"We're in a TikTok gold rush" - 5 Business Ideas To Start Before 2025
TikTok, Millions, Creators, Business Ideas - November 21, 2024 (over 1 year ago) • 44:24
Transcript
| Start Time | Speaker | Text |
|---|---|---|
Shaan Puri | "Alright, Sam. In the next hour, I am going to **flood you with business ideas**. I am going to create an absolute **lunchroom food fight**, slinging business ideas at you.
You're going to be drenched and covered with ideas. Are you prepared for this?" | |
Sam Parr | great analogy the lunchroom one did you just shut up | |
Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Sam Parr | that was very good I'm ready | |
Shaan Puri | And, by the way, all of these ideas — very *half-baked* — came to me... I would say 75% of them I thought of this morning because we had a guest cancel. We said, "Let's record anyway," and thought, "How about we do some business ideas?"
"Let's give the people what they want." *'Tis the season of giving*, and we're gonna give the people what they want, which is **fun business ideas**. | |
Sam Parr | Well, *the first one* you actually have a lot of intel on, right? You actually use this thing—the first...
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | One: I have some bets. I have some bets on horses, and those horses are currently paying out. I haven't been talking too much about it, but I think it's time.
So, **TikTok**—let's talk about **TikTok**. Right now, if you open up your phone, do you have TikTok on your phone? No? Okay.
For some of you, you might have trouble opening the app because there might just be $1,000,000 jammed in the app and it's a little bit like stuck. So it might be hard to open up because there is so much money available in **TikTok** right now. Do you? | |
Sam Parr | use tiktok as a user | |
Shaan Puri | of course I'm I'm a tiktok addict | |
Sam Parr | oh that's why I don't use it I I had it and I deleted it | |
Shaan Puri | I love *TikTok*. I have a lot of fun on it, but I also have a couple of business bets that are doing really well in this space, and I think right now people are **sleeping on it**. | |
Sam Parr | when you say business bets do you mean things that you own or investments of other people | |
Shaan Puri | I own equity in companies that are doing this | |
Sam Parr | That's what I'm asking. Okay, so you invested in companies that are doing this—not something you *fully own* and are operating, correct? Because... because I'm not [unclear]. | |
Shaan Puri | operate anything at this. Yeah | |
Sam Parr | because that like insight is a little bit different | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, yeah. But these are all—there's something in between. There's like **angel investing**, which is: you write the check, sort of passive. You're on the outside. I would say you're on the other side of the fence; they lob you updates over the fence.
Then there are situations where you own, you know, **10%**, **20%**, **30%**, **40%** of the company and you're active. You're more actively in the loop. You're not active day to day with your hands, but you're active with your ears and your mouth.
Alright. So anyways, right now **TikTok**—TikTok today is a little bit like **Facebook** was maybe 2012 to 2014. If you remember, at that time you were working at a place called **Founders Dojo**, and there was a guy who used to work there named **Moiz Ali**. Moiz Ali today is more famous because he started a brand called **Native deodorant**.
Do you want to give, like, two seconds of what it was like being at Founders Dojo when he was creating Native? | |
Sam Parr | Basically, it was this guy who went to **Harvard**—Harvard Law, I think—so he was clearly smart. He had a small e‑commerce startup that he sold for about **$4 million**, so very promising. But he was still young and he was like, "What am I going to do?"
In the "Founders' Dojo"—my little 10‑person office that I shared with some other guys—he was looking for something to sell. He thought mattresses, he thought a few other things. Eventually he landed on deodorant.
Right in front of us, literally every day, he learned how to use Facebook ads. In a very short amount of time, he scaled his deodorant business from zero—just an idea—to something like **$30–$40 million** in revenue in literally 18 months. He eventually sold it for **$100 million** in cash in about 24 months. All right in front of us. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, **two and a half years** end-to-end, from the time of start to the time of exit. It sold for **$100 million** to **Procter & Gamble**.
Okay, so why did he do that? He picked an interesting category, but he was doing something that not many other Harvard graduates—smart people—were doing. At that time, on **Facebook**, you could get traffic very cheaply and you could get sales very cheaply, and he was able to build up a consumer base in the right place at the right time. | |
Sam Parr | Basically, by the way, I saw his sheet [spreadsheet]. We wrote an article on it, and he sent it to me. I think he was spending **$4**, and each customer we spent **$4** to acquire was then spending **$16** with him. I believe that was the number, so it was like a money-making machine. | |
Shaan Puri | Okay, yeah. I'm not sure of the math, but it was something like that. It was sort of like, you know, a 4:1, 5:1, 6:1 payout on every dollar. Which is very hard to achieve today. Today, you know, 1.5 is the new 4:1 — basically you put in $1 and you get $1.50. That same machine used to give you $4 for every dollar. Man, those are the good old days.
Well, the good old days are right now on **TikTok**. So what's actually happening?
Here's the breakdown of how this actually works. You create a product of whatever type — it could be digital or it could be physical — a great product. Now I want you to look at something: go down on our sheet. On page 4 there's an infographic from a brand called **Goli**. You know what Goli is — it's *apple cider vinegar* gummies. They just sell gummies like gummy vitamins, but specifically ACV (apple cider vinegar), which was kind of a health/wellness trend and craze. Now Goli... | |
Sam Parr | Dude, first of all, you could put anything in a gummy. I guess it started with weed — understood. Then I do creatine that way. Now you could do the last thing I thought you could possibly do in a gummy, which is **vinegar**. Yeah. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, and actually, if you drink apple cider vinegar, it tastes horrible. The Goli gummies taste great — it's apple cider vinegar *without the pain*.
Goli itself was a business that grew like crazy, from 0 to **$100 million** in revenue. I think they ran into financial trouble; I think they had to sell or declare bankruptcy or something like that. They basically got way out of their skis. The group that bought it has basically restarted it, and one of the main things they're doing is this TikTok creator method that I'm talking about.
Look at this infographic: this is a rewards program for TikTok creators. So, if you're a TikTok creator, not only do you get a little kickback on what you sell, but if every month you hit a certain sales target, you can get something.
Low tier — **$1,500 GMV** [GMV = gross merchandise value]: you can get an iPad.
Next tier — **$4,000 GMV** (meaning you sell $4,000 worth of product): you get an iPhone.
At **$15,000 GMV**, you get an all-inclusive trip to Aruba.
At **$50,000 GMV**, you get a Rolex.
These rewards stack: at higher tiers you get the Aruba trip, the iPad, and the Rolex.
Now, the high tiers: there are people that have done **$1,000,000 GMV**. They get a condo in Miami. I think this is for a month of hitting that GMV target. So they're going to creators and saying, "Hey, do you want this condo in Miami? It could be yours."
Creators is one way that you can make money on TikTok. You don't even have to build the brand or the service — you could just say, "I am going to sit here and figure out how the fuck to sell apple cider vinegar gummies." | |
Sam Parr | And if I do this, dude... if you get a million, they give you a *Lamborghini*. Yeah — oh my god.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | And there are people who've achieved these targets, okay. So this is their program right now — this is who you're competing against.
If you're going and trying to recruit these creators, it's like you're a **Division I college basketball program** trying to get McDonald's All-Americans to come play for your program.
"There are guys who say, 'Oh man, there's this kid in Wichita. This guy's just a *creative genius*. He just sits in his bedroom and figures out the best hooks, the best angles.'"
Brands are putting him on retainer — $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month — in order to get this guy to create for them. This is what's happening right now in the creator space. | |
Sam Parr | how many views do the big videos have | |
Shaan Puri | I mean, millions—tens of millions of views. They can get, like, 1 million likes on a video. So if you get 1 million likes, you might have had 5 million or 6 million views. | |
Sam Parr | This is crazy — there's a guy dressed up in scrubs talking about it. I have no idea if he actually works in the medical industry, but because he's wearing scrubs I'm like, "Alright, what do you gotta say? Alright, my friend."
A lot of you who listen to the show listen because you want to start a company but you're not sure what idea to choose, or you may not even have an idea. You like our podcast *"My First Million"* because we've done a lot of the work for you researching all these business ideas.
Well, my friends, we've made life a lot easier for you because **HubSpot** just put together an entire list of resources you can use to find a market opportunity and validate your next business idea. If you're looking for a market-size calculator, tools to identify market trends, or a huge list of ideas to get started — there's a link below. Click it and you can have access to the whole thing. It's **completely free**.
Now, back to the show. | |
Shaan Puri | Okay, so Golgi did this Gurunanda teeth whitening. Are you familiar with this? | |
Sam Parr | I think the **teeth-whitening area** is full of scammers, and I think that you are *not* a scammer for using *TikTok Shop*. But I think a lot of these scammers use this shit—this TikTok thing, this way. So it doesn't surprise me that a teeth-whitening company would be using it.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | I'm not | |
Sam Parr | by the way I'm not saying these guys are scammers at all but do you know what I mean | |
Shaan Puri | yeah but but I'm also not saying they're not | |
Sam Parr | No, no, no, no, no, no. I have no idea about this brand, but I know I've seen a lot of *bullshit* teeth-whitening companies. In the research, I'm like, "Oh, this does nothing." | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, I don't know the effectiveness of any of these things. All I know is that they're selling a lot of product. I think the **Guru Nanda teeth whitening** is the number-one selling product on all of **TikTok**, and TikTok is basically the most used app in the country, right? So you have this top-selling product on the top-selling network—it's pretty insane. | |
Sam Parr | and so if they're the top on tiktok how much revenue do do you think they do | |
Shaan Puri | I have tried to back into this. I don't—I don't know the *exact* number. I don't want to say a number that's going to be *way off* on this. | |
Sam Parr | podcast crazy to say like $5,000,000 a month | |
Shaan Puri | I don't think that would be crazy. Now—okay, let me put it that way: the brands that are doing this strategy well are doing really well.
And, by the way, this creates a **halo effect**. You sell the products directly off that one video, but then people hear about it. When they later see the ad, the ad performs better because they've heard about the product before: "Oh yeah, I've seen 10 videos of this product."
Now, when you put the paid ad in front of me, those 10 organic impressions have paid off, or I go search for it on Amazon. Amazon then takes that signal and says, "Wow, people really are searching for this name; maybe we should surface it higher." Or Google says, "Wait — we should surface this higher; people are searching for this brand keyword." So in that product category, give it more rank.
There's this multiple multiplier effect of this. | |
Sam Parr | I have to imagine this is fairly mainstream, though, because marketers are *like piranhas*: when there's flesh in the water, one person tells another and they all flock to it until they eventually *ruin it*. So how much life does this still have, and how mainstream is this among brands? | |
Shaan Puri | Let's say it's in the red zone still. So, basically, it's not as good as when I first discovered it, and I didn't want to talk about it on the pod because it's *too good*. Right? Like when something's just "absolute gangbusters" and it's an unfair advantage—you feel like you know a secret nobody else knows. It's not there.
However, more importantly, it's still at a spot where you can go do this today. It would still work if you just go and do this today. So it still works, but you're not the only one doing it. Both are true. | |
Sam Parr | I have you and about ten other friends in the e-commerce world, and every business complains about a variety of things with software — churn, whatever. With e-commerce, the complaint oftentimes is **cash flow and inventory**.
You're saying huge numbers. Let's say hypothetically **$5,000,000 a month — $60,000,000 a year**. But is that actually a good business when you're doing this? Or is this one of those things where if you get big, you still end up broke? | |
Shaan Puri | Look, **if you're bad at business**, you'll find a way to lose money in any business.
The example I gave you, right — *100 of $1,000,000* [unclear phrase] — basically went bankrupt along the way. So there are ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
There are also people that are absolutely printing profitably with this, and I've seen both examples. I don't think it's about the model. I think it's about how well you actually run your business and how much common sense you use.
One of the great things about this from a cash-flow perspective is: in a normal e-commerce business, you put up the money for the ad. You put up the capital at risk in order to get users. With this, you only put up free product at risk — so you send inventory... | |
Sam Parr | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | To the affiliates: the affiliates create the content. **You pay nothing for that ad until it generates a sale.** | |
Sam Parr | dude so if you're a digital product you crush it here | |
Shaan Puri | Exactly. I have a couple of examples of digital products as well in my list. Okay—here we go. That's a long setup for **5 ideas** that I think you could take onto *TikTok* and crush with right now.
Number 1: I want you to watch this video—go scroll down and look at the link that says **"Botox."** The video starts: **"Face taping is my jam."** Then the other girl goes, "Tell me about this," and she replies, "If you had told me 14 months ago that I would not be doing Botox and I would be taping my face instead, I would have said, 'You're effing out of your mind.'"
What a hook, right? This girl's basically saying, "I used to use Botox and now I use this," and the other girl's like, "Tell me more." This video itself has a quarter million likes (about 250,000 likes). | |
Sam Parr | I don't know | |
Shaan Puri | how many views this thing has | |
Sam Parr | By the way, they have it so usually it's like "bros" — it's dudes discussing stuff in a podcast setting, and then that becomes the meme: "This is like two pretty women— is this even a real podcast?" | |
Shaan Puri | or are they like one is a lot of people fake these but | |
Sam Parr | this is the wellness | |
Shaan Puri | The Process podcast—so that video has 55,400,000 views. To be clear, they're not selling a product. Look at the comments: every single comment is "what's the brand? Anyone know the brand?" She says there's this Japanese face tape. Saying "Japanese face tape" versus just "face tape" already elevates it, and everybody's asking for the brand. Nobody knows what's going on. Some people are criticizing it—it's a polarizing, visual thing. Those are good attributes when you want to sell on TikTok.
**Idea 1: Botox face tape.** You could make $50,000,000 in top-line revenue. I'll say 15% margins, so... whatever that comes out to in the next 18 months. Okay, let's be more conservative: 24 months. If you hit this, you can make about $7.5 million profit. You could build a brand.
If you look at the market, there are a lot of people on TikTok who obviously care what they look like—aka everybody. There are many people who are Botox-curious but will never pull the trigger because it's either too expensive (individual Botox treatments are like $1,000) or it feels too extreme. They're crossing that threshold into plastic surgery and they don't want to do it for that reason. Maybe they'll be judged. Maybe it's a matter of self-respect. Maybe they have to go somewhere and it's uncomfortable—it's like [unclear: "himss"], right? There are a bunch of barriers and reasons why you wouldn't do it. | |
Sam Parr | dude I looked up if this works on chat gbt the answer is no | |
Shaan Puri | Health and wellness is one of those things, right? I don't do those little—do those jade face rollers work? Or just putting cucumber slices on your eyes and doing this...
Ari came on here the other day. I was like, "Ari, you're glowing." She's like, "I did a chemical peel." I was like, "I don't know what that is—tell me more." There's a whole world of beauty treatments that fall on a spectrum of effectiveness and cost; they land somewhere in between.
All I'm saying is that *I think this could work*. I don't know if red light therapy is going to change your skin and your hair, but it's selling, and that's kind of my... Right now I'm not a doctor—I can't make health claims. | |
Sam Parr | I have a friend who is a doctor. She does Botox for people. She was at my house with her kit, and she said, "I need to, like, test this out." We were like... | |
Shaan Puri | did you get botox curious | |
Sam Parr | I was looking at her and I was like, "**Whip that — whip that sucker out, baby. Let's do this.**" So she gave me a little injection about six weeks ago. | |
Shaan Puri | where | |
Sam Parr | "It was in my forehead. I was like, 'I don't even know if I want to do this, but I'm a guinea pig. You've got a needle, you've got drugs — I'm gonna try it.'" | |
Shaan Puri | "I would love to hear this *excuse* you're about to make right now. You're like, 'I like science, and I just thought... you know, I wanted to be a supportive friend of hers and I wanted to support small businesses.' What are your other reasons that you did *Botox*? Tell me."
</FormattedResponse> | |
Sam Parr | let's make | |
Shaan Puri | a list of sam's reasons you did botox besides I wanted to look better go ahead | |
Sam Parr | "Looking dope naked. I mean, that's the only reason why anyone does anything, right? But it was... I got so many compliments afterwards." | |
Shaan Puri | did you really | |
Sam Parr | Yes, I got so many compliments and it was free.
People kept saying, "You look really young," and I was like... it made me self-conscious about how I used to look.
And dude, *you're hooked.* Have you ever—? You would never do that; you're not into that. | |
Shaan Puri | no dude come on | |
Sam Parr | would you what would you say if your wife wanted to do it | |
Shaan Puri | I think my wife does want to do it, but she's in that boat where she's like, "I don't really want to do it, but I'm curious."
It's the same. I bet you if somebody was at the house and had the kit and was like, "Yeah, I can do it right now," I think she would be like, "You and I..." I think her forehead would start looking—yeah, smooth or whatever it does. | |
Sam Parr | "Yeah. She was right here, and I was like, 'Yeah—I mean, if the needle is right there, just stick it in me. *Let's do the damn thing.*'" | |
Shaan Puri | So it was awesome to Taco Bell right now, but DoorDash—if it brings it to me—I wouldn't not eat it. Yeah. | |
Sam Parr | if it's there so yeah I guess you could say I'm botox curious | |
Shaan Puri | I think I'm best beyond curious I think I'm botox activated | |
Sam Parr | alright what's the next one | |
Shaan Puri | Alright, next one. Another one in the beauty space — and this is a theme here: **beauty products tap into a core human desire**. They are visual by nature, they can have before-and-afters, and they are, obviously, high-margin businesses when you can build them.
So I want to take anything that worked in the D2C space in the prior waves of e-commerce and see if I can build a **TikTok-native distribution strategy** around it. That's a lot of fancy words to say: if it worked with **Facebook** ads, I'm going to see if it works with **TikTok** videos.
One of the big winners — I think she spoke at your conference — was a brand called *Madison Reed*. | |
Sam Parr | dude there's a location right out the street from my house I think they do really well yeah | |
Shaan Puri | So, **Madison Reed** has built a real empire around hair color. I don't know the full story, but basically... hair color is not a new idea. There were many brands that existed.
My mom has been buying this ever since I was a little kid. She would go to **Target** and buy dark browns because she didn't want graying hair. Or my sister, if she wanted to try it. *Damn.* | |
Sam Parr | you're gonna do your mom like that | |
Shaan Puri | Oh, dude. Dude, if I'm great up, you don't think my mom's great up, like—obviously, obviously.
And so, you know, my sister would, if she wanted to try having lighter hair for a season, whatever, go buy hair color. So *Madison Reed* basically built a, you know, kinda online-first distribution strategy—so a bunch of Facebook ads—and built a huge brand in this space.
I think *Madison Reed*—I don't, I don't know what they're worth, but I would not be surprised. | |
Sam Parr | I just looked it up. Top-line revenue grew **20%** last year to **$150,000,000** in revenue.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, so the valuation was something like **500 million+**, so huge success.
I think you could do a new **Madison Reed** on **TikTok**. I think that's just a bet worth taking — same idea. Maybe you have some new, novel angle: maybe it's easier to apply; maybe it's less messy in cleanup; maybe it uses less harsh chemicals so it doesn't damage your hair as much. Come up with your reason why this is new and build a brand off TikTok.
You could do this again with creators who are going to use the product, show the customers, build trust, build your brand, and get people searching for your brand. There's always going to be a new wave of people who are interested in this. For example, people whose hair is starting to gray — there's always a new generation — and whatever media they consume is where you need to be in order to sell to them.
Remember "Touch of Gray" or whatever — like the men's hair-color one? They did it on TV ads, and then Madison Reed did it with Facebook ads. Whatever the next generation is, they're probably going to get sold to over **TikTok** and **Instagram Reels**. | |
Sam Parr | And you know what's funny is—you said there's a new generation that wants this stuff—but you know what has not changed and will always be the same is the hooks. **The hooks that worked in 1910 will still work today.**
For example, there's this Wall Street Journal ad that tells the story of two young men. When both graduated college, one young man got a Wall Street Journal subscription, and because of that he got a better career. It tells a story. There are so many ads that replicate that story or that idea successfully. If you Google "best Wall Street Journal ad of all time," they'll cite that ad.
So what I like to do is find old ads from as late as the 1930s to 1940s—print magazine ads—and just see what's an interesting line, the psychology, the human-nature vibe of it, and just rip it. For example, there's this one very famous ad where it says: "They laughed at me when I sat down, but then when I started to play the piano..." | |
Sam Parr | And that's called the *curiosity gap*, which is—do you remember the brand? "BuzzFeed." And then what was the other one called, "Upworthy"?
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | upworthy I remember it | |
Sam Parr | It was like, "10 reasons why [blank]. You're not gonna believe number 7." That's the same hook as that piano ad.
It's really fun to find old ads and ask, "What's the *human nature* element of this?" — then replicate it on *TikTok*. | |
Shaan Puri | Exactly, exactly. Great way to find hooks.
Okay, here's a different category. So I did beauty — let me give you a different one: *self-help*. One of the top-selling products in the last year is something called the "Shadow Work Journal." Have you heard of this? | |
Sam Parr | no but that's a great name shadow work journal | |
Shaan Puri | so you get a if you if you go look on amazon or | |
Sam Parr | tiktok I've seen this I have seen this | |
Shaan Puri | So these Amazon listings for this currently have over **5,000 ratings**, and this is like a self-published type of book. This journal on **TikTok** has sold over **100,000 copies**. You know how rare it is for a book to sell 100,000 copies in the first year that it ever existed with no other promotion. This was a huge success.
Basically, people on TikTok would have the book open and they'd be like… "I gasped when I read this line." Then someone would say, "Alright, what's the line?" and they'd read you this kind of heavy quote from the journal.
It was emo. People would be like, "I finally figured out my… my true shadow." It gets into this whole gypsy-girl type of vibe. There's a whole group of people who love therapy and horoscopes — these weird Venn diagrams of people who are really into the mystic self — and this book capitalized on that.
I think today, if I were to write a modern-day version of, you know, Tony Robbins' book (at least "Of Heart Within") or Mark Manson's book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, and I pumped, let's say, nine months and a quarter — $1,000,000 of effort — into seeding it on TikTok, I think I could by far have a bestseller. I think I could sell, you know, millions of copies of a book. | |
Sam Parr | this isn't a book right is this like one of those things where it's like | |
Shaan Puri | a journal | |
Sam Parr | It's like two words, or two pages—three pages of writing, and then a week's worth of notes. | |
Shaan Puri | No, no, no. *This is not like a planner* — it's not like a daily planner. I mean, I haven't read the whole thing, but it's basically a lot of text content.
Then there are fill-in-the-blanks, or like the prompt "what's that for you" in a box, and you write it in your box. But it's not just days; it's not just a journal you need to fill out yourself. | |
Sam Parr | Have you seen *Designing Your Life*? Is that what it's called?
Yeah — *Designing Your Life*. It's a book that hits all the check marks. It's by, you know, a Harvard psychologist who spent 30 years studying happiness and lifestyle design. | |
Shaan Puri | stanford I think yeah | |
Sam Parr | Yeah. They wrote a book on this — it's a cool book; I read it. Now they have a journal that goes along with it, and you can just look at it and see what works and what doesn't.
But, by the way, I don't know if this angle would work with you. Have you Googled the author of that "Shadow"? </FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | yeah yeah she's | |
Sam Parr | very aspirational aspirational | |
Shaan Puri | she's darn different to me | |
Sam Parr | very aspirational look | |
Shaan Puri | At that point, nobody knew—nobody could see that when they're buying, because they're just watching a TikTok. It didn't look like a commercial for the book; it was just somebody saying how a line in the book really spoke to them or how the book changed the way they view things.
There's a whole TikTok hook that's very famous. It usually starts with someone saying, "Do you have any book recommendations?" Then they zoom the camera in really close to their nose and eyes and say things like:
> "I have books that will change the way you even look at the world.
> I have books that will be so good you will never be able to look at a man again."
They'll mention romance books or whatever, and sometimes say, "I have books that will melt the frontal lobe of your brain." They go really intense with it, and that's a common, memed hook they use. | |
Sam Parr | so the first it's like the first video by | |
Shaan Puri | I like the way you were like, "I don't know if you could do this: *this girl's hot*." That was basically what you were trying to tell me. | |
Sam Parr | Well, she's a **25-year-old**. I'm looking at this **New York Times** article, by the way — she's 25, which is just amazing. She's a really pretty 25-year-old woman, and that's **TikTok**'s demographic. You know, "you're a great voice" — you're a great voice in TikTok world. [trails off] | |
Shaan Puri | Videos are not her. The videos are whatever the videos are from the creator. The creator just looks how the creator looks — they don't look like her. | |
Sam Parr | This is amazing, by the way. I think at one point you were like, "I feel like I'm riding a horse a few years after Henry Ford invented the car." It's just... you can't compete. When I see these videos and these plans, I think to myself, "I can never compete in this world of **e-commerce** — this is just insane."
The way you were describing zooming in on someone's eyes... if I were in that meeting trying to figure out how to do it, or in my bedroom at night trying to write this script, I would have thought, "This is *cringe*. I can't do this." | |
Shaan Puri | do you | |
Sam Parr | know what I mean be able to push post yeah I'm like I I can't you you know what I mean it's really hard | |
Shaan Puri | I totally get what you mean. And, by the way, I'm not saying that these are easy to do. I don't mean to say that—I just mean that somebody's gonna do these. I think the way to think about this is: *what are your attributes?* So, for you and me at this... | |
Sam Parr | If we wanna do something that's gonna be you know | |
Shaan Puri | Successful. We have other **attributes**, like—well, I could just use capital. *I have a lot of capital; I could just invest in things that are already working.* That's an easy way to make money.
I have a good network — a unique network where I know a lot of people who are doing interesting things, and they will uniquely let me into something. Okay, that's cool. Maybe I have this audience from the podcast, so I have attributes.
If your attributes are: "I got a *shit ton* of time, I have nothing to lose, and I'm pretty shameless with my phone," right? | |
Sam Parr | and I'm 24 and I grew up like mastering this stuff | |
Shaan Puri | "Yeah, I’ve just been *effing* around on **TikTok**, or I understand the *meta-game* here better than whoever is the brand marketing manager or the head of paid acquisition for **Madison Reed**—or whatever. Then you’re the one, right, **Moise**?
It’s like, I get that I can go to **Facebook Ads** and tinker on this all day in a way that Procter & Gamble’s head of marketing is not going to do. They’re going to be buying Super Bowl ads; they’re not going to be sitting in **Facebook Ads Manager** every day doing that.
But you get what I mean, right? You have different advantages than the incumbents do. If your advantage is that you grew up on these networks, or you’re willing to hustle in ways that they’re not—willing to sit there, slide into DMs, and send out free product to do all this stuff—you can win. And you can win in these categories that already exist." | |
Sam Parr | When I was with Moiz during that — I mean, when I say "with him," like he was just, you know, we weren't close; we were just acquaintances — but I would see him on his computer. He'd say, "Everyone, check this out," and he would track the numbers every single day in this spreadsheet.
He'd say, "We just changed this number from 1% to 1.25%," and then it was like: now that 1.25% is the standard for that day. "Now we're going to add this one new change — we're going to add a yellow or a red arrow pointing at this one thing. Boom, we just got that 1.25% to 1.4%. Tomorrow we're going to do that." It was very methodical.
I would joke, "I just come... dude, we're all just **spreadsheet monkeys**," because all he was doing was staring at the spreadsheet, turning 1.4% to like 1.6%, you know what I mean? | |
Shaan Puri | Right. Well, I think, by the way, he's not—he wasn't just like that, kind of, at the beginning. Now he's like, "Oh, he's made it," so he's different.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Sam Parr | no he's | |
Shaan Puri | I asked him a question about our e-commerce business: "Here's how we're keeping track of this. We're trying to use this — I don't know if I should trust this or Google Analytics or Triple Whale or Shopify Analytics. They're all giving slightly different numbers. How did you do it?"
I figured he'd say, "I just kept it simple." He did say, "I just kept it simple."
So I asked, "Okay, cool. Which one — did you just pick one?" He said, "No. I just kept it simple. Every day I went in and I wrote down the numbers for all the platforms — every single day. Here's my sheet."
He was still doing it ten years later. The guy's at $100 million now [speaker's exact phrase unclear], and he wakes up in the morning, sits down, triangulates, and tracks. He said, "Yeah, they never drift between me. I'm more than 4%, but I just do it anyway."
It's kind of like a daily practice — almost a religious or spiritual act. He would do it every day, a sort of offering to the economic gods. | |
Sam Parr | If you're a chef at a bakery and you've worked there for 20 years, you know that if you leave the dough out for an hour versus 45 minutes before you put it in the oven, you're going to have a **very minor difference** because you've done that thousands of times. That's basically the same thing.
Yeah, you know what I mean? You notice these *very small differences*. | |
Shaan Puri | I admire his **tenacity** toward things. I don't think he does anything in a non-tenacious way.
Alright, let me continue — I got two more ideas for you. I did beauty stuff. I did a book, or self-help.
And, by the way, that's how **Mark Manson** made *The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck*: tens of millions of copies sold. He was blogging before that and built a blog audience, and he used the blog audience to launch the book, and that was... | |
Sam Parr | Dude, a blog audience, too, seems so *old-school* when I'm hearing this. A blog takes ten years, hundreds of thousands of words, and potentially hundreds or thousands of posts. | |
Shaan Puri | Dude, I've told this story before, but I'm gonna tell it again because there are a lot of new listeners.
There was a time—about 5 to 10 years ago—when I was building an app that we thought would be a big hit in high school. "Oh dude, teens—teens will love this app," we said. I thought, well, what are we doing? We're all just 20- to 30-year-old guys sitting in this office. We gotta go show this to some teens.
So we went. First, we stood outside a Chipotle and offered, "Free burrito if you test our app." They looked at us like we were creeps, but they took our free burritos and tested the app. Okay, we need more people saying yes. Right now only one out of ten is willing to take a risk.
I asked, how do we get a captive audience—where they're trapped? So we went to a school and said, "Hey, I'd love to come in and teach a class on business, and at the end I'm gonna tell them about our new app. Is that okay?" They said, "Yeah, sure." We basically got to be a substitute teacher.
I remember going up in front of the class—this was like a ninth- or tenth-grade class—and I told them about the app. They were like, "Alright, we'll try it. Just give us the app." I said, "Cool. You just gotta get the TestFlight." We put a link on the... so can we just pull up the link and then you guys just go to this URL? Just go to this link and then you'll get the app, and there's this... get back. | |
Sam Parr | was it was it like sean.com/8jl498 | |
Shaan Puri | Whatever. I was just like, "Yeah — just write it down. Just do this link."
The guy in the back looked up; his phone was all cracked. He looked at me and said, "Links are gay."
I could tell there was no recovering from that. The whole class stopped typing and were like, "Yeah — he's right. 'Links are gay.'" | |
Sam Parr | links are gay | |
Shaan Puri | That's what's like today's blog. It's like, if I said, "Hey, I'm starting a blog because I really want to use this as kind of building my audience to promote what I booked I'm going to do," they'd be like, "Blogs are gay." It'd be like that ninth-grader shouting at me—just absolutely humiliating me. | |
Sam Parr | dude but what's old is new again it'll come back eventually | |
Shaan Puri | Hopefully, hopefully. Alright, so two last ideas: candy and candles.
Click this link. If you're on YouTube, you'll see this on our video screen. It's important to look at these because these are — you're selling a *visual product*. So go down and see where I put the candles. Just watch that video right there. | |
Sam Parr | "Oh my God—it's alright, a **mason jar**. Holy crap. Wait, those are not... are those real Oreos?
So it's a mason jar with a lady dipping what looks like Oreos and animal crackers, as if she's making, like, an Oreo smoothie with whipped cream in a mason jar." | |
Shaan Puri | exactly but the but instead of the smoothie it's wax that's wax | |
Sam Parr | I thought that was real | |
Shaan Puri | because this is a candle no this is a candle so these these that's wax I don't know if the oreos are real or not I can't tell | |
Sam Parr | but that's what I'm saying I can't of course it's not real | |
Shaan Puri | look at the numbers on this video | |
Sam Parr | "Alright, it has 600,000 likes. *Holy shit.* How many views does this have?"
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | I don't know. So this woman—she's just a lady, like a baker. She just made that video. I saw it and thought, "Oh man, this could be a product." Why do I believe this?
So, like I said, I wanted to take things that worked in the *Facebook Ads heyday* and see if I could translate them with a new distribution engine.
Another version of that is to take anything that sells well in an MLM [multi‑level marketing], because **TikTok** kind of works the same way. TikTok is basically: you give your product to a bunch of people, they go and sell it to their network and their community. That's how an MLM kind of works—without the pyramid part of the scheme. But this lady's worked. | |
Sam Parr | So good. Like, I'm clicking their stuff — it's like *Frappuccinos* and shit, like coffee that looks like it makes me want to eat it. I want to drink it, but it's a *candle*. | |
Shaan Puri | I want to eat it, drink it, smell it—I want all of it, right? That's what I'm doing. It's basically a *sensory overload*.
If I see that, I think, "This will perform. This will perform." If we armed creators with this and had enough volume, this content would always perform. It has this oddly satisfying, sort of delicious quality. People who like candles *love* candles.
Actually, I said that wrong: there's nobody in between. You either don't use candles or you love candles. There's nobody who just kind of likes candles—that's a candle purchaser.
So that's why, if you go look up successful MLMs [multi-level marketing]—and I did this one night; I should've done an MFM episode on it—you can break down successful MLMs and try to figure out what product categories they are in. Those are categories you could go into and be successful with if you just took out the MLMs. The same product has the same desire, but | |
Sam Parr | you use a new oils | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, there's a bunch of them. *Candles* is a huge one. I think candy candles could be a category that somebody goes into.
I'll give you one last one: **23andMe**. 23andMe was this really interesting company — it got really big, but the company has blown up; it has basically *self‑imploded*. It still does **$300 million** a year in revenue, but they've basically had the board all resign. They quit. The company's losing money, the stock is in the tank — it's like worth nothing now. | |
Sam Parr | dude they had a major hack too I remember | |
Shaan Puri | they lost 6,000,000 people's dna dude | |
Sam Parr | My *dumbass*—I did it when they first launched, and it's been on there forever. I get an email saying, "Your shit's, like, hacked—like someone else has a..." [sentence trails off] | |
Shaan Puri | weird to email yeah yeah | |
Sam Parr | It was horrible. It was, like... that's probably the **second-worst** hack, besides your bank account. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, it's terrible, but I think—there are others in this space. **Ancestry** has an **AncestryDNA** product, and I think you could sell that through this network.
So I think it's a new way of acquiring customers. I think that type of product—which is a mix of a *digital* and a *physical* product—can be a *subscription* product. | |
Sam Parr | have you seen the food ones | |
Shaan Puri | no what is it as an allergy or what is it | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, so you can. The science behind this stuff is *iffy*. It's not, you know — a lot of people debate if it's *legit*, but that [unclear: "never sensitivity"]. | |
Shaan Puri | is what's wrong | |
Sam Parr | Where it's like... yeah, where it's like, "Which foods are you sensitive to based on your DNA and based on your saliva?"
Which—well, it might be *bullshit*. I actually think it is, but a ton of people do them—myself included. [referring to DNA/saliva food-sensitivity tests] | |
Shaan Puri | **I think it's bullshit. That's why I do it — that's why I'm on a two-year annual subscription.**
So, I think there's a huge opportunity. These are five ideas I thought of this morning, but I do think that the upside of it is... unlike the cliché — people say you can't *get rich quick* — there are actually ways that you could get rich quick.
Moiz selling Native in two and a half years for $100 million — that's pretty quick. "It's the best way to get rich quick," as Moiz says.
By the way, I've seen this firsthand in a couple of the companies we've started or incubated that have been in this space. I guess what I'm saying is the growth here is quicker than I've seen pretty much anywhere else.
I don't think it's easy to do. I think you're competing, like you said, in sort of *sharky waters*. It's not that a lot of people are competing, but all the people who are competing here are very smart and very, very scrappy.
There are a lot of categories out there, and if you can find a category where the traditional incumbents aren't doing this, I think there's a lot of money to be made. | |
Sam Parr | Dude, listen to this story really quick.
So, do you remember there's this company called *Elite Daily*? Do you remember *Elite Daily*? | |
Shaan Puri | it's it's like a blog right | |
Sam Parr | **Elite Daily** was a blog launched, maybe in 2012. Within one year, they scaled it.
It was basically a blog that published a lot of controversial takes—things like "why men should do this" or "why women should do that"—and sometimes it was just a variety of listicles.
The guy who started it—his father was **Jacob the Jeweler**. You remember Jacob the Jeweler, the rapper. | |
Shaan Puri | the | |
Sam Parr | guy who like yeah that was his | |
Shaan Puri | supply the rapper right | |
Sam Parr | Yeah — *Supply the Rapper*, that was his kid. He started this blog when he was 22. This was when Millennials were the young adults and Gen Zers were the kids.
Within a year — maybe about 18 months — it became the most popular blog on the internet, getting something like 100 million monthly uniques. I went to their office in New York City about 18 months in. Their office was a bunch of New York kids, like 22-year-olds, who were being paid like $15 or $18 an hour.
They had rows and rows of cheap IKEA tables and everyone just sitting there on their computers, banging out headlines for articles. They would write just a couple words, post them on *Elite Daily* because they had so much traffic, see which ones got a little bit of traffic, and then go and write out the articles.
Eventually the company sold for **$60,000,000**, which in the media world was like the biggest thing on earth. So *Elite Daily* — if you Google "Elite Daily acquired" — it was just like a massive... | |
Shaan Puri | fast was that how many how many years | |
Sam Parr | This was about 10 years ago, so I don't remember exactly. But I think it happened over roughly two years — it was really fast. They were doing tens of millions in revenue literally within 12 months. It was almost overnight.
I remember going to their office and thinking this was a legit publication, but it wasn't. They had built software that could *guess what was going to go viral*, and they were just banging out viral pieces in that room.
It was crazy. It was an example of people who find one little hack and go all in on it. They dedicate their lives to it and end up building a huge business. This is kind of what this TikTok thing is — people say, “You're telling me if I just get this one mom to share this thing, I'm going to build a whole infrastructure around it?” Outsiders look at that and think it’s ridiculous: “You can’t do that.” But the math says that one worked, therefore they plan to get 300 of them.
The Elite Daily thing was insane to see firsthand. I got to talk to those guys. It was wild. This is the new version of that.
I wasn't particularly friends with the founders; I was friends with some of the employees, so I saw it from that angle. They basically got rich overnight. It was the exact same pattern: find a tiny thing and go all in on it. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, I think it's not for everybody, and it's not easy. My disclaimers would be: why am I not doing this? Well, besides the fact that I don't really want to be running businesses anymore...
Even if I could — even if I wanted to — here's why I wouldn't do this. It's a really frenetic and stressful space to be in, and it's changing like every day. I don't know what the right analogy would be, but it's sort of like *sprinting on quicksand*, and I just wouldn't really want to do it.
If I had no other choice, or if I were wired that way — if that's fun for me — okay, great. I'm not really wired that way. | |
Sam Parr | it's also age age age makes you different | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah. The second thing is that most businesses—like the **terminal value** or exit value—is in how durable, how sustainable, how sticky this is. By definition, this is not super sticky, super durable, or super sustainable.
You get the upside, which is a fast spike—that's more than you could otherwise get organically. But the downside is: 18 months from now, I don't know if any of this will work. You might fall off a cliff. So I think that's the upside and the downside of this.
Then also, for a lot of these, it's physical products—it's e‑commerce, which is its own beast. You have supply chains, fulfillment, inventory risk, and generally shitty margins.
So I think digital products and software, even if they don't grow as fast, can still be a better bet to make. | |
Sam Parr | if you're | |
Shaan Puri | able to go there | |
Sam Parr | So, getting big fast is not necessarily bad as long as you have the right mindset.
For example, a lot of people don't talk about this, but Jeff Bezos' Amazon got huge very fast. They were also Google's biggest advertiser when Google first released advertising, and they grew on the back of Google.
It worked because they were like, "We're going to use this to make ourselves huge," and they also believed, "The customer is always first; we have to provide the best customer service with the best product."
If you combine all those things, you can create something amazing. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, yeah — exactly. I do think, also, one last—**I guess important caveat** on this: if you do this, there are better and worse ways to do it. The worse way is what I see a lot.
I would say the most important variable in something like this is just the **repeat purchase** — how much of a true brand and long-term customer can you build? There are a lot of people I see doing this for products that you would only ever buy once. It's like, man, you're going to go through all the mental gymnastics to get somebody to buy one time, and then the product is not a *consumable* — it's not something you're meant to buy again.
So you're going to have to release a new product — a second product, or a third product of a whole different type — in order to get there. That's playing the hard game on extra-hard mode. I wouldn't recommend doing it. | |
Sam Parr | I think the reason is—if I remember correctly; I'm just remembering this from years ago—that's why Moyse said he didn't do mattresses.
I think he was looking at mattresses right when Casper became a thing. He said, "A mattress is $400 and literally everyone in America needs it, which is great, but you only buy one every eight years, right?" | |
Shaan Puri | So, like, of the products I mentioned, the *Botox* thing — that's a constant. Once you get on that treadmill of, you know, sort of face improvement, it's hard to get off. | |
Sam Parr | tell me about it | |
Shaan Puri | > "Yeah, I know — I know you're feeling burned right now. Come a little closer to the camera; let's take a look at that puppy hair color. You've got to keep doing it. Candles: you burn them, they melt, and you have to get another one, right? So these are things that are **consumables** that have **repurchase** in them." | |
Sam Parr | do we wanna end there and save your last one for another one | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, I had a bunch of other ideas not in the TikTok game, but I think we got excited and used the whole episode for TikTok.
So, if you like this, we probably have **two more episodes' worth** of just pure ideas. Go on YouTube or tweet at us and just comment.
If you're gonna comment on YouTube, just be like, "Yo—more ideas," and tell us your favorite idea of these. | |
Sam Parr | alright thank you that's it that's the pod |