have so much great stuff.

Yeah, no, follow me at zelby.substack.com. Z-E-L-B-Y. It's called 3 Things. Every Sunday I publish 3 business ideas, and they're, uh, I would say somewhat well-researched and thought through, but, uh, they're all fun and they cover pretty much every topic you can imagine. And I just talk to founders building in super random niches like chemical marketplaces, or companies that are growing the growth media for lab-grown meat. Just super random stuff, but I find it fascinating.

Like our sister from another mother.

Honestly, when I heard the podcast really early days, I was like, oh my God, these are my people.

Yeah, you're, you're great. Thank you for coming on. Um, all right, see everyone. Like I can rule the world.

Like I can rule the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like I'm on top of the world.