Jul 31, 2021 · 53m · my-first-million
How to Stop Your Tech Addiction | My First Million #205
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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 episode of My First Million, Sam Parr and Sean Puri break down unconventional business opportunities spanning digital lottery couriers, NCAA NIL athlete representation, predatory online mugshot directories, and browser extensions built for tech addiction and attention monetization.
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 99.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.7 Guest teaching 2.9 Guest disagreement 1.7 The hosts pushing back 2.3
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 31:28 Dan denounces mugshot site owners as human garbage
Dan bluntly rejects the moral ambiguity by calling the founders of mugshot publishing and removal sites human garbage.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 23:25 Sam rejects the hustle-culture college framingSam pushes back on Shaan's regret over not starting businesses in college, asserting college is meant for socializing and personal exploration without pressure to make money.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 3:44 Shaan breaks down the Slips courier workaroundShaan deflates Sam's discovery of Slips by explaining he had already beta-tested it and detailing the operational loophole of paying gas station clerks as task couriers.
The host holds their own ▶ 44:22 Sam uncovers the Fun Switch Technologies pivot to BlockerXSam demonstrates rapid diligence by pulling up the parent company's original LinkedIn profile in real time to show how they pivoted from general screen-time detox to porn addiction blocking.
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 and YouTube Channel Promotion | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | Sam and Shaan do standard housekeeping, banter about YouTube comments, and exchange lighthearted jabs about their outfits. | |
| Analyzing Digital Lottery Courier Startups and Regulatory Gaps | 6 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Sam brings up the online lottery courier app Slips, but Shaan deflates his pitch by pointing out he already tested it on TestFlight and featured it on the podcast. They break down the TaskRabbit-style regulatory workaround and ad acquisition bottlenecks. | |
| Capitalizing on NCAA Name, Image, and Likeness Rules | 7 | 3 | 1 | 2 | The hosts analyze the collegiate NIL rule changes. Shaan dissects Nick Saban's disguised recruiting pitch and sports agent fee structures, proposing an on-campus hustler strategy. | |
| The Scooter Braun Playbook and College Entrepreneurship | 6 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Sam details Scooter Braun's rise from college party promoter to music mogul. Shaan fact-checks the Ithaca Holdings sale numbers, and Sam pushes back on Shaan's regret about not grinding enough during college. | |
| AngelList Scout Programs and Deal Sourcing Strategy | 6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Shaan explains how AngelList's tooling changes enabled frictionless scout programs and outlines a clear 3-week cold outreach playbook for aspiring angel investors. | |
| The Dark Business Model of Online Mugshot Directories | 7 | 3 | 4 | 3 | Sam shares in-depth traffic stats and revenue mechanics of mugshot databases and extortion removal services. Shaan pulls producer Dan into the discussion, who forcefully condemns the business operators. | |
| Building Modern Digital Addiction and Content Blockers | 7 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Shaan discusses anti-porn addiction and digital detox apps, while Sam validates the market size by citing install metrics from Chrome extensions like StayFocusd and BlockSite. |
Statements from this episode (15)
Rule Changes and Deregulation Create Huge Startup Opportunities
“And so I've just been keeping an eye out for rule changes and that's kind of a theme. Like we talked about the name and the NIL thing for the, for college athletes name, image, and likeness rule change equals opportunity.”
MMA Gym Paid Miami's Entire Football Roster $500 Monthly
“So it's a mixed martial arts gym in Florida. They offered 500 dollars a month To Miami's entire 90 scholarship football players to advertise their gyms on social media. So that's 540,000 dollars. But every player has to do it.”
Simple Tools Beat Heavy Incumbent Software in New Markets
“I view it as in these markets, it's whoever builds this first simple, useful thing. We'll get a ton of adoption. And then it's a race between the people who tried to build the big valuable thing. And the group that got a bunch of adoption to go from small and …”
NCAA NIL Rules Will Spawn $50M Mega Sports Agents
“So I think you're going to find some super agents that come out of this, like this one rule change. There's some kid who's the next Ari gold. That's sitting on Kentucky's campus or Alabama's campus. That's going to end up being like worth 50, a hundred million…”
Scooter Braun Sold Ithaca Holdings for $1.05B
“So they sold for one point oh five billion and he had acquired that big machine like label thing with Taylor Swift rights for three hundred million back.”
HYBE Deal Gave Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande $14.3M Each
“Braun now holds a one percent stake in Hybe, which is worth one hundred twenty three million itself. The BTS members each have eighteen million in, in Hybe. So there's seven of them. And then Bieber and Ariana Grande have 14.3 million dollars worth of worth of…”
College Is a Zero-Risk Sandbox for Testing Startup Ideas
“College, this four year playground with a whole bunch of potential co-founders all around you with a whole bunch of potential customers all around you with nothing but free time and nothing but energy and no mortgage, no nothing. It's all paid for. It's a gian…”
AngelList Made Launching Angel Scout Programs Trivially Easy
“AngelList made it where it's now very easy for anybody who does any professional investors, anybody like me or you who invest millions of dollars a year into startups, we can now make, it's very trivially easy to create a scout program, to have anybody become …”
How Cold-Emailing Startup Deal Flow Builds an Equity Portfolio
“If you do this, you'll walk, you'll do two things. It'll be fun because it's fun to just check out startups and play that game of fantasy investor. But B, you'll actually walk away within a year You'll have a portfolio of startups that you have equity in, that…”
Mugshots.com and Bustedmugshots.com Get Over 600,000 Monthly Visitors
“Mugshots.com gets at least 600,000 visitors a month. Bustedmugshots.com, 666,000 visitors a month. Findmugshots.com, 72,000 visitors a month.”
BeenVerified Generates 23 Million Visits While Arrest.org Gets 4.35M
“Arrest.org, 4.35 million. Truthfinder.com, 9.1 million. And then been verified, twenty three million visits.”
Posting Mugshots Online Is Legal in Most US States
“In the vast majority of states posting photos online of these mugshots is totally legal. Okay. So you can't, you really can't get a, it's not a big deal to post them. It's public record.”
Aggregating Unstructured Public Data Into Search Engines Is Lucrative
“You can create businesses just taking public data. That's not really formalized for kind of like consumers to like use, and you could like aggregate it, create a search engine on top of it. You create a product there. People do that with Zillow. People do that…”