How a City Tour is Making Millions, & Selling Manhood | My First Million # 177

About this video

Sam and Shaan discuss their podcast’s growth to #14 on iTunes and share numerous business ideas spanning media, education, experiences, and lifestyle services. They explore concepts like a Barstool Sports equivalent for tech, internal company podcasting platforms, crime walks and fantasy camps, and various experiential businesses.

Key takeaways

• Intensity and asking for simple actions drive results—Sam’s focused effort on podcast growth (getting listeners to subscribe) directly correlated with climbing from #80 to #14 on iTunes, and asking for reviews yielded 800 new ones in one day
• Opportunity cost is the key constraint for talent in tech/business media—unlike sports journalism, smart funny people in tech can make significantly more money as operators or investors, making it difficult to retain them for media companies
• Experience-based businesses are scalable—crime walks, fantasy camps, museum tours, and branded TV event replicas (Survivor, The Challenge) demonstrate that people pay premium prices for curated, photo-worthy, intimate experiences tied to genuine expertise or IP
• Course completion rates remain a fundamental problem for self-serve education platforms, but cohort-based and live instruction models dramatically improve outcomes—completion rates can jump from 10% to 80%+ when there’s accountability and peer pressure
• Simple, direct tactics often outperform sophisticated strategies—many smart people overthink growth and overlook low-hanging fruit like just asking customers to take the desired action

Episode details: published April 30, 2021 · 13K views · 1:13:44 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. The business ideas, figures and results discussed are the hosts’ and guests’ own claims, shared as brainstorming and entertainment — not verified facts and not investment advice.

← Previous: How to Buy Distressed Assets, How to Network with Codie Sanchez | My First Million Ep. #176 · Next: Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Communities & Crypto | MFM #178 →

All My First Million videos · My First Million profile · My First Million (official site)