He built a $1M/MRR dinner club app in 2 weeks with 0 employees

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
I can't believe we just agreed to do public math. It's like we only have like two rules here. One, don't get canceled. Two, don't embarrass yourself by doing public math. And we did it.

**Sam Parr** (0:12)
We did it a bunch of times, frankly.

**Shaan Puri** (0:22)
All right. I got a business that you're going to love. Okay. So this is a business that in 10 months, has gotten to 10 million in ARR.

**Sam Parr** (0:32)
I think I know what you're talking about.

**Shaan Puri** (0:34)
Okay. So it started by this French guy and the business is called Time Left.

**Sam Parr** (0:40)
Yep. I had it on my topics list too.

**Shaan Puri** (0:42)
Okay. So check this out. I don't know how deep did you go. Did you go into the backstory or?

**Sam Parr** (0:48)
I know it took a lot longer than it appears.

**Shaan Puri** (0:52)
Yeah, exactly. It's a multi-year overnight success as they tend to be. Right? You've heard the word, the phrase like 10-year overnight success is kind of like that. So I want to show you some things about this guy. So the first thing is this graph. Here's the revenue graph. And if you're listening on audio, you should go to YouTube so you can actually see what we're showing because it's way more fun and you could also see what we look like. By the way, I'm Shaan. This voice, this is Shaan, the Indian guy. Sam, talk. You're the white guy. You should talk now.

**Sam Parr** (1:25)
It's like they think that I would talk like a white, like alpha jock because of the way that I look and I talk like an Indian nerd and they think that you would talk like an Indian nerd, but you talk like a white bro alpha jock.

**Shaan Puri** (1:38)
Exactly. And we need the record to be clear on that. Okay. Who's who?

**Sam Parr** (1:42)
All right.

**Shaan Puri** (1:42)
So check this out. So this is the revenue graph. Already impressive. You could see it kind of starts super, super flat and then gets to now over a million dollars a month that this business is generating. And what does it do?

**Sam Parr** (1:56)
What month did it describe that graph?

**Shaan Puri** (1:59)
Okay. So this is basically if you start in January of last year, it's like zero. You get to January of this year and it's still, the ARR is still under, I don't know, 500K or something like that.

**Sam Parr** (2:15)
Tens of thousands, maybe a month.

**Shaan Puri** (2:17)
Exactly. And now as of October, November, it's over a $10 million annual run rate. It's crossing 12.5 million. And so in 10 months to go to do greater than 10 million in ARR is great. It says, he said, it took seven months to reach one million and then another seven months to get from one to 10 Right? So crazy growth. Okay. So what's growing like crazy? What is this business even? So TimeLift is a business that just gets people together for dinner. It is a solve for the loneliness epidemic that is everywhere. And so if you go to their website, it just says, every Wednesday night, strangers meet for dinner. Book your seat and meet five strangers over dinner, all matched by our personality algorithm, book your seat. And in hundreds of cities, every Wednesday, people get together for a dinner with a bunch of strangers that are kind of curated by this app.
And so you pay something like 20-ish bucks a month to be a part of this club, be a part of this supper club. And every week on Wednesday, they're going to set up a dinner. And then you go, then you pay for the dinner separately while you're there. They book the restaurant, they book the table, you show up. And it's supposed to be a bunch of other people that you should find interesting or get along with. And then you split the bill at the end.

**Sam Parr** (3:34)
And they claim that they have an algorithm where it's like, are you logical? Are you more emotional? Are you this? Are you that? That helps match. Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (3:42)
Roughly what age are you? Are you, you know, kind of single and looking to mingle? Like kind of what are you all about? And so you take this little quiz and you do that.

**Sam Parr** (3:54)
All right. So when I ran my company, The Hustle, I think we had something like two million subscribers and we made money through advertising. We didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model. And so I remember sitting down and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off the hustle that aren't advertising? And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me and the HubSpot team, we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business. And we put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research. And we call it very appropriately. We call it the Business Monetization Playbook. Go to the description of this episode and you're going to see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free. You just click the link and you can see it. Back to the episode.