How to Reverse Engineer Any Business - From the Archive

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
Hey, My First Million fans, this is producer Ben. We're bringing you one from the Archives today, and I think this is a really high-value episode. Now, what this one is about is Sam and Shaan talking about their process for how they reverse-engineer a business. So if they find a business that they really like, how do they figure out its history, where it's been and how it works? And so they go through some of their tools. I think you guys will really like it, so please enjoy this episode from the Archives on how to reverse-engineer any business. Here it is.
What is that?

**Shaan Puri** (0:42)
I saw this website, my guy Chris, Chris who's my apprentice right now for content, he sent this to me, and I even actually spent a ton of time on it, but go to firstversions.com, check that out. And I'm pretty fascinated with this. I think you are too.
We like to go find the OG thing. What did, I did this blog post, I got like tens of thousands of views once before I had any audience. It just went viral because it was, what did the first web page look like for these 10 big companies? And this is kind of like some common to do, like Uber's homepage back in the day, Snapchat's homepage back in the day, the first Facebook homepage, the first eBay homepage, first Amazon homepage. And these things look like, so basic and rudimentary, and it makes you realize like, dude, you need to launch. And there's that quote, if you're not embarrassed by V1 of your product, you launched too late.
And all these companies definitely fall into that category. So I thought firstversions.com was a cool little archive of stuff like this.

**Sam Parr** (1:42)
I think this is so cool. So I actually just sent you a link to an article that I wrote. I think I wrote this in 2016, years ago, 15, October 15
And it probably doesn't even work entirely. But anyway, what I love to do, and I've always loved doing this, is I use... There's a few different websites. Web Archive is the easiest. And what I like to do is I will get a Google Doc and a spreadsheet, and I'll map out the whole journey of a company. So I'll look at where an Airbnb started, and then I'll read all about them of like, all right, here's when they announced they had this many users.
Here's where they announced this much funding. Here's where they said they had their first 50 employees. And then from 50, they actually went to 1,000 in only two years. And then I'll take screenshots of their website.
And in doing that, you can actually see what... Like how the evolution. So...

**Shaan Puri** (2:38)
Progression.

**Sam Parr** (2:39)
Yeah. And I'm just starting... I'm just making this up with Airbnb. But it could be like, it started as AirBed and Breakfast, and it was about renting cots inside of a living room. Then, oh, wow, they actually changed their positioning to travel like a local, and they started taking higher-end pictures. I don't know what it is. But...
And when they started actually taking higher-end pictures, that was actually right when they... Right before they raised their $100 million funding. And so anyway, you can actually track the progression really nicely by doing this. And I love doing that. I love it. And so you can actually see. Oh, Uber, ubercab.com. They were only black car services.
Oh, when they raised all this money, they actually got rid of the black car. The black car became secondary. So actually, the black car didn't work.
So they switched to this. You know what I mean? And so it's kind of cool.

**Shaan Puri** (3:23)
Yeah, you can totally reverse engineer a lot of the stuff. So some of the tools we use to do this, the Wayback Machine, which is the Internet Archive. So just Google Wayback Machine. That lets you put in any domain name and then you go back in time. And they took screenshots of what the website looked like on June 12th, 2010
And then that you can go back. You can see Uber's homepage. It looked like back then. How were they describing themselves?
Another one I do is TechCrunch. I go to TechCrunch, I search for a company's name and then I reverse sort it by the earliest mention of it. So you can go Twitter. You can see the very first article is Mike Arrington being like, the buzz at the party this week was about Twitter spelled without the vowels, basically. It's like the short messaging service was kind of fun. You do this, but who cares? People are just tweeting about their breakfast. And it was all through SMS. Then you could kind of see what was going on then.