Greatest Hits #1 - Turning it Around: From Failure to a $100m+ Success

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
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**Sam Parr** (0:26)
All right, what's going on? So today, we are doing a My First Million rewind, where we look at some of the best episodes that we've ever done, and we're going to give an update on them and replay some of the episodes because we've been growing quite a bit and not everyone has heard some of this great stuff. So today's episode is actually the first episode that we ever did. And at the time, it was just Sean. He basically called me one day and he goes, Hey, I just recorded this podcast idea thing that I have. Tell me what you think.
And it was awesome. I was totally blown away. And that's what this episode is. It's the very first one that he ever did. And at first, it wasn't Sean and I coming up with ideas and brainstorming. It was just him interviewing people. And it was really wonderful. And this episode is the story of Suli Ali. Suleiman Ali is his full name, who's a good friend of Sean and I. And his story is crazy fascinating. It's about how he started and sold a company called Tiny for $100 million. But since then, Sean and I have talked about this guy constantly on the podcast, because he's someone that we really look up to. So this business that he had, it was called Tiny.
He grew it to like $85 million in revenue, $15 million in profit.
It was this great success, but it was a horrible company for a lot of the time, for a lot of the time that he ran it. And they had so many issues. And in this episode, we're going to talk to Suli and figure out what those issues were and how he got through them and how the company ended up selling for $100 million. It's incredibly fascinating. But what makes this more interesting is Suli currently has a new company that's doing roughly $40 to $50 million a year in sales right now. And he asked us not to talk about it yet, but we will one day. And I want you to listen to this episode now because you'll kind of get to see before everyone figures out what his new thing is, you're going to figure out why he thinks the way he does and you're going to figure out the frameworks he uses and things like that. And it's kind of cool, I think, to see someone become successful rather than just looking back. And I want to point out a few of my favorite moments from this episode. So first of all, at two minutes and 40 seconds into the episode, Shaan basically said something like, Suli, what's going on? This episode is going to go out to hundreds of thousands of people. The reality is that we didn't know that that was going to happen, but Shaan totally predicted it and he was right.
At four minutes and 30 seconds, you're going to hear a story about how when Suli got his first job, he was making like 76 grand a year at Microsoft and his dad was like, okay, that sounds good, but when are you going to quit and start a company? And I think that's really important to see your parents support you and how big of a difference that makes.
At 36 minutes, you're going to hear Suli talk about confidence. And basically, Suli is someone who I've always looked up to because he seems very confident. He goes, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. And he's very accepting of the fact that he's going to succeed, which is actually quite hard. But in this episode, he talks about when he's incredibly confident. But he also says, but I know that my confidence is going to get really low when I launch something because it's always really bad. And here's how I get through that. And I think that that that ebb and flow of confidence and how he overcomes is quite interesting. At 37 minutes, you're going to hear about how he started Tiny, the company that made him his first 100 million bucks.