Audience arbitrage

Be the Bankless of a new wave: podcast first, then launch the business

Shaan's playbook: pick a brand-new wave like DeFi, start a podcast (e.g. Bankless), build a community and sponsorships, invest in and get equity in the businesses you cover, then launch your own branded product, like an exchange or ETF, to that audience.

“And eventually they should launch their own branded business in there. Maybe it's an exchange or an ETF or something else with that following. And so that's kind of the playbook I would do given my strengths and what I've seen.”

Steal thisStart a podcast on an emerging wave, build the audience, then launch your own branded product to that following.

The platform-jump play: YouTuber to pay-per-view millions

Shaan breaks down why the Paul brothers' move into boxing is a genius business model: selling pay-per-views is one of the best things a single person can do, and each event simultaneously grows their brand for free via media coverage.

“I think that this move they did to go from YouTuber, Viner to YouTuber, and then YouTuber to basically one of the best business models you can do as a as a single person is basically sell pay-per-views. And why is that right? So like this fight, I wouldn't be surprised if they sold 1 million pay-per-views. And so you sell 1 million pay-per-views at, you know, roughly $60 a pay-per-view, you know, per pay-per-view, you know, that's $60 million.”

Steal thisBuild an audience on a cheap platform, then graduate to a monetization model where a single event can net millions while compounding your brand.

E-commerce never gets the law of increasing returns

Shaan explains that e-commerce is easy to start but has no flywheel: going from $1M to $2M takes more work, not less, because you keep manufacturing product and ad costs rise as you scale. He advises going to one extreme: a defensible flywheel business or a disposable arbitrage play, never the mushy middle.

“But e-commerce doesn't ever get this law of increasing returns. I don't think so, at least, or it's minimal at best, which is that, you know, if you're at $1 million in e-commerce sales, getting to $2 million, you're going to have to do more work. You don't get less work over time, so you have to keep manufacturing the product.”

Steal thisPick either a defensible flywheel business or a disposable arbitrage play; avoid the middle where you grind forever with no compounding.

Five-lever playbook for growing a podcast

Shaan lays out the five growth levers they brainstormed: overlapping-audience big-name guests, paid acquisition experiments, doing a podcast guest tour, tripling down on clips, and sharpening the brand/hook.

“Number 1, big name guests that actually have an overlapping audience. So people like Chamath, people like Tim Ferriss, not just like a famous person who, like, for example, we had Jake Paul on, super famous, but his audience and our audience not going to have a huge amount of overlap”

Steal thisBook guests whose audience overlaps yours, not just famous names; fame without overlap doesn't convert listeners.

Steven Bartlett's Bebo trick: make people Google the app, not click a link

Bartlett bought up large parody Twitter accounts and refused to run trackable link ads. Instead he seeded a brand (Bebo) as a casual mention across many accounts so people would see it repeatedly, wonder what it was, and go search it themselves.

“He's like, No, that's not how people talk on the internet. I was like, okay, so tell me, what do you mean? He's like, you got to think, what you want to do is we have so many accounts that we want somebody, when they scroll on Twitter, they see Bebo mentioned like 7 times and that nobody's explaining it. Nobody's selling it to them. They just realize, why is everyone saying this thing Bebo? What is that? And then they go Google it or they go search for it”

Steal thisSeed a brand as an unexplained casual mention across many accounts so people search it themselves instead of clicking an ad.

The Penny Hoarder: a personal-finance blog that became a $50M affiliate machine

Sam recounts how founder Kyle started The Penny Hoarder as a broke college kid blogging about odd jobs, noticed Uber paid $2,000 per driver referral, and built it into a $50M/year content-plus-performance-marketing business by optimizing articles to drive affiliate signups.

“He started it as a finance blog where basically he was like a poor 20-year-old and he was doing like TaskRabbit and Uber driving and all types of odd jobs in order to make ends meet while he was in college because he came from a low-income household. He would blog about it. Eventually, this is his origin story. I don't know if it's true. He was like, "Oh, wow. Uber will pay me $2,000 for every person I refer to them. I'm going to write a little bit more about this and put more affiliate links." That's what he did.”

Watch elections (and everything) with your favorite small influencers

Shaan argues the future of consuming live events is doing it alongside niche influencers you care about, citing the All In podcast's election coverage and Joe Rogan's 500K concurrent livestream viewers. He frames 'co-watching with your tribe' as a rising business opportunity.

“Joe Rogan had half a million concurrent viewers on his livestream for the election, where he was just shooting the shit with his friends, talking about it. The UFC, often when there's a UFC fight, there's also the Fight Companion, which is always big, and it's just Joe Rogan and his friends getting drunk, eating cheese, and watching the fights together. It's way more fun than the official broadcast. And so I just think this is an interesting trend in a business, in a business opportunity that will continue to rise over time, which is like consuming stuff with the kind of little influencers that you care about.”

Steal thisBuild a product around co-watching live events with niche creators instead of official broadcasts.

Build a niche meme + auto-follow Instagram asset

Shaan's tactic for quickly owning an audience: make a niche meme account (e.g. 'Nurses Know'), have a real insider create the content, and run a scraper that auto-follows anyone whose bio contains your target keyword. Memes get shared, and you build a 300K-follower targeted asset while doing customer research.

“And then I would create a scraper that basically scrapes any bio that says nurse practitioner and just follows them. And I would auto-follow anybody who has that in their bio. There's a bunch of tools out there that will do this for you on Instagram. So I would go follow a bunch of them, get them to do this. And because I'm creating memes, memes are going to get shared. So one is going to get shared with the other, And then everybody who likes my jokes, I would go follow them. And I would end up with a 300,000-person-followed Instagram account that's all nurse practitioners.”

Steal thisLaunch a niche meme account and auto-follow accounts whose bios match your target customer to build an audience fast.

The G Fuel model: own-flavor influencer drinks for any niche

Shaan describes G Fuel, a gamer energy drink doing $30M-$80M+ a year, built by giving top Twitch streamers their own custom flavor and shaker. He pitches applying the same own-product influencer model — and a D2C pre-made gear-kit business — to other niches.

“And then he went to the top streamers, he was like, like, look, you're gonna have your own flavor and your own shaker, uh, that this thing comes in. And so like, uh, I— and you're my influencer and you need to put this in your Twitch bio and whatever. And at that time, Twitch streamers were like underpriced arbitrage. They had a lot of fandom, a lot of audience, and, uh, traditional sponsors didn't know how to work with them”

Steal thisGive each top influencer their own branded SKU (a flavor, a kit, a color) instead of a generic sponsorship, and own the D2C relationship.

Amazon builds an empire; Shopify arms the rebels

Shaan relays Tobi Lutke's framing of Shopify's strategy versus Amazon: rather than become the one mega-shop, Shopify gives individual merchants the tools to run great independent stores. 'Amazon wants to build an empire; we want to arm the rebels.'

“You know, Amazon wants to build a giant empire, and at Shopify, we want to arm the rebels, which is basically like, you know, give, give each of the individual merchants the tools and abilities to sell and have great shops on their own rather than become the one big mega shop of the world.”

Know one channel cold and buy businesses that have never used it

Shaan's edge for acquirers: master a single growth channel (e.g. Facebook ads) and the product traits that win there (scroll-stopping, value clear in under 3 seconds), then buy profitable businesses that have never run that channel and flip the switch.

“So like there's a lot of these that they're just not doing one channel. And if you know that that channel works, if you have experience in that channel, let's call it Facebook ads or Google AdWords or influencers or whatever, whatever's your, your, your growth thing. And you, you know, the characteristics of the type of business that works there, right? So let's say it's Facebook.”

Steal thisMaster one acquisition channel, then buy profitable businesses that have never run it and apply your unfair advantage.

You Probably Need a Haircut hit 150K uniques in 24 hours

Greg Isenberg launched a 'virtual barbershop' (youprobablyneedahaircut.com) during COVID lockdown by seeding it to a few journalists and posting on Product Hunt. It drew roughly 150,000 unique visitors in the first day.

“Like you just seed it with a couple of journalists and throw it up on Product Hunt and before you know it, like, I don't know, we probably had 150,000 uniques in the first 24 hours.”

Steve Bartlett bought theme accounts for $1K and built a fortune

Sam tells how Steve Bartlett, a former 20-year-old shit employee, built tens of millions by buying non-personality Instagram/Twitter theme accounts (like 'I Love Food' with 6-7M followers) from teenagers for ~$1,000, aggregating them, and selling reach to brands like Spotify.

“And he was figuring— he figured out pretty early, wow, the people who run these accounts with a million, million followers, it's an 18-year-old kid, and I can offer them $1,000 and I can get the account. And he's just, you know, doing affiliate links for protein powder. But if I aggregate all these, I can go sell this to Spotify as a great way to reach the masses, and I can control these.”

Steal thisAggregate cheap theme accounts with zero personality risk and sell the combined reach to brands.

RXBAR: a packaging change turned a granola bar into a $600M+ exit

Sam uses RXBAR as proof that distribution beats product: a bootstrapped, unremarkable protein bar redesigned its packaging to list only the ingredients ('3 dates, 4 eggs, 8 nuts'), sales took off, and it sold to Kellogg for $600-700M.

“And so they changed their packaging to say, uh, it only had the ingredients and the, the shtick is that it was just like 3 dates, 4 eggs, like 8 nuts. And like, that's it. And that's their packaging.”

Steal thisTreat packaging as a core distribution lever, not an afterthought; a clearer, more honest design can transform a commodity product's sales.

The unfair advantage of an audience: sell out a workshop with one email

Shaan explains that having an audience makes running a paid workshop nearly zero-work. Neville's list (est. 50K-100K) or even Sam's personal 5K list could sell out a session with a single send; the real cost is the exhaustion of doing the event.

“for anyone listening, there's an unfair advantage of having an audience. Yes. So like, it would be practically no work for us. Yeah. So that's great. Neville, I don't know how many people are on his email list. I don't know this for a fact. I would guess 50,000 to 100,000. Yep. My personal Sam Parr on my email list, well, not The Hustle, probably 5,000, so I could just send out a thing and it would sell out.”

Chrome plugins are the stickiest delivery mechanism

Sam argues that 'dumb' formats like Chrome plugins, Shopify apps and WordPress plugins are dismissed but are really just services delivered through a particular mechanism. He says the Chrome plugin his company owns is the stickiest delivery mechanism for a product he has ever seen, pointing to Honey's acquisition as proof.

“And I'll tell you firsthand, we own a Chrome plugin. And I was showing Sean the stats before this. The Chrome plugin is the stickiest delivery mechanism of a service or product that I've ever seen in my life.”

Steal thisTreat a Chrome extension as a distribution channel, not a toy; build a daily-use service around it.

Distribution first: audience is the hard part, product is easy

Sam learned from a NerdWallet founder to work backwards from distribution. The insight: acquiring customers is the hard part, so bake distribution into your cost to acquire a customer, then figure out what to sell, citing how many low-quality products win simply because they're in every store.

“And he goes, He's like, dude, raise this money and go big. And I was like, I don't know what I'm going to sell. And he goes, you'll figure it out. Getting the audience is the hard part.”

Steal thisPick a distribution channel you can win first, then reverse-engineer the product that fits it.

Dane Cook gamed LimeWire to build his fanbase

Shaan's lesson on doing what's native to a medium: comedian Dane Cook got big by gaming LimeWire, uploading 5 minutes of Chris Rock comedy followed by 45 minutes of his own under searches for Chris Rock, hijacking where attention already was.

“Dane Cook got really big because he gamed LimeWire back in the day. He would— people were searching for Chris Rock comedy, so he'd like put like 5 minutes of Chris Rock comedy and 45 minutes of Dane Cook comedy right afterwards. And that's how he got his followers because he knew how to like game that system because that's where the attention was at that time.”

Steal thisFind where attention already concentrates on a platform and design content native to how people use it.