NEW Haircut At Home Business: Book A Barber Virtually Right Now | My First Million 05/20/2020

What's up guys, Shawn here. Sam is out today, but we got my friend Greg Eisenberg filling in. Greg is a great dude, you guys will like him a lot. He's been a founder of a couple companies, sold two of them, one to StumbleUpon, one to WeWork. He's at WeWork now, he's an investor in companies, he's a cool guy, you guys will like him a lot. He's got a real brain for designing products, so anytime there's like a social or consumer product, he's one of the best thinkers around. And I think you guys will see that. We spent the first half of the conversation talking a little bit about his background, and then the second half is we go through a bunch of random ideas he has on his, you know, notes app on his phone just for fun. So I think you guys will like it. Tweet at me, @SeanVP, tweet at Greg, let us know what you think about the episode. As always, enjoy, hope everybody's doing great out there in the quarantine. Keep hustling, building stuff, keep yourself busy with good things. All right, take care, enjoy the episode. Okay, so I should introduce you. So Greg is on the podcast. Greg is a homie from— I don't know how long I've known you, a few years at least. We, you know, I guess the world probably now knows you for your haircut website, right?

That's true.

Explain what that is. What is the URL? Do you probably need a haircut? Is that it?

Youprobablyneedahaircut.com. Yeah, we're the busiest virtual barber shop on the internet, dude.

So what happened? Okay, so people are in quarantine, they need haircuts, and how does this idea go from a little germ from a little sperm in your head to a real idea out there?

I mean, you know me, I get sort of excited about stuff that goes viral. And I was talking to a buddy of mine, he's a stylist, out of work, couldn't pay his rent. I was like, I need a haircut, I like to look good. Built the MVP and then just threw it on Product Hunt and before I knew it, it was on the Today Show, ABC, and basically the way it works is, It's pretty simple. Like, for people who need haircuts, they book an appointment, they get connected to a virtual stylist, and they could either cut their own hair or they can have a friend cut, cut their hair for you.

And so this is a dope idea. When it came out, I was like, who's behind this? I know— I feel like I know the person behind it. I didn't know it was you, but I was like, I feel like it's either you, it's Alex Tu, or it's like, you know, one of you sort of viral memers of products. Yeah, I feel like actually, in general, I've spent hours brainstorming with you before. I feel like for you to get excited about building something, it's gotta start with some emotion. Like either you think of something that makes you laugh and then you're just giggling, but you're serious about it once you start laughing. Or it's some like really sad story and you're like, okay, this is an injustice in the world I wanna go solve. But is that a fair characterization of you?

Yeah, I mean, I do like things that kind of go viral. And like for me, you probably need a haircut. I mean, I was, I told my girlfriend, I was like, I'm 100% sure this is going to go viral. And she's like, well, how do you know? How do you know? And I was like, well, like the name and, and kind of, you know, where we're at and it was the timing. Like you just seed it with a couple of journalists and, you know, throw it up on Product Hunt and like before you know it, like, I don't know, we probably had 150,000 uniques in the first 24 hours.

How many actual haircuts?

Probably more, probably over 1,000 at this point. Yeah, yeah, definitely actually more than 1,000. We have one stylist who did 200, so yeah, more than 1,000 probably.

Any public speaking thing where they're like, "Hey, can you send me like your bio?" This absolutely needs to be the first thing. You know, "I conducted over, I'm responsible for over 100,000 haircuts over the internet." And the crazy thing is that people like, actually look good.

Like I've seen—

Well, the crazy thing is you don't have a haircut right now. You're growing it out.

The crazy— try booking a haircut like this weekend. You can't. The site is busy. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm out here. I gotta make it happen for the people. I love it.

There's a reason I have this hat on because, you know, your boy butchered himself with his own 2 AM haircut with his own clippers without using your website. And you can't see my hair, so that's fine. All right, so let's give people background and then we're gonna shoot the shit as we do. Sure. Greg, first, do you remember when you became a millionaire? Do you remember the day?

Of course, you always remember the day. Tell me about the day. But I actually like— where I started actually, and I've never publicly said this, where I started, I think you might know this, where I started to actually make a little bit of money was really as a teenager doing affiliate marketing. Oh, affiliate, that's right. In like the underbelly of the internet. Yes. And not a lot of people talk about— there's a lot of actually great entrepreneurs who actually came from that area. I think Julian Smith, who you know, also was in that era as well. But I actually remember 2008, it was my— I think it was my 18th birthday and I was doing affiliate marketing. Basically, I was doing deals with the eHarmonies, the Match.coms, and Zyngas, who were like, they were willing to pay you $3, $4, $5, $6 for every install you generated for them. And back then, there was this arbitrage, I mean there's still arbitrage now, but there was this arbitrage where if you could create a landing page and cost you $1 to get someone to it, to install that game or get that lead to eHarmony, they would pay you $5. So I would just figure out kind of just some innovative ways to do it. One thing I did, which I invented, was the auto-playing video pop-under ad, which ruined the internet.

Were you desperately trying to find which tab is playing the sound?

Well, we did it for a poker company, and yeah, that's it. I remember getting like 1-2% conversions on it. This is a pop-under ad that cost like a fraction of a penny. But from that whole experience of like as a teenager kind of working in affiliate marketing, it really just taught me like what do people want.

Yes.

Because I didn't grow up poor or anything, but my parents weren't giving me money to like go and— a lot of money to like go and buy the things that I wanted. So I was like, okay, I'm going to have to go out there and do it myself. And I ended up building, you know, I put it like, okay, $100 a month on this landing page, $1,000, and it sort of grew. And you really pay attention if it's your own money. You really do pay attention. And, you know, if the difference between like a 1% conversion rate and 1.2% conversion rate is if you make $100 a day or lose $100 a day, or at bigger scales, lose $100,000 a day or gain $100,000 a day. If you realize it's around just subtle details like having a woman with red hair or have the eyes look at you in the landing page or certain copy, all these little nuanced things add up to getting people to do things on the internet.

Totally. Me and I think you know Furkan, the CTO that I had at my startup. We used to literally look for, hire for, can we find anyone who's done affiliate marketing? We were like— The people who understand those arbitrages, they actually understand how the internet works. You understand what makes people click, what drives them to actually take action, how the economics of the internet works, how to move traffic around. And that's a— probably it's not a great long-term path, but it is like a great place to sharpen your sword so that then you can do damage with like products that actually matter or like more sustainable businesses versus these kind of like, you know, moment in time arbitrages.

Yeah, I tweeted the other day actually, I was like, the people I want to hire are, if I'm building a consumer internet thing, is like ex-game developers or game product people or game marketers or ex-affiliate marketers. Those are the people that understand game dynamics, mechanics, social mechanics, how to build like, you know, game companies have very sophisticated marketing funnels and understand the flow very well. And the same with affiliate marketers, like those are the people that have been there, done that. That are, that are probably undervalued in the market.

Yeah, and then you, you went on, you did a bunch of other things. You did an agency that was kind of like building websites for big, big brand, bigger brands.

Yes.

Then you did— by the way, we had James Altucher on the last one and he said he did the same thing basically. That was kind of his first hit was like making AmericanExpress.com or like whatever, those websites.

Well, yeah, after, after I— the affiliate marketing, I mean, no one's lower on the totem pole in terms of status and reputation than in domainers and affiliate marketers. So I was just like, how do I gain credibility? So got into the agency game and said I would only work with the top clients, which is all status, all status, like 100%.

So did you have like status symbols? Do you have like dope car or anything like that? Did you do anything to play the status game?

I mean, not, not. I mean, I feel like for us, like internet entrepreneurs, like that's not even like the status. Like the status isn't dope cars or dope like houses. I feel like it's It's more about—

Do you have a Clubhouse invite or not?

Yeah, exactly. That's whatever's cool at the moment. So yeah, I ended up doing this agency. It was called Stress Limit Design. We ended up doing high-profile projects like the TechCrunch redesign, which was in 2010, which was a big deal. And that spawned a lot of business. And then I think you had Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny, on the show, we had a similar model where we took a percentage of our revenue and we built our own startups. And the startups was really all around this idea around building mostly community. So we built like start a vertical. So we did like startcooking.com, which was like at the time the largest video cooking site on the internet. Things in the finance space, a company called Wall Street Survivor, which became the most popular financial education. And stock market simulator on the internet. And just like, how do you look at a vertical and build something that they really want and then wrap around community?

Yep.

So did that. And then I realized I wanted to go do something. I wanted to do the whole San Francisco kind of like, I was living in Montreal, Canada at the time. I'm like, I wanna go do the whole like, this is like post-Social Network. Yeah. Right around then. Probably when it came out in 2012 maybe.

And what did you think was hot shit back then? Were you like reading certain blogs? Was it Twitter? Was it The Social Network, the movie? What was hot shit? 'Cause I literally, 2012 is when I moved to San Francisco too. And my journey was like, I was starting like a restaurant. I started, I was trying to start the Chipotle of sushi at the time, which ended up becoming this like cloud kitchen. And then some, you know, mentor gave me the book, The Lean Startup, and I was like, oh shit. Yes, we should test if there's demand before we pour everything into this and sign personal guarantees for this lease. And, um, that led me to Paul Graham's essays. And I was like, oh, this guy, this Paul Graham guy, this is the shit. I don't know why his website looks like this, but this is amazing. And so then I started to like, you know, drink the Kool-Aid of Silicon Valley. And I was just, I picked up and moved from Australia just off of the Kool-Aid. I changed my phone number. I was like, here's a San Francisco phone number. That means I'm in, I'm committed. And then I moved. So what were you, What got you hooked?

I mean, I'm like a product designer, so like for me it was really— and I love social apps, and so for me it was really like the path, you know, that was like so cool back then, you know. It was, yeah. You remember Path? Yeah. So yeah, for those who don't remember, it was like kind of a, you know, it was based on this idea around Dunbar's number, which is like a person only really has 150 relationships, so like what if you designed a social network around 150 people, like private. And it was just super well designed and beautiful, and they kind of were like way ahead of their time. Like Danny Tran invented like reactions and stuff like that.

Right.

And I just like remember looking at a lot of like those people, like the Digg guys, the StumbleUpon guys, and just being like, I mean, you needed to be there. You needed to be there. And you know, even if you took quick trips, it just didn't feel There was something special going on in that era. So, came down—

You're speaking past tense. You still think that's true or that's not true anymore?

I mean, I think it's— for me, I think like Bay Area is like very much— I mean, listen, it's a wonderful place, but I think for most people, it's very much like— I look at it like a college experience. Like if you're not from there, it's like you go there for 6, 8, 10 years. You do your stint. You learn as much as possible, you build your network, and then you bring it to wherever you're from or whatever major city that you live near. Are you still in SF?

Where do you live now?

No, I live in New York City now.

Okay, nice.

Yeah.

Did you sell your place here or what?

Yeah, it's gone.

Greg had this fat house here in San Francisco. It was awesome. It was a great little place.

I mean, that was a crazy— that was like a community. It wasn't even— it was my place, but it was a community place. We threw so many events there, and it was— you came to some.

It was like a coworking space if instead of working, you just partied there. It was like a co-partying space.

It was wonderful. It was awesome. I do miss it. So yeah, I think that's what drew me to San Francisco. And I started something called 5by, which basically took a look at all— integrated with all the video popular apps like YouTube and Vimeo and all these sort of sources. And we built a beautiful curation layer on top of it so that when you press the funny button, you'd actually videos that would make you laugh. We sold that to StumbleUpon, which is Garrett Camp's company, which at the time was one of the largest social apps by referring traffic.

You ended up being within reach of being able to invest in Uber. Yeah. Right? Because you knew Garrett. Do you remember the first time you heard that he was doing this Uber thing?

I mean, I don't remember exactly, but I remember when I met him. Uber was a thing, it wasn't obviously what it is today, but I definitely wasn't like, "Hey, take my money." I think, but I guess you live and you learn. You live and you learn. I have a friend who Garrett pitched him, and he was in New York City. This is one of the smartest guys I know. Garrett pitched him on the seed round of Uber, and this is in Manhattan. He was just like, Garrett, I don't know what you're thinking about, man. People aren't going to press a button and a car is going to come. You raise your hand, look at me. He raises his hand, a car comes. Right, watch this. Watch this, bam. It's about creating 10x better product. This isn't 10x, quote unquote.

Yeah, that's true. In New York it actually wasn't, right?

It wasn't.

A whole bunch of other places it was, right? It's like people now with crypto, they're like, oh, watch this, credit card, boom, paid for coffee, I'm done. Uh, you know, look at this bank, you know, don't need to worry about my money. It's like, well, yeah, but that's not the experience for most people in most of the world. And so maybe this doesn't solve your problem, but it's going to solve somebody's.

Exactly. So are you a crypto guy? Am I a crypto guy? I, um, I have some crypto. I— not enough, but I have some crypto. I dabble. I mean, my whole thing is like everyone should have 2 to 5% of their net worth in crypto as a hedge, right?

I calculated the other day, I think I'm at 9%, um, because I was like, am I going a little too crazy with this? But then I was like, no, no, it's okay, it's at 9%. That's, that's except it's in the acceptable range.

I'm at 7.5%. But it also grows, right?

As it grows, the thing is, are you going to sell off? No. No. Yeah, not going to sell off.

We'll see if this ages well, this podcast.

Yeah, exactly. The other thing is pay to learn, in a way. It's like, dude, OK, this is interesting. I need to get in the game. I need to get a little bit of skin in the game just to be— if not driving things in that space, but at least I'm in the passenger seat or the back seat or the trunk. I'm involved in the journey of where that's going by putting a little bit of skin in the game. I highly recommend that too because that's been my approach with a lot of things now is just pay to learn.

Right. Yeah, I think like for me, like I learn best when I'm just like pushed into the ground. Just like push me into the arena and like listen, like I've lost a lot of opportunity and I've learned a lot of things. You just have to assume that you're in it for the long game and like life is long hopefully and that you have enough— it's all about at-bats. It's like getting at bat, trying different things, you know, build good relationships. In the end, you'll be fine if you learn and if you have a lot of at-bats.

All right. This episode is brought to you by SuperSide. All right. So here's the deal. I'm incredibly impatient, like horribly, horribly impatient. And if I get an idea at midnight, by 8:00 AM the next day, I want it done. You know, but that's really hard because if something needs to be designed, where am I going to find a designer at midnight to try to make this thing, bring it to life. Um, so, you know, I don't think I'm alone. Other startups, even huge companies, need design help fast, and they just don't have the internal resources or expertise to get it done. So how do you get reliable design done without dealing with expensive agencies and lots of freelancers? You use Superside. That's our sponsor for this week. Just go to superside.com/mfm and tell them what you want. They have a team of designers that can get it done fast. You know, they are 20 times faster than hiring a designer and 50% more affordable than a traditional agency. So if you need high-quality design done fast, try Superside. Lots of fast-growing teams that are stretched are using them already. Check them out, superside.com/mfm. I've used them before, I love them. Check it out.

So we sold the business to StumbleUpon, um, ran it as an independent unit and sort of helped out StumbleUpon as well. Um, left, grew that to like one of the fastest growing video discovery apps at the time. Left in 2015-ish and started Islands, which was based on this thesis around group chat is the new social network, and it was gonna verticalize, and that you'd have a place to talk with your workplace friends, that became Slack, a place to talk with your gamer friends, that became places like Discord. And we focused on just the college market. So raised a couple million bucks on the idea, and away we went.

And then what's your story on how that ended up?

So, um, the story is we sold the business to WeWork in May 2019. Um, and I would have loved to have continued building it out. It, you know, it, it had amazing— it had a lot of really good metrics. Like the daily active users would send between 30 and 50 messages every single day. Weekly active users would open the app 47 times per week, the average user would invite 2.1 people, it was a beautiful product, people loved it. So it had like engagement, it had retention, and retention was 50% 45-day. So like, that's too, you know, it's like pretty damn good for a social app, above what you normally see. But like when I went out in the market to raise money, I wanted to raise a lot of money. And the reason I wanted to raise it is because we were seeing 5 to 25% penetration on every school we launched at within a couple of weeks. And we had all these metrics. So it was just like, hey, give us money so we can scale this to every college in the United States. But at the time, this is around Facebook antitrust type stuff. Twitter wasn't really like, you know, weren't innovating that much, or they had a lot of like, kind of like health of the product that they were doing. Snapchat, the stock was at $5.90, like social was kind of like, and Houseparty was flat. You know, social was kind of like, no one wanted to look at it, you know? And I could have raised $2, $3, $4 million to continue it, but like, I was kind of like, I'm very much, and you are too, like very much like a go big or go home.

Yeah.

And I just figured, yeah, let's find a good home for it.

So you went home. I went home.

Okay, gotcha.

All right, so tell me what's got your interest now. So what are you doing day-to-day basis nowadays?

So I am the head of product at WeWork, which is awesome, an interesting place to be. I'm a co-founder of a product studio called Late Checkout, which spun up the "you probably need a haircut" idea, among other ideas, which is kind of a reincarnation of what we had at Stress Limit. It's part agency, part, part product studio. I've been an advisor for the last year and a half or 2 years for TikTok, which has been amazing to see because they've obviously grown tremendously. Um, and so I've been keeping busy.

Yeah.

Okay.

Nice. Um, so people, when they listen to this, what they like to hear about is they like to meet interesting people. So I think that's check. Uh, and then the second part is the people who are listening are either current entrepreneurs in the market doing something, or they're people who have a job or thinking about making the shift, or they're college students thinking about making the leap. And, um, You know, one of the things that we do a lot of is we sort of, you know, guess and check or sort of pontificate on, you know, why doesn't somebody solve this problem? Or wouldn't it be cool if you did this? Or hey, that thing's working, what if you applied it in this other way? And so I'm curious, do you have— I don't know, do you have like in your phone, do you have like a notes app of like startup ideas, half-baked startup ideas?

Yeah, I have probably— there's probably over 100 ideas here. I thought what might be fun, because you mentioned that just before, you're like, oh hey, like, do you have any ideas? I have a notes file. I can literally just like— Yeah, let's do it. We can play a game where I just go like this and just spin the wheel. Spin the wheel?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, pulling it up. All right. Okay, some of them are like you had a couple of glasses of wine.

No, no, no, I understand, I understand.

All right, Metamucil for millennials.

Okay, what about Metamucil does what? It's rehydrating or it's like diarrhea or what is it?

Fiber, fiber.

Fiber, okay.

So, I think the genesis of this one was, I think I love subscription-based businesses. I love businesses that are repeatable. People who take Metamucil take it every day mostly to get their routine intact.

Yeah, to be routine. Yeah.

A lot of brands right now are just being rethought of with obviously as D2C with a nice brand. Brand. Like, I don't connect with Metamucil, I'll tell you that.

Not at all.

Yes. You know, maybe it's just so— it's like, that's like a no-brainer.

Yeah, I like that one. In fact, when I did, I, I did a podcast with the guy from— so who created Soylent, and he was like, yeah, like, you know, part of the original thesis was kind of like the, um, you know, I forgot what the other shake is called. Ensure. Uh, it's like Ensure for millennials. Um, and they don't, they don't market it that way, but they were thinking about it that way, uh, early on. And so Might have used another one. All right, I like it. I'll give that a solid 9 out of 10, actually. You came out hot with that one.

All right, spin again.

Yes, all right.

Uh, secondopinion.com. When you need a second opinion on literally anything.

Okay, these are experts giving you opinions or what?

I don't know, man. Like, being an adult is hard, right? And we have to deal with it, and sometimes we need relationship advice, sometimes we need I don't know how to fix something. Like, you know, what I've learned from You Probably Need a Haircut actually is that people are actually open to getting help and they'll pay for it.

Right.

And so it's like, imagine you're having like a big fight with your girlfriend and you want to tell someone, but you want an unbiased opinion. You need a second opinion based on the text that you're going to say.

Right.

Secondopinion.com, here to help.

Great domain if you could get it. Um, okay. I like this. What, what vertical would be the best? That's kind of where this gets interesting to me. Cause like, where would you start? Start? And, you know, maybe you actually just end there because it's— it's— yeah, you specialize. Uh, but if nothing else, you start with one where people really want this or people really have this problem. So, so where could it— where could it be hot?

So a good framework for thinking about, like, how to think about consumer, like, internet products is, like, what is the thing that's going to get a lot of media attention? Because you want free customers, and you also Yeah, you want free customers and also word of mouth is the best customer anyways. So like, what's something, like why don't you just reverse engineer what would be a good PR story? Like that's just one way to look at like MVP, right? It's like what's the minimal viable press release or—

So somebody was doing this like for dating profiles, which especially as Tinder got hot, that was the time where somebody was like, oh my God, there's Tinder coaches. They'll give you an objective opinion on your profile and how you're coming across. And you pay for it. And that's like actually a thing. And that worked when— and that worked when there's like kind of the wave of internet, you know, Tinder itself was kind of newsworthy. And you could piggyback off that in the way that you guys sort of piggybacked off of, you know, all the sort of quarantine woes with the— you probably need a haircut. So you'd probably want to find something that is— people are already talking about, and then you sort of, you offer the second opinion around that space.

Exactly. So, you know, maybe, yeah. So one idea is like maybe you start with like relationship, like relationship advice, because that's like evergreen, that's always. And, but then you launch like the viral piece of it.

Should I get a divorce.com?

Or I was even thinking more on top, like you have to answer the why now. And the why now is like a lot of like single people are like, should I go on a date with this person, like an in-person date, less than 6 feet, let's say? Or should I make out with Johnny? And then you press the button and it's like, no, or something like that. Like, so I think like that's where it comes down to like, yeah, like building little games, building little like nuanced things that like surprise people, delight people, people want to write about.

Okay, I love it. Spin again. Uh, this is kind of like, I'm going to give that one a 6.5 out of 10.

Yeah. This is maybe even a 3.5 out of 10, but like we're picking random ones here.

Yeah.

TextMeASecret.com. And this is, I didn't do a full spin, so I guess it was related to SecondOpinion.com, but like we all have secrets and a lot of the time we want to like talk about those, get them off our chest, get them off our chest. So this is a service that does that. Here's another one.

Oh, I like that idea. So, so here's, here's what I'm imagining. I get matched with someone and it tells me a little bit about them. 29 years old, male, San Francisco, rich. And then he basically— but I don't know more than that. And then they open up and you can open up, or you can sort of roulette wheel get to the next person. It's a secret network of telling secrets to each other.

Yeah, man.

The business model is blackmail. It's genius.

We'll make millions.

We'll make millions. Exactly. I'm doing the money burns, you know, evil, evil hands.

Next idea, which is a bit more the opposite of this idea, more, you know, nice for the world, is a wash and fold for low-income families. So I— a lot of people, especially in New York City, but, you know, everywhere in the world in cities, spend a lot of time in laundromats. And if you're a working mom or working dad, like, you know, sitting for 2-3 hours at a laundromat is like— take— is a lot of unproductive time that you could either be spending with your children, um, or you could be like doing a side hustle or whatever it is, right? So like, how do you like do wash and fold and just take that out of the equation so that they can focus on, uh, what it is they want to be doing.

And so this is just philanthropic. It's like, uh, uh, it will be taken care of for you. We're going to give back hours of productivity to the people who— people who need it.

Yes, absolutely. Okay, here's another one. Um, Spotify but for work in progress. It's called Watercolors. So the whole idea here is Okay, life is messy and there's a reason why there's an eraser at the end of a pencil. But like when you go on Spotify, it's all these like highly curated, like I've produced this piece of content for the last 6 years and this is, you know, here it is. What if artists can put like just like little pieces of work that are like unfinished and create almost like a SoundCloud type website or app. And it's called— yeah, what did I call it? Watercolors? I don't know why I called it Watercolors, but that's the idea.

So for the unfinished thing, would it be like a Dribbble where it's like a shot? It's like 10 seconds of the song. It's not the whole thing raw. It's a snippet that you like.

Yeah, it could be whatever. Whatever the artist decides. So if the artist decides they want to do a like 10-second thing, great. This is like, here, check this riff. But I just think that there's a whole dimension of music that we're not exploring. And I also think that, um, it's just kind of like, I want to see more apps, I want to see more websites where it's fine to put unfinished work. I think that's a part of the creative process.

Yes.

And I think that, um, it's a good message that we should be spreading.

Yeah, and I think stories is an awesome format for unfinished things. Like, just like stories got people to share little raw moments of their life because they're like, look, it gets— it's gone after 24 hours. I feel like if you can make it ephemeral, then more people— the question really is, why don't people share more unfinished work? And then you wouldn't work backwards from that, like, well, here's my objection, here's my hesitation, here's what I'm worried about. And then you could figure out product design that will solve those problems.

Well, yeah, I think like to talk to, to speak to that, I think, you know, artists, and I include myself as an artist because I'm a product designer, is like, we don't, we, we like to show our best work, right? So like putting unfinished work isn't quote unquote our best work. So I think like a part of this is like edu— you know, that's a big challenge with this one, but I think like educating the artist around like, it's okay. Like, It's cool. And in fact, if you're like an artist, hundreds of thousands of followers or even like 20— like if you just have like 1,000 really engaged people, like they want to interact. Like I know this one artist, he has 2,000 followers, but like he posts on stories like little unfinished things and I'm like, "Post more of this." Right.

Yeah, I'm with you. I used to call it working in public and then somebody sent me this link. I think Jessica Livingston or somebody was calling it. Working with the garage door open. I don't know who I was reading, but they were saying like, imagine your startup, you know, you're starting in a garage, but what if you had the garage door rolled open? And like, what are the sort of serendipitous benefits you could have of putting your work out there in public?

Mm-hmm. Another— you want one more? You want a couple more?

Yes, yes.

I get— we can literally do this for hours. Um, this is just a concept, so like I just wrote You know what are cool? Ideas that take something free and then you charge for them. Like, and then I put IG water, like water bottles. If you think of water bottles, like no one was charging for water until some, someone was like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if like you can transport this water and like we would sell it and then we can have like a luxury brand and like you can have Evian and it's gonna be from France. And then there's this whole new category, like new categories. The founder of Gumroad tweeted the other day, he was just like, do you want to make $10 an hour? Do you see that tweet? No, I didn't. You want to make like $10 an hour, like go work for some— someone. You want to make $100 an hour, like charge companies or something like that. I'm butchering it here, but if you want to make $1,000, like $1,000 an hour— the point is, it was like, you want to make $10,000 an hour, create, create a new category and be like the leader of the new category. And I think like I'm always interested in like new categories like virtual, you know, barbershop, new category. Like, yeah, it may not work, but it might work. And if it works, it's gonna work big. Uber, new category. Like, it's really just like a new on-demand, like using technology to bring a car to you, like new category, like boom.

Yeah, for sure. Um, so what's something that's free that could be, uh, could be charged for? So for example, uh, water is a good example. You know, when you first said that, my brain was like, oh, air. But actually, air is also charged for air purifiers, diffusers, things like that, humidifiers. There's, there's ways that people have found a way to essentially charge for air in a way. They're processing it, but they're doing it. Um, what else is free that could be charged for? So content is—

I mean, or, or put another way, like, what are things that we take for granted as human beings that we can charge for? And that opens up like a whole other set of products and services.

And those are hard because those are blind spots, right? You have to actually think hard because they are just embedded in the world. You don't even realize that they're sticking out because they're— you take them for granted by definition.

Absolutely. And that's why, like, I had— I was— before we were chatting, I actually— someone called me and was like, Greg, where do you, where do you see like the consumer internet going? And I was like, it's— this stuff comes out of nowhere. The stuff literally comes out of nowhere. There's like, you can look back in hindsight and be like, oh yeah, like we can connect the dots for these reasons. But I think like the dots are actually pretty messy to connect if we actually look at it. And I think like the best actually consumer businesses are kind of like somewhat random. They're somewhat random. It's based on like an entrepreneur just like being obsessed with like, like I, Ben Rubin, for example, the founder of Houseparty, he's an architect. He, thinks of, you know, house party is these rooms, sort of physical space, you know, digital representations of these physical spaces. The guy's like spent years being, you know, studying to be an architect and obsessing his like entire teenage years about like presence and what that means. So like, it's not because that in like 2016 or whatever, 2015, like the live video was like important, why, you know, it was like, no, the guy's literally been like thinking about it forever and he's like the expert in the world on it.

Have you ever seen— there's this video of Evan Spiegel from Snapchat. He's in a kitchen and he's explaining Snapchat on like, you know, like a notebook, just like a notepad of paper, and he's got like, you know, he flips it 3 times. It's like those are his slides essentially. Have you seen this video?

I have. It's actually— everyone should watch that. Everybody should watch this video because it's He's taking— when you go through that, it's— he, like, I've never met him, but he's such a— like, you just realize that he's amazing because he's able to distill a really quote-unquote complicated sort of— like, he just makes it so simple. And I think the beauty of it is like everyone on his team could look at that and like, oh yeah, then they repeat it to other people. Yeah, what's Snapchat? Oh, it's so hard to use. No, actually, it's so simple.

Right, exactly. Yeah, the video, the video is amazing. Even like, I just remember one detail in it, uh, on the product design. He's like, yeah, so he explains first, you know, why, um, why, you know, it opens up to the camera so you could take a photo. And it's meant to be— he's like, basically, photos today are thought of as memories. You take a photo and you're stashing it away for essentially your, your keepsake. He's like, but we use photos for communication. Uh, we just think if you send somebody a photo It's a great way to communicate, you know, what you're doing, how you're feeling. If you take a photo of your face, it's, you know, it's better than typing in many ways. He's like, first Snapchat is just using photos and videos for communication, not for memories. It's like, boom, insight one. Insight two, he's like, and then we created this thing called Stories. And he's like, uh, for Stories, you know what we wanted to do? He's like, every social network is reverse chronological. So you open up your feed and you see sort of the latest thing first. He's like, but that's not how our brains are really wired. You know, we communicate through story, and that's what we remember. And so, you know, when you click on a Snapchat story, it starts from beginning, then it goes middle and end. And it sounds like obviously, duh, but that was counterintuitive. Twitter was reverse chronological, Instagram was reverse chronological, Facebook was reverse chronological, your email was reverse chronological. And so that was the, you know, with stories, he's like, when you do it beginning, middle, end, you can, you know, you're— when somebody clicks your thing, they're going to experience it the way you are wanting to tell that story. And, um, I was like, oh, okay, guy's a genius. Like, that's what that is. It's, uh, taking complicated things, making them simple, or taking things that seem simple on the surface and showing how much is actually below the surface, how much thought went into crafting that simple experience. Yeah, I think what I like about that is like he starts with the key insight Well, it's, you know, pictures worth a thousand words is one way of looking at it. So communicating through photos is a richer way of communicating than through text or calling somebody, right? And so great. And people do do this, and that's sort of like the immediate hater is, well, I can just— I can go to iMessage, I can upload a photo, and then I can hit send, and I can send that to you. And then, so, so the first insight is, um, people use photos for memories. They should use it for— they, you know, it would— it's a really effective way to communicate. That's the insight. And then he changed the how, which was like, well, what if we reduced the friction to zero? So like, yeah, you could open up iMessage, click your friend's name, click the camera button, click the gallery button, find the photo, then hit send, and then they get it. And like, then they view it. Um, or you open up our app, the camera's already open, you push, you know, you take the photo and then you send it to as many friends as you want, one-to-many, and like, boom, it was done. And so they changed the how, lowered the friction of getting people to do what they already wanted to do.

Right, so I think it starts with the key insight. Next it goes to like, what is the community that has a burning need for this? Like, instead of like, a lot of, you know, a mistake a lot of people make is they create software and then they find the community versus like finding the community and then building the software.

Right.

So like, you know, with this particular key insight, the way it relates to the community, I mean Snapchat started off in high schools in Los Angeles. At like preppy, preppy, preppy, preppy, you know, $50,000 a year high schools. And these people were sending, you know, their kids, they're sending like naked pictures, they're sending pictures of drugs, they're sending things that their parents don't want them to see, or just like making, or just basically things that their parents don't want to see.

So actually, we should change one thing. The unique insight wasn't just that they use it for communication, it's that when photos stick around forever, people, you know, it's so hesitant to share. It sucks. And so there's a whole bunch of things we want to share that we don't want to stick around forever. And so that ephemerality was the, was sort of the key mechanic.

So second, second piece, burning, you know, what is the burning need for the community? And then third, I think, is like, okay, how? Like, what is the— okay, now you, you want to build software. Now explain to me how that ladders up to 1 and 2, and why this is the most beautiful and the fastest. And, you know, and then if you have those 3, like, forget decks, forget like business plans, like just show me 1, 2, and 3. And if you show me 1, 2, and 3, like the market for, you know, when people looked at Uber initially, people were like, on-demand black cars, San Francisco? Come on.

Right.

That's a small market. What are you talking about? I know, I know people who did that. And it's like, yeah, like, but sometimes small markets— you can't always pick a really big market. Sometimes those small markets actually expand to be new categories in really big markets. So I think you got to play the field. I think you got to also, you got to look at small, you got to look at medium, and look at large. And I don't think that if the market is small, you should be like, I can't do this.

Right. And I guess if we're being honest with Snapchat, they didn't realize the high school was the community that they, that would need this the most. Because I think what ended up happening was they had it, they built it while they're in school, summer hit, usage was pretty flat. They were thinking like, oh, college kids will want to do this, which ended up being true. College kids did want to use it to send photos from parties and whatnot, photos you don't want to stick around forever. And then somebody, you know, introduced it to their niece or somebody, something like that. And basically in the, in the school, I think they were using it am I right? on iPads to send sort of in-classroom iPads to send messages to each other across classrooms or whatever, and the teachers couldn't catch it basically because the message destroyed, burn after reading essentially. Do I have the history correct there?

Yeah, that's it. That's it.

And then with Uber, same thing where I think they also probably thought it was a small market because neither Garrett nor Travis ran the company initially, right? They hired a guy, "Hey, guy off Twitter wants to run this thing? Sure, come on over." And he became a billionaire. But like, I think if they knew what Uber becomes, they probably run it from day one themselves. I think they sort of observed over time, holy shit, there's a lot of pull here, and then this could go even further. And so, you know, it progressively stacked up from there.

I agree. And I think like, for the people listening, I think it's important to like, when you're thinking about what do you want to spend your time doing, think about like, what have you spent your time doing? Like, what have you spent your life doing? And why do you have like, this unique advantage or these, you know, what are some key insights that you can have about the world that you could—

So what's the answer for you?

I mean, I have a lot. I've had, you know, I think every person has had unique insights. Like, for example, like, or unique backgrounds. Like, my family used to own, like, store, you know, stores in Quebec for, I don't know, 100 years. And I grew up, and because of that, like, every Saturday my mom would drop me off at the mall where my dad's store was, and I spent a lot of time in a mall, frankly, because that's— my mom was there, my dad was there, and my dad was working. So I kind of like walked around, I got to know them all really well, and I learned— I have a unique perspective on the world in terms of like commerce, in terms of like what does the mall even represent as like a meeting point for people to like You know, young people and old people and why are they there? And like, what are the types of restaurants there? Why is there a restaurant? Why is the food court here? Like, why are things, you know, how are things merchandised? You know, I think one of the big reasons I became a product designer was because I saw that, you know, if you put like a product by, like, I remember like, yeah, basically like if you put products like near, you know, the lineup, like people will buy them. And I was like, "Wow." Like the UI/UX, you know, the interface/user experience of the physical world is a real thing and that just led me to digital.

Right. Yeah, for sure. So, I like that. Basically, there's one school of thought and I think this is the Paul Graham school of thought. This is where I cribbed this idea from, but he basically says, "If you want to invent the future, just live in the future and then invent what's missing." And it's not sort of this crazy thing. It's like back to this— there's some quote where it's like, if you want to paint the perfect painting, become perfect and then just paint. But the idea is like, if you already do something in your lifestyle that is unusual, that is sort of forward-thinking in some way— maybe you're somebody who doesn't own your house, you, you rent, and you rent your car and you rent everything— then the sharing economy is quite obvious to you, right? If you go and do couch surfing and you think that's normal, Airbnb is normal, is a normal idea for you, even though it's abnormal to others, but to you, you're like, no, I live in this future where this is true, right? I push button and my groceries appear. Not everybody does that today, but I live in that future where that exists, and I'm going to sort of enable that for more people, right? And so one way of looking at it is, what are things that are normal to you? It's normal to me to record something and have hundreds of thousands of people I've never met listen to me in their earballs every morning while they commute to work, and they feel like they know me. That's a normal thing for me but not for most, but like maybe there's something that I could sort of, um, make that— make that— make my normal normal for others. Um, so that's one way of thinking about it. And what you said is sort of the, the counter to that, or the like complement to that, which is, um, you know, don't try to get interested in sort of new things to try to create a company. Look at what you're already interested in, the life you've already lived, and there's embedded insights and domain expertise and nuance that you understand because you live that way. And then think, how do I start something that leverages those insights and that experience that I've already had?

Yeah, and be mindful of the fact like, oh hey, like why am I so— why do I love this piece? Like why do I love spending time at the mall? Or like why do I love looking at like how things are merchandised and stuff like that and being like, wow, like I have an eye for that. And let your imagination go wild and be like, "Oh, you know, it would be cool if you could do this. You know, like, what if you could do that?" And then that's when you start like, "Oh yeah, wouldn't it be cool if you can like create that something?" And that's when a business is created to fill that void.

And what are some of the most interesting either products or startups you've seen, invested in, you noticed existing things, what are some of the most interesting things that have caught your eye lately?

So I'm just gonna like pull up my phone. There's an app, have you— I was playing with it today, it's called It's Me. Do you know It's Me?

No, is this avatar app?

Yes.

Okay, I think I had it before but I forgot what it is.

Yeah, so it started— it recently started to kind of take off, but the way it works is you log in with Snapchat and pulls your Bimoji and you say your age, if you want to meet with like girls or guys or both, and it chat roulette style, like you press a button, it connects you to someone. It says a bit about like where they're from, who they are, and you see the avatar talk. So you're like, you're talking, but you see yourself as an avatar. Yep. And I think what I find You know, like, what is the key insight there? Is that like, man, like being, you know, for a lot of people, like being in a physical form, be it even on like a Zoom or FaceTime or, you know, literally physical is tough for people.

Yeah.

And having that like wall is nice as like an icebreaker to eventually get you to meet in person, et cetera.

I like that. Let me connect that to the last idea. So when I first started working in this kind of Twitch ecosystem, the live streaming ecosystem, I saw this one guy. His name's Manny. I think his handle is like TheOneManny or something like that. And Manny streams on Twitch, but he's a dog. He's not actually a dog. He's a guy, but his avatar is a dog. And so he's one of the few Twitch people who their little webcam area is not themselves. It's a, it's a dog that he uses this you know, obscure app, or it got— I think it might have got bought by now, but it's called FaceRig at the time. Um, so FaceRig was this obscure app. You have to have a Windows machine, go on Steam, download FaceRig, pay $20 for FaceRig, then you get the dog, and the dog will mimic your head movements and your mouth movements while you're streaming. And so for him, he was like, oh yeah, this is way more comfortable for me than putting my own real face out there as the, like, kind of the show. And And so I saw that and then I tried it and I was like, wow, that really does make me feel way less anxious about kind of like performing. If I, if I just have this little, you know, goofy looking dog as me instead of me. And so that's another one where it's like, okay, it took today, it took a lot of extra work. You had to go find this app, download it, pay money, blah, blah, blah, set it up on a PC. But once you've experienced the magic at the end of that, you're like, okay, magic is here. Now can I make this way less friction? I've, I've lived in the future. I, I saw what life is like. And now I'm going to bring that back to the present and make it accessible to more people. It sounds like these guys and gals who are building this app might have done that. They might have made it way simpler for somebody to have that same experience.

Yeah, absolutely. It's simple. It's fast and magical. I think what I like about it and what I like about your story actually is that like that dude was like— he was unique and he was like, yeah, I'm going to do this. I don't care what people think. Think, like, this is what I'm gonna do. And he like pushed the envelope and did something weird. And it turns out like weird things are actually like head-turners, right? And like head-turners are actually create word of mouth, and word of mouth actually creates audience and creates buzz and creates all these things. So like same with Snapchat, right? Like, and it's obvious now that like a message would disappear, a photo would disappear, a video would disappear, but at the time like No one— that didn't exist. It's a new concept. So like, people, like, you know, listeners, like, tap into that, like, uniqueness about yourself and don't be afraid to do it. Because who knows, you might be on the verge of a Snapchat or something like that.

And people will doubt it. There's a reason my Snapchat handle is still SVP Test, because I was like, this app ain't going nowhere, right? Like, I don't have to worry about making a real handle here. I'll just do this test account because I just want to try this silly fad. This will be gone in a month. Of course, famous last words.

Absolutely.

Let me give you an idea that's sort of like that. My friend Damien, he's the founder of a company called Doodill. Have you ever heard of this?

I haven't.

It's a British-based company. Doodill as in due diligence. Basically, they surface private company information. In a way that's— I think the EU has different laws of what you need to disclose. He can provide revenue information, employee information, so you can get a lot more information about companies there. He built this platform. FinTech guy doing FinTech things. It's a super valuable company. I think it might be a billion-dollar company. Anyway, he did that. The other day, I see him on Facebook, and he posts, "Hey, I've left, and I was thinking about my next thing, so I came up with this new thing called Batelle. And I was like, oh shit, what's Batelle? Is this like some neobank? Is this— you know, what is this new fintech product? He's like, it's not fintech, it's a remote sleep school for parents. And basically, uh, he's like, I met this woman and what she does is she teaches parents how to put their baby to sleep, um, and, you know, so they get a good night's sleep and the parents aren't up all night feeding every 2 hours and whatnot. And, uh, she doesn't use what's called the cry it out method, which is the the normal way you do this, but it's like really hard on the parents to fight through and let their kid cry it out. She's like, she doesn't use the cry it out method. And she's a, you know, she's like the dog whisperer. It's amazing. I watched her work her magic on 200 families. And I thought, okay, I'm going to help this woman scale her, her, you know, magic to, you know, as many families as I can. And so we created this remote sleep school. It's basically cost $1,000, but you're going to teach, your kid's going to get a good sleeping program. So it's like, you know, what's that worth? To you. And like, I don't know if you know this, I had a kid 8 months ago, so now I'm in that position. And so I was like, oh dude, I'll beta test this now because, you know, I'm going on 3 hours of sleep right now, and damn, I would love if I could, you know, do this. And so I think that there's these fringe sort of weird things where it's like, would people really pay $1,000 for this woman to Zoom call you and, um, and teach you how to put your kid to sleep? Like, you know, but I think that that's one of these products that is just weird enough solves a real problem and like adds a lot of real value and is charging for something that normally this advice is just like a free mommy blog telling you, "Hey, try this." And instead, it's like, "No, here's a super high-end version of that, but we're gonna guarantee the result in a better way than an average blog would do." What do you think of that idea?

I think it's— I actually really like it. I think like I'm a big believer in you know, come for the tool, stay for the network. But like the way I look at it is like, come for the tool, stay for the vertical network, where the vertical here would be parents.

Yes.

Like the fact that he's capturing such a high, like you're just in the, your beginning stages, my friend. And like, you're, you're about to buy a whole lot of products and services for your child and maybe even more children if you have. So like the fact that like, here's the thing, here's one thing I'll tell you. If they help you with this problem, you're definitely going to be, wow, that was amazing.

My trust in them will be like 1,000 points, you know.

Right. So that's what it is. It's like when you're looking at like building a vertical, something in a vertical, it's all about like what is the trust quotient you can have with the vertical. And I like that this particular task will give you a lot of a lot of cred for this business. Yeah, man, I think that's the other thing is like I could see it being like a million dollar a year business, but I can also somehow see it being a billion dollar business. So it's worth a shot.

Yeah, and the math I think works where he has both options where it's like 1,000 people paying you $1,000 a month— or sorry, $1,000 for the program, that's a million bucks. And can he find 1,000 parents to do this? I'm very confident, just through Facebook ads. I think he could bootstrap to $1 million in revenue very quickly with sort of like 30-40% margins on that and just pocket that. So I think very low-tech, easy to start, bootstrappable into the single-digit millions, let's call it between $1 and $9 million. Or what you said, which is like, cool, if he thinks about this bigger, like, how do I— now that I have trust with these parents and I've solved one problem for them, the problem they had during their first 7 months of of their baby. How do I help them with their next phase and the next phase and the next phase? And, you know, could go, go bigger from there. So I like, I like having those options on the table where it starts with sort of those humble beginnings, and it might just be a great cash flow business or goes for the sort of home run.

Yeah, man, tell them to keep going.

I will. Well, I don't think you need— I don't think he needs my, my encouragement, uh, to keep going. That's the best entrepreneurs, don't need any advice. Or encouragement. It's true. I remember I invested in, uh, this invested in Lambda School and afterwards I was talking to my friend, we, we did it together and I was like, here's 3 reasons, you know, here's what I want out of this investment. Cause I was like, I don't know if this will make us money or not, but you know, I want to learn about like the, this idea of this trade school thing for education. I want to hang out with the founder, you know, monthly and be helping him solve problems. I think it'll be really interesting. And you know, lastly, you know, I hope we, we get a return on this. He replied, he was like, "Oh, all I care about is the return. I don't give a shit about the rest, but hey, to each their own." On my end, ironically, the return is going to be there, but for the first two, Austin doesn't need my help, doesn't ask for my help. If I text him something, I'm actually just taking up his time. It reminds me of what an investor told me, which is, "The best companies don't need us." That's the reality of the value-add services, is that the best companies rarely need your help. The worst companies you can't save anyways. There's some in the middle where you can help influence their trajectory, but this idea of investors really helping out or encouraging entrepreneurs or whatever else is sort of overblown. It's marketing.

I totally agree. I think actually last week there was this founder. He's just like literally— he crushes it. For years he's done 10% month-over-month growth. and I responded to his investor update, keep it up. And then he just responds right away. He's like, as if I wasn't gonna keep it up.

Dot, dot, dot.

He came like, thanks, bro. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was like, that's amazing. I just took a picture of myself smiling and sent it back to him.

That's so good. Oh, that's great. Um, all right, we should wrap up. We kind of went over time, but, uh, yeah. Anything else? We do one last spin of the— one last spin of the idea wheel. Let's do— let's get one more, then we're out of here. We'll do a quick one.

Let's throw it. Notes. Boom. Um, okay, so this one is a quarantine-ish idea, but it could last beyond quarantine. Um, it's an idea that basically, um, I called it Chef's Table. And it's this idea that, like, I don't know if you saw Carbone, the restaurant in New York City, is not doing— they're just doing one meal per night and then it sells out. So it's kind of like a drop.

Yep.

Which builds a lot of buzz and demand and it sells out every night. This idea is that, like, it's a drop for a restaurant, but you have a live stream with the chef telling you about like if it comes with wine or the meal, it's like, this is how I did it. And it's more of an experience.

The livestream is after you order or it's before you order?

So everyone, the way it would work is you would, you would order it. Everyone, which is everyone would get the meal at the same time. I don't care if you want it at 7:30, you're getting it at 6:00. This is, this is an idea. It's an idea. Not enough time to talk about how we do it. They all get roughly around the same amount of time and then chef comes and he's like, "Listen, I picked these carrots myself in Hudson Valley," and here's explaining it. I think that's what I miss most about restaurants, I guess, is the stories behind and the experience behind it, which you don't really get if you're just frying up some eggs in the morning.

For sure. Okay. So here's a twist on this idea. You're a high-end restaurant. Your business is gone right now. Um, like you're a Michelin star restaurant. What do you, what are you doing? You can't do anything. And so here's your, your pivot. You go live on Instagram before the drop. So you go live before and you're showing the prep. It's the, you know, you're in the chef's kitchen. They're talking about it. They're drinking wine there and you're seeing it being prepared. And people, I think, like to see, as the show Chef's Table has shown, people like to watch high-end food get made, real skilled, you know, that, that sort of thing. As long as you have a personality with with it. And, um, and then basically by the end of the 20 minutes, um, the, the, the meal is ready for the drop. The drop goes live and it's, um, you know, it uses the new Facebook Shop thing that came out yesterday. You push the button and it orders it basically. And it is like a $100 meal, um, and it's, you know, it's the stuff you don't find on Postmates or Grubhub or whatever, which are all kind of like the bottom of the barrel. So you come in at the very top end of those and it's like the delivery experience is gonna be, you know, the packaging is gonna be amazing and whatnot, but you're gonna get what you just saw on the IG Live. And so you do these like $100 or $150 drops, you know, for high-end stuff through the, through the delivery network. But you can go live before to build up that, that anticipation. QVC but for high-end cooking.

I like it. I think we kind of merged the ideas. That's why it's nice to have co-founders.

Okay, great. I'll incorporate it and we'll get this off the ground. Sweet. All right, Greg, where should people find you if they like your style, they want to hear more of you?

If you want to hear more of me, check me out on Twitter. My name's @gregisenberg, G-R-E-G-I-S-E-N-B-E-R-G. Check and just holler.

Cool. We'll put it in the show notes too. All right. All right, Greg, I got to run, but this has been good. Good catching up.

Yeah, you too. Take care.

All right, man. See ya.

Bye.