#204 - Behind-the-Scenes of Shaan's Power Writing Course

I think when you once you treat your hobby like a job. Uh, that's like a recipe for failure. And that's what happens to a lot of people. I feel like I can rule the world I know why It be what I want to I put my law in it like a day song on the roadless travel, never looking back. Alright, what's going on? What's up, man?

So we're gonna get some into some ideas, but let me tell you something that I did this week and I cannot give D I actually got in trouble three different times where someone was like, Hey, we had this conversation and You just better talk to me. Well I'm like, Well I don't I just when you and I the way that you and I talk now is how we talk all the time. Yeah.

And yeah, and they're so they're right. So I'm gonna try to keep this one vague. I had this dinner. And I was with a guy who has eight thousand Employees in China as well as many thousand in America.

Wow. Okay. Yeah, impressive person. Like a factory or something else in China? Tech tech related, just like just some huge company. You you if I gave you a hundred guesses, you likely wouldn't guess it. It's just some big company that exists and in the tech world. Fair enough. And um it's impressive, but it's not like a mainstream thing. Okay.

There was this other guy there who made a comment where he was like China's gonna crush us in the next five years or something. And then a couple other people love to say that, by the way. Don't people love saying how China's passed up America? A bunch of other people b pounced on that. And then this guy, it was this guy, he lives in China. Um

I believe he he he I don't know what ethnicity he was, but he looked like he I mean he's probably maybe born and raised in China. And then there's this other woman there Who actually was born and raised in China. And this guy with the six thousand Chinese employees goes A lot of people say that.

I do not think that's true. And I don't think any of you should ever think that. Uh he was just saying he was like, Americans actually work maybe as hard. Or harder than a lot of other countries. Interesting. Um and also you talk about this like artificial intelligence and this um It's mostly AI that people I mean, they talk about China crushing America and a bunch of stuff, but AI is like a a hot thing. And this guy was like, I don't think that would happen. And if and what I think you should do is invest all most of your money into American uh equities. I think he goes like I'm just so bullish on America. And that's so it was like an interesting perspective. Have you ever heard that? It's like the one person who probably knows what they're talking about at the table and everybody else who just reads shit on Twitter.

And like regurgitates it. Uh yeah, all right. I'm gonna go with the guy who's got six thousand employees in China. That that makes more sense to me. That's you know, and and that was good. I felt great about that. And so uh it was just an interesting perspective. But We you love you some uh Pro America. Now it's

Yeah. Well, so I'm also just finished reading this really great book. Uh do you know who Gine Steinbeck is? No. Of course you do. Grapes of wrath. No. What is that? Are you serious? Uh I got a blank here. Wow. Uh have you heard of Kill Mockingbird?

I have heard of the kill my that's the author. Oh my God. Like John Sybet. I mean it uh people are gonna make fun of you, by the way. Anyway, just read Harry Potter. Okay, like it let's be clear. This guy he was born in nineteen oh two, so he's dead. He's died probably died in the seventies. But anyway, I'm reading this great book about his memoir from driving across the country for three months in America. And getting to know America and it's really funny. In nineteen sixty five, when he was doing this trip, he was complaining about how Americans are getting out of touch with and are getting too focused on technology and how there's refrigerators everywhere and there's TVs everywhere and how there's artificial food everywhere. It's very funny. We've always complained about this stuff, but I do love

learning about America. I think America's special. I think we have this resil resilience and I think the Yeah, anyway, I'm I'm very pro America. So yes, I did like hearing it. But you want to talk about some ideas? Uh yeah, by the way, Dan corrected us. I don't think he wrote To kill Mockingbird, but

No, my dead man or something. He he he didn't write to kill a mocking bird. I'm saying His work is like this. It's it's like did he write of Mice and Men? I know he wrote like Gripes of Wrath. It's just like a famous like American classic. I'm just shocked. The fact that you don't know that

He wrote of My Cement, so you know that. So the fact that you you do I know that as in I've heard those words before. That's all I know about that. Anyways, let's let's go into the stuff I do know about'cause I feel a lot better about that. And also Bitcoin rally. Thank you.

I I've been waiting for this bitcoin pump and here we are. We're back up. Life is good because Bitcoin is now. It like spiked up to almost forty thousand. uh over the last like twenty four hours, forty eight hours. There was a bit of a short squeeze, about a billion dollars of short positions.

Got liquidated. And that caused the price to uh run up because Um are you familiar with how that works, by the way? Like what a short squeeze is? Here's the like non technical non super uh Super like

nuanced version of it. Basically when you have a short you're betting against something. And if it goes up, you're on the hook to pay the the the sort of the price for the for being wrong. And so if you think something's gonna keep going up. You're better out just closing down your short position, just taking the L and saying, Okay, I'll pay

I'll I will I will go buy the shares now. Because I'm you know, let's say I'd I was it's at thirty thousand, I think it's going down. It goes to thirty two. You know what, to close out my position, I'll go buy the asset at thirty two and I'll eat the loss. Right. Um

But what happens is because all the short start worrying that the price is gonna run up. They all start trying to close out their positions at the same time. So they all start buying. So The people who are betting against it. All of a sudden at all this buying pressure. Where they have to to close out their position, they have to buy Bitcoin.

Which causes the price to go up and up and up and up. And so what happened is as it started running up All the shorts had to cover their positions'cause they were massively leveraged, right? They're not putting in their own money, they're putting in like Five to ten percent. down and they're taking the the they're taking ten X or twenty X

leverage on their position. So as the price goes up, they're very sensitive to it. And so I think that's what happened uh to cause the price to go up about ten thousand dollars. And the last Two days is

those shorts had to cover their position. This is what happened with Tesla. Tesla was the most shorted stock in the stock exchange. And then as the price started to go up, those shorts You know, they're basically paying a huge price for every every dollar it goes up. So they start to close out their positions which puts a bunch of bunch of buying pressure

Which is why it becomes a squeeze because the short themselves Cause the other shorts. to like have to cover and it just causes the price to shoot up way above what its earnings is and anything else. Dude, this is funny. It's funny because like when you

You do so we're in this chat group, Sean and me and all a bunch of other like successful young guys, and they talk about like alpha, like crushing alpha. And I'm like, I don't know what that means. I got no idea what that means. We talk about short squeeze of like this these words don't mean anything to me. I don't even know what they mean. You you guys feel like so sophisticated to me. Yeah. Some ideas, can we? Yeah, let's do it. You wanna go or you want me to go?

You go first. Okay, I have one. Okay, here's another one that's crypto related and you're gonna be like what Uh, but I'm telling you this is a good idea. This is actually Ben's idea. So first of all, Ben is visiting me. So I'm getting to see Ben in person. He's sitting five feet away from me. I wanted him to join this, but And so many goddamn technical difficulties setting up that like I don't know how he I could get it to be where it works, but

Maybe Wednesday. We'll take an extra hour beforehand and just get it set up for a two person setup. Um But anyways, Ben, we and Ben were talking last night, and he's like, you know, one, we're talking about courses, right? Because and I can share kind of like how what the numbers re like I just finished my course, I can share what the numbers were on that. But

We're talking about other few other potential courses we could do, like what would be fun. He's like, I don't know. He's like, We're not the right people to teach this, but I think this course would crush right now. So Sam, tell me, do you know what solidity is? If I say, Oh, solidity. So no, when I saw you writing, I thought I thought it was a type of her solidarity. Solidarity is what we'll call it. So solidity is the programming language. that you use to write smart contracts for Ethereum.

So let's say uh like one of the most promising things about crypto is that you can write a smart contract. So think like A basic escrow contract. I buy a house. You're gonna give me the title, I'm gonna give you the money. I don't wanna give you the money first. You don't wanna give me the title first. So we use this third party, this escrow agent, we pay them five thousand dollars.

Basically you hand them the title, I hand them the money. They say, Yep, they're both here. And then they give it to each other, right? So in the real world we pay these Exorbitant. middle man fees I I don't know what you paid for your house when you when you bought it, or you just did another real estate transaction. I don't know what you're paying for escrow. I don't even I didn't even look at it. For me it was like four grand to do an escrow transaction, which sucked. I was like this is just four thousand dollars for nothing.

When I sold my business, I think the escrow was fifty thousand dollars. Right. Crazy. They they they this crazy. So any and then and they literally do like one ounce of work. Um they literally just Oh, you hand me the title and you hand me the money? Great, I'm gonna just Turn one hand over here and I'll give you the you'll give you this, I'll give them that.

So a smart contract basically says, Look, we don't need this like person in the middle and we don't need to pay them four thousand dollars. Let's just make a contract with some rules and we'll just instead of writing it Like a lawyer contract will write it like a programmer contract. The programmer contract says, Hey

When this wallet Has this much money in it. Person A has fulfilled their obligation. And when this wallet has this asset in it, person B has fulfilled their obligation and then release The assets to each other.

Um and so and instead of paying four thousand dollars, you can pay four dollars or forty dollars, whatever the gas fees are at the time. So That's smart contract. So What what that means is

A lot of jobs today that go to lawyers are gonna go to programmers because you're not gonna want a lawyer to write a contract for something. You're gonna want a programmer to write it down. But you need that contract to like work. It needs to be like solid, bug proof, hack proof, and like I need it to do the many things that I need my c my transactions to do.

So there is an extreme shortage right now. of smart contract developers. of developers who know how to write in this new programming language and write these types of contracts. But It's clearly like a big part of the future, in my opinion.

And so one idea here is to create Basically a boot camp. It takes an existing engineer and says, Hey, cool. Oh, you write JavaScript or like, you know, you you're a you're a back end engineer? You're one of like

Ten million? Um, why don't you come over here where there's this high demand, high shortage of engineers that know how to do this thing? I can train you in six weeks. To learn how to write s like smart contracts and solidity. And then go to all the companies that are trying to hire this and basically do a lambda school. I think you can do a lambda school that's really niche, really focused. And if I'm an engineer that like, I'm a crypto nerd.

This is a business that I think you could do. You could just train other engineers. to like learn how to write smart contracts and then get hired and placed in these jobs or you take the placement fee. What do you think of that? So I'm doing research while you're talking. All right. Mm. Wow. Okay. No, I

I agree with the lot that you said, except for the last part. So There's this company called Coursera. Have you heard of Coursera? Of course. Um so they were started in two thousand twelve and I believe that they were started because the two guys I think they worked at Google. And they're noticing that we are struggling to hire a particular type of engineer. I'm just this is just off memory, so I I might be a little bit off here about some of the stuff.

But anyway. They uh And so they built like these courses and they built it so people can get jobs at Google. Data science or machine learning or something. Yeah, it was some type of data science or machine learning. I've I forget exactly what it was. And they they came out of the gate and they crushed it. And then like over the last

Five years they kinda like went nowhere and kind of like it's like what the hell happened to that company? And they're not really doing that well anymore. Well, over the last year and a half, two years with Covid and a bunch of other stuff, they started crushing it. Do you know what uh Coursera's revenue is now? No idea. So they uh they went public. Did you know that? No. Yeah, a lot of people didn't know it. I thought they had like stagnated and like wasn't going anywhere. Yeah. That's what everyone thought. So in two thousand twenty they did about three hundred million dollars or sorry My bad, four hundred million dollars in revenue, and they're currently publicly traded at a five and a half billion dollar valuation. And

Crazy, right? Totally forgot about it. And what you did with your course, what well, I don't know if you did this, but What a lot of people and Like you and me. We'll do courses and we'll kinda do these kind of like bootleg things. Not bootleg, but like Yeah, it's like modeling it.

Yeah. And you'll charge like Three hundred dollars. Or something like that. Which I've done before. And

That makes things a little bit and you want like a person to buy it. And that things it makes things a little bit challenging. What I would do is I would take the thing that you're describing. And with this with Bitcoin, there's like all these crazy new things that you've got to learn really quickly. I would just copy the Coursera model and just churn these fuckers out and charge like eight thousand dollars and it's like We're gonna like a company needs to buy in order to train in their people. I would just do so I think that's Lambda for X. I would do Coursera for X. Okay, I think that's fair. The thing with the Lambda side, which is basically I think every time you place one of these engineers, that's like a twenty to twenty five thousand dollar

fee that you get. And so it doesn't take much to be I don't I wouldn't do this as like a venture scale business. Not not at all. This is basically I'm a developer. So You have to be the right mold. It's like

I've been tinkering with smart contracts for the last two years anyways. I've actually kind of like gotten up to speed myself. I'm a converted back end engineer who now does smart contracts. And I could go I I work at like a fan company today, I make four hundred thousand dollars. Like

Wouldn't it be great to make like four million dollars a year? And I think this is a way to make four million dollars a year as like A two person company basically. That's I agree. But I would never do it in a lambda. So when Sean says Lambda School, he's referring to it's free. And you make money. By getting like a twenty five thousand dollar referral placement or s or a percentage of their salary.

I have I know nothing about Lambda other than we had Austin on the show and I think he's amazing and I love him. And you're an investor. That's really all I know about it. I think my prediction if I had to bet money on it is that it won't work. Yeah, I that's a I mean, I think that's a fair prediction about most startups. I think that's true. Uh yeah, but they're not most startups. They've raised like a hundred million dollars probably. They're not like an early stage startup, they're like in the thick of it. I think that if they're out of business in two years, I wouldn't be surprised. Right. And I would agree with that, even as a fan and an investor, I I would agree with that.

Um I think that you that okay, so here's okay, let me do two things. First Let me share with you a really hilarious story. Do you know this Twitter account? Greg?

It's like Greg nine five five three two like three two six seven. White guy like a like a white old guy. It's a white no, not old guy. It's a white, like nerdy Dork guy. No, I don't know it. You haven't seen this? Just r Google search Greg Meme. Uh Greg Me McCount.

Uh you'll see it and I bet you've seen this guy. So You know like these meme accounts though, there's like Doctor Park Patel? By the way. Big fan of him. I think he's a big fan of us. Uh he works for the hustle, you know that, right?

Dr. Park Patel works at the hustle? Oh my god, you just outed Dr. Park Patel. Amazing. No. He Like him. He he's a contractor for us. He writes for us sometimes. Oh my God, I love it. Wow, no, I did not know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Uh my brain is racing to figure it out who it is now. Okay. No

Like I was a fan of his and I DMed him and I was like, Hey you wanna write So you don't know the real identity. Uh I do. Okay, you do. It's yeah. So you're saying after you saw Dark Park though, then you contract it Okay, gotcha. Makes way more sense. So anyways, what he one thing he does is like every time Chamoth tweets

He's like the first reply and he's like Just says like Like I'm proud of you, son. Or something like that. Like something like completely non standard. So Greg does that with like

Kylie Jenner. And like other people like that, where every time she posts something like babe. Why didn't you like You didn't call me or like be like I'm so proud of you, babe. So it's like as if they're dating. And so he's this like dorky looking white guy account.

And Uh the other day, do you know who Jose Canseco is? Of course. Ben told me the story. So so Jose Caseiko, the base former baseball player, tweets out Uh I need a I need a smart contract developer for a new token a token developer for a a new token I'm gonna launch. It's just like the classic thing for like Paris Hilton and

Has been has been celebrities that are like ready to launch launch their own crypto token. Here we go. That what could go wrong? So uh so Greg replies and Greg's like, uh Like whatever, like me. Ben, what did he say? What did he what was his reply? Was it just like pick me, something like that? Uh Oh yeah, he goes, Hey, it's Greg. DM me. How can I help? And Jose replies and goes.

Um he goes. Awesome. Like are you a token developer? And then are you are you a developer or smart f can do you know how to do token development? I think Greg just replies. No way, Jose.

And it's like two hundred thousand likes on that tweet. It's just like one of the most liked tweets on Twitter. And it's just like so good, so dumb. Uh, but anyways, this guy's like crushing it right now. Like he's got like I don't know, a hundred and something, hundred thirty. Well, it's the funny thing is, you know, when you sign up for Twitter, let's say you type Sam, it'd be like Sam's not available. Would you like Sam? eight hundred thousand and six,'cause that's like the next one available. So his is Greg, and then it's like twelve numbers that are like the whatever the default thing would be. So it's like You would never think it's gonna go viral. Yeah, it's Greg one six six seven six, whatever, like you know, like ten numbers line. So what does this have to do though with Okay, that was just my smart contract uh token developer uh tangent.

My next idea, if you're ready to transition. I is Is Um Unbundling a piece of Y C so

Y C does a few things for founders. Why C Puts a stamp on you, it says This is a Y C startup, so all of a sudden your valuation is gonna go up, blah, blah, blah. They kinda coach you, so they say, Oh, you know, come in for office hours, tell us about your idea, maybe we help you pivot your idea, maybe we

Help you stay focused on growth or you know, how to like tweak it so you grow faster. And they do that for three months and then Then they start working on your pitch and then there's demo day, which is like We're you're gonna get to stand in front of investors, you gotta give a one minute pitch, you're gonna raise money. That works, and they have like whatever, a hundred or twenty startups a year now or something doing that.

Um But another s another kind of like course, quote unquote course. I'm very I was th brainstorming, I was like very interested in working backwards from What's a course where the person gets a clear outcome. So this is part of my learnings of like doing a course, which is People don't buy a course for learning.

They buy some change. They buy a transformation for themselves. And so like, you know, for a startup going from unfunded to funded or like You know, no name to like, oh stamp of approval. That's like actually a big change. And so one one transformation and one change that people would buy is Getting their first round of funding.

It's like I'm not just gonna teach you m knowledge that you can may or may not use. It's like I'm gonna help you get funded. And so I was thinking, could you like I've raised probably twenty million dollars in my life and I've helped a bunch of founders raise money. And I think I'm pretty good at storytelling. So I was like

I think I could help. A founder who's got no no funding today, get funding in like A one month period. And I think I could basically just sit you down with the deck. With your story.

And then basically say, Cool, like There's a pretty intense workshopping of your deck and your story to get that to be as good as it can't be. And then there's like A bunch of angel like introductions and like teaching you how to manage your pipeline so that you run this like a process, like a bidding war. Unlike what most people do, which is they kind of try to date one investor at a time and they go kind of slow and they fear rejection and they don't know how to reach out and all this stuff. I could teach you the kind of like the sales process.

I'm investing. And I was thinking, I was like, Oh, you could do this like on a success basis. So L again, like Lambda, which you don't like, but Uh Honest you can align your incentives, which is by the way, I like Lambda. I just think the business model is silly. I think because the thing with education is that

Most people will never benefit from what you're telling them. Right. Well that's the in some ways that's the beauty of Lambda, but it's also the bad side of Lambda, right? The beauty of Lambda is. Their incentive is aligned. So let's say most courses, like let's say for my writing course. I don't care if you're good at writing, bad at writing, and I really don't truly care if you're gonna do it or not because I get paid either way, right? Like I'd love for you to take the course.

And have a big benefit. But the reality is like my financial incentive is not such that If you don't if you if if you don't hit your goals, it doesn't really make a financial difference to me. Whereas for Lambda it does. They have to select people who are gonna Be able to succeed.

And then they only make money when somebody gets what they want, which is a high paying job. So that's the beauty of Lambda, but it's also the hard part about scaling Lambda. Wha what were what were the results from your course, though? Like didn't that go well? Uh it went well. It w so basically okay, so here's the kind of the like the learnings from my course. All right, so can I guess?

Can I guess? Yeah, yeah. We'll do it on each category. So first is Let's just start with the most interesting one, money. How much money do you think I made? doing this course. And by the way, let me get the context.

I taught a course on power writing, which is basically writing to get a result. So Like The writing I type I do, which is like If I'm writing an email, it's'cause I want somebody to reply. If I'm writing a landing page,'cause I want somebody to click the buy button.

I'm writing uh tweet storms because I want people to share it. And like the stuff you learn in school is not the stuff that That actually works in the real world. And so Like copyrighting plus plus. That's the that's the course. All right, so

I do this my guess. 150,000. Very close. So I did 127,000 of top line sales. And then let's just break down the the PL. So So then there's my cost of making the course. So I basically had a guide to like custom illustrations and graphics and things like that. That'd probably be Eight to ten thousand. Seventy five hundred. Um, and he was amazing. And he was really good. And so I'm like I love that. That was that was worth it.

Then there's Maven's feet. Uh so maybe the figure's on the top number, so I should take that number first. 10%. 10%, right? So take out twelve grand. Roughly from hundred twenty seven, then you take out seventy five hundred of Cost Russia, then everything else. Oh then there's payment processing fees. That was another four three or four grand.

And so my net was like one oh I'm I I'm doing the math bad here, but I think it was like one oh five, roughly. Um and then Okay, so so that's kinda like That's the the money in. And so that was off of three hundred and twenty students. I charged uh I the first batch I did at half price. So I charge I think

Four hundred fifty dollars or something like that? Uh, four hundred dollars maybe it was for the for the course. Uh Did you do like an MPS? Yes.

I would bet it was s like out of ten. out of ten. So for those who don't know, net net promoter score basically you ask one question to your audience, which is How likely are you to refer this to a friend on a scale of one to ten, ten being I you know, I absolutely will refer I would absolutely refer a friend to this. One being no way.

Seven point three. Nine point one. That's amazing. Most everything is in a static. Some people didn't reply to the survey. So I I'm assuming the people who really didn't give a shit also didn't reply to the survey. So I gave myself a true NPS of probably eight.

But it was a nine point one on the the stats. So do you think people loved it? I think people loved it. Uh the feedback was kind of amazing. And then I did a survey of like what did you like about it? And basically it broke into three categories. It was like Look, I can't uh you know, the first one was

Do two of those sessions were like Like game changers for me. It's like oh you're cold emailing one. Like that was great. I immediately implemented this and I got, you know, meetings that I wanted. I booked more sales. Like that one I just I used right away. Or like the second one would be like You have one about writing inside of a big company, how to like stand out with your writing inside of a big company.

That was I didn't even know I wanted that. That was a great one. And so everybody kind of had two of the I did seven sessions. Everybody had like two sessions that they were like That was the one and the rest was fine. You know, like the rest was good, but like didn't really like Those two I got my money's worth, the rest was gravy. Um

And then I asked people the other question I asked people was On average. How much value did you get? Like You know, zero dollars the price of admission, like a one X return. three X, five X, ten X, whatever it was.

And then the average per the average answer to that was ten X my money. I got ten X my value. Back out of it. And I was like, Okay, for what I don't know if that's like a scientific question because How the hell are they measuring that? I don't really know. But okay.

Downsides. Guess what the biggest downside was? Because you've done a course before, so Tell me what you what do you predict was my biggest the b the biggest downside of it. Oh. Well, does that include logistics? Like quality So I think they'll probably complain about your camera or your sound or the time.

Uh yeah, timing was the biggest one because I taught it live. Yeah. And so a lot of people, you know, were like, Oh you know, I could I either the time worked great for me, it worked okay for me, or it was horrible for me'cause I'm in Australia and that time zone was awful. Uh so I only watched the recordings. The

The but I meant the biggest complaint I had in doing the course. What was the biggest downside of doing the course? Talk too fast. No, no, I mean like why What was a pain in the ass for me? Well, it's probably just way too much work. Yes. Complete underestimation of the work. Yeah, it's so much work.

I spent probably Fifty to a hundred hours. Like making the content. Which was way more than I thought I would do. I thought it would take me like so much work. An hour or two per session. All right, so let's say two hours per show. That's like fifteen hours of work.

It was like a full day. It was like an eight hour day per per session I made, plus like the actual teaching of it. And then afterwards, what I would do is. So I structure my qu the one the best thing I did, by the way, was I think I don't think I invented this, I'm sure other people do this, but I didn't really know what it's called.

But I basically structured the session like this. It was like all right, you show up. So it's like, hey, we're gonna be here for an hour. The very first thing I do is I say, All right, the promise is this. By the end of this hour. You're gonna be Able to do this. All right, so that's my problem. That's the magic trick I'm gonna show you. Today you can't do that or you're bad at it.

You're gonna be good at it by the end of the time. And I basically would do I'd say, All right, let's say it's a cold email. I'm not gonna tell you anything about cold email. Write a cold email right now. And they would all have to sit there while I'm sitting there watching them. Ten, fifteen minutes, write the thing.

So it was called do learn redo. So I'd have them do it. That that gives the baseline. And they would all share it in the Slack channel. Then I would teach them like not everything about Cold E Mill and be like, Hey Here's the three biggest things you could do to improve your improve cold emails. I'd do some examples.

I'd teach them the theory and then I'd say be like all right last fifteen minutes, you're gonna redo it. And then they would redo it and then they would just have a before and after of their one hour session where it's like a really shitty first attempt. And then like a pretty good second attempt. And then after the course I would take one hour and I would just go through as many examples as I could of students.

And just give them like feedback through Loom. So that was like uh that worked pretty well, but it was like kind of intense for me'cause I'm Basically performing a magic trick live. I don't know what they're gonna do. And so it was kind of high risk. It wasn't like

Like a quick So are you thinking? My wife did it, by the way. Sarah, my wife did it and she sold out. She made ten thousand and like Two weeks maybe? And why did she cap it? Because they told me to cap it.

And I didn't cap mine. She's not like you and me. This is her first time doing like a public facing thing. Right. Um You know, you and I have Uh th you know, tens of thousands of hours of like riffing under our belt and like we know how to perform. She she's just learning and trying to figure out how to do it. By the way, one thing you should tell her best thing I did was I did rehearsals. So for each session, I would invite four kids who were like kind of like

twenty five and under usually. I who can't afford the course and I just say, Hey, you want the course for free in a personal session. I need to do a dry run. you and so I did a dry run for each of the sessions and in doing that I would realize five minutes in like Oh, this is all fucked up. Like I gotta change this. Or like

Wow, this is way too hard when I just asked them to answer. They're confused. Like they don't know what to do. Yeah. So I I needed to do those open mics basically to make it work. Will you do this? Do you think this will be a significant income source for you in the future, or are you gonna quit doing it? So I'm doing it one more time and we're gonna see how that goes. My my goal was basically I put the price back where the original price, so it's nine fifty.

So I'm like, all right, let's see if there's enough demand there at that point price point, because below that, it's not really worth it for me, I don't think. 'Cause you need a lot of students and it's a lot of work. So I'm doing it one more time. In August.

We'll see if it's like Good again. I had a lot of fun doing it. So we'll see if it's fun again or if it's gets like old for me. But then I also have a bunch of other ideas for other courses that I wanna do. So I think I'm gonna teach different courses, which is more work, but I think more fun for me. Can I tell you okay, so now by the way, we're talking about Maven dot com.

Which uh this uh the here's your disclosure. We both have incredibly invested interest in this and I want them to make money. Yeah, because we invested in them. But uh yeah. But I do think they're gonna have to change. I don't think it's gonna work to do live courses I don't think are gonna have it can't be their bread and butter. It's just gotta be w how they get into the market. That's that's my prediction, but we'll see. Well, I started off being like I'm gonna do it recorded and I started recording the content. And I bounced off a few people and I was like, Oh, first of all, recording good content takes a lot of time too. So it's not like it was gonna s it say saves me time when I

You know, it's scalable later, but it takes a lot more time up front. The second thing was People were way less excited about me recorded. And I was like, no, no, look, I'm like It's me.

I'm like planning this out. It's gonna be like as good as I can get it. It's gonna be edited. It's gonna be tight. Versus me live and they're like No, we'd rather just to be you live off the cuff and like not so tight. Like The perceived value of live is way higher. And so I was like okay, if it's easier for me to do and it's higher perceived value, like

That was one Pivot I had to make halfway through of like switching to live. Um All right, let me let me pivot to a different topic. Yeah. You maybe told me about this, but I had Jake research it. I I think you did you tell me about Swimpley?

Yes. Okay. So I like to keep a list of things that I thought are horrible ideas. And ended up doing like amazingly well.

I definitely would put Bitcoin in that category. Like if telling Bitcoin, like the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Ryan Hoover told me about Product Hunt the day he was launching it, and I was like, Just quit. Yeah. Yeah, um If you tell me about it, I have an easy hack to do this. When I I just have a bookmark thing on my Chrome. So whenever I see a startup website that I'm like, Oh, that's interesting.

I bookmark it either into I think it's gonna work or I think it's not gonna work. So I have this like then I can go back like a year later. I could just go click and see how many of those websites are still like up and like doing something. Uh, you know, and I have these bookmarks. I've had this for like five years. So if I saw this next company that I'm about to tell you about, then and this next idea, if I saw that

Five years ago or a year ago. I would be like, Well, like just quit. Why why are you even doing these stupid games? Like this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. So it's explained the name, David's stupid. It's called Swimp. Lee. Is that P supposed to be there or is that a typo?

Uh Swift. Let me see. Is it swimly? It might be swimmly. No, it is swimply. Swimply. That's it. Okay, so we're looking at a Google Doc. That's uh that's crazy. I thought that I wasn't sure if that was a typo, but he wrote swimply on like everything. The way I found this, I was just driving and I saw a billboard and it just said swimply. Rent a swimming pool near you.

And I was like what? And that's what it is. So uh Uh, you know, with everything going on, people are desperate to get out of their homes and they're working from their house and they want to get out. And so they go and they can rent Someone else's pool. Airbnb for pools. If you told me about this four years ago, I'd be like

This is the dumbest thing I've ever done. This is right next to like go out and rent a dog for an hour. But you're a believer? I'm not a believer yet, but the numbers definitely show that I'm wrong. So they've grown two thousand percent since summertime and uh roughly four th what's so if you grow four they've grown four thousand percent.

In a year. What's that mean? Forty X? Four thousand is forty X, yeah. Okay. They just read. But they raised a series A, which I'm shocked. And who's their their their twelve million dollars. So so the idea is like I have a pool in my backyard, I can set like a fifth doll an hour rate.

And somebody who doesn't have a swimming pool in their backyard,'cause that's a big expense, can say say Cool, we'll rent your private pool. We'll rent your pool. We're gonna come swim for two hours, hundred bucks. There's four of us, it's worth it. Like we we're gonna have fun doing that. You like kinda clean up your backyard later.

Um that's the idea. They raise their money from like some ballers, like people who like I think I respect as knowing what they're doing. So I definitely think I was around. Two. Uh Northw Northwest Ventures. They're I mean they're like a huge um A huge thing, right? Norwest.

Yeah. Generic name. Come on. If you're gonna figure out what I've got to do, like a multi billion dollar They're big enough that I ass that they have employees who like vet. Yeah, of course. Uh okay, so their traffic like if you look at their similar web thing, it's pretty nuts. So like January it's uh you know, fifty thousand visitors and by June Like hockey sticking to four hundred thousand monthly visitors, uh according to similar web. So similar webs the exact number's not right, but the direction is correct usually. And so this thing is like doubling.

It's like doubled. last month doubled the month before that, doubled the month before that. So four doubles in a row. And so I got I was I was interested in the space because I found a company that was raising money and what they were doing, and the reason I got interested in this company was we had this guy who I talked about this guy named Preston on a podcast. His name was uh I don't even remember his last name, but Preston. I think he the company he started was called Spatious. Where they would uh do short term

l retail space and rent it out for co-working. Yeah. There's this other company that I'll find or I'll say the name in a second. And what they're doing is you can rent People's homes. Just during the day for co working. Oh yeah, I've heard of that.

And it starts with a C, what's it called? Cozy or some sh I don't know what it is. Yeah, chills I'm just making up names. And again, that idea I thought was the stupidest thing. And then I talked to Preston and he's like, No, these could be legit. These could be huge companies. It's astounding. And so here's a few more companies that that that are interesting. So neighbor is a storage marketplace. And by the way, almost all these I would bet against, and I am being proven wrong consistently. Neighbor is a storage marketplace. They just raised a fifty-three million dollar series B. IMove is an electric vehicle subscription service. So you can um

Uh, they just raise a bunch of money. I'm actually on board with that. It's just like leasing. Kazoo, subscribe to your next car online. Picasa, buy and own a second home with eight others. That's just a timeshare, isn't it? Yeah. And then resort resort pass. You can share uh uh day passes to uh resorts, pools, and hotels. So anyway, kind of interesting. I I this space has always interested me because I've been the one saying how I think it's really stupid and it's not gonna work. But these things are actually. are are are beating my are are proving me wrong.

Right. Uh, by the way, a a you you just said something like share a thing and we were talking about courses. Uh we had this idea a long time ago. I still think it's a good idea. If somebody wants to do this, I'll be uh You know, first customers last year. minority business partner who does nothing. Um, besides give you the idea, which is class pass for online courses.

So I right now would pay like If you said, Hey, I can bring you a student But You're gonna have to you're gonna have to give it to him for fifty percent off, but I can get you volume of students.

And you don't have to worry about getting students. Um I'd take that. And if you basically I think you can work out the math where you can basically get Let's call it a hundred dollars a month from somebody, and then they get access to like

Your course, my course, Sarah's course. Yeah, like ten other courses right now. Um And and get all of them basically Like

And all you can eat pass. So I think there's a class pass for courses that could work for online courses. It's Let me uh could exist. Let me keep being a hater, but there's this company called um Every Every dot.

What is it called? So or every dot two. I think every dot two. Yeah. Um there's guys doing that for newsletters and the guys running it are great. Uh his name's Nathan, really cool, wonderful guy. Uh N I know Nat is a writer there. I like his work. There's a bunch of like interesting, uh great writers on there.

But I think this business model's horrible. Um because Dealing with how you're gonna pay the each writer Seems like a huge pain in the ass, doesn't it?

Yeah, if I'm like a big shop. So if your stuff brings in a sub, you get the bounty of that. You give some to the one bring in subs, like go F yourself. I want to own all of it. Yeah, but you get so you get the majority bounty on yours. So let's say you get fifty percent of those subs you bring in. But you're gonna put fifty percent in the pool, so you're gonna get fifty percent from everybody else. And so it's a but the beauty of it is When you do in paid newsletter, there's this obligation like shit, I gotta write this thing. I can't write One a week, I gotta write

Two a week, it's gotta be good. It can't just be like off the cuff, you know, random stuff. They're paying for this, it's gotta be better than normal blog content. So what they what every does is say, look You just gotta write one good thing a week, let's say. Because the consumer is gonna get ac value from eight other writers in the bundle. And so that's the that's why this works is

For each person, they don't have to carry the whole subscription value themselves. Um they have eight other people contributing to that subscription's value. And they just give away some. You think this is gonna work? I don't know if it's going to work. I think For the concept at least. You're I think it can I think it can work. I think so basically I think

I'm kind of a believer in that that But Mark Andreessen thing that he stole from whoever, which was basically like most businesses just bundling and unbundling. And so I think that Right now, newsletters are all unbundled.

And somebody creating a bundle of newsletters it'll be like the cable package and like You'll Somebody will say, Ah, why am I pay for I don't want to pay for Ten individual subscriptions and Some of them are good, some of them are bad.

And instead if I could just pay a flat fifteen dollars a month and get access to my Ten favorite writers, like great. So I think I think it can work. Are you getting sick of newsletters? Uh no I have fun. I like writing my stuff.

Uh, but I'm I I do it on my terms. So like I'm not consistent this thing I send out every Tuesday, but like if you subscribe to it, you're like Bullshit. You don't send it every Tuesday. You send it like every other Tuesday at best. And so yeah,'cause I just like if I'm doing something else that's fun, I just don't send it. And like you've experienced the pain of my like by like inconsistencies or being late and things like that. Like

It's just kind of like the way I operate on all things and like, you know The good is the good of it is like When I do it, like I'm never just going through the motions. Like I'm always trying to bring it But if I don't have something to bring, I don't like do it. Or like sometimes I'm I don't send the thing'cause I'm doing something interesting, but that'll make the next week's letter more interesting because I was doing something interesting. Um

So that's my only way of sustaining newsletter things. I think when you once you treat your hobby like a job. uh that's like a recipe for failure. And that's what happens to a lot of people. They they think it's fun to blog. And then they want to make that their career? And then you know, they make the grave, grave mistake of turning your hobby into a job, uh, when it when you weren't you didn't want it as a job really.

Yeah, i it it's hard. It's fucking hard as someone who has Not I haven't written them, but I have owned a newsletter company that has sent three hundred and sixty five newsletters times four years. It's very hard. By the way, I heard uh a a another newsletter company that shall not be named.

uh say that oh you know our subscriber base is like you know the third largest City in America. And I thought that was just a badass way of saying like we have whatever two million subscribers, three million subscribers, or whatever it is. Uh, and I think you should steal that and start saying things like that. Yeah, I like that one. It's kinda like I think the skim was the one who said um

The skim said like If we were a morning show, we would be the number one most popular morning show. Right. Um Another great way of framing. That's part of that's part of the power framework. It's just like how do you say you frame it.

It's a bit bullshit but it is Yeah, it I it is useful. Right. Um Do we want we wanna wrap here or do we wanna go to one more? Let's do one more fun thing. Do you have one? Otherwise I can pick one. You pick one.

Uh do you want to pick one off your list, maybe? Uh do this Elon filing a patent thing. That sounds good. Okay, so basically I'm working with Jake, our researcher, to like find different signals and figure out what do those signals mean. And so There's something interesting. I've always been I've always been interested in gas stations because, like I said, we said earlier, I'm like into this nerd about America. I love like nostalgia, uh middle America stuff.

And gas stations are interesting to me because we spend a lot of time there. Like I have fond memory memories of gas stations and many of the biggest top one hundred privately owned businesses in America. If you look at one of the biggest privately owned companies in America, most not most, but a very large percentage are gas stations. Right. And so by revenue, gas makes up typically two thirds of sales. For gas stations, but it only makes like one third or less of profit. The majority of profit comes from buying shit on the inside. And Elon Musk recently filed a trademark

for different restaurant services aimed at Um uh uh electric vehicles and and things like that and for food services basically. And so I'm very eager to see what Tesla's gonna do. And also I'm very eager to see how the the modern gas station is gonna change. And so far

So what are the biggest ones? I think the biggest ones are um Our Casey's Quick trip. I there's a few more that are the top ones. They're not doing shit.

Because if you go to a gas station right now for Tesla, it's still a pain in the butt. The Tesla superchargers are way better. And so I'm very eager to see, and I wanted to know what you think. What is gonna happen to gas stations and how are they gonna continue to make you money? Yeah, so I think there's two big changes that are happening. So cars go electric.

then what the hell happens to gas stations, right? Um, do they just convert into electric charging stations or Is it gonna be different? Cause you're charging at home. Right, like I can't fill up my tank overnight. in my garage, but I can charge my electric vehicle that way.

And so maybe those gas stations, they're just not needed anymore. They need to convert to some other use of real estate. Um, you know, it's like Blockbuster on the corner store, when why would I need that when I can just push a button and stream Netflix to my TV? Um The second is uh self driving cars, which is gonna change The game for both gas stations.

And for um Uh parking garages. So uh you don't need as much parking when you have self driving cars. Most of city real estate is parking. Whether it's street parking or parking garages. There's a huge amount that's just parking and

Because cars are idle ninety percent of the time. cars go self driving, they're not gonna be idle ninety cents. So cities are gonna have to like re renovate basically the the the way they use their land'cause it's gonna become totally obsolete. But let's do gas stations for a second. So one theory is

Gas stations become like entertainment hub because actually charging a car takes a lot more time than filling up a gas tank. I think even supercharger takes like thirty minutes, right? To uh to to fill up and to basically to recharge your your Tesla while you're like on a road trip or whatever. And so, you know, what do you what do you do to entertain people during that time? Maybe they're just sitting in their car

Using the the in in car entertainment system, but maybe there's something else that you do with food and drink and T Vs and Sport maybe it's a sports bar essentially that you turn turn this into. The other thing that I think is interesting. Is um

Like I'll give my cousin a shout out. So my cousin Rohan has a startup called stable.auto. So check it out. Yeah, you're not gonna fully grok it from the from the landing page, but but I'll just tell you about it. So it says company stable. Uh the stable like S T A B L E, like a like a stable of horses. Not what? Auto.

A A U T U. Um So so he started off what he started off doing was he he he was like a robotics guy from MIT. So he's like look Um

How do I make it where a a self driving car When it Like self driving cars are gonna need they're great because they're gonna drive people around without a driver, but how are they gonna charge? Okay. They have to go to a charging station and then

Are you just gonna have like a tendons there plugging in? cars and taking them out like How is it gonna do that? And so he was creating like you if you're ever seeing Elon tweeted this out once. Um, which is a robotic arm that would just find the charging thing and would like plug itself in. So it was like a self

A self yeah, like as imagine the gasoline pump could go into your car without you having to pick it up and put it in the hole. So he built a robotic arm that did that. So what my cousin was doing was basically he was just saying, Oh, if Tesla's doing that, but then there's all these companies trying to compete with Tesla. I'll make the robotic arm. for all the other companies. So like every other company has a different like

Charging like kinda like Location on the car. How how would I make machine learning that's gonna find the hole and stick the stick in the hole? Uh basically for for that. And he started doing that, but the problem was

And we I told him this, which was like look Uh like self driving cars are not here. So you're building for a future market, like you don't know when it's gonna happen. Like We all know it's gonna happen eventually. Like that's a little bit difficult. And so um

And so the and you're also building those robotic arms really hard to hard to Built. So he he switched to now he switched to something else, which is basically like software. That basically will Um

It it it basically tells you when you need to go when you should go charge your When you should go charge your electric car. For so imagine like Uber and Lyft, they have these fleets of electric vehicles. uh that are gonna be out in the roads, and that's for sure happening. And so when do you go charge?

If you go wait till you're like almost out. You might miss like peak. peak uh traffic time where you're gonna like get a bunch of rides and make a bunch of money. Um You also might go charge when it's really expensive to charge because electricity costs fluctuate throughout the day.

So what they're building is basically a app that you load into your like uh this is at least the last I heard of it. It's like an app for any driver of Uber or Lyft that has an electric vehicle that will say Now is the optimal time to charge. Go over here. There's a charging station nearby. There's little there's not much traffic for Uber rides right now and the price of electricity is low.

And so it basically that'll work while you have human drivers and then when you have self driving fleets, it'll do that whole thing automatically. It'll basically say, Hey Let's send to this ten percent of your fleet. To go charge right now. Let's keep ninety percent on the road.

And it'll optimize it so you're like saving the most money. Both ways. But let's talk about What do you think is gonna happen? Where's the opportunity right now? I I mean The his idea that

Maybe I I think it's far simpler. Have you ever heard of Bucky's? Yes. Tell people about these. Bucky's is basically in Texas, there's like a

A gas station chain that like People love. They don't just like it, they love it, it's a tourist destination and it's destination for a couple of reasons, I think. I've never been to one, even though I lived in Texas. It

has extremely clean bathrooms. And then they have a bunch of food that people are like obsessed with. It's basically shitty sh sugary food, but it has a funny logo and they serve like brisket. It's just like low quality, but function. Yeah.

But it's huge. So I think that it's gonna break down in two categories. The first categories are just everyday use. I think people are gonna Keep the shit at home. Charge at home. Or

charge while they're in the grocery store. And that's how they and that's and Whole Foods is gonna be the winner. The second thing is is traveling. And I think the way that that's gonna look Is Bucky's. It's gonna be just like it's gonna be a Bucky's meets museum of ice cream.

So when I go to Bucky's, it's a spectacle. I stop there because I'm gonna get like a huge soda. I'm gonna get maybe something to eat, but I'm just gonna look at stupid shit like a bucky knife or a bucky book back, just dumb trinkets going into a bass pro shop, basically. It's like going into a bass pro shop or just looking walking around Ikea. It's just a spectacle. It's gonna be like that with a little bit of museum of ice cream where there's gonna be a little bit even more spectacles that are fun to take pictures in front of. That is where what's gonna happen, I think. And I think like the shells Or

Whatever gas station seven eleven. Seven eleven I actually think could become a bucky because seven eleven has a little bit of nostalgia. Like seven eleven, it it's kinda it could be cool. It's like Subway. It's nice. Yeah, it yeah, it could Subway could be could be uh the next version of Vans. Yeah. So I think there's definitely some people that are gonna go that route, right? They make it a tourist destination and they have a quirky brand.

And that works. I think some people are gonna go full automation. So like in San Francisco we had that thing Cafe X. I don't did you ever buy coffee from that? No, it took too long. I mean it tastes like

A minute, right? It was just stupid. I thought it was dumb. Cafe X is stupid. How could you think that's stupid? That's like that's so good. So if you' no nobody knows who caffeines, describe it. So it's basically

Okay, but here's the thing. So like It's basically a curing machine. Like it's not that fancy. But it looks like it's usually like it's in a building and it has like this glass around it and it's a massive robot arm that's making a spectacle of like Moving the co the coffee cup around and then pouring the milk in it.

In reality, it could like you don't need that stupid fucking arm. It could just be like a Coffee vending machine. Like I don't so that's why it whenever I saw that, I'm like When I see these like in warehouses or and stuff, it's just like you put two quarters in and you just get like a like at the hospital. You never been to the hospital and use one of those like cappuccino machines. Like I don't need this dumb fucking arm to trick me and act like it's doing something special. Okay, so that's definitely one way of seeing it. And I I can see that point of view. I think what's the difference between Starbucks and that vending machine? Is it the quality of the coffee or what what's the difference?

Probably not the quality. So what is the difference? One's a spectacle and one you talk to people. Uh no no no so I'm saying like between the Curig machine and Starbucks like Why do you even need a Starbucks? Why can't Starbucks just be a cure? I like getting out of the house and seeing people.

Okay, so maybe it maybe it's that. If that's the case, then Starbucks is safe. The other case is basically that There's some middle ground of like variety and quality. That's like above a a coffee machine. But

More like a Starbucks where you have like fo forty drinks that you want,'cause you want your soy latte with you know, uh you know, you want you want almond milk and then you want two pumps of sugar and you want light ice or whatever. And like that's how you like your drink. And so You know, you can't get that out of a co out of a normal coffee machine. Either the coffee doesn't taste as good or the drink is not as elaborate. And Cafe X basically says

Cool. What if we could serve coffee faster and cheaper than a Starbucks? What if we could serve Starbucks quality coffee, but faster and cheaper than a Starbucks? Why? Because we have a robot arm that could just like do the thing. twenty four seven.

And never call in sick and never be an employee, never need never have any employee like issues. And uh by the way, I take up one tenth of the square footage. Of a Starbucks'cause it's like a It's like a Giant robot and a hamster ball.

Uh it's like it has everything it needs right there. It takes up like Ten square feet. Whereas bigger. And so what they're doing with Idea with Cafe, I don't think Cafe X specifically is gonna succeed. But I'd be shocked if there's not

A Cafe X type winner. Down the road because You can shove these things anywhere. You can shove it inside of an apartment building and it can make sense in apartment building, whereas like a full surface Starbucks with staff wouldn't make sense in a st in an apartment building.

And so I think that those are gonna succeed. Um and so I think there's a version of the gas stations that's like that. I think there's a version of the gas stations that basically It's just all automation. The charging's automated. And then you go and you push a button and it creates a giant slurpee for you like seven eleven.

But it's just a robot arm doing it. We'll see. We'll see if it works out, but I think it's gonna be more like buckies. At least I hope it will be. Um

All right, that's the episode. I gotta I gotta go get a haircut. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like no day song On a roadless travel never looking back

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