#80 - The Guide on Generating Startup Ideas

**Shaan Puri** (0:08)
Sam, what's up?

**Sam Parr** (0:10)
What's going on? Let me pull up some of our documents.

**Shaan Puri** (0:14)
Couple of things I thought were interesting. One, you posted something about this thing called Moe Points. What is that?

**Sam Parr** (0:19)
So Moe, it's my friend Moe. Him and Ramon grew up together in... Moe is from Afghanistan by way of... Where is Ramon from? Netherlands. And then moved here. And they used to have a business.
It's shut down now, so I could talk about it, where they would buy and sell airline points.
And he became an expert on how to maximize points. And so I'm getting into this now. And so, for example, if there's all these ways that you can, like if you're spending money on advertising on this and that, you can maximize your points and fly free forever, for years. And so he would teach me how to do it myself, and I was like, Moe, turn this into a course. And so that's what it is. Let's pip them out though. Is it moepoints.com?

**Shaan Puri** (1:04)
moepoints.com. Yeah, I checked it out because I was pretty interested in this.
In the same way that you want a tax guy to help you save money on the back end, whenever you do pretty significant credit card spending, and a lot of times, if you own your own business, you can rack up a lot of spending on credit cards.
I hate going and figuring this stuff out. I just feel like it's a waste of my brain and it's a waste of my time to go optimize my spending and buy points so I can travel free and book all this stuff. But I know it's valuable. And so I was hoping to get, what's the shortcut? What's the like, either you do it for me or what's the 80-20? Give me the few things I can do that will give me the highest return on my time and effort because I know I'm sort of wasting this opportunity and I don't wanna go become an expert in this stuff. But if you're an expert, fantastic. So I signed up for it.

**Sam Parr** (1:52)
Points are interesting. I just got into them recently. So I earn 300,000 to 400,000 points a month.
And that translates to 1% of that in cash value. So if I spend a million dollars a year through my credit card, which sounds like a lot if you're just an individual, and that is a lot if you're an individual, but for your business, that's nothing.
I get $100,000 cash back. Now here's the cool thing. That cash back in most cases is tax free.

**Shaan Puri** (2:21)
Interesting.

**Sam Parr** (2:22)
So if you live in San Francisco, that's the equivalent of getting a salary of 180 grand.

**Shaan Puri** (2:27)
That's a full-time job.

**Sam Parr** (2:29)
Yeah, and so it's great. And so I've actually met some entrepreneurs who earn, I think you can get up to $360,000.
Some accountants gonna tweet at me and say I got it wrong, but I'm almost positive, and it's controversial. I'm almost positive you can get up to $350,000 in cash back. And so I know this one lady who's got this flower company, and she gets $350,000 in cash back income a year.

**Shaan Puri** (2:54)
Yeah, that's great. I have a friend who, he basically negotiated with his investors. He's like, I'd like to pay the AWS bill for my company on my personal credit card.
And so he earned like whatever Amex, double black platinum gold, whatever it is, like the highest tier for life, because they were spending like three million a month on AWS or something crazy. And so like, he's like, oh, if I ever wanna fly, I fly first class now. Oh, I get like free Equinox, I get free this, I get free that because that's the perks of like the highest tier of Amex. And he's like, yeah, I got lifetime because during my company, I just asked, can I just put this on this card and keep that tied to my name?
And they did it. And I was like, that's pretty amazing.

**Sam Parr** (3:34)
And so that's what Mo's trying to do. Now it's just like a course and hand to hand combat, like consultation where he's trying to help people.
But that is kind of interesting to like log in to a portal or like technology and it does it for you. That is pretty amazing. And your transaction fee is either upfront fee or you skim a little, that is incredibly interesting.

**Shaan Puri** (3:55)
I like it. Okay, so I have another random idea I want to talk about. So I have a friend, shout out to my friend Mike, who he went to Duke where I went to school.