3 Niche Business Ideas We Thought Would Fail… But Actually Crushed It

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
May 25th, 2023, subject line. He said it was a bad business idea, dot, dot, dot. E-mailed out to his whole list, I think.
Hey folks, Alex here. Telling people you run a mouth-taping business isn't all sunshine and rainbows.

**Sam Parr** (0:15)
Did anyone think that that was sunshine and rainbows?

**Shaan Puri** (0:19)
You know what they say, running a mouth-taping business isn't all sunshine and rainbows.

**Sam Parr** (0:22)
Everyone always asks me, how awesome is this business?

**Shaan Puri** (0:33)
What's up, everybody? Back to the greatest podcast of all time, My First Million, where we talk about business ideas. We talk about businesses that are under the radar, crushing it that you haven't heard of. Hopefully, when you listen to this podcast, you get a little inspiration, you get a little wind in your sails, so that you go out and kick a little more ass today.
Sam, I have an ass-kicking story for you. You want to hear it?

**Sam Parr** (0:52)
I love ass-kicking stories.

**Shaan Puri** (0:54)
In fact, this is two ways. It's stories of other people who are kicking ass, and it's a story of me getting my ass kicked as an investor. So here's two investments that I passed on for two totally different reasons, and I'm going to tell you the reason why I missed it and the really cool story of what these companies did.

**Sam Parr** (1:10)
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**Shaan Puri** (1:42)
All right, so this first one, two or three years ago, two years ago, I think it was, and it's this guy, David, and he's pitching me a startup called Jenni. And it was at peak AI time. So this is 2021, GPT-3 was out, everybody was excited about AI, and this guy had yet another AI startup idea. I didn't really know what to make of it. It was small. It was only doing $2,000 a month in revenue. So he's like, hey, we've got great traction. I'm at 2K MRR. And I'm like, that's cute, son. 2K MRR? You know, like the pool guys make a 2K MRR. Come on, we got to do better than that. But really nice guy, we get on a call. And I don't remember what I said, but he told me afterwards, he was like, yeah, you were like one of the nicer people in terms of giving us feedback and telling us what to do. At the time, they had a pretty undifferentiated product. So what they were doing was a product called Jenni AI. And what Jenni was doing was it was a writing tool. So it was just like Jasper, which was like, you just say, hey, I need a blog post. It writes you a blog post. You need SEO content, you need blog content, you need email content. It was just like writing blogs for you. And there was a bunch of starters doing this at the same time.
Jasper was doing it and they were taking off. So it was like a kind of a hot space, but I was like, dude, I think you're late to that party.
And he's like, no, no, no, we're gonna make it.
And I liked the guy. He told me that at age 16, he had basically started being an entrepreneur at age 16, trying to build companies, like trying to build a t-shirt company, failed. But like, you know, that's a rite of passage is start your first terrible idea. He had gotten that out of the way. And now he was onto this, which was cool. But he's like, he's actually funny story, he goes, we got on GPT-2 when it was just like developer access mode only.
And we told it to like, I don't know, tell us a joke or say something wise, but funny.
And it's GPT-2 goes, what's the darkest place in the world? And they go, what? And he goes, a butt hole.
This thing is crazy. What is this tech? And so they're like, we got to go all in on this. So they start trying to make ideas for this.

**Sam Parr** (3:39)
And how old are they when they start working on this?

**Shaan Puri** (3:41)