#114 with Steph Smith - The Head of Trends Talks Insider Trading and The Gen-Z Mafia

**Sam Parr** (0:20)
We are live. My apology, guys. I was just saying, I was late today. Shaan's normally the late one. I've been late twice in a row now. My apologies.
Shaan, that was a dig at you, which...

**Shaan Puri** (0:30)
I thought it was a compliment.
I'm not late. I thought that's how I took it.

**Sam Parr** (0:35)
You are not late. It is me, but we are with Steph Smith. Steph Smith is my coworker. Steph runs Trends and is just like a creator at our company. We kind of just tell her to do stuff and she does a great job. I've met Steph. How did I meet you, Steph, on Twitter?

**Steph Smith** (0:49)
I think so. You reached out. I wrote an article around a year ago and you reached out based on that.

**Sam Parr** (0:54)
And Steph's article, it had one of the better headlines I've read. I'm a big copywriter, headline fan, and it was to be great, just consistently be good, right?

**Steph Smith** (1:03)
Yeah, something like that, exactly.

**Sam Parr** (1:05)
And it was a great headline. So we're gonna have Steph here. But before we get into that, Shaan, I did meet up with Ty Lopez texted me last night and he goes, hey, I'm in New York. Do you wanna meet up?

**Steph Smith** (1:17)
Oh shit.

**Sam Parr** (1:18)
I met up with him for about an hour and we talked about how to hire, mostly how to hire and a bunch of great stuff.
He's cool, man. Ty's a cool dude.

**Shaan Puri** (1:30)
He likes it.

**Sam Parr** (1:30)
He's a, he's changed my perspective. I've changed on him.

**Shaan Puri** (1:35)
How swole was he?

**Sam Parr** (1:37)
He's big. He is a buff dude. His dad was a professional bodybuilder, he said. So he definitely has those genetics.

**Shaan Puri** (1:42)
Could he beat you up?

**Sam Parr** (1:45)
He's probably stronger than me, but no, I think that I probably have 20 years younger than him. So I haven't.

**Shaan Puri** (1:50)
There's a feistiness inside you that he is not aware of.

**Sam Parr** (1:53)
You don't think he's aware? I think people are aware. I don't know.
Anyway, I don't need to talk about beating Ty up. I like Ty. He's my friend now.
What are we going to talk about today? Steph came with like a list of ideas, which I always love when people do this.

**Shaan Puri** (2:10)
It's a six page list. So I think this is going to be like a 26 part episode. All right, Steph, so did we do you justice introducing you or did we leave out any important bits?

**Steph Smith** (2:20)
I think he did me justice. I work on trends at Sam's company, The Hustle, and I create stuff for fun. I think that's a pretty quick summary of what I do.

**Sam Parr** (2:27)
She has a good personal website, stephsmith.io, and Steph is just like, you know, there's like this whole community, Shaan, they're called Indie Hackers, you know what they are?

**Shaan Puri** (2:37)
Yeah, of course.

**Sam Parr** (2:38)
Steph is like the definition of an Indie Hacker. It's like this weird nerdy community of dorks who build awesome stuff.

**Shaan Puri** (2:46)
She's better than 99% of the Indie Hackers I've ever met.
The most of the Indie Hackers I've met build stuff and they never get it to anyone. There's like zero distribution muscle. And so I got to give her credit because she actually writes stuff that people read, builds stuff that people see. And I think that's a pretty big separator. That's a line in the sand.
There's one line in the sand which is like, you make nothing or you make something. All right, cool. And then it's like you make something and people see it and like it, or nobody ever hears about it. It's just a tree in the forest. And so I got to give you credit. But also your website is awesome.
Five minutes before this, I messaged her and I was like, hey, who made your website? She's like, I made it. I was like, what? And then I just offered to buy the template. I was like, I want one of those. Can I have that? Can I have a website as cool as yours? So it's definitely awesome. You should check it out.

**Sam Parr** (3:35)
All right, we need to stop just like-

**Shaan Puri** (3:39)
Sucking up to Steph.

**Steph Smith** (3:42)
No, I appreciate it. And I'm super stoked to be here. But yeah, happy to jump into some of these ideas if you guys want.