MFM #157: Instagram Food Drops Making $200k/Week, Chrome Extensions That're Crushing & Open Salaries

About this video

Sam and Shaan discuss emerging food brands built on Instagram using cloud kitchens and drop-based sales models (like My Cookie Dealer and 1900 Ice Cream), exploring the viral formulas behind food trends and predicting private equity will acquire these brands. They also cover trends in financial transparency around salaries and compensation, tools like Levels.fyi and Tiller Money, and Shaan’s early experiences working at HubSpot, reflecting on why software businesses are superior to other models.

Key takeaways

• Instagram food brands using weekly drops and direct-to-consumer models are generating millions in annual revenue (Sam cites My Cookie Dealer’s claimed $10M/year) by leveraging the internet’s ability to distribute the best product globally without physical retail presence.
• Shaan identifies repeatable formulas for food virality: making side ingredients the main focus, adding unusual colors, changing size/container, combining unlike foods, or elevating/de-elevating fancy foods—and notes these concepts could be franchised across platforms and categories.
• Salary transparency through crowdsourced databases (Levels.fyi, Google’s anonymous spreadsheets, Buffer’s public salaries) is shifting power to employees but may hurt companies at scale; similar data-collection businesses can be exported to other industries like venture capital, nursing, or consulting.
• Shaan’s first corporate job at HubSpot reveals software’s structural advantages: sticky revenue, low churn, compounding improvements via updates, and high switching costs make software businesses superior to e-commerce or media—though choosing the right game matters more than playing it perfectly.

Episode details: published March 3, 2021 · 5.4K views · 57:58 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.

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