Bootstrapping a +$1B Business + Selling To The Ultra Rich | Jesse Pujji

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
You said a couple of interesting things, so let's break this down.

**Jesse Pujji** (0:02)
We have no money, we're bootstrapping, let's get ourselves on GLG as experts. I'm like, okay, my charge is $500 an hour. She goes, no problem. But we talked to someone after a few weeks, and he goes, do you guys have research? And we look at each other, we're like, yeah, yeah, we have a report. It's $5,000. So I always joke, that was Ampush's angels round. We raised $150,000 selling research reports to hedge fund people.

**Sam Parr** (0:24)
That's pretty sick.

**Shaan Puri** (0:25)
That's an amazing story.

**Jesse Pujji** (0:26)
And by the way, there's eight of them that all have like high eight or low nine figures in EBITDA. The whole category has just crushed.

**Shaan Puri** (0:33)
The two takeaways from this, by the way, are sell to the rich and then your way of figuring out what they need was. Jesse, what up dude? How are you doing, man?

**Jesse Pujji** (0:48)
What's up guys? I'm pumped to be on here.

**Shaan Puri** (0:51)
Good to see you. Where should we start? You sent us a doc, had a bunch of cool ideas on it. Which one do you want to start with?

**Jesse Pujji** (0:56)
Yeah, I mean, maybe some of the stuff we've learned at Gateway X as we've been building new ideas. I think the idea I'm most excited about, which I think Shaan, you and I have talked about, is Aux Insights.

**Shaan Puri** (1:06)
Sam, do you know about this business?

**Sam Parr** (1:08)
No. What is Aux Insights?

**Shaan Puri** (1:10)
Dude, this is sick. Tell us about this business.

**Jesse Pujji** (1:12)
You're going to love it, Sam.
One of the things as we've learned starting new businesses, and some of them you guys probably know like Kehane, Shaan, you are a customer of it, it failed, we stopped doing it. One thing I've learned sitting in this seat is, it's really important to understand demand and that there's a customer who has a problem that you need, and then goes like to stand up the thing. With Growth Assistant, that's what I did. I already knew people needed it, I just stood it up and immediately started to work. I started my career in finance and consulting, I went to Penn, I got a million friends who were in private equity. After we sold Ampush, I would get a call from one friend once a month without fail, who worked at Blackstone or worked at TPG or worked at one of these fancy private equity firms, and they'd go, hey, I have this deal in front of my investment committee, it's a billion dollar company, and I'm getting asked all these questions about their Google and Facebook ads, Jesse, like what if they don't perform well, or how do we know they're good at them? And they're asking me to like look at the web traffic and make some analysis. Jesse, I have no idea. And my investment committee is not happy because I can't convince them to buy this business. What should I ask them? So the first few calls, I'm like, well, the same thing any of us would do. We'll go look at the Google Analytics. Well, how many how many creatives are they testing? My fourth guy was like, dude, can you just do this for me? And I'm like, you know, me, I'm like, yeah, a couple hundred thousand dollars. I'll do it for you. And he's like, oh, that's it. Yeah, done. Let's go do this.

**Shaan Puri** (2:35)
Hey, real quick. You know, one of the cool parts about what we're doing is that people have reached out and told me that they've built actual million dollar businesses, made their first million off an idea they heard on the show. That is crazy. That's wild. That's why we want to do the show. And we want to see more of that. One of the questions we get asked over and over again is, is there some kind of idea, database or spreadsheet where we list out all the different business ideas that we've talked about? Well, the answer is finally yes. The fine folks at HubSpot have dug through the archive and pulled out 50 plus business ideas and put them into a business idea database. It's totally free. You go to clickhubspot.com. slash MFF and get the database for you.

**Jesse Pujji** (3:10)
All right.

**Shaan Puri** (3:11)
Now back to the show.

**Jesse Pujji** (3:12)
And so Aux Insights is essentially a private equity consulting business. It works for private equity firms, specifically in the office of the CMO, marketing-related diligence and what's called value creation. Value creation is after they buy the business, they want you to spend time helping them put together a strategy for how they grow the business. And there's businesses like Accordion, the cool example, 300 million revenue, 100 million EBITDA. It's only a 12-year-old company. They do the same exact business for office of the CFO. What? So, anything finance related. Yeah, Accordion. I mean, you could look at LEK is 800 million and 250 in EBITDA. McKinsey has an over billion-dollar business just for private equity firms. It's got 55% EBITDA margins.