#151 - How To Go Viral, Grow Your Following & Tons of Ideas with Lambda School's Trevor McKendrick

I put out the bat signal today because Sam could not make it to the recording because he has good news. He just tweeted it out. The Hustle has been acquired by HubSpot. He'll come on probably at some point and talk all about that, but because of that, he's understandably busy today popping bottles and doing trillionaire shit, uh, that you do when you— when the day you sell your company. The day you sell your company, you're a trillionaire. Um, okay, so I put it out and I got a bunch of people responding. Some people in the DMs, we got some blue check marks coming in saying, oh, pick me. And we decided to go with the underdog. We picked Trevor McKendrick to come on the pod. If you suck, nobody will ever hear this and this pod never happened. But if you're good, uh, This is your time to shine, baby. You, you were, uh, one of the all-access pass members. That's how I, I first got to know you, your chief of staff at Lambda School. And most importantly, you applied intelligently to this call to action of come on the podcast. You sent me a screenshot of a bunch of ideas. And so I was like, good, that's way better than somebody just saying, oh, I'll do it. You know, I'd be interested. I'm down. So you applied intelligently. So that gets rewarded. Some other people did as well. Don't get mad at me if you didn't get picked, but I just said, let's give it a shot. So Trevor, how does it feel to be here?

Feels super great. I'm super excited to talk to you.

Do you normally listen to the pod or no?

Yeah, no, I listen, uh, all the time.

Okay, great. So you already know the deal. You know how we do things. Actually, you probably know how we should do things, which is more about ideas. And sometimes we get off script and bullshit too much. So, um, we'll try to stick to the script here. So ideas, are you, do you consider yourself an idea man?

I try to be as much as possible. Yeah, I got my list. Uh, whenever something comes down, uh, write it up.

Okay. So we'll see how good your ideas are. So what I want you to do is you start spitballing ideas and, um, if it's interesting, we'll start talking about it. Dumb, I'm just gonna say that's dumb and we could pass. If it's just, I have nothing to say. Okay. And so you're gonna be the, the, the machine gun firing out ideas and I'll just be deflecting and doing whatever I gotta do. Uh, all right, so let's do it.

Let's go.

What ideas you got for me?

All right. First up, I call it the $5 headshot, which is everyone wants a good headshot. Everyone's vain. Everyone needs a good headshot, but most headshots suck.

Like why? It's like we have all these editing tools, we all these things. Why don't people have good headshots? So the idea is, Pay $5 for an app that all it does is takes a headshot, editing tools specifically for a headshot, lighting, the whole thing. And the way that you grow it is you can share like 3 or 4 of your favorite pictures with your friends with the app logo at the bottom. They vote. This worked for like 99designs.

Nice.

So you get like confirmation that you got a great pic. People, everyone else downloads the app and then you gotta pay $5 to download your favorite pic.

Okay. So, so you have a headshot for your Twitter account. Which is Trev McKendrick. Did you pay to get this headshot taken?

My wife is a wedding photographer, so she did it. All right.

So your wife did it for you. You're on this yellow background. Was that the real background or you Photoshopped a yellow background?

Photoshopped it in to stand out.

Gotcha. It was white before that or what?

It was like an outdoors background or something.

Okay. Gotcha. So you cut it out. Okay, great. I got a Facebook ad. If you look at the thumbnail of this podcast, that picture you see is not just a picture. That's an investment. I went and paid some guy $270, $300 maybe. I don't remember what it was. Basically some guy was doing Facebook ads and the Facebook ad was amazing because he just had a normal looking photo that somebody had as their like kind of LinkedIn bio and then like this like ultra like sick looking photo of that same person. And he is like, I can do this for you. I take professional headshots. If you take your career seriously, just come in and get a good photo taken. You're gonna want that to, to do things. You know, that's something I would make fun of publicly, but privately I'd be like, damn, I kind of wish,, you know, when somebody asks, like if you're talking at a conference or they always ask, do you have a headshot? And then I'm sending them this like shitty low-res thing of me from college and they're like, you don't even look like that anymore. That's you 70 pounds ago. So I went and got this done and I paid $300 for this. So I'm a believer that people would pay for this. And I do think the tech could do this well. I don't know how this is much different than just like a normal photo editing app, like Facetune or some shit like that. Is there something that's actually headshotty?

There's friction. So like setting up your lighting, lighting's everything for pictures. So like the app can tell you, hey, your lighting sucks, pivot right or left until it looks good. And it's like, okay, you got the dotted outline, take it here. It can also do things like there's friction between like exporting for like the 90 different platforms that your headshot needs to go into, right? So it can just one-click bump out to all the different formats. And if you look at like the Facetune, the other apps, the photo editing controls are like super complicated. There's like for people that are like the most vain, want to like make every pixel perfect. I think you could dumb it down a ton for like average Joe just wants a solid pic and make real like controls just built specifically for getting a headshot, which is a lot simpler.

Okay, I like it. I'm a fan of this idea and I like the little viral mechanic of, hey, which— because I did this, I sent it to my, my wife, I sent it to my sister. I said, hey, which of these pictures— because, and that when you go to a photo shoot, they're like, here's your gallery, but you can only own 2 of these. And I'm like, you know, Shift+Alt+F4, you know, whatever. Like I can take screenshots of all this shit. So, so, so, so don't try to limit my downloads, bro. But basically, yeah, I did get their opinions and that was a kind of viral mechanic.

All right.

That's a good idea. I'll give it a B+. What else you got?

All right. Next one. So we always talk about like product, product, product. Like tech world is obsessed with product. We're always trying to like experiment and find the best product. But what about a product that's built on experimenting with distribution channels? And things that aren't tried and aren't as known in the tech world. Like, so for example, using like direct mail. So like direct mail, you can find people that the tech world doesn't find, like our grandparents. And then you can come with a product like, just an example, like newsletters are super hot right now, but I promise you that our grandparents are not into newsletters. I don't even know that like that's a thing right now. How do you— and this idea came because like my grandparents are always asking me about like, what's new, what's interesting, blah, blah, blah. And it's like I wanted like a thing I could point them to, like, hey, to talk to your grandkids better, like what they're into. Check out this newsletter. And it's like, okay, well how am I gonna find them? Probably not Facebook ads, be too expensive. But like direct mail, there's no startup using direct mail to target grandparents. So yeah, what do you think of that?

Okay, so I didn't fully understand the idea. So basically you're saying there's channels like direct mail, then what's the business or what's the idea here? I mean, I might have missed it cuz I started thinking about it, I started riffing on it in my head and I kind of missed what you said. So explain it simpler to me.

I kind of changed it halfway, but the idea is How do you keep your grandparents informed about what is cool for their grandkids?

Okay, so here's a fun, silly idea, which is just every, you know, schmuck with a newsletter right now, every schmuck with a Substack, hey, for $7 a month, we'll print out your, your Substack, we'll mail it to your mom and your grandma because they miss hearing from you and, uh, they actually care much more about you than your shitty Substack subscribers do. So, okay, that's just a goofy idea. But if you combine that with a company I invested in, Addressable— Addressable, have you heard of these guys?

I have not.

Yeah. And there's, I just like the idea of channels that non-tech people have not explored or looked at and like using, you know, handwritten signatures to like customize the thing, make it feel more special. And addressing like an older audience, I think fits that checkbox.

Yeah, that's cool. Like I told these guys, you know, for e-commerce, e-commerce is always looking to like increase retention and lifetime value of a customer. And these little things go a long way. Now, if you try to do a handwritten letter through, you know, yourself to your customers or through your maybe your 3PL who packs your orders, they'll charge you like a, you know, $0.50 or $0.75 just to put an insert in. And that's not even personalized. So with Addressable, if you're sending it for $2, and your customers are worth $100+ to you, that could be a worthwhile investment, a personal touch where they feel like this is kind of a wow moment by this brand I bought from. And for the brand, maybe you're gonna like step up and be able to drive more lifetime value because you could see that those customers come back and order. And that's the best part about Addressable is they, because it's all programmatic, they'll tell you, cool, this person you sent the piece of mail to, did they go back and act on your website? You can connect those two dots because it's the same, you know, user ID and email that you uploaded. So they'll pass it back and then you could check like, did they take any actions? So I think that maybe you could do this for e-commerce as well.

Awesome. Should we go on?

Yeah.

Next one. All right. Next thing is virtual shadow, uh, CEO. So work— so I'm the chief of staff for Austin at Lambda School. And one of the things that was super interesting about that is you get to like get into the brains and see how somebody actually works. Like how do they process their email? How do they choose who to talk to? And like the real details. You know, we saw this a little bit with, uh, when you did All Access Pass. And I think, um, like what I want to do is shadow a CEO for a day, like record their screen, watch how do they do email, how do they do like literally these little decisions. Because I think that most people would be shocked, as an example, by how fast these CEOs make decisions about big things, how they like view what to act on. And there's just no, there's no version of that. What do you think?

So if I'm the CEO, why am I letting you record my screen and all that shit? We gotta figure out those details.

Details later, man. This is, this is the value prop to the customer.

Okay. So I like the idea of being able to shadow CEOs. I'm obviously a believer in that. I did it myself when I moved to San Francisco. I specifically didn't go start my own company. I wanted to work with somebody who had done it before. And I literally just said, I wanna sit right next to you and see how you operate. Cuz you've clearly had massive success. Uh, this was to this guy, Michael Birch. I said, you've clearly had massive success and I would love to just work with you. You know, I think you seem like an awesome guy. My secret intent was, look, if I could just see how this guy operates, then I can operate more like him. You know, my, uh, okay, I won't tell this other story, but I have a second version of that, which was Scott Harrison is the founder of Charity:water, and he's kind of like this really inspiring guy. If you ever go listen to him give a talk about Charity:water, you know, you're moved, you're moved to take action, to donate, to do all these things. He's an amazing storyteller. He's building like a tech company, but it's a nonprofit, right? Like the people who go work there are like ex, Adobe and, you know, Google and wherever else. Mostly those folks don't leave for nonprofits because he's pretty— one of the reasons he's a pretty charismatic CEO and he pitches a big dream. So I emailed him once and I said, hey, can I just come shadow you for a week? And I said, I'll work, you know, I'm going to take a vacation. I'm going to tell my company I'm taking a vacation, but my vacation is I'm going to come shadow you. And he said, yeah, let's do it. And so I'm a big believer in this shadowing idea. For the record, I never did actually go do it, but I'm a big believer in the idea. Not big enough to actually go do it, but enough to email the guy and ask. Now the question is, how do you make this pay off for the giver of access, right? When I did the all-access pass, I charged for it. You know, I made good money doing it, so I was charging for the access. So how would you maybe solve that problem?

I think I would— what would I do?

I got an idea for you. So a lot of times for these CEOs, money is not the driver, legacy is. So something like MasterClass, they do make money on MasterClass, but I think the real appeal is kind of like to the ego. It's like, we're gonna like document this, we're gonna capture you in this like super high quality thing and you're amongst this elite group of people who are like masters of their trade. So in comedy we did it with Steve Martin, in basketball we did it with Steph Curry, and in business we wanna do it with you, Howard Schultz. Like that's their pitch. So maybe you could do it that way. Maybe you could capture it as a little documentary day in the life. It's gonna be sort of overproduced and like a spin thing, but I think that's maybe the only way you can get 'em to do it.

There's like a slightly tweaked version of this, which is recording how just like not CEOs, but like normal people work and like giving feedback on like how to like work more efficiently. Yeah, yeah. Work better, which I think would be hard to do. But if a CEO believes that they can get even 1% improvement, like in a workflow that they just don't even know about, I think the ego idea is actually better. But if CEOs believe like a 1% thing is worth it, then that's also another angle.

One version of that that I think is kind of cool and weird is, um, we've talked about this, this app, this company called Deep Sentinel before on the podcast. They're basically like a security camera company. Like you put the camera outside your house, but there's somebody remotely watching it for you. So whenever it beeps that there's somebody there, there's actually a human being watching it that like will then send you a message that says, hey, it's all okay. Or hey, there actually is a threat and we're monitoring it. We'll call the authorities or whatever else. Right. And so there's like a, you know, security guard for the everyday home. So I think there's a version of this that for meetings, because I'm often in meetings, and I'm watching people and I'm thinking, man, they have no idea how they're coming across. Either they're being rude, their body language is totally disinterested, they're too aggressive, they're too passive, you know, whatever it is. I wonder, and meetings are very important, right? Like at Twitch, there's this one room that's the big meeting room. It's on the 9th floor of the office and it's the big boardroom table. And it's where basically the CEO, Emmett, just kind of sits there all day and different teams come in and talk to him. Like the amount of value that's in that room, right? In terms of people time and their salaries and the decisions that get made is all like super critical. But there's no feedback loop of like, how are you doing in these meetings? How are you running meetings, right? There's a lot of like executive coaching, but they're kind of like therapy. So I wonder if you could marry these three ideas, right? Marry the idea of executive coaching and the Deep Sentinel and meetings. And the way this would work is you put a little camera in your meeting room that gets piped to a coach the coach is going to watch that back, watch back the meetings and find game film like a, like a basketball coach would and say, they'll chop it up and they'll say, hey, they'll send it to you after the fact, you know, like a day later, you know, like 4 hours later or whatever. And they could say, hey, look, during this meeting when this person was saying this thing, you were, your body language is totally disinterested or confrontational. And look, you could see if you pause right here, you can look and see their reaction to it. So that's a moment where you can improve. Because imagine like how much better we could be if we got that type of feedback that athletes get where they get real footage that says, look, you did this, maybe you could have done Y instead. And then by the, you know, for the next game, they like have that little movie in their head.

The question I'm asking myself for like all of these ideas for you is like, how much are you considering viability when you're riffing on ideas? For me, it's like, I was like, I don't think the most important thing to Sean, which is why I was like, I'll pitch this shadow CEO thing. We'll figure out the hard half later. And then you like struck it down. So I was like, oh shit, like, uh, maybe I gotta— maybe my, my calibration was wrong.

All right. Next idea, Shopify for cash-based doctors. So if you want to get a procedure done, you can get it done generally a lot cheaper if you pay straight cash and more doctors are in Mexico or what are you talking about?

What's going on here? Who's taking cash? I've never paid a doctor in cash, nor have they asked me. Is that a thing?

Yeah. I like that idea a lot. I didn't realize this cash payment thing was a big deal, but just a quick Google tells me that there might be a there there. That seems like a, like a real opportunity. I don't know enough about it to like intelligently talk about ideas, but I know enough to know that that's where there are opportunities like that. And I'm just curious in general, who is building the kind of AngelList, Stripe Atlas, or, or whatnot for starting your doctor's practice? Like, I'm guessing today that starting a practice is a bunch of work, a bunch of paperwork, a bunch of legal work, a bunch of insurance work, compliance work. And like whoever figures out how to streamline that into like what AngelList did for starting funds, what Stripe Atlas did for incorporating companies. And I'm sure somebody's gonna say that exists. I bet you, you could take it down like one more order of magnitude in friction and make it even easier, right? Because like you could have said, LegalZoom exists. Why do you need Stripe Atlas? And then you use Stripe Atlas and you're like, oh, okay. Yeah, that's exactly why you need Stripe Atlas. And I bet you somebody's gonna do that for, uh, doctor's practices.

Yeah. Okay. Next one. This is kind of an out there idea. It's more of like a, almost like a reality show thing, uh, which is, and it's also like an entrepreneurship hustle behind it, which is like, watch me as I try to get on the Joe Rogan Show. What does that look like? Who am I talking to? Who am I networking with? And the end goal is really specific, really clear.

So just a mission.

Yeah, just a mission. And like, how do I get there? How does that happen? Okay.

You, they have to have something to care about, right? And like whether you succeed or not is like irrelevant.

So what would yours be? Getting on Joe Rogan?

Yeah, I do Joe Rogan. That's the, that or like Sam Harris, which is like a not my first million.

One of those.

Yeah, I won guys making the video today. We hope, we hope. Yeah, uh, I think Joe Rogan's a great one. I mean, Oprah, whatever, maybe of last generation.

I do think also it's cool to have something be authentic and slightly quirky. So like, it's one thing to say, you know, I want him, uh, Joe Rogan is— I think the Joe Rogan one is good, but I think a better one might be like, let's say Michelle Obama. Not Barack, but Michelle. Because I think if it's an obvious, you just want power, people don't root for it as much. But if it's like something that's someone that really mattered to you and you have like a real story about why that matters to you and why you why you want it so bad, you want it more than you should. That's what will get people to share it because it's sort of more remarkable than, well, we all wanna be rich, right? We all wanna be famous. So it's like, I think it's gotta be both specific and I actually think quirky specific will work better. So it's like getting on like, you know, the Maury Povich Show might work better than Oprah or whatever it is.

Totally. I mean, you're good at ideas, man. And then to build a sense of like community around the quirkiness, people like select in.

Yeah, we saw this with the WallStreetBets thing. I think that's one of the reasons why people got behind it, right? There was the David versus Goliath underdog story— people love that. There was the, like, you know, revolution— people love that. People loved that they could get a little bit rich if they were doing it. But there was also the absolute randomness of what was going on. Why GameStop? Why, like, you know, this Reddit WallStreetBets, this quirky community going after this random-ass stock and trying to take down the big guy? You know, like, it's interesting when it's that versus I don't know if it was Microsoft, would it have felt the same? I kind of don't think so. I think because it was GameStop, there was even more juice to that story.

Yep. And there's a lot of people like they want to start a podcast, they want to start a newsletter, they want to grow an audience, but you need like something to talk about that makes you interesting. You need a mission. And having a mission.

Yeah.

Let's do the next one. So one of the things we see at Lambda School is we're training people to be programmers, to get a job, technical skills, but 50% of getting the job is having like the right social skills. Like, How do you network? How do you email? How do you, how do you be like a white-collar worker? This would be, you could do any number of things, but I think one course that you could offer is like how to email as a professional. The hard part about this is that people that don't know, they don't do it right, don't know about it. Right. And so you have to kind of convince people that there's value here, but it is a huge gap in the people that are like trying to make it. And there's so many little Tweaks in email that we don't get taught anywhere.

I think it is a much better version, or it's a great way to sell what I was talking about. I think it would be super tough to judge kind of what the writing level is.

Oh, it's just arbitrary. It doesn't even fucking matter. Right.

You just, oh, you're just like labeling 'em.

And then you can have people compete against each other for like which label they are, how good they are. And that's incentive to share it. You can track between your friends. And then you're, the whole time you're selling whatever course it is that can help improve the writing.

Okay, so if any Lambda School student wants to make a project out of this, I will sponsor. Is that how it works? Can I just be like, I'll pay $3,000 for any student who makes a good version of this? Can I do that at Lambda School?

We'll get you someone for free to try for a month.

Oh, perfect. Okay, great. So you heard this on the podcast and then this is my mission. I'm gonna collect, I'm gonna call it 100,000 email addresses of people who take this quiz. That's gonna be built by a Lambda School student as their like internship project. I'm gonna show you how viral this can go.

I love it. All right. This justifies my presence here to Austin. I can, uh, be like, hey, I got it. I, I pimped, uh, that's your investment too. So we're good here. We're good on both sides.

All right.

Exactly. Next up, a, uh, call it GitHub for contracts or for lawyers. So if you've done any deal on the face of the planet that involves lawyers, it is the biggest pain in the ass cuz you're sending Word docs back and forth from each other with red lines and it's a whole thing. So getting this started would be difficult, but the idea is creating a GitHub where you can track changes on a single doc between all parties. You can't hide anything on a single place and it's easy to track. And it's one thing, the benefit of this is like, you become like the platform for contracts that everyone uses. And, uh, the trick is like, how do you get, uh, how do you get those first start, first users?

So this idea has been around for a little while and it does feel like, fuck, this should exist. I was also like, I think 5 or 6 years ago I was like, why doesn't this exist? And I talked to our lawyer and she was like, well, like the thing is lawyers don't really love to change anything. Like we all use desktops and laptops and we use Microsoft Word and we all understand it. And like we have our file history and I'm like, no, but it could be so much better if you just did it this way. And so, you know, I think the challenge here is just a lawyer adoption. I know this company Ironclad is doing pretty good here, but I think this is a, a good idea that when it happens, it's going to be— seem so obvious. But I don't know how you get lawyers to use it because I think that's where the real point of friction is for this, unfortunately. So they should do it.

Should is not— not, uh, yeah, an actual need.

Should is not will, uh, or what's that phrase? Like, you know, if Grandma had balls, she'd be Grandpa type of thing. Like, yeah, that's what this is. They should want it. If everyone did what they should, then, then the world would be a different place.

All right, so the next idea is children's books. Like pick the thing that— pick the value that a parent wants to get into their kids and like make a children's book for that. For— I've seen like children's books are all like the healthcare system or about like libertarianism, whatever it is. Like parents want to like plant these freaking ideas into their kids' heads. And so make like a decent children's book for, you know, pick your topic of choice.

Uh, okay. Don't love it. Next idea.

Next idea. All right. All right.

What is the best idea on your list? Have you already done it or is there one that you got like hidden in the wings?

No, I'm not hiding anything.

You're like, I'm giving you my best already.

What else we got?

Okay, answer me this. I had said a Lambda School for X idea before. I said Lambda School for executive assistants before. Was that a bad idea? And I'll give you the 2-sentence why. EAs make actually great money. So they make almost like a, you know, a programmer is a big leap ahead of where you were. If you were kind of like not in the white-collar tech industry. So EAs in the tech industry will make $75,000 plus, I believe, and could be, you know, $120,000, $130,000, $140,000. I think that's possible. Check me on that if I'm wrong, but I believe that's true. So there's a really specific set of teachable skills, like the actual skill of calendaring, how to do that, how to do meeting minutes, how to organize, you know, these events, or sort of like little offsites or whatever it is. So just, I think it's something that can be taught in 6 months where you could become a staffing agency. Basically, you could say, hey, hire from us. We have a guaranteed pipeline of really good EAs that whenever you need one, they come out with, you know, a specific set of skills. Because I think typically right now EAs are just people who were doing one thing and then they get asked to do it and then boom, now you're an EA and learn on the job. You know, they're like kind of in rare quantity because when somebody has a great EA, they never want to lose them. It's like that executive's, you know, safety blanket is that EA. So they never— they work with them for like 10 years sometimes. So there's like a lack of liquidity. What do you think of that idea? Am I off?

Okay, cool. Let's do 2 more ideas, and then we'll switch and you get to ask me whatever questions you want.

All right, here we go, man. Bible stories to get you to fall asleep. So the reason I like this is because this whole ASMR genre has, A, it's a trend, and B, there are specific Spotify people and YouTube people who all they do is they'll talk slowly for you to fall asleep. So like, how do you do that better? Well, you make people like feel good about it in the process, right? And so you read them the thing that they're supposed to be reading or they feel like they're supposed to be doing in the first place. And it like happens to make them like fall asleep. Okay.

I like that idea. I like combining anything with sleep with anything with religion. So you're speaking my language. Those are two themes I'm always trying to find excuses to do businesses in because I think they're amazing places to do business. So, uh, so, so I'm in on that idea. I like that one.

As a former atheist Bible salesman, I can tell you religion's a, a good business to be in.

What was that story? So you were an atheist Bible salesman. That sounds cool. I like that. That leads on the resume. What does that actually mean?

Okay. That's amazing. Why are you a chief of staff?

Chief of staff because I wanted to learn how to run a company without actually kind of doing it first, if that makes sense. So I get all the visibility that Austin and the CEO have without necessarily like the responsibility of delivering on like a venture-backed startup. Which is probably not like the best reason, but it's been amazing to go from, you know, I was number 20 to like the 200 people that we are now.

Who should become a chief of staff?

You should become a chief of staff if you think you want to do a venture-backed startup, but you're not sure because it's like the easiest way to test it out with almost no kind of risk or stress on your part. I mean, yeah, it's regular work and it's stressful, but it's nothing like actually being the CEO.

On a day-to-day basis, like what percent of your day are you doing like bitch work that you don't want to do?

The percent goes down over time as you get good and you earn trust.

But what did it start at and what is it now?

Yeah, started, let's call it at 60% was bitch work.

And define like what bitch work is for people who don't know what bitch work is.

Calendaring, responding to emails, that type of stuff.

Okay.

Today it's like 10%. So eventually you get good enough where you like, we've hired an EA for Austin who like does most of this stuff.

Gotcha. And now what do you do? What do you do with the other 90%?

Now I do, you know, like big company stuff. So goal planning, OKRs, internal comms. A lot of external comms, marketing on the PR side, stuff that's like very broad across the whole company, but not like not super deep anywhere.

And you're basically like as a chief of staff, you're kind of like in a relationship with the CEO.

Totally, totally. So texting 24/7, access to their email, you know, and Austin's like one of the easiest CEOs to work with, quite frankly. I'm like super chill and, and pretty easygoing. You know, it's if he needs something, I'm trying to do my best to get, to get whatever that is.

What's an embarrassing story about Austin he wouldn't want you to tell on the podcast, but you're going to?

Um, I don't know if I can do that. I mean, we can talk about the fund that was not raised for him on Twitter by Sahil, which is like insane.

The number that I heard was like $30 million. I don't know which of those actually like came through, but yeah, it was $30 million.

So $30 million of interest, at least through like a survey or Typeform or something, which I think would translate roughly based on my fund, would translate probably to $20 million of actual commitments, which is no joke. And then, uh, respect to Austin for not getting distracted by the shiny object. And he was like, that's way too much, I don't need to do that. So no. So I like that. Okay, so I've asked you some questions, you've given me some ideas. Let's do 15 minutes or 20 minutes, however long you want to go. I'm cool, I'm done with meetings for the day. Of any questions you wanna ask me.

Yeah. So you've been getting better in shape. You know, that's a goal that a lot of people have similar to like wanting to start a business, kind of like all these classical goals and like some people for whatever, like can't do the thing. They're like not motivated or whatever the reason is. For a long time you weren't able to get in shape. I know you say like, I've hired a coach and I like built this system. Do you think it would've been possible? I want, I wanna hear about how you would've done it without that stuff or if it was just not gonna happen.

I think it's important to note that you, the order that you did those, cuz the second was like the infrastructure, whatever. The first was like, no, I'm just like going to do this. And I found for myself too, I lost 25 pounds last year and it was kind of like the same thing where it's like, no, this is just, this has to happen. And I think, think people underestimate just having will, how much having will can make things happen.

You don't get your, your what you want, you get your musts. And that's like the biggest thing. And so once it becomes an actual must, the world will start to move. My method is irrelevant whether you can afford a trainer or not and you can, you have the time to meal prep or not. Those don't really matter in the end because the person who, for whom it becomes a must, they will figure out the way to do it right. They will with no, you know, guys in jail with no equipment, can just do push-ups all day and then eat slop and get, you know, ripped. And so there's really no excuse. I also heard a funny thing, which is my friend said this is totally politically incorrect, but I'm going to say it because I think it's funny and it struck a chord with me. It's not okay to be rich and fat. And he goes, he goes, he goes, if you're poor, look, getting in shape is probably like, you know, maybe not the most important thing for you. Maybe you don't have access to healthy food. Maybe you don't have time. Maybe you're working multiple jobs. But if you're rich, no excuse, bro. And, and I just thought it's like it went against what I normally see, which is that usually the richer you get, the chubbier you get. And I thought, that's so true. There's no excuse. Your excuses are gone if you're rich to be fat. So that in that case, if you have no excuse, then you can't do it. You can't be rich and fat. And I adopted that. I can't say his name or he'll get canceled.

All right.

I'm okay. I'm going to keep saying things that nobody can cancel me because there's too many. I'm going the Trump route. Say everything and you eventually become immune. You know, it's like a person with a great immune system, you know, after living in the swamps.

Let's talk about you growing your audience. So this is clearly a goal that you have made and you've played around with like the— I think you've called it like the, the what red pill are you like? What is the thing that people know you for? I think in your Twitter bio right now it says the Idea Guy, which is to me is funny because people like always shit on the Idea Guy. Yeah. So how do you think about growing your audience?

I would, uh, recommend people listening. Uh, so I— the all-access pass was awesome, but it was paid, and now you basically made it free in the current newsletter. So just a pump for, uh, seanpuri.com.

Yeah, I'm trying to get the newsletter to 100K also. It has also doubled in size in the last month. So seanpuri.com. If you're at this point of minute 55 of the podcast or whatever and you are not subscribed to my newsletter, That is a direct slap in the face to me and to yourself. Don't do that to both of us. You deserve to get this newsletter for free.

What a pitch. What a pitch. Okay. You talk about this like concerted effort to grow and I see you have a lot of viral tweets. You have like these viral threads, like, are you drafting these and testing ideas? Are you trying things with friends or are you just like pumping the first thing that comes to mind and seeing what happens with it?

That's awesome. Yeah, it's one of the things I've tried to do is I don't know if you've heard of Readwise.

I've heard of it.

Yeah. One of the things it does, it lets you save Twitter threads and they have a leaderboard of who has the most saved threads. And so trying to march up that is like a sign of not just quantity, but like quality, like how much people actually like the things you're making.

I hate those things, by the way. Every time I tweet something, everybody, the first comments are always like, "@readwise," "@threaderapp," or it's like, dude, what is this spam? Like, was it so hard just to read this? Like, why do you need this? Like, compile this for me. Doesn't Twitter do that? What is the appeal of this? I don't understand.

I love that, like, these are the people that are, like, most interested in your content, and you're like, what the hell are you doing saving my words?

I don't even understand it. Why are they doing that? Why don't they just read the thing?

Because they want to reference it. So they want to, like, save—

Oh, it's a bookmark.

They can sort of do a document that they can save in— yeah, it's a bookmark.

Exactly. Oh wow. Okay. Yeah. Not saying that smart things. You don't need to save all the shit. Just hit the retweet button and move on.

That's all I ask. So at least I don't think you talk about this much on the podcast from what I've heard, but it's obvious that one of the things you're really good at, and you've told a couple of stories about this, is persuading people to kind of get behind whatever your vision or your idea is. You told some story about you had dinner with this random guy who also had a bunch of charisma and you're like, yeah, how do you, how do you deal with your superpower? You know, you have an idea, you have a thing you wanna do, how do you think about rallying the troops to kind of, kind of get people behind you and into a thing?

Well, I think it's super important, first of all, right? So I place importance on it. A lot of people think it's a nice to have. For me, I'm like, well, that's what I do. That's important. You know, like that, I've, I've seen so much value come from it. I treat it like it's work. You know, it feels like play, but I treat it with some importance is what I mean. I don't just like hope it happens or like get to it when I get to it. I'm like, no, I, let me actively try to do this. Yeah, I think people respond best to stories and that's why I talk about storytelling a lot. That's why I told that story of that guy Billy that you remembered, right? Like this guy I met in a sushi restaurant and he was so charismatic. And then I asked him like, dude, you have this power of persuasion. I'm like mesmerized by you. As awkward as this sounds, like we just had a date and that was a great date. You know, you just took me out to sushi and wined and dined me. That was awesome. How do you deal with this? And he told me in that moment, he goes, if your intentions are good, then use all you got, right? And so Same thing. I don't feel awkward or manipulative. Some people feel salesy if they're trying to persuade somebody of something or get somebody behind something. I don't think that. I just have a really tight filter at the beginning. I don't— I try not to do shit that's bad, that'll be bad for you or stupid or a bad investment or a bad product. I try to just deal with good things that I genuinely believe in, and then I carry zero guilt about sharing those with the world. In fact, I feel the opposite. I feel like I'm giving a gift out whenever I talk about it. When I talk about it, I try to talk about it through stories because I think that's what sticks in people's heads. And I think that's what gets people interested in hearing what you have to say. And so then I started to think about what makes a good story and started to practice doing that. And anytime I hear a good story, I sort of try to think about what made that such an interesting story. Oh wow. They, you know, like one thing that makes a good story is stakes. Stakes, meaning like what was on the line for the person who was telling the story. So it's one thing to say, I really wanted this to happen. 'But I'm, you know, I'm already happy and I'm rich and it's all good, and, and if it didn't happen, it's all good.' Well, that story has no stakes, and so it's not going to stick with people. But when somebody says, you know, 'I was down to my last dollar, and, you know, if I didn't do this, you know, whatever was gonna— bad things were gonna happen to me, and I pushed my chips all in, and boom, here's what happened from it,' now people are invested because stakes matter. So there's just a whole bunch of different mechanics that make for a good story. So I try to study those, and I actually think I'm just like Nowhere. I'm a white belt at the game of storytelling, but at least I show up to the dojo. Most people aren't even, don't even consider it an art, so they don't practice it.

So when you say using storytelling to, you know, rally the troops, like let's say, I don't know, you're recruiting someone for a new project, whatever it is, you find like a compelling story about what you're doing to get them vested, or how do you, how does that work?

Uh, yeah. Like give me an example of some time where you wish you had the superpower and I'll, if I've, let me, let's see if I've had an experience like that.

I mean, I was kind of using the example of our recruiting somebody. Let me think about— okay, so like a project, let's say as a hypothetical example at Lambda, I had a hypothesis that we should make it more difficult to get in, not more difficult, but have a higher bar so that the quality of people in are better so that we're more likely to get paid. How do you persuade people that that's a thing that, you know, you have to get legal, you have to get all these people to buy in? How do you do that?

You gotta know your audience. So if your audience is legal, Sometimes people are not— yeah, they have to first be open, and sometimes they're not open because they are— their job, literally.

That was just one example though.

There, I mean, there's— the core is first you got to know your audience. Where is your audience at? Is your audience in a defensive position because they're so used to being defensive about things, or they feel attacked? In which case, you're not going to persuade them until you get them to put their defenses down, right? Like, if you're a boxer and you're trying to hit somebody, it's not about just keep throwing punches. It's in fact sometimes you make yourself available so that they stop playing defense, they go on offense, and now they become open. And so first it's like, where's your audience at? Are they familiar with the topic? Are they down in the dumps and they need inspiration? Are they defensive because they feel like they're being attacked? So you got to kind of know where your audience is at first because that will change your strategy on how you're going to approach this. And then you sort of take out the right story, right? So if somebody needs inspiration on how something can go, I think personal stories do better than abstract stories. You know, if I had to pick, let's say we were going to do some project, I wouldn't say, you know, when Napoleon wanted to like, you know, invade wherever, he, you know, had this decision to make it. That's our decision today, you know, we're making on should we do X or Y. That's okay. History is okay, but it's not as good as a personal story. Even better is a story about the listener. That's like, you know, now you're really cooking with gas if you can really tell a story about them. So I'll give you a story on the recruiting side. There was somebody I really wanted to recruit, and I knew that they were weighing other options, and their other options were higher-paying jobs at more reputable companies with a more senior job title, right? So like, I kind of had everything stacked against me. And so first I tried to figure out where's my audience at? And I saw that they were, you know, somewhat conflicted and they were a little bit unsure. And really what was happening was that they were feeling down because their last startup had failed. They were feeling just like a little bit bummed out about themselves, a little bit low self-esteem. And so the story I told was really about, I told a personal story about why I joined the company, what had motivated me. And I told a story that tracked very similarly to where they were at, right? I was down in the dumps because I had failed before. I met this guy. I was sort of hesitant because shouldn't I go with this more sure thing? But something told me I need to go with, I need to make a bet here. And here's how it all worked out for me and has this happy ending. And in you, I see you having these two paths. Here's what could happen. You know, you go down this story and here's how this plays out, or I think you could go this way. And just as a friend, you know, I'm rooting for you to go down path B, right? Because I think that's gonna be the more exciting version. That's gonna be the story you wanna tell your kids. That's the story you wanna be telling on stage 3 years from now when you're at the Growth Conference and you're talking about how you led this initiative or how you made this happen. And so I think it's about figuring out who's your audience, what's motivating them right now, telling personal stories either about yourself or about them, and ideally like tapping into like, you know, whatever is most inspiring or desirable to them.

How do you get someone who knows, you know, with this person, you're not like negotiating against each other, but you know, he knows that you have an interest in him joining. How do you get that person to like open up about what they are actually thinking and what their kind of vulnerabilities are.

You just be honest. You just be honest and you ask. So if you first say, look, obviously it's in my best interest if you pick us. I'm excited about having you here. I'm excited about this. Like, I think you're going to kick ass. And, you know, selfishly, like, that's the best outcome for me. But look, I wouldn't pick what's selfishly— like, honestly, you know, you being here is like just part of my world. But for you, if you pick this, that's all of your world. Let's put me second and let's put you first. Right? So I'll say something like that because I genuinely think that's true. Like, they should just make the best decision for them. And I'll be honest, hey, I have a conflict of interest here. I want you to pick this. So you should know that going in. You decide if what I'm saying speaks to you or it doesn't, right? Because I can just tell you my side of the story. And if that resonates, it's because it's true for you. And then the second thing would be like, what was the second part of your question? Or was that it?

How do you— well, it was how do you get them to be open about what they're vulnerable about, what they're afraid of?

Oh yeah. Then you just ask. You're just like, look, I think there's a lot here that makes sense, but you're still undecided. What's causing the hesitation in your head? What— when you go home and you can't decide, why are you torn? Um, and then they usually just tell me why they're talking.

Yeah, that makes— I mean, basically what I'm hearing is get them to trust you that you have their interest at heart too, and then to literally just ask them, right?

And if you don't have their interest at heart, it doesn't actually work in the end. So there's a self-fulfilling sort of cycle here where you genuinely have to have their best interest at heart or you get screwed in the end.

Okay, totally different question. You have your fund. I'm sure you see a ton of different deals and ideas. What is something that you would love to invest in today?

So I did 3 deals today.

You did 3 deals today?

They all kind of got confirmed today. They've been in the works, but they all, you know, sort of got agreed to.

And you do like how many a month? Like, how is that? Is that a lot or a little? Sounds like a lot.

That's a lot. That's not a normal day for sure. We do like, I don't know, 6 deals a quarter, 7 deals a quarter.

Oh, wow.

Okay. Something like that. Something like that. So, you know, basically 2 a month roughly. You know, what I want to be invested in right now is I'd love to be invested in Coinbase and Stripe, like late-stage companies. I think those are like largely de-risked but still not public. And so, you know, if I could put $1 million in there today, I think I'd get $2.5 million out in a short amount of time. So I think those are like attractive for that reason. Whatever, those numbers are made up. There's a high degree of high likelihood that they go public soon, you know, in the next 2 years, let's say, and that when they do, they're gonna be highly sought after stock and it's gonna go up from where it is right now. So I think those are kind of like no-brainers. The hard part there is just access. I invested in a company just now. Let's see, which one can I talk about? So one I just invested in is called Goldcast. These guys basically made it so that it's easy to do digital conferences. You know, you can use Zoom, but you know, if you're trying to replicate the value of a conference, A conference has like multiple stages maybe where you're speaking on. And as a, you know, it has like first an event page where you're like, oh, here's the schedule of today's talks. And then like you click the button and you go to that person's like conference from the room. And then when you ask a question, they made it where you can just like pull the question up on the screen and it's big and large and everybody could see the question and you can talk to it. And then it kind of like, you throw the question away and then the next one can go up. And then after the fact, they let you export all the attendees. Of the event and you can export those into Salesforce. And let's, let's now those are, you know, potential leads for our business or whatever it is. They just did a really smart job of saying, hey, if you're a marketer throwing events for your company, we are the best way to do that. And it turns out there's just a lot of that that exists in the world. They're kind of a competitor to Hopin, which was sort of got a lot of press because, uh, you know, within like a year they got like a billion dollar valuation or something nuts. Um, because it's just a big space and it's gonna, continue on post-COVID, I believe. So that's one I'm excited about. There's a company called Joe Coffee that I think is really cool that I just invested in. What they did was, you know, Starbucks— if you just look at like Starbucks versus the independent coffee chains, right, the mom-and-pops. And so Starbucks on one hand has all this money to invest in technology. So the Starbucks app is like amazing. You can order ahead, you can find a nearby store, you can pay without taking out your credit card just through the app, you can save your favorites. You get stars every time you go by, so you're like incentivized to keep coming back. So Starbucks has this like app that's like this amazing experience. And then Joe Coffee basically was like, oh, actually let's just give that same superpower to every mom-and-pop coffee shop that exists. And so now if you're a mom-and-pop coffee shop, you can say, hey, download the Joe app, we're on there. And then, hey, we'll save your orders. You can pay ahead, you can pick up mobile order, like all those good things. And, um, they're kind of kicking ass. They have like, you know, I don't know how much I can say, but they have like, you know, over 1,000 coffee shops on board using them. Those coffee shops are seeing an uptick in sales when, you know, when somebody has the app, they'll actually buy a little bit more because you can kind of quickly upsell things and they'll come back more because they're getting loyalty rewards and points for every time they come back to you. And, you know, their favorite order is saved. It's super convenient. They don't have to like wait in line. And so I just think this is a really cool business that falls into this general category called You know, it's the Shopify model. Shopify had this great quote, which is, you know, Amazon is the empire and Shopify is trying to arm the rebels. Uh, well, Joe Coffee's doing the same thing. Starbucks is the empire and they're trying to arm the rebels with the tools that they need to be able to compete in the modern day world.

Is that joe.coffee or Joe? There's like a bunch of Joe Coffees. JoeCoffeeCompany.com. I think it's joe.coffee.

I think it might be Joe. Yeah. Joe.coffee is it.

Okay, cool. And so, okay, you were one of the first people to do a fund. Which was Rolling Fund. Excuse me, Rolling Fund. Thank you. When your audience was much— so at least your Twitter audience was much smaller. I assume like your Silicon Valley audience was relatively the same size it is today. So why were you able to do that? And like, what makes you— what gives you access to the companies and the deals that you see today? Like if someone's like, hey, I want to be Sean in 5 years, how do they do that?

Is that how you get access to deals too? You think people know you from the podcast? It sounds like you had a pretty decent network before the podcast.

Yeah, the deals I don't want to come from the podcast, to be honest. Uh, the deals mostly I want to come from my network in the tech world, in Silicon Valley and whatnot, because I think that's where the higher quality deals are than just like general inbound. But it does help me get in because I say, hey, You know, when I shout out Joe Coffee or Goldcast, you know, like I bet you there's somebody out there right now working at a company who's got like an event they want to host for a bunch of potential customers or like a meetup or a, you know, conference that they want to, that they host every year. And now with COVID it's all thrown out the window. They're going to go get customers from this because it's a genuinely good product and I brought it to the limelight. So it does help me get in because when it's a good deal, getting in is the hard part. It's, uh, I've said this before, but you know, startups are a unique asset. It's not like a stock where you, if you want to get in, you just buy it and it's yours. For startups, you have to pitch why, you know, I pick you, but you have to pick me too. And, uh, so the investors need— that's why you see so many investors trying to build their brand on Clubhouse and Twitter and everywhere else, because they want to be known so that not only do they get inbound deal flow, but that when they want to get in a deal, those founders feel like they, they know them and they want them to be a part of the company.

Is it harder and more valuable to raise the fund or to be able to get into the deals, or is that like the same thing?

For most people, it's hard to raise the money, right? Because where the hell else are you going to get all the money to invest? For me, I probably could have just hit up people with my network and say, "Hey, I'm interested in starting a fund." And that was the good news of being in San Francisco for a while was I had met enough wealthy people who I had done business with. They had seen me, and so they would have invested. So for me, I probably could have got the money elsewhere. So for me, access is probably more important. But for the average person, I think that raising the money would be the hard part.

All right, do you want to do a couple more? How are you feeling?

We can cut it off whenever you want to cut it off. I have 10 minutes, but if you're like, I don't really genuinely have any more questions, that's also cool.

I got wild questions like, why Bitcoin and not Ethereum?

Well, the answer is actually both, right? I've been— I bought both. Uh, I'm, I'm like—

oh, you did? Okay.

Yeah, yeah, I'm like 80/20 split of Bitcoin and Ethereum, kind of always have been. I just talk about Bitcoin more because I think the important thing right now is for people to just to understand a simple idea, which is that Bitcoin is like digital gold. It is an amazing way to store wealth. Your cash is being diluted and inflated away because Bitcoin is this generation's gold and it's going to sort of change the world in that sense. I like to just talk about that. Ethereum is a much more complicated concept. I am a believer in it, but I believe in Bitcoin more. And I think just for publicly talking about it, I think that talking about Bitcoin is just easier for people to understand and get their toes in the world of crypto. And then once they taste Bitcoin, they're like, ooh, what else you got? And I'm like, hey, here's Ethereum.

All right, let's call it there.

Cool. Trevor, this has been fun. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for bringing energy and ideas. And we'll see if people like this episode. Where should they find you, follow you, and, and all that good stuff?

Check out my website, TrevorMcKendrick.com. I have a weekly free newsletter. It's got great stuff for you to read. And then you can follow me on Twitter @TrevMcKendrick.

All right, Trevor, good stuff.

Thanks, man.

See you.

Really appreciate this. Have a good one.

Bye. Bye.