#107 with Chris Bakke - This Serial Entrepreneur is an Idea Machine

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to I put my law in it like my day's song On the roadless travel, never looking back Okay, well I would uh typically introduce you, but I don't even know you, so I only know you from Twitter, so I'll introduce what I know from Twitter.

Uh You're good on Twitter. You have um Hot takes. Uh don't take yourself too seriously. Like it's like the perfect thing where it's like a nugget of wisdom wrapped in uh like kind of like a witty slash jab at something. Yeah, exactly. That's what we try to go for. I think you do a good job of it and um So when Sam was out, I was like, Okay, who should I have on? And I tweeted that out in a couple people said your name and I was like, Oh good, that's a guy I've been following and I don't really know. Like I don't know your story. So give me like the two give me the two minute version and then I'll

kinda ask you about whatever's juiciest in there for me, but Um, give me the two minute version. Who who the heck are you? You're you're Chris Bachie, you said, right? That's the way to say it? Yep. Chris Packy and um What's your Twitter handle?

It is at Chris J Baki. So it's at Chris J B A K K E. That's right. Okay, cool. So so what's your story, man? Who are you? All right. So I uh I uh have been in the Bay Area for about eleven years now. Um so I moved from Los Angeles where I was in college, uh up to the Bay Area to join a startup right out of college. Um, and that startup was in the online real estate space, and so we were helping all of these brokers. This is like two thousand nine, two thousand ten, twenty eleven. Uh, as the you know market was rebounding in all of these hot cities, Miami, Chicago, New York.

Uh we were helping real estate agents um basically manage all of their uh listings and all of the leasing that they were doing. Uh and so uh joined early and and kind of just did sales, partnerships, biz dev at this company called Rent Juice. Um and after a couple of years um we had raised a seed and series A Uh and that's called by Zillow. Did you say it's called red juice? Rent juice. Uh a very terrible name to uh try to explain to uh to customers, but

Uh yeah, the business was called Rent Juice. Not not the most fortunate name. I like it. I like the use of juice. I you know, we had Greg Eisenberg on and he was talking about naming your startup and we there's he has all these like this random list of like Okay, but you can be like bank juice or like bank buddy or bank house or whatever, right? Craig is a fan of uh of Bueno, I believe. Yeah, Bueno, that's right. Bank Bueno. Yep. Um yeah, so it's it uh it's it's a great it's a great catchy name, especially for like the kind of stodgy, you know, stale real estate industry, like something with juice at the end, like all right, we're gonna like juice up our listings or something. Um and so we sold uh in

early twenty twelve to Zillow, uh, who was just going public in twenty twelve. Um and we were Zillow's second acquisition. Um, and so I stayed at Zillow for about two years and ran business development at Zillow from twenty twelve to twenty fourteen. And so that was uh really helping them build out a bunch of new verticals. Um up until twenty twelve, Zillow was really known for uh this estimate. Like you could go on a map and you could figure out what your home is worth and you could contact a broker who would then list it on Zillow. So it was a marketplace and homes.

Um, and so we were super interested in doing the same thing for rentals, doing the same thing for mortgages, doing the same thing for interior designers and contractors. Um so fell in love with the online real estate space, fell in love with marketplace businesses. Um and then went on to a early stage startup that was coming out of Y Combinator uh around that same time called Forty Two Floors. Uh and Forty Two Floors was building uh Zillow but for commercial real estate. Right. Uh and so uh joined. Jason Friedman, yep, yep. So he uh he he hired me

Uh and uh and and as one of the first business hires and we were all working out of like a awesome house in in Soma. uh when when Soma was slightly less sketchy, I think, than it is right now. Um and and really the goal was, you know, Airbnb was just kind of becoming big. Um, and so that business forty two floors uh had already raised a bunch of money um prior to me coming on. And so it was it was a pretty it was a super hot company coming out of Y Combinator.

Um they had raised like back to back, I think over the course of less than twelve months, uh close to twenty million dollars. Um, and really my job and a couple other people's job on the growth side and on the biz dev side was how do we make money from this thing? You know, there's huge expectations. Uh the expectations are that, you know, we really want to build kind of an Airbnb or Zillow experience, but for finding office space, for finding retail space, industrial space. Uh, and so we started in San Francisco, eventually expanded to New York. Um we grew the team to uh about eighty people. Um, and we but that was all like rapid fire. We went from a team of eight people to eighty people in like twelve months.

We were like, you know, using all this money to to go hire great people. Um, and then after about I think probably like sixty, seventy, eighty people, we noticed that. Um, we we started to have problems. You know, every startup has problems, but I think our problem was that Um, we really just were hiring mostly on culture fit. Uh, and so we had hired all of these like Yeah, cool people. Not necessarily

Um, I think the right people to build that business. Um, and so it was it was like the most fun company, you know, I've ever worked at. Um, but there are, you know, ramifications to that. Which is that um we actually, I think, did an amazing job with the the engineering side of the house. Uh, and so we hired all these great engineers, we hired some great um, you know, QA people and and data people.

Uh and then on the business side, uh on the sales and marketing and and customer support side. Um we we just have like awesome kind of young cool people. And I think a lot of startups go through this, right? You get money in the bank and you just wanna you know, you wanna pass the airport test, you wanna work with great people. uh and so uh around that time in in uh late twenty fourteen early twenty fifteen By the way, what what's the airports like if you're stuck at the airport, would you want to hang out with this person or something like that? Yeah, exactly. Like you you get you know, you get uh unexpectedly rerouted through Chicago for a six hour layover.

Do you hate that layover or is it like the best layover of your life? Right. Like are you are you like making buddies with like this work colleague or are you just having the worst time and And just trying to power through it. Um and so uh and so that really uh that experience of uh hiring some some amazing engineers Um, hiring a lot of great people, but people who actually weren't great fits at, you know, kind of entry level sales, entry level customer support.

Uh we started doing I think what inevitably a lot of startups start doing and they Read these books about hiring Uh and and so we went out and we bought this book by Laszlo Bach, who was at the time running HR at Google. Um, and I forget the name of the book, but it's it's an excellent read. Uh and basically his his take on it was look at Google we do take home tests, we do work samples, we try to get a piece of the work that you know this candidate would ultimately doing if if if he or she got the job.

Uh and so we started building these in Google Docs in kind of late twenty fourteen, early twenty fifteen. Uh and then that ultimately became this idea that we left. Uh so Jason Friedman uh is is kind of a a pioneer of of of just like if you have an idea, like I will support you, you know, leave the company. And he was like an awesome backer to us. So myself and and and two others, uh, Darren Nix and Daniel O'Shea, we were all early employees there. We had this idea to take what we were doing in Google Docs, which were basically take home tests. Like we were taking actual customer emails from

you know, angry tenants and angry landlords and stuff that we were getting and saying Um, you know, if you want to apply to this customer service job. Why don't you craft a response that would be kind of indicative of how you would handle this if it was actually your first day here at forty two floors. Right. Um and so we looked at a bunch of companies and at the time. Uh there were lots of companies like HackerRank and Calibur and all these companies doing this for technical. Um so for if you're like hiring for software engineers, if you're hiring for QA.

Um, there were like six or eight companies that did this. Uh really for like the non technical type roles, you found these like really old antiquated solutions that were like multiple choice tests and it was, you know, like testing cognitive ability more so than You know, how is this person gonna perform on the job? Uh and so in early twenty fifteen we started a company called Interviewed. Um we uh ran that company for two and a half years.

Um I uh one interesting story is we did founder led sales. The three of us sold the first two million dollars in ARR at that company, and we were just going out to big companies saying, Hey, do you have this problem? of failing to hire great customer service reps. And we really started with that kind of vertical. And then eventually we expanded into entry level sales. uh entry level financial analysts we're working with Fidelity and IBM, some pretty big companies. Um and indeed was one of our seed investors.

Uh, and so after two and a half years we sold the business to indeed for uh a high eight figure amount. Uh, and then stayed at Indeed for three years, and the three of us all ran uh different teams. So I ran an enterprise product team at Indeed for three years. Uh and then just three weeks ago left indeed and I'm now kind of working on the next thing. Love it. Uh I love that product, by the way, because

Um f that's the way I h hire as well, is like hey Let's do a project together. I I have this old Yeah. p phrase I always use, I don't know where I stole it from, but it was like, you know, the only way we're gonna know if we wanna work together is to work together.

And um you know, so what's the mini sample of that we can do now that will tell us, hey, if we should try this for three months and then if it's good for three months, great, let's do this for three years. And like Uh that's typically the way we do it. And Um, I have a friend in the e commerce space who was just the other day bitching about, you know God, hiring customer service rep is so hard. They send in like kind of resumes. I don't what is your resume gonna tell me? You know, first you're applying for a customer service rep job, and secondly, like I don't know if you can actually do this.

And so he was like manually trying to create this. And it sounds like for you, you guys did the same thing. You were manually creating some workaround. to make this process work for you and then you spun off and said uh uh let me let me actually export that as a business. I've always talked about this import export uh framework, which is If you're inside of a bigger company You're gonna inevitably build these like kind of

internal tools, workaround systems. Um You know, stuff that solved a problem for you, but guess what? There's thousands of other companies just like you who have that same problem. you know, a hundred of them are baking up their own solution and it's a pain and I'm not maintaining it. And in if you could export your good solution and actually make it work, then uh there's a probably a market for that. And that's kind of the the export side. Import is the opposite where

God, we run into this problem all the time. I wish somebody just had a solution that would do X and when you're in a big company you can see what those problems are that they would import or export a solution for. Totally. Yep, I love that. And so uh okay, so that's who you are and um

And what are you into? So are you into the whole kind of like VC venture backed uh go for the billion dollar outcome thing? Uh,'cause I've seen some of your tweets where you're also interested in like kind of more niche uh simple, profitable bootstrap businesses like what's your, you know, business palate now. What do you like? What flavors do you like? I I think I think my I really try to advocate for this hybrid approach and and I think that that's what we'll ultimately do on our on our next company. And so that the hybrid approach is is you know, you generally have Um you have one camp who historically said

You know, go get as much money as you can on the best terms possible. And generally these people are like angel investors or their former VCs or they are VCs. I I think that there's a lot of merit to that. Um And then you have this other camp, which is, you know, the the bootstrap. Camp or the kind of like services business camp, which is, you know, I want to own 100% of this business or I want to do things my own way. I don't want to have to kind of work for any investors. And I think a lot of, you know, those both have a lot of

uh upsides. And so I always try to think about, well, what are the what are the downsides to each of these camps and is there kind of a a hybrid approach? And so Uh what we did at interviewed um was we raised uh two million dollars total. um we got to, you know, a a a a kind of low seven figure like two or three million dollars in Air R with with founder led sales and then brought on a couple of salespeople. Uh and ultimately built that into a profitable business by the time that we sold it. And so I think if there's this hybrid approach where

I see a lot of my bootstrap friends work for like a year or two years or four years and and largely these become like consulting businesses because you get You know, you get starry eyed when a big customer comes along and says, Hey, will you build this custom thing for me? If there's no money in the bank and somebody's waving, you know, three hundred thousand dollars to you and your team to go build something, in a lot of cases you build it. And so you know, two, three, four years out, there's uh you you may be doing well, you may own a hundred percent of a business, but it's generally a much smaller business than if you would have taken some capital. And so there's this like you know, raise a sane amount of venture capital. I don't think

There's very few businesses that need to be g going off and raising tens of millions of dollars. And so I like those types of businesses that say Um, hey, if I can raise a million bucks, if I can raise two million bucks. It helps me skip over those years of having to go, you know, be a consultant and kind of do that agency style work for big customers to put money in the bank. Um and I think the more times you d do businesses like this, obviously the better terms that you get. Um and so that's that's really the the approach that I think has worked really well for for myself uh and and for my co founder who I've now worked with across, you know, three businesses over the last eight years.

Um and I think that ultimately I I think a lot of it uh is determined by your market and and how big that market is. And so I love Um, you know, my my co founder and I just for fun, like while we were working out indeed, we would start e commerce sites on Shopify just to like play around with Shopify and obviously We're not gonna raise capital for that, but also our our expectations are pretty low. Like if we can ever get that business to the point of making

you know, thousand dollars in profit per month. Like we're we're super stoked about that. Um and and I think that uh you know ultimately too, I think in our space, in in the last business that I was in candidate assessments. Um what you saw were these very large companies um like Higher View that that came out and had raised, you know, I think ninety or a hundred million dollars. Um, and the space just wasn't that big. And so if you raise a million, if you raise two million dollars, I think very similar to to what you know you and your team did. You just have a lot of optionality, right? Like

Ten million dollars, twenty five million dollars, fifty million dollars, these are all like game changer exits for for you personally as a founder and for your team. Um, and again, I think you can do this much faster than a than a than a bootstrapper would be able to. You can get to that ten million dollar, fifty million dollar exit. Yeah, a lot of times, you know, I've seen it in uh you know three or four years versus

you know, kind of a ten year slog uh doing that business and owning a hundred percent of it at the end. Right, right. Uh okay, that's interesting. And we uh before we came on I was like, you know, uh Are you kind of an idea person, right? Like these podcasts work best. uh when we're brainstorming ideas, right? The reason I get excited to do these is typically I'm either hanging out with Sam who I already know and we only talk ideas, or it's somebody new like you who

I like to get to know your story. I think it's interesting. Um and then I like to shoot the shit after that and say, Okay, cool, what's on your mind, what's interesting to you Alright, today's episode is brought to you by Tempo. Tempo dot fit is the website. I actually use this. I've used this for a few months now. And it's this machine that has a touch screen and this three D sensor. And what it does is they give you weights, like a hundred and fifteen pounds in weights. And it's for strength training. So what it is is it measures your body.

And it sees how much weight you're lifting. It sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in, what your heart rate is. It's pretty amazing. And then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift, how many to lift, what workout to do, whether you want to do a twenty minute, ten minute fifty minute workout. It's pretty amazing, but the best part is the leaderboard. The other stuff, all the features that they have, that's cool. But I'm obsessed with the leaderboard because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing and you can compete with other people who have taken the same class. So it's made me want to work harder, lift more weight. or have more endurance. It's just pretty freaking fun. And the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that will make you live longer. And this product tempo, it checks that box for me. So they're our sponsor today. If you use the code TEPOHSLE, you'll get a hundred dollars off. So Tempo.fit is the URL and Tempo Hustle. One word, you'll get a hundred dollars off. So check it out. I use it. If you look me up on Twitter, you'll see I'm always filming videos where I'm talking to that company saying I'm trying to crush their employees on the leaderboard'cause I actually love this thing and I and I use it all the time. So check it out.

So I'm curious, did you did you do your homework, did you bring any ideas or interesting spaces to the table? Yeah, let's let's run through a few. Jump in. Jump in. Let's give me one. Um, so this this this one idea um I almost did and and I have a lot of research on it and I have a lot of thoughts about it. So if anybody wants to do this, feel free to email me. It's Chris at Laske L A S K I E dot C O. And the idea is uh Shopify, but for SaaS businesses.

Right. So I I have this this kind of thesis that Uh Shopify has empowered Hundreds of thousands of accidental e commerce entrepreneurs. By providing a framework Uh here's how to choose a name for a business, here's how to go incorporate that business, here's how to set it up. I think Stripe Atlas and some of these businesses have done similar things with SaaS.

But they haven't taken it all away. And so if you look what Shopify has done as a platform for people who want to sell you know, gadgets, widgets, candles, whatever it is online. Um, I think that there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of small niche SaaS businesses. Where I think really honestly like the best in class thing today is something like an accelerator, something like an incubator.

you know, somebody to take a a a sizable percentage of your company and handhold you through that process of this is how to find your first 10 customers. This is how to actually like set these things up. And I think if you if I think about a lot of these SaaS businesses, uh, you know, your example earlier about Import export.

Um, you're only, you know, exporting so many types of business from a company. And so a lot of times, you know, people say, Um, how can we do what we're doing with Excel or how can we do what we're doing with Google Docs? and turn that into its own standalone platform. And I think when you think about the components of a of a you know software as a service business. You only have so many components, right? You have like

You know, user registration, you have you know admin privileges, you have payment collection, you have analytics and dashboards. And then you have like something else that that business is doing, but a lot of these things are componentized. And so I think if you have a business That has some sort of like low code way for people who have a SAS idea to come on And register that business, create it, get it set up, come up with a name, set up the website, all that stuff is easy, and you can go do that on you know Squarespace or a million other places.

But then actually build and kind of componentize in in a low code way the back end. Um and and the the reason that we came up with this idea is when we were doing customer research, we met a guy Uh, actually here in in Minnesota where I am now Uh and he was working a full time job. And his job is designing uh high end cabinets for these like multi million dollar lake homes.

Um, and he and a couple of friends have created a one million dollar a year SaaS company. uh that is like a CRM for high end cabinet makers. Right. And they've had to do this through an insane process over six years where they have you know, hired people on Upwork, they've hired developers, they've like kind of patched all of this together and And the main guy, Ryan, he gets on the phone with me and calls me. uh and ask for advice and like it's kind of an insane process, but at the end of the day, like

that you know business for uh high end cabinet makers uh there's never going to be like uh you know something that would get you venture backed returns. And I think that if you look at Um, holding companies in a lot of cases like you know, constellation software in Canada. They're comprised of thousands of very small, you know, addressable market businesses.

Um that I think you know at Shopify similarly, you have a lot of these kind of small T shirt sellers and and candle makers and you know gadget makers that are selling a couple thousand dollars. Uh and I think if you can do that in a really easy and efficient way, there's a huge market there. That's interesting. So when you first said it, you know, Shopify for anything, I'm like, Oh, yeah, maybe. Um, and then I didn't understand at first what you meant, but now I do, which is that Okay, you're gonna build the app that actually solves the customer problem, but then there's the generic set of things to be a SaaS business, such as landing page. Viewers registration, payment collection, having different billing plans.

And right now you either build that yourself or you stitch together three or four tools to be able to do the do the rest of that. And um A store builder. for SaaS developers is actually kind of an interesting thing because On one hand you think well

People who build SaaS businesses, they're they can code anyway. So why wouldn't they want to do this? But it's like they don't want to code the stuff that's non-core to their business. And What can be sort of outsourced. will be outsourced if they uh if you make it sort of convenient and simple enough. I actually like that you said you did research on it, you decided not to pursue it. What

Do I I think you said you decided not to pursue it. What is the kind of main challenge or hold up or what what got you to sort of say, Okay Sounds like you you initially had a hard on for this business and then something kinda cooled you off. Wha what cooled you off? Yeah, I think the the challenging thing with this business is really that

Um you have these subject matter experts. Often these people are already already running their own successful businesses. So you know, that the person who's selling, you know, high end cabinets, he's probably making collectively with his business over you know, a million dollars a year or else you would just like stop making high end cabinets and go do the SaaS business the first time. And so I think that You have this problem of trying to you know, glean information from the subject matter experts. What do you know about, you know, building log cabins? Or what do you know about like managing trailer parks? What do you know about installing cabinetry? What do you know about

you know uh industrial scales that nobody else knows Uh, and gleaning that information from people is is really hard. And so I think the thing that I I like about this is I think that there's a massive opportunity if you can you know, go and find those people. I think finding people who are already have you know, subject matter expert and are running these successful companies, convincing them to

you know, give you information, give you customers, whatever that is is hard. Um, I think that there are ways to do this through like revenue shares and stuff like that. Um, but I think really that's the piece that that made us go um, you know, there's there's probably more exciting opportunities out there um that that that uh you know could actually make Cash uh a lot faster than this idea.

Um, so I think that this is probably like a good like venture backed business. I think you could go raise a couple million dollars with this framework with this idea. uh and then take what a lot of these you know, no code tools are doing through the various components and stitch them together. Uh and and if you can find that end customer who's wanting to make a thousand dollars a month, ten thousand dollars a month in kind of incremental SaaS revenue.

Um there seems to be a a pretty interesting market there. Right. You tweeted something out the other day that's a different idea that I think your buddy or your your business partner uh is building. It's like Um It's a it's an asynchronous golf instructor. Uh so tell tell people what that is and what you liked about that business. Yeah, so um so my co founder, uh Daniel O'Shea is a custom of this business that I love. I I loved it before and I like it even more in in kind of crazy covid times.

Um, so he lives in Austin, Texas, and he has been Uh in his in his first month off from from leaving indeed he's been trying to improve as a golfer. And so all you do is you s you take uh you take your iPhone. Uh and there's this guy I can't think of his name, but I it's like Professional Golf dot com or something. He has this this like pretty decent domain. Um, but it's just an individual guy. He works a full time job and this is his side hustle business. And so what he tells you is for ninety nine dollars a month.

You can upload there's some parameters. I think it's like a two or five minute video of you at the driving range. Uh, and I think you take like two minutes of footage, you know, driving a couple of balls. at one angle and then you move the camera behind you and you do another two minutes of it. Uh, and so I love this business because all he's doing is he's taking video content Uh, and he's talking about something that he loves.

So he has some sort of, you know, uh application or software where he's uploading your video and he's just recording audio over it. Uh and then in real time he's marking up your actual golf swing. You know, see here how your left knee, you know, buckled a little bit, see how your hips weren't aligned to the ball. And so it's this like highly tailored solution. Uh super cheap, I think way cheaper than you know a a golf instructor would be. Um, and then the great thing for him, uh, for my co-founder as a new dad is like he can go do this whenever he gets a break. He doesn't have to commit to kind of this like

you know, regular sink of meeting a golf pro at the golf shop. Uh, and so I I I think that you know there's huge advantages for you know, if you're trying to get better at exercising, if you're trying to get better at a certain sport. you know, meeting somebody in person, I think you're gonna get, you know, the best experience. Um

But there's all of these like YouTube, you know, videos that just give like generic, you know, golf advice that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. And so why not monetize this, you know, if you can get Um, you know, 10 people charge them$100 a month, and you're probably improving your own golf game as you're giving, you know, the users feedback. I think that this is a great little side hustle. I like it. I was I'm wondering how Uh how this guy's doing. I feel like there's um you know, you'd sort of do the math, okay, a hundred dollars a month.

And You know, could th could this person be serv'cause they're it's a personal thing. He's like servicing these you know, these customers, but Uh, you know, I think it probab let's say it might take him thirty minutes per customer uh to do this to take a two minute video, annotate, give you good feedback, and send it right back to you. Um So you know, maybe thirty minutes per customer, let's say he wants to work, I don't know.

Uh five hours a day. So he's gonna get Uh, you know, what what is that? So ten um you know, t ten customers a day serviced and he's gonna do this twenty days a twenty days a month. And so you know, servicing two hundred customers at a hundred dollars apiece, right? So you know, it sort of adds up where you're like, Okay, this is for something you probably would do for free for fun anyways,'cause you just can't resist'cause you're a you know, you're a golf nut.

Um, you know, it's a very conveniently designed business. I think that's what's beautiful about this is It's not so much that there's a big market or is using some fancy technology, it's like off the shelf technology. generically big market. But I like the design of this business'cause I think it's probably like a passion.

that can monetize without taking over your life and becoming inconvenient. Totally. Yeah. I totally agree. Yeah, it's it's really interesting. I like that one. Uh all right, what else you got?

Um Uh I've also been thinking a lot about franchises. So uh I'm kind of obsessed with, you know, how do we create more entrepreneurs, how do we create more founders in in America. Uh And I I think that I'm I'm all about these like hybrid approaches. Uh and I love your your framework that you've talked about many times on this podcast, which is

you know, you kind of draw this like two by two matrix and you have you know, old problem, uh, new problem, old solution, new solution. And I think, you know, crossing those and and finding these hybrid approaches is something that I'm super passionate about as well. Right. And so actually I think, you know Uh many months ago when I think you first talked about that framework Uh, I was thinking at the same time about franchises and about how Yeah, throughout the nineteen sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties.

Um, there was this hybrid approach to entrepreneurship uh in in America and all over the world, which was You know if you if you don't want to start a company from the ground up, you don't want to have to go set up a bank account and hire people and you come up with an idea and register that business and do all of the hard work to come up with an idea, but you want more upside than working you know, a nine to five at a big company. You could go open a McDonald's early on Starbucks head franchises. You could go open a Starbucks. And you would de risk yourself as an entrepreneur, but you would still have a lot of the benefits of entrepreneurship around hiring people.

Uh, and so I think, you know, how has the world shifted over the last six months and what kind of new franchise opportunities are available that are more asset like? Like the big problem with with franchise is that almost all franchises are tied to these like very asset heavy businesses. You know, dry cleaning. You have to rent the equipment, you have to rent the space. Um uh you know, obviously fast food and and coffee businesses, same thing. You have these huge equipment expenditures, you have high rent. Um, and so I'm really obsessed with like

You know, what in this framework, how can you take this, you know, seventy year old idea of a franchise business and apply it to You know, these times where everybody's working from home. Uh, and I think that somebody will build like a multi billion dollar company. Basically doing like a franchise version of Geek Squad. I think that that's one super interesting example. So

Uh indeed. Um, the the company that I just left. We had about twelve thousand employees. Uh and we would provide like remote kind of help desk support, um, you know, from Indeed's IT team in Austin, Texas to employees who had Broken laptops, their internet connection wasn't working and they couldn't troubleshoot it.

Uh, and there was all sort of like tech issues when you move a company with tens of thousands of people to go work from home. Uh and I think that this, you know, something like this has this like regional approach where you could actually sell specific geographies to, you know, founders or entrepreneurs who wanted to run you know, the Bay Area version of this business. Uh and it it seems like there's huge demand right now. So somebody tweeted out that their dad

Uh, as I was thinking about this idea, their dad's company Um, had spent like fifty thousand dollars. It was a small uh, I think accounting firm of like twenty people, and they had spent fifty thousand dollars through Accenture. Uh and Accenture set them up with like Zoom licenses and Dropbox and just like gave them off the shelf software and then basically did like a webinar, like here's how to use it. Um but I think increasingly as you have You have so many different technologies that you're running from home.

Uh and that becomes mission critical to actually doing your job. Um, I think that there's like a personal element of having somebody come over and, you know, fix your TV, fix your printer. Um, but there's also this idea of you know somebody coming and actually fixing your laptop. And the great thing about this business is that I'm I'm fairly convinced that large companies and small companies would just like pay a monthly fee to just have this problem go away. Uh and so I think that there's like a direct to consumer side. Um and then there's also this like B2B element that I'm super excited about where you could go contract with large company.

Uh and I think that there's actually a lot of these businesses. I think Um if you look at asset light franchises. You know, every company when they set up, whether they're a financial services company, or an HR tech company or an educational tech company.

They all need to do a million integrations, and so you know, one of the problems with these like integrations companies is that there's all these independent, you know, developers who like do your integration with SAP or with Oracle or whatever. And I think building a layer of trust. building a simple pricing, you know, uh page. uh doing all this thing and then just running this like a startup.

uh makes for this super interesting like franchise kind of hybrid approach that is a lot less cost intensive than spending, you know, a million and a half bucks to to get a McDonald's open. Yes. Uh yes is my answer to this. Uh I love this idea. I have Ton of thoughts. So first I've I've personally encountered a couple of friends who

did this as their side hustle as like an 18 year old, uh 17, 18 year old. So you're in Minnesota. My friend Tyler Hayes did Uh he had a business called Tyler the Techie. And basically he'd come he was Geek Squad and he would come fix your shit and he would like set you up and like tell you why your router sucks and give you a new router'cause that's why your wifi is terrible in your house. Like he would just solve little problems like this. And um I had a friend in college, this guy named Tofique, who we would be in college and he would just

He would be the only guy who went to go check his mail. We were like, Why do you care about checking your mail? And the reason why is because he's getting checks in the mail. And we were like, What are you getting checks for? He's like, Oh, I s I started this kinda like, you know I forgot what it was called like um Nerd Nerd on Wheels or something like that was the name of it. S something like that. Um

Is you know, it's Geek Squad. And he's in West Virginia and he was fifteen years old, I think, when he started at fourteen fifteen. And he was like, Oh, I know how like technology works and like oh my God, my dad doesn't he started with his dad's like I think doctors uh doctor's office and he's like, Oh, they need like networking And so he would like go set up your internet. Uh, for any d doctor's office, hospital, dentist office, that sort of thing.

And this guy basically paid for college and w you know, I went to Duke is like an expensive ass school and he was like Yeah, look, this is this is a twenty four thousand dollar check. He's like, This is just like my cut. I gave the business to like another kid. 'Cause he's you know, I'm gone now and he's g he can run that and I just get like a royalty check now a little bit out of it. And um so he was making a ton and I was like, Wow, this is it very interesting. Um and so I think there's two interesting bits to this.

Um, one is I think Geek Squad itself, I don't know what the state of that business is, but I don't think it's doing very well just given it's a I think it's part of Best Buy, correct? So so I think that Um you know. When the parents dying, you know, the the the the the the child is is gonna be in trouble as well. So I think Geek Squad's probably gonna be In trouble.

Um I love that it's mom and pop fragmented everywhere, which means that if you actually had a franchise system where you'd have a local operator and you could find that sixteen, fifteen year old kid or group of four who are, you know, tech savvy and you could say, look, here's the brand, here's the website, here's the marketing budget playbook. I'm gonna give you leads, you go fulfill. Um, and it reminds me of this company I invest in called Nana. So have you ever heard about Nana? Yeah, I love what they're doing.

There if for for those who don't know, Nana's like a Uh I think they they're doing this, but in the appliance repair space. So The equivalent of Geek Squad was Sears's uh Sears has th had this huge fleet of appliance repair technicians. And Sears has gone bankrupt and you know, that home services business actually was still doing pretty well, but who knows what'll happen to it now.

Um So they had like hundreds of thousands of technicians all around the country that could come fix your dryer, come fix your fridge, come fix your w dishwasher. And so what and then you know besides them was just mom and pop, you know. find some gu guy on your yellow pages or Google and find somebody on Craigslist or whatever.

And so what Nana's doing is is they're Unifying this under one brand, that's simple, just nana. Um It's on demand. You push a button in your app and somebody will come fix your thing. Like I had my dryer was broken, pushed a button.

An hour later, a guy showed up. And they were basically dispatching local technicians to come fix your stuff. And they were guaranteeing the technicians, hey, you don't need to learn how to market yourself and get customers. Like I will just send you a message when there's somebody within five miles of you that needs something fixed, and you either say yes or no. And this guy was making, you know, between 75,000 and 150,000 a year. Working flexible hours, I was like, This crushes being an uber driver. And then they created an academy which was like

In one month. you can go from not knowing how to fix any appliances to one month you can repair one appliance. And in two months you can repair two appliances, and so on and so forth. And so If you're earning powers thirty thousand a year. Well, here's a pathway for you to f for free learn how to do this job and then get free customers to you know deliver to your phone

that you can go and you can now be making seventy five K more a year. It's like this amazing thing for the economy. So that's why I I invest in that company, but That model applies to what you're talking about. Um in a pretty big way. And I think that the Um There's other spaces as well that this applies to. So one that I've been thinking about that I meant to bring up on the podcast, but I wanted to do a bit more research.

But fuck it. I you know, we're talking about it now, so with no research. Um, are you familiar with Kumon? Uh a little bit. It's like the learning centers, right? Yeah, exactly. So come on I d I didn't have this growing up, but my wife is from this area in California and it's like Everybody knows about coupon around here. And you you live in in in uh in in the same area as I do, so so you'll see'em at the corners. Uh in d every strip mall will have one of these. And so Kuomon is like a place you send your kid to get good at math.

Uh so it has a stereotype of like, you know, Asian Asian parent uh you know forcing their kid to become like, you know, good at math. Uh, but you know, parents really care about this stuff and so Kumon was a franchise. That you could open up. And they give you the playbook, they give you the all the materials. It's kinda like Kaplan or you know, whatever, like where you where you can teach people how to

Um Yep. So so Cumon is this for little kids and they charge, you know, a handful and parents are willing to pay. So I think that you can create the Airbnb of Kuomon. Which sounds ridiculous, but what I mean is

You don't need a brick and mortar shop for this anymo. I think you could arm people and say, Hey, do you have like a dining room? In your house? Um because you can create a little micro school. Uh

You know, ten kids who are each paying, you know, a hundred bucks a month to come learn from from you. And who are you? You're a college kid or you're like an of a twenty five year old or you're an eighteen year old who knows math. And we give you the brand, we give you the materials to like Outfit your room. And um and make this work. And so

Cooman I think does billions of dollars a year in revenue. And um I think somebody can create The coupon with the asset light model, meaning Use the sharing economy, use people's garages, use their living rooms, use their extra spare bedrooms. And turn them into little classrooms for the neighborhood.

and give them um you know materials and lesson plans that they can teach off of And um, I think that that could be a monster, monster business. Like that's one that I would consider going and building, because I think it would transform that you know the way education works. There's a another variant of this. Um, is my sister has this program that she created these um child care centers or kind of like preschools. In San Francisco.

And um Initially her model was smart where she would buy a house. Uh so she she wanted to own a home. The the home had extra space, like a whole bottom floor that was like separate entrance and exit. So she was like, Oh, I really want this house, but I can only afford half of it. Oh, what if I created uh you know a child care center at the bottom of here, an in home child care center. 'Cause there's a shortage of child care centers. So there's permits for in home.

And I can have twel kids. And in San Francisco, each kid pays three thousand dollars a month to go to school. So you're you know, you're making thirty six thousand dollars a month in revenue. Um and it and you basically pay, you know. For teachers. uh as your salary and the rest is your your you're renting your own space. And so she's

paying for a you know a multi million dollar home in San Francisco, she's profiting by having you know, her own little school and she sends her own kids to it too. And so it's like, you know, her own child care as well is taken care of. And so she built this really good model. And then to expand, uh, she was like, you know, I really want my kids to get outdoors more. So she created this thing called Nature Kids. And I think this could also be a franchise model.

Um, so what she did was she was like, forget the house, cause that has pro you know, I have to go find a home that has the separate entrance and exit and permitting and all that stuff. There's beautiful parks everywhere. What if there's a half day program where you send your kids and it's away from technology, it's in it's outdoors, it's in nature, learning about like animals and trees and plants and building things and stuff like that. And uh I pay zero rent. And um

And so she created a whole curriculum for this thing and it's working. It's taken off because A Covid like that helped, but B, parents just want their kids outside. And so I've told her like hey, instead of thinking about how you can add Ten more kids to nature kids. You should be bundling this up as a franchise in every

kind of like an you know, enterprising mom or dad who wants to create a local business around childcare and they want a better option for their own kids. And there's like Two parks near them. they should be able to buy this business in a box and they can go make six figures a year. Um doing something like this with

V essentially zero risk. What do you think of that idea? Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Uh it it reminds me, so I uh growing up I lived in Colorado and in uh in Jefferson County, which is a suburb of Denver. In fourth, fifth, and sixth grade. Uh it I think parents can opt out of it, but there is basically like a one week nature camp that you go to, but these are privately run.

uh amazing business because you basically build like, you know, sixteen log cabins out in the woods in the middle of nowhere in Colorado. Um like the cheapest plot of land that you can find. Uh and then you teach kids, you know, uh how to like boil water over a fire and you just do this for an entire week. And it's an amazing, you know, one week vacation for the parents. Uh so they love it. Like every parent signs their kids up for this. The kids get to go run around in the woods.

Uh and I love this, like doing it uh doing it without the real estate component I think is super smart. Um there's also this business in in uh Manhattan that's taken off and I think you know Inc or entrepreneur or something wrote about these two women who Uh they have like a big suburban And they go around to all these high end, you know, penthouses around Manhattan and the pitch is like

Your dog hates walking around on Manhattan sidewalks. Right. And so we have this plot of land in upstate New York. It's like ninety minutes north of the city. Uh we load your you know, your dogs like twelve at a time into the suburban And we just let'em go like dig holes and play with each other and just like run around and it's I think in one of the women's back yard. uh in in in in uh you know northern uh northern New York

uh and and they get like an insane amount of money. I think like one day of doing this There's like twelve dogs. It's like eighty dollars per dog. So every day they do this, they're like printing a thousand dollars for real estate they already have. you know, on this like five acre plot of land that one of the women lives on. Um, any business like that, you know, getting Pets, kids, whatever, out to nature. I think it's it's genius. That's that's so funny. Even adults out to nature, right? Like I did Tough Mudder and Spartan Race, and what are these, right? It's like

I can get your you know You're out of shape, thirty year old body off of a desk. Into nature and I'll let you take photos that you can put on Instagram. Like that's the model, right? Like I hope this doggy thing, I hope they're taking I hope they have like you know some drone that flies around and just takes. high quality videos and just send it to the parent, you know, to the to the dog owners or the parents. Um, and it's just like look how much fun your dog is having right now. Like look how messy they're getting and don't worry, I'm gonna bathe them and bring'em back later. Um and you know, this eighty dollar a day day camp for your dog to like for your dog to have a vacation out of the city for like bougie people is a hilarious

hilariously great business that that I'm a fan of. Yeah, I love the I love the videos and and photos. I think that was a big part of like Wag's business model, right? They'd come to your house and walk your dog for thirty minutes and they would get a video or a photo, and I think it was up to each dog walker, but that was a huge part of their growth, I think, was was watching your dog have fun is a is a huge value add. Right. Yeah, I just think that there's more Um Experiences that should be like fun or enrichment, but d' like doubles as like babysitting. Um right. So like that's another thing with like after school activities is like great.

Take my kid for the hour. Like, thank you. Um, and and one reason I like the local coupon is you don't have to drive so far to do it. Like if there really was one in every neighborhood, which I think realistically, in every single neighborhood There's some There's at least five kids who are in high school who are good at good students, good at math, and want to earn thirty five bucks an hour. Uh to teach little kids, you know

And if you give them a playbook, they'll just follow the playbook. And you know, now that's within walking distance or like a two minute drive away rather than like a Okay, I'll drive for twenty five minutes, drop you off. Now I have

Forty five minutes to kill, and then I gotta pick you up again. It's not even worth going home. And it's like parents get exhausted by this sort of like You know, just becoming an u Uber driver for your kid. Um I've heard. I don't know. My kid's tiny. I don't know about all this, but I this is what I understand. You'll find out soon. Exactly. I also like, you know, your for your Geek Squad idea, another framework I like is Um business ideas is what do the rich have that the poor would want?

Um and it's not money. And so like, you know the rich rich people had private drivers and now everybody has private drivers through Uber. Um, you know, rich people got like these crazy vacation homes that they could go to. And now Airbnb says, Cool, you know, stay in this log cabin in Tahoe, you just don't have to own the place. And um make it really easy. They reduce the the friction required for you to have the same experience that rich people have. And um DoorDash, right? Like

You know, don't cook, get food, you know, get get restaurant quality food. You know, you don't have to have a private chef. Here's like a sh a chef that'll make it and deliver to you in thirty minutes. Um So similarly with companies, when comp what do big companies have that small companies would want'cause it you know, they have the whole department that deals with this pain in the ass. We can't afford that department. We can't even afford one IT guy But what if, you know, we could just subscribe to this Geek Squad thing for

you know, three hundred dollars a month and like our IT needs are taken care of or whatever, right? Like I think that's another way to look at this is what's a department inside a big company that small companies don't have. And then spin that department out and turn it into a you know a service business or turn it into a product in some way. Yep, a hundred percent. Yeah, I think this works really well. I mean there's Um, any sort of uh, you know, fractionalized executive uh is another idea that I love, right? And so I think

This is another business where Um when we were starting interviewed five years ago, uh you know, day one, if you have two people, You don't want or need to hire a CFO. You don't need a head of HR, but you want like somebody to keep you compliant in these areas. And I think that, you know, similar to all of those businesses, these are areas that like Require

huge levels of trust, right? If you're handing over all of your financials, if you're handing over all of your you know, human resources files to a person who's working with you and twenty five other companies. Right. You want to make sure that that person knows what they're doing. And I think, you know, Bench and a lot of other companies are are are trying to get good at this more for like SMB accounting. Um I think that there's you know similar

companies, uh, you know, Ripling and and Gusto and and stuff have come along and shipped away at parts of kind of, you know, payroll automation and and you know new higher onboarding. Um, but I I still think that there's a whole stack of things just in You know, in in like fun cultural things like a a fractionalized office manager uh you know in accounting, in HR, in any of these departments, IT that that would be uh hugely valuable for a you know, two person to

In I think a lot of cases up to like two hundred people you can't afford or you don't want to hire these as as full time roles quite yet. So ninety five percent of businesses. Here's a bad idea that's a version of that, right? Um so a a good a good idea that I think Just hasn't quite clicked, but My friend Marin started a company called Zirtual. And Zurtual got famous'cause it famously, you know, raised a bunch of money, was doing well, and then it blew up overnight and like closed. And like, okay, you know, whatever. That was sort of a financial fiasco, uh, of just sort of mismanaging the the cash flow and not being able to hit payroll, but

The um the idea was really, really solid, which was Again. Rich people or executives or big companies have this one benefit, which is that they have EAs, right? So I have an executive assistant. And um

That's because I'm at a big company, but when I'm at a small company, I'm not gonna hire an EA. It's just too expensive and I don't have that sort of need. And so what they did was a fractional EA. I could have seven hours a week of this person's time and she could be serving s servicing you know, let's say eight clients um at the same time. And so more people got access to the service. um for a lower price and then that the the pr service provider is able to fractionally divide their time and end up making twice or three times more than they would at at any one uh company. So that's the good idea. The bad idea version of this is like

You talked about kind of you said the word company culture. And every company I've been at, there's been like the kind of the one person who really like keeps track of everyone's birthdays and, you know, oh, somebody's having a baby, let's send them a gift basket and like, hey, this person's, you know, they came down with something and how do we help them get well. And they're sort of the person that makes everybody like a little bit human in the company and they they're thoughtful, they buy gifts, they organize things, they organize parties, they organize like you know off sites and things like that. And I feel like there's You know.

For the person who has the skills of a party planner or wedding, but it's like okay, here's like a boring version of that. Uh like corporate The corporate fun. Um and and how do you provide that to a thirty person company who doesn't have that person or today it's your head of marketing who's just does it. Because otherwise no one's gonna do it. And um maybe that there's somebody you could have that's just like the thought person in your company.

And what a fun job to be doing from home. If you're kind of a stay at home mom or dad, uh, just to provide that for for you know, four companies is your you're there like people person and you're cheering everybody up, you're bringing little s surprise and delights to every everybody in the company and they'll pay you Yeah. Whatever, a thousand dollars a month to be doing this. Yep, yep, I love that. And I think uh in a lot of ways that's completely uncharted territory. So one of the one of the side projects that uh my my co founder and I and a couple of friends actually created is this company uh that we're still working on, but it was like a side project called Team Cation.

Uh, and it was this idea of like You know, now that every company is a remote company, what all remote companies would do before this, like if you were a cool, you know, twenty person remote company, is you would go, you know, get an Airbnb up in Napo once every year or whatever. Once every half yeah, apply everybody in Yeah, and and I I think in our experience, even if you have that person or those people who are like you need to make you know, new higher onboarding like core to your business that's really hard to outsource all pieces of it, or you will have like a terrible culture.

Um, but the the idea of having like A travel agent that knows these niche spots where you can get twenty or forty or sixty people into a house. Uh, they're actually kind of hard to find. And I think, you know, then you have like all the travel coordination. Okay, maybe for the first time ever these companies are having to set up, you know, expense policies for you know, how much per diem you get if you're on the road, if you're driving in versus flying in.

Uh, and so just being able to take that, I think And maybe give parameters, you know, hey, we have fifteen people, this is our budget, just go book something awesome. Um we think that there's an interesting business there. If anybody wants to run this site for us, feel free to reach out to me and uh I'll give somebody a job around it. So you you have that domain? That's a good domain too, if you have Damke. So that's a good domain. Good idea. I would hate to run that business just l because I'm a terrible logistics person. Like I'm awful, god awful at it. Um

But I would love that, right? Like for my team of twenty, thirty people who are like, you know, remote. If we could say if if all we had to say was this is our date. We're we're c we're we're we're down to leave on this date, come on this day, and here's our parameters budget. And uh here's you know, everybody's like location. So you know geo geographically where to where to send people.

Um And if somebody was like, Great We found you guys the spot. Uh, we've organized the activities, we've booked your travel, we're handing everybody kind of a temporary expense card that we have that like will just keep track of everything for you for you guys. And when you get there you'll have your your swag or your goodie bag or whatever you're gonna get.

Um That would be I think something that a lot more comp like the market for that has been created now. um because of Covid and because of the sort of increase uh the sort of exponential increase in remote work.

Um there's a market for this now that was very different four years ago when only a handful of companies We're doing remote only and then they they built internal systems for this. This is exporting their internal system and making it like a button you push for for team team vacations. Uh so I like that idea. I would hate to run it, but I think Yeah, it'd be interesting if someone did. Same. It's fun to build the website. Uh I I have no plans of actually uh doing the back end of all that work myself. Uh all right, I love it. Um we should wrap up. We're we're almost at the hour. This has been fun. You uh you are You're one of you're one of us. Uh you you are an idea machine who who thinks about things in I think a a good way where you're looking at what's changing, you're looking at pain points and you're trying to figure out

You know, how do I find that either new solution or old solution to either Old old pain point or new pain point. Um So where should people find you? So Twitter is the best way to f pla best place to follow you? Yep, uh follow me on Twitter again at Chris J Baki B A K K E on Twitter.

Um or feel free to send me an email to Chris at L A S K I E dot C O. And are you ready to talk about where your new company is, or do we have to end the recording and then I ask you a bunch of questions about that? Uh So the the high level is that uh we are uh we're really in love with helping large enterprise businesses uh find where the problems are in their organization uh and then go solve those.

Uh, and so the high level of this is that um you know, I've worked at a couple Uh very large companies that are growing fast. I think that there's this general adversion to things like McKinsey and Bain. And you know, BCG and bringing in these high end expensive consultants that big companies like Coca-Cola would go, you know, pay all day long.

Uh and I think that there's also a way where professional services, uh, a huge part of that job is coming into a company and cracking open a new spreadsheet. Uh, and then getting down to business, flying people in to start interviewing. Uh and so the core of this business will be, you know, effectively building McKinsey two point oh. Uh and helping high growth companies with some of their biggest business problems. So this would be a service it would be a consulting business. It's a uh so the the idea is actually to take what consultants do uh and turn these into uh uh turn it into software. So

Uh at my last company, we took something that was done in a spreadsheet. Uh we built an entire, you know, SaaS business around it. Uh and then we sold it. So the idea here is to find these pain points whether that's, you know, what should I price my product. Uh historically you would go pay McKinsey for a study of that. You know, startups can't afford to do this. Um, and so we are building software to help you, you know, price your product, distribute products.

Um a lot of things around product distribution, but also a lot of things around, you know, hiring and actually building up you know, building up that company. And so anything that a large company would turn to McKinsey to uh solve, you know, in the next three to five years it's our goal to you know, have uh pieces of software or partners that we can go, you know, refer these executives and founders to to go help some of these critical business problems. Interesting. Okay. Um

I like you a lot, but I don't know if I like this pitch. I feel like W w finding one of these and building the software solution to one of these is in itself Probably like a big A big company worth building and would take time to build and so I'm not sure I'm not sure I'm on board with or I'm not sure I believe the sort of like we're gonna solve a bunch of these. Uh

Ma maybe. That's cool. Uh I'm I'm interested to see how that goes. We we uh I think I think it's like a Keith through Boy quote. You always want, you know, like fifty percent of people to not understand the idea. You want like twenty five percent of people to hate it, and you want twenty five percent to love it. I think we're like pretty equal in that ratio. Uh I think to be clear, like I think day one we have a very specific uh pain point that we're gonna go solve. Uh and a lot of that just starts with research, talking to a ton of founders, talking to a ton of business executives. So Uh if there are any uh, you know, business leaders and team leaders at large companies uh who want to just talk to us about some problems and and we can give you some free advice, uh feel free to shoot me a note.

Nice. Uh all right, cool. Uh thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate the uh the guest uh guest spot. And maybe maybe if people like this, we'll have you back. Uh I think they will. I think you had some pretty solid Pretty solid idea. So thank you for coming on. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. Cool

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 3 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.