Dec 17, 2021 · 1h 2m · my-first-million
Half-Baked TV Show Ideas, Miss Excel Making Millions, The Adventure Challenge, and More
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this idea-packed episode of My First Million, hosts Shaan Puri and Sam Parr break down lucrative creator business models like Miss Excel and The Adventure Challenge, while pitching creative unscripted television and digital media concepts.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 99.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.6 Guest teaching 1.1 Guest disagreement 0.5 The hosts pushing back 1.0
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 44:51 Skepticism on modern fraternity culture
Sam pushes back on Shaan's Frat U TV concept, arguing that modern eighteen-year-olds are too woke and frats are cultural faux pas.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 8:08 Challenging Miss Excel revenue sustainabilitySam immediately doubts that Miss Excel's viral course run will last, forcing Shaan to present market data on Excel course demand.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 27:03 Explaining investigative genetic genealogySam educates Shaan on how open-source genealogy databases like GEDmatch match distant relatives to identify cold case serial killers.
The host holds their own ▶ 54:32 Validating ambient TV with Atmosphere dataSam demonstrates strong domain knowledge by detailing how Chive TV built Atmosphere into a $200M out-of-home ambient video empire.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Episode Preview: Viral Business Breakdowns and TV Show Pitches | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Introductory banter discussing the upcoming show format and launching the podcast clip contest on TikTok and YouTube. | |
| How Miss Excel Built a Multi-Million Dollar Course Business | 6 | 1 | 0 | 1 | Shaan breaks down the business model of Miss Excel, detailing her unit economics, low cost structure, and course launch strategy. Sam adds context about Wall Street consulting culture. | |
| Energetic Content Strategy and Scaling Miss Excel to $100M | 7 | 2 | 1 | 3 | Sam initially doubts the longevity of the course business, but Shaan counters with course marketplace data and her expanding funnel into the broader Microsoft Office suite. | |
| High-Energy Webinars and High-Ticket B2B Corporate Retainers | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Shaan explores how top-of-funnel consumer virality converts into high-ticket enterprise training retainers, citing a peer in the growth mindset space. | |
| The Financial Modeling World Cup and Excel Esports | 5 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Sam introduces the viral Financial Modeling World Cup, and the hosts discuss how personality-driven energy transfer drives evergreen info-product businesses like Neville Medhora's. | |
| Creator Education on Monthly.com and Casey Neistat's Class | 6 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Sam shares Monthly.com and Descript's text-based video editing innovation, while Shaan recounts Andrew Mason's background post-Groupon. | |
| StoryWorth, Family Memory Preservation, and Personal Podcasts | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Sam describes StoryWorth's solo-founder model, while Shaan gently pushes back on the friction of written prompts versus recording an oral family podcast. | |
| DNA Genealogy, Cold Case Resolution, and Privacy Implications | 6 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Sam outlines how open-source genealogy database GEDmatch solved the Golden State Killer case and the privacy tradeoffs of genetic databases. | |
| How The Adventure Challenge Built an $85M Scratch-Off Empire | 7 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Shaan narrates the founder journey and $85M ad-driven scaling of The Adventure Challenge scratch-off books. Sam compares it to true-crime mystery boxes. | |
| Half-Baked TV Idea #1: Frat U Reality Docuseries | 5 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Shaan pitches a docuseries following college fraternities, while Sam questions whether modern campus culture and woke backlash make the concept unviable. | |
| Half-Baked TV Idea #2: Basic to Baller | 6 | 1 | 0 | 1 | Shaan pitches giving modest earners extreme wealth temporarily, and Sam validates the concept by referencing the 2005 Showtime documentary Reversal of Fortune. | |
| Half-Baked TV Idea #3: Ambient Background TV and Chive TV | 7 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Shaan analyzes Twitch background viewership and ambient TV demand, and Sam adds commercial validation via Chive TV and Atmosphere's out-of-home bar network. | |
| Salary Transparency Sheets and Personal Finance Formats | 6 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Sam and Shaan discuss CNBC's Millennial Money, anonymous corporate salary spreadsheets, and how community data assets spin out into viable companies. |
Statements from this episode (15)
Kat Norton makes single-digit millions annually from Miss Excel courses
“She is making courses and she is making six figures a month off this thing. So she's making Single digit millions a year. She has a few days of the year where she's made six feet over a 100,000 dollars on a day in course sales.”
Excel courses consistently rank top 10 on Teachable and Udemy
“If you go to Teachable's top courses, Udemy's top courses, learning to master Excel is always in the top, like, 10 earning courses.”
Shaan Puri predicts Miss Excel will hit $100 million annual sales
“I think she's gonna get to my bold prediction. She's gonna get to a hundred million dollars in sales... A year.”
Kat Norton works 15-hour weeks while relocating states monthly
“She basically, she's working 15 hours a week, so then she's like, oh, cool. Quit my job. I'm going to be a digital nomad. Something you kind of did this last year. She's like, every month, me and my boyfriend, we just moved to a different state, and we just wa…”
Neville Medhora's copywriting course has paid his bills for 12 years
“My friend Neville, my best friend Neville, he had a course called copywriting course. It honestly changed my life. And he made this one course. Like, 12 years ago, maybe. And it's been paying his bills every single year since then.”
Course customers recommend based on emotion, not remembered content
“People will forget the content, but they won't forget how they felt taking your course, and so they'll still recommend it, and refer it, and be happy with their purchase.”
StoryWorth founder Nick Baum remains the company's sole employee
“I actually knew the guy, Nick. He started it. I shared an office with him and he's still, I believe, the only employee.”
Law enforcement caught dozens of violent criminals using GEDmatch
“And now they've,
Caught many dozens, maybe even hundreds of killers or rapists this way”
23andMe's primary business model is selling data to pharma companies
“And I think 23 and me, their business model is to sell your data, right? Like, I think that is the core business model is they sell it to pharmaceutical companies for you know, like the research or whatever.”
The Adventure Challenge hit $85 million sales selling scratch-off books
“They've grown this thing to now, if this is true, eighty five million dollars in sales. They've sold about two million copies of this book.”
A $100,000 giveaway YouTube series could recoup costs in ad revenue
“I think what could be, what you should do is just get a 100,000 dollars and do a YouTube series on this. You, I think you can make your money back and add revenue.”
Significant Twitch viewing time occurs in background browser tabs
“When I was at Twitch, we looked at some of the data and about the usage data and somebody was pointing out like, oh yeah, like X percent. I can't say the exact percent, but like a significant percent of the viewing time is when it's not the tab that's in the f…”
Atmosphere TV generated tens of millions in pre-pandemic revenue
“And they eventually spun this off and they create this business called atmosphere. And this was making tens of millions of dollars in revenue pre pandemic. I believe they raised tens of millions of dollars at like a two hundred million dollar valuation.”