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My First MillionHow We Got Our First 100 Customers (No Bulls**t, Specific Details) (#534)
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60 min read · 12,214 words- 0:00 – 2:00
Intro
- SPShaan Puri
And then we were like, "All right, fine. Deal." Like, that's, you know, this business is so fricking hard, like, let's try this.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And, uh, in the end, I don't think it ever ended up working.
- SPSam Parr
But you got the customers, and that's the point of the episode.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, we got them. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Um [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
The, the subsequent failure is irrelevant, okay?
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] Yeah. [upbeat music] All right, we're live. Shaan, we're gonna do a Q&A session today. We got a bunch of questions. I have a feeling we're gonna spend most of the time on one question, but the question is, how did you get your first 100 customers in your businesses, and what are the best ways that you've heard of? So I- I'll ask you, Shaan, but, uh, I personally have grown, I think, five things to a million to 10 million in revenue. I've grown one thing to well north of 10 million in revenue, multimillion dollars per month. I've grown a bunch of stuff to thousands of users. I've grown a bunch of stuff to hundreds of thousands, and I've grown one thing to millions. And we'll go through examples, and, uh, you've done the same. You've... How many did Bebo have, or, uh, Blab?
- SPShaan Puri
Blab had, like, four million users. Um, yeah, basically we've done this a bunch of different times and a bunch of different ways. And so when we get this question, you know, "How did you get your first 100 customers?" I actually really like this question. This is a very different question than, like, you know, "What's your advice?" It's like, forget the advice. Let me tell you literally what I did when it comes to how we grew our businesses at the very, very start. 'Cause if you're at the start, it doesn't matter what somebody did to go d- to get to 10 million in revenue. What matters is what, how they got to $10 in revenue. How did they get the ball going? How did they get the initial momentum? 'Cause if you don't do that, by definition you don't really get to, you know, you don't get to step two unless you've done step one. And so this is the, uh, the step-one-isode, and I thought it'd be fun if we take the, our own, like, just all the different projects that we've done and just try to label the method that we used to go and get those first 100 customers that are, that got the ball rolling.
- SPSam Parr
Do you wanna go back and forth?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, let's trade off.
- SPSam Parr
All right. So the first thing that
- 2:00 – 6:00
Throw an event method
- SPSam Parr
I grew, I'm actually not gonna talk about it a lot because I didn't realize it, but I was breaking the law. But it was, I had an e-commerce store, and I originally got my first 100 customers by posting in, uh, forums. But I'm not gonna mention that.
- SPShaan Puri
Statute of limit-
- SPSam Parr
But, um-
- SPShaan Puri
By the way, is that a real thing, the statute of limitations? Like, is it, is there a real thing? Uh, maybe we need Producer Ari to let us know. As, and by the way, show her in her sweater. Fantastic sweater. Okay, it's not a thing. All right, so, so, correct. Do not tell people what you were doing. I thought after 10 years-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... everything's forgiven.
- SPSam Parr
No, I'm not gonna mention that. But all right, the first, uh, my first business was called Bunk. It was, like, my first, like, actual startup out of college. It was called Bunk. It was a roommate matching app. It was Tinder for roommates, which I always say was stupid. We should've done Tinder for Tinder, 'cause this was right when Tinder came out.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
It was, like, swiping, like, clicking less, yes or no. Um, but before it became an app, we actually just had a website that was built on Weebly. We probably did 50,000 in sales in a handful of months, something like that. And what we used to do is, in San Francisco, it's mostly transient people, so people like me and Shaan who move there without knowing too many people, and you wanna rent a one-bedroom apartment, but you can't afford a one-bedroom apartment. And so instead there's a four-bedroom apartment where there's one room left, and p- you apply to move in there. What a lot of people don't know is back then, and I don't know if it's this way now, but back then, literally 100 people would apply for that one bedroom. So the way that we got users is we went and found people who had, like landlords, who had four-bedroom apartments and three-bedroom apartments. And we said, "Hey, we're gonna host an event. It's not gonna be a party." It was a party. "It's gonna be an event at your three and four-bedroom apartment, and we're gonna have a bunch of prospective tenants there, and they're gonna team up and get their own place." And so let's say that it was a four-bedroom place for 4,000. We would create individual ads for a one bedroom at $1,000. And we, and back then on Craigslist you could use HTML and create these beautiful, like, images of what the apartments looked like. And it said, "This is Bunk SF. We help people, match people. This is a one bedroom in a four bedroom, but we're gonna help you team up." And we went, we, we would get, like, 10,000 users, uh, a week coming to our bunksf.com website, and that's how I got our first bit of users was through Craigslist. And the point being, the takeaway, by the way, is we already knew the seekers were there, and so it was just to piggyback where people already were.
- SPShaan Puri
[upbeat music] I can't find this client info.
- SPSpeaker
Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better.
- SPShaan Puri
So the, the smart part there is using Craigslist, 'cause Craigslist already had a lot of search volume, basically. You, instead of SEO, you use basically CEO. So it's like, go, go to Craigslist and get, uh, use that traffic, but then hosting the event. What'd you do in these events, by the way? Was there anything special you did? Or, like, how did you get people to... Did you have to make it marketable, or did you just make it normal? Because I know for The Hustle you had these great little events that you used called Pizza and 40s-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... where you would invite a speaker to an event, but the, you would tape two [laughs] two 40 ounce beers to their hands. And the rule... This is genius, by the way. This was so good. I remember when you did this, I was like, "That guy Sam is cool. I wanna be friends with him."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, literally I had that thought. And then I, like, tried to become friends with you.
- SPSam Parr
I didn't even drink, by the way.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
At this point I didn't even drink, but the name of the game was Pizza and 40s, 'cause we didn't have a lot of money. So we'll supply Costco pizza, and we'll have beer, and the speaker has to have a 40 ounce beer. And the, the interview is done when the 40 ounce beer is done.
- SPShaan Puri
Right, right. It's like a TED Talk, but instead of 18 minutes-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... it was however long it takes him to finish the beer. If he wants to get off the stage, chug, baby, chug. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
And, and you'd get a little bit more loosey-goosey with the questions towards the tail end.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
And they would get-
- SPShaan Puri
Totally simplified. That was genius. So that one was marketable. Was your, did you have to do that for the apartment thing, or was it as simple as saying, "Hey, come check out this apartment"?
- SPSam Parr
So we would get, like, hundreds of applicants for a one be- uh, for, like, a four bedroom, and we just emailed them. And, and we were very transparent in the ad. It said, "This is not a one bedroom.
- 6:00 – 13:30
The floor-to-floor method
- SPSam Parr
It's a one bedroom in a four bedroom. But what we're doing is we're gonna host a party with 50 people. Here's the types of people who are coming. Show up at this time And then they would team up and get a place, and once they got a place, the landlord would tell us it came from us, and we would take money from both the user and the landlord. And, um, uh, yeah, we were just really transparent about it. And I would literally, like, ride my bike at the time [laughs] to the house and be like, "Knock, knock. Um, give me your $100 please," uh, or $300 or however much it was, and that's how we made money. But no, it was, that- it was very easy. But now you can't do this. Uh, Craigslist has changed how they operate. But this, by the way, is exactly how Airbnb got popular. Um, all right.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
What's yours?
- SPShaan Puri
All right. I'm gonna give you my first business as well. So this is, uh, I'm 21 years old. We are starting a sushi restaurant chain, and I'm living in Denver, and the way our thing worked, it was like a cloud kitchen. So it was, um, because we didn't wanna sign a 10-year lease and build out a physical location and have to go raise $500,000, we had a mentor who was like, "What if you did a delivery only, a delivery only method, and you, um, rented a commissary kitchen by the hour?" I remember we were paying $19 an hour instead of having to... So, like, the contrast was we were about to sign a 10-year lease with a personal guarantee and drop about 300 to $500,000 to build it out, or for $19 an hour we could start Monday. And I was like, "Wow."
- SPSam Parr
You're 15 years, you're 15 years in the future. I mean, you, you nailed it.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. We-
- SPSam Parr
You're just 15 years early
- SPShaan Puri
... were too early, but still it w- and so how do we get customers? Back then, DoorDash, Uber Eats didn't exist. So where are we gonna get customers for our delivery only restaurant? I didn't know any better. Knowing what I know now, I probably would've just run ads, local ads, maybe Facebook ads, Google ads, something like that for people looking for sushi, but I didn't know that at the time. And ignorance is a bit of a superpower. So the ignorance led us to, our planning meeting was, like, 12 minutes long. It was like, "We need customers." So, like, "Hey, we got the kitchen now. Like, we need customers." "Hey, um, I don't know, walk around and b- ask people." So what I did was I went downtown and I did a version of door to door, but instead of door to door, I did floor to floor. So I went into a skyscraper 'cause I wanted density. So I was like, "Oh, let me just go to this big office building. There's thousands of people working in this one building, so I don't have to walk around all day. I can just go in the elevator, click one, get out, talk to whoever I see, click two, get out, talk to whoever I see, and I'll go up, you know, 30 or 40 flights in this building." And what I realized when I was doing this was, um, it's kind of amazing. I actually recommend this to pretty much anyone, which is when you have a new thing, you, you have all these ideas about why it's so great, but you haven't actually, like, pitched it to somebody in a concise way where you have, I don't know, 30 seconds to a minute to, like, get your foot in the door, and then maybe another minute to explain what your thing is, and then you gotta make a call to action and try to get them to buy. And my pitch really sucked. But because I was floor to floor, it was like high intensity.
- SPSam Parr
But by floor 20, by floor 20 though-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, by floor 12 it was solid. I knew.
- SPSam Parr
Ugh. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And so what I realized was, okay, you go in, you can't just bother people in an office. You have to find the front desk lady. Her job is to greet a visitor. So I said, "Okay, that's the accessible person." She also had a lot of clout, and so I learned about basically a local influencer. So when people think about influencers they think it's gotta be a celebrity, but actually in any, in any pocket of people there is somebody who is more influential than the rest, any tribe of people. And in an office that's always the person at the front desk. It's the office manager, the secretary, whatever you wanna call it. And so I would go to this kinda office manager and I would say, um, I would say, "Hey, do you guys ever do c-" So instead of saying, "Hey, would you like to eat some sushi?" It's like, "No, I don't just eat sushi from strangers." I realized pretty quickly. That was my first pitch. By floor two I was like, "All right. I'm not saying that again."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
So floor three and four I realized, okay, I should actually ask them, like, do they ever, um, "Do you guys ever do office catering for lunches or whatever for the, for the, for the group?" And they would say yes. So I asked a question that had a very simple answer, a yes or no answer. If it was no, then I knew don't waste my time on this prospect. They're not gonna order. But if it was yes, now I had one person who might order 50 lunches, um, in one order, right? Like, they would order bulk. And so I would ask them, "Hey, do you ever order, um, you know, do you guys ever do catering for office lunches, maybe a birthday or a big meeting or, or just every Wednesday?" And they were like, "Yeah, we do it every Wednesday." And I'd be like, "Awesome." I said, "When you order, um, where do you typically order from?" "Oh, we always do the sandwich place," blah, blah, blah. I said, "Awesome. Um, w- if you ever wanted to try something new, we actually just opened up a restaurant and I would love to do a deal with you guys where we actually do it for free one time." Right? So I created an offer. I was like, "I'd love to bring you a sample tray just for you, and you can invite a couple people in the office to try it out. If you guys like it, we'll leave a menu with you guys. If you don't like it, no problem, we'll come back, clean it up." And I created an offer. I created an opening question, and I e- ended up getting my pitch right. And this one thing, we were profitable month one. I remember we made, like, 13 grand in the first month, and, like, at the time everybody said, "Restaurants, you don't make any money," and we were like, "We're doing it. We're making money. This is fantastic." And so this floor-to-floor sales and understanding who is the gatekeeper, who is the person I need to get on board, and what is the, the sort of, uh, risk-free offer that I can offer them was the way we got our first, first customers.
- SPSam Parr
How much revenue were you doing in year six? Or not year six, month six.
- SPShaan Puri
Year six? Zero, dude. We quit in month three [laughs] 'cause what we realized-
- SPSam Parr
Oh, great. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... was, we were like, all right, we were making, I don't know, tens of thousands a month. So I think we were doing, like, maybe 30,000 the first month and then a little bit more the second month. And then by then it was like, dude, we were so worn out of the, just the process of running a restaurant, and we, we-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... kind of had a realization of like, great, we can keep scaling this, but that means we're gonna have to keep doing this. And it was, you know, we were waking up at 4:00 in the morning, going to the fish market, staying there till 11:00 at night 'cause we would do private caterings at night, and, uh, doing dishes in the night. We didn't know anything. It was so stupid. I didn't realize you should hire people. We just did everything dumb.
- SPSam Parr
You were like, you were, like, looking at your partners one day after work and you're like, "Bail?" And they're like, "Bail." [laughs] Like, "We're out." [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
We had a realization. We, we realized we were in the wrong business. We realized actually the, the, the genius of this was the d- delivery part. People actually liked food delivery, but they only ate sushi every couple weeks max. And so we were like, "Oh, you know what we should do? We've been telling everyone for a year we're gonna create the next, you know, this Chipotle of sushi. Actually, what we should do is just deliver whatever the hell they actually want. They want sandwiches, dude. They want burritos. So we should just deliver that. That's the business. Not the sushi part." And then we were like, "All right. I think that's true." Do we wanna do that? I was like... And, you know, we had the smart thing, which was, "Hey, guys, maybe the first business idea we ever had in our lives might not be the best one."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And, uh, we're still young and we haven't committed anything to anybody. What if we just switched to a better, to a different business altogether? And I'm so glad we had that conversation, because most of the time if something's working, you're making a little bit of money, and you've been telling everyone for a year, you just feel like you need to stay consistent with it. And that would've been a terrible-
- SPSam Parr
No
- SPShaan Puri
... decision for us.
- SPSam Parr
Um, that's hilarious. Um, all right. I'll tell you, uh, another one. So I'll skip the book club one, but I'll mention it briefly. I had a book club, TheAntiMBA.com, and I-that's how I met Siebe. I met Ryan Hoover this way. Uh, some of my best friends. Dude, I just put another ad on Craigslist and I said, "I'm, uh, organizing a business book club," and it was just from Craigslist, and I ended up getting 10,000 people signing up to my email list.
- SPShaan Puri
By the way-
- SPSam Parr
And again-
- SPShaan Puri
... sorry. Can we name these methods? I will call the first one you did either, like, uh, piggybacking, 'cause you piggybacked off Craigslist, or, like, host an event maybe. That was the method you did.
- 13:30 – 15:00
Magnet method
- SPShaan Puri
by brute force, hand-to-hand combat, go get 100 customers that way. It'll only take you a few days to do that. Um, and this third one, you're talking about the book club, we call it, like, the Magnet. It, it, there's something different to it, 'cause it wasn't just an event. 'Cause what you did was you found a bunch of like-minded people, 'cause there was a filter. The only people who wanna do a book club for on- for like biographies and business books are gonna be the type of business nerds that you wanted to be around-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... and, like, create a product for. And so, like, the selective filter where for s-
- SPSam Parr
We'll call it filter
- SPShaan Puri
... 90, 95% of the people they're gonna be like, "Hell no." But 5% they're, it's a hell yes because it's like so niche to their obsessions. And I think that there's something smart there that's different than just hosting a general event. It's a magnet.
- SPSam Parr
The learnings, by the way, for a book club, no one reads the book except me. I was the only one who read the book.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
I was just, like, teaching the book. Um, all right, I'll do the second one though. All right. So Bunk was acquired for a very small sum, and we ended up turning it into an app called Roommates. We'll call this methodology Made to Stick, I guess, because I learned this, I, uh, one of the books that we read at my book club was called Made to Stick. It was by Dan and Chip Heath, I think. They're experts on, like, virality. And there was something in the book where it talked about, I forget exactly the phrase, but it, but my takeaway was that phrase that I always say, "Niches make riches." And the idea being, if you ever see one of these BuzzFeed articles, and it'll be like, 50 ways you... 50 reasons why, or, uh, 50, 50 things onl-
- 15:00 – 20:00
"Made to Stick" method
- SPSam Parr
only Long Islanders will laugh at.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
Or 50 things you know you're an Italian American. Or-
- SPShaan Puri
Yes
- SPSam Parr
... 50 ways you know you're from St. Louis. And the thing about those is they don't get a huge amount of traffic, but the people in Long Island or St. Louis or who are Italian, they will always click it. They, and so the click-through rate is through the roof. And so we didn't have a budget when we launched the app Roommates, and so what we did was I stole that, that, that learning and I created... We launched in LA, Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco. Five or six cities. And so what we did was we made an infographic where we called it the typical roommates of San Francisco, the typical roommates of LA. And I had never even been to LA or New York or Boston. I'd never even been there. And what we did was each image of the infographic, it was 18 people I think, or 15 people, and it said, "Here's the people from the Marina," which is a neighborhood in San Francisco. "Here's a typical roommate from the Mission," which is the hipster area of San Francisco. And in each thing we said, "Where do they shop?" And we named eight or four different places that they would shop. Where do they eat? What, what's a fu- funny quote they would say? And I would read Yelp and I would find out in, in, let's say, New York, like, what is a, the most reviewed restaurant on Yelp in that area, and are people making jokes and saying that it's over-hyped or whatever. And which stores are the most popular. And then what we did, we made those infographics and we, uh, we shared them out on Facebook and Twitter and I think Instagram. I don't even remember where. And we tagged those restaurants and those stores, and most people were like, "Oh, this is so funny. They totally know us." Which we just stole it from Yelp, all the jokes.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
And they ended up sharing it, and we got something like 100,000 users just from that infographic. Just from those five infographics. And if you Google, you guys can Google, um, typical roommates of LA, and you'll see Huffington Post or all the local newspapers of those regions shared it, and that's how we got all of our initial customers from, uh, f- from those four or five infographics.
- SPShaan Puri
I remember seeing that. I remember seeing the San Francisco one. It was really funny. It would be like... Like, you're making it sound almost like it was, like, uh, like utilitarian, but it was actually humorous I thought. Like, it wasn't necessarily-
- SPSam Parr
It was funny. Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... where they shop, it would be like, the Marina. It's like, and then it'd be like whatever. I, I don't remember exactly how you phrased it, but it would be like, um, uh, here you're gonna fi- uh, Kelsey is blah blah blah, and you would kind of like make fun of them but also backhanded compliment them. And then you would say like, you know, the upside, you'll, you know, you'll always have, um, you know, Lululemon around the house. The downside, blah blah blah. And you would like kind of poke fun at them, and because of that everybody shared it 'cause-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... for their own neighborhood-
- SPSam Parr
They're like, "That's so me"
- SPShaan Puri
... they'd be like, "That's so true. That's so true. That's so us. Oh, my God. This is you." And then for others that they didn't like, the other neighborhoods, same thing. Right? It was like kind of like our team versus their team. And so y- y- a lot of people shared this thing. I was living in San Francisco at the time. I remember seeing that right when I actually moved there, and I was like, this is actually quite... It was useful 'cause it's li- it's not info you really found anywhere else [laughs] either. Like, uh-
- SPSam Parr
Right. It was like supposed to be like-
- SPShaan Puri
... most websites wouldn't say this
- SPSam Parr
... the real, the real take. So here's an example. This is Wrigleyville in Chicago. I've never even been there, but it's an image of a bro-y looking guy who I, I guess went to Indiana University, and he's wearing a Cubs shirt. It said, "Average one bedroom rent, average two bedroom rent." Um, here's how much you would save if you had a roommate, and it says $310 per month or 20 Merkel's Fishbowls, which I guess is like a restaurant in that area.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
Or it would say, um, avoids Pilsen and Andersonville, so it creates like the tribe thing. Those are other neighborhoods. Occupation: a PE teacher or a weekend bartender at Deuces. Uh, you'll probably find them at Rig- Wrigley Field Rooftops crushing old styles or doing 17 shots of Fireball. Secret spot: the back bar at- of The Stretch, trying to get the waitress to play Find The Water or calling everyone boss.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Shit they say: "Hey bro, want a shotski?" So like things like that-
- SPShaan Puri
Right, right
- SPSam Parr
... where we would make fun of people. But you'll notice we name as many brands as possible. The name of the game was throw in as many brands as possible, and those are the people-
- SPShaan Puri
Local references
- SPSam Parr
... and those are the people who share. And that is how we got... I forget exactly how many users we had, but I remember I got paid on how many swipes people did, and they were swiping millions and millions and millions of times.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
And so that's how we got, uh-
- SPShaan Puri
That's great
- SPSam Parr
... that's how we got traffic and users to the app Roomates.
- SPShaan Puri
All right, I'm gonna tell you, uh, I'm going in order here. So my next business was a biotech business in Australia that, um... Go to Australia. Now biotech is a very, like, like, we're talking about, like, scrappy startup stories, like how do you get someone to download an app? How do you get somebody to, like, order food? Biotech is like science. [laughs] And people in it are very like-
- 20:00 – 26:00
The no risk offer
- SPShaan Puri
technology was there's coal that's underground, and people think coal is real dirty 'cause if you mine it, you bring it up to the surface and you burn it. Yes, it is very, like, bad for the environment. However, our technology was this thing where you don't have to mine it, so you don't have to bring it out of the ground, and you don't have to burn it. Instead, what you do is you pump little microbes into the ground, little naturally occurring microbes, and their natural feeding is basically they eat the coal. They, they basically decompose the coal. Essentially it's like they eat coal and they fart out natural gas. So their natural metabolism of it will release natural gas, which then bubbles back up to the, to your pipe in the surface, and, uh, boom, you have a flare of natural gas. It's really great.
- SPSam Parr
Was this like a company? Like a big company?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, it was, it was a company. It was a startup company. So basically this, the backstory was this guy in the United States, this scientist in the United States had been, had gotten $40 million of government funding to develop microbes that would, uh, decompose ammunition 'cause the government had, uh, w- there's wars all around the world, and part of the, like, the environmental cleanup they had to do as part of the wars was they needed something that would decompose a lot of the ammunition and the, the, the waste product of the wars. And so what happened was somebody realized, you know, the guy who, the CEO of our company realized, "Hey, ammunition actually has a very similar composition to coal. I wonder if these bugs could decompose coal."
- SPSam Parr
Got it.
- SPShaan Puri
And so, but it was speculative, and we didn't know if it would work. It worked in the lab. Will it work in the field? Now, what are you gonna do here to get your first customers, right? To get a customer-
- SPSam Parr
Oh, God
- SPShaan Puri
... you need somebody that has, owns like, land that has coal. You have to have permits. They have to let you, like, go do shit on their land. How is this gonna happen? It's like so much friction. So what we did was what I'll call the method of the no risk offer. So what we did was we would go to... We, we said, "Who needs this the most?" And we said, "Well, it can't be somebody that actually values their coal," 'cause we're gonna go and we don't have the money to go buy this coal. Like, we can't buy the land from them. Like, if you own land with a bunch of, you know, coal that's basically like fuel, like that's very valuable property. So we said, "We need to go to people that have stranded coal," meaning they have coal that mining it would be uneconomic. It'd be too deep, it'd be too gnarly the way the, the ground structure is. So there is coal, but like, it's not good for mining. And so we got really tight on basically finding some- for somebody for whom this was excess capacity. And I think, you know, like Airbnb, that's what they did, right? They sold excess rooms, excess space in your house. So we had took that same method. We said, "How do we make a no risk offer?" So we went to them and we said, "Look, you're sitting on a bunch of coal."
- SPSam Parr
Who's them?
- SPShaan Puri
What's that?
- SPSam Parr
Like who's a, an example person?
- SPShaan Puri
Like the landowner. We would find, we would do a geographic, we looked at the geographic survey. We would find where the stranded coal was, meaning coal that's not economic to be mined. Then we would go figure out from the property, like, records who owns that. We would go knock on their door and we'd say, "Did you know you're sitting on a bunch of coal?" And they'd be like, "Yeah, but like you can't really mine it. We did a feasibility study. It didn't work." And we would say, "Great. What if I told you there was a way that you could make this many dollars per square foot without mining the coal?" And they're, "Uh, yeah, I'm interested. Okay, tell me more." And we said, "Well, look, we have this technology, but you know, obviously we need to, to prove it. It'll only take us this much space, and here's the deal. We will do this all at our cost to do this whole method. Costs you nothing, and but if it works, we want a share of the upside." And they were like, "Okay, so you might make my land way more valuable, and I only pay you if you do it. And if I don't, if it doesn't work, I'm out, I'm out nothing? Deal." And so we were-
- SPSam Parr
And I'll throw in a tray of sushi.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Exactly. And so th- we were able to do this. Now this is something that, this is also how Alex Hormozi did his gym launch thing, if you listen to his story. What he would do is he'd go to the gym owners. He'd say, uh, you know, "I have a marketing program." They're like, "Ah, I don't wanna buy it. We tried a bunch of marketing things. I, I don't ha- I don't have enough money, money anyways to go do this. I'm not gonna buy your marketing program for $10,000." So he reworked his offer, and he was like, "How about this? If I don't incre- I will, I will increase your sales by $100,000 using my marketing method, and all I say is that anything we, any of the incremental revenue we bring in, we get to keep, whatever, 15%." It's like, okay, so you keep 15%, but like you don't get anything if, if you don't raise my, my revenue? It's like, yeah, we, if we don't raise your revenue by X, we get nothing.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, no-brainer.
- SPShaan Puri
Hormozi did a no, no-brainer offer. Main Street did the same thing, grew really fast in the s- tech startup community by saying, "Hey, there's R&D tax credits available. We will do it for you. We keep 20% or 25% of all this, all the extra tax credits you get. N- You're not gonna do this anyways, so it's just free money for you." Um, and so a lot of people use this, this no risk offer method, and I think that's a very, very fast way to bypass one of the hardest parts as- if you're a new company, which is you have no relationships, nobody trusts you, nobody... You have no track record, so you need to offer them something that has, like, zero downside and only upside.
- SPSam Parr
How many customers did you get doing that?
- SPShaan Puri
Well, ironically, what ended up happening was we had, like, five interested customers, and then one of them was like, "Hey, hey, hey. If you're gonna do this, I want the, I wanna own this technology. Like, if it... Sound like, basically, don't go to my competitors with this offer. Like, they're gonna... Then they're gonna have, you know, all this benefit. I want this." And so then they, they came back later, and they renegotiated the deal, and they said, "How about this? We'll give you $5 million and the land, and we'll do the permitting for you." Um, but... And then we're like, "Okay, what's the catch?" And they're like, "The catch is if this works, we wanna be able to buy 50% of the technology for 50 million." And then we were like, "All right, fine. Deal." Like, that's, you know, this business is so freaking hard, like, let's try this. And, uh-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... in the end, I don't think it ever ended up working or I'm not sure what actually happened 'cause I left after that deal was signed.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
I was like, "Okay, I'm not gonna sit here-"
- SPSam Parr
Turns out microbiomes, uh, microbiomes don't even like charcoal, so turns out that it didn't even work. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
No, they, they went to the lab, but it's like it's... I think it would turned out to be kind of expensive. Or what, what actually happened is this field trial was gonna take five years to do. I wasn't gonna sit around and wait till the, till the conclusion of this. And so I think what happened-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... was like the guy who said yes got fired or took another job. The next guy who came in was like, "Ah, I don't know. I don't wanna fund this." And I have no idea what happened. It's kinda died on the vine.
- SPSam Parr
But you got
- 26:00 – 31:00
Viral content
- SPSam Parr
the customers, and that's the point of the episode.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, we got... [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Um.
- SPShaan Puri
Exactly.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
The, the subsequent failure is irrelevant, okay? [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. That doesn't matter. Um, all right, my next one. So, uh, I started a conference series called HustleCon. I ended up hosting this event maybe four or five times. The first time I hosted it, I decided to host it in May, and I think it went li- uh, it, the event happened in July, uh, July 1 or July 15. But I had roughly six weeks between deciding to do it and it happening. And I think I made 60 grand in revenue and I think 50,000 in profit. The next year I think it was something like 180 grand in revenue, and my costs were only 20 grand, so whatever that is, that's what I made. And then I did it again, and I think I made, like, a quarter of a million in revenue and, like, 200,000 in profit. Um, and then we hosted a bunch more events.
- SPShaan Puri
Peak did, like, 600K, right?
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. It, it made, uh... Each event was doing clo- like, a couple times we got close to a million. And I made a ton of mistakes. The biggest mistake I made is I made it like a TED event, not like a trade show. Had I made it like a trade show, I probably could have made tens of millions per event, but I just didn't know what I was doing. And I also charged, like, $300 to attend this event. So I screwed up the business, but I did get a lot of, uh, hype right away. And the way that I got hype was I actually found one of my old posts. Um, I would, uh... This one is on Priceonomics. So this guy, Rohin, uh, Rohin, he has a blog called Priceonomics, and at the time they were, like, the best bloggers out there. He was such a good blogger, and he would go viral all the time, so he was gonna give a talk on content marketing. And what I would do is, I think I had eight speakers. I wrote a blog post every Tuesday and Thursday on each speaker, and I would go to Hacker News, and I would go to Reddit, and I would figure out which subreddits would this article fit best in. And then later on in my second thing I'm gonna talk about af- uh, after you go is I ended up eventually writing blog posts specifically that would go get popular in Reddit or on Reddit in different, like, subreddits. But at this point I hadn't figured that out. And so right away, I think on the first day of business, I think I got 1,000 people to come, uh, to the website, and then after that it would go to, like, 1,000 to 5,000 on any given day. And you would go to the website, and it would say a, a funny pop-up that I would get your attention, and I would say, "Give me your email." And the hustlecon.com, you couldn't even purchase a ticket unless you gave me your email. You couldn't even see all the details. And so I would get people's email, and I would subsequently, like, the way I had it set up was I would write blog post number one, put it on Reddit, blog post number two, put it on Reddit. The traffic comes, I collect their email. When I get their email, they go into a cycle where they get sent blog post number one, then they get blog post number two, and then I would keep writing blog post number three, number four, number five, and I would keep emailing it to the past people. So it was like a cycle. And those people would share just a little bit, and that's how I eventually got two, three, four, 5,000 people coming to the website. And I did another thing where I made the speaker look like a hero. So it was, like, a glowing article about them, and they would share it within their company, and the each employee would share it to be proud. And that's how I got two, three, four, 5,000 people. And I think, I think the email list, I s- if you Google, um, HustleCon Nev blogs, my friend Neville Medhora, Nev, N-E-V-B-L-O-G, he wrote a blog post about how I made 60 grand in, like, six weeks, and I list all the blog posts and emails that I sent, and that's originally, uh, how we got our first I think 10,000 email subscribers, um, is just doing that blogging. And, and w- and when I say we, I mean me in my kitchen, uh, just, like, doing this in my crappy San Francisco apartment.
- SPShaan Puri
That's... Yeah, that's great. I remember reading those blog posts. They're really good. I s- highly suggest you go read those. Uh, they're detailed and specific, and you literally have screenshots of what you wrote in certain emails, and I think that's really cool to go see. I like when people share those specifics. Um, oh, do you hear that? Do you hear that? That's the-
- SPSam Parr
No.
- SPShaan Puri
Dude, that's the, that's the thrill of the shill.
- SPSam Parr
Oh. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] I got you with that one too.
- SPSam Parr
I thought we had a pause. I thought we had a pause.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
I was like, "Wait, what?" Uh, all right, you've got 90 seconds to, to, to thrill me-
- SPShaan Puri
All right
- SPSam Parr
... and to shill me.
- SPShaan Puri
For those who don't remember, the thrill of the shill is where we shill a thing, but- The way we do it is with value. We do it with, we, by, we, by entertaining with a little bit of story. So I was gonna talk to you about Shepherd, but the way I did it was I asked Marshall, I go, "Yo, when you launched this thing..." 'Cause this is now a business that is coming up on, like, I, I guess I really shouldn't say, but millions of dollars of profit a year. So a very, very, very healthy business. I said-
- SPSam Parr
How old are they? Four years?
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, yeah, like, less than four years old. So, uh, in less than four years, getting to, you know, basically eight figures in profit. Profit,
- 31:00 – 36:00
Use the personal story
- SPShaan Puri
not revenue, profit. So anyways, I was like, "Hey, dude, I'm doing this episode about how you got your first 100 customers. What did you do for, for Shepherd?" And he goes, um, he goes, "Well, I did a couple of things." But he's like, "What I did was I..." He linked me to the tweet. So he did three, like three or four steps in a row. So tw- tweet one, I'll show this on the screen. He just goes, "I'm launching a new business tomorrow." And then did the shh sign emoji, and then he said, "Hint, it's an agency." And he had a small Twitter following, about 10,000 followers at the time. Um, not like a huge mega influencer, but enough. And that, that post itself has 350 likes. So that post itself probably got a bunch of people being curious, going inbound. And then what he did next is, like, "I'm gonna explain it on my newsletter." So he goes to the newsletter, and he writes this post, and he goes, "Today I'm launching this new business, but let me tell you a story." And he goes, "A few years ago, my business is struggling. Here's why." So he does what I call the personal story tactic, which is instead of pitching the solution that you've made, you pitch the problem that you had, and you tell a personal story where you reveal some information and you do some vulnerability, and hopefully other people resonate with the problem that you had. So he goes, uh, "My business was, was doing good." And he's like, "But I, uh..." Or so he's like, he's like, "I had this business, it was kinda struggling. I was working all the time, but we never really had any profits. I realized I, I always thought I could solve the problem with growth. And then finally one day, I was like, 'Maybe I should try to lower my cost.' I didn't really know what to do, so I looked for where could I lower my cost?" He goes, "I heard about a guy who had hired somebody in the Philippines for less than $1,000 a month. Meanwhile, I was paying somebody 5,000 for the same service. So I did it. I did another one. Here's a picture of me in the Philippines wh- you know, we went out and met them 'cause I was so amazed at how this worked." He goes, "And so then that became my secret weapon. I was hiring overseas, and so now all of a sudden I went from profit margin of zero to profit margin of, whatever, 15%. And that made the difference between the business sucking to the business being good. So I started doing this for a few friends just for fun. Finally decided I'm gonna make a business called supportshepherd.com to help you find eq- equ- like, uh, amazing employees that are 80% less than the US equivalent." He goes, blah, blah, blah. And then he sent me the screenshot. We can show this on the screen. So this newsletter went to 12,000 people. It had an 11% click rate, which is the power of a story versus an ad. And so-
- SPSam Parr
Normally a, a, an ad would get, like, a one to 3% click-through rate.
- SPShaan Puri
Exactly. So this is 10 times better. Why is it 10 times better? 'Cause again, he kinda opened up the kimono and told a story. So to supportshepherd.com, it says 1,300 people clicked that link, and then that's where he got, you know, j- s- you can even assume even, like, a 3% conversion on 1,300 people is gonna get you, you know, your whatever, your f- I don't know the math, but, like, let's say your first 20, 30 customers to get the ball rolling. And for a business like this, where each customer is worth thousands of dollars, that was enough to, to sort of really actually move the needle. And then what he did was he just kept doing the same thing. And so if you wanna hire people, go use Shepherd. That's really the, the shill, but I actually like this method a lot. I remember that Ryan Hoover did this amazingly with Product Hunt also. I remember him doing this. So he did the hand-to-hand combat, where every morning he would go to Philz Coffee in San Francisco at, like, 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning, and for the first three hours of the day, all he would do would be reply to people's tweets. So anytime somebody said about, something about Product Hunt, he would reply personally. Anytime somebody mentioned a cool product, he would be like, "That's awesome. Do you wanna post that on Product Hunt? I gave you access." And he would, he would manually brute force do this in the mornings, but then he would go and he would go to Fast Company and say, "Hey, do you wanna cover Product Hunt?" And they're like, "I never heard of it, no." So he's like, "Damn, I really wanna get press, but I can't. Uh, they're not, they don't wanna talk about Product Hunt. It's not sexy enough." So then instead what he did was he would go to, uh, Fast Company, he would say, "Hey, I signed up 1,000 customers for my side project in a weekend. Can I tell you how we did it? And I wrote this blog post. It's already written in this Google Doc. Will you guys run this?" And as a guest post. And then if you go look, Product Hunt has a bunch of posts that he wrote. And so it was like he would get to 100 customers, then he would write the post of how he got to 100 customers, get that posted somewhere on Indie Hackers or whatever. That would get him to 1,000. Then he would go write the post of how I got to 1,000, 'cause he's like the generically interesting story. People aren't that interested in Product Hunt, but they are interested in how a guy can bootstrap his side hustle to 1,000 customers in a week.
- SPSam Parr
And he did the work for them.
- SPShaan Puri
And he did the work for them, and so again, it was a no-brainer offer to, to basically say, "Hey, it's written. Do you wanna run this or should I go, you know... I, I like Fast Company. You guys should run this. If not, I'll, I guess I'll go ask somebody else." And that, that method I saw was something somebody else did that worked really well.
- SPSam Parr
All right. Solid thrill of the shill. Good job. You forgot the call to action. Joinshepherd.com?
- SPShaan Puri
Supportshepherd.com.
- SPSam Parr
Supportshepherd.com. Um, all right. What's your, uh, what's your next one?
- SPShaan Puri
Okay, so my next one I call pissing in the pond.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And pissing in the pond is as good of a method as it sounds like. So what you wanna do, like you said niches and-
- SPSam Parr
Sounds like a horrible method. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
There's riches in niches. Similarly, what you wanna do is not try to boil the ocean. Bad phrase. You wanna piss in the pond.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Okay, so boiling the ocean is when you go try to get the mass markets to care about what you're doing.
- 36:00 – 38:00
Pissing in the pond
- SPShaan Puri
Doesn't really work. What you wanna do is say, "All right, I'm small anyways. To me, when I have no customers, 10 customers is a big win. 100 customers is a ph- a phenomenal win. And so where can I go that is small but hyper-obsessed?" And so what we did when we launched our e-commerce brand was we kn- we knew that there were Facebook groups dedicated to literally, like, comparing products in our niche. These weren't big, right? There were maybe 5,000 people total, and this is, like, in Facebook, you know? It's like th- that's a l- that's kind of a small overall Facebook group. And what we would do is we'd go there and we would do the Marshall thing. Just like he did with Shepherd, we would go tell our story, which was why we started this brand. So instead of saying, "Buy our product," we would say Um, hey y'all, wanted to share my story, the ups and downs that's gone over the last six months trying to launch a brand that does this. And then we would share, like, here were some of the ups we had, here were some of the downs we had when we got screwed or we got scammed, or we were so naive, and people really started rooting for us. And you can get people to root for you. Um, and so that's how we, for my e-com biz, we did, I think, th- uh, 30,000 in month one in, in revenue about, uh, I think 28,000 specifically, and our ad spend was only maybe 500 or 1,000. So we did try, try ads, but most of the, the revenue that first month came from this group. And this was really good because who those 100 customers are actually matters. And if you can get 100, 100 of the hyper-obsessed people of a niche to actually c- give a shit about you and know about you, they're the ones who spread the word. They're the ones that other people look to for recommendations. And so it's actually quite valuable to go get, to go piss in that pond. And so you go to that group, and the way you do it that's acceptable, where you're making the water warmer, not uncomfortable, is you tell a story of the ups and the downs you've had trying to build something cool in this space. Why you started, what worked for you, what didn't work for you, some of the big mistakes you made, and people will then root for you 'cause you're the underdog. Now, let me give you another example of
- 38:00 – 45:30
Booth babes method
- SPShaan Puri
this. So, I can't believe we even did this business. I'm embarrassed to even say this is a business I was doing, but in our idea lab, we had a hackathon, and in the hackathon our, our DevOps guy was like, "Hey, I built this app. It's like a Foursquare..." Foursquare was hot at the time. This was way back in the day. He's like, "Four- it's Foursquare for beers." And he's like, "Basically every time you drink a beer, watch this. You scan the label, and it checks in that beer, and it keeps track of all the different beers you've drank." And then everybody's like, starts laughing and we're like, "That's awesome, man. That's cool. You know, beer, who lo- who doesn't love beer?" And so we were kinda like, "Maybe there's a thing here." And actually to this day, there actually there is a business called Untappd that does this, and there's a, there's a version of this for wine. We were just the wrong people to start this business. Similar to the sushi business, I made the same mistake again, which was-
- SPSam Parr
You don't even drink beer, do you?
- SPShaan Puri
The guy who d- I'll drink beer, but I'm not like a craft beer aficionado guy-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] No, like-
- SPShaan Puri
... who loves to go try new craft beers. Oh, th- th-
- SPSam Parr
You're like drinking it. You're like, "Ah, yes."
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
"A Miller Lite. This is beautiful. The, [laughs] like a great finish."
- SPShaan Puri
Like, I did a brewery tour once and the guy was like, "Smell these hops." And I was like, "No, thanks. I don't, I don't care."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] Do you guys have french fries?
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Yeah, exactly. I was like, "Can I just drink it? I don't care about all this."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
So anyways, um, we had this app called Beer Hunt. Okay, so how do you do it? W- there was a craft beer... So it was like, where do you get... Again, if you go to the b- the mass market, mass market is like me. They don't care about beer enough to care about this product. But instead there was a craft beer tasting festival or something like that in San Francisco. We went there and we tried to make a splash. This is also the, uh, what I'll call the booth babes method. It's how do you actually make a splash at an event? And so we weren't hosting this one, we were attending, and so we dressed up like it was Oktoberfest. We dressed up like in our, like, whatever lederhosen and whatever. We wore outfits like we were straight from Germany. And we came and we created, we were like, people probably won't just download our app if we say download our app. So how do we give them something-
- SPSam Parr
What age were you when you did this?
- SPShaan Puri
23, 24.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Um, and so we... But you know, we were, our whole company was, is older, but we're all there. And they were, they were down for it, which I liked. Uh, you know, my, our engineers are doing this. And so the, um, what we did was we created a scavenger hunt for the conference. We were like, "Hey, here's a little card. Um, if you can mark off all these things at this conference, uh, we're gonna give one person like, you know, the, like, whatever, some beer dream." It was like, you know, you're gonna get a year's supply of, of craft beer. And it was like it didn't even matter what the prize was. The idea was, like, people are gonna wander around this place anyways. They were happy to play the game of, like, marking things off as they went. So we had our branded little scavenger hunt. They would do it, and at the end we would st- had a guy standing at the door. He would collect them. He would give them out, and he would collect them, and on it they had their email address. And so now we had basically I think we had 1,400 leads or something from this day. It was 1,400 leads of people who are so into craft beer that they will go to this craft beer f- like, paid money to go to this craft beer tasting festival type thing. And so then that, those became the first, you know, whatever, 700 customers, uh, 700 people to download our app, and they really gave a shit. So that, that cr- really cranked the engine to get something started.
- SPSam Parr
Seeing you at a 23-year-old you at a-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... like, fancy brewery, it reminded me of a time, one time I had told Neville, I go, "Neville, I've never been to a strip club," or somehow it came up. And he was like, "I'm gonna take you right now." And I was like, "I don't, I don't really wanna go to a strip club." He's like, "Well, you have your flight at 5:00 PM. There's a strip club near the airport in Texas. It's 2:00. Let's go." And I don't drink, so, like, it's even worse.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
And we go out to the strip club, and I'm so uncomfortable. I'm rubbing my hands. I don't know what to do with my hands. And, uh, I'm like [laughs] and, like, these strippers come up and, like, touch my shoulders, and they're like, "Hey, can I get you anything?" And I was like, "Yeah, can I get some ketchup for these fries?" [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Like the waitresses?
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs] Like, and the food was only $6. It was $1 for fries, $5 for a sandwich. I remember texting my wife, and I'm like, "Do I, how much do I tip?" 'Cause I kinda took up a seat, but I didn't do anything. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
It's just like, it was the most uncomfortable that I've ever been. It's, like, the first and only time I've ever been to a strip club was 2:00 at the airport in Austin strip club. Uh, [laughs] and I just-
- SPShaan Puri
Can I-
- SPSam Parr
... sitting there
- SPShaan Puri
... can I tell you the one time I went to a strip club? It's, it's a incredible story. So I've been one time in my life, uh, you know, maybe 22 years old, something like that. And we go, and it's me, a- people know me, so I don't need to describe me. But it's my buddy who's, like, the ladies' man. This guy, like, was the big man on campus. He, you know, like, your dorm has, like, an RA. He, like, hooked up with the RA's girlfriend.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- 45:30 – 49:30
Launchpad method
- SPSam Parr
like I, as a little skunk project, and if you actually see the link, I list to my original Gumroad project. I made a Gumroad page, and I think it was like 400 words of me just writing like a story explaining. So basically the story was, like in 1996, Jeff Bezos saw this amazing stat, which was that the internet was growing at 2,300%. Nothing grows that fast, Bezos said, unless it's in a Petri dish. And immediately then, he knew that he had to start an internet company that sold something. Um, and so that was how it started. And then I said, "Hey everyone, I'm Sam. Um, I invest in a lot of companies or I in, or I have this company called The Hustle, and I'm ab- able to see a lot of interesting things. Next quarter I'm launching this product called Trends, where I'm going to, um, break down interesting companies and explain how they work, and hopefully identify a handful of trends as shocking as this Bezos one that he found. So you're gonna be able to catch the tidal wave instead of miss it."
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
"I'm gonna charge $300 a year for this, but right now you just spend 100 bucks and you get a lifetime of, of access." And so I got, originally I got, um, 1,000 or 2,000 people to sign up for this, and I'll explain how. But before we even launched this whole project, I ran Facebook ads against a, this Gumroad page, and it made $60,000 in pre-sales. And the way that I got the initial 100 users is The Hustle at the time probably had a million emails, and I just found the 300 engaged users and I sent them an email that basically explained this story and linked to the Gumroad page. Um, and then what I did was I actually got on the phone with all 100 of them, and I asked them, "Why'd you do this? What are you looking for? What, what are your expectations?" And then I went and made the first report based off of like some of their insights and what they wanted. And then what we did was people would sign up to The Hustle, and afterwards they would see a page that says, "Thank you. By the way, we have something coming soon." And it would link to this Gumroad page. Now, that's a little bit, if you're listening to this and you don't have an audience, you're like, "Wow, what the fuck? That's not really actionable." But I had to share, this is how we built like I think it was 400 or 500,000 by month 18. And so it worked, and we built the product around just calling those people.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, that's like a, you had a launchpad. You had an audience that you had built for years, and then you were able to do this. And I wouldn't recommend doing that just to launch a product, but if you don't really know what product you wanna launch, it's not a bad idea to, uh, to build a launchpad along the way.
- SPSam Parr
But-
- SPShaan Puri
Just to reach out
- SPSam Parr
... I, I did the same thing with Hampton, and I would DM people on Twitter. And you could say I have an audience, so it helps. I didn't use my audience, but I did use my reputation. So some people had known me.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
Um, so I, I, but I cold emailed people on LinkedIn and I cold people on Twitter. So if you wanna do this methodology, you could still do it that way.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, and we didn't mention a couple of the obvious ones. So ads, we kind of loosely mentioned it. Cold outreach. There's a bunch of traditional methods to, to try to do this. We told you what we did, which was partly because we were young and dumb and we didn't know any better. We didn't know that you could just... I didn't know you could just run ads or just do cold emails. I would go door to door instead. Um, but also, you know, it, it, some of it's in the specifics. So for example, for Milk Road, I had an audience. So I had a newsletter, I had this podcast, and I could have just mentioned it, but I layered on another tactic, which is what I call the David Blaine method.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And you know, David Blaine will do this shit where he's like
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] I'm gonna freeze myself for a week.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, watch me, you know, slightly torture myself and try to do something incredible.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
And it's like, all right. And he's like, "I'm gonna freeze myself in a block of ice. I'm gonna bury myself underground. I'm gonna like-
- SPSam Parr
I'm gonna hold my breath until I pass out. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, I'm gonna... He literally did one where he's like, "I'm gonna hold onto these balloons and fly away." [laughs] It's like, okay, dope.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And he did it. He like flew away like the movie Up. And so he, um, David Blaine does this stuff. So when we started The Milk Road, I was like, okay, if, I think if I told people that, "Hey, I'm starting a daily newsletter about crypto for people that wanna read, um, you know, the latest kind of news and info on crypto,"
- 49:30 – 52:46
The David Blaine method
- SPShaan Puri
I think people would sign up. But I wanted to like juice it a little bit. So how did I go a little bit further? I was like, let me do a stunt. And so I said, "I am funding..." And of course, you know, you have to have some money to do this, this version of it, but you could really... David Blaine puts his body through torture. I put some money on the line. So what I did was I said, "I'm gonna put a million dollars in this wallet. You can go look at the address right now. Here's a million dollars in a wallet, and then I'm gonna try to turn this into 10 million through trading crypto." And this is like, um, you know, Dave from Barstool does this with his, uh, Davey Day Trader. Uh, you know, Jason Calacanis tried to copy that and do JTrader. Like, people try to do a version of this where it's like, watch me try to run this bankroll up. Uh, I s- I learned this from back in the poker days. I used to love when any- anyone would do this in the gambling or poker space, and they'd be like, "I'm starting with this bankroll. I'm either going broke, I'm going to this level, I'm get- I'm getting to this milestone, and here I'm gonna post all of my history." And it never works out, but it's really fun to watch, and that's what I figured, and that's exactly what happened. I managed to turn a million dollars, 'cause we bought it like at, you know, peak crypto, into what became like $350,000 at the bottom, and then now it's a little bit higher. But, um, basically it's like watch me lose money. But either way, watch me lose money is also entertaining. People will subscribe to watch me get my ass kicked. They'll watch... They'll subscribe to watch me kick ass. And even better, they'll subscribe to find out whether I get my ass kicked or whether I kick ass. And so I was-
- SPSam Parr
And the other version of this is people call it now build in public. People do that. Before that, Buffer and ConvertKit did this stuff where they would share like all their team's salaries, they would share all their team's revenue, uh, or the company's revenue, and it, it tends to work. I remember this guy named Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income. He was one of the first guys to do this. He would share his monthly revenue and where it all came from, and I would go there every month to see like what he was doing.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
And it totally worked.
- SPShaan Puri
The a- the extreme access works, but I think the other one is calling your shot or, uh, basically creating a, a storyline. So it's basically like, what is a story? There's the hero, they have a goal, and they have an obstacle, and then there's some stakes. There's, there's something on the line, and I think that's the way to like juice that up. So it's not just, I'm gonna build in public so I'll, I'll provide a monthly update. It's I'm gonna try to do X, and if I don't do X, you know, like there's a, there's a... Like, I'm putting something on the line trying to get there, and I'm gonna try to do this incredible thing, not just inch my way forward. You know, if I said, "Hey, I'm, um, you know, I'll show you, you know, my pro- you know, some of the things I'm investing in," that'd be okay. But to say, "I'm gonna try to turn a million dollars into 10 million or go bust," that people wanna watch more. And so, you know, I think the David Blaine spectacle method is another one.
- SPSam Parr
I wanna see you do that with your second trip to the strip club.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] Build in public, bro.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] I'm gonna order as much food and free water as I can until they kick me out of the strip club.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Can I make it over or under six hours before they realize-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... this guy's just here for the fries? [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Oh. [laughs] All right. We gotta end there. That's the pod. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 52:46
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Transcript of episode tpwkJjGz-R8
