3 strangers showed us how they made $8M, $10M, & $40M/year

19:27Thank you so much for the time. All right. We appreciate you.

19:30Sam Parr:God bless. All right. See you, dude. Thank you. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you, and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

20:02Sam Parr:All right, we have another one. Who we got? Bring them in. Yo, what's going on? What's good, boys? You sound like a hockey player. All right, we got to spend too much time in the locker room. That's the problem. So I know you. So this is Nick. What's doing? And I know your product because I've been addicted to these things. I actually had to wean myself off of them. I was like, I needed a midday break of eating Midday Squares. But do you know Nick well or not? I never. I've just met him a second ago. I just lurk on X. Yes. Well, I have these in my office at Hampton because my co-founder is obsessed with them and I started eating them.

20:40Sam Parr:They are awesome. I appreciate that. So you're Nick. I appreciate that. Midday Squares is your company. Sure is. That you and your wife do. I got two other partners. Yeah, I got a shout out to my wife and my brother-in-law. So we did this as - Oh, keep it all in the family. We got to talk about his wife. She's amazing. She's the beast. Okay, so before we start, we want you to start with the one big number. We basically sold$40 million worth of$2.49 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.

21:10Wow. 40 million in - This year. In the last 12 months. Yeah. Yeah. 60 of these bad boys every minute, every minute of the year. Every minute of the year, 365 days a year. Including, if I'm not wrong, wasn't Kim Kardashian spotted with these in her bag? Is that true? Yeah, yeah. Not paid, right? Not paid. She's hooked us up two times on her social. And I think that's the beauty of when you're hustling and we make it 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 to become friends with chefs.

21:47And that's – so Chef K, shout out Chef K, who cooks for the Kardashians. I mean, we were sending our product for years and years and years. No. Influence the influencer strategy. Oh, cool. Who influences the influencers? And then you – actually influencing them is a lot easier.

22:03Sam Parr:But you find who the chefs are of celebrities? Yeah. There's a lot of chefs on Instagram and TikTok that you can see who they're cooking for. For athletes and others. And you just DM them and say, hey, can I send you some? Yeah. What's special about the product? Well, what is the product? 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.

22:38Do you know there's like a cocoa crisis? Cocoa crisis? Why was there the cocoa crisis? 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. I got stories. I went into the Ecuadorian forest. So like, if you ever want to 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.

23:18Nobody 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.

23:26Sam Parr:Had you raised money or is this whole thing bootstrapped? No, no. We raised money through a quasi equity in our government. So shout out to the Canadian government's super pro in agricultural manufacturing. So they were able to give us - How much in aggregate have you raised? million in total. So you've raised$22 million? They built their own plan. 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. I can't confirm nor deny.

23:55I can say this stuff. They got a cease and desist from someone being like, you can't use the color orange or stuff like that. It was orange. It was like a ridiculous - I'm sure we could all play two and two together. Yeah. Reese's 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. We actually made a diss track. They made a rap diss track. They made a music video. Him and his wife. And it's like ridiculous, but it kind of works.

24:23And they tell the story. And they tell the story about their plant. And they tell the story about 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 on storytelling ability.

24:36Sam Parr:Who named it Midday Squares? Because it's perfect. Thank you, man. I think it was me and my wife brainstorming, riffing. Shout out to 5-Hour Energy. So I listened to the podcast on 5-Hour Energy and 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. for adults. For adults, yeah, specifically. And so was this a form factor that already existed, that people were already doing these like kind of square, I don't even know what this is.

25:15It's a dual layer square, yeah. What's the bottom? Peanut butter base. Okay, peanut butter base, you got jelly on top. This is a PB &J one. Or that's PB &J, this is also PB &J, strawberry. But you also have chocolate, right? Yeah, chocolate's where it started the business. Chocolate's where it started. Where did the initial idea come from? You're just sitting around and why this? So my, my cousins, um, my cousin was super high up at Smucker's and he was just always, uh, pushing me to get into this gang, 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.

25:53So chocolate that wasn't using palm kernel oil at the time and refrigerated was growing. So like the refrigerated category at grocery stores, fastest growing section of a grocery store. So that's why I keep seeing refrigeration pop everywhere. Like Fresh Pet at the pet section, they're starting to put fridges in. Oh, so every category started to have a refrigerated item. We were talking about this with vitamins, right? Like those liquid vitamins that you put in the fridge versus in the cabinet. Oh, wait, so go back. Your cousin's at Schmuckers. Shout out to Aurelio, by the way. That's my cousin.

26:24And he's like, you got to get into this jelly game. And so you're studying the data. that you notice this trend of refrigeration in different categories. So you notice chocolate's on the rise. There's not a refrigerated chocolate. Yep. You see a gap. You see an opportunity. Big time.

26:37Sam Parr:Tell us how much money you put in of your own money to do it. And then if you could remember each year's revenue leaving up to - Oh, yeah, 100%. 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 is where we came from. We're like, we got to get to a million dollars here.

27:06And if we get here, then we can go to the next level where we can really start to take this seriously. That's dope. It was the first one on Facebook ads just because, hey, we don't have a lot of capital. So we're not going to 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. Yep. Because if they don't really love it, we don't have it right yet before we earned the right to go to other cities. I'm, I'm a contradict, I think Facebook creates a lot of false positives for early businesses.

27:35At least early on. Yes. So what'd you do to get Montreal on board? The content, man. It was, so this was the, and this is where the brilliance of 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? Because a lot of people feel intimidated when they're getting into this thing. Like you got to have a pre, we had no followings. And so for the whole summer, we just started posting. When you're making food products, 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.

28:04And so we just all told each other, like everybody, when we're doing something, cameras 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 industries.

28:21Sam Parr:Okay. So it was like pretty young guys are like, we don't know what the hell we're doing. But you're saying your friends, your own natural social network was like, what's going on? Why is Nick suddenly in this like lab wearing a hairnet, you know, testing different people. Correct. Because we all, my wife was in fashion. My brother-in-law was like a gym buff going around colleges. And I had typically been in software my whole career prior to that. So to see us with like hairnets doing stuff was like, okay. So you use content, you use story to get it going. Yeah. Tell us about the ramp. So you start off year one, what'd you do?

28:52This 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 you can buy one square for 50 cents. And the idea was, 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. He's an animal. By the way, Nick's the only one who's not based in San Francisco doing this thing. He flew in for this too.

29:28This guy is the ultimate hustler. Yeah, Ben messaged me. He's like, any chance you're going to be in San Francisco? I'm like, yeah, of course. He's like, here it is. I'm like, okay, perfect. I'm flying in Sunday. It's the only way, man. You got to make opportunity. So yeah, so 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. So in the morning, all of our orders would be ready and we would literally go on people's Instagram.

30:01So 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? Just meathead shit. Yeah, complete like just - For a customer. And we would take a Polaroid picture and we would show up to their house and this always happened. Okay. So we would show up to the house and 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. Oh my God. Then we would leave them the photo. Then they would post the, we got to a million dollars in like four months.

30:31Like it was like, boom. Dude, that's sick. That is amazing. That is such a great story.

30:36Sam Parr:So the number, tell us the numbers. So, so, okay. So year one, I want to say a million four, then year two, let's call it 3 million. Then we did a big jump to like 7, 14, 22, 30, 40. And now this year, we're on track for about 60. And you guys got into Costco. We launched Costco Canada National. Costco US is launching September 1st. How did you get into Costco? Not easy to do. Everyone wants to get into retail. This is a crazy story too. This is a crazy story. Okay. We're going to have to extend the time limit on Nick, just so you know. No, because this is a crazy story. Whoever's next, go take a walk for a minute.

31:16So Costco, they had seen. The content brings in the action, okay? Brings in the action. So we get this meeting with Costco. Content brings in the action, baby. Let's go. Got to grab that action. So we basically go to the first Costco meeting. And everyone 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 midday squares at Costco. Like we knew we were going to hit this out of the park. They didn't feel as confident in that aspect. And we knew that the right price point was$19.99 for our 12-pack.

31:52There was a disagreement that lasted about two and a half years. Okay. Going back and forth. The gentleman's disagreement. Yeah. Like we just couldn't see eye on the price. And for the record - They wanted it to be what? I'm not going to state that price. Yeah. Because they're a great partner. and they want to be lower. And we just held our ground, you know, because this is - So two and a half years. Two and a half. So during that, weren't you guys just kind of like, God, let's just go into Costco. 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.

32:24There'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 got to be in Costco for 14 days. You mean like giving out samples?

32:38Sam Parr:Physically. Like sampling. Yeah, you're sampling, you're hustling. It's like the - Oh, so that's what's happening. When you walk into Costco, there's kind of a cool product. Somebody standing there. There you go. They're taking a consignment bet on their product to prove to Costco that - That they're worthy of it. And there's no guarantee you're going to get Costco. So I was really rattled. Again, 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 looked at the buyer who we had started to develop actually a good relationship with him.

33:06And I'm like, if we do the roadshow and we break the roadshow record, like the most sales ever in 14 days, will you give us$19.99? And we shook hands that day. What made you want to do that bold statement? Our search on Google was so high for, I knew.

33:24Sam Parr:Yeah, but you knew that it's high for you, but you didn't know that it was how it compared to like when the Swiffer came out. You're correct. I don't know. There's just moments in life where you just. Was that an impulsive thing or you planned to say that? No, it was impulsive. we were your wife looks at you during the meeting you're like it was like my wife looked at me and we but she was I don't know I guess you have nothing to lose at some point baby married a wild stallion this is how it goes sometimes I run away so how much did you guys sell? 140 100 we can't put 160 ,000 in 14 days and how much of that 160 was your did you barely break it or did you no we smashed the record the closest record I think prior to that was sub I saw their content and they made a story out of it We rallied, man.

34:05We rallied. We rallied. Like, we rallied. Okay, so first off, most founders don't spend 14, like, we were doing full days. Don't wag your figure, Envy. Dude, when he's saying we rallied, that goes perfectly with backstage. We were talking about nicotine pouches, and he's like, oh, I used to put it in my toes before ice hockey practice. I've never even heard of this. It sounds like we have some degeneracy to explore. Yeah, I can tell by your tattoos. So for Costco, you put it between the toes, and you just went for it 14 days. It was like the craziest rally of life. And it wasn't 14 days. We spent 36 days straight into Costco.

34:42We had to do multiple Costco. What's the trick when you're in the Costco, like kind of flagging people down? What was the showmanship that worked? Yeah, two things that I think are really takeaway. Most founders don't do the roadshow themselves. They leave it to a third party. That's mistake number one. Yeah, because everyone hates rejection. And there's also time. You got to be in those for 12 hours in a day. Like they open at eight and you're closing at nine, you know? So most founders brush it off and just, they pay the service and they don't go. Every day, you don't understand. It was bananas.

35:15Sam Parr:Okay, so you were just grinding. You were living in the Costco. Me, my wife, our whole team was in there. First thing is founders do it themselves. What's the second thing? The second thing is basically, while you're there, you want to be really methodical. So I would just stand in front and yell out keywords. Gluten-free, die-bentably friendly. And no, I swear on my life. So you're doing keywords as people are - Keywords. You bought like a white girl dictionary. Yeah, yeah. And so you're throwing out like your keywords and it really works. Hispanic. Yes. No, I mean like, so we would have this, we would get so warehoused at one point.

35:50Like we were so 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 coming. Like you just start, but the keywords are really key. So the keywords, why are the keywords key? One, we changed our box because of the keywords that work. So when you go to Costco, it is not this box. It is a specific box that went into Costco. Oh, you discovered it while you were there, changed the packaging afterwards. What'd you discover? Gluten-free was a massive thing. Real chocolate's huge at Costco. So I think the second thing, Sean, is like, don't just mindlessly be there while you're doing the roadshow.

36:25Be intentional about what you're doing.

36:27Sam Parr:Dude, this is awesome. Congratulations. What, um, so, okay. So 10 years from now, what do you think is going to happen? Are you going to sell the company? You're going to run it forever? What are you going to do? All I know is that my dream was to make the NHL and I didn't make the NHL. And so, no. So now you're going to buy a team. No, no, no. Only 0.5 % of companies make it past a hundred million dollars of revenue. That's been my goal since the beginning. And I don't know what will happen after, but that's the goal. You're the shit, man. What's, uh, what's one thing we could help you with? One, having me here today, I can't tell you how much this means to me.

36:57Have you been listening for a while? Dude, come on. You know, we met each other for five years. Well, we met in Club LTV. So I used to host this thing for PECOM owners. He was in there. You probably were only doing like five, 10 million in revenue at the time. I was five million bucks at the time. Five million at the time. But he had amazing energy. I was rooting for you since then. So I'm not surprised that you're now at 40, 50, 60 million. Keep on going, man. What would you like to see as a flavor? I mean, you guys actually consume the product. I would love to, even if it was a fully different direction.

37:23Let's not even say no bread, PB &J. What's a flavor you'd like to see us do?

37:26Sam Parr:That's a good question. 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 got to, this sounds weird because you're doing content. It sounds weird because 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 I didn't actually realize that the reason your stuff tastes better and is better for you is because it's real chocolate that's refrigerated.

38:04That's why there's no preservatives. So it's one thing to say, no preservatives. It's kind of like when I've heard that type of stuff so much, I just assume they're shoving something else in there that I don't know. Oh, no pommel 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. But this isn't even chocolate. chocolate though. This one's a no bread PP &J. Is your chocolate still your popular skew? These are no, I mean, this is now the most popular. This is number one by far. Dude, I would keep going

38:31Sam Parr:with this. It seems like, dude, you know who's making a huge comeback is Uncrustables? 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 bad choice. A bad choice for them. For me, I'm making a shameful choice. This I don't feel ashamed of. So congrats. Well, thank you. All right, we appreciate you doing this. Thanks for having us, man. I appreciate it. Dude, great to see you. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses.

39:02I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards, one click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury.

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39:45Sam Parr:All right, guest number three. Can we go? What's up, dude? What's up, man? All right. Introduce yourself, your name, what you do, what's the name of the company? Okay, sounds good. 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. Oh, dude, I've been DMing you. We've been DMing. We've been in the DMs together. 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 do these, like, cold outreach to invest off of no information, just like a Twitter bio or like two tweets.

40:21And that's what I think I did with you. That's great. That means my Twitter's working. Yes, it's working. There you go.

40:25Sam Parr:I got you. All right. So you kind of already started with the big number. You say, let's say it again slower. So you said. So we're adding a million dollars a month in ARR every single month. Across a bunch of dentists. Yeah, across a bunch. Explain what you do though. 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, you know, what actually is this, right? And that's because the insurance companies are trying to screw not only the patients over, but the doctors over. 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.

40:56They 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 Sean's insurance is going to 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 pay.

41:17Sam Parr:So it's like AI, like negotiating with the company. Insurance companies. Yeah, exactly. So we have AI calling the insurance company to get the status of these claims. AI submitting the claim. And AI voice being like, hey, you did not approve this. Why not? Exactly. Here's why you should. Well, the funny thing is on their side, they also have AI. And so normally it's a war of attrition. It's like, 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. Exactly. And you know what I always tell the insurance companies?

41:44I'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. The incentive is not there. Yeah, the incentive is 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.

42:00Sam Parr:Can you read off a few facts? So how old's the company? How much funding? And like this year's revenue? Yeah, so we're about 926 days old, two and a half years. About. Dude, you know who started that? Was the Ramp CEO? Do you know his shtick? Yeah, yeah, yeah. His shtick is... Like how many hours old? Today we're 2 ,243 days old. Sorry. 926 days old. What was the second part? Yeah. So we've raised$11.5 million to date. By the end of this year, we'll finish north of$10 million in revenue. Wow. And another underrated thing is, so the way our business started was we actually went out and acquired an existing service business.

42:33So before, you know, people would be doing this work manually. Right. So we actually bought this company and then we've just been improving their margin. How big was their book of business when you bought it? Less than a million. And so really the goal was, when you run a services business, one day you run out of, you either have to hire more humans, you become 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. Who came up with this name? I did. My mom's practice, the practice's name is DreamSmile.

43:03And so 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 the first thing you're doing is daydreaming. like, oh, like to the unpaid child workers out there. I see you. I see you. I've been there. Making shoes in the mines, wherever you're at. Yeah. Or, uh, you know, posting EOBs in a dental office in Philadelphia. I'm 25. 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. Now you grow up, you start thinking, what can AI do?

43:34What was the actual reason you like had the idea? Take us to the epiphany of the idea. Yeah. And it's going to get, it's going to get dark, but then it's going to get positive, I promise. Okay. So I'm forewarning. My mom, she's okay now, but she had gotten sick. And so I graduated Stanford. I was working at AI startup. I was like over the moon. I was like, yo, I'm going to dominate the world. And then she gets sick. And so I go home and I start running our practice. And I go from like a hundred to suddenly being the most overqualified dental office manager in America. And that was when I realized how much money we were losing.

44:03I think when I grew up, I kind of knew that it was a problem, but I was just doing and 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 like it doesn't have to be this way it doesn't have to and like you know I've been spent I've spent so much time you know I'm more of a like a NLP nerd like I always loved natural language processing and I'd seen the field like develop and so I was probably one of the first hundred 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 GPT-3.

44:37Sam Parr:Dude, there's this like Venn diagram where like personality type meets with opportunity with like the circumstances in which you grew up and that you had the resources that you... Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah, it's like, okay, perfect. So, you know who else was working in their parents' dental office and then went on to do big things? Zuck? Mark Zuckerberg, yeah. Did he really? You know the story? No. 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 he's like, okay, I guess I've kind of outgrown this.

45:05I should go do something else. Oh, that's awesome. And Michael Dell, underrated. His dad was an orthodontist, I believe. Yeah, Dr. Dell. Children of dentists. Yeah, it's a mafia. How big is it going to get? There's tens of us. How big? I mean, I think we're going to serve every dental practice in America. Like, are you wanting to be like a CEO of a publicly traded company? 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.

45:33I don't know if you guys have, you know, these PE roll-ups. They're buying up all these like 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 want to 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 and own your practice? And they're like, heck yeah. That's the multi-billion dollar business here. So let's go over the business model. So you said you save dentists. You bring in additional cash flow that they were otherwise losing or was delayed.

46:06You take a percentage of that. So you said that basically, let's just take$1 ,000 or$100. Every$100 that comes in, what do you guys take? Anywhere from two and a half to three and a half percent. Oh, that's it. Okay. Yeah. But how does that math work? So you said 10 million of ARR, but you're saving, bringing in a million a month from that. So that's 12 million a year. So how does that work? No, no. We're adding, as Daydream as a business, we're adding 1 million in ARR net new. And so we are processing. But is it ARR? Yeah, ARR. So when we submit claims and we post the payments, which is like entering it in, we take a fee.

46:39So it's not just money we recover. It's every dollar going into the business we are helping them process. Gotcha. So you're like Stripe on the backside. Exactly. All their billing. And then the part where you guys are even better, you add that sort of 10%, 15 % to their practice overall. How big is your team? 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 you're close to profitability. Yeah. And I think that's like, you know, we did raise venture capital. And I think like, I think it's nice to kind of have like, we could like go for profitability or we could keep on growing.

47:11I think like we just want to do more. Like I know that there are like 150 ,000 dentists. The job's not done. Job's not even like, we can't even be talking about the job. We haven't even, you know what I mean? Job's not done. Is Job even in the room with us right now? No, I can't even see him.

47:26Sam Parr:So things are going great. you seem happy what is bad? This is a safe space you can tell us and the millions of people that are going to listen to this what's going bad. Everything it feels like you know what I mean like I don't know I mean like 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 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 open AI and anthropic and I'm like So yeah, that part is tough.

47:59Sam Parr:Do you have to pay crazy amounts of salary? 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 - No, I don't know what you mean. When you, like their mission is like AGI, cure cancer and you're like back office dental work. How is your mission winning out against the mission of these labs? There's no way. 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.

48:29Yeah, 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. And like, that's the mission. And like, yes, we sell to dentists, right? But like, to me, this, 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, 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, I kind of miss being able to go to my guy, the person I've been going to for 15 years.

49:00Sam Parr:You have a great pitch. He's got a really good ability. Yeah, you're great. Let's ask you a different question. What's not figured out yet in the business? So there's a business you only need to figure out the sort of six inches in front of you as you're going. And there might be some things you don't know yet, but it's kind of a little bit further away. You can keep punting it until you get there. What's unfigured out? You know, like I think we're growing fast, but we could be growing faster. We do creative go-to-market things, but we could always be doing more of them. So how do I get more of that 150 ,000 dentist?

49:27Exactly. Come get the benefits that we offer. We're going after like, you know, these guys aren't on LinkedIn. You've never met a dentist on LinkedIn. Well, how do they find you now? Honestly, word of mouth. We're in these like Facebook groups where there's like tens of thousands of dentists. Right. And I just like, I just comment for 10 hours a week, just like following these Facebook groups. We go to conferences. How do you make it an absolute no brainer for a dentist to take you on? So 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?

49:53So for example, could you go to these dentists and just say, hey, daydream, we will take over this, you know, this cost 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 two and a half percent or something like that where it's like, oh, these guys are basically saying they're going to 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 acquisition like create an offer so good they would be stupid to turn down yeah yeah it's so hard because 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 right but yeah i mean that's oftentimes the biggest thing that comes to mind is like how do we like

50:40Sam Parr: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 all these people were like, use the CRM. He's like, what the f*** is that? No, no, I'm done. 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 make more money? So we've tried putting in offers for those other Facebook groups and then we have started our own.

51:11It only has about 250 members, but we have someone offshore right now just adding them and then like friending them for my account. But like, Yeah, like we need to like hypercharge it maybe. Can you buy one of those groups? We've tried. Sometimes they'll block you though if you do that. So you have to be careful because you might. 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 a huge amount. 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 want to do this.

51:38What have you found so far? 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. And I think like, yeah, we've tried one or two like 50 location groups, but those have been the hardest deployments. Those have been the most like demanding things. And again, maybe this is like something that's bad. We were just like, what if we just like stayed in the thing that like we're very good at for now?

52:05And like, well, I hope we can work there. But like.

52:08Sam Parr:Do you have a community manager? You're looking at him? Yeah, which is smart that you do it. I would go super hard on like owning and running a Facebook group and creating like, you know, we were buddies with this guy named Tommy Mello, who has a garage door business. Oh, A1 Garage. Yeah, it does. 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 services mastermind conference type of thing. And he was like, the ticket prices will pay for my team. But the real thing was like, if I can find a handful that I can buy, I would love that.

52:44Sam Parr: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. How many dentists are you onboarding every month? About 50, like 30 to 50. 30, 50. And so really the question is like, how do you get that number to be 150? Yeah. So you start by saying, well, what's working today? Where do you get the 50 right now? Yeah, so we do like direct mail campaigns like this where we send out like a photo.

53:15Like what's a direct mail you're not going to throw away? It's like one with your face on it, right? Oh, that's them. Yeah, that's them. And so we have all these different options. This is a great idea. Who made this?

53:23Sam Parr:What vendor? You're looking at it? You did this? Me and the team, again, we have like some of the smartest go-to-market people I've ever worked with. This is so good. And then we've done this one. Have you studied like the old school direct marketers? Not really. No, we've been mostly doing it vibes. Yeah, you're doing direct response marketing. You should study the guys who basically cracked a single sales letter sent through the post. Do you know what he's talking about? That would make like millions of dollars. No, sorry. Okay, so listen, before the internet was the internet. It was copywriters, direct marketers.

53:53Sam Parr:So basically, let's say I made vacuums and I would go to Joe Sugarman or David Ogilvie and I would say, hey guys, I need a bunch of people to buy this vacuum. So they would pay us a database to give them the addresses of a million housewives. And they would come up, the copywriter would come up with this amazing angle to capture the housewife's attention. And they would write out this letter, they would type it out, they'd put it in an envelope and they would send it to them. It says, here's all the reasons why you should buy this. Here's a little coupon, tear it off, write your checking information and put a check in there or whatever, mail it back to me.

54:28Sam Parr: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 are 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 this opening letter and they could sell the shit out of these people. And it's all via direct response, long form copywriting.

55:02you've sold me on this. Yeah, it's like, this is like a 12th grade English class. That's what I've done. 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 going to 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, here's a budget and I need you to acquire dentists at this cost and see what they can do.

55:26Sam Parr:Which, by the way, this, like one of the frameworks for copywriting, one of the most simple one is ADA, attention, interest, desire, action. This is A. That's the best attention-grabbing headline you could possibly have. So you're kind of doing it inadvertently, but you 100 % can improve this. And you have the, book a demo and get free AirPods. So that's another thing they would do is the Cracker Jack, you know, gift in the box. They would do a thing where they would, you know, they would paperclip a dollar bill onto a letter. And just by putting a, like, when you see a dollar, you're just, what is this?

55:56And 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 step of this work. So this is one of the tactics. Is this bringing in everybody right now? No, no. I mean, there's not a single dental podcast in America that I've not gone on to. Just every single dental podcast, every dental conference. Sponsor or you just went on as a guest? Sometimes sponsor, sometimes I should 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 conferences. Like I think on any given like month, I'll probably be at like three or four.

56:25Sometimes like twice a week.

56:27Sam Parr: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? Yeah, like for better or for worse. In a good way. In a good way. Okay, listen, Joe Sugarman is the author. It's called The Ad Week Guide to Copywriting. Read that and then read On Advertising by David Ogilvie. Read those this week and your mind will change. Okay. And then I like the idea of the users conference too. The A1 guy does this where they bring people together. Yeah, it's just like, we're going to teach everyone. We're just going to be the meeting place for people to aggregate and share ideas on how they make their business better.

56:56Sam Parr:and hopefully, and just so you guys know, we have this, but regardless if you use our software or not, this is like a great thing. Another question, who influences the influencer? So 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 we invest in this company that was 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.

57:25So therefore they liked listening and 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, which is just shows kind of like, there's always influence in every niche. You got to find it and figure out how to get them on board with what you're doing. Yeah, we've done like one or two, but like there are so many dental influencers because my whole feed is just dental influencers now. Yeah, I'm friends with one of them.

57:50Sam Parr:You know, Aiman, his wife is a dental. Oh, really? Yeah, I know a few of them. Okay, yeah. I guess we just got our first influencers and our first guests at DreamCon, the users conference. You got the copywriter bug in you. 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 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. We can improve your collections by 5 % and decrease your median time to payment to 10 days.

58:25That feels clunky when I say it. Yeah, so what does that mean in terms of like, I'm a dentist, I don't think about my median time to collection. I think about like how much money I made. If the average practice makes, let's just use a million dollars a year, and you're saying you increased their claims by 5%, so you'd be adding$50 ,000 to their practice, straight to the bottom line. Yeah. $50 ,000 more in your pocket and all your money in 10 days. 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 the claim is.

58:58You want to massage that, like try to get down to like a one-liner that's just like a marketing kill shot. It's like, if this is true, okay, I'm interested, right? And it's just got to be that juicy for them that if this is true. We used to have one that I like, it was like, oh, like your Ferrari's waiting or something like that because that's how much you can buy. Like for some of these practices, is we recover enough money to like pay for a car. Right. We just got to like, sorry, this is like very helpful. I should be writing this stuff down.

59:24Sam Parr:It'll be recorded and you can rewatch it. Dude, thank you so much. You're the man. Thank you guys for coming on. Great to meet you. Thank you so much. 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 watched the episodes. What are you doing? Subscribe so you can watch episode two. and do me a favor. Whether you're a listener, then you're going to go to Spotify or if you're a watcher, go to YouTube. Put in the comments the city that you want us to go to next.

59:55Sam Parr: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. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you.

1:00:26Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.