#5 - The First Viral Website: "Hot or Not"

**James Hong** (0:00)
Basically, I had nothing to do, I was just going out drinking with my friends all the time, like almost like five days a week.
We had the system sending us stats, like at noon and at midnight, $10,000, $15,000, on a good day like $20,000-something. $20,000.

**Shaan Puri** (0:36)
And is it recording?
Okay.
Okay, so what is this? So, something that entertains me, and so I wanted to create a podcast, which was first and foremost, just an excuse to hang out with people who I haven't been able to hang out with as much. So, one way is to say, hey, let's go grab a coffee, and the other way is to say, what if we recorded this so that other people could be a fly on the wall? And hear stories or chatter about random stuff. And I'm not trying to do it educationally. So, for me, it's stories. So, stories is the part where, so the podcast is called My First Million. And the reason I picked that is because the audience that listens to this, they are entrepreneurs already, or wantrepreneurs kind of thinking about, hey, that's the dream. I'd love to sort of quit my job and start a business someday. And I remember for me, and I think this applies to many people, which is the idea of a million bucks is like a magic number. Even today when everyone's a billionaire, still, if you're a thousandaire, a million bucks sounds like all the money.

**James Hong** (1:33)
Totally understand.

**Shaan Puri** (1:34)
And so-

**James Hong** (1:35)
In fact, when I made my first million, I put it all in one account and I went to the ATM.

**Shaan Puri** (1:40)
Just to look at it?

**James Hong** (1:40)
Yeah, and I withdrew money so I would have a slip of paper that said I had a million dollars.

**Shaan Puri** (1:46)
You framed that? What'd you do with the slip?

**James Hong** (1:48)
Yeah, well, you know, the funny thing is like, then we had all these jokes because I had these ATM slips with a million dollars on it, and we were just joking around. We were like, man, we should keep these in our wallet. And then when you give a girl your phone number, she's like, oh, let me write it down. Let me write this before everyone had phones. I was like, oh, let me write it down in a slip of paper. I have one.
Never actually did it, but it was a funny idea. And actually, it turned out, I remember, then I was Googling the idea, and there were companies, I remember, that sold fake ATM slips online.

**Shaan Puri** (2:22)
Oh, wow.

**James Hong** (2:22)
So I wasn't the first to do that.

**Shaan Puri** (2:24)
I wasn't the first guy thinking about doing this.

**James Hong** (2:25)
It's a whole new industry.

**Shaan Puri** (2:28)
Yeah, so basically, it's called My First Million. I'm talking to you about how they made a million bucks in all different ways. So some people are tech entrepreneurs, started business. Some people made a million bucks selling mushrooms, and they're mushroom farmers. Someones did it in crypto, CBD, all the different types of things, real estate. And so I want to tell stories so that the listeners basically hear, man, first there's a million ways to success. You don't have to follow a particular track.
And B, just a little bit of inspiration and entertainment about how these stories tend to be really interesting. They kind of come out of nowhere. It wasn't a perfect plan.
It wasn't a straight line. It usually has ups and downs. And so I want to tell those stories.

**James Hong** (3:07)
You know, like in Harvard Business School, they have these HBS cases.
And everything in those cases is like, oh, you know, Shaan was looking out the window at the Charles River, thinking about what he was gonna do for his company. And the solution is always, they give you all this data. And then at the end, like it's like, oh, he did this and this and this and this and this, and then he did that and that and that and that. It's like, oh, look how like, it's everything's like, the solution was like a neat package. And in reality, you like, you know, like the guy wasn't, you know, he was not sleeping. And like, he probably did 20 million things before he did what he actually ended up doing, or she, whatever.
But you know, it's funny because like, it's always like that, but it's reality is never like that, you know what I mean? So it's nice.

**Shaan Puri** (3:46)