Dumb iPhone Apps Are Making People Rich Again (Here’s how)

10:19Shaan Puri:Apps are the new info products, I think. So anything in health, wealth, relationships, productivity, self-improvement, these are all great spaces. And the reason why I wanted to share the dumb apps because they're the most funniest when you think about them, I'm not saying go build a dumb app, but build anything in these sorts of spaces right now, health, so fitness, gym apps, these sorts of things, wealth, money, productivity, these sorts of things. That is a great space to be building right now. What are you seeing in wealth? Well, there's not any kind of the silly apps, but anything that's in like crypto, trading, these sorts of things, those are really, really popular.

10:59Shaan Puri:What's a stop vaping app? Yeah. So that would be another one of the health. I think the health one is a good space. There's a guy that just built an app that helps you track. It was called Puff Count. And I think you just track how many puffs you took. And then once you get to a certain low amount, it sort of gamifies the process of quitting nicotine. That was a cool one. He sold it for a lot of money. and that was a really cool example. Did a lot of TikTok. Who bought it?

11:23Sam Parr:Like Philip Morris and they shut that sucker down? Get that out of here.

11:32Sam Parr:And are these kids, like I assume, I watch your channel and it's almost a young, like 20 something. Are a lot of them actually technical or are they just using AI

11:41Shaan Puri:to make this stuff? That's the thing is they're using AI coding and this is why it's big now and you're thinking it was big 10 years ago. It's big now because in order to build an iPhone app, you needed to have a team of four. To build a good iPhone app, you needed a designer, you needed a product person, you needed an engineer, probably a backend and a frontend engineer. But with AI coding tools, you can just have an idea. It's not perfect, but it's like 95 % of the way there. You can just build it with zero. Basically a team of zero. Apps that couldn't have existed before because it wouldn't have been cost-effective.

12:15Shaan Puri:You couldn't have built a stop-vaping app with a team of four people getting paid$100 ,000 a year or$200 ,000 a year, it just wouldn't have been feasible. But now there's this opportunity for all these little kind of weird, fun apps that blow up on social media because you don't need anybody to build them anymore.

12:33Sam Parr:You know what's interesting is you said that apps, the new info products, that didn't hit with me until just a second ago. Do you guys remember the police scanner app? I think it was called 5-radio or 5-0 radio. Do you remember that, Sean?

12:47Pat Walls:sort of. Not really. I've heard of these like Citizen. This is the one I know about. This is before that.

12:53Sam Parr:So I'm part of this forum where this guy is a poster and I knew he was kind of a celebrity to me a little bit. And his name's Alan Wong. And he started this thing called 5-0 Scanner. So if you guys Google him, he kind of was famous because he created this iPhone app. And I think his story was that he was an immigrant from another country. He came here with nothing. His family, I think they worked in a restaurant, something like that. He created this thing called the 5.0 scanner right when the iPhone got started. And he made eight figures. I think he was making like$5 million a year repeatedly for a very long time.

13:26Sam Parr:And he wrote this story about how he was able to retire his mom and dad. Then he bought a Lamborghini. He took a photo of himself in the Lamborghini when he was like 24. And he kind of went viral for that. But he never actually taught how to make apps. He was kind of true to just making apps. And I remember this guy. And he was like one in a million. There was not other people doing these iPhone apps that were making$5 or$8 million a year with one employee. He was one in a million, and it was so cool. He's like a celebrity a little bit to me because I kind of grew up. He was kind of like my Tai Lopez.

13:55Sam Parr:It is kind of interesting to say that they are the new info products because info products, when I was growing up, when I was 19 and 21 trying to get into the internet, it was always info product people. I didn't exactly look up to because I thought they were sleazy a little bit, but I was like, I want that life. I aspire to have that. I can make money anywhere, anytime, be on a beach type of lifestyle. And it is funny that you're saying that the apps weren't even on my radar because I didn't know how to make them. I couldn't, I physically couldn't do that. But now I probably could. And that is kind of an interesting way to look at it.

14:25Sam Parr:And then we saw, we had this one, what was the kids who we had on here, Sean? Calorie Tracker, Cal? Cal AI. We had Cal AI. Guys, have you guys seen how big that business is now? So he talked to it. This guy, Zach, talked to us. Literally, it was noon on a Tuesday. We go, what are you doing here? He goes, I came home for lunch during high school to do this interview and I have to go back to school. And at the time, I think it was a$30 million a year business. How big is it now?

14:51Shaan Puri:I saw on X, so it's not verified or anything like that, but they said they did$6 million in January alone. So$70 million, what does that put it at? $70 something million?

15:02Sam Parr:That's incredible. Well, he launched a thing called App Mafia, which is like a course on how to make apps. apps. And I don't think it landed. I think people kind of mocked it. But anyway, it was cool to like see that this is the new info product.

15:15Pat Walls:Well, it's cool because there's sounds like there's two trends coming together, right? It's apps are getting easier and easier to make with AI and vibe coding. And on the other hand, you have a new discovery platform, TikTok, that you can get your app downloaded from. And both happening at the same time, like Charlie Munger calls these like Lollapalooza effects, where multiple factors kind of conspire in your favor. And then suddenly you get this crazy sort of Lollapalooza effect out of it. So you get one, two, three, four variables all pushing in the same direction unintentionally, and it creates a new opportunity.

15:47Pat Walls:So we were joking like, dude, iPhone apps, this is like 2010? What do you mean that's the opportunity? Well, there's something that changed. Apps got way easier to build, and apps got way easier to be discovered. There's a new way to get discovered as an app. So the playing field reopened in a way that the window was sort of closed over the last, let's say, five years ago. It was less juicy than it is currently.

16:09Sam Parr:Yep, that's right. Okay, you want to do another idea? What else you got? Let's do this B2B video.

16:15Pat Walls:I'm curious what you have there. Yeah, I don't have crazy business ideas here,

16:20Shaan Puri:but I have just some intel on how big this opportunity is. And there's so many business ideas you can do off of this. So I know this, and you guys know this, is that video content is hard. doing anything on video is hard. It doesn't matter if it's long form, short form, paid ads, organic, getting authentic, non-AI, we're not talking about AI generated stuff, like video to work for your business that gets views and converts customers. It's really, really hard. At companies, there's lots of functions, right? Design, that's pretty much solved. You get good designers, they do good stuff. Product, that's a little tough, but kind of generally solved.

16:58Shaan Puri:Engineering, kind of solved, especially with AI. Sales, there's lots of playbooks for all these, right? But there's no playbook right now for video. I'll stop there. Let me know what you guys think immediately about that.

17:10Pat Walls:I think you're spot on. I've said before, video is now the native tongue of the internet. It's the language that the internet speaks. And so if you can't make good video, you essentially, it's like moving to America and not being able to speak English. You might be able to get by, but it's not going to be easy for you. And so you're right that the way you just put it is really great, which is that companies don't even have really the job function yet at the majority of companies to be able to produce video. Who in the company should be able to produce video? Right now, it's like, it's kind of the youngest employee maybe is going to do it.

17:43Pat Walls:You know, the guy who happens to have a camera and, you know, understands TikTok a little bit, I guess you can sort of do it. The social media person's supposed to be expected to do this, but it's probably going to elevate up to the level of product, design, project management. Like there's going to be one of these functions at companies where you need to be able to produce good video because that's how we communicate with the world now.

18:04Sam Parr:Yeah. Or it's going to be the person who's least embarrassed. What's funny is like, so starting in December, I started doing, I tried, I wanted to learn Instagram. So I was like, I'm going to make a video a day. I was so ashamed to be doing this. Yes. And like, then I like started learning how to do this. And I was like, this is so like manipulable. Like I know how to do this now. It took me about 30 videos to master. But what was holding me back was just the shame. Just the shame. It's just so embarrassing to be walking down the street and talking and be like, hey, so here I'm going to... Wait, hold on.

18:37Sam Parr:Got to redo it again. Hey, so here I'm going to... I was like, well, if I hold it a certain way, I could just pretend that I'm on FaceTime, but people hear me repeating the same thing over and over again. Like, this is stupid. Like, I'm acting here. It was horrible.

18:48Shaan Puri:Well, that's actually why it's a huge opportunity. And I have this on one of my other ideas, which is around YouTube SEO, but that's also related to video. But I talk to a lot of founders or people that want to be founders, people are afraid to put themselves on camera. That's actually why there's one of the biggest opportunities because 99 % of people would rather write an article or do something with like Google SEO or just do something that doesn't have to put themselves out there and put their face out there. And that's actually why YouTube, I think, will be a huge opportunity because most people are too scared to actually put a camera in front of their face and start yapping.

19:21Pat Walls:It's also hard, right? Like it takes a lot of work to do YouTube. compared to a podcast, a podcast is so much easier than doing planned, scripted, edited, packaged YouTube content. And then you get the big view number in your face and you get immediate like slap or, you know, that quick high that you're then going to chase, right? And that's a very tough cycle on YouTube. I think, you know, short form is sort of similar. There's like the phrase like 200 view jail where a lot of people will create TikToks and they just sort of never get past the 200 view number. You just stay stuck in that state.

19:55Pat Walls:But there's a huge amount of, I don't know, self-consciousness as well as actual work that goes into doing this.

20:25Pat Walls:book instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. So what's the solve here? How do you actually solve this? What are different angles you could take? Sam, let's say you believe this was the problem. I think Pat has accurately described the problem and the value that's there, but you still need a key to unlock the door. What would be the key? What would be an idea that you would create in this space?

20:47Shaan Puri:I could show you a couple people. One guy that I think is cool, So big companies, they want to get into video. HubSpot obviously wants to get into video. Big Fortune 50, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies, they need to figure out YouTube and they need to figure it out fast. And I know a guy who has an agency that he goes for the big boys. He goes for like the Microsofts, the Figma's. And he basically just sends them, he helps them build YouTube teams and he sends them packaging ideas. Do this title, do this thumbnail. Do this title, do this thumbnail because you are Microsoft or some massive company, he charges, like, it's different probably per client, but he's told me some crazy numbers, like 50 to$100 ,000 per month just for YouTube strategy.

21:31Shaan Puri:And that shows you how much B2B, this is a B2B specific play here, how much they're willing to pay to have this problem solved. And I still don't, like, that's like one example. I don't even know a lot of people that are solving this problem. I don't know what you guys think.

21:47Pat Walls:Well, there's other people who are doing like done for you, right? So we've talked about the guy, I think his name is Josh, who does the street interviews for companies. So it's like, oh, like, you know what's the most shameful and awkward and difficult version of video? It's like man on the street interviews. So he's like just niche down into like, I'll give you that format, you give me money. I will walk around New York. I will stop people on the road and I will ask them, you know, three goofy questions to try to get, you know, try to get you some clips. Okay, so that's like one guy who's doing the done for you service.

22:18Pat Walls:I know these other guys that do, they fly to companies and they podcast to interview them. They're like, look, forget even getting booked on an actual podcast. I'll just interview you. Chop it up like you were on a podcast. Nobody even needs to know that there's no long form podcast actually underneath this. And I'll just give you the clips. And for you, that's a lot easier. Usually the CEO or the founder is pretty comfortable just sitting down and being interviewed about their company in a podcast format. And they just do it, the whole thing turnkey. And it's like, wait, let's just cut out the part of helping you get booked on actual podcasts and cutting it.

22:52Pat Walls:We'll just fake the podcast. It's great. And so that's like another, like, we will deliver this format to you for a, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month type of thing. Now you only need 10 customers and you're, you know, now you're cooking at over a hundred grand a month.

23:06Shaan Puri:Yeah. I like the idea of taking one popular format and then turning that into a business. Like you said, the street interviews do that one format for one business. And I actually met that guy who started that business. And he told me some pretty wild numbers about his revenue.

23:21Sam Parr:We talked about it. Yeah, it was doing, I think this year he's going to do 10 million in revenue. Yeah.

23:27Shaan Puri:One format. It's great.

23:29Sam Parr:Well, here, do this, Pat. Let's show. Okay. So do me a favor. You sent me a thing where you have your Google sheet or sorry, your Google doc that you have for every single video that you made. I want you to show it to Sean. And the idea here is like what you, your pre-work for your, your YouTube video was really good. And it outlined the whole story. You did a really good job of when you showed me how to make a YouTube video. And what Sean's describing is basically just doing that, but for companies.

23:55Shaan Puri:Let's do it.

23:56Sam Parr:So for the audience, Sean and I have done 750, almost 800 podcasts. Sometimes they're super well-researched. Other times we're like, let's just riff. What do you want to talk about? Tell me about your weekend. Let's just talk. And it requires like no work. And occasionally those will get seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Occasionally there'll be an interview that has little research and we're just friends with the person and that could potentially get a million views. But then I saw yours and it was so much more work, but worth it.

24:22Shaan Puri:Yeah. I'm very anal retentive and I want everything to be planned out and I don't like off the cuff. I don't like spontaneous. I want everything to be there in the doc before that gets filmed. I'm not saying that's better or worse, but that's more my style, but I can pull up. Let me just find the right one to show you. Okay. So this is what we call a prep doc. I mean, my first million has something like this too, but this one is a little different. This is our prep doc for all of our videos that we do at Starter Story. And we will do a couple things in here. First, we start with the package. So this is before anything gets filmed.

24:56Shaan Puri:It's not post film, it's pre-production. And we do the title and thumbnail. So this is this guy here, it's a different guest, but we're saying, hey, this is the thumbnail we're going to do. And this is the video. This video did pretty well. I think it got like five, 600, 700 K views. Uh, so that's why I want to show it. It's like a good example. And I learned this when I read this production book, it was like Hollywood production book. But when you sell a script in Hollywood, they have what's called a treatment. And it's basically a pitch of a video of why someone will want to watch this video.

25:30Shaan Puri:If you want to sell your script in Hollywood and convince some director to pick it up or whatever happens in Hollywood, you have to sell this. You don't give them the 120 page script. You sell them the sales page of the script. So we always have title thumbnail, obviously. And then we have what's called a treatment. I'll stop there and let me, you guys, let me know what you think about this.

25:51Pat Walls:So let's just read the treatment. So you go, this is Mike, founder from Australia. Now, are you thinking about this? Like what, what needs to be nailed in the treatment? What do you have to, what's the important part to find when you write this pitch?

26:02Shaan Puri:Yeah. I always try to think about how, and this might've been written my producer. But what I like to think about in the treatment is like the vibes and the feeling that the viewer will get when they watch it. Why should this video exist? Why will they leave this video and think about it for the next two weeks or send it to their friend? I like to think about the feeling that you have when you watch it. Maybe this isn't the best example of that, but what is the viewer going to walk away. This isn't really like an intro. This is more like, I'm telling my producer right now, sell me on this idea so that when we go to record it, we know exactly what we're trying to get out of this and that it ends up being how we planned.

26:47Pat Walls:So in this case, is the kind of the main thing I would be feeling or wanting is, oh man, I really want the sort of exact playbook. In this case, the 10-step playbook validated by a Reddit post with 151 comments of how he's built these, you know, he builds SaaS apps to 200K MRR, something like that.

27:07Shaan Puri:That's the premise of this video is that, hey, I have this very specific 10-step playbook and this is something that we found because he had written this awesome Reddit post about it. And it was really like a simple 10-step playbook. If I do this, I do this, I do this, I do this, something that our audience really likes. So we build the whole video around that checklist. And that checklist almost becomes like a character in the video that we can further dive deeper on. And this, the whole video, and this is another thing too, I kind of have it down here a little bit, is that every video has like a big idea.

27:41Shaan Puri:Like, why should this video exist? I don't want to tell the entire story of how, you know, he was born and how he grew up and all these things. I want to do it around one idea. And for this video specifically, it's the 10-step playbook. and then everything is built around that video because when the, yeah, that's something that our audience likes and is really valuable because he used it to actually build a great business off of.

28:03Pat Walls:Gotcha, that's pretty cool. And then when you go to interview them, you're trying to extract, you're trying to basically now fill in the blanks of this skeleton you already think is a winning video.

28:11Shaan Puri:Yep, yep, exactly. And I like to look at, I mean, one thing I like to look at is successful social media posts, successful Reddit posts, successful seminars or like talks that they gave at a conference. those are all good bones for a great and this is the checklist right here that he did um or the 10-step process those are all great bones for any video it's like how i like to think about videos if they've done this sort of talk or or they've written this before it's always always

28:40Sam Parr:a great outline i guess so you how many of these videos are you doing a week we're aiming for two to three right now so you're making two or three of these a week that's a lot yeah yeah it seems

28:51Pat Walls:like you kind of undersold yourself at the beginning when you were like, you know, I stuck with it. I think obviously consistency and sticking with it mattered, but it sounds like also what really mattered was building a system to be able to do this at scale, right? A team and a system. You had to do that. I would say most creators don't know how to build a system. And it sounds like you found the growth hypothesis, which was if I put these types of stories on YouTube, there's always, YouTube will keep feeding me more and more audience for this type of content. And I can grow that way versus SEO versus anything else, right?

29:25Pat Walls:Like one of the frameworks I always liked that I think has kind of gone out of style was Eric Reese when he did the Lean Startup. And he said, basically a company, you really have two main hypotheses. There's the value hypothesis that if I do this, this will be valuable to this type of person, right? It will help this type of person with this problem. And then he goes, you have the growth hypothesis, which is totally separate from the value one, which is, if I do X, Y, Z, that will create sustainable compounding growth. And that growth hypothesis can be, if I run Facebook ads, I can spend this much money, acquire users for this much, and generate this much to reinvest to buy the next user.

30:01Pat Walls:It can be SEO. It can be YouTube. It can be anything, right? Where you're going to basically have some hypothesis as to how you grow. And he's basically like, if you get the value hypothesis wrong, there's no company. If you get the value hypothesis right, but the growth one wrong, you've built a very, very small business. If you get both of those right, you just have to be an idiot to not get the money part right at the end. And I always liked that framing. And so whenever I do a project, I sort of try to think about what's our value hypothesis. And I call it a hypothesis because we don't know until we go test it.

30:29Pat Walls:And what's our growth hypothesis? We don't know until we go test it.

30:32Sam Parr:What do you do with the money once you've already made it? This is a question Sean and I ask our successful guests all the time. And the reason we ask it is because if you are successful, if you do have a little bit of money, information on how to spend or invest your money, it's actually really hard to come by. And I know this because inside of Hampton, which is my community of founders, people ask this question all the time. People have made$10 or$50 million. How do you spend it? How do you invest it? And so to help solve this problem and answer this question, I actually interviewed 80 plus founders.

30:58Sam Parr:Guys like Scott Galloway, Alex Ramosi, Brian Johnson, people who are worth 50, 100, even billions of dollars. And we got them to reveal everything. So their net worths, how much they pay themselves, their monthly expenses, their portfolio, things like that. And we turned these 80 interviews into one document. And I don't think you can find this type of information literally anywhere on the internet. And it's completely free. So if you want to see behind the net worth of people who are worth billions of dollars and their portfolios, their expenses, everything, you go to joinhampton.com slash reveal.

31:25Sam Parr:Again, joinhampton.com slash reveal. Check it out. I have a feeling you have a bunch of other like system related stuff up in that Chrome window with all those tabs. Yes. And I personally am very interested in seeing you click around. Can you do that? Yeah, let's do it. But so, yeah, as Sean said,

31:44Shaan Puri:I'm a big fan of systems and processes. Maybe that's just like my more like logical brain, former software engineer, spreadsheet kind of guy. So I try to build my company around a lot of systems. And I had a note in here that I wanted to talk about, which was busy people are the biggest losers. I used to be in corporate nine to five and I hated when I hated urgency culture. I hated getting emails and one-off Slack messages. I worked at Deloitte and you'd get an email and then all of a sudden you're working a deal the whole weekend. I hated that. So I knew that when I started a company, I didn't want to build my business like that at all.

32:21Shaan Puri:I wanted to build it around systems, asynchronous systems so that I could play tennis every day at noon. And also my people that work for me enjoy that too. It's not for everyone, but this is how we operate. So everything exists on a notion. So right here, we have all tasks that need to get done in the company are simply assigned out to people and there's no real deadline or meetings about them. There are just things to get done when you can manage that deep work session that you meant to do that day, go and do those and we're good. As long as you get the stuff done that we plan to and we hit our KPIs and all these things, you can work whenever you'd like and everything is here in this notion.

33:06Shaan Puri:And additionally, we have all of our production for our company, including YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, everything. Everything we post on any sort of social media, we track it all inside Notion here. And we have freelancers helping edit the content and create the content. So who runs this?

33:23Pat Walls:Who manages this board?

33:25Shaan Puri:I would say, well, I have a producer, like producer light, I call him, who's sort of starting to manage this more. But I built this over, I wanted to get more serious about repurposing. So I built this over like course of like two, three months, built it. It's more just like created the spreadsheet and created the processes. And then I sort of handed it over in the last two months to someone else. So I have a light producer who manages this right now.

33:49Sam Parr:Light as in part-time or light as in half a person, a little guy? Both. A little guy. A little guy who works a little amount. Yeah.

34:03Pat Walls:All right. I love the busy people are the biggest losers because I think busy is a badge of honor in a lot of different circles. And what a terrible badge to be proud of, in my opinion. I remember my buddy came and worked for me and he used to work in investment banking. And he kept saying this phrase that we were like, dude, Sam, what is this thing you keep saying? and he would say, he's like, yeah, he's like, can you get that to me ASAP or sooner? And I was just like, dude, what is, ASAP means as soon as possible. What does ASAP or sooner mean? And he's like, I don't know. We just always say that in investment banking.

34:43Pat Walls:And I was like, what a, what a like fight or flight, what a cortisol phrase to just keep injecting in your company.

34:50Shaan Puri:Yeah. You know, everyone has that friend when you, you hang out with them and they're always on their phone. They're always on work emails. They're dropping out to take calls. I remember when I was a kid, I was on a hike with my buddy and his dad was on the hike. I'll never forget this. I was probably like nine years old or something like that. And his dad was just on the phone for the entire hike. Really nice hike. And I was like, man, I just never want to be that person. Like you said, it's a choice. It's more typically around a bad business or a flaw, systems flaw or an overextension of yourself.

35:22Shaan Puri:It's usually not like you're just handed that.

35:25Sam Parr:What's that EOS thing up there? Yeah, EOS is cool.

35:31Shaan Puri:Entrepreneur Operating System is, you guys are probably familiar with that, right?

35:36Pat Walls:Yeah, I've never actually done it. Do you do it, Sam, at Hampton? Do you pay for EOS?

35:40Sam Parr:Well, you don't have to pay for it. You could read a book and just make your own show.

35:43Pat Walls:No, no, but like people pay for the implementer and all that stuff.

35:46Sam Parr:Yeah, I paid an implementer for a one-day seminar with our leadership team. And that was what, like 20 grand or something? No, no. It was like$3 ,000 for one day.

35:57Pat Walls:Oh, you got like the clearance integrator or what did you do?

36:00Sam Parr:No, like someone who was like a certified like implementer or something, I was going to hire him and then I showed him my pre-work and he's like, well, you guys are actually almost there. Let's just meet with your whole team for six hours and I'll teach everyone how to do it and then we'll go over your current rocks and I'll show you the right format and then you're good to go, it looks like.

36:18Pat Walls:Is this the first company you did it at? No, I did it at The Hustle as well. EOS specifically?

36:23Sam Parr:Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, I'm a fan of it. I think that I'm...

36:27Pat Walls:Are you like a I swear by it kind of guy or where are you at with it?

36:30Sam Parr:I swear by a... We use like a transformer version. So for example, EOS, for those listening, it's an operating system run your company. The book is called Traction by this guy named Gino. Gino, by the way, Sean has asked to come on a whole bunch. So if we want, we can invite him on. But basically, the crux of the whole thing is your L10 meeting, which happens for us every Monday at three o 'clock. It's a one and a half or two hour meeting. And each team has some number or metric or goal that they are assigned to and then tasks below to reach that goal. And we go over each week what's going well, what's not going well, and how to improve.

37:05Sam Parr:Typically, EOS is divided quarterly. We actually at Hampton do ours every six weeks. So we do rock planning every six weeks as opposed to quarterly. I think quarterly is too long for a startup. So you can kind of manipulate it to fit your needs. but over the course of many, many years, we've kind of made our own. I like the six weeks. We do it quarterly, but I already like that idea. It just takes too long. With a startup, you can get new information relatively quick. And so what we do is we actually, each team actually only, we try to limit it to two rocks. So each team just gets two important rocks and that's six weeks and then we change them or keep them, but whatever we want to do every six weeks.

37:45Yeah, yeah.

37:47Sam Parr:And then you have a scorecard and what we're looking at is, your scorecard where you go over every single week what's going on. So this looks like the scorecard that you go over at your L10 meeting. Yep. It gives you nice,

37:58Shaan Puri:for someone like me with no management experience, I don't have an MBA, I don't have to manage people. It was nice. We've been doing it for like two, over two years. It's nice to just have a basic, I don't think it's the perfect system, but I think it's a system for someone who's a creator, like we talked about earlier, who wants to start building more of a business or someone who's going from solopreneur like me that didn't intend to build a business. It's a good Rails or system for KPIs, planning, and it's not perfect by any means, but it is a system. And most people just need a system.

38:31Pat Walls:Can I say a quick disclaimer? Because I used to be the kind of guy who somebody I'd be watching something or I'd hear a talk and somebody would be like, oh, I use this system. They gave me some acronym and then they're like, yeah, this is what I do. This is, it's so good for me. And I'd be like, ah. That's what I've been missing. That's the tool. I was one tool away. I was one framework away, one acronym away from success. And it turns out, spoiler, I was never one acronym away from success. And there's a specific type of person and a specific moment in time when you need a system tool. And that is when you have growth, but you have a growing headache.

39:10Pat Walls:So the business is growing healthily, but your headache is growing, you know, maybe even more than that or proportionately to that. And I think what most people have is a business that is not really growing enough. And then they try to add systems and processes and it actually slows them down and they don't even grow faster because growth often is like a matter of like striking a vein. It's like drilling for oil. You don't need to be super efficient. You just need to find the oil. And sometimes that's brute force. Sometimes it's a little bit of gut instinct. Sometimes it's a little bit of cowboyness to trying different little experiments.

39:46Pat Walls:but I think, you know, I just want to say that out loud because I wasted a lot of time when I actually needed growth and then I adopted systems of people who had growth and I've conflated the two. I thought the system creates the growth. No, no, the system manages your headache as you grow. That's how it's been for me, at least. It's my personal experience.

40:05Sam Parr:Well, I'll take the other side of that, which is I think that there are times where the system does create growth because I think typically what happens when you have a company is you can get to a million or two million or three million in revenue through a combination of either luck or you knew how to do one thing well or for a variety of reasons. But what I have found is whenever I hit those, that like three, whenever I get to like 3 million in revenue, I then like think like, okay, I need to now go do this new marketing channel or do this new thing. And oftentimes the actual answer is, no, you should actually do less things and just do this one marketing thing over and over and over again.

40:41Pat Walls:You're saying at 3 million. I'm saying most people are not even at the 3 million. Most people don't get the 3 million. Most people who watch this or are going to watch any type of content on YouTube are pre-getting 1, 2, 3 million in revenue. And for those people, I think that's the sucker-like spot where you think you might be a tool away. So I totally agree with you. If you've already got the thing that's, again, you have healthy growth if you've gotten to 1, 2, 3 million in revenue. And from there, you need systems to scale, right? But you don't need systems of scale if you don't have a working thing.

41:15Sam Parr:Or even when your team size gets kind of above four people, you kind of have to have something. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. You want to show us anything else?

41:24Pat Walls:I want to ask you a question about this blog post. In December 2020, and maybe you could take us back to how the business was doing back then. You wrote a blog post that says, 2020, I am my own greatest obstacle.

41:36Shaan Puri:Yeah.

41:37Pat Walls:I haven't even read the post. I already nodded my head. because I think every entrepreneur gets there to this realization. Can you explain where you were at this blog post and what this blog post means?

41:46Shaan Puri:Yep. This blog post all revolves around a single week in my life where I, it's post COVID, I was about three years into building the business. And what most people don't know, they think, oh, you just built Starter Story and you grew that. Well, no, I was the guy with like 10 side projects and I had two businesses that were like, I was splitting my time on and then other side projects and other personal brand and doing all these things. Starter Story was making$8 ,000. These are sort of high level numbers, but it was making$8 ,000 a month. And then this other business I was building, which is like a software plugin type app, was doing$2 ,000 a month.

42:22Shaan Puri:I thought this was gonna be a bigger than Starter Story because I didn't think Starter Story was gonna be big. And I was so burnt out that I said, I heard about this Think Week by Bill Gates, where you go off to a cabin and you just think about stuff. So I couldn't afford a cabin in the woods or anything at that point. And I decided, okay, I'm just gonna go get in my car. I'm gonna get drive across the country and I'm gonna think. Through that process, through that week of not being on the phone, this is no social media, nothing. I couldn't even check my email. I realized that Starter Story was the business I should be going all in on.

42:59Shaan Puri:This is the business that I was meant to be built. I'm throwing basically no time into this business that's doing$8 ,000 a month. And I'm throwing all my time into this business that I'm supposed to be building. This is how I get into YC and I do all these things. I'm putting 20 % of my effort into 80 % of the revenue. Let's just drop everything else. And in that moment, after that week, after I realized all this, I basically sold that business, stopped working on anything else, and I went all in on Starter Story. And this is three years after starting it. Best decision I ever made, obviously.

43:30Shaan Puri:And I don't know if I would have made that decision if I didn't take that week off. and essentially I doubled the business's revenue a single month after that and then everything went up after that and that's probably why I'm here today selling my company and talking to you guys is that I realized that I was the biggest obstacle I was limiting my own success by thinking I could do everything

43:57Pat Walls:I love that, that's very powerful what sounds right on paper and what's actually right for me might be two different things. Because a lot of people would tell you, you should do the SaaS business, recurring revenue. It's amazing. You could do this plugin and it's software and all these great things. But you kind of realize like the thing I'm good at, the thing I enjoy, the thing that has momentum is this other thing. And if I keep splitting focus, I'll never know.

44:26Shaan Puri:There's something that I like to call you have your ego business. this is the business you're supposed to build, the business that you look up to other people because they built those, or that's the business that you're supposed to start, whatever, but actually follow the money. What's making money? What are you truly good at making? What are you meant to build? I think it's like a lot of people watching this, maybe think about that. What's the ego business and what's the actual business?

44:52Pat Walls:So for this think week, you just drove 3 ,000 miles. Just like, I'm looking at the map. It looks like you started, where'd you start? Salt Lake City?

45:01Shaan Puri:Yeah, I was living with my mom at the time. So shout out my mom for housing me in this time when I was trying to figure things out. But yeah, I went from Salt Lake down to the West Coast and then up and around back to Salt Lake.

45:14Pat Walls:You're up in like a giant circle, basically. Yeah, yeah. On the West Coast. It wasn't my plan around. From Salt Lake all the way up to Jackson Hole, but in a circle format.

45:22Sam Parr:Being 29 and living at home, and I think in this blog you say you met a girl later on, So I assume you're single, 29, living at home, trying to do this thing. That's definitely not the most glamorous place to be in.

45:35Shaan Puri:I was more just, I would do anything. I worked in corporate for five years. I worked at Deloitte. I worked at some startups. I worked at some big companies. And my motivation, I was so sick and tired of that. I think a lot of entrepreneurs just start early. They start at 17. They start at 18. I actually went through college and the corporate life. So starting this business was more about freedom. And I knew I would do anything. I moved to Asia because it could be like$1 ,000 a month. I lived with my mom because I could not go back to a regular job. That was my main motivation. And then obviously the business started working out.

46:12Shaan Puri:And that's why I live with my mom.

46:14Pat Walls:So check this out. This is your monthly revenue at the time. So it looks like for the year preceding your Think Week, you were basically plateaued from August 2019 to mid 2020, almost August 2020, June 2020. And you're basically at 8K a month for a year flat. You do the Think Week, you make the decision. Six months later, you're now over 25 ,000 a month. And you change the trajectory of the business with that.

46:41Shaan Puri:Yep.

46:41Pat Walls:I think that's a great story. Also, in this blog, you were talking about how you felt. You're like, I know I had so many projects and tasks I know I should do, but at the same time, I felt unmotivated to start any of them. I'm in this really weird spot right now. I don't feel motivated about work. Nothing feels super important to work on. I don't feel like tweeting or writing. I don't want to read any books. You know, it's kind of burnout, essentially. And, you know, the solution to burnout wasn't like, I need to take six months off. It was like, I need to do something that's just more in alignment with what I'm trying to do and simplify rather than keep adding.

47:14Shaan Puri:Yep, exactly.

47:15Pat Walls:That's cool, man. Well, congrats on all the success. Congrats on, you know, fingers crossed that this thing closes. We have to air this episode anyways. And it will be a cautionary tale about counting your chickens before the hatch.

47:29Shaan Puri:But thank you guys. Yeah, you guys are huge inspirations to me. Been listening to My First Million. Obviously got a lot of inspiration to do what we do through everything that you've done, both in My First Million and out of it. So you guys are awesome. Keep doing what you're doing.

47:41Sam Parr:You're the shit. Thanks for doing this, man.

47:44Shaan Puri:Thank you guys for having me. I feel lucky. I feel lucky.

47:47Pat Walls:Check out Pat. Check out Starter Story on YouTube. And yeah, all the things. That's it. That's the pod.

48:02Sam Parr:All right, my friends. I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit. And it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Louise and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're gonna hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.