Dumb iPhone Apps Are Making People Rich Again (Here’s how)

- February 24, 2026 (6 days ago) • 46:44

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Pat Walls	When I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing six of them are crushing it with iOS apps. There's the guys we interviewed on the channel who have an app that forces you to do push-ups — they're doing $30,000 a month.
00:17	Sam Parr	So, Pat is here from Starter Story. Pat — HubSpot just bought Starter Story. Yeah, that's amazing. Congratulations.
00:24	Pat Walls	"Thank you."
00:25	Shaan Puri	Is the news out?
00:26	Pat Walls	It is a fit — technically not closed yet. I'm going through a whirlwind. I'm going to try to put on a good face for you guys.
00:34	Shaan Puri	"You're seven days out right now from selling, and when this goes live it is presumably closed. Yet you are nervous — what's that about?"
00:43	Pat Walls	Well, the deal is supposed to close tomorrow, but you know, it's the psychology of it — it needs to be signed, closed, wired. Otherwise I cannot take myself to that place yet; that place to celebrate or tell people or anything like that. It's kind of weird doing the production process because content needs to be recorded early to go out, so it's super weird to do an interview before it's done.
01:08	Sam Parr	How did you do with the negotiation? Do you feel like walking us through how you approached it and how you think you did? Give yourself a score there.
01:14	Pat Walls	I had a number in my head before any of this conversation happened. When it just came to me, I started talking to ChatGPT about it — having a little conversation about what it was before even the sale or any conversations happened. ChatGPT asked, "What would be my walk-away number?" I remember thinking back to what that number was, and when I returned to the negotiation it sort of was that number. I thought, "Okay, well — that would have been my number before any sale influenced me." I negotiated to that number because I wanted to be authentic in my negotiation — that was truly my number, not something I made up for some other reason.
01:55	Shaan Puri	Do you feel any bit of regret because you're like, "Oh — I got my number. I should have asked for more"?
02:00	Pat Walls	Yeah — 100%.
02:02	Sam Parr	You haven't. If that doesn't happen, that's the final stage for maximum regret, and then it turns to maximum relief when it's done. Yeah, yeah. Alright, so let's explain: what is Starter Story? People don't even know.
02:14	Pat Walls	Starter Story is a lot of things, but it started out as a side project while I was working a nine-to-five job because I couldn't start a successful business. So I said, "Why not just start interviewing founders and sharing their stories online?" Maybe I will find a co-founder through that, or I'll find a good idea through that. Long story short, it took off. We found other mediums: we had the blog with the case studies, we had products, we had community, and we had a YouTube channel. It is all built around interviewing founders, doing anywhere from $10K to $100K per month.
02:46	Sam Parr	"Let me ask you: what'd you get right? Because this idea of 'hey, I'm gonna interview founders about — you know — how they did it' isn't a new idea. You did this only a couple years ago. How many years has it been — three? Four? How long has it been?"
03:00	Pat Walls	I've been in the game longer than you might think. Eight years is when I officially started.
03:05	Shaan Puri	The business.
03:06	Sam Parr	Even eight years ago, that wasn't a completely novel idea. But you did well with it, right? You separated yourself from the pack and made it a success. What do you think you got right that others didn't? And I really hope it's not just, "I worked hard," you know.
03:20	Pat Walls	Yeah. I think one thing that—now that I'm looking back—what we got right was that we required you to share your revenue to get on the website. A lot of founders at the time didn't want to share those things because they had investors, it was private, or whatever. We made it a requirement to share your revenue on the site. This is something we got from Indie Hackers at the time, which was big on that too. Shout-out to Cortland, who built that. Once you could see the revenue, you didn't want to read a story about a business without knowing how much revenue they're making. You want to know: how's this business doing? Okay, now I want to learn from this business. So having that revenue number at the top was really, really big.
03:54	Shaan Puri	If you guys Google "Starter Story case studies," you can find one — it's called the Full Case Studies Database. Early on, you were really interesting because you would interview people. I always thought I was in a very small niche of people who liked this, but I think it's actually a lot of people. I love numbers; I'm obsessed with numbers. You would do these interviews with people and they very clearly were not interviews of you speaking. It was as if you just sent people a Google Doc — the same Google Doc over and over and over again — and you asked questions and they typed out the replies. Then you created a graphic at the top. One example said Brewmate. The header read: > "I grew a drinkware brand to $1,100,000 per month at 23 years old." It listed Jacob, and it said his revenue per month is $12,000,000. There was one founder and there are 53 employees. You did such a good job of just outlining those numbers. Once you had about 100 of these, I could sort through them — D2C, SaaS, all these things. Frankly, if I was just trying to clone someone's company — that's probably not the right word — figure out what business model I wanted to do...
05:11	Sam Parr	"Company, but some asshole was going to do that."
05:13	Shaan Puri	Yeah, but if you wanted to—research is a better word—you and Indie Hackers were the best. You had a bunch of legends early on, like David Hauser from Grasshopper and many people like that. It was really cool.
05:29	Pat Walls	Every single week, I talk to founders, as I mentioned, who are doing between $10k and $100k per month. I also speak with people whose businesses have recently taken off. I have these conversations every single day and see what's working right now. We can go over some of that if you want.
05:46	Sam Parr	Yeah, give us one.
05:47	Pat Walls	"Yeah, sure. What do you guys want to talk about? I have a couple of options for you: - We can talk about iOS. - We can talk about YouTube SEO. - We could talk about APIs. - We could talk about B2B video. What's exciting to you?"
06:01	Shaan Puri	Let's do iPhone apps, because to me that sounds like ten years ago.
06:05	Sam Parr	Yeah, that was probably the most surprising one on the list, right? It's like, "Wait — that's the... that's the now opportunity." I feel like that was the 2010 opportunity.
06:14	Pat Walls	Right, right. So, yeah, it might feel like it's an old opportunity or it's too broad. But again — this is not something I read on Twitter, this is not something I just came up with through ChatGPT. This is what I'm seeing when I talk to 12 founders a week: six of them are crushing it with iOS apps. This is where this is coming from. A couple examples: there's a guy we interviewed on the channel who has an app that forces you to do pushups before you can go on social media. When you scroll, it blocks you, and then you have to put your phone out and prove that you've done the pushups. They're doing about $30k a month — actually a lot more; I can't disclose the exact number, but after we interviewed them they told me some crazy numbers. There's another one that does basically the same thing — it makes you pray, makes you do a prayer to God before you can go on TikTok.
07:04	Sam Parr	Yeah, just like God intended. Yeah, yeah — to enter heaven.
07:09	Pat Walls	Yep, there's a feature in the iOS API (or something like that) that allows you to screen‑block apps. So there are tons of apps like this—or just basic blocking apps. There are a bunch of productivity‑related apps that are popular in that space; they have a sort of almost gimmick element to them. But you see it on TikTok, you see it on social media, and you're like, "Oh, let me try it." Okay — I want to do something. I want to get a little healthier, or whatever.
07:32	Sam Parr	And... are these okay? So, I see it: "push-up, push-up, time blocker."
07:36	Pat Walls	Right. Push up after scroll — that's the one.
07:39	Sam Parr	Push Scroll. Okay, gotcha — you go Push Scroll. Okay, Push Scroll Screen Time. So you replace doom-scrolling with a healthy habit. It literally has a picture of a guy doing push-ups with AI watching. Then it says it can limit the apps you're addicted to, and basically you earn it as you make progress. Now here's my question: are these doing the same kind of thing — like you make a fun, novelty app and then do massive TikTok content by giving or paying influencers or affiliates, or basically getting a hundred or a thousand pieces of content posted every week? They'll come up with their own hooks, like, "Oh my gosh, y'all, check this out — I haven't used Instagram at all this week because of [the app]," right?
08:23	Pat Walls	Or, yep.
08:24	Sam Parr	Here's where these gains came from: Instagram. What? And then it's like, "Hey, you know — is that the playbook that they're all doing?"
08:30	Shaan Puri	"Sean, you should become a TikTok affiliate. That's pretty good."
08:32	Sam Parr	"That was kinda natural."
08:34	Pat Walls	What was really cool about this app—and this is a cool story worth telling—is that they didn't actually build the app first. They created the viral video first. Basically, they made a video about having to do push-ups before scrolling. They pretended the app existed and showed themselves doing push-ups (or whatever). They had created a bunch of other videos about other app ideas, but this was the one that went viral. When it went viral — it got hundreds of thousands of views — they scrambled to create the app, and then it took off. They were able to validate the idea through TikTok and through the marketing show they were going to use, and then build it, which I thought was super cool.
09:12	Shaan Puri	Were they technical?
09:14	Pat Walls	There were two guys. One was the technical guy. The other was kind of the marketing guy.
09:19	Sam Parr	"Push-up guy." Yeah, one guy's just great at push-ups. So this is the opposite of Field of Dreams, right? Instead of, you know, "If we build it, they will come," it's like, "If they come, then we'll build it." I guess—you gotta build it, then they just went.
09:31	Pat Walls	Viral — first, they reversed the whole process, which I think is the right way to do things now. Because imagine creating ten apps and having none of them work; that would take you a year. Or imagine creating one video in one day and having it work — that takes one day.
09:49	Shaan Puri	Alright. Pat is giving you guys something straight out of his playbook: his method for finding a $1,000,000 business idea. It's a template that guides you through seven proven methods to identify 21 problems you can solve. It includes real founder case studies so you can build and validate your ideas fast. If you want the template and case study straight from Pat, you can download it right now—just click the link in the description. Now, back to the episode.
10:12	Sam Parr	Are there other apps—or another genre of apps—that you're seeing that are working?
10:16	Pat Walls	Apps are the new info products, I think. Anything in health, wealth, relationships, productivity, and self-improvement — these are all great spaces. The reason I wanted to share the "dumb apps" is because they're the funniest when you think about them. I'm not saying go build a "dumb app," but build anything in these sorts of spaces right now. Examples: - Health: fitness, gym apps, and similar. - Wealth / Money - Productivity These are great spaces to be building in right now.
10:46	Sam Parr	"What are you seeing in wealth?"
10:48	Pat Walls	Well, there aren't any of the silly apps, but anything in crypto trading—those sorts of things—are really, really popular.
10:56	Shaan Puri	"What's a stop-vaping app?"
10:58	Pat Walls	Yep. So that would be another one in the health space. I think the health one is a good area. There's a guy who just built an app that helps you track—it was called Puff Count—and you track how many puffs you took. Once you get to a certain low amount, it sort of gamifies the process of quitting nicotine. That was a cool one. He sold it for a lot of money, and it was a really cool example... it did a lot of
11:20	Shaan Puri	TikTok — who bought it? Like Philip Morris? They shut that sucker down. Get that out of here. And are these kids built—like, I assume they watch your channel and it's almost all young, like around 20. Are a lot of them actually technical, or are they just using AI to make this?
11:39	Pat Walls	The thing is, they're using AI coding, and this is why it's big now. You might think it was big 10 years ago, but it's big now because to build a good iPhone app you used to need a team of four: a designer, a product person, and engineers—probably a back-end and a front-end engineer. With AI coding tools, you can just have an idea. It's not perfect, but it's like 95% of the way there. You can build it with basically a team of zero. That means apps that couldn't have existed before because it wouldn't have been cost-effective can now be built. You couldn't have built a stop-vaping app with a team of four people getting paid $100,000 a year or $200,000 a year—it just wouldn't have been feasible. But now there's an opportunity for all these little, weird, fun apps to blow up on social media because you don't need anybody to build them anymore.
12:31	Shaan Puri	You know what's interesting is, you said that apps — the new info products. That didn't hit me until just a second ago. Do you guys remember the police scanner app? I think it was called "5-0 Radio" or "Five-O Radio." Do you remember that, Sean?
12:44	Sam Parr	"Sort of — not really. Okay, I've heard of these. Citizen is the one I know about."
12:49	Shaan Puri	This was before that. I'm part of this forum where this guy is a poster, and I knew he was kind of a celebrity to me a little bit. His name's Alan Wong, and he started this thing called "Five-O Scanner" [iPhone app]. If you guys Google him, he kinda was famous because he created this iPhone app. I think his story was that he was an immigrant from another country. He came here with nothing. His family, I think, worked in a restaurant or something like that. He created "Five-O Scanner" right when the iPhone got started, and he made eight figures. I think he was making like $5,000,000 a year repeatedly for a very long time. He wrote the story about how he was able to retire his mom and dad. Then he bought a Lamborghini — he took a photo of himself in the Lamborghini when he was like 24 and he kind of went viral for that. But he never actually taught how to make apps. He was kind of true to just making apps. I remember this guy — he was like one in a million. There were not many other people doing these iPhone apps that were making $5–$8 million a year with one employee. He was one in a million. It was so cool, and he was a little bit of a celebrity to me because I kind of grew up — he was kind of my Tai Lopez. It is kind of interesting to say that apps are the new info products. When I was growing up, when I was 19 and 21, trying to get into the internet, it was always info-product people. I didn't exactly look up to them because I thought they were a little sleazy, but I wanted that life. I aspired to have that — to be able to make money anywhere, anytime, be on a beach type of lifestyle. It's funny that you're saying that the apps weren't even on my radar because I didn't know how to make them. I couldn't — I physically couldn't do that. But now I probably could, and that is kind of an interesting way to look at it. And then we saw — we had this one... what was the kid who we had on here? Sean... calorie tracker... cal...
14:27	Pat Walls	Cal AI
14:29	Shaan Puri	Cal AI. He was a have.
14:30	Pat Walls	Have you guys seen how big that business is now?
14:33	Shaan Puri	So he talked to us. This guy Zach talked to us—literally. It was noon on a Tuesday. I said, "What are you doing here?" He goes, "I came home... fifth." He goes, "I came home for lunch during high school to do this interview, and I have to go back to school." And at the time, I think it was a $30 million-a-year business. How big is it now?
14:48	Pat Walls	I saw on X [the social platform, formerly Twitter] — so it's not verified or anything — that they said they did 6,000,000 in January alone. So... 70 — what does that put it at, 70‑something million?
15:00	Shaan Puri	"That's incredible. Well, he launched a thing called App Mafia, which is like a course on how to make apps. I don't think it landed — I think people kind of mocked it. But anyway, it was cool to see that this is the new info product."
15:13	Sam Parr	Well, it's cool because it sounds like there are two trends coming together. On one hand, apps are getting easier and easier to make with AI and vibe coding. On the other hand, you have a new discovery platform, TikTok, that you can get your app downloaded from. Both are happening at the same time. Charlie Munger calls these "Lollapalooza effects" — where multiple factors kind of conspire in your favor and suddenly you get this crazy effect. You get one, two, three, four variables all pushing in the same direction unintentionally, and it creates a new opportunity. We were joking, "Dude, iPhone apps — this is like 2010. What do you mean that's the opportunity?" Well, something changed: apps got way easier to build, and apps got way easier to be discovered. There's a new way to get discovered as an app, so the playing field reopened in a way that the window had been sort of closed. You know, over the last—let's say—five years ago it was less juicy than it is currently. Yep, that's right.
16:07	Shaan Puri	Okay. Do you want to try another idea? What else do you have?
16:10	Sam Parr	"Let's do this B2B video. I'm curious what you have there." [B2B = business-to-business]
16:13	Pat Walls	Yeah, I don't have any crazy business ideas here, but I have some intel on how big this opportunity is. There are so many business ideas you can build off of this. I know this—and you guys know this—that video content is hard. Doing anything on video is hard. It doesn't matter if it's long-form, short-form, paid ads, organic, or getting authentic, non-AI-generated stuff: making video work for your business, getting views, and converting customers is really, really hard. At companies there are lots of functions, right? Design—that's pretty much solved: you get good designers and they do good stuff. Product is a little tough but generally solved. Engineering is solved, especially with AI. Sales—there are lots of playbooks for all of these. But there's no playbook right now for video. I'll stop there. Let me know what you guys think immediately about that.
17:07	Sam Parr	I think you're spot on. I've said before: video is now the native tongue of the internet — it's the language that the internet speaks. If you can't make good video, it's essentially like moving to America and not being able to speak English. You might be able to get by, but it won't be easy. You're right that the way you put it is really great: companies don't even have the job function yet — at the majority of companies — to be able to produce video. Who in the company should be able to produce video right now? It's kind of the youngest employee who ends up doing it. The person who happens to have a camera and understands TikTok a little bit. The social media person is supposed to be the one expected to do this, but it's probably going to elevate to the level of product design or project management. There will be a function at companies where you need to be able to produce good video, because that's how we communicate with the world now.
18:02	Shaan Puri	Or it's going to be the person who's least embarrassed. What's funny is, starting in December I wanted to learn Instagram. I said, "I'm gonna make a video a day." I was so ashamed to be doing this. Then I started learning how to do it and thought, "This is so manipulable — I know how to do this now." It took me about 30 videos to master it, but what was holding me back was just the shame. Just the shame. It's so embarrassing to be walking down the street and talking and be like, "Hey, so here— I'm gonna… wait, hold on, gotta redo it again. Hey, so here I'm gonna…" I figured, "Well, if I hold it a certain way I could just pretend that I'm on FaceTime." But people hear me repeating the same thing over and over and think, "This is stupid — I'm acting here." It was horrible.
18:45	Pat Walls	Well, that's actually why it's a huge opportunity. I have this on one of my other ideas, which is around YouTube SEO, but that's also related to video. I talked to a lot of founders or people who want to be founders. People are afraid to put themselves on camera. That's why there's one of the biggest opportunities: 99% of people would rather write an article, do something with Google SEO, or just do something that doesn't require putting themselves—or their face—out there. That's why YouTube will be a huge opportunity, because most people are too scared to actually put a camera in front of their face and start yapping.
19:19	Sam Parr	It's also hard, right? It takes a lot of work to do YouTube compared to a podcast. A podcast is so much easier than planned, scripted, edited, packaged YouTube content. And then you get the big view number in your face and you get an immediate "slap"—that quick high that you're then going to chase. Yep, that's a very tough cycle on YouTube, I think. Short form is sort of similar. There's the phrase "200 view jail," where a lot of people will create TikToks and just never get past the 200-view number—you just stay stuck in that state.
19:52	Pat Walls	Right.
19:53	Sam Parr	But there's a huge amount of, I don't know, self-consciousness as well as actual work that goes into doing this. So what's the solve here? How do you actually—how do you actually solve this? What are different angles you could take? Like, Sam, how would you—let's say you believe this was the problem. I think Pat has accurately described the problem and the value that's there, but you still need a key to unlock the door. What would be the key? What would be an idea that you would create in— [incomplete / inaudible]
20:17	Pat Walls	Could show you a couple people. One guy that I think is cool—he works with big companies that want to get into video. HubSpot obviously wants to get into video. Big Fortune 50, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies need to figure out YouTube, and they need to figure it out fast. I know a guy who has an agency that goes after the big boys. He works with companies like Microsoft and Figma, and he basically helps them build YouTube teams and sends them packaging ideas: “do this title, do this thumbnail,” because you are Microsoft or some massive company. He charges different rates per client, but he's told me some crazy numbers—like $50,000 to $100,000 per month just for YouTube strategy. That shows you how much of a B2B-specific play this is and how much they're willing to pay to have this problem solved. And I still don't— that's like one example. I don't even know a lot of people who are solving this problem. I don't know what you guys think.
21:17	Sam Parr	Well, there are other people who are doing done-for-you services. We've talked about a guy—Josh—who does street interviews for companies. It's like, "Oh Josh, like, sucks," you know? What's the most shameful, awkward, and difficult version of video? Man-on-the-street interviews. So Josh says, "I'll give you that format. You give me money. I will walk around New York, stop people on the road, and ask them three goofy questions to try to get you some clips." That's one guy offering a done-for-you service. I know other people who fly to companies and podcast-interview them. They say, "Forget even getting booked on an actual podcast. I'll just interview you, chop it up like you were on a podcast, and nobody even needs to know there's no long-form podcast underneath it. I'll just give you the clips." For many CEOs or founders, it's easier to just sit down and be interviewed in a podcast format. It's turnkey. So another offer is: "We will deliver this format to you for tens of thousands of dollars a month." You only need 10 customers and, you know, now you're cooking at over $100 a month. [Note: audio unclear—speaker likely meant "over $100k a month".]
22:36	Pat Walls	Yeah, I like the idea of taking one popular format and turning that into a business. Like you said, the street interviews—do that one format for one business. I actually met the guy who started that business, and he told me some pretty wild numbers about his revenue.
22:51	Shaan Puri	"We talked about it. Yeah, it was doing... I think this year it's going to do 10 million in revenue."
22:56	Pat Walls	Yeah, one format — it's crazy.
22:58	Shaan Puri	Well, do this, Pat — let's show it. Okay, so do me a favor: you sent me a thing where you have your Google Sheet — or sorry, your Google Doc — that you have for every single video you made. I want you to show it to me. The idea here is your pre‑work for your YouTube video was really good, and it outlined the whole story. You did a really good job when you showed me how to make a YouTube video. What Sean's describing is basically just doing that, but for companies.
23:25	Pat Walls	Let's do it.
23:25	Shaan Puri	So, for the audience: Sean and I have done 750—almost 800—podcasts. Sometimes they're super well researched. Other times we're like, "Let's just riff. What do you want to talk about? Tell me about your weekend." Let's just talk. It requires no work, and occasionally those will get seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Occasionally there'll be an interview that has little research and we're just friends with the person, and that could potentially get a million views. But then I saw yours, and it was so much more work—worth it.
23:52	Pat Walls	Yeah, I'm very anal-retentive and I want everything to be planned out. I don't like off-the-cuff or spontaneous stuff. I want everything to be in the doc before that gets filmed. I'm not saying that's better or worse — that's just more my style. But I can pull up—let me just find the right one to show you. Okay, so this is what we call a prep doc. My First Million has something like this too, but this one is a little different. This is our prep doc for all of the videos we do at Starter Story, and we use it for a couple of things. First, we start with the package. This is before anything gets filmed — it's pre-production, not post-film. We do the title and thumbnail here. This is the thumbnail we're going to use. It's a different guest on this example, but we're saying, "Hey, this is the thumbnail we're going to do." This video did pretty well. I think it got like 500, 600, 700K views, so that's why I want to show it as a good example. I learned this from a Hollywood production book: when you sell a script in Hollywood, they have what's called a treatment. It's basically a pitch of a video — why someone would want to watch this video. If you want to sell your script in Hollywood and convince a director to pick it up, you have to sell this. You don't give them the 120-page script; you sell them the sales page of the script. So we always have title, thumbnail, and then what's called a treatment. I'll stop there. Let me know what you think about this stuff.
25:21	Sam Parr	Let's just read this treatment. So you go, "This is Mike, founder from Australia." Now, are you thinking about this—like, what needs to be nailed in the treatment? What do you have to... what's the important part to find when you write this pitch?
25:32	Pat Walls	Yeah. I always try to think about how... and this might've been written by my producer, but what I like to think about in the treatment is the vibes and the feeling that the viewer will get when they watch it. Why should this video exist? Why will they leave this video and think about it for the next two weeks or send it to a friend? I like to think about the feeling that you have when you watch it. Maybe this isn't the best example of that, but what is the viewer going to walk away with? This isn't really an intro—this is more of a sell. I'm telling my producer right now: "Sell me on this idea," so that when we go to record it we know exactly what we're trying to get out of it, and it ends up being how we planned.
26:16	Sam Parr	So in this case, the main thing I would be feeling or wanting is, “Oh man, I really want the exact playbook.” Yep. You know, in this case the 10‑step playbook validated by a Reddit post with 151 comments about how he's built these — you know, he built SaaS apps to $200k MRR, something like that.
26:37	Pat Walls	That's the premise of this video: I have this very specific, 10-step playbook. We found it because he had written this awesome Reddit post about it. It was really a simple 10-step playbook — something like: > "If I do this, I do this, I do this..." It's something our audience really likes, so we built the whole video around that checklist. That checklist almost becomes like a character in the video that we can dive deeper into. This is the whole video. Another thing to keep in mind is that every video needs a big idea — a reason for the video to exist. I don't want to tell the entire story of how he was born, how he grew up, and all those details. I want to structure it around one idea. For this video specifically, it's the 10-step playbook, and everything is built around that because it's something our audience likes and it's really valuable — he used it to actually build a great business.
27:33	Sam Parr	Gotcha. That's very cool. And then, when you go to interview them, you're trying to basically fill in the blanks of this skeleton you already think is a winning video.
27:41	Pat Walls	Yep — exactly. One thing I like to look at is successful social media posts, successful Reddit posts, successful seminars, or talks they gave at a conference. Those are all good bones for a great piece. And this is the checklist right here that he did — the 10-step process. Those are all great bones for any video. It's how I like to think about videos: if they've given this sort of talk or they've written about it before, it's always a great outline, I guess.
28:12	Shaan Puri	So, how many of these videos are you doing a week?
28:14	Pat Walls	We're aiming for 2 to 3 right now.
28:17	Shaan Puri	So you're making two or three of these a week. That's a lot.
28:19	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah — it seems like you kind of undersold yourself at the beginning when you were like, "I stuck with it." I think obviously consistency and sticking with it mattered, but it sounds like what really mattered was building a system to do this at scale: a team and a system. You had to do that. I would say most creators don't know how to build a system, and it sounds like you found the growth hypothesis: if I put these types of stories on YouTube, YouTube will keep feeding me more and more audience for this type of content. I can grow that way versus SEO or anything else. One of the frameworks I always liked — and that I think has kind of gone out of style — was Eric Ries when he did The Lean Startup. He basically said a company has two main hypotheses: > There's the value hypothesis: if I do this, this will be valuable to this type of person — it will help this person with this problem. > And then there's the growth hypothesis, which is totally separate from the value one: if I do X, Y, Z, that will create sustainable, compounding growth. That growth hypothesis can be something like: "If I run Facebook ads, I can spend this much money, acquire users for this much, and generate this much to reinvest to buy the next user." It can be SEO, it can be YouTube, it can be anything. Basically, you'll have some hypothesis about how you grow. He's basically like: if you get the value hypothesis wrong, there's no company. If you get the value hypothesis right but the growth one wrong, you've built a very, very small business. If you get both of those right, you just have to be an idiot to not get the money part right at the end. I always liked that framing. So whenever I do a project, I try to think about: what's our value hypothesis? (I call it a hypothesis because we don't know until we test it.) And what's our growth hypothesis? We don't know those until we go test them.
30:01	Shaan Puri	Right, I have a feeling you have a bunch of other, like, system-related stuff up in that Chrome window with all those tabs. Yes—I personally am very interested in seeing you click around. Can you do that?
30:12	Pat Walls	Yeah — let's do it. As Sean said, I'm a big fan of systems and processes. Maybe that's just my more logical brain: a former software engineer, spreadsheet kind of guy. I try to build my company around a lot of systems. I had a note in here that I wanted to talk about: "busy people are the biggest losers." I used to be in corporate 9-to-5 and I hated urgency culture. I hated getting emails and one-off Slack messages. I worked at Deloitte, and you'd get an email and then all of a sudden you're working a deal the whole weekend. I hated that. So when I started a company, I didn't want to build my business like that at all. I wanted to build it around asynchronous systems so that I could play tennis every day at noon, and so that the people who work for me could enjoy that too. It's not for everyone, but this is how we operate. Everything exists on Notion. All tasks that need to get done in the company are simply assigned out to people. There aren't real deadlines or meetings about them — there are just things to get done when you can. Manage that deep work session you meant to do that day, go and do those, and we're good. As long as you get the stuff done that we planned and we hit our KPIs, you can work whenever you'd like. Everything is here in Notion. Additionally, we track all of our production in Notion — including YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, everything. Everything we post on any sort of social media is tracked inside Notion, and we have freelancers helping edit the content and create... [transcription trails off]
31:55	Sam Parr	"Who manages this? Who manages this board?"
31:58	Pat Walls	I would say, well, I have a producer—like "producer lite", I call him—who's sort of starting to manage this more. I built this because I wanted to get more serious about repurposing, so I built it over the course of about two to three months. I set it up by creating the spreadsheet and the processes. I then sort of handed it over in the last two months to someone else, so I have a producer lite who manages this right now.
32:22	Shaan Puri	"Light as in part-time? Or light as in 'half a person' — a little guy?"
32:28	Pat Walls	Both.
32:30	Shaan Puri	A guy who works a small amount.
32:33	Sam Parr	Yeah.
32:35	Shaan Puri	All right.
32:36	Sam Parr	I love the "busy, busy" people—they're the biggest losers, because I think busy is a badge of honor in a lot of different circles. What a terrible badge to be proud of, in my opinion. I remember my buddy came and worked for me. He used to work in investment banking and he kept saying this phrase. We were like, "Dude, Sam, what is this thing you keep saying?" He would say, "Can you get that to me ASAP—or sooner?" I was just like, "Dude, what is 'ASAP'? It means 'as soon as possible'—what does 'ASAP or sooner' mean?" He said, "I don't know. We just always say that in investment banking." I was like, "What a—what a fight-or-flight, what a cortisol phrase, right? Keep injecting it into your company."
33:23	Pat Walls	Yeah, you know, everyone has that friend — when you hang out with them they're always on their phone, always on work emails, stepping out to take calls. I remember when I was a kid I was on a hike with my buddy and his dad. I'll never forget this. I was probably like nine years old or something, and his dad was just on the phone for the entire hike. It was a really nice hike, and I was like, "Man, I just never want to be that person." Like you said, it's choice. It's more typically around a bad business, a systems flaw, or an overextension. It's usually not like you're just handed that.
33:58	Shaan Puri	"What's that EOS thing up there?"
34:00	Pat Walls	Yeah, EOS is cool. Entrepreneurial Operating System — you guys are probably familiar with that, right?
34:08	Sam Parr	"Yeah, I've never actually done it. Do you—do you do it, Sam? At Hampton, do you pay for EOS?"
34:12	Shaan Puri	Well, you don't have to pay for it. You could read a book and just make your own shoot.
34:15	Sam Parr	No, no — but people pay for the implementer and all that stuff.
34:18	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I paid an implementer for a one-day seminar with our leadership team...
34:23	Pat Walls	And that.
34:24	Sam Parr	"It was like $20 or something."
34:26	Shaan Puri	No, no — it was like $3,000 for one day.
34:30	Sam Parr	"Oh, you got the clearance integrator, or what? What do you do?"
34:33	Shaan Puri	No — I liked someone who was a certified implementer or something. I was going to hire him, and then I showed him my pre-work. He said, "Well, you guys are actually almost there. Let's just meet with your whole team for six hours and I'll teach everyone how to do it. Then we'll go over your current rocks, I'll show you the right format, and then you're good to go." It looks like...
34:50	Sam Parr	Is this the first company you did it at?
34:52	Shaan Puri	No, I did it at the hustle as well.
34:54	Sam Parr	EOS, specifically. Yeah—oh, wow.
34:57	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I'm a fan of it. I think that...
34:59	Sam Parr	Are you, like, an "I swear by it" kind of guy, or where are you at with it?
35:03	Shaan Puri	I swear by Traction. We use a transformed version of it. For example, EOS — for those listening, it's an operating system to run your company. The book is called Traction by this guy named Gino. By the way, Sean has asked him to come on a whole bunch [of times], so if we want, we can invite him on. Basically, the crux of the whole thing is your L10 meeting, which happens for us every Monday at 3:00. It's a one-and-a-half to two-hour meeting. Each team has some number, metric, or goal that they are assigned, and then tasks below to reach that goal. We go over each week what's going well, what's not going well, and how to improve. Typically, EOS is divided quarterly. We actually, at Hampton, do ours every six weeks, so we do rock planning every six weeks as opposed to quarterly. I think quarterly is too long for a startup, so you can manipulate it to fit your needs. But over the course of many, many years, we've kind of made our own.
35:55	Pat Walls	I like the six-week format that we do quarterly, but I already like that it's...
35:59	Shaan Puri	Too long. With a startup, you can get new information relatively quickly. So what we do is: each team—we try to limit it to two "rocks". Each team just gets two important rocks, and that's for six weeks. Then we change them or keep them, whatever we want to do, every six weeks. [rocks = top-priority goals]
36:18	Pat Walls	Yep, yep.
36:19	Shaan Puri	And then you have a scorecard, and what we're looking at is your scorecard where you go over, every single week, what's going on. So this looks like the scorecard that you go over at your L-10 meeting [Level 10 meeting].
36:28	Pat Walls	Yep. It gives you a nice framework for someone like me with no management experience. I have an MBA, and I don't know how to manage people. It was nice — we've been doing it for over two years. It's nice to just have a basic system. I don't think it's a perfect system, but I think it's a system for someone who's a creator, like we talked about earlier, who wants to start building more of a business. Or for someone who's transitioning from solopreneur — like me, who didn't intend to build a business. It's good rails — a system for KPIs and planning. It's not perfect by any means, but it is a system, and most people just need a system.
37:04	Sam Parr	Can I say a quick disclaimer? I used to be the kind of guy who—I'd be watching something or hear a talk and somebody would be like, "Oh, I use this system." They'd give me some acronym, then say, "Yeah, this is what I do. It's so good for me." I'd think, "Ah—that's what I've been missing. I'm one tool away. One framework away. One acronym away from success." Turns out—spoiler—I was never one acronym away from success. There's a specific type of person and a specific moment in time when you need a system or tool, and that is when you have growth but you also have a growing headache. The business is growing healthily, but your headache is growing—maybe even more than that or proportionately so. What most people have, I think, is a business that is not really growing enough. They try to add systems and processes, and it actually slows them down. They don't even grow faster because growth often is a matter of striking a vein—it's like drilling for oil. You don't need to be super efficient; you just need to find the oil. Sometimes that's brute force. Sometimes it's gut instinct. Sometimes it's a bit of "cowboy-ness," trying different little experiments. I just want to say that out loud because I wasted a lot of time. When I actually needed growth, I adopted the systems of people who had growth and conflated the two. I thought the system creates the growth. No—the system manages your headache as you go. That's how it's been for me, at least in my personal experience.
38:37	Shaan Puri	I'll take the other side of that, which is: I think there are times where the system does create growth. Typically, what happens is when you have companies, you can get to $1,000,000, $2,000,000, or $3,000,000 in revenue through a combination of luck, or because you knew how to do one thing well, or for a variety of reasons. What I have found is whenever I hit that—like $3,000,000 in revenue—I then think, "Okay, I need to now go do this new marketing channel or do this new thing." Oftentimes, the actual answer is no: you should do fewer things and just do this one marketing thing over and over and over again.
39:14	Sam Parr	"You're saying at $3,000,000. I'm saying most people are not even at $3,000,000. Most people don't get to $3,000,000. Most people who watch this, or are going to watch any type of content on YouTube, are pre‑$3,000,000 in revenue. [The original said "pre getting $1.02 3,000,000" — transcription unclear.] For those people, I think that's the sucker spot where you think you might be a tool away. So I totally agree with you: if you've already got the thing — again, you have healthy growth. If you've gotten to $3,000,000 in revenue [originally transcribed as "$1.02 3,000,000" — unclear], then from there you need systems to scale, right? But you don't need systems to scale if you don't have a working thing."
39:47	Shaan Puri	Or even when your team size gets kind of above four people, you kind of have to have something. But yeah — I hear what you're saying. Do you want to show us anything else?
39:56	Sam Parr	I want to ask you a question about this blog post in December 2020. Maybe you could take us back to how the business was doing back then. You wrote a blog post titled "2020: I am my own greatest obstacle." Yeah — I haven't even read the post and I already nodded my head, because I think every entrepreneur gets to this realization. Can you explain where you were when you wrote this blog post and what the post means?
40:18	Pat Walls	Yep. The blog post all revolves around a single week in my life post-COVID. I was about three years into building the business. What most people don't know — they think, “Oh, you just built Starter Story and you grew that.” No. I was the guy with like ten side projects. I had two businesses that I was splitting my time between, plus other side projects, a personal brand, and doing all these things. Starter Story was making $8,000 a month, and this other business I was building — a software plugin-type app — was doing $2,000 a month. I thought that second business was going to be bigger than Starter Story because I didn't think Starter Story was going to be big. I was so burnt out that I said, “I heard about this Think Week by Bill Gates where you go off to a cabin and you just think about stuff.” I couldn't afford a cabin in the woods, so I decided, okay, I'm just going to get in my car and drive across the country and think through the process. For that week I was not on the phone, no social media, and I couldn't even check my email. I realized that Starter Story was the business I should be going all in on. This was the business I was meant to build. I was throwing basically no time into this business that was doing $8,000 a month, and I was putting all my time into the other business. I was putting 20% of my effort into 80% of the revenue. So I decided to drop everything else. In that moment — after that week of thinking — I basically sold that business, stopped working on anything else, and went all in on Starter Story. This was three years after starting it. It was the best decision I ever made. I don't know if I would have made that decision if I hadn't taken that week off. I essentially doubled the business's revenue in a single month after that, and then everything went up after that. That's probably why I'm here today — selling my company and talking to you guys. I realized that I was the biggest obstacle; I was limiting my own success by thinking I could do everything.
42:30	Sam Parr	I love that — that's very powerful. What sounds right on paper and what's actually right for me might be two different things. A lot of people would tell you, "You should do the SaaS business — recurring revenue is amazing. You could build a plugin; it's software," and all these great things. But you kind of realize the thing you're good at, the thing you enjoy, the thing that has momentum, is this other thing. If I keep splitting focus, I'll never know.
42:58	Pat Walls	There's something that I like to call: you have your ego business. This is the business you're supposed to build — the business you look up to because other people built it, or the business you're told you're supposed to start, or whatever. But actually, follow the money. What's making money? What are you truly good at making? What are you meant to build? I think a lot of people watching this should maybe think about that: what's the ego business and what's the actual business?
43:24	Sam Parr	So, for this thinkpic you just drove 3,000 miles. I'm looking at the map — it looks like you started... where did you start, Salt Lake City?
43:33	Pat Walls	Yeah, I was living with my mom at the time, so shout-out to my mom for housing me while I was trying to figure things out. I went from Salt Lake — up through, then down to the West Coast — and then back up and around.
43:46	Sam Parr	Dropping like a giant circle, basically. Yeah — on the West Coast.
43:50	Pat Walls	Wasn't my whole way up.
43:51	Sam Parr	To Jackson Hole, but in a circle format.
43:54	Shaan Puri	Being 29 and living at home... I think in this blog you say you met a girl later on, so I assume you're single — 29, living at home, trying to do this thing. That's definitely not the most glamorous place to be.
44:06	Pat Walls	Yeah, I was more just... I would do anything. I worked in corporate for five years. I worked at Deloitte. I worked at some startups. I worked at some, like, big companies. My motivation — I was so sick and tired of that. I think a lot of entrepreneurs just start early. They start at 17, they start at 18. I actually went through college and the corporate life. So starting this business was more about freedom, and I knew I would do anything. I moved to Asia because it could be like $1,000 a month. I lived with my mom because I could not go back to a regular job — that was my main motivation. And then, obviously, the business started working out, and that's why I live with my mom.
44:47	Sam Parr	So check this out: this is your monthly revenue at the time. It looks like for the year preceding your Think Week you were basically plateaued from August 2019 to almost August 2020, and you were basically at $8,000 a month for a year—flat. You do the Think Week, you make the decision, and six months later you're now over $25,000 a month. You changed the trajectory of the business with that. I think that's a great story. Also, in this blog you were talking about how you felt: "I had so many projects and tasks I knew I should do, but at the same time I felt unmotivated to start any of them. I'm in this really weird spot right now. I don't feel motivated about work. Nothing feels super important to work on. I don't feel like tweeting or writing. I don't want to read any books"—you know, kind of burnout, essentially. The solution to burnout wasn't, "I need to take six months off." It was, "I need to do something that's more in alignment with what I'm trying to do and simplify rather than keep adding." Yep, exactly. That's cool, man. Well, congrats on all the success—congrats. Fingers crossed that this thing closes. We have to air this episode anyways, and it will be a cautionary tale about counting your chickens before they hatch.
46:01	Pat Walls	But thank you, guys. Yeah — you are huge inspirations to me. I've been listening to My First Million and have obviously gotten a lot of inspiration to do what we do from everything you've done, both on My First Million and outside of it. So you guys are awesome. Keep doing what you're doing.
46:14	Shaan Puri	You're the shit. Thanks for doing this, man.
46:16	Pat Walls	"Thank you, guys, for having me. I feel lucky. I feel lucky."
46:19	Sam Parr	Cool. Check out Pat. Check out Starter Story on YouTube, and yeah... all the things.
46:24	Shaan Puri	"That's it. That's the pod."

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