He built a $1M/MRR dinner club app in 2 weeks with 0 employees

I can't believe we just agreed to do public math like we only have like two rules here one don't get canceled two don't embarrass yourself by doing public math and we did it yeah we did it in budget times [Music] frankly all right I got a business that you're going to love okay so this is a business that in 10 months has gotten to 10 million in ARR I think I know what you're talking about okay so it's started by this french guy and the business is called time left yep I had it on my

topics list too okay so check this out you I don't know I don't know how deep did you go did you go into the backstory or I know it took a lot longer than it appears yeah exactly it's a uh a a multi-year overnight success as they tend to be right you've heard the word the phrase like 10year overnight success is kind of like that so I want to show you some things about this guy so the first thing is this graph here's the revenue graph and if you're listening on audio you should go to

YouTube so you can actually see what we're showing because it's way more fun and you could also see what we look like and by the way I'm Shawn this voice this is Shawn the Indian guy Sam talk you're the white guy you should talk now it's like they think that I would talk like a white like Alpha jock because of the way that I look and I talk like an Indian nerd and they think that you would talk like an Indian nerd but you you talk like a white bro Alpha Jack so exactly and we

need the record to be to be clear on that okay who's who all right so check this out so this is the revenue graph uh already impressive you could see it kind of starts super super flat and then gets to now you know over a million dollars a month that the this business is generating and what does it do what month did it describe that graph okay so this is um basically if you start in January of last year it's like zero you get to January of this year and it's still you know the ARR

is still under I don't know 500k or something like tens of thousands maybe a month exactly and now as of October November it's over a $10 million annual run rate it's a it's Crossing 12 a half million and so in 10 months to go to do greater than 10 million in AR is great it says he said it took seven months to reach 1 million and then and then another seven months to get to from 1 to 10 right so so crazy growth okay so what's growing like crazy what is this what is this business

even so Tim lift is a business that um is just gets people together for dinner it is a solve for the loneliness epidemic that is everywhere and so if you go to their website it just says every Wednesday night strangers meet for dinner book your seat and meet five strangers over dinner all matched by our personality algorithm book your seat and in you know hundreds of cities every Wednesday people get together for a dinner with a bunch of strangers that are kind of curated by this uh by this app and so you pay something like

20ish bucks a month to be a part of this club be a part of this separate club and every week on Wednesday they're going to set up a dinner and then you go then you pay for the dinner separately while you're there they book the restaurant they book the table you show up and it's supposed to be a bunch of other people that you should find interesting or get along with and then then you split the bill at the end product and they claim that they have an algorithm where it's like you are you logical

are you more emotional are you this are you that that helps match yeah roughly what age are you are you you know kind of single and looking to mingle like kind of what what are you all about and you so you take this little quiz and you do that now the back story so I first I found it pretty fascinating that this business which is so simple a dinner club with strangers is scaling so well and this is not a new idea obviously like people have been doing this not even as a business for a

long time I remember when I first moved to San Francisco I used to use this app called I let's lunch it was called and it was same idea every you would just agree hey I'm down to get a lunch with a random person who's also in the tech industry and I used it when I first moved there and I knew nobody I used it to meet some cool people and uh it's kind of a hit or miss first date without the romance right you remember uh grouper before that I loved grouper grouper was my favorite

it was you and two friends go on a group date with three other uh ladies and they tell you where to meet and you have a you have a blind date a three-way blind date I guess a six way blind date right okay so now here's the backstory that I find interesting so let me just get you interested in this guy and I know that there's really only one way to get you interested in a guy do you know what I'm about to show you what's his Cals look like I'm gonna show you a body

transformation there he is I'm going to show you what this founder looks like without a shirt on all right so not only did he transform his business in 10 months I think this is also like a 10mon body transformation where he went from the skinniest he ever was did he have was he sick he was trying to run a like Ultra race or whatever so he got to like less than 10% body fat and then he was like cool now I'm going to try to become the strongest I could ever be and in 10 months

he kind of transformed his body too so this guy's pretty fascinating before doing all of this so here's here's his story so this guy starts out and he's a nightlife promoter which ding ding ding is a bit of a pattern Scott Harrison from charity water before he you know went to save the kids in Africa NTI nightclub promoter in New York there are several people who have the same sort of background story before they make it so he starts off as a nightlife promoter then he's he's decides to start a media company and so like

you like I did we start he started a media company now his Media company was the The Twist was I'm only gonna say good news because the news is always bad news if it bleeds it leads instead I'm just going to tell uplifting good news stories every single day and they did it uh he grew the business to 90 employees sold or kind of got acquired by this larger French Broadcasting Company and went through that whole process what was that called I think it had like a it's called buzz like buzz something Millennium Buzz something

like that I don't know I don't know the exact name of it and they mer and he's written about it because they got Acquired and they merged but they had this horrible deal structure it sounds like which was it was a three-year earnout but the way the earnout worked was year one we're going to make all these changes and invest in the business year two we're going to continue with those changes and invest in the business it's going to be losing money and then year three if it hits if it performs you get this big

payout and if by year three we haven't done that thing you get nothing and he basically that was too aggressive of a plan too too risky they did not hit the three-year plan it's kind of a messy divorce he gets ousted by the majority shareholder and he basically walks away with nothing it sounds like uh I don't know exact details but it it didn't end well for him I think they ended up settling and he got a little something out of it but it wasn't the thing that he wanted out of this whole thing okay

and this was after creating kind of like this video first online only News company that was doing hundreds of millions of views a month and he was getting excited that hey we've we've built something here that's the future and this this traditional company was buying them and it you know one plus one is going to equal seven right and it it sure didn't so he goes through that experience and he says okay uh he gets the the settlement so he finally leaves and I think he's got you know some money but he's got a lot

of time and so he goes and he decides to travel now this is right when 2020 happens Co hits and this guy basically while everybody else is locked at home he's traveling solo he planned I think to travel for 30 days solo and it ended up being 700 days because he was like Co happened he's like well I I might as well just kind of travel around a different different uh you know locations anyways rather than being boarded up at home how old is he he's I think 30 years old at the time and so

he um something like this 30 something years old early 30s he uh during this time he's posting on social media he starts getting some push back and people are like dude like there's a pandemic going on I'm stuck at home a lot of people are kind of miserable right now and you're out here posting pictures of you on a beach in Australia or scuba diving or doing these like kind of fun exotic solo travel things and so he meets somebody and a friend suggests to him hey you should you should do a little shakeup you

should have coffee and meet with a hundred strangers do a hundred coffee meetings with strangers so he does and he does he accepts the challenge he does 100 coffee meetings and something that happened in that changed his life he's meeting with these people and what he realized is that the common denominator amongst 100 strangers was like man what stood out to him was I meet these people and I ask them what they're excited about or what they dream about and they're dreams have been snuffed Jeff propest at the tribal council has snuffed their torch basically

they've forgotten how to dream they've been suffocated by everyday life and they don't really even have like a compelling Vision or dream for themselves and so he decides to make his own bucket list and you could see his bucket list on his homepage got a hundred things he wants to do before he dies what's his name Maxim barbier uh I think is how you say his name french guy and if you go to his blog daily Max you could see a hundred things that are on his bucket list things like swim naked in the ocean

number one crossed out participate in a protest do a live DJ set at a festival you know things like that so he's got this reach 12% body F he's got this bucket list for himself he decides he's going to make an app so he says okay I got it I got my new company my new company and this is kind of like idea one in 2020 he says I'm going to create a app that lets people create their bucket list so create and share your bucket list so he sets out he draws the wireframes he

finds a coder he hires a guy they make the app and people upload thousands of their dreams to this but kind of goes nowhere after that so he says okay uh strike one all right my friends so a lot of you guys who listen to the show you 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 and you like our podcast my first million because we've done a lot of the work for you on researching all these business ideas well my

friends we've made life a lot easier for you because HubSpot they just put together an entire list of all the resources that you can use to find a market opportunity to validate for your next business idea so if you're looking for a market size calculator or tools to identify market trends or a huge list of ideas to get started so if you're interested 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 so he says okay maybe I'll try something different you know

what was the problem with this one I I got people to create a bucket l but they're not doing anything what if I connected people over their dreams so it'll be like Tinder for bucket list and so now this is 2021 so year two he says I'm gonna make a dating app that's not dating meaning uh you say what your dream is I say what my dream is if if I swipe right on a dream and both you and I share that it'll connect us over our shared dream and maybe we could actually go and

do it together right so that's aspirational people message but they don't actually go do anything and this is still under the same all under the same name of time left yeah oh I should explain that so why is it called time left it's called time leftt because when he did was traveling and recharging his batteries after that acquisition and the kind of messy divorce and the settlement he ends up doing some math and he goes okay I'm 30 I forgot he 36 years old or something like that that time 35 maybe he goes so if

I'm going to live till I'm 80 he did the math he goes I have 600 months left in life and he goes That's my time left and he read that blog post on but why yeah which was uh your life in weeks where it kind of prints out a poster that visualizes the number of weeks left and he did he he created that he put it on his wall and every week he would take a black dot and he would Mark out one week gone and he just had this urgency around himself about how much

time do I really have left and what do I want to do that's what spurred The Bucket List thing that's what wanted other people to realize how how little time they have left and he loved that quote which was I forgot who says the quote but it's you know every man has two lives and the second begins when he realizes that he only has one does this stuff inspire you as you're talking about this I can't decide if I am like all in or if the old man in me is is like that's a lot

of work but like I'm pretty sure I'm like 60 to 70% on the side of like this is inspiring I I need to have a bucket list yeah I get what you mean it's like I saw these kids that were like skateboarding and doing tricks by my house and I was like this is awesome this is great look at what they're doing they're having so much fun they're doing their thing and then I was also like kind of out of breath from watching and I was like okay probably just move along with my day you

know uh it is a lot of work to his list is cool insired by it yeah like he wants to go for a run around Paris he wants to get his boating license some of these aren't crazy but then he's like I want a world record so by the way sick thing for personal website I'm goingon to steal this put this on my site which is write your bucket list and start Crossing them out publicly on there I think it's great and he links to the story behind each one once he does it it's great

um so anyways he's uh he names the company time left because he realizes he's got about 600 months left in life and and he starts doing this bucket list thing bucket list doesn't so app one but create a bucket list fail app two connect people over share dreams now they can message each other also fail now it's your three and he says okay here's what we're gonna do I'm going to connect to people so you have the same you want to do the same activity I'll actually like connect you and get you to go do

the thing in real life let me get you off your phone the whole point is find somebody to do the thing with and it starts off okay but then he realizes that women don't feel safe doing one-onone stuff with strangers right so this is kind of like why grouper worked so that's 2022 another year no traction uh 2023 he says okay forget the one-on-one small groups doing an activity in the city you love and um he gets small groups together and he has one feature on there which is like you upload a photo of who

you are so that you when other people are trying to create the group they can just check you out before they do the thing trying to make people feel comfortable but what you realize is talking to users as soon as you put photos in the app they thought of it like dating even though it wasn't a dating app yeah right people immediately wanted to gravitate towards certain people they started judging people he's like this is not at all what I wanted to do so 2023 goes by third year of no progress he can't cross off

have a winning app on his bucket list you know just sitting there uncrossed uncrossed 2024 this year finally he hit he realizes okay this company's called time left well I got nine months of cash left so now cash left is sitting there realizing this doesn't work he had raised $2 million initially back in 2020 for this idea nobody wanted to invest anymore so he said I had honest conversation with myself and by the way so many convers so many success stories start with this I had an honest conversation with myself he says do I want

to continue and if I do want to continue more importantly what do I no longer want to continue doing and so he realized he made some rules he goes I want to do an idea that I can launch in two weeks or less without any technical team so I no Co no coders needed and I can launch this thing in two weeks number two I want to actually make some money it's been three years I've made zero dollars in the lifetime of this company I want to make some Revenue it goes three I want to

have it be a group thing connecting people over an activity but it's got to work without photos meaning I can't have it be where people want need to check out the other person to be willing to go do the activity so he comes up with this idea of time left as dinners with strangers so in three weeks he launches this thing it's the first time left dinner there's four tables of six people that he launches with on that Wednesday in his City and he makes $110 and at the time he does it with just he

makes a type form so just a form you fill out uh using type form off the shelf a WhatsApp account that's how he coordinated all the dinners and a stripe account for how you pay and he was able to spend that up in three weeks and he was doing all the matching manually for three months so he himself was the algorithm no code he was just figuring out who should I put together at these dinners that I think will work and then he starts to move it to low code and eventually he's getting 300 people

together every Wednesday and he makes 20 20 grand but he does the math he says all right I still don't have a lot of cash left here I'm default dead I'm dying slower than I was before but I'm still gonna die unless I figure out how to do this um in a more you know in a more scalable way so he quickly builds a simple app and he makes sh go does he have any employees it's just him and a co-founder and so he goes I'm going to figure out how to do these without having

to book the uh go visit the restaurants in person because what he was doing was he was doing this in his City and he was checking out each restaurant himself he says I got to figure out how to scale this so he takes a leap of faith he says we're going to do this without without doing that that preep I'm just gonna book the restaurant book the table and see what happens do they have like a I guess like automatically used like a handful of like popular booking forms or something like that yeah you know

Open Table type of things to book these restaurants and so he does it like that it works on that Wednesday he says holy [ __ ] this is going to work so now he starts opening up more cities not just his City that he's in he's like I could do this without geographically being in the place I was being too precious about that that was a sacred cow that once I slayed that sacred cow oh the the the ceiling for my business you know got removed and I could explode this thing so now he opens

up hundreds of cities how are people hearing about it ads so he's he's advertising about it and people are talking organically about it and he's getting a ton of Free Press so he's been written up in 400 Free Press Outlets because the narrative fits the the the the Zeitgeist of to St which is that people feel that people are too alone they're too depressed if it's the trends of people you know not getting married if it's the trends of people being sad after covid of people being incels of all this stuff right there's all these

other stories that you could piggyback and newsjack on and on top of that it's just a Feelgood mission right I'm getting people together in person not on social media not on their phones but actually in real life listen to the the ad from Facebook it says dine with five strangers all matched by our algorithm every Wednesday night in your city it's all it said it's nothing very simple and if you go look at their Tik toks go look at Tik Tok content about them it's really cool you can see what's going on and so um

in one year now he's exploded this thing so it's now in 300 cities it's the app is translated in 18 languages he's got 70 employees that are all ops people organ ging thousands of dinners 18,000 dinners a week they have to plan what he did you know over a million dollars by November their IG exploded they now have a million IG followers written up in 400 articles and the reason why he says is because I tapped into a simple Universal Multicultural need people want to get together and they enjoy eating at a restaurant and I

love the way he talks about this by the way he goes I realized that dinner is a technology that if I wanted to get people together to actually have a good time dinner is a piece of tech that that just works it makes that whole meeting new people thing just work cuz we all know how to do it already it's an activity every every single person knows how to do so there's no skill required it has a natural flow that we're all familiar with it has a natural start you know beginning middle and end and

at the very least you're going to break bread and eat good food uh at the very best you might actually meet a couple of cool people that you want to have you know ongoing connection with you met some cool cool people in your city and um how amazing is this dude how amazing is this business this is great how did he hire I'm looking at his jobs page how did he hire all these people that fast he's he's like I'm hiring PE every week I'm hiring people I'm interviewing everybody myself and the job is pretty

simple which is like it's all ops it's all Ops and user experience so he's like you know we take the dinner we try to break it up into moments a dinner is not a single thing a dinner is um like Scott Harrison said on this podcast it's the moments between the moments that matter so you think it's just about the dinner well break the moments down so there's the greeting the sitting the connecting initially getting to know each other the sharing of information and food H there's the bill and the awkwardness of the of that

at the end and he's like basically how can we make each one of those steps a little bit better and if we could do that we can make the user experience better we don't measure clicks and daily active users we measure you know how many people had a great dinner this week and that's the kpi will this last yes I think this will last I think that some ideas just take like the time when the time is right the time is right so in the same way that calm the meditation app went from this kind

of Fringe behavior that not a lot of people were going to do it seemed like outside of the mainstream you know we all had a buddy who meditated but like you know it wasn't a behavior everybody did and then only when we all got too hooked to tech technology did the need for Comm break through and all of a sudden Comm headspace and these apps became mainstream and I think that this like getting together with strangers thing people are lonier than ever they're more addicted to their phone and Technology than ever and you know whether

it was Co or was other things that that accelerated the need for something like this to exist and so I'm a Believer in this I think this is like the new meetup.com I think this is going to scale and I think that you could build a kind of ritualistic thing and I think there's G to be a lot of turn in this business but it's a huge Tam everybody needs this and it's inherently viral you're going to tell people were doing this well it's it's they're charging now on a monthly subscription it's not a month

it's not going to be a monthly subscription business but it's still going to be an awesome company I think and I think they're branding is fantastic too yeah exactly I think this is like an inspirational company that a lot of people are going to Rally behind and you could see like that's why the traction is what the traction is I went and read a bunch of reviews on Reddit uh they're overwhelmingly positive people love it they'll say like uh we met up I was so awkward and uncomfortable at first but we hit it off and

it was great but then what they said was after their dinner let's say their dinner went from like 7 to uh 10:00 p.m. at 10 p.m. they said that there was like uh uh I guess there's eight people at dinner so there must have been 10 other dinners happening in that City that night because 70 other people met up afterwards at the Afterparty that was also arranged by T left and they were like it was a little too crowded but it was awesome like I got to meet these people and I ended up leaving early

but I had a fantastic time and then there was even I we have a group now there was even an after after party where people were hanging out till 4 a.m. and I'm going to do it again and so it sounded like people absolutely loved it yeah exactly and this is a big city problem like dude it's so hard to make friends when you become an adult like once you're out of college you don't really realize till you leave college but you're like man my number of new connections that I just get to stumble into

per week drops dramatically because you're at home you know alone or with a couple of Roommates you have work which is a static number of co-workers and then you might go to like a bar or go to a you know go to some place where PE you don't people it's not clear that people default want to meet you and it's so different than when you're in school um and I think that yeah particularly shocks a lot of people men just like won't talk to anyone I was reading this thread where it says like what's something

that women should know about men that that would surprised them and the top comment was uh most men never get a compliment uh and I was and I thought that was pretty funny yeah their life and someone was saying a story about how uh you know they were with their boyfriend or something and someone else just like said they smell nice or I don't even remember just some like random compliment and the guy was like very affected and the woman was like why why are you like that he's like I haven't had a compliment in

like eight months like no one said anything nice about me in so long and then so it's like compliment should we change the world right now you look great today and should we create should we create exact thank you I love your love your jacket uh love your Inspector Gadget outfit uh oh wait did it wrong um should we just start like you know a you know like a no November should we start a new trend should we pick a month and it's basically just Bros complimenting Bros yeah and it's like hey every day your

job you gotta you got to give another guy just a solid compliment yeah one way a oneway flight to feel good and uh and that's that's what that's what what month has like nothing going on like just a bunch of guys being dudes every May yeah the march of men and it's like yeah here we go every March every day 30 days got to give another guy a compliment that's actually a great idea this is also what I wanted to do with like you know people were hosting these MFM meetups in every city this kind

of what I wanted this to be which is like I would love it if we could do this with uh like if we could basically have time left create like a you know an MFM an MFM button or whatever or like a or I don't know somehow somebody create this for for our listeners which is like if it was you know on the first of every month and it's always on the first of every month there's a dinner in hundreds of cities around the world where you're going to meet with you know five other people

six other people who listen to the podcast we're going to have to call it a like more than a nod because that's basically like my interaction with most every man ever is just a nod uh and it's like so are we G are we going to do more than a nod to each other now is that yeah yeah exactly the nod is is pretty effective to be honest this I see you yeah just a I see you and I respect you yeah let can I ask you a question about your weekend you I have a

strong I have a strong opinion about something but I have nothing to do with the industry and you do how is you are work in the Ecom world was Black Friday and I guess Cyber Monday is still for you miserable or awesome well for me now I have a full team in place so it was awesome I didn't have to do a thing I didn't I just looked at the app and I said wow that's a that's a great number right there it was not resp I was not on the hook you know it's like

the perfect thing I'm not on not on the hook for the inputs but I get the outputs now to be clear I sweated this business for you know three four years to be able to get to that spot but like now it's great before that I will say very stressful and it's stressful in the same way that I don't love birthdays I don't like forced fun and I don't like high expectations based you know events where it's like you you need this to go well you want this to go well it seems like it's going

well for everybody else because you'll just see screenshots of people just crushing it and I remember in the first couple of years I was so underwhelmed and disappointed by Black Friday which was a combination of me not knowing how to do it but really when you start a like Black Friday is basically people who already know about your brand who kind of wait around for discounts who like your brand to come back which for a new brand you just have a very small pool of people that already know and care about you that want to

shop that are you know have been waiting to shop with you for your discounts so the first couple of years just sucked and now it's amazing now I get why they call it Black Friday you know why it's called Black Friday it's called yeah let me tell you the the the background really quick but basically in the 70s originally Black Friday was negative it was called Black Friday because uh for some reason there was a uh what was it army versus Navy uh football game it was the Philly police called it Black Friday because they

hated it they hated the Friday after Thanksgiving this is the day that all the bad people come in town and it's just going to be crowded and then retailers also use Black Friday because they're like this is when our employees never show up because it's day after Thanksgiving like Black Friday sucked and then like in the 80s or 90s you know it kind of got shifted to where Black Friday now means we're going to change it from uh this is the your business your retail business is in the red meaning you lose money all the

time this is the one SE the beginning of the season season the first day of the Season where you're going to switch to Black and you're finally going to make a profit for the quarter exactly exactly they they they they flipped it on its head right they they they lemons since lemonade it where this this bad day where oh there's going to be this huge rush in the city everyone's going to try to do their shopping at once going to create traffic then there's gonna be a bunch of drunk people because of the game and

they turned it into this like shopping event now that the retailers love and then in 2005 a consort there was like a trade group that included like Google and Amazon and a few other other online retailers they said hey that's Black Friday thing like that's that's pretty good but like we need our own thing and they come up with Cyber Monday and so they like collectively agree to do cyber monday together and then once Amazon gets even more famous and more big they kind of are like you know pushing it forward to where Cyber Monday

is huge and now all the other retailers are uh are doing it but as an outsider my opinion and and it's not entirely rooted in data other than there are there are numbers where like if you discount something like you know 20% and you only have a 40% gross margin you got to sell like two times as much if you discount it 30% you have to you know uh sell three three times as like the stats are pretty crazy how much more you need to sell for each uh 10% discount but from an outsider I

hate Black Friday like I just think that it like ruins people's Brands like to me like everything eventually is going to turn into J crew where it's like I only buy it when inevitably they have their 50% off sale well actually it kind of works the other way which is every brand wants to discount but doesn't want to dilute the brand why do you want to Discount you got too much inventory left over and that's just uh cash that's tied up sitting on your shelf uh maybe it's expiring maybe it's just out of season but

it's definitely cash that's tied up in inventory so every brand is not perfect with inventory that's the first problem the second is if you you want to juice your numbers so if you have a way to juice your numbers you would love to have more Revenue more profit if you could the problem is is if you just start discounting you sort of train people to to shop with discounts like you said the beauty of Black Friday is it gets every brand air cover it says all right we're all gonna do it I'm not less of

a premium brand because I'm doing this right I'm gonna join in and so you get the kind of middle set of Brands right you in every like category you're going to have the lowend that are always trying to compete on price they're always trying to lower the price they're always trying to Discount they're known as discount Brands you have the mid tier which is trying to find that balance between still value still a value purchase but maintaining some brand premium would you say that's like a that's like a J crew I don't shop J crew

so I couldn't tell you anything about J crew uh but that's like a Nike for example right Nike is not Louis Vuitton it's not truly luxury scarcity but it's also not trying to be 32 degrees you know the Costco athleisure brand right and so you you have that middle group and that middle group they want to participate in a Black Friday because it gives them air cover to do the discounts like the cheap Brands without being seen as a desperate cheap brand because it's like well today is the day we all do it right and

so I think it's really important for them and then you have the luxury Brands who can go the other way and they could say zero% off in fact it's 10% more expensive today right because they're going to use this as a branding moment they're not going to sell high volume anyways so they use this as a moment to reinforce their position as luxury so it kind of works for everybody I think I prefer the last one I like I would hate to have to do this I've been friends with you and I've been friends with

you know dozens of other people who have startups in the Ecom space not established yet brand some establish but and like their Fridays are miserable and it seems like their entire year kind of is made it makes a break this two weeks does that seem like accurate it is for a lot of people it's not that's not the case for us like I saw somebody who does their like 50% of their revenue for the year in this like 8 week Sprint or six week Sprint between you know Black Friday the start of your early Black

Friday sales to the Christmas uh shipping cut off uh by the way can I give you two funny things what one is um Jack butcher used to do this great reverse Black Friday sale do you remember this he always did some crazy stuff he's great man he's an artist what what what which one he's an artist and he knows that kind of that positioning and count positioning is all counter positioning meaning you position yourself relative to the position of other things that's how position works it's all a relative exercise and so he gets that and

so what he did was I think he had like a course or something like that he would do a reverse Black Friday sale where he would start the price at a certain thing and then they would just go up in the like two weeks leading to Black Friday every day the prices are going to go up so if you want to buy it buy it now because for the next two weeks prices will go up every single day and it wasn't even really that that was that effective of a sales tactic but it's like rather

than do nothing or dilute your brand he decided to use it as a branding moment which I thought was cool we also talked about the uh I don't know if it was Brooklyn and who started this but it was uh the the old leaked email tactic chubbi well I st I I did it and I stole it from Chubbies did they also steal from Brooklyn I think they also I think they also stole it I've seen like a ton of people do the same Trend but we talked about on the Pod seem beneath Brooklyn and

but but most consumers don't know they don't care they don't they have no idea they fall for it right that's kind of the point which is you send this email out to your user base that looks like it was supposed to be an internal email where someone on the marketing team is like hey just doing the testing final testing for Black Friday I have it uh you know the code is X um you know go test it out and see if it works and then you send a follow-up oh my God whoops that was not

meant to send to everybody but we're going to honor it they're not fired yeah or you know whatever we'll deal with Jacob's you know mess up internally but but you know whatever have at it well we're going to leave it up for 24 hours and then people go crazy because they feel like they got access to a leaked discount code and it works by the way I did that too it was super effective I did it in uh 2019 yeah uh right before we sold uh about a few months before we sold and I did

it in 19 and we did it for trends.co which was a digital product which is like the best Black Friday deal ever I don't have to fulfill anything and it's 100% profit and I don't remember exactly but we made something like a million dollars in profit in one day right from that from that email you love bra Friday what the hell are you talking about well I guess like if I were to own a brand now like a like a a particularly I think Black Friday is mostly clothing or Furniture something like a like a

normal retailer I don't think I would do it but I would be tempted to dude you're like those people who live in a gated community with 12 foot fences around their house and then want like an open border it's like bro you your house doesn't even have an open border what are you talking about it's like you're like oh I hate Black Friday after you like you know totally leaned into Black Friday and did the like uh yeah once I got yeah exactly it's dumb and beneath me now yeah oh you used to do that

uh yeah no it's um I I do you did you buy anything yesterday no by the way I found it so funny there's a great meme that was like Thursday everybody's like I'm so thankful for everything that I have and I just feel so full my cup is so full with all the love and and everything that's my life my life is so so full I'm so thankful for everything so grateful and then Friday you're like I need more more or [ __ ] I don't have any I don't have anything I need I need

you know how much stuff I need right now that I don't have it's like literally the clock strikes 12 and everybody's attitudes flips dude you want to do it all right you we were talking about challenges how about this challenge what if you try to go one week so seven days without spending a cent on a consumable so like your mortgage or rent is okay daycare is okay but like coffee like uh no it has to can't eat out you you know you can't eat out it's just like what you bought the week before at

the grocery store you think you can go seven days without spending a cent so uh you can't buy anything extra can I absolutely will I absolutely not I think I I'm down I want to do that as the M MFM challenge you know we a whole week of not buying anything they do you know dude look we people do fast we got to do a money fast I'll tell you what I wanted to do that you're not I'll tell you where I'm going to get your butt to clench so I was pretty inspired by burning

man and everybody you never gone to Burning Man have you no but I'm it's like it's like a movie this based on a true story so everybody if you live in San Francisco people will make you nauseous telling you how amazing ber man is and what they're trying to do is convince me to go but what they don't know about me is I'm like a cat where the more you try to pet me the further I run away so you telling me to do something only makes it less cool in my books and so by

this at a certain point I was like I'm definitely just not going why because I'm stubborn you're dug I am what the what the French call dug in and but I was like oh what's cool about it and I was like I do like the idea of like you go to this deserted place you basically build a town it's all barter and free love and you know all that good stuff and then they burned this thing at the end and it's sort of symbolic in this way and I thought what's my version of that and

came up with this idea and I pissed at at this dinner and this this guy was like that so here was the idea I go we should do a money burn I was like so much of our life is based around money and wanting money and this attachment to money and people have unhealthy relationships with money and money has this power over you and I felt it on me money has a power over me it gets me to do what I don't want to do sometimes it gets me to act in ways that are I'm

ashamed of sometimes it gets me to uh it just takes up so much of my mind space that it really shouldn't that portion of my mind could be used on other things but money has this power over me I go you know what we should do once a year we should do this thing where you take some amount of money then for everybody it's different you come with an envelope and it's an amount of money that hurts you to burn oh my God and we burn it and I was like think of a how it

would feel B what it represents see how polarizing and how angry this would make people how much how much news and Buzz this would create and how much of a conversation this would create I go imagine if the the sort of like Tech head up their ass you know Elites in San Francisco do the the most obnoxious thing possible they go and they literally light money on fire and they say they're doing it for this reason but it's going to piss off a bunch of other people it's going to inspire a bunch of people I

was like this is actually a tremendous idea and my friend was like dude this is one of the best ideas you ever had I'm hooked who which friend said this was a good idea I have to make sure I never listen to their opinion ever again all right I'm not I'm not gonna say their name uh because I don't want to out them on this but they were like and for years every year they text me the same thing when are we doing the money burn and I don't do it because I'm like I literally

already feel anxiety over that idea of like taking I don't know $7,000 and just burning it just some amount of money that would feel horrible to to burn like what is that minimum how are you going to say that you're willing to burn $7 but I'm just saying don't spend like 150 bucks in one week on coffee well because I think it's like if I'm going to do it might as well do the more dramatic impactful version of it you know what I mean like how good of a story is it if I'm like yeah

and then for one week I didn't drink coffee outside the house like nobody gives a [ __ ] right it's like okay it's like doing a fast where you still eat sandwiches like okay well that's not really that impressive so if I'm G to do something I'm gonna do something that's makes for a better story than your like consumables fast which is not catchy and not not buzzworthy and not brag worthy um yeah I mean that sounds like a horrible idea but uh I think you should do it I I would love to watch imagine

there was the money burn would you do it no but I would love to watch you do it what um yeah I'm still too scared to do it all right let's move on you want to do one more topic yeah by the way I did a great chat gbt prompt about Black Friday just want to share this prompt prompt hack prompt hack is uh so I go to chat GPD and I'm like hey tell me about Black Friday the origin and anything interesting blah blah blah and then it's like ah the Phil Philadelphia Police Department

did this thing right so me and you both did the same thing here's the prompt act then I went and I said it said something about the Macy's day parade I go tell me about the Macy's day parade as if you were Malcolm Gladwell teaching me about it what would he say because I just I use Malcolm Gladwell is this like yeah guy who gets interested in the things that we all Overlook or the the the things we've all already accepted and then turns it into like a bigger story so he goes so it just

goes a Tipping Point for American Consumer culture and he talks about how the Macy's day parade was started uh by this immigrant and how it was the employees that were dressing up almost like clowns and cowboys and knights they borrowed live animals and Malcolm would say this is how all great great movements began messy Grassroots and deeply personal and then it talks about how each symbol of it right like the balloons or why the balloons were a genius thing over the live animals and just using this how Malcolm Gladwell would explain X or you can

you know switch out Malcolm Gladwell but you can be like Richard feineman how would he explain this scientific topic is such a prompt hack for chat GPT it makes chat GPT talk to you in a different way our friend sahill he had a tweet and he said what's the best one-hot prompt that you've made in the last 30 days it could be for a recipe a front-end developer an image generation the more specific the better the best answer gets $1,000 and it's all these pretty good like prompts that people have submitted that were amazing like

the simple one that I actually liked which is based off of everything that you know about me suggest three to five books that you think I'd enjoy reading uh it was that was pretty good and I went and did that and it suggested a book that I'm going to start reading um another one was you are a lawyer that specializes in working with startups pleas review this legal document that was sent to you by your client and Summarize each section in plain English and determine if that's good or bad for me that's actually a pretty

good one too uh but there's like this is good today has been chaos ask me questions to help me figure out what to do next don't stop asking until you are fully sure you have all of the context of my situation and can generate an actionable plan for me I use chat GPT this way too I use I tell chat GPT often to ask me questions so say I'm Your Role is this I'm trying to figure out X I don't know where to start start asking me questions and don't stop until you feel you have

necessary information to give me to give me useful advice or ask me question and I just I keep saying yeah ask me more questions I'll answer parts of their questions along the way and it's such a useful thinking tool this way versus just searching and getting an answer if you try to say hey how should I do X it's going to give you a generic answer but if you say ask me the questions that you would need if you were my coach who has tons of experience in this subject in order to get me to

figure out the answer to this it forces you to think about it better are there like deep questions it could it be like uh Mar marriage advice or it could it be like what do I do with my life advice or like I'm struggling with this person help me solve it like things like that yeah cuz any of those any of those personal things I've used it with tax things because if you ask it a tax question or a legal question it'll give you a generic answer but there's high risk right like it doesn't have

all your context because you you don't know how to give it everything you need so it just gives you kind of a general answer which could be totally misleading when it comes to tax or legal but instead I say here's my situation ask me the questions that you would need to know if you were my lawyer so then it asks me the question at that point now it has the context then I say give me an informed answer based on what I just told you and then it knows well you could do X but but

since you said you're Incorporated here blah blah blah right and it can give you a smarter answer that way oh that's pretty good have you used it for any other props that like are helping you solve like uh just like life problems where it's like a like a therapist would help guide you or like an executive coach yeah I use it I tell it it's my coach or it's my therapist or it's my strategist or it's my analyst and then I'll either you know ask it the questions or I'll tell it to ask me the

questions by the way that's one of the useful things about chat GPT is uh tell it the role up front so a prompt structure that works is role goal and then I think context and so you go roll you say you are my research assistant your job is to find examples that support the ideas that I'm going to present you goal I'm trying to write a really persuasive blog post about X so I need to come up with great examples and counter examples and then I'll give it the context the context is blah blah blah

and then it knows the role it knows the goal and then it has the context in order to actually do the job dude that's amazing I love chat gbt that's why I got my AI tutor every every week to teach me how to actually use these tools better I uh I have a friend that works at uh open aai and apparently he was able to sell some of his shares and he was like uh do you remember when I told you I was starting to work there and I told you like if things go well

how much money I think I could I could make add a zero to that and that's how much and that's just a percentage of the shares that I sold to achieve that number wait can you say uh like roughly the roughly the level of seniority of this person and roughly the amount of money they made and roughly what time I I'm I'm gonna be very vague on purpose I'm gonna say uh let's say they've worked there for two to three years and I think according to the news like if Business Insider they just did an

article and they said the average pay Allin pay was like $800,000 so if you're making $800,000 three years ago let's say that's 400 cash 400 Equity so you're expecting 400 a year in equity uh I don't know how much their value has gone up in three years but I think 10x yeah so if you're expecting four 400 Grand a year in equity you now have $4 million a year in equity and if you've been there for three years that's $12 million nice that's crazy right and that's like not even all your shares uh because I

think like they do like they for paying people even more now that there's even more competitors and you didn't even invent artificial intelligence right like you didn't even have to do the incredible thing at that company in order to do that you did good work and I mean this in a good way you didn't have to pull off a miracle in order to get incredibly wealth and you were like the 1000th employee like which is why people should listen to our SOS list episodes and whether you believe that the companies we picked are right or

not you should uh do that if you're going to take a job might as well take a job on a rocket ship right like might as well take a job where your Equity is going to appreciate this like absurd rate or has has the has like a realistic chance to the problem is most people have no ability to assess that and it's not always obvious like like like like for example I think open aai raised money at $120 million valuation recently is that right uh 120 billion sorry 120 billion and I would imagine the majority

of people listening to this are saying that's outrageous but in 5 years there's death defitely a world where we look back and be like that was a steal how did I not like put my whole life savings into like it it there's a around there's a world where that's that's definitely a possibility yeah yeah there's still a 10x jump from here for for an open AI they could be open AI could become has a legitimate a realistic chance of becoming a trillion dollar company which you can only say about a handful of companies I was

listening to this thing about Facebook and this guy was talking about working there and he was like when I joined it was worth $78 billion and I thought like this is Peak I'm sell I'm I'm selling everything like I got to get out Facebook's now worth 1.5 trillion and so these numbers they're really hard to to comprehend uh I mean I dude have you ever thought about a trillion dollars how much is it honestly haven't a trillion a trillion dollars is 1,000 billion that is like an insane number they should call it that they should

call it 1,000 billion and not even trillion trillion actually doesn't even do it justice that's so and you know what in about five is that right is it a th000 billion or is it 100 billion no it's a th000 billion it's a, billion is that insane is that insane that's insane not only is that insane there's a world where in 10 for sure 20 years that a human being is worth that because I think how much is Elon Musk worth now 200 200 billion so if it just if he just has a a 7% annual

growth rate that's going to double in 10 years and then double again so you're looking at 8 800 Bill like it that's just so much money 1,00 billion yeah he he's the betting favorite to become the world's first trillionaire that is so so which would way I think he said that he thinks Putin might already be that um or he said that he's the richest man but he's not on any of the lists so that would be like let's say if you're worth uh the difference between so 100 million divide so that'd be like the

equivalent of a 100,000 so uh a trillionaire to a billionaire is the same thing as a 100 millionaire to a 100,000 Aire does that make sense yeah that's insane right that's insane so like the a100 million person is someone worth $100,000 they're not in the same ballpark like their lifestyles are like drastically different now to a billionaire a billionaire yeah and a trillion that's the that's how different is it makes a billionaire like just like a sixf figure like w2y yeah like like like bad medical bill knock you out yeah where it's like you know

what I mean like you still use wow Airline and you only did it because you got the the voucher for $50 round trip like it's like ridiculous that I was thinking about like that that math it's crazy and the reason I was thinking about it is because um Warren Buffett just did this big speech or this big letter where he wrote that he dude he's such a good writer he was like Father Time always wins and father time he's a mean son of a [ __ ] and he like that's basically really yeah like he

said like Father Time's always wins and he's like a real fickle guy and he took my wife Susie before me and our plan all along we just assumed because you know he eats horribly we were like we just assumed that I was going to die first and so the plan was that it was her job to give away all the money unfortunately she died uh and then we also gave the the money to our children uh but you know what's crazy our children are in their 70s now and they are not going to live long

enough to be able to give away all of our money and so when Susie died they each got $10 million and War Buffet's currently worth 15 billion so 10 million is nothing but uh they each got $10 million and now it's their job when I died to give away the money I don't think they're going to live long enough to be able to give away this much money and the future Generations I don't know them as well as my current kids and I cut I trust my current kids but you know it's hard to say

with my future generations and so they have this Monumental task to give away all this money and if they don't it has to go to this Foundation where uh everyone has to vote on it because this way each of the children as well as the grandchildren have an excuse to say something like well my brother doesn't think that's a good investment so I'm so sorry I got to pass on you and so he wrote this letter explaining uh a bunch of tips and tricks he's like even if you're rich or you're wealthy my opinion is

you should discuss your will with your children before you die it's a great way to bring the family together like he and and he also says that's so funny by the way isn't it funny that will is like the surprise it is weird it is weird it's like oo let's open up the Time Capsule see what was in it like why is it a surprise that doesn't even make sense dude there's so many issues with Will that like uh that I've learned about because we're setting up a States like for example a lot of people

and he talks about this but I've read about it constantly and I know friends their Wills are aren't equal so particularly women so then like uh Vanderbilts did this where it was like the women get $400,000 the men each get $10 million and it creates like all this like anger among siblings which ruins families and he talks about that in his letter and so it was a really good letter that he just released like last week about how he's didn't he sign the like giving pledge though right like yeah but he pledged I don't think

he pledged a percentage I think he pledged an amount that he said in the letter and he's like but the amount is now huge so I need to give more and so yeah he's giving it all the way 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death maybe it's just that the 1% is now huge is that what the is that the issue I didn't understand well I didn't understand it because in the letter it was like I am now gifting $150,000 shares of brick hathway previously we did this but

now we need to give more that so he didn't reference the giving pledge it was like an absolute amount not a percentage amount uh other than saying he gave each of his kids $10 million uh and he's like that's all I gave them so he's selling uh these gifts I'm making today reduce my Holdings of birkshire shares to 206,000 a 56% decrease since my 2006 pledge so he's cutting it in half and so how much is that 206,000 shares I think it's a$ 1.5 billion that he just gave away I think it's more dude how

much Berkshire a stock is 700 Grand a share so 700 Grand a share times 250,000 just to use round numbers is almost oh sorry wait 7 dude my calculator like yeah how many commas is this that's 200 almost 200 billion oh yeah well that's a lot of money what's happening the point the numbers are so Grand that it's frankly incredibly hard to comprehend but basically he's making like the largest Gifts of all time I can't believe we just agreed to do public math like we only have like two rules here one don't get canceled two

don't embarrass yourself by doing public math and we did it yeah we did it a bunch of times frankly uh but dude that's it's a good article right you got to you you'll have to read that yeah I'm read Buffet talking about giving away $150 billion but doing he's doing it in a way that we can easily understand by saying everyone should read their will before they die with their children dude Buffett doing anything I'm in I'm so in on Buffett telling any story or talking about any subject of his liking he is absolute blank

check of attention from me right yes yes like Bill Simmons had this thing that he coined once called the Tyson Zone about Mike Tyson where he goes the Tyson zone is when somebody reaches a level of crazy that somebody could tell you anything about Mike Tyson and you would believe it like if it was like oh Mike Tyson got arrested because he's been eating sharks every morning it's like H [ __ ] that's crazy you know he bit an ear he he's going to jail it's like there's no story that is out of bounds on

Mike Tyson and I feel like the the buffet zone is basically somebody who you have my undivided attention at will whenever you want it for however long you if he's like I'm doing a 16-hour live stream I'd be like okay well I guess I I guess I better you know like get a comfy chair because I'm gonna be here for 16 hours today you know like there's no there was no nothing Warren Buffett could do that I would not be interested in if he was just like I'm gonna live stream myself like you know like

doing ASMR eating soup I'd be like all right I'm in I'm gonna start just like attributing facts and stats to him well you know what Buffett says he says yeah Buffett says is the the new Harvard study yeah right yeah there was a study at Harvard to support whatever point I'd like to make and similarly you know Buffett once said uh X oh really quick can you tell me if this is true is this Enron thing a joke I think it's real but I'm not sure all right which is I I hope it's a joke

which is what is it what's the story they someone bought Enron is relaunching it as a crypto token like it's like worse than a bad like Silicon Valley plot uh I don't know if um the story is is out but the the Twitter handle Enron which Enron if you are you know under the age of 28 you probably don't even remember this but Enron is like FTX for oil yeah it was like an oil Energy company in the 90s that uh was one of the biggest companies in the world and then in a month's time

it went bankrupt and it turns out because the executives had all committed fraud and a bunch of them even killed themselves before they got sentenced and a lot of them got went to prison whatever horrible uh on Twitter somebody is now tweeting from the en on Twitter handle with their logo saying we're back and they are talking about their new decentralized product and no one online knows is this real or is this not but it's the perfect way to say [ __ ] you to the crypto crowd because that's basically what they're doing we're they're

just sitting in they're sitting in a room they're like should we name our new crypto scam after a scam dud d d two do two wrongs to make a right like this it's like when a rapper samples an old song and they're like yeah it's like one a new fraud sampling an old fraud yeah they're remixing crime dude can I just give you one rant real quick I was watching this video that was like uh it's called I was on YouTube It's called The Elon Musk learning method I was like all right click that's like

another Warren Buffett says yeah exactly Elon explaining how he does this or like you know some some backstory about Elon um but one thing he says in it which I think is just it just struck me this is obvious point but I guess the implications of it really just like SLA me in the face he was like um people say like you know we have to give people better access to education he goes he's like that could not be further from the truth uh he's like you can literally learn anything everything you want to learn

is available online at a world-class level for free to anyone who has an internet connection which is almost everyone and he's like basically there is no lack of access to education and it's so true like I could if I want if I was like oh man I wish I could have gone to Harvard okay just Google it watch every Harvard lecture you want is online you could sit there you could get a Harvard Computer Science Education today for free in your underwear at home and Nobody Does it and that's like the second I do it

I spent hours this weekend learning how different magic tricks were done on YouTube hours I can't be fooled oh not even learning how to do them just learning how they're done I just needed to confirm that David Blaine was just a human dude that when that show came out magician's greatest secrets revealed do you remember that they're so pissed I was I remember literally thinking to myself I was like I was like TNT you sure do know D drama like this is an amazing premise they were like this magician has to wear this mask CU

if his peers in the magic industry knew what he was about to tell you going to he would be killed ostracized he could never show his face in a magic room again I was like oh holy [ __ ] Mom Mom where's the remote and I was like it's like pre-recording I was like got a notebook out and I was like oh my God how do they do it and he just showed you every magic trick in how they do it it's the greatest it's the great the greatest right that's the absolute greatest um that's

what I do that's what I do on YouTube like you're telling me he didn't actually bite that quarter and half yeah oh it's so insane what you say about Elon though doesn't matter that's the Pod all right that's it [Music]