#9 - Bonus episode! Answering listener questions

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
But going from to 1 million in the bank is a pretty big life change. You know, I looked at my bank and I was like, holy shit, okay, like, I don't have to work.
This is a bonus episode. So we've been getting a lot of listener questions, which is great. I love getting DMs or messages or emails from listeners. And a lot of you guys wrote in with questions.
So we wanted to take time and do a quick little bonus episode where we answer questions that you guys write in. So I got, I'm here, Shaan, and I got my partner in crime, Ishan, almost the same name.

**Ishan Haque** (0:43)
Yeah, I guess.

**Shaan Puri** (0:44)
Welcome to, you've been behind the scenes. Welcome to the front of the scenes, my friend.

**Ishan Haque** (0:48)
Thank you. It's really good to be here.

**Shaan Puri** (0:50)
You want to give everybody like the 30 second rundown. First question is for you. Who are you and how did you get involved with the podcast?

**Ishan Haque** (0:56)
Yeah. So my name is Ishan Haque. I'm 20 I'm from Australia. I've ran a few podcasts before, so it's not necessarily a new thing, but I've been following Shaan for years, and he reached out to me one day, liked what I did before.
And, you know, I liked the concept of the podcast, and from there, history is made.

**Shaan Puri** (1:18)
Yes.
And so you do most of the work, to be honest, and it's been great working with you so far. And let's get to some of these questions. So I think the way we should do this, maybe you read the questions that you have in the mailbag, and we'll just answer them and go from there.

**Ishan Haque** (1:32)
Awesome. But before we do that, do you want to just let everyone know how they can send in the questions?

**Shaan Puri** (1:38)
Yeah, you can send in questions through Twitter. You can DM me at ShaanVP, S-H-A-A-N-V-P, or you can find me on LinkedIn. You can do whatever you want. You can find a way to get to me. So feel free to write in any questions. If this is fun, we'll do this again with more questions. If this is not fun, then my apologies. We won't do it again.

**Ishan Haque** (1:57)
Yeah, agreed.
So we're going to jump to the first question here. It's from Petrel from Detroit, and he said through Twitter, I feel kind of trapped in the Midwest when it comes to the tech world. There are some meetups, but nothing exciting for startups out here. And so if I wanted to create a conference or an idea generation group that would attract my demographic, how could I plan for it to be successful? And I'll just quickly add on to that in saying that he should listen to, or anyone listening to this should listen to Sam Parr's episode, who created the hustle and has hosted the successful HustleCon.

**Shaan Puri** (2:29)
Exactly. And Google search, Sam Parr, How I Got Speakers From My Conference. He literally shows the email templates of what he sent to each speaker, how he convinced them to come. And it's kind of amazing. You could literally just clone that playbook and get speakers' attention that way. OK, so the question is, if you're in Detroit, how do you meet other like-minded people? There's meetups, there's things like that. But actually, the idea you wrote in there, a conference, is actually a really interesting idea. I've been to some conferences that are also not in Silicon Valley, not in New York. They're in these other remote cities that you wouldn't really expect. So some examples for you to look up are there's Myriad, which is a conference in Australia. These guys are really clever. They went to the Australian government and they said, hey, you guys would love to have more innovation in Australia, right? And the government's like, of course. How could you say no to innovation?
And so they got the government to pay for them to host a conference, to fly out speakers. They literally chartered a jet for me and like 50 other speakers to fly, you know, a 747 to fly from San Francisco all the way to Australia, like an 18-hour flight to come speak at this conference, all expenses paid. And it was paid for by the government. So maybe you could go in Detroit to like the Chamber of Commerce or something like that and see if the city would like to stimulate, you know, innovation. And maybe they could help, you know, book a venue for you for free or things like that.