MY FIRST MILLIONHOSTED BYHUBSPOT MEDIA
Sam Parr and Shaan Puri brainstorm new business ideas based on trends & opportunities they see in the market. Sometimes they bring on famous guests to brainstorm with them.
Popular Clips
I just remember I grabbed the ticket and I put on clothes, and I walked down the stairs and I see my dad sitting on the couch with my stepmom. And I was like, okay. Like, I'm ready. He's just he's gonna just rip into me. And I sat down and I was just expecting him to just eviscerate my character. And instead of eviscerating my character, I remember he looked at me and he was like, listen. I'm not gonna try and control you or tell you what to do or tell you that you need to change your life. I just wanna tell you I'm just I'm really worried because if you keep doing this, I think you're just gonna end up killing yourself. And it was weird, but in that moment, when he said that, it was like, I think when you're young, you feel invincible. Right? Like, you drink, you feel like nothing will happen. You drink and drive, you feel like nothing will happen. You do drugs, you feel like nothing would happen. And it was like in that moment, I recognized that he was right and that I'm no different from all these other people who have gone down this path. I could actually end up really hurting myself. And I think the second to that was I felt so terrible that I made someone who loves me so much and has invested so much and only made my life better feel so shitty by who I was being. And so, you know, I left and I was like, I can't keep doing any of this. You know, like, yeah, being fat and working on all that, but, like, I can't keep drinking like this. I can't keep doing drugs like this. This is not the life I want. And I remember, like, what I really thought about was, when does it end? You know, like, at 8 arrests, at 10 arrests, at £300, at £350, you know, what kind of drugs do you stop at? And so I just really thought about that and I was like, what does my life look like in 3 years, in 4 years, in 5 years, if I keep doing this? And that terrified me enough.
Modern men's style. And Brummell used to spend hours tying his cravat, his white cravat, which is kind of like a neckerchief. There's a famous story probably made up, but the the story is that one of his valets was seen exiting the room once with a huge pile of cravats, and someone asked him, what are what are those for? And he said, these are our failures. And the idea was that Brummell actually spent hours and hours and hours in the morning putting together his look. And then he'd walk out and then pretend that he just happened to have fell into these clothes. Like, it was no big deal. It was a complete natural thing. He he woke up like this. And that is part of the idea that style is kind of a natural extension of you, and it's not an artifice. And that's sort of you're doing sprezzatura with your Twitter handle and with your writing and with your reach. You're like, oh, I just kind of just wrote what came interesting, And I don't know how big it is. But in reality, you're just behind the scenes just scheming. You're just, you're like, oh, I just wrote this this really funny burn to this guy who replied, and it just happened to get 2,000,000 views. Because that's what one of your the things that you do, which is pretty funny is you, like, reply to a couple people, but you murder them. Like, it's called murdered with words. You just, I kind of annihilate them. And that's kind of your your style, which I find hilarious. But one person you've turned me on to is, Ralph Lauren. And Ralph Lauren has an interesting story, but I'm, like, getting obsessed with some of his quotes because he was raised a very normal background. But he said that he got obsessed with movies at a young age. He was like, I I you know, I'm not sure if I can be an actor, but I can design my life via clothing. You know, if I put on a farmer's outfit, I'll feel like a farmer. If I put on a soldier style office, I'm gonna feel like a soldier. I'll feel tough and brave. And he has this great quote. He says, I don't design clothes. I design dreams. And then he dresses as as if whatever he wants to become. He was a Jewish kid from
My First Million
Unicorn Founder on Unseen Arbitrages, the Paradox of Wealth + Charlie Munger Wisdom ft. Ryan Petersen
Mon Nov 11 2024
Months ago, and they found one manifest. And so if people don't know how this works, what you guys did was basically you took public data about the shipping manifest, and then you organized and structured it so you could see for any business who's their supplier and for any supplier who are all the businesses they work with. Is that right? Is that the right way of describing it? Yeah. That's what import genius does. It's still it's still we haven't raised price as much either. It's still about the same as you said, 99 or a 199. We might raise it a tiny bit, but, importgenius.com is the business that I started. And, you know, you if I even mentioned Alibaba, because that's I started that business out of frustration. I was living in China for a while, and I would use Alibaba to find a factory that would show up at the factory, and they weren't expecting people to just show up. And it'd be like, fake factory. Like, he's just a middleman. Right. You know? Or, like, one time they I did give them a couple of the advanced days, but I showed up and they were, like, very clearly, like, faking it. Like, this was not bunch of guys in a warehouse with no equipment or anything. So, yeah, it was frustration for that. I I think it'd been poor genius kind of like the organic search results. Like, Google, you know, if if it was all AdWords, you'd that's kinda like what Alibaba is, like, people paying for price, etcetera. Alibaba dot com is, of course, the original business was B2B searching for factories, but that that's not what drives their market cap. Their market cap is driven by Taobao and Alipay and all these other products. Right. But, yeah, the original business is, like, finding factories. I think import genius is a much better way to do that. I do think that my brand is around seeing problems that somehow other people just kinda take for granted and they're blind to in some way that they just sort of accept it as, oh, that's just reality. And then actually getting really curious about it and looking at what could you do to solve it. And that's where import genius came from. That's where much more came from, and that's sort of that same problem. It's annoying. I'm kind of annoying in that way. Like, when I go to a restaurant, I'm, like, doing bottleneck analysis on the cashier. Like, what would I do to, like, you know, get this get the traffic flowing faster through this place? But,
Studies. Currently, those partners are at under $10,000, but there's a very clear path to scaling this once we have a bit more credibility under our name. You said market rate. Who else is doing something like this, and what are they doing? We do have a handful of competitors. So this initial thing that we're describing is called, like, mid funnel conversion. It's basically getting people who are later on in the enrollment funnel and then trying to convert them. There's a few competitors listed in that second column. Where we really stand out from them is our integrations with social media because we're able to get a large organic user base at the earliest and latest stages of the enrollment funnel. So a lot of our competitors are, like, 3rd party apps where the university basically emails all of their students, says, hey. Download this, and kind of forces them to use it. And the reason they do that is because these communities generate so much valuable data and they have a lot more control over it. And social media stand alone really doesn't do this for them because it's not a tailor made higher tool higher ed tool. So we're basically retrofitting these social media platforms and bringing all the data that they pay for the So, Jonah, if you were charging them what you think you can charge them, have you had any conversations about how much they would be be willing to pay either as a percentage of sort of saved students or as a flat fee? What's your sense of how much each college gonna pay you? So, initially, just for this mid funnel conversion tool, we believe that it should be pretty reasonable. Of course, the colleges vary in size, but we've seen these at the lowest for the smallest schools around $20,000, and then we've seen them scale past 200,000. This is, of course, just like one small part of the enrollment funnel.
My First Million
I failed 22 times... then I built a $2.5B Company | Christina Cacioppo from Vanta
Wed Nov 06 2024
I'm curious about that. What startup trope advice actually helped you? I think the build something you want is a bit of a red herring. It works in some cases, but you're also very limited to your experience. It's kind of like when they tell writers, write what you know, and then you, like you know, it's like a 14 year old who's had a charmed life. And, like, they just don't know that much. And so, like, what are they gonna write about? And so, my version of that is, like, look. If there is something personally meaningful, like, by all means, go for it. That's top ranked. Totally. But, like, 2nd best is, like, find someone else with the problem and deeply, deeply understand them. I think there's a verity, shut your eyes, imagine the future. What's it look like, build that? I think this makes sense in retrospect. I think in the moment, it's pretty hard to generate reasonable start up ideas doing that. Right. But I I can tell you a story about Vanta, where Vanta fits that. Yeah. And it does, but it's But that's in retrospect. Yeah. Yeah. So what was the actual in the moment way that you stumbled into this idea of Vanta that now seems obvious as all great ideas do once once they exist. Now there's you guys and competitors trying to do the same thing. But that was kind of a novel idea, and it was a new part of the market at least. Yep. What was the insight for that? The insight was wanted to start a security company that started serving startups. There seemed to be like, security was this huge market, but no one was really focused on startups and startups didn't use security tools. And I was sort of like, why? And, like, when does this become a 90 quadrillion like, go from a 0 TAM to, like, 90 quadrillion dollar market size in precise terms? Yeah. That's the official number. Yeah. Exactly. But wait. Why security? Because, like, you know, when I'm talk I've been talking to you for, I don't know, 20 minutes now. You don't strike me as somebody who's like, I wake up every morning, and I was thinking about security during that year off. What why did you even think about security to begin? It seemed really interesting. It seemed like this kind of competitive cat and mouse thing where they, with attackers, where there's, like, kind of a real dashboard. Right. I mean, one of the things I've I mean, I guess