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I'm like, I should create this.
Search this video
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And then I looked in the mirror and I was like, yeah, this ain't going to work.
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There's a reason your nickname is the vanilla gorilla, okay?
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Like It wasn't going to work.
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So Sam, I got a question for you.
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You have launched this business this year called Hampton. And I love the name. I love the brand.
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I go to the website, I love the website.
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More than anything, I love the idea.
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Uh me I'm jealous of this idea.
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Andrew Wilkinson was saying said, "I'm so jealous that I didn't start this idea."
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We are I feel like you got so much right.
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And I know that the that in doing any idea, whatever you cut you know, there's something called the idea maze.
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You go through, you wander around, you try to figure out the right path and you cut you if you're lucky, you pop out the other side with what you did with Hampton where everything turned out right.
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What I want to know is what were the other paths you considered but ended up saying no to along the way?
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Cuz nobody sees that stuff.
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That's on the cutting room floor.
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I want to know, you know, I love the name Hampton.
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Were there other names that you thought about?
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And like how did you pick that one?
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And like what was that decision process?
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I want to know target market.
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Like you I feel like you nailed the target market and you nailed the value prop.
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Were there three other runner-ups that you considered that you didn't have?
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I kind of want to see what goes on underneath the surface before this beautiful execution comes out. Well, first, thanks.
1:23
You you you you you you you you hopefully only see the good stuff.
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Obviously, there's all types of bad [ __ ] that happens on the on the back end where we're like, "This sucks."
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But in general, it's been quite pleasant.
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So, dude, with this company, it's so funny.
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I purposely had on we had guests that ran these types of companies and I wanted to prove to everyone I'm going to I'm going to do my research in front of people.
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You left a paper trail, right?
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Like you left public breadcrumbs as to exactly how you did this step-by-step.
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And by the way, I love that you're honest about this because you definitely had guests come on and basically explain to you what the blueprint is and then you were like, cool, thanks.
2:01
Going to go execute on that blueprint.
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And um And I didn't hide it from them.
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I I told them I I told them before and after I go, I'm going to launch I want to launch I'm thinking of launching something like this and let's talk about it.
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So there was nothing unethical or evil about this, but yeah, I wanted to do it publicly so people could see.
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So the So let me tell you first.
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So I sold the Hustle I think in 20 two. Yeah.
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And uh something like that.
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And I had about six months or eight months or 10 months I forget where I was just kind of fooling around and I was looking at different ideas.
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The two ideas that lost, I'm so thankful they lost.
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One, remember how I got super into Airbnbs?
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I was like, this is the thing. I could do this.
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So I bought one and I did it. And it did okay.
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But I was like, this sucks.
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I do I do not enjoy this.
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This doesn't This isn't in my zone of genius. It's a pain in the ass.
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And it seems on paper like a good idea.
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You had a You created this Facebook group of I forgot what you called like Sam's short-term rental bros or whatever the hell you call it. What was it? The STR crew. The STR crew. Short-term rental crew.
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And people piled in and they started explaining their blueprint.
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They're like, yo, I own 40 Airbnbs.
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They make this much cash flow. Here's the pain points. Here's the plus sides.
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This other guy's like, oh, I do the same thing with this angle.
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And I was like, dude, this is fascinating.
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Sam's doing his research again in public.
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And then you were wandering around the idea maze.
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You're like, maybe it's over here.
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Maybe the Maybe the exit path is over here in this short-term rentals thing.
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And it kind of seemed like a good idea uh on paper, but you ended up saying no to that.
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And and it was a good idea.
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It wasn't a good idea for me.
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It is a profitable thing, whatever. It was cool.
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The second thing that I thought about doing was I thought about creating I've always wanted to create a trucking business.
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I'm I'm passionate about truckers.
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I'm passionate about blue-collar workers.
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My family I grew up in a trucking family sort of my They work in that industry.
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And so I was like, I'm going to become a YouTuber and I'm going to create an audience of truckers and then I'm going to build a product for them.
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And then I started like doing it and I was like, nah, hate this. Not going to do it.
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You're like, I love the idea of blue-collar workers.
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Yeah, I like the the idea of it. Being amongst them. Yeah.
4:01
Yeah, it's like getting a neck tattoo.
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It's like the idea of it's kind of neat, but I don't know if I actually want it.
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Um and so then I was like, look, we had this thing called Trends at The Hustle and I got a lot wrong and I love the business model still. I think I can do this.
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And my partner, my now business partner and I, uh we had like basically a therapy group where we would like [ __ ] and complain about everything going on and we're like I settled on that product.
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You built a product, launched it, did not use your audience initially publicly.
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You didn't use the podcast to promote it initially.
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Maybe your brand your brand name helped per the in private, but you didn't do it publicly and you drove you drove it to millions of dollars in revenue um very early on.
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So very successful thing that everybody listens to this podcast kind of wants that outcome.
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So so you know, you're a a walking case study. Go ahead.
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Yeah, so Hampton is a peer group.
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So some people call it a community, I call it a peer group.
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Basically, there's three parts of the peer group.
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So you have an eight-person group that have uh like similar size or types of companies and you basically it's like a therapy group.
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You just kind of complain.
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So it takes about six months to like really like for it to like catch and be awesome, but I have a six-person or eight-person group. It's freaking awesome.
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And you will do everything like you uh someone will make a presentation for every meeting and they'll say like here's my portfolio, here's my net worth.
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Can you guys tell me am I doing something wrong?
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Am I doing something right?
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Here's how my company works. What am I doing wrong? What am I doing right?
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And so they do a presentation. So that's part one.
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Part two is we have a digital community where you can like post in there and see what other people are saying and you could like, hey, I'm trying to hire a nanny.
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Um what are you guys's best uh advice for agencies that to use in the northeast? Things like that.
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You can do personal stuff, non-personal stuff.
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The third thing is events.
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I think we host 200 events a year at this point uh including retreats, all these types of things.
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So it's highly uh inspired by Chief, YPO, Vistage.
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These are large companies that are in the space. So that's the business.
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Originally, I was trying to go after marketing executives and then just executives in general.
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Dude, I called I did 50 to 70 meetings with people trying to convince them to join.
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And none of them wanted it.
6:00
Hello dear marketing executive.
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Yeah, anyway, how's your marketing today? no one [ __ ] wanted it.
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I couldn't get And then eventually I was like, I I need to charge like around 10 grand a year in order to make this like a viable business. No one [ __ ] wanted it.
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They're willing to pay $500 and I created a group that was actually $500 and I was like, "Dude, this sucks. I can't do this."
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And then my And then we were like, "Should we do doctors? Doctors would be cool."
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Um but like what the [ __ ] I don't know anything about doctors.
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I tried to get in a I tried to get in touch with a ton and like no one wanted it.
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And then I was like, "Fortune 500 CEOs." Same problem.
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Like, "How do I get in touch with a Fortune 500 CEO?"
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Like, I don't I don't know one. Like, it is really hard.
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And then Ideas that sound great on paper, but as soon as they came into contact with reality, they got punched in the face and they ran home with a nose bleeding.
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Well, this one really punched me in the face.
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The next one we thought about minorities.
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We're like, uh you know, my my wife is a minority and I like hear a little bit of the things that she goes through.
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I'm like, "I should create this."
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And then I looked in the mirror and I was like, "Yeah, this ain't going to work.
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I'm the opposite of a minority.
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Business ideas look great on paper, but then Yeah.
7:07
your own reflection for you. in the mirror. Yeah.
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I remember when you told me that idea and I was like, "Dude, honestly, it's a great idea.
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I think it's an underserved community.
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I think they want that career development.
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I think that I think that makes sense."
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But I was like, "Dude, what are you going to do when you're like, 'Hey, I'm like you you know, are you going to have Sarah be the CEO?
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Like, what are you going to do?
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You're going to be like, 'I am this this white man who is running this I don't know.
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You Possible, but like I don't know."
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If you Google the word white bread, you're going to see a picture of Sam Parr.
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Like, it like it would not have worked.
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There's a reason your nickname is the vanilla gorilla, okay?
7:45
Like It wasn't going to work.
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And then my partner was like, "Dude, let's just go after CEOs."
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And he'd been saying this whole time.
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I'm like, "They will never pay for this."
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But all along some people had heard rumors I was launching this, so they asked me like, "Can you do this for us?"
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And I kept saying no, and then finally we're like, "Fuck it, let's do it."
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And then that obviously was the right decision.
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But by the way, I did a ton of research.
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So I interviewed a ton of members of all these different groups, and they're like, "I'm a tech guy, but there's it's all like guys who own like 18 apartment buildings in South Florida in my group. It kind of sucks.
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Like I love them, but we don't like a line on business."
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Which just sounds like it's better founder fit, right?
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Like, you know, it's a it's who it's who our audience is on this podcast.
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It's where you had a reputation.
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It's where you knew the relatable pain points.
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It's you knew how to you knew where to reach him cuz you knew where you hang out.
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You It's like way better founder fit. so much easier. It was way easier.
8:31
All right, everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot, and this one's really easy for me to talk about because I'm going to show you a real-life example.
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So I've got this company called Hampton. Joinhampton. com.
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It's a community for founders doing between $2 million all the way up to like $250 million a year in revenue.
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And one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these cool surveys.
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And so we have a lot of founders who have high net worth, and we'll ask them all types of questions that people typically are embarrassed to ask, but provide a lot of value.
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So things like how much the founders pay themselves each month, how much money they're spending each month, what their payroll looks like, if they're optimistic about the next year in their business.
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All these questions that people are afraid to ask, but well, we ask them anyway, and they tell us in this anonymous survey.
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And so what we do is we created a landing page using HubSpot's landing page tool, and it basically has a landing page that says, "Here's all the questions we asked.
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Give us your email if you want to access it."
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And then I shared this page on Twitter, and we were able to get thousands of people who gave us their email and told us they want this survey.
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And I could see did they come from social media?
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I can see did they come from Twitter, from LinkedIn?
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Basically everywhere else that they could possibly come from.
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I'm able to track all of that.
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And then I'm able to see over the next handful of weeks how many of those people actually signed up and became a member of Hampton.
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In other words, I can see how much revenue came from this survey, how much revenue came from each traffic source, things like that.
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But the best part is I can see how much revenue came from it.
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And a lot of times it takes a ton of work to make that happen.
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HubSpot made that super super easy.
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If you're interested in doing this, you can check it out hubspot. com.
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The link's in the description and I'll also put the link to the survey that I did so you can actually see the landing page and how it works and everything like that.
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I'm just going to do that call to action then. And it's free.
10:04
Check it out in the description.
10:04
All right, now back to MFM.
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Now, let's talk about the names.
10:08
Here's a good story about the names.
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So, the company's called Hampton.
10:11
A lot of people think that means the Hamptons.
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Um up until I was like 27, I didn't know what the Hamptons were.
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I thought I had read about it in like The Great Gatsby.
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I thought like it was like that.
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I didn't even know what it was until I married a woman from that area and I learned about it.
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So, what I do is all of my LLCs are named after streets in my neighborhood of St. Louis.
10:32
And there's a lot of really good names for some reason.
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And so, I just usually look at the map of where I'm from and I just look at the names.
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So, let me tell you some names that I thought about naming it.
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None of these really fit, but they could fit for other things. Number one is Macklind. I love that name.
10:43
So, at one point I thought about having the Macklind Running Club.
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Um the second one is Sublette.
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I've always liked Sublette.
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Uh the third one was Simpson.
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That was a a street I grew up near.
10:56
And then last one, check this out. Kingshighway. Is Kingshighway awesome? I love Kingshighway. I love Kingshighway.
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And then eventually we settled on Hampton because I grew up near Hampton Avenue and everyone thinks that it means the Hamptons. It doesn't. It means Hampton.
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And so, sometimes peo- people will say like, "Oh, I love the Hamptons."
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referring to my company and I'm like, "No, it's Hampton."
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So, we settled on Hampton because it had a good uh it had a good sound to it.
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By the way, could you tell me, in deciding a name, uh is that like a one-day process, a one-hour process, a one-month process for you?
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And are you bouncing it off people or are you just going into a dark room and saying, "What feels right in my soul?"
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Like, what's your What is the actual way a name gets picked for you?
11:37
I only asked like three people.
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Usually, it's my wife, my business partner, and that's about it.
11:40
Three people, but actually, there's only two. Even better. Did I just name two? And myself. The royal we. Yeah.
11:47
Um no, I don't really ask too many people because I just don't care that much.
11:52
Like, I just want to like hear someone's good opinion.
11:54
But, um and also, hampton.
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com, I don't think I'm ever going to get.
11:58
You know who it owns that? It's Marriott.
12:01
Yeah, the Hampton Inn, yeah.
12:01
Uh so, I don't know if I'm ever going to get that.
12:04
But, check this out with branding.
12:05
If you ask me about this 5 or 10 years ago, I never in a million years thought this was important, but I actually do.
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I hired a branding agency.
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So, I paid $15,000 right out the gate.
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And what I did was, and I sent this to you, I created this document.
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And And And it'll says It just says one line.
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It says, "Elite, but cheeky."
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And the reason I was inspired by that was Have you ever read Felix Dennis's book? Yes. How to get rich? Yes.
12:28
So, Felix Dennis is this famous entrepreneur.
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He's He's dead now, but he was a wild guy.
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He was basically a combination of Richard Branson and Mick Jagger.
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So, he had like swagger, but he was like a legit business guy.
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Um but, he like was He was like elite in that he was great at what he does, but he was like a silly person, and he uh wrote in a very conversational way, and I love that.
12:47
And so, when I wrote out this branding document, I listed what the business is, who uses it, whatever.
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And then, what I did was, I listed a ton of ads that I liked.
12:56
So, there's a a bunch of advertisements from the '70s.
13:00
That's one of my favorite eras for ads.
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And I found a bunch of GQ ads, Porsche ads, and Rolex ads.
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Like, Rolex had this famous series of ads called "The men who built the world wear Rolex."
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And they would do like a really cool exposé on like an astronaut.
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And you could see the astronaut, he's wearing a Rolex.
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Or Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the United States, he's got a Rolex, and it's "The men who built America are wearing a Rolex."
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And then, there's one with a Wall Street Journal, where it says, "Money talks. We translate."
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And it's just this beautiful imagery.
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And so I took that imagery and then I took the color British racing green.
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You know what British racing green is?
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I mean, it's the Hampton colors, but it's like a famous color from like Land Rover and Jaguar.
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It's like these British racing colors that I love.
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And I thought that cuz like when I think of a Land Rover or Range Rover or Jaguar, what do you got there? There you go.
13:50
That That's almost So, I I freaking love that color.
13:52
That's my favorite color.
13:54
I've got motorcycles in that color.
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I've had a car in that color. It's my favorite color.
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And I took that color and I'm like, "We have to make the brand feel like these ads, but be that color."
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And I wrote a bunch of sentences that I would want on the website.
14:07
And that's how we selected the branding.
14:08
And dude, hiring a branding agency is like a total hack.
14:10
What are some things along the way of making Hampton that you could have done, but you said no to?
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And in retrospect, maybe it was a good idea, bad idea, you don't know.
14:20
You don't know how it would have turned out.
14:22
But like, what were the no's?
14:22
Cuz we can only see what you said yes to.
14:24
We can see the the name you chose.
14:26
We you told us what names you said no to.
14:28
We can see the color you chose.
14:31
What were the things you said no to along the way?
14:33
Was there anything else that was like path you considered?
14:36
Here's two really uh big ones.
14:38
So, Hampton gets let's just say these aren't the exact numbers, but we'll use them.
14:43
Roughly 100 people a day who apply.
14:47
We accept a fraction of that.
14:47
And my partner, Joe and I, we watch So, in order to get into Hampton, you have to interview.
14:53
We watch 100% of the interviews and we are the only people who click approve or deny. That is it. It was us two.
15:00
That is our job is to watch 100% of the interviews.
15:05
So, you said no to delegating that out.
15:07
We said no to delegating that out.
15:07
And we also Here's what sucks.
15:12
Dude, we turn down so many people and it's like we're turning down so much revenue and it [ __ ] kills me.
15:16
I'm like adding up the numbers when I Now, when you ask me, so Chief, chief.
15:23
com, there it's it's like this business, I guess we're like them, but they're for women executives.
15:26
You know why they grew so fast?
15:28
They grew to a 100 million in revenue in four or five years.
15:31
They let in 100% of the people who apply and interview.
15:36
We don't, and it [ __ ] kills me.
15:36
I see all this missed revenue, and I'm like, "Oh my god."
15:41
And so I'm thinking in my head, I'm like, so a lot of people we've talked about this, but Kingsford charcoal was invented because Ford had all this extra wood that they used to light their furnaces, and they eventually turned it to charcoal.
15:53
That's how Kingsford charcoal came about.
15:54
And so always in my head, I'm like, what's the charcoal I could make from these people who we've rejected, or who don't fit our criteria at the moment, and but we've said no to doing any of those ideas.
16:05
And so we're all where we said basically we're only focusing on CEOs of this demographic, of this type of business, and we're only going to do that until we say otherwise, and there's no time in the near future that we intend to say otherwise.
16:17
Well, let me tell you two things I think you could be doing.
16:20
So let me let me give you two ideas I think you maybe should have said yes to.
16:25
Number one, I think if I go to your website right now, I don't see that you say no to that many people, or that you it's a that there's a curate that how heavy the curation is.
16:36
All the things you just said to me would make me want to join because it's like, "Oh, they're really actually curating the community.
16:40
These are actually high-quality people.
16:41
The founders watch every single interview.
16:43
They let They accept in less than 1% of people.
16:44
They have a counter on their website of how many people they've said no to, or how many how much revenue they've said no to in order to make the community solid because that comes first."
16:52
And we put our money where our mouth is, we turned down this much revenue.
16:56
And then maybe maybe it's too too vulgar, but like I think you could use that.
16:59
The second thing, you got the elite part right.
17:02
Now now now we have to make it cheeky. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
17:07
I just went elite douchey, so I don't know.
17:09
We got to work on the other part.
17:10
Um the other thing I don't think you did did a great job of is your story.
17:12
So like Would you do you value a founding story in uh or like the founder story and the founding story of the company?
17:21
Do you think that's important or useful?
17:25
I think that's incredibly important and I think I made a mistake because I wanted to make this not the Sempire business and I think I've screwed up.
17:30
I think I should have leaned into that.
17:33
I think the way it works, I did this with the Hustle.
17:36
You can have the founder can be the company or be the face for a period of time and you could phase it out.
17:41
And with this time I was like, I'm not going to be it and I screwed that up. Yeah, yeah.
17:45
I think you should lean into that because you know the the situations where you don't want the founder to be the the the face and the reason to join is when the founder has to deliver the service.
17:53
It's like the the law firm or the the specialty, you know, marketing exec.
17:57
It's like, oh, this guy's great.
18:00
But oh, now I'm handed off to some junior person, they're doing my marketing.
18:02
I want that guy on my account.
18:03
Whereas with this, you don't have to be the account, you know, you're not delivering the actual service.
18:09
Um, so I think you could use it because the true founding story is that's how we met.
18:13
that's how we met. We made a peer group in San Francisco when we didn't know [ __ ] when we were running our companies and there was our companies could fail or succeed and in that group came a billion-dollar company, a hundred-million-dollar company, a
18:26
thirty-million-dollar company, a two failures, but one best man at your wedding and a friend who you ended up investing in their thing and that came out of that and then this podcast came out of that, which then has become one of the top business podcast, blah blah blah. Like, that's actually almost like
18:37
Like, that's actually almost like your founding story as an entrepreneur and helped you when you actually sold the Hustle successfully.
18:44
So from I remember in our peer groups, it was like, I'm going to do the Hustle.
18:48
It was an events business.
18:49
Then no, no, no, next month.
18:51
No, it's not an events business, it's a blog business.
18:54
You said something that stuck with me and it was It pissed It pissed you off.
18:58
No, no, because you weren't wrong.
18:58
You were right in that I couldn't build a huge company that way, but you were wrong in that I don't have to build a huge company in order to achieve my goals, which was you go, dude, you're showing up to this fight you're showing up to this knife fight with just a knife.
19:13
I don't even want you to have a gun.
19:15
You need to have a magic [ __ ] wand.
19:17
And I was like, "Well, you're not wrong.
19:19
That would be nice to have that, but I but I don't."
19:23
And so until then we're using our fists.
19:25
In Silicon Valley if you go pitch for investors, you're basically making a promise it's going to be a billion-dollar company.
19:29
So I was like, "I don't think this is going to be a billion-dollar company."
19:31
What I didn't know is you were like, "I'm not trying to build a billion-dollar company.
19:33
I'm trying to build a company that makes me X millions of dollars and like and I could do it. I can actually do that."
19:40
And that would change my life and it would be [ __ ] awesome.
19:41
Which is a different pitch.
19:44
So you are right, but where where I was wrong was I shouldn't have aimed for that in the get from the get-go. But you are correct.
19:51
But so I think you know, maybe using a founding story would be helpful for you because it's genuine.
19:57
That's actually, you know, the origin of I think, you know, a lot of this is like first-hand experience, how the peer group helped you and how blah blah blah.
20:03
And then how it also leads to all these other thing that group became, you know, one guy's like, you know, a groomsman at your wedding, another guy becomes an investment you make down the road, blah blah blah.
20:12
Like that's that's kind of how these tend to work.
20:14
So anyways, that's my my two cents. Well, thank you.
20:17
Did you have you ever used a branding agency?
20:20
Um have I used I used a guy for the Milk Road.
20:23
Not I mean, he's an agency, but it's like a guy, one guy. Uh this guy Jeremy. you actually nailed.
20:28
I think you nailed that to be honest. Yeah, I I loved it.
20:31
It was a cool experience.
20:31
It definitely felt so indulgent.
20:33
It's like, "Oh, and now I'm going to take a break from my zero revenue business to go through this mood boarding process with this designer and talk about how the brand needs to feel."
20:45
It's like, "It needs to feel like there's a user and a customer."
20:48
And there's a definitely part of my voice that was like, "Shut up. Shut up, you idiot.
20:54
You go go build your business."
20:55
But what we did the trade-off we did was we actually with Milk Road we wanted to do a brand right away and we said, "Let's reward ourselves with a brand when we get to" I think we said 100,000 subscribers on the on the list.
21:08
And I said, "Today we're going to make the brand.
21:11
And but when we get to 100,000 then we'll know like this is we can always rebrand and we can we can polish it up."
21:16
And that's what we did to reward ourselves.
21:17
I think in the future I would probably use an agency if I'm confident about the idea.
21:23
If I uh it's also just like I don't know, it's a luxury item.
21:25
It's not a necessity, but it's a luxury.
21:27
I think for some things it is a necessity like if you're e-commerce brand or something you got to get your brand right.
21:32
And you know another thing that I thought was the dumbest thing ever, but I think could be cool. A naming agency.
21:36
I used a naming agency once.
21:39
I I find a lot of value in that now.
21:41
I think that it's like most agencies where a lot will suck, but I actually think that it could be quite valuable.
21:46
What What naming How much did the naming agency cost?
21:50
This is one of my many rookie mistakes.
21:52
I hired a naming agency once. I paid them $25,000. A lot of money.
21:59
I paid and they came in Now, let me tell you a couple things about them that's interesting.
22:02
One, the people who work at a naming agency are actually awesome.
22:07
Somebody who is drawn to that is a super interesting person and actually the move is to go vet branding agencies or naming agencies and then just pluck the most interesting person you have and be like, "You're going to run our whole brand.
22:17
Come over just come in house you're going to run our whole brand."
22:18
That's what I should have done.
22:19
And just just the audacity that they think that they could just name something that they that they think that could be the job.
22:28
Who do you think you are? It's like that's crazy.
22:29
So, the guy they come in and there's three of them.
22:32
And I'm like, "It takes three? To do this?" Oh my god.
22:36
And so that's they three of them come in and they sit down and they say, "So, tell me about tell me about the company."
22:40
And when I tell you I've never felt this much pressure in a pitch cuz I'm like this isn't pitching for an investor or a customer.
22:47
I'm like, "I need to give these creatives cuz creative people like that they're very skeptical.
22:51
You know, they see a bunch of corporate BS."
22:52
It's like, "I need to be cool and so clear and I need to capture the essence inside this business.
23:00
I can't just say the surface level cuz that's what they want.
23:02
They were there like, "Yeah, but but what is it?"
23:04
And you're like, "I just told you what it is.
23:06
What do you mean what is it?"
23:09
So anyways, I had this conversation with them.
23:11
And then I'm like, "I want to know this guy's process."
23:12
And so I leave the room, he comes I come back in.
23:17
smokes a bunch of weed and eats Doritos.
23:19
in the middle of the room.
23:19
He's moved our table to the side.
23:22
He's sitting Indian style on the floor with a white I took our whiteboard, put it on the ground, and he's writing long sentences.
23:29
And I'm like, "This is not names.
23:30
Like this is like paragraphs. What are you doing?"
23:34
And he's just writing out almost in first person.
23:36
This was awesome, actually.
23:37
He's writing out in first person uh who I think we were doing a dating app at the time.
23:40
So he was he was helping us with a dating app.
23:43
He was just writing out like from first person, almost venting as the customer.
23:47
He's like, "I don't download a dating app, I download dating apps, all of them, every single one of them. It's embarrassing."
23:52
And he's like, "I've tried them all, I use them all, and I hate them all, but I use them. I I hate use them."
23:57
And he's like, "I hate them because it's mostly me sitting there sending out messages that are not getting replies, and I just and then the next message I send, I know this is probably not going to get a reply.
24:09
That's a pretty hopeless feeling.
24:09
At least if I go up to a girl at a bar, she rejects me to my face. Online, cowards.
24:15
These women are cowards."
24:15
And he's like, "They don't even reply."
24:18
And well, so then he's he's just venting.
24:19
And he's like, and he's scratching stuff out cuz he's like, "No, that's not really true."
24:21
But it was almost like slam poetry.
24:23
It's like he was trying to like almost get into the feeling of the problem and then the solution.
24:29
And he was but he was doing it not in a business planning way, but a other way.
24:32
I really actually liked that process and I kind of hijacked that.
24:34
So I paid a very expensive 25K to learn that one process, which is actually very useful as a copywriter to to like get to the essence of like what you're trying to do.
24:46
The name ended up sucking.
24:46
And like they did all these exercises where they would be like they put out these flash cards that were like Branson, Elon Musk, Einstein.
24:54
They're They're "Pick two that you think fit."
24:56
And then they'd be like, "Corvette, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, blah blah. Pick two."
25:01
And then I'm like, "Dude, what is this personality quiz?"
25:03
And I was just like I hated the whole process and then whatever.
25:07
The name was whatever it was.
25:08
I don't even I don't even remember now.
25:09
This is You don't even remember the name?
25:10
I'm sorry, it's a very unsatisfying end ending to it, but How do you not remember the name that they picked? That's c'est la vie.
25:23
That's what you should have called the [ __ ] app.
25:25
The app like failed by the time they gave us the name.
25:27
We were like, "Oh, this is a stupid idea.
25:28
We don't know how to do this app. Let's move on."
25:31
I still think it's worth it, by the way.
25:33
I still think it's worth it.
25:33
I think that's a lot of money though. 25 grand is a lot.
25:36
I think I paid my branding agency 15,000. Yeah.
25:40
It's hard though when you once you start to fall into that hole, you're like, "Well, do I want the best brand or just a mediocre brand?"
25:46
Like how much is my brand going to be worth?
25:50
Is it not worth an extra 5K?
25:52
It's very hard to say no. Dude, that's ridiculous. Um Is that the pod?
25:56
Well, let's let's let's recap real quick.
25:57
It took you You did your research in public.
26:02
It took you five false starts on figuring out who is the customer.
26:05
And the way you did it was you had an idea that sounded good in theory and then you went and tried to contact them and be like, "Do you want this?"
26:11
And then you got like punched in the face five times.
26:12
And then one of them looked great, but then like no founder fit.
26:17
And you settled on what was probably the obvious idea.
26:18
So that's like the first takeaway.
26:19
Second takeaway, um your name is awesome.
26:22
The name is awesome, but you use streets around Okay, I don't know if anyone else wants to copy that.
26:26
Mine would be a Grand Floral Boulevard, if which I don't think is going to make for a great startup name.
26:31
No, San Francisco has a bunch of good names, too.
26:35
Well, that's why I used to live in another kid.
26:35
I think should we I think we should show the deck that you made for the branding agency.
26:39
The cuz you this is not what they gave you.
26:41
This is what you gave them to get a good output.
26:45
You know, cuz you garbage in, garbage out.
26:46
If you give the bad instructions or bad prompt, you're going to get a a result on the brand.
26:49
So I think that's cool to show.
26:51
And I think, you know, maybe one one other thing that I think people could take away is using a founder story.
26:55
I think a founder story is very powerful.
26:59
And I think I need to fix that.
26:59
So, I just got like $25,000 worth of advice for free. So, that's good. I appreciate that. You got my Venmo.
27:08
Um all right, is that it? Is that the pod? That's it. That's the pod.