Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. Today we’re joined by Furqan Rydhan (@FurqanR) who is a tech badass. He was paid $120K as a 15 year old programmer during the Dot Com Boom, made a million dollar e-com biz at 17 and was an early employee at Applovin that was valued last at $2 billion. Remember Ramon’s soap opera blog that he sold for $9M in cash? He did that through the online business broker Quiet Light Brokerage. We’ve partnered up with them to give you guys a FREE 25-point checklist to see how sellable your online business is. To receive this free guide, visit quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion. Topics for today: Our Guest’s @FurqanR Background (00:36), Funny Story about Vungle’s Jack Smith and Lance Armstrong (07:12), The Process of Brainstorming Ideas (09:36), VR/AR Experiences (10:16), Opportunities in Reviving Stale Franchises and Company Turnarounds (17:07), iPad Whiteboard Meeting Idea (22:44), Reinventing the Phone Call through Airpods (27:51), Furquan’s House Hackathon Ideas (29:49), Serialized Story Apps like Hooked (37:09), Drone Washing Windows on Big Buildings (38:38), Money Printing Mobile Apps (44:44) and What Furqan learnt being Applovin (50:20).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. Dear all loyal listeners: 1) Please, please, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts!, 2) Screenshot your review and tweet it to Shaan and Sam, 3) They'll give you a present!. Also, if you're looking to promote your own podcast, visit castro.fm/promote - they push your podcast out to thousands of people. And last promo for the day... the way to make a million is by surrounding yourself around other people who want it. Join our Facebook group where we share ideas and help each other out: www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. Alright the topics for today: The first Hustle office was also Craiglist's office (01:43), Taking craiglist sections and turning them into unicorn startups + Sam's first startup (05:34), New email clients like Superhuman, Hey.com and Front (12:06), Pay to get a reply from influential people like Earn.com (21:23), Getting paid by the minute instead of bi-weekly (23:26), Donation business models (25:52), Taking on Wikipedia (29:39), Menstruation apps (32:01), Life schools (36:29), Prenups (38:49) and Negotiation tactics / How to keep your star players (43:12).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sam and Shaan are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. The way to make a million is by surrounding yourself around other people who want it. Join our Facebook group where we share ideas and help each other out: www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. Sam and his team happy about Twitter earnings (01:20), Long term stock exchange (03:11), NYSE bid to buy Ebay & direct listings (05:39), Commercial laundry businesses (07:39), Jessica Simpson's billion dollar clothing line & other influencer IP businesses (14:06), Secretive founders making the big money (17:12), Company universities (20:10), What would you do once you have all the money in the world (23:51), Remote Year (28:32), Shaan gives Sam a gift...(33:45), How to get your team to take bigger risks (36:35) and their book recommendations (45:20).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sam and Shaan are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. The way to make a million is by surrounding yourself around other people who want it. Join our Facebook group where we share ideas and help each other out: www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. Harry's (D2C razor brand) sale blocked & D2C selling to PE strategy (0:55), /r/WallStreetBets & Tesla shorts (6:05), Drew Houston sitting on Facebook board & Professional board sitters (11:39), Labor law posters, MailChimp for governments & other weird compliance rules (14:48), Turnkey compliance, contracting remote workers & Letsdeel.com (18:11), Huge unsexy business: exec headhunting (21:23), Influential people curating job boards (27:52), Crowd-sources salary comparison sites like levels.fyi (33:08) & The Ringer selling to Spotify & why it makes podcast acquisitions make sense (35:41).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

** In our Facebook group yet? We hang out there so come join and let's talk ideas: www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion ** Amanda Bradford (@amandabradford) was 28 years old, in business school and using dating apps. She got tired of stalking every match on Linkedin, Facebook etc.. to see if they were legit. Why doesn’t the dating app do this for me?So against all her advisors advice, she started a dating app called the League that checks your Facebook & Linkedin to verify that you are who you say you are.Strange idea, but It’s kinda working! They have over 100k paying members, profitable & been around for 5 years. We talk about: how she got her first 400 users at launch, how they figured out if people would pay $$ for subscription and what the future of dating looks like.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

*** JOIN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP for share ideas and insight with each other: www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion *** Today we first chat to Tom Wang, who has sold a 7 figure Amazon FBA biz + runs a 7 figure FBA Masterclass. Some stuff the guys talk about today is Utah as a new startup hub, Sam ignoring Andrew Yang before he became a democratic candidate, a social network built on Airpods, dry toothpaste, emergency bags, educational content and the recent Barstool acquisition.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We interviewed the founder of Rev.com (they transcribe audio into text), to hear how he built this into a $206M (to be precise) business. We used them to transcribe the My First Million podcast episodes, and realized how badass of a service this was. Super simple concept - create a workforce (currently 50,000) that works remotely, transcribing audio from podcasts, conferences, meetings etc.. into text, for less than $1 per minute. Jason talks about freelancers making money in their pajamas, why they opened an office away from Silicon Valley, the impact of AI on remote work, working for free to show your worth, buying his domain for $400,000 and a clever way come up with and test a killer startup name.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm is back. Host Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and The Hustle CEO Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sit down and discuss what side hustles, trends and big business ideas that's keeping them up at night. Long episode today! First half is with 8-figure ad agency founder Brendan Gahan to talk biz models, overhead and profitability. Then the second half is with Daniel Gross who sold his startup to Apple in his twenties and rolled that win into multiple unicorn investments. Enjoy!  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Ever think your side-hustle could become a million-dollar company? Paul Anderson (@paul_d_andersen) did. Today on My First Million, we sit down with Paul who quit his 9-to-5 to focus on his Amazon FBA and how his passion became a full-blown multi-million dollar company. Side hustles, getting ‘em out there, increasing your profits, credit lines and more this week! Also, go sub to his new personal finance newsletter: https://wealthfam.com/newsletter/  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm is back. Host Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and The Hustle CEO Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sit down and discuss what side hustles, trends and big business ideas that's keeping them up at night. Today Shaan kicks it off with food industry ideas: keto peanut butter, vintage fast food chains transitioning into the modern era, modifying US chains and taking them global. Then the guys chat about Aliexpress, pop-up esport tournaments, Tough Mudder bankruptcy, data privacy tools, targeting wealthy alumni for fundraising, networking hacks and a discussion about Silicon Valley mistruths.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Shaan sits down with Peter Dering (@peterdering), Founder & CEO of Peak Design, maker of beautiful, highly functional redesigns of photography equipment. He quit his construction job and traveled the world with $25K in savings. After awhile, he found it to be a pain in the ass carrying his camera around with him. So he thought of a camera holder clip that’d go onto your bag strap. Next thing you know, he filmed a kickstarter video to accompany his simple yet revolutionary product and within 90 seconds of launching he had his first sale. Bags, tripods, straps. Almost every year Peak Design releases some sort of iteration of an outdated piece of equipment and it SELLS. Last year they employed 38 people and did $70m in revenue. He owns 100% of it. Like I said, you want to be this guy. He talks about the process of how you actually create a physical product from scratch, how to work with international distributors, why and how he structured a public benefit entity, how to offset business carbon footprint and how much it ACTUALLY costs (it's tiny!). Have a listen to learn how to kickstart your own carbon-neutral Kickstarter empire.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm is back. Host Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and The Hustle CEO Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sit down and discuss what side hustles, trends and big business ideas that's keeping them up at night. We're going to try and keep these consistent -- about every Thursday and even maybe even 2 a week. Today Sam kicks it off by telling some of the most promising technologies he found at CES 2020, meeting some D2C guys and being astounded by their insane growth rates, the 3 bro's shamelessly knocking off US startups and getting rich, how lucrative trade shows/membership programs/courses can be, why compliance education packages could sell for $$$ to large companies & Shaan reflects on his decade goals and talks about what he wants accomplished by 2030.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We're back with Season 3, brought you by Microsoft: The latest episode of My First Million, Shaan sits down with Vlad Magdalin (@callmevlad), Co-Founder & CEO of Webflow: a visual tool to build web apps. Vlad shares the several attempts in 6 years to get his no-code brainchild going. Persistence paid off as it quickly got to $20MM in revenue and raised a monster $72M Series A round led by Accel. He talks about the emotional rollercoaster of getting into Y-Combinator, the video that made him quit his high paying job immediately, kickstarter kicking him off their platform and the trick to get investors interested without changing anything.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We've got a different flavor today for you. We sat down with Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky) join us today and instead of hearing his backstory, we bounced around a bunch of topics. Scott has done it all. He's been a founder (Behance), angel investor (Uber, Pinterest), VC (Benchmark), Tech Executive (CPO of Adobe currently), and Author (The Messy Middle). So sit back, grab a salad (cause we're healthy in 2020) and enjoy this conversation.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Mike Brown is my new hero. He's an ex military man, who came back & built a super lean business (5 employees and 10's of millions in revenue annually) - hired best friends and brothers to share the experience. Mike Brown (@mb_abides) and his gang went on a mission to buy small pieces of real estate from hundreds of families because they were potentially (and quite literally) sitting on a gold mine. They'd then package them up and sell it to the big oil & gas funds - which meant tens of millions of dollars for them. The business part is good - but I love the philosophical and practical advice around optimizing for quality of life. Let me know what you think! [email protected]  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

LifeAid’s Aaron Hinde (@aaronhinde) stopped by to talk “vitamins that you’ll enjoy drinking.” He built a new beverage brand from zero to $100m+ in value, taking on the big boys like Red Bull, Monster etc.. He talks about coming up with the formula, and their distribution strategy thru CrossFit gyms. We also chat about his unique decision to live off the grid: chicken, solar & batteries and more. Got feedback? email us at [email protected]  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm is back. Host Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and The Hustle CEO Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sit down and discuss what side hustles, trends and big business ideas that's keeping them up at night. This time, it’s live with you guys who came to the Trends meetup last Thursday and answered some of burning questions.They also explore this week powder diets, turnkey instagrammable moments, building products around the distribution & why Facebook groups is the place to be.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Carey Smith sold Big Ass Fans for Big Ass Money. As you can probably tell, he found a way to make ceilings fans sound sexy, but more importantly a sexy business. Find out how this unconventional self-appointed CBA (Chief Big Ass) turned a failed bootstrapped Mom & Pop into a 1,200 person $500M giant. Hear him talk about re-branding his company name to include ‘Ass’ & how that changed his entire business’ trajectory, a random meeting that turned into selling for half a billion dollars, writing $50M worth of checks to his employees after the sale and how the secret to making money isn’t to make money. Like our podcast? Join our Facebook group to share feedback, ideas and advice so we can all make that first million: www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Faraz Jaka (@FarazJaka) is a Poker pro who’s made $10M on the felt... What started out as a fun game during his spare time in college turned into big money FAST. Turning a few hundred dollars into $180k in 6 months as a 19 year-old. He was on top of the world appearing in articles, throwing massive parties, flying to Vegas every other weekend and ambitious plans to make millions a year… until it all came crashing down, went into debt and battled depression. Obviously, he rose from the dead and became hugely successful, so join this roller coaster story on My First Million, and also listen to how he uses the “+EV” method for all decision making, why you shouldn’t be results orientated, meditation exercises to overcome stress and tackling depression by confronting your issues like ‘folding a rug’.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm is back. Host Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and The Hustle CEO Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sit down and discuss what side hustles, trends and big business ideas that's keeping them up at night. We're hosting a meetup on the 21st November in San Francisco, check out details here: https://bit.ly/354TQ7H. This week these two discuss: the top businesses using Shopify (Check the ranking tool here: https://myip.ms/browse/sites/1/own/376714), millennial apartment plants, science fiction workout bikes, D2C hallucinogenics and businesses that you can start with $1000 this weekend that could turn into a $100M+ revenue biz.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.