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

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, everyone, we have a quick ad for HubSpot. But I want to let you know, I actually use HubSpot and I use their sales tool, which is what this ad is for. HubSpot sales platform, it makes it just easier to sell stuff, to do it faster, to look at your pipeline, to see what sales are going to happen. Just prospect to cold outreach and get more customers faster and easier. Plus, it's easy to learn and free to start. So you guys can check it out, hubspot.com/sales.

**Shaan Puri** (0:43)
I put out the bat signal today because Sam could not make it to the recording. Because it's 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 that you do the day you sell your company. The day you sell your company, you're a trillionaire.
OK, 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, pick 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, this is your time to shine, baby. You you are one of the All Access Pass members. That's how I first got to know you. You're 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?

**Trevor McKendrick** (1:54)
It feels super great. I'm super excited to talk to you.

**Shaan Puri** (1:56)
Do you normally listen to the pod or no?

**Trevor McKendrick** (1:58)
Yeah, I listen all the time.

**Shaan Puri** (2:00)
OK, 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. Sometimes we get off script and bullshit too much.
So we'll try to stick to the script here. So ideas. Are you do you consider yourself an idea man?

**Trevor McKendrick** (2:13)
I try to be as much as possible. Yeah, I got my list whenever something comes down, write it up.

**Shaan Puri** (2:18)
OK, so we'll see how good your ideas are. So what I want you to do is you start spitballing ideas and if it's interesting, we'll start talking about it. If it's dumb, I'm just going to say that's dumb and we could pass if it's just I have nothing to say. OK, and so you're going to be the machine gun firing out ideas and I'll just be deflecting and doing whatever I got to do. All right, so let's do it.

**Trevor McKendrick** (2:37)
Let's go.

**Shaan Puri** (2:38)
What ideas you got for me.

**Trevor McKendrick** (2:39)
All right. First up, I call it the five dollar headshot, which is everyone wants a good headshot. Everyone's vain. Everyone needs a good headshot, but most headshots suck.
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 five bucks 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 three or four of your favorite pictures with your friends, with the app logo at the bottom. They vote. This worked for like 99 designs. So you get like confirmation that you got a great pick.
Everyone else downloads the app and you got to pay five bucks to download your favorite.

**Shaan Puri** (3:21)
OK, so you have a headshot for your Twitter account, which is Trevor McKendrick. Did you pay to get this headshot taken?

**Trevor McKendrick** (3:27)
My wife is a wedding photographer, so she did it.

**Shaan Puri** (3:29)
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?

**Trevor McKendrick** (3:35)
Photoshopped it in to stand out.

**Shaan Puri** (3:36)
Gotcha. It was white before that or what?