Brainstorming Ideas with The $200M Man

**Patrick Campbell** (0:00)
One of my goals, something, this is gonna sound crazy, and this is the perfect audience to say this, but I get so jacked up about the idea of toppling a dictatorship one day. I get so excited by it, and I'm like, I'm not even kidding.

**Sam Parr** (0:24)
All right, look at what I have on my head.

**Shaan Puri** (0:29)
Look at this guy. Wow, you went from dad to cool dad in one episode with that hat.

**Sam Parr** (0:35)
I'm hip. I'm hip.

**Shaan Puri** (0:37)
I saw you had the shirt too. Did you buy a full uniform? Are you actually just working there now or what?

**Sam Parr** (0:41)
Jonathan got the hookup, and he got a swag bag from them, and he came over to my house the other day and gave it to me.

**Shaan Puri** (0:49)
And have you gotten any compliments, or do anybody under the age of 25 recognize you now or something?

**Sam Parr** (0:56)
A few, a few young people. One young person called me cool guy.

**Patrick Campbell** (1:03)
That's all the affirmation you're looking for now as a dad.

**Shaan Puri** (1:06)
Get away from me, cool guy.

**Sam Parr** (1:09)
Hey, why are you staring at me, cool guy?

**Shaan Puri** (1:13)
Did you need something?

**Sam Parr** (1:19)
That's how it was. You want to kick us off? Who do we got?

**Shaan Puri** (1:22)
All right, we got Patrick in the house. Patrick's been on before, so the OG listeners know all about Patrick Campbell PC as he's in my phone. He created a company called ProfitWell, sold it for 200 million bucks. He's got the background that we always talk about where I'm like, I notice that people who have this background tend to be winners more often than not. He was a competitive debater.
Some would call him a master debater. He was in the NSA, the intelligence agency.
So last time you were on, you were telling us about all the crazy shit you did to gather intelligence as in the startup world. So like, how do you learn about what your competitors are doing and whatnot.
And now today he's back with a bunch of ideas and I wanna know what you've been doing because you sold your company for 200 million bucks and then you had a bunch of time on your hands and that's a deadly combo.
You sent us something. I wanna start with this thing you texted us about the Bezos number. And I don't know too much about it. So I want you to explain. You go, I've been working on it. I've been searching for my Bezos number. All right, before we get back to this episode, I gotta tell you about our sugar daddy, the ones who make this whole episode possible, HubSpot. You know, it's Q4 and this is where the deals are trying to get closed. This is where the champions are made inside your company. If you are closing deals in Q4, you're the star. You're the one who's doing it. And if you're gonna try to do that, you should be using HubSpot's Sales Hub. They have an easy to use platform that makes it easy to find, track and close all your deals. They got an AI assistant. It works in with your CRM. They have a prospecting workspace. The Sales Hub is the easiest way for somebody who's trying to close deals this quarter to get it done. It's even better if you pair it with other things like HubSpot Smart CRM. So stop sticking to the old strategies and start closing more deals with HubSpot Sales Hub. So make the switch to HubSpot Sales Hub at hubspot.com/sales. All right, let's get back to the pod.
I don't even know what that means. Explain, what is the Bezos number?

**Patrick Campbell** (3:18)
Yeah, totally. So here's the thing. As this started from a premise, so sold the company, basically working at paddle and also thinking about what the next thing looks like.
And what I found in the ideation process, I haven't come up with ideas in 10 years. I've helped companies come up with ideas, but it's just one of those interesting aspects of the entrepreneurship journey. And my big belief is your job as an operator is to basically know your customer and know your space better than anyone else. And you need to do this before you start building, because a lot of entrepreneurs fall into this trap where we're really good at wheeling stuff into existence because that's our job, except it's relatively easy to do that today. So this means that like basic ideas are cheap, mostly indefensible and worse, they waste a lot of our time. And so the first step I come in terms of an ideation process is using this Bezos number framework. And basically when Jeff Bezos started Amazon, he noticed this like crazy stat, this new thing called the internet was growing 2,700% per year.