3 Genius Business Ideas We're 'Borrowing' From Syed Balkhi

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, we've got our buddy, Syed Balkhi, on today. If you don't know Syed, he is one of the few people on earth who has bootstrapped a company to a unicorn status, a billion dollar company, without ever taking outside money.
The guy's a legend. He's in his 30s, and he's done all this.
What I liked about this episode is most people, we talked to a lot of guys who have made it, but they're kind of just like, you ask them, what would you do today? And they kind of just shrug, like, I don't know, that's what worked for me back then, but good luck to you. And you're like, shit, all right, I gotta figure this out myself. Syed's the opposite. He didn't close the door behind him. He kind of just puts a ladder down and he's like, hey, here's three specific opportunities that I see. And what I liked about these opportunities is, he's very specific. He says exactly what he would do. And actually he's looked into doing some of these things.
The second thing is that these are not like moonshot ideas. It's not like, oh, invent the next big AI thing. These are just ideas that will just work. Like if you execute them well, they will work.

**Sam Parr** (0:54)
And this is one of those episodes where I actually was like writing down what he was saying. I was like, oh, I should do that.

**Shaan Puri** (0:59)
I literally Slack Ben. I was like, at Ben, at Ben, call me when you're free.
I gotta talk about some of these ideas.

**Sam Parr** (1:04)
And by the way, at the end, we talk about money and we ask a little bit about what people's numbers are. You'll understand when we get to that part about what your number is. I want you guys to do me a favor. If you're listening on your podcast app, go to our YouTube page. Obviously you have to subscribe because that's the gentleman's agreement. You subscribe when we create valuable content for you. All we ask is just for a subscribe. But tell us in the comment section what your number is. You'll understand when you get to that part. And also you can view what other people's numbers are. So this will be like a little bit of a social experiment.
We have to do an intro, Sean.
So Syed was on the podcast like six months ago. You were a hit. People loved you. Basically the gist of the pod is you have this empire that you own, that you've not raised money for.
It mostly started as a WordPress blog called WPBeginner.
And then you saw which WordPress plugins, among other types of businesses, were most popular. You bought them or invested in them. Now your empire is doing something like over 100 million. I think you were somewhat vague, but I think you said over 100 million in revenue, the whole thing. You own gas stations, I think. You own tons of real estate. So you're just, you kind of have your hands in everything.

**Shaan Puri** (2:20)
The title last time, the catchy title, which I thought was really cool. Syed is one of the very few people on earth who is a bootstrapped billionaire, meaning or has built a billion dollar company, sorry, as a bootstraps, so not taking external money and did it kind of slow and steady and in a really unique way where you really grew inside this WordPress ecosystem and WordPress turned out to be really big. Andrew Wilkinson came on and called this strategy the Barnacle on the Whale. So there's a whale and it's a growing whale.
And if you can be the right barnacle, you can actually just kind of grow with it. And you can ride that, you could surf that wave and actually build a large business yourself.

**Sam Parr** (2:58)
And by the way, for the record, we have to protect Syed here. He never said billionaire, I think. I think we said that. So that's us. He doesn't have to deny or confirm it.

**Syed Balkhi** (3:07)
I tend not to focus on the valuation. The goal is to keep building cool things that our users are loving and with the team that I enjoy working with and have a good time.

**Shaan Puri** (3:19)
And if you want Syed's like backstory, you know, we were talking about like when you were a kid, what you were doing in your teens to how you built this empire. Like we did that episode. So this one, we're gonna do something different, which was just, we were like, hey, come back on. You're like, well, I kind of told my story already. But we said, actually just come in and just hang out with us. Like we do a normal MFM where we're gonna talk about five different things.