5 Internet Goldmines To Spot The Next $1B Trend | Steph Smith

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
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Now back to the pod.

**Sam Parr** (0:49)
Dude, I was at a dinner and somebody said something as a joke. And I put up my finger to my lips and I said, I need to write this down because it was an incredible idea.

**Shaan Puri** (1:01)
But you put your finger on his lips.

**Sam Parr** (1:04)
And then my own lips, back and forth.
And I was like, say no more. I need to, I don't want to lose this idea.

**Shaan Puri** (1:20)
So today you're going to talk to, talk us through a bunch of research products that you use, a bunch of pipes, you call them, right?

**Steph Smith** (1:27)
Yeah, internet pipes.

**Shaan Puri** (1:29)
I call that research tools. You said that was dumb.

**Steph Smith** (1:31)
Well, it just sounds boring. It's more accurate, but it's boring.

**Sam Parr** (1:33)
I call them gold mines, which is basically, some people just come back and show you a little piece of gold, maybe a jewelry.
Steph shows you where the mine is. So you can just keep going back to the mine for more and more gold over time. Because I think people wonder, if they see your tweets or read your blog posts or hear you on our podcast, they're like, where does she come up with this stuff? How does she find this stuff? So today, you're going to tell us exactly that?

**Steph Smith** (1:56)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think the internet is such a special thing.
And we often rely on something like Twitter to serve us the information of the day. But I feel like these tools are like, like you said, the gold mine. There's so much information that tells you exactly what people want or aggregates a bunch of opportunities for you. So.

**Shaan Puri** (2:16)
Steph, tell me about this patent one.
Because there's actually a handful of really good examples with this one. Okay. That I know of.

**Steph Smith** (2:23)
So there's two parts. There's patent filings and patent expiries. So patent filings, I think, there's probably some databases that do this, but the newsletter that I like to read is called Patent Drop. And they'll basically break down every newsletter, three or so patents from, again, big tech firms like Fang, but also companies like Nike.
By the way, I think Nike is the company with the most design patents, or it's up there.
In any case, there's patent filings. So you can track what these big companies are betting on, what they think is interesting, that they wanna retain some IP around. And then there's also expiries, which is interesting. I think we covered the company Hymns before and how they basically leveraged a patent expiry to build their company, or at least their first products. So there's a website called patentsexpiringtoday.com, which aggregates these. And obviously it takes quite a bit of sifting because there's a lot of things like, okay, I don't care that some shin guard is expiring, but I think the combination of those two definitely can result in some business ideas.

**Shaan Puri** (3:29)
Have you guys heard of Bluechew? You guys know what Bluechew is?

**Steph Smith** (3:33)
Bluechew?

**Shaan Puri** (3:34)
Yeah, so about three or four-

**Sam Parr** (3:36)
I don't think they target you in ads, but they target us for sure.

**Shaan Puri** (3:39)
Yeah, basically about six weeks ago, I went to these guys' office and I met the two founders. And one of the founders is a doctor and the other one was a commodities trader.
And basically they worked together and they were like, what can we start? And they saw that the Viagra patent was going to expire in 2017 And so they were just plotting and plotting and plotting. And HIMSS gets a lot of credit for doing this, but Bluechew I think is actually more interesting. So what Bluechew does is, I think they also own med.com. So it's basically a telehealth business where you call in and you say what your issue is. Their main thing is their pill. I guess, I don't know if they call it Bluechew, the name of the pill, but it's for erectile dysfunction, which I didn't realize it.