3 Killer Businesses Hidden in Plain Sight

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, so check this out. I'm going to tell you about three products that are hidden in plain sight. And the genius of these is that they take something that's free and they sell it. They take a free thing and they sell it. And I'm going to tell you about one example that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars, another one that makes millions of dollars, and then another one that's made hundreds of millions of dollars.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
I know I could be what I want to.

**Sam Parr** (0:28)
I'm going to tell you about a couple of business ideas. I'm going to start with one that makes thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands, let's say. One that makes millions of dollars and one that makes hundreds of millions of dollars. And they're all products that are hidden in plain sight. So we've all seen them, but you probably never even realize they're businesses. And secondly, the magic thing about all of them, they sell a product that's actually free.

**Shaan Puri** (0:51)
What inspired this? Did you just see something?

**Sam Parr** (0:54)
Found one, found a second, found a third, drew a line, three dots make a line. So that's kind of what happened here. So first is I'm on Twitter and I see Joe Gabbia, who's the founder of Airbnb, friend of the podcast. I see Joe tweet out something about a screenshot of an app that was checking water quality. So the cleanliness of water. It was this app called Oasis. I thought that sounds familiar. Sam mentioned that like, I don't know, six months ago, Sam mentioned that in passing, but I never really paid much attention to it.
What is the story of this thing? Oasis. So here's one that's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling a product that is free and it's hidden in plain sight and it's just water quality testing. So there's a kid who is behind this and we chatted with him. So Oasis is a app. It's an app that checks the water quality. It'll tell you if your city's water is clean, if your county's water is clean, it'll tell you, you can hold up a bottle of this aquapana right here and it will tell you, is this aquapana actually clean or does it contain, you know, PFAS, forever chemicals, that whole deal, right? What's in the water?

**Shaan Puri** (2:04)
It's an app and a website, right? An app and a website.

**Sam Parr** (2:07)
And it started by this guy named Cormac. And Cormac is from Minnesota, which is known for having really fresh water. He said drink it. Growing up, he would just drink tap water, no problem. He'd drink hose water like you, Sam. And that was what he did. And then he moves to LA and he just starts doing the same thing. He starts drinking tap water. You notice tastes a little bit different. And he gets an upset stomach. He gets a little bit sick. Nothing life threatening, but he's like, dude, that's weird. I'm like, I just drank the water. Like why is the water so much different here? So he tries to look it up. He says, how do I find out if my water is actually safe to drink out of the tap? And it turns out that you can go to any city and you can request a report. You can request a report about the water quality in your area. So he does that and he finds, oh man, there's tons of contaminants in my water. And so he stops drinking tap water. He goes to Whole Foods. He buys water from Whole Foods. He says, well, let me see if this one is actually contaminated too. It turns out you can contact any bottled water company and they have to provide you a report about the testing of their water. And he finds that the water has been sold in Whole Foods also has lots of contaminants. And then he's like, what's going on here? And so he creates a app really for himself, but for others too, to be able to check the quality of water, whether it's your city, your town or bottled water that you're drinking. And he's basically just aggregating free data that already exists, that anybody could go request. So when we first mentioned it, it was on the Jeremy Giffen episode a few months back. It was at $10,000 a month in revenue.

**Shaan Puri** (3:36)
And the way that you make revenue is I think he has an affiliate scheme where like if you buy something that he recommends, he gets a cut. And also you pay $50, right?