#78 - 10 Startup Ideas I Had This Year

**Shaan Puri** (0:01)
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What's up, guys, Shaan here.
Sam is driving for some Memorial Day weekend thing. So it's just me flying solo today, but got some good stuff to talk about.
First, it's been almost exactly a year since I had this idea for the podcast. So I'm looking at my messages right now to Sam. So 5-13-2019. So this is May 13th, a year ago. I messaged him, yo, I got a proposition for you. He says, yes. I said, I'm starting a podcast. It's like how I built this. Good quality, good guests. And I sent him a list of guests that I had in mind. I said, I want The Hustle to be the publisher. I'll do all the work. You include it in the email in this new episode. And if we start monetizing, let's share the economics.
Sam says, okay, deal.
I said, cool, I'll send you the first episode to preview at the end of this week.
And then we go back and forth a little bit. And then we started. You know, the first thing I did was I went and found somebody who could edit a podcast by going on Twitter and writing Podcast Editor in the search and then looking for people who wrote that in their bio. And then I found Ishan, who was an editor for other people's podcasts. We made a cover art. We figured out a name. I'm looking at the messages here. The original name that I was thinking was, because I was basing it off of how I built this, so the name was How I Got Rich, which I decided was way too, you know, I don't know, crude or something. It could have been a good name.
It's at least sort of, I don't know, gets your attention. But I knew I'd have trouble getting guests on with that name. And in fact, My First Million also had trouble getting guests on because a lot of people who are successful don't want to come talk about money. And they don't want to seem like a rich asshole. But it worked out anyways. My First Million got off the ground. We shifted off of interviews and started doing more casual, brainstorm-type episodes. And that's what people resonated with. They liked listening to something where it gets the wheels turning in your head. It gets you to learn about a new space or a new business model or a new product that you hadn't heard of. And people like to hear two people scheming and thinking up new ideas and dreaming about what could be. Because there's not very many podcasts that do that. And so that's what I learned along the way. I'm looking at our stats now.
We have reached over 2 million downloads. We did about a million downloads in the first six months and a little more than that in the second half. And, dude, I could have never imagined that we would hit 2 million downloads in year one. That's kind of amazing.
I'm like in shock even right now, just sort of looking at it. Because I don't really check, you know, I don't really pay too much attention to it. Because I'm not doing this really for the listeners. In fact, when I started this, I told Sam, I said, he asked me, why are you doing this? And I said, well, our company is getting acquired. We're in the due diligence phase right now, and it's a lot of either lawyers or security people looking at our code, things like that. It's really boring. I want to do something. I can't start a company, but I can start a podcast during this time. And so I had the itch to start something. And this was my something. And I'd always wanted to do a podcast because I like to talk. And I figured this would just be a great little networking hack.
When I actually started the podcast, I didn't think anybody would listen to it. My plan was there's all these interesting people here in San Francisco. I want to meet them. Instead of just saying, hey, my name's Shaan. I'm a founder of this company. You want to get some coffee? Which is annoying. I hate when people ask me, hey, can I have some of your time? Do you want to get a coffee? Do you want to do a call? Would love to chat. I'm like, well, what's in it for me? This is awful. I don't want to. I don't even drink coffee. So fuck that. But if somebody invites me on a podcast or invites me to speak at a conference, I'm like, OK, cool. Tell me more. And I usually say yes. And it's weird, because it doesn't even matter how many people are listening to the podcast, or it could be an event that has 100 people. But still, it feels good to sort of be on stage. And I knew that other people liked that too. So my goal was, this is a great way to meet interesting people and have an excuse to connect with them.