Super niche businesses making millions in 2026

Shaan Puri 0:00 All right, today we're playing Shoot Your Shot, where we let founders come in, sit in the hot seat, and pitch us their business. We got founders that have million-dollar businesses all the way up to $100 million businesses. They get 15 minutes, and in it, they start by telling us the one big number, give us the pitch, and, uh, and shoot their shot. They get to ask us any questions that they want.

Sam Parr 0:17 We've done this in New York City. This time, it's in San Francisco. Whether you're listening on Spotify or YouTube, if you're working out right now, whatever you're doing right now, uh, you need to stop and go to Spotify or go to YouTube, look us up on My First Million, and let us know in the comments which city you want us to go to next.

Shaan Puri 0:33 All right, let's do it. [upbeat music] All right, Sam, what's up? We are doing a new episode, new format. We're calling it Shoot Your Shot, and in... We basically, we go from city to city. We invite founders from those cities to come and shoot their shot, to come pitch us. We got business owners that are doing a million dollars a year to $100 million businesses that you're gonna see in this batch of founders. What should we expect?

Sam Parr 1:02 Well, the best part about this podcast, what, the reason why people listen, the reason why even, we even do it is we talk to, like, unique people. They tell us stuff that we don't normally see, and it's gonna range from, like, people who are, like, way established and, like, killing it, all the way down to people who are just getting started. And we don't actually know who's coming.

Shaan Puri 1:17 We don't know who's coming.

Sam Parr 1:18 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:18 We... This is blind to us. These are all people who listen to the podcast, right? People who, who listen to this podcast? It's founders, en- entrepreneurs, business owners. It's like an audition. It's like American Idol-

Sam Parr 1:27 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:27 ... but for business, I guess. [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:29 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:30 All right, let's do

Shaan Puri 1:31 this. So Shoot Your Shot. Let's get the first founder in here. Who do we got?

Sam Parr 1:34 What's up, dude?

Shaan Puri 1:35 All right, here he comes. [clapping]

Sam Parr 1:36 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:36 What's up?

Sam Parr 1:39 What's up, dog?

Shaan Puri 1:41 All right, have a seat. So you got 15 minutes, but take your, take your time here.

Raghav Gupta 1:45 Excited to be here.

Shaan Puri 1:46 What's your name?

Raghav Gupta 1:47 Raghav.

Shaan Puri 1:47 Raghav, okay. And your company is Posha?

Raghav Gupta 1:51 That's right.

Shaan Puri 1:51 Posha, okay.

Sam Parr 1:53 Where are you from?

Raghav Gupta 1:54 I live in San Francisco.

Sam Parr 1:55 Okay.

Raghav Gupta 1:55 The Bay Area, to be precise. I grew up in India and have been here for five years now.

Sam Parr 2:00 How old are you?

Raghav Gupta 2:01 I'm 32.

Sam Parr 2:02 Is this your first company?

Raghav Gupta 2:04 It is my first company. Um, I did run a project before this where we were trying to build micro wind turbines, but everything that I've learned about Posha has been at Posha. Everything I've learned about building a business has been primarily at Posha.

Shaan Puri 2:18 So we have one rule, which is we are, uh, shameless numbers guys.

Sam Parr 2:23 [laughs]

Raghav Gupta 2:23 Okay.

Shaan Puri 2:24 And so we ask everybody to give us a, a big, juicy, impressive, or interesting number. Doesn't have to be that big, but interesting number that would hook us. Go ahead.

Raghav Gupta 2:31 So we're amongst the 1% of robotics companies you have ever met that are actually shipping a real product in real homes-

Shaan Puri 2:40 [laughs]

Sam Parr 2:40 Okay. [laughs]

Raghav Gupta 2:40 ... in real kitchens, with 1,000 real-world deployments.

Shaan Puri 2:44 Okay, so one, you're in the 1% of non-bullshitting robotics companies. You've shipped 1,000 robots. What do your robots do?

Raghav Gupta 2:51 We are putting a private chef in every home, and we're doing that-

Shaan Puri 2:54 Mm

Raghav Gupta 2:54 ... by building cooking robots for homes. We thought that if Waymo and Tesla and Zoox can use computer vision and AI to take you from point A to point B, why can we not use the same technology to cook a fresh meal for you? Takeout is expensive. Eating at, I mean, cooking at home takes forever. There's no way for you to eat food that is fresh, that's delicious, that doesn't take 60 minutes of your time in the kitchen, that doesn't cost $25 per serving, um, and, and we're, we're, we're the alternative.

Sam Parr 3:25 Dude, my diet right now is man kibble. You know what man kibble is? [laughs]

Raghav Gupta 3:28 I don't.

Sam Parr 3:29 It's three pounds of ground beef [laughs] with rice that will last me for three or four days in soy sauce.

Shaan Puri 3:35 [laughs]

Sam Parr 3:35 So I'm on board with this. Did you raise funding?

Raghav Gupta 3:38 We are backed by Accel.

Sam Parr 3:40 How much did you raise?

Raghav Gupta 3:41 Uh, 8 million.

Sam Parr 3:42 $8 million. And how long ago did you start it?

Raghav Gupta 3:44 We started the company eight years ago. This was right out of my, you know, parents' ground floor. This was back in India. Uh, it was still a project. We formalized the company about five years ago.

Shaan Puri 3:57 Is this the thing, by the way? This is the robot?

Raghav Gupta 3:59 Yeah, that's the robot, and it's, uh, it's cooking.

Shaan Puri 4:01 Can you give us, like, what... Is there, like, a demo? Can it do something? Can it cook us something?

Raghav Gupta 4:05 So what we did was we just cooked spaghetti Alfredo with mushrooms. The food's ready.

Shaan Puri 4:09 No shit.

Sam Parr 4:10 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 4:10 I haven't eaten today. This is perfect.

Raghav Gupta 4:12 And, you know, you need to-

Shaan Puri 4:13 This looks good. By the way, can the... I don't know if the cam- camera should have already seen this. This looks amazing. So d- wait, wait. Did it come out like this?

Raghav Gupta 4:20 We cooked using fresh ingredients: fresh olives, fresh garlic, fresh milk, fresh butter, fresh pasta, and we put some fresh Parmesan cheese on top, and it was all cooked on Posha.

Sam Parr 4:32 Wait, that machine did all-

Shaan Puri 4:33 Made this

Sam Parr 4:33 ... did, did all of this?

Shaan Puri 4:35 Yep.

Sam Parr 4:35 How much does that cost?

Raghav Gupta 4:36 $1,500, which is less than a month of takeout. Um-

Shaan Puri 4:40 [laughs]

Sam Parr 4:41 For who? [laughs]

Raghav Gupta 4:43 Uh, for a family of four.

Shaan Puri 4:44 Okay.

Sam Parr 4:45 Okay, and so what all features-

Shaan Puri 4:46 So this is, I mean, give it a score here.

Sam Parr 4:48 This is great. I mean-

Shaan Puri 4:48 Yeah

Sam Parr 4:48 ... 9 or 10.

Shaan Puri 4:49 Yeah.

Sam Parr 4:50 Perfect.

Shaan Puri 4:50 This is very good.

Raghav Gupta 4:51 Yeah. As I said, 1,000 customers already use us, um, three times a week, which is more than the oven.

Shaan Puri 4:57 [laughs]

Raghav Gupta 4:58 Because you're numbers people, our M6 retention beats DoorDash, HelloFresh, any other food service out there. Last month alone, we clocked $2 million in bookings. Uh, we did that again this month.

Shaan Puri 5:10 [laughs] I've just already finished this.

Sam Parr 5:11 That was great.

Shaan Puri 5:12 It's supposed to just be a taste.

Sam Parr 5:13 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 5:13 [laughs]

Raghav Gupta 5:14 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 5:15 Okay.

Sam Parr 5:15 Wait, so walk me through this. So I, the viewer, uh, the, the listener won't know this, but the viewer will see what you did. But tell us, because it looks just like a bowl of-

Shaan Puri 5:25 Can you, can you grab a couple of the things in the back? It looks like basically there's ingredient containers.

Raghav Gupta 5:30 So here is a pan. It's a, it's a pan that's dishwasher safe. There's a detachable stirrer, detachable spatula. There are containers where you put ingredients. There is a drawer, which is super cool, which has spices. There is space for oil and water, and most impressively, there's a camera that looks at change in color, texture, consistency, makes sure it is mimicking a human chef's intelligence so food can be cooked perfectly.

Sam Parr 5:59 How did you train this?

Raghav Gupta 6:01 So in the early days, we had chefs alone training Posha Now we have our customers training Posha.

Shaan Puri 6:08 Uh-huh. Cool.

Raghav Gupta 6:08 We possibly have the world's largest culinary vision data set for cooking food, and we are taking the Tesla approach. Waymo spent 500,000 hours of supervised driving and $20 billion in venture capital to crack self-driving. Tesla did it a different way. Tesla said, "We'll release something that's useful to consumers, also use it to collect tons of data, and then put robotaxis out."

Shaan Puri 6:32 Wait, wait, so how does that work? Hey, I wanna tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes the team at HubSpot went through, they pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable, uh, ideas that we have brainstormed, and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show. If a customer's that good at cooking, why do they even buy this, and how do they, how do they train your thing?

Raghav Gupta 7:03 Uh, so customers buy this because they want a freshly cooked meal. This can only cook one-pot meals for now.

Shaan Puri 7:11 Oh, yeah. One-part meals, so- No, one-pot. Have you seen this- One-pot meal. So- ... like trend of one-pot meals? No, I don't know what that is. If you go to, like, Reddit or TikTok, there's, like, a whole, like... It's a category of cooking called a one-pot meal, where you're just gonna put a bunch of stuff together and- Yeah, I mean, I called that a Crockpot growing up. So you're not gonna make cheeseburgers. All right, but-

Raghav Gupta 7:26 So it's not going to do a steak.

Shaan Puri 7:27 Right.

Raghav Gupta 7:27 It's not going to flip burgers. It's not going to bake a cake. Um, anything that requires, uh, spreading out, like pancakes, is something it won't do.

Shaan Puri 7:38 What are the... What's the most popular two or three things that people cook with this?

Raghav Gupta 7:41 So the data changes as we change our customer base, but our Indian users cook a lot of paneer. Our Italian users would cook a lot of risotto and spaghetti because it's so hard to cook risotto at home 'cause you have to continue to stir. Our Thai, Vietnamese users would use it to cook Thai red curry, Thai green curry.

Shaan Puri 8:01 So not to be a hater, but basically is the robot just taking out the easiest part of cooking, which is just stirring?

Raghav Gupta 8:08 Um, the robot is taking away the stirring. It's taking away the regulation of heat. It's taking away you being there to add ingredients at the right time.

Shaan Puri 8:19 Okay.

Raghav Gupta 8:19 It's taking away you monitoring the food because, you know, an eight-year-old needs to know what charred onions look like or what browned onions look like. So all the intelligence and all the-

Shaan Puri 8:29 The judgment

Raghav Gupta 8:29 ... babysitting is being taken away. It does not cut down your time in this, uh, in the kitchen from 60 minutes to zero. It cuts down your time in the kitchen from 60 minutes to, to 10 minutes.

Shaan Puri 8:40 Okay. So what's... Uh, give us two things. Give us the big idea, meaning you said something like, "It's already used more than the oven." So do you have this sort of vision that like, "Hey, look, our kitchens all come with these appliances, these three, and now here comes number four. It's gonna be in everybody's home." Th- that means it's this big... Like, get, get me excited about the big idea here.

Raghav Gupta 9:00 So 10 years from now, nobody's going to be cooking because they have to. They'd only be going to cook because they want to, same way nobody's going to be driving because they have to. They're only going to be driving because they want to. Uh, cooking is going the exact same way. DoorDash is something you will only order when your robot at home cannot cook the meal that you want to eat or when you're ordering corporate lunches. Cooking will become a leisurely activity, something that you only do for joy but not Monday through Friday when it's a chore. And we are the company that's building the future where every house will have a robot chef that cooks food for you so you don't have to.

Shaan Puri 9:37 That's pretty cool. W- Are... Okay, so how much revenue are you do- What's your, like, uh, run rate right now?

Raghav Gupta 9:43 So we did $2 million in bookings last month, and the m-

Shaan Puri 9:47 And it's $1,500? Why are you saying bookings? Yeah. Just 'cause you don't have the devices yet, so it's presale?

Raghav Gupta 9:50 So we have about 1,000 units shipped on the field and a long pre-order wait list that we're trying to fulfill as fast as we can. So we're, we're making sure our manufacturers can scale with demand. We're making sure our recipe library can scale with demand. We're making sure reliability, supply chain, logistics, uh, all of that is just scaling with demand.

Shaan Puri 10:11 This is awesome. What's the cur- So the current bottleneck is manufacturing these things?

Raghav Gupta 10:15 Uh, it's manufacturing. It's also operations. So, um, whenever you ship a hardware product out in the early days, uh, you always need to handhold people. Something or the other can go wrong, um, and you need a service infrastructure for people to have support if something goes wrong.

Shaan Puri 10:32 Right.

Raghav Gupta 10:33 It's the same bottleneck that Waymo has. It's-

Shaan Puri 10:35 Wh- where'd you get the 2 million in bookings? Is that just viral demos on social media, basically? Did you do anything to get customers, or it's just people like the novelty, people wanna try it? And did they give you the cash already?

Raghav Gupta 10:45 Yeah. They gave us the cash already. There are, uh, three ways, uh, that we drive demand. The first is organic word of mouth. Every paying customer gets us at least one more paying customer without us spending a single dollar on marketing. Second, Posha is built for the camera.

Shaan Puri 11:02 Yeah.

Raghav Gupta 11:02 So a random nobody would get Posha home, shoot content, post it online, and overnight, they become internet celebrities. We had this creator who had 11,000 followers. Within six weeks, she got X number of followers. Guess what X is.

Shaan Puri 11:17 I don't know.

Raghav Gupta 11:18 She went from 11,000 to 450,000 followers, and all that changed was that she was not shooting Posha content and she started shooting Posha content.

Shaan Puri 11:27 Have you seen the Matic?

Raghav Gupta 11:29 Yes.

Shaan Puri 11:29 Have you seen the Matic, Shaan? Yeah, I, I've seen it 'cause of this exact reason. It's basically- I own it ... fancy Roomba. It's awesome, and it, like... There's, like, one viral moment. Well, there's probably a few, actually. One, it sucks up a sock, and it, like, opens up its latch, and it t- like, throws it out. And it's huge, though. Like, I live in New York City. I... This sounds awesome. My wife complains about how much time it cooks, and I'm like, "Dude, just make me a kibble. It's fine." And I would definitely rather eat that, but that's huge. I can't use that in New York yet. You can't use it 'cause you don't have counter space, you mean, or what are we- Counter space. Okay. Yeah.

Raghav Gupta 11:59 So you're absolutely right, and the good thing is that the market is so huge-

Shaan Puri 12:03 Of course

Raghav Gupta 12:03 ... that there are enough people with space to put this in their kitchen. We're working on the next version of Posha that will be miniaturized, uh, that will fit in Manhattan apartments. But the version after that Will actually replace the range in your home-

Sam Parr 12:17 Oh, that's interesting

Raghav Gupta 12:18 ... and cook four dishes at a time.

Shaan Puri 12:19 So, so, so I got a question. This can't cook meat, right?

Raghav Gupta 12:22 It cannot cook steak, but it can cook meat as long as the meat has been cubed and the size is one cubic inches or smaller.

Shaan Puri 12:30 Okay, so you can put chicken in there cubed, and then it cooks it.

Sam Parr 12:32 Yep. Hey, what do your parents think?

Raghav Gupta 12:34 They're extremely proud that I was able to break out of the family business, which was- which had nothing to do with tech, and I used my education well to actually make a big impact in the world. Uh, they're extremely proud and happy.

Sam Parr 12:49 They're supportive. They like it.

Raghav Gupta 12:50 Yeah.

Sam Parr 12:50 That's badass. What was your family business?

Raghav Gupta 12:52 Uh, my dad runs a food grain business. So they grind wheat. Um, you might have heard of this thing. It's called an atta chakki.

Shaan Puri 13:00 Okay. They grind it.

Raghav Gupta 13:01 Yeah, they grind wheat, and then they sell fresh flour. So fresh food has been something that's always been close to my heart from the very beginning.

Shaan Puri 13:07 What do you need help with?

Raghav Gupta 13:09 Um, you guys have built great communities, uh, you with MFM and you with Hampton. We feel community is going to be a big lever of growth for Posha. How do you think we should leverage community to continue to grow Posha?

Sam Parr 13:23 Let me say something really quick. I think people use the word community and audience differently.

Raghav Gupta 13:29 Okay.

Sam Parr 13:29 So, for example, MFM is an audience, meaning if we quit doing this, the audience eventually is gonna go away.

Raghav Gupta 13:36 Mm-hmm.

Sam Parr 13:36 Shaan owns a, a, a brand that has a community. It has a, a community online where lots of his customers are talking and interacting, and that's a community. And I think you'd have to determine which of those two are you actually talking about.

Shaan Puri 13:49 Yeah, the best thing I heard of this is if everybody was together, which way would the chairs be pointing? So an audience is all the chairs point at the stage.

Raghav Gupta 13:56 Correct.

Shaan Puri 13:56 A community is the chairs point at each other. So, for example, to your question, what's that air fryer brand that went crazy, like, just like the-

Sam Parr 14:03 Ninja?

Shaan Puri 14:04 Uh, yeah, maybe it's Ninja, but, like, basically the air fryer in the last, like, five years had, like, a big renaissance. And actually a community-

Sam Parr 14:11 Or the Creami did too.

Shaan Puri 14:12 Yeah, Cr- Ninja Creami did too, where there's a community of people that are sharing recipes. And it works because I think a little bit more than yours, the user can kind of figure out, like, create new things that rather than, like, the app only lets you do 14 items, pick one of the 14. And so if you have some element of UGC, user, user-generated cooking in this case, user-generated recipes that they could share and they could kind of get props for from one another, I think that's the, the key. And you have to find a, you know, a hub for them. Is it, is it on Reddit? Is it on Discord? Is it on Facebook? Is it on Instagram? How are you gonna get people to share this stuff? But I would study what the Air Fryer community did. I would study what the Ninja Creami did, and I would try to replicate as much as I could of the factors of that success.

Sam Parr 14:55 Yeah, like for example, I used to love this app called Aptiv. It was a fitness app. And they had a Facebook group. And I was very active on the Facebook group. And same with Peloton. I'm sure they have a Facebook group where you, like, talk about your favorite instructors, or like, "Has anyone tried this type of workout?" Another one is Ladders. That's a, another fitness app that they had this, like, community. So that's their customers talking together. It's super valuable. And so what I would do is for every... I would put, like, something in your, when you ship it out, like, you just... I don't know. If it's, like, mostly moms, I would, and what age they are, might choose Facebook. If it was nerds, I would choose Reddit, whatever. Facebook groups, though, I do think are, are still the best.

Shaan Puri 15:29 I think the other question is what do you- what's the bigger benefit you're attaching yourself to? So are people buying this fundamentally for time savings? So then you would say, "Well, this is for people who really value their time. Maybe it's a busy professional, the b- the working mom," et cetera, et cetera. And you need to create metrics and success stories and attract that type of person, go to those influencers who are gonna spout that kind of religion. Or is the religion about foodies, people who love food that, but they've been limited by skill?

Raghav Gupta 15:55 Okay.

Shaan Puri 15:55 "I would love to cook risotto. I would love to eat risotto, but I don't know how to cook risotto. And that skill gap is getting bridged by this thing, and it lets me indulge my foodiness." And it's not about the time savings.

Raghav Gupta 16:04 Mm.

Shaan Puri 16:05 It's not about brutal- like, efficiency, utility. It's about enjoyment. And so I would try to figure out, and the easy answer's gonna be, "Oh, it's both. It's all." But in order to really get a community going, you wanna have a beachhead. You wanna have, like, an initial s- persona that you're targeting, and really it's like what's the happy ending, the dream outcome for that person, the kind of inner itch that they've been waiting, waiting to scratch, that your, your product is helping them do that. Your product's not the hero. It's the tool that the average person uses to become a hero themselves. And so which one, w- which one is it? That's something I would kind of ask myself because that'll change a lot of your marketing, a lot of your strategy.

Sam Parr 16:41 But my gut tells me you're not gonna have a customer acquisition problem.

Raghav Gupta 16:45 Right.

Sam Parr 16:45 I don't think that's ever gonna be the problem here.

Raghav Gupta 16:46 Our marketing team is, like, a total of one person. [laughs]

Sam Parr 16:49 I don't think that's gonna be the issue. Your constraint is not gonna be getting people to buy. It's, they're gonna be does this thing actually work and can I get it in their house?

Shaan Puri 16:55 Yeah, but it'll change your product strategy.

Raghav Gupta 16:57 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 16:57 Like, if your product strategy about m- utility, man-kible. Like, he wants health, and he wants convenience.

Sam Parr 17:03 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 17:03 So he's willing to sacrifice presentation, taste, and other things maybe along the way, but you would create a different product. Like, you would literally have different pieces of the robot, different constraints on the manufacturing side versus if you were trying to make this, this beautiful Parmesan-topped impressive thing when friends come over, "Yeah, I cooked this for the, for the family. I was never able to do that before."

Raghav Gupta 17:25 Got it.

Shaan Puri 17:25 Maybe making it easier or harder to manufacture.

Raghav Gupta 17:28 Right. I think community is important primarily because, um, it's not growth necessarily it drives, but, but over time, I think your CAC comes down because, you know, your K factor just jumps up. People start talking about you. Second, engagement increases and so retention increases. And if retention increases, it's a better business.

Shaan Puri 17:47 So let's pause them. Of the best community builders in the world, how many of them use phrases like K factor-

Sam Parr 17:52 K factor, yeah

Shaan Puri 17:52 ... engagement, stickiness-

Sam Parr 17:54 Nope

Shaan Puri 17:54 ... and CAC?

Sam Parr 17:54 Not this early at least.

Shaan Puri 17:56 None of them do.

Sam Parr 17:56 You, you get magic first.

Shaan Puri 17:57 Community's from s- the soul, you know what I mean?

Sam Parr 17:59 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 17:59 And so you gotta, like, have two different parts of your brain. There's metrics guy, startup founder, go raise money from Excel.

Raghav Gupta 18:06 And there's feelings guy.

Shaan Puri 18:07 And there's feelings guy. There's soul guy. "We're gonna do this because it's awesome. We're gonna do this because it's the right thing to do. We're gonna do this because-"

Sam Parr 18:12 And they eventually-

Shaan Puri 18:13 "... it's cool." Yeah

Sam Parr 18:14 ... can.

Raghav Gupta 18:14 Coincide.

Sam Parr 18:14 But right now it's like- Cool shit that eventually gets popular s- does not talk about K factor. It talks about silly, it talks about emotion-

Shaan Puri 18:22 Hmm

Sam Parr 18:23 ... you know, these types of words, not K factor.

Shaan Puri 18:25 Interesting.

Sam Parr 18:25 Don't worry about that. Just get the 1,500 people who are using this, get them to log into Facebook groups every single week to talk about, to c- either... Yeah, c- to complain, to celebrate-

Shaan Puri 18:34 Right

Sam Parr 18:34 ... to nerd out, and then you also, it needs lore.

Shaan Puri 18:36 Right.

Sam Parr 18:36 So lore would be, like for us, it would be like no small boy stuff. Like, we say these silly phrases. We're no nerds in a room and be like, "How do I get people to like, like us more?" You know what I mean? We just make up dumb stuff. This is... Like, we used to call this show th- this episode the Denim Dungeon just 'cause I wore denim. Like, do that silly stuff.

Shaan Puri 18:51 Okay.

Sam Parr 18:51 It doesn't math. Who cares? But you just do the stuff where you create lore, you c- cr- create catchphrases-

Shaan Puri 18:56 Shared stories essentially

Sam Parr 18:58 ... a common bond-

Shaan Puri 18:58 Right

Sam Parr 18:59 ... us versus the world.

Shaan Puri 18:59 Right.

Sam Parr 19:00 And that sounds silly when it comes to cooking, but, like, you could still do it, right?

Shaan Puri 19:02 Right.

Sam Parr 19:02 So you create this, you create lore, and you repeat it constantly, constantc- And you have a face, whether you or if you have someone else at your company. C- you seem very charismatic, I think you could do it, but you have, like, every, every cult needs shared language, rituals, and a leader.

Shaan Puri 19:17 All right, we gotta wrap up.

Raghav Gupta 19:18 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 19:18 Uh, Raghav, thanks for coming.

Raghav Gupta 19:20 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 19:20 Posha?

Raghav Gupta 19:21 Yes.

Sam Parr 19:21 posha.com. You got the URL. Good job.

Raghav Gupta 19:24 Amazing.

Shaan Puri 19:25 All right.

Raghav Gupta 19:25 Thank you so much for the time.

Shaan Puri 19:26 Yeah, for coming.

Sam Parr 19:26 All right, we appreciate you. God bless. [clapping] All right, see you, dude.

Raghav Gupta 19:29 Thank you.

Sam Parr 19:31 All right, we have another one. Who we got?

Shaan Puri 19:33 Bring him in.

Nick Saltarelli 19:34 What are you doing?

Shaan Puri 19:36 Yo. [clapping]

Nick Saltarelli 19:37 Hey.

Sam Parr 19:37 What's going on?

Nick Saltarelli 19:37 What's going, boys? Yeah, I brought you guys something.

Sam Parr 19:38 What's good, boys? [laughs] I- You sound like a hockey player. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 19:42 All right, we got-

Nick Saltarelli 19:43 Well, I spent too much time in the, uh, the locker room. That's the problem.

Shaan Puri 19:46 So I know you. So this is Nick.

Nick Saltarelli 19:48 Let's do it. How are you?

Shaan Puri 19:48 And I know your product because I've been addicted to these things. I actually had to wean myself off of them.

Nick Saltarelli 19:53 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 19:53 I was like, I needed a midday break of eating Mid-Day Squares, but-

Sam Parr 19:58 I don't-

Shaan Puri 19:58 So do you know Nick well or no?

Sam Parr 19:59 I'd never. I don't, I've just met him a second ago.

Nick Saltarelli 20:01 I just lurk on X.

Sam Parr 20:02 Yes.

Nick Saltarelli 20:03 That's it. [laughs]

Sam Parr 20:03 Well, I've, I have these in my office at Hampton because my co-founder's obsessed with them, and I started eating them. They are awesome.

Nick Saltarelli 20:08 I appreciate that, man.

Shaan Puri 20:09 So you're Nick.

Nick Saltarelli 20:09 I appreciate that.

Shaan Puri 20:10 Mid-Day Squares is your company.

Nick Saltarelli 20:12 Sure is.

Shaan Puri 20:13 That you and your wife do.

Nick Saltarelli 20:13 I got two other partners, yeah. I got my, a shout-out to my wife and my brother-in-law. So we did, we did this as-

Sam Parr 20:17 Oh, keep it all in the family.

Shaan Puri 20:18 We gotta talk about his wife. She's amazing. Uh-

Nick Saltarelli 20:20 She's the beast.

Shaan Puri 20:20 Okay, so before we start, we want you to start with the one big number.

Nick Saltarelli 20:25 We basically sold $40 million worth of $2.49 cent chocolate bars. That equates to about, let's just call it roughly 60 bars per minute have to be consumed every minute in 365 days a year for you to hit that number.

Sam Parr 20:38 Good job.

Nick Saltarelli 20:38 So.

Shaan Puri 20:39 Wow.

Nick Saltarelli 20:39 That's it.

Shaan Puri 20:40 40 million in-

Sam Parr 20:41 This year

Nick Saltarelli 20:41 ... th- th- in the last 12 months.

Sam Parr 20:43 Yeah.

Nick Saltarelli 20:43 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 20:44 60 of these bad boys every minute, every, every minute of the year.

Nick Saltarelli 20:48 Every minute of the year, 365 days a year.

Shaan Puri 20:49 Including, if I'm not wrong, wasn't Kim Kardashian spotted with, with these in her bag? Is that true?

Nick Saltarelli 20:54 Yeah, yeah. [laughs] She, she's-

Shaan Puri 20:55 Not paid, right?

Nick Saltarelli 20:56 Not paid. She's hooked us up two times on her social, and, uh, I think that's the, that's the beauty of, like, when you're, when you're hustling and I, and we make it a, a point to be in with all the chefs. And so we're not looking for the direct connection to celebrities. That's what everybody's doing. So we've made it a point over the last decade-

Shaan Puri 21:13 Smart

Nick Saltarelli 21:14 ... to become friends with chefs, and, and that's, so Chef K, shout out Chef K, who cooks for the Kar- Kardashians. I mean, we were sending her product for years and years and years.

Shaan Puri 21:23 Oh, this?

Sam Parr 21:23 No.

Shaan Puri 21:23 In- the influence the influencer strategy. So-

Sam Parr 21:26 Oh, cool

Shaan Puri 21:26 ... who, who influences the influencers, and then you... Actually influencing them is a lot easier.

Sam Parr 21:31 But, but you find who the chefs are of celebrities?

Nick Saltarelli 21:34 Person- Yeah, there's a lot of chefs on, on Instagram and TikTok that you can see who they're cooking for.

Shaan Puri 21:39 For athletes-

Nick Saltarelli 21:39 Yeah

Shaan Puri 21:39 ... and, and others. Yeah.

Sam Parr 21:40 And you just DM them, say, "Hey, can I send you some?"

Nick Saltarelli 21:41 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 21:42 What's special about the product?

Sam Parr 21:43 Well, what is the product?

Nick Saltarelli 21:44 Okay. So we started out as chocolate bars, and a crazy thing happened. You know, since we started this business in 2018, chocolate went parabolic, the cost of cocoa. And that means we lost, like, 27% of our gross margin overnight. We were killing it, and chocolate, we were paying $4,000 a kilo for cocoa butter. It went up to 32,000, just to give you perspective.

Shaan Puri 22:06 Did you notice there's, like, a cocoa-

Nick Saltarelli 22:08 Crisis

Shaan Puri 22:08 ... cocoa crisis? What, what, why is there a co-

Nick Saltarelli 22:10 It's down now

Shaan Puri 22:10 ... why was there the cocoa crisis?

Nick Saltarelli 22:11 So it's the cycle that happens all the time, which is super interesting. It starts off with, like, a real mismatch in terms of weather will come in, disease will spread, then there won't be enough cocoa coming to the ports, and then corruption kicks in, though. And corruption usually takes about two years.

Shaan Puri 22:28 [laughs]

Nick Saltarelli 22:29 I, I got stories. I went into the Ecuadorian forest, so, like, if you [laughs] ever wanna go there, we could go there. But basically, you know, when your back's against the wall, I remember we started this thing with, like, no unit economics, kind of like, I'm not comparing this to Tesla in any sense, but build the product, no gross margin. Nobody wanted to manufacture this thing. Then we went to a big kitchen, and then we built a plant. And we had finally reached profitability, everybody, and then we get smashed by this cocoa thing. And, um-

Sam Parr 22:54 Had you raised money, or is this whole thing bootstrapped?

Nick Saltarelli 22:56 No, no, we raised money through a, a quasi equity in our government. So shout out to the Canadian government's super pro in, uh, agricultural manufacturing. So they were able to give us-

Sam Parr 23:04 How much, uh, in aggregate have you raised?

Nick Saltarelli 23:06 Uh, 22 million in total.

Sam Parr 23:07 So you've raised $22 million.

Shaan Puri 23:08 And they built their own plant.

Nick Saltarelli 23:09 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 23:10 They're a great follow on social. In fact, I've stolen many things from your social strategy. So you guys, his wife in particular, they make this incredible content. So they got sued by whatever, Hershey, who, I forget who it was, Hershey's or-

Nick Saltarelli 23:22 I can't confirm nor deny. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 23:23 Yeah, you, they, I, I can say this stuff. They got a cease and desist from someone being like, "You can't use the color orange," [laughs] or you know, like, stuff like that.

Nick Saltarelli 23:29 It was orange.

Shaan Puri 23:30 It was, like, a ridiculous-

Nick Saltarelli 23:31 Yeah, I'm sure we could all put two and two together.

Shaan Puri 23:32 Yeah. Reese's, uh, was like, "Hey, get off orange." So instead of just sort of taking the disadvantage, they said, "How can we turn this into an advantage?" And they came out with this campaign where they were making videos talking about how they're just this independent company.

Nick Saltarelli 23:44 We actually made a diss track. Yeah.

Shaan Puri 23:45 They made a, a rap diss track. They made a music video.

Nick Saltarelli 23:48 [laughs] It was wild.

Shaan Puri 23:48 Him and his wife, and it's, like, ridiculous, but it kinda works, and they tell the story, and they tell the story about their plant, and they tell the story about the... They tell the story about-

Sam Parr 23:56 That's awesome

Shaan Puri 23:56 ... the good things and the bad, which I think everybody only tells the good. And there's a lot to learn from y'all's strategy. But also you guys have a lot of, like, natural charisma and storytelling ability.

Sam Parr 24:04 Who named it Mid-Day Squares? 'Cause it's perfect.

Nick Saltarelli 24:06 Thank you, man. Um, I, I, I think it was me and my wife brainstorming, riffing. It w- I, I shout out to 5 Hour Energy. So I, I listened to the podcast on 5 Hour Energy, and I, he was so methodical about like, "I want my product to be what it is." And we were, we really... So the big gap that we saw was that the afternoon market's just as big as the morning breakfast market, except it gets nearly no attention. So, like, everybody's crowded into breakfast. And nobody's really focused on the afternoon part. Um-

Shaan Puri 24:33 For adults

Nick Saltarelli 24:34 ... for adults, yeah, specifically.

Shaan Puri 24:35 A little, and, and so was this a form factor that already existed that people were already doing these, like, kinda square... Uh, what, I don't even know what this is. It's half, half-

Nick Saltarelli 24:43 It's a dual layer square, yeah

Shaan Puri 24:44 ... what? What's the bottom?

Nick Saltarelli 24:45 A peanut butter base.

Shaan Puri 24:47 Okay, peanut butter base. You got jelly on top. This is a PB&J one.

Nick Saltarelli 24:49 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 24:49 Um, or this, that's PBJ. This is also PBJ, s- strawberry. But you also have chocolate, right?

Nick Saltarelli 24:54 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 24:54 And, and so you-

Nick Saltarelli 24:55 Chocolate's where I started the business

Shaan Puri 24:55 ... chocolate's where you started. Where did the initial idea come from? You're just sitting around and-

Nick Saltarelli 24:59 Yeah [laughs]

Shaan Puri 24:59 ... why this?

Nick Saltarelli 25:00 So my, my cousin's, um, my cousin was super high up at Smucker's, and he was just always, uh, pushing me to get into this game, you know? And we would always riff back and forth. And finally, through a few of his friends and stuff, I started getting data, and it was the data that, like, really sprung to me was chocolate was growing at a ridiculous rate. So chocolate that wasn't using palm kernel oil a- a- at the time, and refrigerated was growing. So, like, the refrigerated category at grocery stores, fastest growing, uh, section of a grocery store. So that's why you keep seeing refrigeration pop everywhere. Like, fresh pet at the pet section, they're starting to put fridges in the pet-

Shaan Puri 25:37 Oh, so every category started to have a refrigerated-

Nick Saltarelli 25:41 Item

Shaan Puri 25:41 ... item.

Nick Saltarelli 25:42 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 25:42 And we were talking about this-

Sam Parr 25:42 Oh, wow. Yeah

Shaan Puri 25:42 ... with vitamins, right? Like, those liquid vitamins-

Nick Saltarelli 25:44 Correct

Shaan Puri 25:44 ... that you put in the fridge-

Nick Saltarelli 25:45 Bingo

Shaan Puri 25:46 ... versus in the cabinet.

Sam Parr 25:46 Yeah, yeah.

Shaan Puri 25:47 Oh, wait. So go back. Your cousin's at Schmuck- Smucker's.

Nick Saltarelli 25:49 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 25:49 Smucker's? Smucker's.

Nick Saltarelli 25:50 Shout out Aurelio, by the way. That's my cousin.

Shaan Puri 25:52 And he's like, [laughs] "You gotta get into this jelly game."

Nick Saltarelli 25:54 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 25:54 [laughs] And you're l-

Nick Saltarelli 25:55 No-

Shaan Puri 25:55 And so you're studying the data. You notice this trend of refrigeration in different categories.

Nick Saltarelli 26:00 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 26:00 So you notice chocolate's on the rise. There's not a ch- refrigerated chocolate.

Nick Saltarelli 26:03 Yep.

Shaan Puri 26:03 You see a gap.

Nick Saltarelli 26:04 You see a gap.

Shaan Puri 26:04 You see an opportunity.

Nick Saltarelli 26:05 Big time.

Sam Parr 26:06 Tell us how much money you, you put in-

Nick Saltarelli 26:08 Yep

Sam Parr 26:08 ... of your own money to do it, and then if you could remember each year's revenue, leading up to-

Nick Saltarelli 26:12 Oh, 100, yeah, 100%. Um, so basically it took about 60 grand. Me and my partners basically put this together. We put in 60 grand. So we created a constraint. We couldn't use Facebook ads. We had to get to a million dollars of revenue, and we couldn't use Facebook ads. That was constraint number one. And number two, it all had to be in our city. So we couldn't, like, just spray and pray. We had to... We chose Montreal as where we came from, and we're like, "We gotta get to a million dollars here. And if we get here, then we can go to the next level, where we can really start to take this seriously."

Sam Parr 26:39 Badass.

Shaan Puri 26:39 That's dope. It was the first one on Facebook ads, just 'cause, hey, we don't have a lot of capital, so we're not gonna be able to reserve this much money to burn there. Or was it... I get the Montreal one, which is like, look, let's try to get people that we can see, feel, and touch here to love it.

Nick Saltarelli 26:53 Yep.

Shaan Puri 26:53 Because if they don't really love it, we don't have it right yet-

Sam Parr 26:56 Before we-

Nick Saltarelli 26:56 Correct

Shaan Puri 26:56 ... earn the right to go to other cities.

Nick Saltarelli 26:58 I'm, I'm contradict... I think Facebook creates a lot of false positives-

Shaan Puri 27:02 Yeah

Nick Saltarelli 27:02 ... for early businesses.

Sam Parr 27:03 At least early on.

Nick Saltarelli 27:04 Yes. And-

Shaan Puri 27:04 So what'd you do to get Montreal on board?

Nick Saltarelli 27:06 The content, man. It was, so this was the... And this is where the brilliance of my, my wife and my brother-in-law. So it was, it was, like, really simple. Going out, none of us had social followings. That's a really important piece, right? 'Cause a lot of people feel intimidated when they're getting into this thing, like you gotta have a pre... We had no followings. And so for the whole summer, we just started posting. When you're making food product, you usually end up in really cool environments. You know, we were in labs with, like, food scientists and different manufacturing plants where we were testing stuff. And so we just all told each other, like, everybody, when we're doing something, camera's on. Tell people what you're doing, but don't reveal what you're doing. Just show the environment. And people started getting interested, like, "What, what?" Like, "What the hell are you guys doing?" You know, especially all of us had not come from this industry.

Sam Parr 27:49 Okay, so it was like y- uh, pretty young guys are like, "We don't know what the hell we're doing," but-

Nick Saltarelli 27:53 Yeah

Shaan Puri 27:53 ... oh, you're saying your friends, your own natural social network-

Nick Saltarelli 27:55 Yeah, my mom thought I was losing my mind

Shaan Puri 27:57 ... was like, was like, "What's going on?"

Nick Saltarelli 27:58 And-

Shaan Puri 27:58 "What, why is Nick suddenly in this, like-

Nick Saltarelli 28:00 Yeah, yeah

Shaan Puri 28:00 ... lab wearing a hairnet, you know-

Nick Saltarelli 28:02 Yeah, yeah

Shaan Puri 28:02 ... testing different beakers?"

Nick Saltarelli 28:03 Correct.

Shaan Puri 28:03 Yeah.

Nick Saltarelli 28:03 Yeah, 'cause we all, my wife was in fashion. My brother-in-law was, like, a gym buff going around colleges. Uh, and I had typically been in software my whole career prior to that. So, so to see us with, like, hairnets doing stuff was like, "Okay, these peo-"

Shaan Puri 28:14 So you use content. You use story to get, to get it going.

Nick Saltarelli 28:17 Yeah, yeah. And th-

Shaan Puri 28:17 Tell us about the ramp. So you start off-

Nick Saltarelli 28:19 This, this-

Shaan Puri 28:19 ... year one, what'd you do?

Nick Saltarelli 28:20 This is where the magic happened, okay? So when we turned on the jets in September, so September 2018, we sold our product on our website for 50 cents. And there's two reasons, okay? So w- you could buy one square for 50 cents, and the idea was, uh, it was all a content play. So we didn't want to actually make money, but we didn't want freebie people. So you had to get your credit card out, actually do a transaction, and we hand delivered everything for five months. So it was all in Montreal.

Sam Parr 28:50 [laughs] Awesome. He's an animal.

Nick Saltarelli 28:51 I- i- so we did f-

Shaan Puri 28:52 By the way, Nick's the only one who's not based in San Francisco doing this today. He flew in for this too.

Nick Saltarelli 28:56 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 28:56 This guy is the ultimate hustler.

Nick Saltarelli 28:58 Yeah. Ben messaged me. He's like, "You happen to, are you, you, you, any chance you're gonna be in San Francisco on Monday?" I'm like, "Yeah, of course."

Shaan Puri 29:04 [laughs]

Nick Saltarelli 29:04 He's like, [laughs] he's like, "Here it is." I'm like, "Okay, perfect. I'm flying into Honda."

Shaan Puri 29:06 You're such a hustler.

Nick Saltarelli 29:07 It's the only way, man. You gotta make opportunity. Uh, so yeah, so we're, we're, we're getting in the car. We do deliveries for, like, five months. Here's where the magic happened on content. We would wake up in the morning, every morning, and this I took, I think I took Do Things That Don't Scale, and we just went way too far with it.

Shaan Puri 29:24 [laughs]

Nick Saltarelli 29:24 So in the morning, all of our orders would be ready, and we would literally go on people's Instagram. So if you had a dog named Chuck, we'd be like, "Shout out, Chuck," and we would wear these crazy outfits, and we took Polaroids of ourselves, okay? Now it-

Sam Parr 29:37 Just meathead shit.

Nick Saltarelli 29:38 Yeah, m- complete, like, just-

Shaan Puri 29:40 Per customer

Nick Saltarelli 29:40 ... and we would take a Polaroid picture, and we would show up to their house, and, and this always happened, okay? So we would show up to the house. They'd be like, "Wait, why are you doing the delivery?" And then we would do, and so you would get to hang with the customer. We would get more content out of it, so we'd be filming the whole experience.

Sam Parr 29:54 Oh my God.

Nick Saltarelli 29:55 Then we would leave them the photo. Then they would post the f- we got to a million dollars in, like, four months.

Sam Parr 29:59 Wow.

Nick Saltarelli 30:00 Like, it was like, boom.

Shaan Puri 30:01 Dude, that's sick.

Nick Saltarelli 30:02 Yeah. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 30:02 That is amazing. That is such a great story.

Sam Parr 30:04 Okay, so the number, tell us the numbers. So-

Nick Saltarelli 30:06 So, okay, so, uh, year one, I wanna say 1.4 million. Then year two, let's call it 3 million. Then we did a big jump to, like, seven, uh, 14, 22, 30, 40. And now this year we're on track for about 60.

Shaan Puri 30:23 Wow.

Sam Parr 30:23 And you guys, you guys got into Costco.

Nick Saltarelli 30:25 We j- like, we, we, we launched Costco Canada National. Costco US is launching September 1st.

Shaan Puri 30:30 How did you get into Costco? Not easy to do. Everyone wants to get into retail.

Nick Saltarelli 30:33 This is a crazy story, too.

Shaan Puri 30:35 Yeah.

Nick Saltarelli 30:35 This is a crazy story. Okay.

Shaan Puri 30:36 We're gonna have to extend the time limit on Nick, just so you know. [laughs]

Nick Saltarelli 30:40 Dude, no, 'cause this is a crazy story.

Shaan Puri 30:41 Whoever's next, g- g- go take a walk for a bit. [laughs]

Nick Saltarelli 30:44 All right. So Costco, they had seen the content brings into action, okay? Brings in the action. So we get this meeting with Costco [laughs]

Shaan Puri 30:52 Content brings in the action, baby.

Nick Saltarelli 30:53 Yeah, content brings in the action.

Shaan Puri 30:54 Let's go [laughs] .

Nick Saltarelli 30:55 Gotta grab that action.

Shaan Puri 30:56 [laughs]

Nick Saltarelli 30:56 So we, so we, we basically go to the first Costco meeting, and everyone I'm about to say Costco, shout out Costco, like super respectful. Like, we weren't seeing eye-to-eye. We knew that our second most searched term online was Mid-Day Squares at Costco. Like, we knew we were gonna hit this out of the park. Th- They didn't feel as-

Shaan Puri 31:14 Confident

Nick Saltarelli 31:14 ... confident in that aspect, and we knew that the right price point was 19.99 for our 12-pack. There was a disagreement that lasted about two and a half years, okay? Going back and forth.

Shaan Puri 31:25 Right [laughs] .

Nick Saltarelli 31:26 So-

Shaan Puri 31:26 A gentleman's disagreement.

Nick Saltarelli 31:27 Yeah, like, like just, we just couldn't see eye-to-eye on the price, and for the record-

Shaan Puri 31:30 They wanted it to be what?

Nick Saltarelli 31:32 I, I'm not gonna say that price.

Shaan Puri 31:33 Okay, can't say. Okay.

Nick Saltarelli 31:33 Yeah, 'cause, 'cause they're a great partner, and they wanted it to be lower.

Shaan Puri 31:36 [laughs]

Nick Saltarelli 31:37 And we just held our ground, you know, because this is-

Shaan Puri 31:40 So two and a half years.

Nick Saltarelli 31:41 Two and a half years.

Sam Parr 31:41 Constantly talking to them.

Shaan Puri 31:41 So during that, weren't you guys just kinda like, "God, let's just go into Costco and let us compete against-"

Nick Saltarelli 31:45 So, okay, so this happened on the third meeting. This is where things... It was the third meeting. We drove out to the head office for the third time. There's two ways to go into Costco. There's like, you're in line, or you could do a road show. And the road show is like, everything's on consignment. You have to show up. You only get paid for what you sell at Costco, and you gotta be in Costco for 14 days. So-

Sam Parr 32:05 You mean, like, giving out sam-

Nick Saltarelli 32:06 Phys- physically

Sam Parr 32:07 ... like, sampling.

Nick Saltarelli 32:07 Yeah, you're sampling, you're hustling, it's like the-

Shaan Puri 32:10 Oh, so that's what's happening. When you walk into Costco, there's kind of a cool product.

Nick Saltarelli 32:13 There's-

Shaan Puri 32:13 Somebody's standing there

Nick Saltarelli 32:14 ... bingo

Shaan Puri 32:14 ... they're taking a consignment bet on their product to prove to Costco that this thing will sell.

Nick Saltarelli 32:19 That they're worthy of it, and there's no guarantee you're gonna get Costco. So I was really rattled. Again, we, we didn't see eye-to-eye. This is the third time, and like, we're talking almost three years at this point in time. And so I, I looked at the buyer, who we had started to develop actually a good relationship with him, and I'm like, "If we do the road show, and we break the road show record, like the most sales ever in 14 days, will you give us 19.99?" And we shook hands that day.

Shaan Puri 32:46 What, what made you wanna do that bold statement?

Nick Saltarelli 32:48 Our search on Google was so high for... I knew-

Sam Parr 32:52 Yeah, but you knew that it's high for you, but you didn't know that it was, how it compared to, like, the, when the Swiffer came out. I don't know if-

Nick Saltarelli 32:57 You're, you're, you're correct. I don't know. There's just moments in life where you just-

Shaan Puri 33:00 Was that a impulsive thing, or you planned to say that going in?

Nick Saltarelli 33:02 No, it was impulsive. We were, we were [laughs]

Sam Parr 33:04 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 33:05 Your wife looks at you during the meeting.

Nick Saltarelli 33:06 Yeah, yeah.

Shaan Puri 33:06 You're like-

Nick Saltarelli 33:07 It was, like, my wife looked at me, and we... But she was... She... I g- I don't know. I guess you have nothing to lose at some point.

Shaan Puri 33:13 Maybe married a wild stallion.

Nick Saltarelli 33:14 Yeah [laughs]

Shaan Puri 33:14 This is how it roll, how it goes. Sometimes I run away.

Nick Saltarelli 33:17 Uh, and I just-

Sam Parr 33:17 So how much did you guys sell?

Nick Saltarelli 33:18 Uh, 140, uh, 100... We can't put... 160,000 in 14 days.

Sam Parr 33:23 And how much-

Nick Saltarelli 33:23 We broke the record

Sam Parr 33:24 ... of that 160 was your, was your homies?

Shaan Puri 33:25 Was that, did you barely break it, or did you-

Nick Saltarelli 33:27 No, we smashed the record.

Shaan Puri 33:28 Smashed the record.

Nick Saltarelli 33:28 The closest record, I think, prior to that was sub, was 100.

Shaan Puri 33:30 I saw the content.

Nick Saltarelli 33:31 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 33:32 And they made a story out of it.

Nick Saltarelli 33:32 No, we rallied, man. We rallied. We rallied.

Shaan Puri 33:34 [laughs]

Nick Saltarelli 33:35 Like, we rallied. Okay, so first off, most founders don't spend 14, like, like, we were doing full days in Costco.

Sam Parr 33:42 Don't point your finger at me.

Nick Saltarelli 33:44 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 33:44 Dude, when he's saying, "We rallied," that goes perfectly with backstage, we were talking about, uh, nicotine pouches, and he's like, "Oh, I used to put it in my toes before ice hockey practice." [laughs] I've never even heard of this.

Nick Saltarelli 33:55 Okay, okay, so we're showing...

Sam Parr 33:56 [laughs]

Nick Saltarelli 33:56 It sounds like we have some degeneracy to explore together.

Sam Parr 33:58 Yeah, I can tell by your tattoos.

Shaan Puri 33:59 So for Costco, you, you put it between the toes, and you just went for it 14 days.

Nick Saltarelli 34:03 It was, like, the craziest rally of life, and it wasn't 14 days. We, uh, spent 36 days straight in a Costco 'cause we had to do multiple Costcos, so.

Shaan Puri 34:11 What's the trick when you're in the Costco, like, kinda get- flagging people down? What'd you... What wa- what was the showmanship that worked?

Nick Saltarelli 34:17 So most... Yeah. Two things that I think are really takeaway. Most founders don't do the road show themselves. They leave it to a third party.

Shaan Puri 34:24 Right.

Nick Saltarelli 34:24 That's mistake number one. Like, that's-

Shaan Puri 34:26 Yeah, 'cause everyone hates rejection, and you're just gonna be rejected

Nick Saltarelli 34:28 ... and then, and also time. Like, you're-

Shaan Puri 34:29 Yeah

Nick Saltarelli 34:29 ... you gotta be in those for 12 hours in a day. Like, they open at 8:00, and you're closing at 9:00, you know? So most founders brush it off and just they pay the service, and they don't ghost. Every day to... You don't understand. It was bananas.

Sam Parr 34:43 Okay, so you were just grinding. You were living in a Costco.

Nick Saltarelli 34:45 Right, me, my wife-

Shaan Puri 34:46 Okay, so you said-

Nick Saltarelli 34:46 ... our whole team was in that room

Shaan Puri 34:47 ... you said first thing is founders do it themselves.

Nick Saltarelli 34:49 Founders do it yourself.

Shaan Puri 34:49 What's the second thing?

Nick Saltarelli 34:50 Um, the second thing is basically while you're there, you wanna be really methodical. So I would just stand in front and yell out keywords. "Gluten-free, diabetic friendly," and y- and, and [laughs] no, I swear on my life. So you're doing keywords as people are-

Sam Parr 35:05 Keywords [laughs] .

Nick Saltarelli 35:06 Like-

Sam Parr 35:07 You bought, like, a, like a white girl dictionary.

Nick Saltarelli 35:09 Yeah, yeah, and so you're throwing out, like, your keywords, and it really works. You start-

Shaan Puri 35:12 Hispanic.

Nick Saltarelli 35:12 Yeah. Yes. Like, no, I mean, like, so we would have, so we would have this... We would get so warehoused at one point. Like, we were so w- out of our... You start to hallucinate, you're in there so long sometimes, that we would just be like, "It's a dog and pony show. Come and..." Like, you just start-

Shaan Puri 35:27 [laughs]

Nick Saltarelli 35:28 But the keywords are really key. So the keywords, why are the keywords key? One, it, we changed our box because of the keywords that work. So when you go to a Costco, it is not this box. It is a specific box I went into Costco.

Shaan Puri 35:39 Oh, you discovered it while you were there.

Nick Saltarelli 35:41 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 35:41 Changed the packaging afterwards.

Nick Saltarelli 35:42 Yeah, yeah.

Shaan Puri 35:42 What'd you discover?

Nick Saltarelli 35:43 Uh, gluten-free was a massive thing. Real chocolate's huge at Costco. So I, I, so I think the second thing, Shaan, is like, don't just mindlessly be there while you're doing the road show. Be intentional about what you're doing.

Shaan Puri 35:54 Right.

Sam Parr 35:55 Dude, this is awesome. Congratulations. What, um... So okay, so 10 years from now, what do you think's gonna happen? Are you gonna sell the company? You gonna run it forever? What are you gonna do?

Nick Saltarelli 36:03 All I know is that my dream was to make the NHL, and I didn't make the NHL, and so... No, the-

Sam Parr 36:08 So now you're gonna buy a team.

Nick Saltarelli 36:09 No, no, no. Uh, only .5% of companies make it past $100 million of revenue. I, that's been my goal since the beginning, and I don't know what will happen after, but that's the goal.

Sam Parr 36:18 You're the shit, man.

Nick Saltarelli 36:19 [laughs] Appreciate it.

Shaan Puri 36:20 What, what's, uh, what's one thing we could help you with?

Nick Saltarelli 36:22 One, having me here today, I, I can't tell you how much this means to me. Uh, you guys have-

Shaan Puri 36:25 Have you been listening for a while?

Nick Saltarelli 36:27 Dude, come on. You know.

Shaan Puri 36:28 [laughs]

Nick Saltarelli 36:28 We met each other, what, five years-

Shaan Puri 36:29 Well, we met in Club LTV.

Nick Saltarelli 36:31 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 36:31 So I used to host this thing-

Sam Parr 36:32 Yeah, yeah

Shaan Puri 36:32 ... for e-com owners. He was in there. You probably were only doing, like, five, 10 million in revenue at the time.

Nick Saltarelli 36:35 I was five million bucks at the time, yeah.

Shaan Puri 36:36 Five million at the time, but he had amazing energy. I was rooting for you since then.

Nick Saltarelli 36:40 Thank you. Appreciate it.

Shaan Puri 36:40 So it's, I'm not surprised that you're now at, you know, 40, 50, 60 million.

Nick Saltarelli 36:43 We're anxious to keep on going, man.

Shaan Puri 36:44 Yeah.

Nick Saltarelli 36:44 Um, what would you like to see as a flavor? I mean, you guys actually consume the product. I would love to... Even if it, it was a fully different direction. Let's not even say No Bread PB&J. What's a flavor you'd like to see us do?

Sam Parr 36:54 That's a good question.

Shaan Puri 36:55 I think what I would love to see You told me three things today, and I've known about your brand for four years, that I didn't know. I think you gotta... This sounds weird 'cause you're doing content, it sounds weird 'cause you work on your packaging. I think there's actually still, like, a long way to go in terms of, like, being able to, through, whether my point of contact is just seeing the box, whether my point of contact is seeing something on social from you or from a celebrity, how do you make it where the story really pops? Because, you know, just, I, I, like, I didn't actually realize that the reason your stuff tastes better and is better for you is 'cause it's real chocolate that's refrigerated. That's why-

Sam Parr 37:33 True

Shaan Puri 37:33 ... there's no preservatives.

Sam Parr 37:34 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 37:34 So it's one thing to say, "No preservatives." Like, it's kinda like when I, I've heard that type of stuff so much, I just assume they're stu- they're shoving something else in there-

Sam Parr 37:41 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 37:41 ... that I don't know.

Sam Parr 37:42 Back door.

Shaan Puri 37:42 No palm oil, olive. Oh, then they're using some other thing. Who knows? And so I think just saying, like, "Hey, this is chocolate you keep in your fridge." Because it's in the fridge, that's the reason why.

Sam Parr 37:51 But this isn't even chocolate, though.

Shaan Puri 37:52 Well-

Sam Parr 37:52 This one's the Nutbread PBJ, yeah

Shaan Puri 37:54 ... is, is, is your chocolate still your popular SKU?

Sam Parr 37:56 These are, no, I mean, uh-

Shaan Puri 37:57 This is now the most popular?

Sam Parr 37:58 This is number one by far, by like a mile. Dude, I wanna keep going with this. It seems like, dude, you know who's making a huge comeback is Uncrustables.

Shaan Puri 38:03 But yours is, like, fresh and healthier than, like... Dude, an Uncrustable, like, if I buy that for my kids, I know I'm making a-

Sam Parr 38:10 A bad choice

Shaan Puri 38:10 ... a bad choice for them.

Sam Parr 38:11 Like, they're, they're, they're-

Shaan Puri 38:12 If I'm eating it for me, I'm making a r- a shameful choice.

Sam Parr 38:15 I-

Shaan Puri 38:15 This I don't feel ashamed of.

Sam Parr 38:16 Yeah, I j-

Shaan Puri 38:16 So congrats.

Sam Parr 38:17 Well, thank you. All right.

Shaan Puri 38:18 Yeah, thanks for coming on, man.

Sam Parr 38:19 We appreciate you doing this.

Shaan Puri 38:19 Nice for having us, man. I appreciate it.

Sam Parr 38:21 Dude.

Shaan Puri 38:21 It was great to see you.

Sam Parr 38:22 Thank you, man.

Shaan Puri 38:23 Appreciate you flying in, too.

Sam Parr 38:24 All right, g-

Sam Parr 38:25 guest number three.

Shaan Puri 38:26 Here we go.

Sam Parr 38:26 What's up, dude?

Shaan Puri 38:27 Good to see you. What's up, man? All right. Introduce yourself, your name, what you do, what's the name of the company.

Shreyas Parab 38:33 Okay, sounds good. Uh, my name is Shreyas, and I'm the CEO of DayDream, and we are adding a million dollars a month helping dentists automate back office tasks.

Shaan Puri 38:41 All right.

Sam Parr 38:42 Oh, dude, I've been DM'ing you.

Shreyas Parab 38:43 We've been DM'ing.

Shaan Puri 38:43 Uh-

Shreyas Parab 38:43 We've been in the DMs together.

Shaan Puri 38:44 Yeah, we've been in the DMs. I love the name of the company, and then I saw you were doing something for dentists, and I was like, "That's so smart." I think I tried to invest or something. I was like, "This is..." You know, I, I do these, like, cold outreach to invest off of no information, just, like, a Twitter bio or, like, two tweets, and that's what I think I did with you a while back.

Shreyas Parab 39:01 That's great. That means my Twitter's working.

Shaan Puri 39:02 Yes, it's working.

Sam Parr 39:03 Here you go. I got you.

Shaan Puri 39:04 All right. So you kinda already started with the big number. You said, let's say it again slower. So you said-

Shreyas Parab 39:08 So we're adding a million dollars a month in ARR every single month.

Shaan Puri 39:12 Across a bunch of dentists.

Shreyas Parab 39:14 Yeah, across a bunch. So it's-

Sam Parr 39:15 Explain what you do, though.

Shreyas Parab 39:15 Yeah, so basically what we do is, I don't know if you've ever been to the dentist or a doctor and gotten a bill from the insurance company and been like, "Yo, what actually is this," right?

Shaan Puri 39:22 Yeah.

Shreyas Parab 39:23 And that's because the insurance companies are trying to screw not only the patients over-

Shaan Puri 39:26 And the dentists

Shreyas Parab 39:26 ... but the doctors over.

Shaan Puri 39:27 Yeah [laughs] .

Shreyas Parab 39:27 And so the reality is, in order to get reimbursed from the insurance company, the doctor has to do a bunch of administrative work, and doctors hate it, and they do a bad job. They lose money. My mom is a dentist. She's losing 10 to 15% of her money to these insurance companies. So I was like, "What if I could automate this process of dealing with the insurance company?" So verifying insurance to say, "Hey, this is what Shaan's insurance is gonna cover." We submit the claim. We appeal the denial, because guess what? They love denying these claims. And then we do all the bookkeeping when the money does come in. And in exchange, the doctors pay us a small percentage of every dollar they collect.

Sam Parr 39:55 And so it's like AI, like, negotiating with the company.

Shreyas Parab 39:58 Insurance companies. Yeah, exactly. So we have AI calling the insurance company to get the status of these claims, AI submitting the claim.

Sam Parr 40:03 An AI voice being like, "Hey, you did not approve this. Why not?"

Shreyas Parab 40:07 Exactly.

Sam Parr 40:07 "Here's why you should."

Shreyas Parab 40:08 Exactly.

Shaan Puri 40:08 Well, the funny thing is on their side, they also have AI, and so they're, normally it's a war of attrition. It's like they're gonna m- You have to wait to hear the menu, then you have to say the number, then they didn't understand it, but it's like, "Let's let my robot talk to your robot all day." [laughs]

Shreyas Parab 40:21 Exactly. And you know what I always tell the insurance companies? I'm like, "Yo, you're spending a lot of money. We're spending a lot of money. What if you just gave us the data in an API?" But this healthcare industry is so backwards that they don't want to. And so-

Shaan Puri 40:31 The incentive is not there

Shreyas Parab 40:31 ... yeah, the incentive's not there, and so we have to find all these creative ways to beat the system and make sure that our doctors and our patients get paid.

Sam Parr 40:38 Can, can you run off a few facts? So how old's the company, how much funding, and, uh, like, this year's revenue?

Shreyas Parab 40:43 Yeah, so we're about 926 days old, uh, two and a half years.

Shaan Puri 40:47 About.

Shreyas Parab 40:48 About.

Shaan Puri 40:48 To the day.

Sam Parr 40:48 Dude, you know who started that was the Ramp CEO. Do you know his shtick?

Shaan Puri 40:51 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Parr 40:52 His shtick is-

Shaan Puri 40:53 Like how many hours old

Sam Parr 40:53 ... today we're 2,243 days old.

Shreyas Parab 40:56 Sorry.

Shaan Puri 40:56 926 days old. Um-

Shreyas Parab 40:58 What was the second part? Yeah, so we've raised $11.5 million to date. Um, by the end of this year we'll finish north of 10 million in revenue.

Shaan Puri 41:05 Wow.

Shreyas Parab 41:05 Um, and another underrated thing is, so the way our business started was we actually went out and acquired an existing service business. So before, you know, people would be doing this work manually.

Shaan Puri 41:14 Right.

Shreyas Parab 41:14 So we actually bought this company, and then we've just been improving their margin month-

Shaan Puri 41:17 How big was their book of business when you bought it?

Shreyas Parab 41:20 Less than a million. Um, and so really the goal was, you know, when you run a services business, ob- of one day you run out of, you either have to hire more humans, you become m- more unstable, quality goes down. And so we got them right at the perfect time when they were like, "Hey, I think we could grow, but we just don't have enough human talent."

Sam Parr 41:35 Who came up with this name?

Shreyas Parab 41:37 Uh, I did. My mom's, uh, practice, her name is, or the practice's name, uh, is Dream Smile. And so, uh, I grew up working my whole life in this practice. And I don't know if you've ever been an unpaid child worker, but, like, the first thing you're doing is, like, daydreaming, like, "Oh, I-"

Shaan Puri 41:50 Shout out to the unpaid child workers out there listening [laughs] .

Shreyas Parab 41:52 Yeah, I see you. I see you. I've been there.

Shaan Puri 41:53 Like, yeah.

Shreyas Parab 41:53 I've been there.

Shaan Puri 41:54 Making shoes in the mines, wherever you're at.

Shreyas Parab 41:57 Yeah, or, uh, you know, posting EOBs in a dental office in Philadelphia.

Shaan Puri 42:00 How old are you?

Shreyas Parab 42:01 Uh, I'm 25.

Shaan Puri 42:02 Wow. So you were, you're working in your mom's dental office. You were forced to do some of this work, or you saw Debbie was doing this work, and so that was there.

Shreyas Parab 42:09 Yep.

Shaan Puri 42:09 Now you grow up, you start thinking, "What can AI do?" What was the actual reason you s-

Shreyas Parab 42:14 Yeah

Shaan Puri 42:14 ... you, like, had the idea? Like, give, take us to the epiphany of the idea.

Shreyas Parab 42:17 Yeah, and it's, it's gonna get, it's gonna get dark, but then it's gonna get positive, I promise.

Shaan Puri 42:20 Okay.

Shreyas Parab 42:20 Okay? So I'm, I'm forewarning.

Shaan Puri 42:22 Thank you.

Shreyas Parab 42:22 Um, my, my mom, she's okay now, but she had gotten sick, and so I was, I, I had graduated Stanford, I was working at AI startup, I was, like, over the moon. I was like, "Yo, I'm gonna dominate the world." And then she gets sick, and so I, I go home and I start running our practice. And, you know, I go from, like, 100 to suddenly being the most overqualified dental office manager in America.

Shaan Puri 42:39 Wow.

Shreyas Parab 42:39 And that was when I realized how much money we were losing. Like, I think when I grew up I kinda knew that it was a problem, but I was just, I was just doing it. I was just ready to just, like, finish and go, like, go home. But then I saw it, and I got to chance to see and feel what my mom has felt for 15 years of her life, and I was like, "This is just unacceptable." And like-

Shaan Puri 42:57 You're like, "It doesn't have to be this way"

Shreyas Parab 42:57 ... it doesn't have to... And like, you know, I've been sp- I've spent so much ti- you know, I'm more of a, like, a NLP nerd. Like, I, I always loved natural language processing, and I'd seen the field, like, gr- ... develop. And so I was probably one of the first 100 people to have access to GPT-3, because I was really into words, and so when I got into computer science, I got access to-

Shaan Puri 43:14 Dude, there's this like Ven-

Shreyas Parab 43:15 ... GPT-3. I'm into words.

Shaan Puri 43:16 There's this like [laughs] there's like this Venn diagram where like personality type meets with opportunity with like gr- the circumstances in which you grew up and that you had the resources that you-

Shreyas Parab 43:24 Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Shaan Puri 43:25 Yeah, it's like, okay, perfect.

Shreyas Parab 43:27 So you know who else was working in their parent's dental office and then went on to do big things?

Shaan Puri 43:32 Zuck?

Shreyas Parab 43:33 Mark Zuckerberg.

Shaan Puri 43:34 Yeah.

Shreyas Parab 43:34 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 43:34 Did he really?

Shreyas Parab 43:35 You know this story? Yeah.

Shaan Puri 43:35 No.

Shreyas Parab 43:35 His first project was, like, he set up like the IT system in his dad's office, and like souped it up and like made it sick, and then he's like, "Okay, I guess I've kind of outgrown this. I should go do something else." [laughs]

Shaan Puri 43:45 Oh, that's awesome.

Shreyas Parab 43:45 And Michael Dell, underrated. His dad was an orthodontist, I believe. Doc- uh, yeah, Dr. Dell.

Shaan Puri 43:50 Children of dentists.

Shreyas Parab 43:51 Yeah, it's a mafia. We're trying to create it.

Shaan Puri 43:52 How big is this gonna get?

Shreyas Parab 43:53 Um-

Shaan Puri 43:53 There's tens of us. [laughs]

Shreyas Parab 43:54 [laughs] Uh, how big? I mean, I think we're gonna serve every dental practice in America.

Shaan Puri 43:58 Like, are you wanting to be like a CEO of a publicly traded company?

Shreyas Parab 44:02 Yeah. Why not? I mean, I think, like, to me, like the opportunity here is today what we do is we help dentists bring money into their business, but soon we can store their money, we can help them spend their money, we can lend money to them. I don't know if you guys have, you know, these PE roll-ups. They're buying up all these like-

Shaan Puri 44:15 Yeah, of course

Shreyas Parab 44:15 ... Taco Bells, dental practices, and, you know, the truth is 70% of the market are still independent guys like my mom, and they feel like they have no other choice but to sell to the big guy. I wanna give them the third door, which is like, "Hey, if I handle this back office BS for you, would you want to still be a dentist-

Shaan Puri 44:32 Right

Shreyas Parab 44:32 ... and own your practice?" And they're like, "Heck yeah." That's the multi-billion dollar business here.

Shaan Puri 44:35 So let's go over the business model. So you said you save dentists, you bring in ex- a- additional cash flow that they were otherwise losing or was delayed. You take a percentage of that. So you said that basically... Is it... Let's just take a, $1,000. For every thou- or $100. Every $100 that comes in, what do you guys take?

Shreyas Parab 44:53 Three- anywhere from 2.5 to 3.5%.

Shaan Puri 44:56 Oh, that's it? Okay.

Shreyas Parab 44:56 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 44:57 But how does that math work? So you said 10 million of ARR, but you're saving den- bringing in a million a month from dentists, that's 12 million a year, so how does that work?

Shreyas Parab 45:03 No, no, we're adding... As DayDream as a business, we're adding 1 million in ARR net new, and so we're processing like-

Shaan Puri 45:10 But is it A- is, is it ARR?

Shreyas Parab 45:11 Yeah, ARR. So, uh, when we submit claims and we post the payments, which is like entering it in, we take a fee.

Shaan Puri 45:17 Oh, okay.

Shreyas Parab 45:17 So it's not just money we recover, it's every dollar going into the business we are helping them process.

Shaan Puri 45:22 Gotcha. So you're like Stripe on the back side.

Shreyas Parab 45:23 Exactly. We're like help-

Shaan Puri 45:24 All their billing, and then the better, the part where you guys are even better, you add that sort of-

Shreyas Parab 45:28 Exactly

Shaan Puri 45:28 ... 10%, 15% to their practice overall.

Shreyas Parab 45:31 And how big's your team? Uh, so we have about 60 people, but we have people on the billing team, the service delivery team. That's about 50 people. I think we only have about 10 people in the office, so-

Shaan Puri 45:40 So you're close to profitability.

Shreyas Parab 45:41 Yeah. Um, and I, I think that's like... You know, we did raise venture capital, and I think, like, I think it's nice to kinda have like, we could like go for profitability or we could keep on growing. I think, like, we just wanna do more. Like I, I, I know that there are like 150,000 dentists. We're... The job's not done. Job's not even like-

Shaan Puri 45:57 So what's [laughs]

Shreyas Parab 45:57 We, we can't even be talking about the job. We, we haven't even... You know what I mean? [laughs]

Shaan Puri 46:00 Job's not done. J- is job even in the room with us right now?

Shreyas Parab 46:02 No, I can't even see him. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 46:03 [laughs] So things are going great. You seem happy. What is bad?

Shreyas Parab 46:09 This is a safe space. You can tell us and the millions of people that are gonna listen to this what's going bad.

Shaan Puri 46:14 Everything, it feels like. You know what I mean? Like I, I don't know. I mean, like-

Shreyas Parab 46:17 No, where, where are the bottlenecks right now? I think, again, like hiring engineers. Again, like this is, like our job is to take this service business and make it software mar- you know, software experience. There's so few people talented to do this, like, really weird work and, you know, we're competing against like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Shaan Puri 46:34 Yeah.

Shreyas Parab 46:35 And I'm like... So yeah, it's, that part is tough.

Shaan Puri 46:37 Do you have to pay crazy amounts of salary?

Shreyas Parab 46:39 No. I think we get really people on the mission. Like, you can get a job, you can have a career, you can have a mission, and like when I get people on the mission, job's done, you know what I mean? Like everything else kind of-

Shaan Puri 46:48 No, I don't know what you mean. When you... Like, their mission is like AGI, c- cure cancer, and you're like back office dental work. How is your mission winning out against the mission-

Shreyas Parab 46:57 I-

Shaan Puri 46:57 ... of these labs? There's no way.

Shreyas Parab 46:59 I, I think it's like... Yeah, very fair, very fair pushback. I think it's like, to me, the dentists are the underdogs, the small business, the people who are like... You know, we're dealing with people in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Yeah, great, you can like make AI SDRs, you can sell more AI slop to people in SF, or you could help the guy who you grew up to going for 15 years.

Shaan Puri 47:15 Yeah, that's awesome.

Shreyas Parab 47:16 And like that's the mission. And like yes, we, we sell to dentists, right? But like to me, this, the, the story is so much more powerful, which is like my mom knows who every one of her patients is going to prom with. She knows when their kids are sick. She knows, she knows what... She knows more about them than she does about me, right? And like that's the experience of healthcare and like that's, I think, the mission that people get excited about is like, "Hey, like I kinda miss being able to go to my guy, the person I've been going to for 15 years."

Shaan Puri 47:39 You have a great pitch. He's got a, he's got a, he's got a really good ability.

Shreyas Parab 47:42 Yeah, you're great. Let's ask you a different question. What's not figured out yet in the business? So there's, you know, a business, you only fi- you only need to figure out the sort of six inches in front of you as you're going, and there's might be some things you don't know yet, but it's kinda a little bit further away. You can keep punting it for until you get there. What's unfigured out? You know, like I think we're growing fast, but we could be growing faster. We, we do creative go-to-market things, but we could always be doing more of them.

Shaan Puri 48:03 So how do I get more of that 150,000 dentists to-

Shreyas Parab 48:05 Exactly

Shaan Puri 48:06 ... come get the benefits that we offer?

Shreyas Parab 48:07 Yeah, 'cause we're, we're going after like, you know, these guys aren't on LinkedIn. You've never met a dentist on LinkedIn.

Shaan Puri 48:11 Well, how do they find you now?

Shreyas Parab 48:12 Um, honestly, word of mouth. We're in these like Facebook groups where there's like tens of thousands of dentists.

Shaan Puri 48:16 Right.

Shreyas Parab 48:16 And I just like, I just comment for 10 hours a week just like following-

Shaan Puri 48:20 Really?

Shreyas Parab 48:20 ... these Facebook groups. Um, we go to conferences.

Shaan Puri 48:22 How, how do you make it an absolute no-brainer for a dentist to, to take you on? So today, how do you take all the friction out? The same way you're taking the friction out of the billing, how do you take the friction out of the onboarding? So for example, could you go to these dentists and just say, "Hey, DayDream, we will take over this, you know, this cost center of your business"? But basically if you just said like, "We don't charge you a penny until we've made you $100,000. The first 100,000 we make you, we take nothing, and after that, we take 2.5%" or some- something like that where it's like, oh, these guys are basically saying-

Shreyas Parab 48:51 I'll work for free

Shaan Puri 48:51 ... they're gonna make me an extra $100,000. And for you, onboarding that person, your actual cogs is not $100,000. Your cogs to onboard a dentist is probably very, very small. And so you will just use that as your acquisit- Like, create an offer so good they would be stupid to turn down.

Shreyas Parab 49:07 Yeah. Yeah, it's so hard 'cause some, most people are like afraid of change management. Like that's what, like dentists are like- Yeah, like maybe I'm losing a little bit of money, but like, eh.

Shaan Puri 49:15 Right.

Shreyas Parab 49:15 But yeah, I mean, that's oftentimes the- the biggest thing that comes to mind is like how do we like-

Sam Parr 49:18 Dude, my... Well, my dad is in this, not this space, but he owns a, um, an old school small business, and if you were gonna like tell him, like, like I made this post about him saying like, "My dad makes, you know, this much money a year selling onions, and his CRM is this notebook and filing cabinet," and he, all these people were like, "Use a CRM." He's like, "What the [beep] is that? No. No, I'm done." Uh, and so I do understand, like, that pitch can be hard. Why don't you own a Facebook group that teaches dentist owners how to, uh, uh, make more money?

Shreyas Parab 49:45 So we've tried putting in offers for those other Facebook groups, and then we have started our own. It only has about 250 members, but we have someone offshore right now just adding them. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 49:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shreyas Parab 49:54 Um, and then like-

Shaan Puri 49:54 That's smart

Shreyas Parab 49:55 ... friending them from my account. But like, yeah, like we need to like hyper-charge it maybe.

Sam Parr 49:58 Can you buy one of those groups?

Shreyas Parab 49:59 We've- we've tried. I-

Shaan Puri 50:00 Sometimes they'll block you, though, if you do that, so you have to be careful 'cause you might-

Shreyas Parab 50:03 But-

Shaan Puri 50:03 Just in making the offer, you might get blocked. What about the private equity guys? So the private equity roll-ups that are happening, they already own huge amounts. So in theory, you sell one, you get many. But maybe they built this in-house or they are really sensitive to margin and they don't wanna do this. What have you found so far?

Shreyas Parab 50:17 I thought that they would be like a much more straightforward, like very like logical... But many of them just like bought a bunch of practices in 2021, and like they're just trying to stay afloat and like not, like be able to service their debt these days, to be honest.

Shaan Puri 50:30 Right.

Shreyas Parab 50:30 And I- I- I think like, yeah, we- we've tried one or two, like 50 location groups, but those have been the hardest deployments. Those have been the most-

Shaan Puri 50:37 Yeah

Shreyas Parab 50:37 ... like demanding things. And, and again, maybe this is like something that's bad. We've... We were just like, what if we just like stayed in the thing that like we're very good at for now, and like-

Shaan Puri 50:44 Yeah

Shreyas Parab 50:44 ... and like we'll... I hope we can work there, but like-

Sam Parr 50:46 Do you have a community manager?

Shreyas Parab 50:49 You're looking at him. [laughs]

Sam Parr 50:50 Yeah, which is smart, uh, that you do it. I would go super hard on com- like owning and running a Facebook group and creating k- like, you know, we, um, we're buddies with this guy named Tommy Mello who has a garage door business.

Shreyas Parab 51:00 Oh, A1 Garage.

Sam Parr 51:01 Yeah.

Shreyas Parab 51:02 Okay.

Sam Parr 51:02 And he does, uh, I- I think maybe close to a billion in revenue, and now his job is he's trying to buy more service businesses to implement his playbook. And so he actually created like a, uh, services mastermind conference type of thing, and he was like, the ticket prices will pay for my s- my team, but the real thing was like, if I can find a handful that I can buy, I would love that. And if I was you, I 100% would have a community manager, probably an ex-dentist or something like that, and I would create like a community on Facebook groups where it would be all the best practices where people share their tips and tricks on how they're making their lives easier, their businesses better.

Shaan Puri 51:37 How- how many dentists are you onboarding every month?

Shreyas Parab 51:39 About 50, like 30 to 50.

Shaan Puri 51:41 30, 50. And so really the question is like how do you get that number to be 150?

Shreyas Parab 51:45 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 51:45 So you start by saying, "Well, what's working today? Where do you get the 50 right now?"

Shreyas Parab 51:49 Yeah, so we do like direct mail campaigns like this where we send out like, like a pho- like what, what's a direct mail you're not gonna throw away is like one with your face on it, right?

Shaan Puri 51:57 Oh, that's them.

Sam Parr 51:57 Brilliant.

Shreyas Parab 51:57 Uh, yeah, that's them. And so we have all these different options.

Shaan Puri 51:59 [laughs] That's so good. I'm gonna show you.

Shreyas Parab 51:59 Yeah, sorry.

Sam Parr 52:00 This is a great idea. Who made this? What vendor?

Shreyas Parab 52:02 Like [laughs] you're looking at it.

Sam Parr 52:04 You did this?

Shreyas Parab 52:04 Like me, me and the team. Again, we have like some of the smartest go-to-market people I have- I've ever worked with.

Sam Parr 52:08 This is so good.

Shreyas Parab 52:09 Um, and then we do- we've done this one.

Shaan Puri 52:11 Have you studied like the old school direct marketers?

Shreyas Parab 52:13 Not really, no.

Shaan Puri 52:14 'Cause you're-

Shreyas Parab 52:14 We've been mostly doing it vibes

Shaan Puri 52:16 ... you're, you're doing, yeah, you're doing direct response marketing. You should study the guys who basically cracked a single sales letter sent through the post-

Sam Parr 52:24 Do you know what he's talking about?

Shaan Puri 52:25 ... that would make like millions of dollars.

Shreyas Parab 52:26 No, sorry.

Sam Parr 52:27 Okay, so listen. Before the internet was the internet, it was copywriters, direct marketers. So basically, let's say I made vacuums, and I would go to Joe Su- or, uh, Joe Sugarman or David Ogilvy, and I would say, "Hey, guys, I need, um, a bunch of people to buy this vacuum." So they would f- uh, pay us a database, uh, to give them the addresses of a million housewives, and they would come up, the copywriter would come up with this amazing like angle to, to capture the housewives' attention, and they would write out this letter. They would type it out, they'd put it in an envelope, and they would s- send it to them. It says, "Here's all the reasons why you should buy this. Here's a little coupon. Tear, tear it off. Write your checking information and put a check in there or whatever. Mail it back to me." That's a very arduous process. So they got so freaking good at copywriting that every single word served a purpose, and it was beautiful, and it was incredibly effective. And then the internet came along, and the best copywriters tended to be people who were a little bit on the fringes of like they would sell like how to pick up chicks or how to... like these programs that were a little bit like fringy, but they were the best. And these guys still exist. And you could get someone to help you with, uh, this opening letter, and they could sell the shit out of these people, and it's all via direct response long form copywriting.

Shreyas Parab 53:40 You've sold me on this. [laughs] Yeah, it's like th- this is like a 12th grade English class-

Shaan Puri 53:44 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Shreyas Parab 53:44 ... that what I've done.

Shaan Puri 53:45 I mean, what I love is that you're just doing the entrepreneurial thing, right? You're just stumbling around trying to figure things out as you go, but you're gonna be able to like, there are people who are masters at this, either the old school people or the people who have studied them and do it today. Find them and be like, "Hey, I need you to acquire, you know, an a- here's a budget and I need you to acquire dentists at this, this cost and see what they can do."

Sam Parr 54:04 Which, by the way, this, uh, like one of the t- frameworks for copywriting, one of the most simple one is AIDA, attention, interest, desire, action. This is A. You are... That's the best attention grabbing headline you could possibly have. So you're kind of doing it-

Shaan Puri 54:16 Their face, yeah

Sam Parr 54:17 ... inadvertently, but you 100% can improve this.

Shaan Puri 54:19 And you have the fr- book a demo and get a free air- get free AirPods. So that's another thing they would do is the Cracker Jack, you know, gift, gift in the box.

Sam Parr 54:26 Like props, yeah.

Shaan Puri 54:26 They would do a thing where they would, you know, sta- uh, they would paper clip a dollar bill onto the mai- onto a letter. And just by putting a, like when you see a dollar, you're just, "What i- what is this?"

Shreyas Parab 54:34 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 54:35 And it just had a higher response rate. They figured out like all the different things that you can do to do this, to make every, every step of this work. So this is one of the tactics.

Shreyas Parab 54:43 Yes.

Shaan Puri 54:44 Is this bringing in everybody right now or-

Shreyas Parab 54:45 No, no. I mean, there's not a single dental podcast in America that I've not gone on to.

Shaan Puri 54:48 Okay.

Shreyas Parab 54:49 Um, just every single dental podcast, every dental conference.

Shaan Puri 54:51 Sponsor, or you just went on as a guest?

Shreyas Parab 54:52 Uh, sometimes sponsor, sometimes I just go on as a guest. Again, the story is like very, you know, something that I think a lot of dentists can get behind. And then, uh, conferences, like I think on any given like month, I'll probably be at like three or four con- sometimes like twice a week.

Sam Parr 55:04 Dude, they probably think that you're like a freak. They're like, "Who's this young, charismatic guy at a dentist?" Like, "We've never seen this." Like, you know, you probably stick out, right?

Shreyas Parab 55:11 Yeah, like for better or for worse. [laughs]

Sam Parr 55:13 In a good way.

Shreyas Parab 55:13 Yeah, yeah.

Sam Parr 55:13 In a good way. Okay, listen.

Shreyas Parab 55:14 Normal.

Sam Parr 55:14 Joe Sugarman is the author.

Shreyas Parab 55:16 Okay.

Sam Parr 55:16 It is called the co- uh, The Adweek Guide to Copywriting. Read that, and then read On Advertising by David Ogilvy. Read those this week and your mind will change.

Shreyas Parab 55:23 Okay. And then I like the idea of the users conference too. The A1 guy does this where they bring-

Sam Parr 55:28 Yeah

Shreyas Parab 55:28 ... people together.

Sam Parr 55:28 Yeah, it's just like we're gonna teach everyone, everyone's gon- we're just, we're just gonna be the meeting place for people to aggregate and share ideas on how to make their business better. And hopefully, and, and just so you guys know, we have this, but regardless if you use our software or not, this is like a great thing.

Shaan Puri 55:40 Another question, who influences the influencers? So who, who do a lot of dentists listen to, like, trust today? Obviously you've been on a couple of podcasts. I don't know if podcasting is the main thing. Are there people on Instagram? Like I found that for every space, like, uh, we invested in this company that was, uh, doing stuff with auto shops, and it turns out there was just like a guy who was like the auto body guy, and basically he had a 50 store chain. And so everybody who owned one wanted to own 50, so therefore they liked, listened to, respected this guy, and he was able to drive like crazy volume. I think this guy was making like 20 million a year himself as like an auto mechanic influencer [laughs] which is just shows kinda like there's always influence in every niche. You gotta find it and figure out how to get them on board with what you're doing.

Shreyas Parab 56:21 Yeah. We've done like one or two, but like there are so many dental influencers 'cause my whole feed is just dental influencers now.

Shaan Puri 56:27 Yeah.

Sam Parr 56:27 Yeah. I'm friends with one of them. One of my... You know, uh, Amin, his wife is a dental, uh-

Shaan Puri 56:31 Oh, really?

Sam Parr 56:31 Yeah. I know a few of them.

Shreyas Parab 56:32 Okay. Yeah. I [laughs] I guess we just got our first influencers and our first guests at DreamCon, the, the users conference. [laughs]

Sam Parr 56:38 You got the copywriter, uh, bugging you.

Shaan Puri 56:40 What, what's your killer, like your kill shot with your marketing? Meaning, you know, the average practice is leaving X dollars on the table, DayDream captures 90% of that or whatever. What's, what's your version of that? Like a one-liner that immediately makes me realize how much money I'm missing out on if I'm not doing, not using you guys.

Shreyas Parab 56:58 Uh, we can improve your collections by 5% and decrease your median time to payment to 10 days. That feels clunky when I say it.

Shaan Puri 57:05 Yeah. So what does that mean in terms of like I'm a dentist, I don't think about my median time to collection.

Shreyas Parab 57:10 Yeah. It, you put a-

Shaan Puri 57:10 I think about like how much money I made. As if the average practice makes, let's just use a million dollars a year.

Shreyas Parab 57:15 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 57:15 And you're saying you increase their claims by 5%, so you'd be adding $50,000 to their practice straight to the bottom line.

Shreyas Parab 57:23 Yeah. $50,000 more in your pocket and all your money in 10 days.

Shaan Puri 57:27 We fight the insurance companies, and on average we add $50,000 take-home pay for every single dentist that uses us, right? Or like on average or whatever, whatever the claim is.

Shreyas Parab 57:37 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 57:37 You, you wanna massage that, like try to get down to like a one-liner that's just like a, a marketing kill shot. It's like if this is true, okay, I'm interested, right? And it's just gotta be that juicy for them that if this is true.

Shreyas Parab 57:50 We used to have one that I like... It was like, oh, like your Ferrari's waiting or something like that 'cause that's how much you can bo-

Shaan Puri 57:54 [laughs]

Shreyas Parab 57:55 Like for some of these practices we recover enough money to like pay for a car.

Shaan Puri 57:58 Right.

Shreyas Parab 57:59 We just gotta like-

Shaan Puri 57:59 [laughs]

Shreyas Parab 58:00 Sorry. I, I like this is like very helpful. I should be writing this stuff down. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 58:03 Yeah, yeah.

Sam Parr 58:03 Well, it'll be recorded, and you can-

Shreyas Parab 58:04 Yeah. [laughs]

Sam Parr 58:04 ... you can re-watch it. Dude, thank you so much. You're the man.

Shaan Puri 58:06 Yeah, Shreyas, thanks for coming on.

Shreyas Parab 58:07 Thank you guys so much.

Shaan Puri 58:08 Great to meet you.

Shreyas Parab 58:09 Thank you so much.

Sam Parr 58:09 Oh, you're awesome.

Shaan Puri 58:11 All right. That's the end of part one of Shoot Your Shot. We got three more founders coming up on the next episode. Make sure you're subscribed on YouTube, on Spotify. We looked at the data, I think 80, 90% of you guys are not subscribed who watch the episodes. What are you doing? Subscribe so you can watch episode two.

Sam Parr 58:25 And do me a favor. Whether you're a listener, then you're gonna go to Spotify, or if you're a watcher, go to YouTube, put in the comments the city that w- you want us to go to next. Right now we're doing this in San Francisco. We've already done New York. We'll go somewhere next to do it, so let us know in the comments right now. [upbeat music]