Business Finds: Hormozi’s Skool Investment, $700M Water & VC Hacks

Sam Parr 0:00 It's insane. I think it's insane and brilliant. That's a good find.

Shaan Puri 0:03 Nobody knows about this account, by the way. This account only has 750 followers, so I kind of... Maybe I'm blowing up my own spot here. [upbeat music] All right, what's up? It's time for the first ever Friday quickie. This is a little idea me and Sam had where we share basically the little things that we saw this week that were either the best article, the best tweet, the best, um, you know, little video that we saw. Normally, this is stuff we just o- only share in our group chat. Um, and we wanted to try it out on the pod, showing it to each other. I don't know what he's gonna say. He doesn't know what I'm gonna say. We each have three. So we're gonna do a list of six things. Let's run through it. Uh, Sam, you wanna go first?

Sam Parr 0:45 All right, you wanna go first? Ooh, jinx.

Shaan Puri 0:48 [laughs] I'll do, I'll do one. I have a quick one. So this is a genius deal flow hack. You ever heard about how hedge fund traders will, like, move their servers to be as close as possible to the, to the pipe, or they'll use a

Shaan Puri 1:00 certain kind of wire so that the trades get executed faster? I used to hear all these things about, like, how in traditional finance, people would go to crazy lengths just to get that little edge, that little extra edge. And I always felt a little sad that us, you know, s- the soft boys of Silicon Valley, we don't really do that. We're all nice, paying it forward. We're just blogging everything that we know. There's no, like, kind of, uh, you know, real secrecy, real ruthless secrecy about things. Until I saw this. So our buddy Suli tweeted this out [laughs] that there is a company that started to help v- VCs improve their deal flow. So he was like, basically, every VC knows deal flow matters. Normally, the way you do it is you're hosting dinners or conferences or you go on podcasts or you make, you know, a, a Patagonia vest that you give away, s- shit like that. But they were like, "The problem is you're, you're... You don't know what deals you're not hearing about." So what if there was a way where you could know about the deals you're not hearing about? [laughs] So what they did was some company basically puts a photographer in front of the offices of, like, Sequoia and Andreessen and all these, like, the top funds.

Sam Parr 2:03 Is this real or an idea?

Shaan Puri 2:04 I think this is real. So when people are leaving the office, they're like, "Hey, do you want a picture in front of the Sequoia thing? I'll send it to you." They take a picture 'cause it's a great moment for the entrepreneur. "Oh, this is when we pitched Sequoia." And they're like, "Great. What's the name of your company?" And they're like, "Awesome." [laughs] And they basically sell that list to all the other funds. It's like, "Hey, did you know these guys are out raising? They were talking to Sequoia." [laughs] And, um, w- he's like, he's like, "I heard about this, and I thought it was amazing. Genius deal flow hack." He's like, "The VC who told me about it was like, 'We don't pay for this, but I know it exists, and others do.'" Um, I think that's brilliant. What do you think?

Sam Parr 2:34 I think it's brilliant. I think it's insane. I think it's insane and brilliant.

Shaan Puri 2:39 There, there's another version of this that I follow. There's a Twitter account called, like, stealth something. And it's anytime somebody who had... Like, working on something new or stealth blah, blah, blah. Anytime they change that to, like, the name of a project, it immediately tweets out, "This person just announced they're doing this thing." And so you could reach out to them and be like, "Hey, you know, that's really cool. I, I like what you're doing."

Sam Parr 2:58 What's the name of that handle?

Shaan Puri 3:00 All right. So that account is called StealthCoSpy. So if you go to @StealthCoSpy, it's a real-time notification of anytime, like, people... Uh, it also tracks, like, LinkedIn. Like, if you leave a company that they consider, like, a high trajectory, like, h- fast growth startup. It's like, this person's leaving to do something new, and you can see it. So, like, for example, the last tweet was, "Julia is now building in stealth mode. Uh, she's an ex-data science director from GitHub, and now... And she lives in Boston. Here's her LinkedIn. She just announced... Uh, she just posted

Shaan Puri 3:30 that she's, she's working on something new that's in stealth."

Sam Parr 3:32 This is awesome.

Shaan Puri 3:33 Or it'll be like, "Noah comes out of stealth. He's got a platform for no-code SDK tooling for enterprise LLM applications. Here's the link. Here's his LinkedIn." [laughs]

Sam Parr 3:41 This is awesome. All right, that's a good find.

Shaan Puri 3:42 Nobody knows about this account, by the way. This account only has 750 followers, so I kind of... Maybe I'm blowing up my own spot here.

Sam Parr 3:49 This is a good find. There's also that for when people, um, remove their employer off of their Twitter handle or their LinkedIn. And they'll be like-

Shaan Puri 3:57 Right

Sam Parr 3:57 ... "This person's now available." I like this. Um, all right. Let me give you another one. So I was reading Reddit the other day, and I found this old post. It's over a year old. Do you remember Jake Kassan or Kassan? I don't actually know how to say his last name. But Jake. So he started MVMT Watches.

Shaan Puri 4:11 MVMT Watches.

Sam Parr 4:12 And they were one of the first, like, D2C guys to go big. And so they started this company where they sold watches. They got popular on Instagram. I think he sold it for $100 million. Then there was another $100 million earn-out, which I'm not sure if they hit or not. But the company was bootstrapped, so he made north of 50 million, I would imagine. I found this post. I don't know why he did this, but he did, and I think it's great. But he didn't really talk about it on social media, but I found this on, uh, this subreddit called Find A Path. For those who have a hobby, passion, or a passing whim that they want to make a living out of but don't know how they can get there. So that's the, the description of the subreddit. But he's got this description or this post on this subreddit and says, "I sold my company, MVMT, a few years ago for a lot of money and thought all my problems would be solved. I made my life really cushy and comfortable, and I optimized to be as stress-free as possible." And then he goes on to say that he's new to this subreddit, and he's still trying to find out what he's, what he wants to do to his, with his life, and that he set up his life to be easy. And now it's been two years since he sold the company, and he's 31, single. He never has to work again, but he's never been lonelier and depressed, or depressed than ever. And he basically talks about what he's trying to do in order to find his passion. And I think that what's interesting about this post is, A, people never talk about this type of stuff, like, publicly, where they put their name on it and they truly say how they feel. That's fascinating. And, B, he, like... You see his replies of people saying, like... asking him different questions. And he goes through really detailed replies of what he's trying to do. So he's like, "I love video editing and making movies. So now I bought a camera and I've been tr- and I took a YouTube class and I'm trying to learn how to take pictures and film new videos and chop them up or whatever." And it's super fascinating to see behind the scenes of someone who's young. I think he was 29 when he sold. So 29, worth tens of millions of dollars. He's pretty lonely. He's depressed. And it's really fascinating to see someone break all this down. I thought this was a really, really fascinating Reddit post that I didn't see shared anywhere.

Shaan Puri 5:58 I love this. Um, I thought it was awesome. I saw it because- Somebody on Twitter goes, "I wonder what the guys who, like, crushed it in the early wave of e-com are doing now. I bet they're just killing it." This is some- somebody tweeted this, and then this other guy goes, "Actually, I just saw this post on Reddit..." And this, this is a year ago. He's like, "I saw this post on Reddit from the founder of MVMT saying exactly what he's been doing. And actually, you know, he's been kind of wandering and trying to figure it out." Um, and then I read this thing, I was like, dude, that's the magic of the internet. Someone just tweeting a random question, somebody else being like, "Oh, well, here's an obscure Reddit post that's, like, filled with, you know, the answer to your question." And also just that this guy... You know, I almost felt bad I didn't bring this up on the pod, 'cause I was like, it's kinda personal, it's kinda personal. Maybe he doesn't want this, like, you know, on blast. I mean, he posted it publicly on Reddit, so I guess it's fair game. But, you know, he's being very vulnerable. He's like, "You know, I'm lonelier than ever, I'm deeply depressed, and I'm trying to figure it out." Um, but props to him for, for doing that and doing it with his name on it, 'cause he could have, uh, very easily just, like, done this same thing and just say, "I sold my company." He didn't have to say who he was. Um, so, you know, respect to him for doing that. I really, really appreciated that.

Sam Parr 6:59 I think it's awesome. I think that this is a problem that not a lot of people go through, but it's really fun to, for people who are dreaming of making money or who wanna sell their company, what happens on the other side? Uh, you know, I think someone described this thing as called the second mountain. So you've climbed the first mountain, but you still need another mountain to climb. And, and he talks about... They're like, "Why don't you start another company?" He was like, "Well, in the past, money and ego were the huge motivators for me, and I kinda... Those motivators are gone now, and so whatever I do next, I need to find fulfillment and to help others in some way." And so I think it's really interesting. Um, all right, what do you got?

Shaan Puri 7:30 All right. Number three, I'm gonna do the Hormozi bump. Okay. So, uh, Alex Hormozi, a friend of the pod, good dude. He bought a company recently, Skool, from another guy who has been on the pod talking about Skool, the original founder of it, Sam Ovens. So that's, like, his new thing. And that was like the... He s- he tweeted out, he's like, "This is the biggest bet I've ever made. Uh, you know, I'm investing a bunch of money into this." And now he's wearing a Skool hat on every interview he goes on and every video he creates, and he's k- you know, trying to promote Skool.

Sam Parr 7:59 It, it's an awesome product. Skool is really good.

Shaan Puri 8:01 I haven't... Uh, I've never used it. You actually used it?

Sam Parr 8:04 Yeah. It's a good product. That guy Sam is very savvy, and it's a very good product. Yeah.

Shaan Puri 8:09 And so basically, it's a, um, a, it's like a community-building tool, so people, you can ma- create a paid community and people can join it, um, on there.

Sam Parr 8:16 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 8:16 Um, it looks like it's heavy in, like, the, like, affiliate marketing, like, dropshipping type of game when I went, I went and browsed, like, the top communities that were on the site or whatever. Um, anyways, I think it's a, it's a good, good investment. So I was curious, how much of a bump do you think Skool got in web traffic after Hormozi did it? 'Cause obviously he's doing it with this belief that, "Hey, I've just spent two years plus building my audience, huge audience, um, of entrepreneurial people, and I'm gonna invest in this thing, and then I'm gonna try to use my weight to drive traffic." So I can, you know... This is very much the same strategy I've used, which is you could buy something at a fair price knowing that you have a growth lever to bring more traffic to the site. So I'm curious, how much do you think it went up? So I'll give you the, um-

Sam Parr 9:03 The double-

Shaan Puri 9:04 ... the befores.

Sam Parr 9:04 Yeah. What was the before?

Shaan Puri 9:05 So before was, let's say, uh, web traffic was in, let's say, three months ago, if I was... Let's say no. One, two, three, four, five. Five months ago was at about 8 million in, in monthly, monthly visitors. What do you think it is?

Sam Parr 9:22 Um, I would've guessed, I would've guessed 10 or 12. All right, everyone. A quick break to tell you about HubSpot, and this one's easy because I'm gonna show you an example of how I'm doing this at my company. When I say I, I mean not my team. I mean I'm the one who actually made it. So I've got this company called Hampton. You can check it out, joinhampton.com. It's a community for founders. And one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these surveys where we'll ask our members certain questions that a lot of people, a lot of times people are afraid to ask. So things like what their net worth is, how their assets are allocated, all these, like, interesting questions. And then we'll put it in a survey, and I went and made a landing page. So you can check it out at joinhampton.com/wealth. You can actually see the landing page that I made. And the hard part with this is with Hampton, we are appealing to a sort of a, a higher-end customer, sort of like, like a Louis Vuitton or a Ferrari. So I needed the landing page to look a very particular way. HubSpot has templates. That's what we used. We just changed the colors a little bit to match our brand. Very easy. They have this drag-and-drop version of their landing page builder, and it's super simple. I'm not technical, and I'm the one who actually made it. And once it's made, I then shared it on social media, and we had thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information. And I can then see over the next handful of weeks, this is how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did. This is where the revenue came from. So it came from Twitter, it came from LinkedIn. Whatever it came from, I can actually go and look at it and I can say, "Oh, well, that worked. That didn't work. Do more of that. Do less of that." And if you're interested in making landing pages like this, I highly suggest it. Look, I'm actually doing it. But you can check it out. Go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started. All right, now back to MFM.

Shaan Puri 10:55 Okay. So it went from 8 million to in January it looks like spiked at almost 17 million according to, like, Similarweb, which is not exactly accurate, but directionally correct. Um, so almost double the, uh... About, about double, double the traffic for that month. Now, a lot of it is people just coming and checking it out 'cause of the announcement, and it's not, like, necessarily the most sustainable thing. But let's now look, uh-

Sam Parr 11:19 Wow. So go, so-

Shaan Puri 11:20 It's mostly through February.

Sam Parr 11:22 S- s- but-

Shaan Puri 11:22 So what's the February numbers looking like?

Sam Parr 11:23 But check this out. So Circle dot, circle.so I think they're called. Circle.co or circle.so. They're a community platform that's a competitor to Skool. They've raised, I think, tens of millions of dollars. Skool has more than doubled their traffic. They had doubled their traffic before they even took the money.

Shaan Puri 11:40 Right.

Sam Parr 11:40 That's insane.

Shaan Puri 11:41 Yeah.

Sam Parr 11:41 And S- Sam actually told me, and he posted it on their About page, that he, uh, has invested $10 million of his own money, wh- which I, I think was a large percentage of his money that he had, into making Skool a reality.

Shaan Puri 11:53 Yeah. Uh, uh, it's interesting what these are, so I just sorted by paid. So you can see it's the digital growth community, which is, like, basically, uh, internet marketing. Number two, Mark's manifestation thing. Pay $49 a month and you join his thing. It's got 284 members. Um, Digital Wealth Academy, right? It's like it's a lot of the like, uh, The Adonis School, h- like-minded men who wanna live the Adonis lifestyle, [laughs] right? It's like a lot of, like, Andrew Tate-y type stuff, uh, which I find interesting. But it's cool 'cause, you know, I think you've done a bunch of paid communities on Facebook and now Slack and other places. Uh, you didn't use this for Hampton, right?

Sam Parr 12:31 No, because when we started I didn't know enough about it and I didn't think it would be any good. But then I met Sam, the guy who started it, and we were already on Slack, but I was like, "Oh, th- you actually are really smart. I should've..." I, I kind of regret not using it. And I have nothing to do with this company, but I thought it was awesome. But they have a bunch-

Shaan Puri 12:47 Yeah

Sam Parr 12:47 ... of like non-business-y stuff, so there's like a, stuff on like style and clothing, and then there's one on meditation. So there's stuff on non-business stuff. It's just I think that-

Shaan Puri 12:56 Yeah, it's like anything aspirational you would want, right? So what do you, whatever you want. You want a better body, you want a better style, you want better, you know, finances, whatever it is, that's how you, you get there. I think it's a great move also just in general, the business model of I take a kind of crappy but high-volume business model, which is, let's say media, but I use it to buy assets in the best business model, SAS, [laughs] which is what he did, right? So he converted his YouTube fame, which doesn't pay very well, into owning a SAS asset, which is like one of the... SAS is one of the best business models out there. So good move by Alex, uh, on that one, and congrats to, to all involved on the, on the big spike.

Sam Parr 13:31 I hung out with Sam Ovens once. My wife and I, we were at a restaurant with him or some type of bar or something, and we were just talking. And Sam Ovens is, he's a wonderful person, but he's, uh, he's almost a little awkward. Like, he's, he's really in- awkward in the sense of he's comfortable with silence. And it got to the part in the conversation-

Shaan Puri 13:46 Yeah, you're like, "Turns out I'm awkward." [laughs]

Sam Parr 13:48 Yeah, yeah. He's, he's the, the-

Shaan Puri 13:50 He's actually kind of normal, I guess. [laughs]

Sam Parr 13:51 Yeah, it was me. And, and it got to the point in the conversation where there was some silence, and I was just like, I was just like, "I'm gonna sit in this for a minute. Let's just see what this feels like. Let's sit in the silence." And so we sit and we finish the conversation, and there's about five seconds and he goes, "I delivered my baby." You know, and he's, he's from New Zealand. And I was like-

Shaan Puri 14:10 [laughs]

Sam Parr 14:12 ... "Uh, what? What, what do you mean you delivered your baby? With what?" He goes, "My hands." And he tells this story about [laughs] how, like, his wife went into labor and, uh, like, the paramedics couldn't make it in time, and he's like, "I just..." He delivered it b- on, on his own. And, uh, it was a... [laughs] And he

Sam Parr 14:30 just threw that out there, and I was like, "Oh." I thought-

Shaan Puri 14:32 Dog, I would join a paid community of him just sending me a voice note every morning of that. [laughs]

Sam Parr 14:35 Yeah. [laughs] That was like the-

Shaan Puri 14:37 $9 a month

Sam Parr 14:38 ... that was like the silence breaker was, "I delivered my baby." [laughs]

Shaan Puri 14:42 [laughs]

Sam Parr 14:43 And I just thought it was awesome. I was like, "You're the best person I've ever met." All right, let me show you another one. There's this tweet I saw. Her name's Julia Chang, all right? So this m- uh, she just shared this woman, uh, on Instagram na- named Amanda Woolf. So she goes through... What she does is she gets people to share their finances, and then she, like, is a personal, uh, finance wizard or something like that. And so she writes out all the, all the-

Shaan Puri 15:05 Wizard. [laughs]

Sam Parr 15:05 I don't know. What do they call these people?

Shaan Puri 15:07 [laughs] She's, she's some sort of magician. [laughs]

Sam Parr 15:10 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 15:11 She's, she's a witch. Some personal finance witch. [laughs]

Sam Parr 15:14 I don't know. Whatever you call these people. But it's normally, like, people who are making, like, 80 grand a year, and then she talks about, like, you know, "This looks normal, this doesn't work- look normal." She got this couple that's 39 and 37 years old, a husband and wife. One's an attorney, one's a CIO. Their net income or their, uh, personal income is $3.7 million. They live in Alpine, New Jersey, and their expenses each month are roughly $77,000. And they break through or they break down what their expenses are. So the biggest one being mortgage, $29,000, utilities $1,200. But then it gets to, like, some wild stuff. So where does it say they're, uh-

Shaan Puri 15:54 Oh, the $29,000 mortgage wasn't wild?

Sam Parr 15:56 That's wild. That's wild.

Shaan Puri 15:57 [laughs]

Sam Parr 15:58 But, but, but, but a $29,000 mortgage, I think that's what it costs to have a, like, $4 million house. I mean, so that, I, I guess that makes sense. But their personal trainers are four grand a month. And she breaks down all these expenses, and I thought it was really fascinating to see kinda, like, what these people are spending on, and, like, basically how you can make almost $4 million a year and you're not really saving a lot of money at all. It's pretty ridiculous how much these people spend. And so they, they are able to invest, so they invest, like, a, something like a million dollars a year, so that's a ton of money. But then she kinda, like, per- uh, shows that off in a weird way where she's like, "Look, they only have $2,300 left over each month after they invest a million dollars each year." Uh, but it's kind of ridiculous to see, like, these expenses. Sorry, the mortgage for $29,000 is $5.2 million at a 4.25%, uh, interest rate. But pretty crazy, right, to, like, see these expenses of 80 grand a month.

Shaan Puri 16:55 And so what does she do? I see it all written out with nice handwriting here. Does she just, like, cross it out at the end and be like, "No, start over. [laughs] Change, change this"? Like, what, what is the, what's the punchline of this? What does she take, what's the takeaway?

Sam Parr 17:07 Well, her takeaway was just basically like... [laughs] I, I don't think her takeaway is important.

Shaan Puri 17:12 She's just like, "Crazy, right?" [laughs]

Sam Parr 17:13 Yeah, it was just like, "Crazy." I mean, I don't think that the take- the takeaway, her takeaway is actually that interesting to me. But I do think that four grand a month of personal trainers is ridiculous, but a nanny, $10,000. Uh, their kids' school, $2,500. Kids' tutors and coach is $3,000. My takeaway is just I- I mean, if they live in Alpine, New Jersey, I bet they work in Manhattan then. Just that lifestyle out there, even if you are making close to $4 million a year, it is really hard to get, uh, terminal velocity out to the point where you don't actually have to work anymore. So in order to, uh, in order to not work and spend a million dollars a year, you have to have something like $25 million liquid. I think that would be the number. So, uh, right around there if you wanna withdraw 3% of your money every month. Uh, a year. Sorry, a year. And so in order to, like, actually save up that amount of money, even when you are earning almost $4 million in the Manhattan area, really, really challenging if you live the life like these types of people, and I thought that was wild.

Shaan Puri 18:08 Yeah, I think that's the key is if you, if you wanna spend $29,000 a month on your mortgage, if you wanna spend 10 grand on your nanny, another, you know, basically eight grand on miscellaneous and personal trainer, 6,000 a month on shopping, right? Like, the shopping is separate fr- or, like, just on shopping, fun, and dining out is four grand, four grand, and six grand, [laughs] right? So, like, 14 grand a month on shopping, fun, and dining out. Um, I don't know. If you're not having fun with the shopping and dining out, maybe don't have another ... [laughs] Maybe don't spend another 4K on the fun, right? [laughs] Like, you gotta ... Th- this is just excessive spending for that level of income, I think.

Sam Parr 18:45 I agree, but it's just interesting. I think a lot of people who earn that amount of money, by the way, I think they spend that way.

Shaan Puri 18:52 I think the real takeaway of this is whoever posted this is just good at social media. They're like, "How do I enrage everybody? Okay, let me post this." Um, because th- all this does ... This is just engagement bait, right? You're just g- e- everyone in the comments is just like, "Oh, man, what the fuck?" Like, "I can't believe this. This is not real. These people are so out of touch." They get, like, so angry about it.

Sam Parr 19:09 Dude, I know so many people who live like this, by the way. I know a lot of people who live like this, who make multi-millions, and they spend almost all of it. I know a lot of people who earn millions of dollars a year, and they still live almost paycheck to paycheck. It sounds crazy, but I know people who do that.

Shaan Puri 19:23 What's it like having dumb friends?

Sam Parr 19:24 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 19:27 [laughs] You know you are the

Shaan Puri 19:30 average of those five people you're spending time with, those five idiots that are somehow burning four million a year [laughs] -

Sam Parr 19:35 Dude, it's insane, man

Shaan Puri 19:36 ... for fucking making four million a year.

Sam Parr 19:37 I ... If, if, if you live in the East Coast, man, it's insane. You spend a lot. Um, all right. You do one, and then I have one more.

Shaan Puri 19:42 All right. My last one, uh, quick one. Did you see this Liquid Death marketing campaign that they did?

Sam Parr 19:46 No.

Shaan Puri 19:47 Oh, okay. Genius. So Super Bowl was a couple weeks ago, and they were like, "Hey. All right, how do we ... We wanna do an ad. We wanna hijack this moment of, this marketing moment, but we don't wanna buy a $6 million Super Bowl ad." So they, they go, they put on eBay, um, the, they called it the biggest ad ever. And they go, "We have a national run of half a million Liquid Death cases, and it's the side of this box. And, uh, you can have this ad space. It costs you 6 million bucks to get in front of 110 p- million people on the Super Bowl, but 200 million people are gonna walk through the doors of these retailers and see, see our, uh, our Liquid Death thing." Pretty big leap of faith, by the way, that all of those people who attend a grocery store will look at this ad, but whatever. And they auctioned it off. Coinbase ends up buying this thing for half a million bucks. So they get first, like, pump one of PR in the marketing community, um, because marketers are like, "Oh, so smart." Then pump two was Coinbase actually pays them $500,000 to buy the ad space, so they got 500 grand off this thing that was just excess inventory for them anyways. And then pump three was the news that somebody actually bought it, uh, and they got three hits out of this thing. Very smart marketing by Liquid Death.

Sam Parr 20:58 Dude, the guy who started Liquid Death, he came on our podcast, I think, two years ago. So they were getting going, but they were still big, but they weren't this big. And if I remember correctly, his background was he worked at an agency. And my takeaway from the podcast was basically, when you're selling water, the product's not that important. It's just water. And I don't think it tastes particularly different than any other water. But he was just like, "I'm really good at advertising, and I'm gonna do all of these funny things in order to get eyeballs." And I would not have predicted that that would've worked, and it has.

Shaan Puri 21:28 And he's c-

Sam Parr 21:29 He's com-

Shaan Puri 21:29 [laughs]

Sam Parr 21:29 He's com- he's completely crushed it. His name's Mike, uh, S- S- I don't know his last name, actually. I just remember him being Mike.

Shaan Puri 21:35 I don't know how you pronounce it.

Sam Parr 21:37 Uh, but if y- you can go back and listen to that pod. It's really good. He was really fascinating.

Shaan Puri 21:41 Yeah, that was a few years ago, and they were a lot smaller then. Now they're, like, prepping for an IPO or something like that. It's pretty crazy. Um, I don't know how healthy the business is, but it definitely went way further than I ever thought it would, uh, probably way further than you ever thought it would too because it's basically the bet was, "We're just gonna be incredible at marketing." [laughs] Like, that was the entire bet

Shaan Puri 22:00 was, uh, "Yeah, it's water. Um, and then we're gonna be absolutely incredible, world-class at marketing, and that'll be the thing." And they pulled it off. Props to them.

Sam Parr 22:08 All right. Here's the last one. So I found this article. It was from houseoffresh.com. So if you goo- if you Google House of Fresh and then David and Goliath, you'll see this article. But I'm gonna tell you what, uh, why I was interested in this. So do you ever use review sites to, like, decide which product you wanna buy?

Shaan Puri 22:26 Not anymore, but I did for a long time.

Sam Parr 22:28 Me too. I did for a long time, and I started diving deep on l- on, on, on this. And I was like, "Okay. So how does BuzzFeed, like, which is, like, a I don't even know what their specialty is, know which air f- purifier is best? Like, I don't know if they can actually test all of this stuff." And I started noticing that there's all these websites like menshealth.com and a whole bunch of other stuff reviewing products or posting, like, this is the 10 best these items. And I'm like, "I don't think that they actually review these things, but maybe I'll trust them." Well, I read this article, and at this point I'm not gonna trust any of them. So let me give you, like, a little breakdown. So this company that wrote this, houseoffresh.com, they're a small company, and all they do is they review air purifiers. And that's all they do. And they're like a missionary in the mercenary game, meaning most of the people who review air purifiers, they're just like BuzzFeed, and they're just like, "Look, we can rank on Google, so we're just gonna, like, read a bunch of Amazon reviews, and we're gonna, like, whatever, pick the one that looks best, and we're gonna put that at the top of our list." Whereas these other guys, House of Fresh, they actually buy the products, and they don't ... They're not given it, so they're not, like, owed, uh, good coverage to any of the, uh, manufacturers. And they test it out, whatever. Well, they did this big article explaining how review sites work. And so the takeaway is basically 16 companies, so it's, like, Meredith, uh, which owns a whole bunch of, uh, different magazines, Dotdash, which owns a whole bunch of stuff, BuzzFeed, um, Penske Media, who we talked about on a podcast, uh, they own all this stuff. And they basically, 16 media companies get 3 billion clicks per month, and they basically dominate, uh, Google. And it's really hard for any small company getting into the review space in order to ... Th- th- they can't actually rank high because these 16 companies control the whole thing. But this article went and d- dived deep into how they're doing reviews. They basically hire a freelancer just to, like, go out and do whatever, and then they post the article on their websites. But then they own, like... They each own, like, 50 different websites. They'll post it across all the other websites, and they don't actually show how they're doing the reviews. And the takeaway is that they're really likely what they're doing is they j- they just go to Amazon, and they just review what Amazon people have actually said, and they just aggregate those, curate them, and put that into their article. And it's not a great way in order to, like, find out actually what's best 'cause you're trusting someone else versus going out and doing the research. And I read this article, and my takeaway was two things. One, I don't trust any website now that's doing reviews. But number two, I only trust a few of them. There are a few. So I used to trust Wirecutter. Now I'm nervous about trusting them because they're owned by The New York Times, and so it's owned by a much larger company, and so I think they have different incentives. Besides that, there's very few companies out there who I trust for reviews. I go to Reddit, but that's even hard. But I think there's actually an opportunity to create some type of trusted review website. I don't know how e- ex- exactly you could do that and get big, but I'm pretty certain you could still do that while remaining small. But there's a whole bunch of, like, these niche websites that used to, uh, talk about really interesting stuff. There was one for VPNs. There was one for mattress companies. And then the mattress company, like Casper did, or the, uh, large VPN companies, they go and actually buy the review sites, and they put their link up top. And so at this point, I'm skeptical of the entire industry, and this made me not trust any reviews. And I've already written-- written lots of articles about how Amazon reviews, most of them, or a lot of them, are total bullshit. I used to have friends that would make products, and they'd be like, "Hey, I'm gonna make this product free on Amazon. Will you buy it so you-- it says that you're a proper, uh, customer, and then just give me five stars?" It's all a circle jerk, and I don't trust any of the reviews online at this point, and it's ve- it makes me very skeptical.

Shaan Puri 25:58 100% agree. This is crazy. Um, it's gotten completely out of hand. This is, uh... So it's the main way that, like... Or not the main way. It's one of the major ways that news sites actually stay in business, is that they basically sell their SEO juice to the highest bidder. Um, this w- is for everything, like what you were talking about, air purifiers, but also mattresses, but also everything. It's e- it's all just SEO hacks. So f- for example, if you wanna find the best mattress and you Google "best mattress," you're not gonna find the best mattress. You're gonna find: Who is the best at SEO? Which mattress company is the most aggressive at SEO? Is the only answer you get when you Google "best mattress." And, uh, I'm totally with you. I wish there was a better solution to this 'cause there's more products than ever, and you do wanna find out if they're any good or which one to buy. It's just that you can't really trust any of the current solutions. I actually think that there's probably something you could do with a combination of video and subscription. So what I would do is I would say, "Hey, we're coming out. We're calling out the BS that exists in this space. We're gonna do a subscription product. You pay for this, and you're gonna get access to, like, the super high quality reviews." Only, like, conscious consumers will do it, and so you start small. But, again, it's like The Athletic, so you're gonna get people to actually care enough to pay. Um, and then you tell them, like, "Look, because you pay, now you get no bias in the, uh, in the results. We are not going to take affiliate commissions anywhere." And I think if you drew the line there, there would be a market for that. Um, maybe you could even let people sort of share their subscription so that a bunch of people could, you know, chip in and basically say, "Cool, I want access, too," and it's 100 bucks for all of us in order to make the economics work. Um, so anyway-

Sam Parr 27:33 I completely agree

Shaan Puri 27:33 ... I think that's, that's the solution, is somebody's gotta say, "I'm, I'm gonna choose a different business model. I'm not gonna get paid on my affiliate links." And that's the person that would end up getting trusted because their incentive is not to just push, you know, affiliate products.

Sam Parr 27:45 You know how there's that, uh, infographic or image where it's, uh, where it shows that, like, four companies or five companies own, like, 80% of the food in the grocery store?

Shaan Puri 27:55 Yes.

Sam Parr 27:56 That's what this article has. They have one of those infographics where it's basically 16 media, or 16 media companies, Hertz, Dotdash, Bustle, Ziff Davis, The Arena Group, Red Ventures, and a handful of others, and it shows all of the companies and titles that they own. And you scroll through this, and you're like, "Those are all supposed to be the reputable ones."

Shaan Puri 28:15 Right. [laughs]

Sam Parr 28:15 And I'm like, "I don't trust any of this anymore." And so it almost makes me a little bit of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to this stuff, and it completely ruins, like, my, my browsing experience, 'cause now I see this stuff and I'm like, "I can never go to those websites in order to get reviews." And so it kinda opened up my eyes. It's kind of interesting. Uh, you can see it at House of Fresh. Just Google House of Fresh David versus Goliath. Very fascinating article that has kinda changed my opinion on review sites, and they do a huge breakdown. All right. Is that the pod for our-

Shaan Puri 28:42 That's it.

Sam Parr 28:42 What are we calling it? Quickie Friday?

Shaan Puri 28:44 The Quickie.

Sam Parr 28:45 [laughs] The Quickie. All right. That's it. That's the pod. [upbeat music]