Startup Ideas For Developers, Rebranding Elizabeth Holmes & Billy Of The Week

27:04so by the way I invited him on the podcast we follow each other on Twitter. So I DM'd him last night and I was like, hey, you should come on. I want to hear, I want to hear about some of the stories that the experiments that didn't work out because this is all the wins. I'm, I'm sure if you're a guy who's tried this many different things, you had to have a bunch of, a bunch of, you know, trial and error along the way. So he posted this on Instagram last month. He goes, why I'm excited about pickles, all caps. And he goes, last week I said I wanted to buy or partner with a pickle company and boxes of pickles have been shown up my house all week.

27:36It's exciting. I'm doing a live taste test this week. They're also different. Lots of people asking me why pickles. Here's why. He goes, first of all, can you name five pickle companies? I hate pickles. I don't know. Can you name any pickle companies? There's probably only two or three that I like to buy. I buy a lot of pickles. I'm a big pickle guy. Yeah. Big in the pickle scene. So he says, can you name five pickle companies? Exactly. It's a crowded market, but not many dominant players. Second, pickles are underrated. Americans eat 20 billion pickles a year and there was no buzz in the category.

28:08Not much fun for creativity. All the packaging is the same. Number three, the average American eats nine pounds of pickles per year. Number four, the average American household buys a new jar every 53 days. Number five, clearly pickles are a big deal. Entrepreneurs look to make things better. Often those new ideas come in the form of products they use daily. They get excited when they see a new lane and I see a new lane to hear. And so he created this thing, this pickle company called Hoya Yaya Pickles. And he's like, this is the name of our new company. We just need the perfect pickle. Is that like a Yiddish thing?

28:43I have no idea. Well, pickles are like popular amongst Jewish people. He's Jewish. Is Hoya... Is that like a... Maybe it's like a Yiddish name. I don't know. It's a funny name. It says, if you go to their bio, they only have 2 ,000 followers right now, but I'm going to follow this. I want to hear the story play out. He goes, we're crowdsourcing our brand while we create the best pickle company, while we find the best pickle company to partner with, DM if you have a clean ingredient pickle company. And then he's basically like, he's got a feed and it's like, here's a picture of Adam Sandler casually eating a jar of pickles.

29:15It's like, he's just trying to build this pickle company. He's trying to do the coconut water thing again for pickles this time. And I find this to be really interesting. I think you could probably pull it off. Dude, pickles are awesome. I like Jesse. We should get him on. Jesse, if this makes it to you, this will make it to you anytime. Yeah. Yeah, and remember when you went to HustleCon, your conference, and there was the guy who created Method Soap, and he created Oli Vitamins, he created Welly Band-Aids, he created three hit consumer CPG goods that were sitting in Target. Ryan something. Eric Ryan, I think is his name.

29:48It's him and his brother. Eric Ryan. Yeah, and he's like a flamboyant looking guy. He wears these bright glasses and his hair is combed exotically. I like that guy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He looks like he was born inside of a Warby Parker or something. So he was on stage and he gave a great talk at your conference. One of the things he said, they were like, how do you come up with ideas? Like which, you did Band-Aids, you did vitamins, you did soap. How do you choose? Where do you see the open space? And he said basically the same thing that Jesse just said. He goes, I walk down the aisles of a grocery store and I just wait till I see a sea of sameness.

30:25So basically, a sea of sameness is an area where there's a shelf. We're just seeing like a ton of products with no differentiation. It's just a bunch. He's like, for soap, go look at the soap aisle. It was just green bottles of the same product in the same shape sitting there everywhere. He's like, so we came out with a different bottle that was blue and had clean ingredients. That was going to be our thing. And that was method. So he's like, go to the bandaid section. Same thing. Sea of sameness. Whereas we took a different approach. And he's like, band-aids, we're trying to all be this like nude color that was like same color as your skin.

30:59and he's like but nobody's skin is actually that color so it's just like this kind of you're just trying to hide something he goes we believe every cut is a badge of honor it's a great story to tell and so we want to put a badge on that wound that stands out and that was his approach to that one or whatever and so the same thing with the vitamin zyle he's like the vitamin zyle was just a bunch of labels that all said like vitamin D3 B12 C blah blah blah he came in and with Ollie, they have like a different look at jar and it'll say like better sleep or it'll say better hair and nails or whatever, right?

31:35Like it'll say the benefit of the vitamin, not the vitamin itself. And so just taking a slightly different approach to these like kind of stale categories was the, was the idea. And I think if you go down the pickle aisle, it's probably a pretty stale category. It's probably as a sea of sameness. And so I think this is going to work. Well, Jesse, if you're listening, come on, man, come on, on, come on the thing i i got like a we were i was one time i was doing one of these events and we were looking at speakers and we typically had never paid speakers and for some reason his name popped up and like his agent sent or some agent sent like how much his fee is and it was like a hundred thousand dollars to get him come to come and talk so the guy's killing it in a variety of places that's right um all right i have another interesting person um and i'm gonna explain why i found this person have you ever heard the phrase the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

32:22I hate that phrase. Why do you hate that phrase? Because I do a bunch of things terribly. I'm like, does that mean I'm going to do everything terribly? So I hate it because if it's true, I'm in trouble. So I believe that that phrase to be true. And I believe it to be true because I've always, I've got on myself because I'm not entirely like you, but I'm a little bit like you where I like to like, you know, free ball it. I free ball life. You know what I'm saying? I just, I try to figure out as I go, but my lack of discipline and my lack of process sometimes really hurts me. And so I'm trying to make up for that.

32:53And so I've, over the past couple of years, I've been obsessed with the phrase, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. So for example, you're late for this pod. You are also late for your kids. Home Depot class. So the way you do that one thing is the way you do everything. And it's like one of the, that's one of the reasons why the military, they make you make your bed in the morning is because they say, if you start making your bed in the morning, that means you're going to eat breakfast the correct way. That means you're going to run the right way, which inevitably you're going to fight the right way.

33:17And so I believe in that. And so I was looking for examples of that. And so have you ever heard of this company called Rakuten? So the company called Rakuten, it's basically like Amazon in Japan. It started by this guy named... What's his name? He goes by Mickey. So Mickey Tani is his name. And he's similar to Jeff Bezos in Japan, where he's this pretty hardcore guy, but he's lovable. And he's a titan of industry. So Rakuten is like Amazon in Japan. It has 32 ,000 employees, 14 billion in revenue, this huge thing. And I love reading about Japanese entrepreneurs because there's something about their culture that fascinates me.

33:54And they have this thing where he has a handbook that he gives every employee. And I got a hold of that handbook a few years ago when I read it. And one thing that stuck out to me was in chapter zero, the very first thing that they have you do, what that chapter is about. The book is called The Basic Principles. But in chapter zero, it's called... They outline how at their offices, they don't have any janitors. And the reason why they don't have any janitors is every Tuesday at 4 o 'clock, they have an hour of clean time, which basically means that... So no janitors come by. But every week at the same time in the morning, everyone at Rakuten, from the CEO to the lowest level staff, cleans their workspace.

34:37They take out rags and spray bottles. They clean off their surfaces. They pick up trash. They get on their hands and knees and they polish the legs of the chairs. And it's part of the company of the culture. And it's been like that since the beginning, since the company was around. And the purpose of it is to foster a sense of ownership. He says, We do this activity to remind ourselves that everything the company does is relevant to each and every one of us to keep a sense of direct involvement top of mind. It's also an opportunity to reaffirm that the entire company is a team by having everyone, regardless of position, work together on the same task.

35:07And I read this when I was leading the hustle and I tried to make that a thing and it didn't work. No one got into it. No one got into it. I'm so glad you said that last part because I've done this so many times. I've just Michael Scotted it so many times where I will read something or hear something or have some kind of crazy idea. But usually it's, I heard some cool person did some cool thing. And then I'll try it in our office. and I just got these looks like, okay. And then within four days, the thing is gone. And I'm like, oh man, I really needed a different like force of will or charisma or some like a leather jacket.

35:49I needed something. I'm missing something to make this thing. Because the way you do one thing is the way you do everything, man. You didn't do a good enough job. Neither did I. And once I failed at that, I realized I needed to do this stuff even more. And so with Hampton, with Hampton, I'm trying to figure out what is that thing that we can all do. And I realized right now, it's our Zoom setups. So I actually, I linked it down here in our document. But I have this, so if you go to scroll all the way down to where it says Zoom, I have this document called How to Look Good on Camera. And the reason I do that is because when people apply to Hampton, we interview everyone.

36:23And then me or Joe or someone else goes and watches the interview to see if that person should be approved. And I saw one of our guys, his name is Alex Pattis. He works at Hampton and he's awesome. But I saw that his camera setup was horrible. I was like, dude, this looks like a ransom video you filmed on a Nokia camera. This looks really bad. And so we're gonna have to fix this. First impressions matter. And so I created this guide on how to make your Zoom camera look good. And then we gave everyone a budget to go and buy the proper lighting and things like that. And that's my one thing that I'm trying to implement now where it's like, I won't talk to you unless your Zoom camera looks great.

36:59It has to look good. And it doesn't have to look professional. like you and me, like a DSLR camera, but it's got to look pretty good. And you can make it look pretty good with like$500. And so we're making everyone have their Zoom camera look great. So first of all, this doc is hilarious. And the picture of the guy who looks like the ransom guy is hilarious. I think you're close, but I don't think you quite got it. I hate to do that to you as a friend to just pop the bubble like that. But I think you got half of it right. meaning I think your solution is great, but you picked the wrong area, meaning this is too logical.

37:37It's too quantifiable why this is a good idea. You say, well, first impressions matter. Everybody agrees with that. And you say, well, you're doing sales essentially for the company, so you need to show up the right way. It's almost like you could calculate the ROI. The beauty of the polish, the chairs, the leg chairs or whatever, is that it's unnecessary. Same thing with the make your bed in the morning, first thing or wake up at 4.30 in the morning just to harden yourself as a person or take a cold shower is it's got to have some, it's got to be something you kind of don't want to do or seems unnecessary to do.

38:10And it's like, but that's the point. So what's an example? This is almost like you kind of got to do it. This is almost like, yeah, it makes sense. I agree. I'm not taking a leap of faith here. I'm just doing what, you know, maybe I was held back by money or the tech setup and I just didn't get around to it. So I think it's good. But I think you need something that's a little bit more story worthy, which is like at Hampton, we made everybody blank. And I think if you say we made everybody fix their camera setup, it's not going to have that same showmanship. It's not going to have the same punchiness as if it's something that was completely unnecessary to do.

38:49I've got to figure out what that thing is, though. But I desperately want it. I want a shtick. I love a good shtick. I love a good shtick. I'm a big fan of shticks. I think they add a lot. Right now, my current shtick is your Zoom camera has to look good. It's got to look great. You get a small tattoo on their ankle of a date five years in the future, which is when Hampton will be worth a billion dollars, right? You have to go pledge, baby. You got to go get Brandon if you're going to get on this train. But I love that stuff. And that's another thing we're thinking about Hampton is we're like, what rituals do our members need to have in order to get them bought in?

39:26And so I'm trying to research fraternities and sororities. But I love this stuff. In the same way that Tony Robbins, his shtick is that, what's it called? A fire walk? Yeah, walk on coal. Which isn't even that big of a deal, is it? Have you walked on coal? Yeah, I did it. I've done it twice at his events. It's like a pretty sanitary thing, isn't it? There's no risk in doing this. Basically, he's like, yeah, you gotta get your mindset right. you got to get in the state. And when you're in state, you could do anything. It's like, I'm pretty sure that like, they basically just make you stand on this thing that's wet before.

40:00So you get like moisture on the bottom of your foot. And then you can just walk across these coals and it's not going to like, unless you stood there and stayed there, it won't make it past that layer of water or whatever. There's something like, it's just actually science that if you're, if you walk across this much thing for this much time with this much water on your foot, you're not going to get in. You're not going to have any problems. And so a great actor, dude a great actor needs a good set and good props and i'm like reading this book about jp morgan jp morgan was this guy in the he was gilded age whatever rich guy and he one time was trying to settle an agreement with like five different like union heads of like different steel companies and he goes come out to my boat and we're gonna go for a boat ride and we're gonna discuss he gets on the boat and he goes all right everyone and he like the the pilot of the boat uh like goes off in a rowboat.

40:48He goes, we don't have a captain. We're stranded out here until we settle a deal. We are not leaving until the deal is done. And it's that pizzazz, that showmanship. Every great actor needs a good set. He set up that set wonderfully, and I'm constantly looking for what's our ritual? What's our set going to be? How can I add the showmanship to this game? I've gone down this road before, and I studied a bunch of different rituals. Basically, anybody that has a really strong community, what is it? everything from actual cults uh european soccer clubs where the fans are just insane um like i went to duke and we used to live in a tent for three months which is basically living in a line to try to get into the big game really and everybody behaved everybody behaves a certain way people don't even like basketball or living in a tent for three months just to do this just because they get swept up in the rituals the movement um i remember i never been to burning man but i talked to people i was like dude there's something about burning man that gets people to act totally differently than their normal behavior what is it and they told me that when you enter burning man i might butcher this again i've never been but when you get to burning man so you first you wait in line in your car basically for hours hours and hours trying to just get to the entrance and when you get to the entrance i apparently you kind of like you get out and they give you a name they give you like your new name your burner name and then you like roll around in the sand or some shit like that.

42:13Have you heard this? Yeah, like Firefox Lion Boy. Yeah, and then you roll in the sand and that's like your fucking entrance thing or whatever. I did something at my last company that was kind of like that, which was just rolling around the streets of Soma. No, I'm just joking. We had a meeting once. Everybody had been at the company for like... What's it like? The hepatitis huddle. Everyone's going to go out in the streets of Soma and roll around. it's syringe sunday baby get on the ground yeah go pick one up we're cleaning these streets up with our body the uh but i did this thing where after six months of working i um i called a team meeting and i basically gave a presentation to the team about each one of them and i basically said this is this this is sam this is sam's story and this is sam's superpower and i gave everybody a superpower.

43:07And I was like, this is Derek. Derek was our designer. I said, designers are notoriously, they're just artists. They're fickle. They need inspiration. You give them a deadline. Artists are terrible with deadlines. But Derek's superpower is that Derek is the mailman. He delivers every day of the week, except on Sundays. And I was like, Derek, if you give him something at 9 a.m., he will have it to you by 5 p.m. every single day without fail, except Sundays. as you message Derek, he's not going to get back to you. And I was like, which is like, it's totally not true, but you've just implanted that into him.

43:43It was like mostly true. Everybody's thing was like believable, believably true, but it's amazing. Then everybody started living up to it. Everybody started referring to him as the mailman. And then he would like, sure enough, he would always deliver that he never didn't deliver. Cause he had to live up, give people a reputation to live up to. With Furkan. I was like, Furkan, his superpower is that. He'll always lend you$5. whenever you ask for it. You ask for him, he's got you. He's always got some change on him. Always good for 20. I was like, he melts bullshit. And I was like, he is just a bullshit melter.

44:18You can't bring bullshit around him. It's like radioactive. It'll just start to melt right away. And so he otherwise, I was pretty direct. And I think some people were intimidated by him and they felt like he was criticizing them when he would say something. but then they reframed it as he's just using the super he's just but he just he's great at identifying a melting bullshit it's not you it's it's the shit that he's melting and so so I tried to do that for everybody and I really that was one of the few like management random like random experiment schticks that actually worked that people really like they liked that they had a superpower and then they kind of I named it and then I reinforced it and people people started using that one actually in the office whereas most things were just me trying to make fetch happen.

45:06And they're like, it's not going to happen. Well, I remember early in my career, the only job I ever had, this guy had a shtick and he would get everyone to clap, slow clap before a meeting. Synchronize it, yeah. Yeah. It was like that. And I remember thinking, this is so stupid. And then after a couple of weeks, I was like, all right, it's cool. Love your slow clap. Yeah, now I'm a little bit older and I'm like, shtick is good. A good shtick is great. Like it's really good. A lot of that like performative stuff. I used to think I'm too cool for this. I don't need this. And then you realize like, no, man, humans are not logical.

45:40We need emotion. Like this emotional stuff matters. Like the difference between a highly motivated person and who's using their emotions effectively is significantly better than someone. I mean, that's like, if you look at like different wars, like you could like look at like who is like fired up the right way versus who's not. And it really has a massive difference. I think that leadership, basically, if you want to be a leader, three things are true. The first is that you have a higher standard for yourself than anybody else has for you. So it doesn't really matter what your job title is, but if you hold yourself to a higher standard than your manager holds you to, you are a leader.

46:15And so that's the first definition of a leader. Second is somebody who understands what the emotional state is and what it needs to be and can transfer it. So basically anybody who can understand that morale is low, it needs to be high. They can shift the mood. They can shift the energy or everybody's a little too comfortable. We need to get a sense of urgency. They understand the state of the emotional state and they know how to shift it. That's two. And then the third is they see things how they actually are. Not worse than they are. Not better than they are. How they actually are. And then they paint a picture of how it's going to be better than it currently is.

46:51To me, those are the three things. Are you reading this? are you reading this off something? No, that's just straight off the dome. That's a good little thing. Next tweet. There you go. That's a great one, actually. If I wasn't a retired Twitter artist, I would have tweeted that one. I got one other quick one for you. I want to read you. Justin? Yeah. Yeah, I've been eager to see what you're going to say. I want to read you something. So this was... You're on that Justin Mayer's tip. So we talked about Justin Mayer's last pod. Justin's a very fantastic entrepreneur. You've clearly been reading his blog.

47:22you've been obsessing. Actually, somebody sent this to me afterwards. I have only read this screenshot that they sent. Somebody sent this to Ben. They go, I feel like you need to read this. This is the second time you've done this. Last time you read, you said you were reading a book and I was asking about the book and you're like, I've actually, you go, I just read this awesome book and turns out you're five pages in. Yeah, it's awesome. You love it for a sight. You know what you know. All right. So here's what it says. here's a quote from his blog. It says, I give the same advice to friends who want to start a company.

47:58Startups are momentum plays. That's the key thing. Startups are momentum plays. You choose the idea you are most excited about. You put a date on the calendar for three to six months. At that date, you're allowed to reflect on your commitment level. Until then, you do not spend any time questioning it. Should I be chasing X idea over there? Should I be doing this over here? No. You put blinders on for a period of time. You allow yourself to dig into the problem space and spend your early time actually working on the thing versus intellectualizing. Is this the exact perfect, right, and obviously huge thing I should be working on?

48:32At least that's what I've struggled with when working on something new. I love that. That hit home for me. Startups are momentum plays in how you have to put blinders on for a period of time to just actually do the thing versus intellectually, questioning or considering the thing versus 10 other things and paralysis by analysis. What do you think of that? Yeah, I've told you about this. I think I have this thing called worry time where I say like, all right, today of the week, I can worry about these things. Once that hour is up, no more worry time. It's only due time. I can go back and reflect and figure out my worries and figure out what's legit and what's not at a later date.

49:11Sometimes I'll do it six months out. So when I was searching for... Kind of like where you are now, when I was searching for which company to start, I go, all right, for the next six months, it's plan mode. All I'm going to do is read, consume. I'm not going to decide a thing. I'm just going to consume and read. And then at the end of six months, then I'll make a decision. And so I love setting clear dates where you can't do anything. I also love momentum. So when someone talks to me about starting a business, I go, try and see if you can get sales in the next 24 hours. What's the least amount of...

49:38What's the smallest thing you can do to get a sale in 24 hours? because the second you make$1, everything, it feels like changes. It's like as if you had poor eyesight and now you have glasses on. Like that little bit of eyesight gives you a boosted energy and you feel significantly better to get the second dollar, which makes getting to$100 and then$1 ,000 easier. Once you're at$1 ,000, you can go to$1 ,000. So you have this really cool line. You say A, B, Z, where you go, you worry about step A and how do you get to B and then don't worry about anything else. But you can think about Z occasionally, which is like your big motivating factor.

50:11but don't think about, you know, all the, whatever the other letters are. Yeah. This reminds me of something I've seen a bunch and I have a sensitivity towards it because I did this, which is, um, a lot of people want to do like startup studio idea lab. I want to do multiple things at once, basically. So they want to do parallel entrepreneurship. I ran an idea lab for five, six years or so. and I loved it because it's the most fun thing you could possibly do. I had a blank check in an awesome team and I could pursue not just any idea, many ideas at the same time. And I could go from meeting to meeting to meeting and have all this amazing variety of adventures and challenges and ups and downs.

51:00And it was like, I felt like I got 20 years of experience in four. But notice that I said experience instead of success. Yes, because it was a lot of lessons learned and a lot of skill sharpening. It wasn't a lot of winning. If you would have had to have stick to one idea, do you think that would have been better? Or if you would have had a smaller budget? Sticking to one idea would have been far better. Or just I'll give you kind of the three options. So there's what I was doing, which is parallel entrepreneurship. So you basically take multiple ideas and you pursue them in parallel. this is an easy trap to fall into once you already have a win under your belt this is why you've seen Mark Pickus with Zynga create an idea lab, Kevin Rose create an idea lab, the guy from Uber create an idea lab, the guy from you know, whatever there's like 10 of these examples out there that's usually a successful founder, wants to do startups still, but has too many interests, too many ideas more ideas than time, so they create a lab a studio that's going to create multiple hits is the idea.

52:07And almost none of them have any hits whatsoever. Zero. Zero is the average and the median for these studios. It doesn't work. It doesn't work for a bunch of reasons I can get into, but it's this form of parallel entrepreneurship. It's very sexy, but not great for actually winning. So there's parallel. Then there's serial entrepreneurship. Serial entrepreneurship is like the Jesse Itzler thing, which is like, I'm going to do this for this period of time. And then I'm going to do a different thing for the next period of time, or I'm going to take this one thing. And if it doesn't work, I'll pivot it into something else.

52:41And then I'll try that for a few years, but I'm going to give each one a several year, you know, chapter basically of, of effort and focus and like full intensity on one, one thing. But then I'm willing to switch with the one thing is. I'm not trying to run the same company for a decade or stay in the same industry for, for 25 years of my life, I'm going to switch around. I'm going to hop around. So that's serial. And then there's the last one, which is repeat entrepreneurs. The person who actually does the same company or stays in the same space. It's like, I created one DTC brand, I'm going to create another DTC brand.

53:11Or I run one company and I'm just going to run it for 15, 20 years. Or I did a newsletter business, I'm going to do another newsletter business. And that's repeat entrepreneurship. And so I personally have tried Parallel. I've tried Serial. I haven't really tried repeat. I've stayed away from that one. I think if you wanted in order of most likely to succeed, repeat is number one, serial number two, parallel number three. And in terms of fun, parallel is number one, serial is number two, repeat is number three. And so I actually think that the correct decision for me is serial. It has enough fun and enough winning that that's the choice versus going for maximum success probability or maximum fund with lowest success probability.

53:59Which idea do you think would have been the one that you should have stuck with at Monkey Inferno? I think for the most part, it was ideas that we weren't, what we should have done. So what we did do versus what we should have done. What we did do was we tried to create hit social apps. Why? Because before that, the guy who was running it, who hired me and the guy who became the main investor or was the main investor, they had built a social network called Bebo. They had competed with Facebook and MySpace back in the heyday of social networks. They sold it for$850 million. Facebook went on to become worth$850 billion.

54:35And there was always this sort of like shoulda, woulda, coulda. And at the time, people were pretty down on Facebook. It felt like there was going to be something new, but nobody knew what it was. And sure enough, it turned out to be Instagram, then Snapchat, then TikTok eventually. and so new things did come out that part was right but the wrong part was trying to recreate rechase that dream because it was just so low chances of success so we built messaging apps and social networking apps and all this stuff and it just was really really hard to get it to work what we should have done was we should have built either tools for startups or tools for developers because we knew what the pain points of an early stage startup were and we had a bunch of developers like 18 developers.

55:16And so it was like, we could have built products that were... What was the total budget? What was your budget for the, you know, like 3 million, 4 million? I think we burned about 3 to 4 million a year in funding. Which isn't that much money for 20 people. Well, we also had... It wasn't fully 20. 20 was like where it got to at the peak. But also, I would say the core team was like, let's say 15 people. So 15 people, I think you can do the math. Maybe I have it a little longer. There was... I don't know if that was pre-taking and took out the profits from one of our businesses. So we also revamped one of his early businesses.

55:48That was his cash cow birthday alarm. And birthday alarm was making millions of dollars of profits before. It had been declining year over year for five years straight. We kind of like revamped it, tried to turn it around and got it back to, you know, slightly growing basically at that, by the time I left. And so that covered a portion of the burn. So I don't know if the three or four million was pre that or post that. I don't remember at this point. It's been six or seven years since I was doing that. Was there a developer tool idea that you thought you should do, but you didn't, and someone else came and took the opportunity?

56:20So I'll tell you three ideas that I think would have worked that we had, that we literally discussed and had the idea for. The first was user testing. So I used a very early version of user testing, and I was like, hey, this is a pain point for a startup. Like the company user testing? The company user testing, which is basically like, I could pay$100 and I could get four people to go try our app, talk through it. They would find bugs. They would tell us if they liked it or if they didn't like it. They would tell us what's confusing about it. And I was like, these videos are amazing. This is saving me so much time versus having to go in the wild and literally find people, stand over their shoulder and watch them do this or just guess.

56:59And I was like, this is a super useful service. And I told Michael that one day, I was like, hey, I think we should build this for startups and I think we could outpace them in terms of marketing because we're here in Silicon Valley. We understand the startup. game. We would be good at getting early stage companies to use this. And usertesting.com is like a multi-hundred million dollar a year business now. Yeah, exactly. It went public at a period of time. It went public. I think it went back private now. But yeah, it turned out to be a big success eight years later. They took it all the way and took it to IPO.

57:31And he was like, yeah, could do. Seems kind of boring, right? And I was like, too young and weak. And I was 24 years old and he was my hero and he was my boss at the time kind of thing. And I was like, yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. You're right. Dumb. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I even said that. I backed off it right away. Same thing happened with cryptos. 2013, our sysadmin, the guy who's running our whole server setup, was like, guys, I'm mining Bitcoin on this server. And we were like, mining what? And he tells us why Bitcoin is going to be the next big thing. All of our engineers were like, yeah, this makes sense.

58:07We love this. And our team loved it. And what our CTO was like, hey, no, normally this guy never had product ideas. He was like, tell me what to build. I can build anything. He's like, I got an idea. And I was like, oh shit, Paul's got an idea. Fantastic. Let's hear it. He's like, Bitcoin, I think is going to be a thing. And there's like, no, there's only one exchange. There's a startup called Coinbase, but like, they're just getting started. And he's like, I think we could build either an exchange or one of the other like financial services for this like cryptocurrency industry. And he's like, it's hard to take a payment.

58:42You can't take credit card. You can't do any of these things that you're going to want to do for a human being to use crypto. And he's like, we should just start building financial services. Let's start with an exchange. And then let's see, maybe we could do debit cards, on-ramp, off-ramp. What can we do? And he was so motivated. He built a prototype overnight. He started coordinating with the designer. He shoved the product manager into a corner and was like, shut up. I got this. And it was just like a great sign for a startup where the engineers are like, I know what needs to be built here. I intuitively understand.

59:16And then our lawyer, our in-house counsel called up our investor was like, hey, the guys are talking about Bitcoin. I Googled it. I think it's for drugs. And like, you know, I don't know if this is the right idea. So he came in, he was like, you know, I don't mind losing the, you know, three or four million dollars we spend on whatever. Like, that's okay. That's an acceptable burn. But I'm not going to jail. But I'm not trying to go to jail and I'm not trying to handle money in serious ways like this. Bitcoin, isn't this like snake oil? I don't know. I convinced him enough that day to buy Bitcoin, I think.

59:52He was basically like, I don't know. Sounds a little sketchy. He bought some as a hedge, but he was like, I don't think we should be in the Bitcoin business because you need licenses to do this. You're basically talking about building a bank. It's a super gray area. I'm not trying to lose my billion dollars. I can lose the three million. I can't lose my billion. And it was like the message I got. Cockblock Michael Birch. He just blacked you guys hard. I don't mean to blame him. The mistakes were all on me. I recall two examples where I think we had good ideas that we didn't see through. The third was we had built Blab into a business that was a really good video chat product.

1:00:35and it had got to 4 million users. So it was like kind of a thing. So it was basically like, if you see Clubhouse today or like Zoom today, it was like basically like a Zoom call or Google Hangout, four people could be on the screen talking. But there was like a live audience and anybody could kind of request to join and jump in from the audience and start talking. So you could do like call-in shows and shit like that. And it got pretty popular. Like Tony Robbins was using it. Like famous bands were using it. The UFC was using it. Martin Scorelli. Martin Scorelli was using it. Yeah, exactly. And so we got to 4 million users, but it was like, so we thought maybe this is that thing, that big social product we've been waiting for.

1:01:09But it was pretty clear to me that it was too leaky. Churn was high. Yeah, churn was going to be too high. People weren't going to use this every day. Or the people who did use it every day, they were there just to make friends. So therefore, it wouldn't grow because they didn't bring friends. They were there to make friends. And so you have this problem where if your sticky users are people who are there to meet people, they're not going to bring people. And so you're either not going to grow and you're going to have stickiness or you're going to grow and you're not going to have stickiness was the problem we ran into.

1:01:37Which is why, by the way, when I wrote that thread that went viral explaining why Clubhouse was not going to work back when Clubhouse was at its peak, the reason I knew that was because we had built a very similar product and run into all those same issues. And sure enough, it's all playing out now. Hey, so you didn't get rich, but at least you got kind of popular on Twitter. So there's that. It's like I just dropped$400 at Chuck E. Cheese and I got this like, you know, a little slinky. Laser pointer. Yeah. I got a laser pointer that'll die in three ways. Yeah. So that's cute. You have your little Twitter thing.

1:02:12That's nice. Exactly. So that was the thing there. The move there would have been to shift towards like Citrix was the big. Citrix had a thing called WebEx, which was like their like video chat, like for meetings and conferences and webinars. And the obvious thing was we had built a way better tool for webinars or large company chats, all-hands meetings and things like that. If we had pivoted to B2B, basically, we genuinely had a 5X better product than them at the time. And I think we could have made it successful. We even had the idea. We were like, should we do this? We're like, kind of got to do sales and shit.

1:02:53I don't know. Do we want to do that? Are we a B2B company now? and I was like, nah, we'll just try again to build the next big social app, which was a giant mistake. Hey, you're not flying private and you don't have a vacation home in Tahoe, but at least you learned. At least you learned. You know, if you're not winning, you're learning. That'll be the title of my book. It's a memoir called At Least I Learned. Dude, I hate when people say winning or learning. I'd rather win. I don't want to learn. I'd rather be a dumb winner than a smart loser.

1:03:29all day of the week. That's easy. I'd rather be waiting on my plane but barely know how to read. This is why I love this pod. You get stories like that. Those are good stories. Yeah, I think we should wrap it up there. But tell me one thing. What's that say on your shirt? Austin 316, baby. What's that say on your shirt?

1:03:54We got to start getting back into that stuff. I've been out of the game. But anyway, good pod. That's the episode.

1:04:24All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of. And then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

1:04:52It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past. and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to, you know, actually fix it himself. And really any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency. Well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

1:05:17For more information, check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.