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Drunk Ideas23 August 2022

Drunk Ideas: Only Fans For Therapy, A Secret Bookcase for your Phone, and More

4Frameworks
8Insights

Frameworks in this episode

Innovation5 steps

Bad-Good Ideas

Deliberately entertain ideas that sound stupid on first telling, because embarrassment is a poor proxy for market demand.

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Strategy6 steps

Buy the Neglected Traffic Juggernaut

Acquire a user-generated-content site that passed critical mass and was abandoned, then bolt a monetisation model onto its existing audience.

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Marketing6 steps

The Novelty Food Pattern

Four repeatable manipulations that turn an ordinary food into a business people photograph.

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Innovation5 steps

The Relatable Remix: Take Something Vivid and Use It Somewhere Unexpected

Start from a thing people already feel strongly about, then transplant it into a context nobody has put it in.

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Insights & moments

The myth-busts, hot takes, explainers, and tools worth keeping.

Takeaway· 1

Takeaway02:00

The 'Bad-Good' Standard for Ideas

Shaan sets up the whole format by distinguishing bad ideas from 'bad-good' ones — ideas that sound stupid when you say them out loud but contain a nugget of gold. His reference case is the woman selling farts in a jar who made ~$500,000. He notes the 'drunk' framing is deliberate air cover, since neither host actually drinks: the point is manufacturing permission to voice ideas that self-censorship would otherwise kill.

  • Bad-good = sounds like the stupidest thing you've heard, works anyway.
  • Canonical proof: farts in a jar, ~$500K.
  • Neither host drinks — the 'drunk' label is purely social permission.
  • Shaan describes generating ideas in one flood and dumping them all out rather than pre-filtering.
  • Prior season's example he still thinks about: the 'really long distance girlfriend'.
  • A producer judges best, worst and honorable mention at the end — a lightweight forcing function.

“these are ideas that i know are not great but there's some nugget of gold in them there's some truth to them and so they…”

Shaan Puri · 02:30
#ideation#creativity#process#founder-mindset

idea· 3

idea18:30

Only Problems: OnlyFans for Therapy

Shaan's headline pitch. People avoid therapy because it is taboo, expensive and vulnerable, yet happily watch reality TV for the same emotional payoff. Only Problems is a monthly subscription that lets you sit in, fly-on-the-wall and anonymous, on a real therapy session matching the problem you care about. The participant gets subsidised or free therapy because ~25 anonymous listeners are paying to be in the room; therapists get clients; listeners get entertainment plus what Shaan calls second-hand-smoke help.

  • Shaan cites Tony Robbins: across 4 million people and 22 years, everyone has the same five problems — health, wealth, relationships, happiness, purpose.
  • Listeners fund the session, so the person in therapy pays little or nothing.
  • Listeners can back-channel in a chat the participant cannot see.
  • A tipping and rev-share mechanic means the more vulnerable you are, the more you earn — which Shaan concedes incentivises fabrication.
  • Sam compares it to Fight Club's terminal-illness meetings; Shaan reframes the appeal as 'gratitude as a service'.
  • Sam's grade: best idea of the episode.

“a lot of people need therapy but guess what a lot of people aren't going to therapy it's too taboo it's too expensive it's too…”

Shaan Puri · 20:00

“gratitude as a service right it ain't so bad after all”

Sam Parr · 22:30
#business-ideas#consumer-subscription#mental-health#creator-economy
idea34:00

Instagramahanas: A Restaurant Where the Product Is the Photo

Shaan's Benihana-format concept where the food exists to be photographed, not eaten. Tables of eight, omakase-style delivery of deliberately absurd items — a giant pile of sour gummy worms, an oversized doughnut, a 36-ounce beer — with a drone filming overhead, footage dumped to Google Drive and edited overnight by outsourced editors so guests leave with their best reaction shots. He models ~$100 a head plus tips, 20-30 tables, two to three turns a night.

  • Explicitly modelled on Benihana and the Museum of Ice Cream: experience over food.
  • ~$100 per person, tables of eight, 20-30 tables, 2-3 turns per night — Shaan models ~$1M/month.
  • Food cost collapses because items are cheap non-proteins; waste collapses because one item serves a whole table.
  • Benihana's HBS-case advantage: the stove is the table, so kitchen space becomes dining space.
  • Overhead drone plus an overnight offshore editor turns the meal into delivered content.
  • Sam's verdict: worst idea of the episode — 'one food would be enough.'

“it's a restaurant that's not about the food it's a restaurant about the content”

Shaan Puri · 34:30

“your five pound burger doesn't need to taste good”

Sam Parr · 37:30
#restaurants#experience-economy#unit-economics#business-ideas
idea42:30

Swag School, and the $10M Charm Bootcamp Business

Prompted by Indian Matchmaking, Shaan pitches Swag School — a Toastmasters/AA-format group class teaching socially awkward men presence, dress, eye contact and physical confidence, on the premise that it can't be learned from a textbook. Sam supplies the proof point: Jordan Harbinger's Art of Charm was doing roughly $10M a year running four-to-five-day bootcamps for men, and even taught charm techniques to special-operations groups. Sam knows someone who attended and called it life-changing.

  • Format: seated circle, AA-style introductions, live practice with an instructor.
  • Premise: charm and presence are physical skills, not information — so they need in-person coaching.
  • Art of Charm was doing ~$10M/year on four-day bootcamps.
  • Art of Charm also ran sessions for special-operations personnel on using charm to blend in.
  • Shaan's own formative lesson, from a dancer 15 years earlier: 'if you're gonna touch a girl, touch with intent.'
  • Sam's anecdotal validation: a friend attended and credited it with a major life change.

“if you're gonna touch a girl touch with intent and i was like oh and i literally have never forgot that that was like 15…”

Shaan Puri · 47:30

“he was making like 10 million dollars a year hosting these like four-day boot camps”

Sam Parr · 50:30
#education#cohort-business#personal-development#business-ideas

teardown· 2

teardown05:00

Hideaway, and the $40M App Nobody Talks About

Shaan pitches Hideaway — a private camera and camera roll hidden behind an app disguised as a bookshelf or calculator, a Murphy door for your phone, framed around preventing 'digital humiliation'. Sam immediately searches and finds the category is already a quiet juggernaut: Private Photo Vault, ~807,000 reviews, ranked 86 in the App Store, 10M+ Google Play downloads, apparently run by a near-solo founder in Vegas, with a ~$50/year premium tier and a decoy-password feature Shaan hadn't conceived of.

  • Framing: the real fear isn't public speaking, it's public humiliation — and the worst kind is someone opening your phone.
  • Private Photo Vault has ~807,000 reviews and sits at #86 in the App Store.
  • Google Play alone shows 10M+ downloads; the hosts estimate 20-30M+ total.
  • Premium is roughly $50/year; at a ~3% conversion the hosts model ~1M paying users and ~$40M lifetime gross.
  • The decoy password — a dummy code that opens a safe set of images — is the feature Sam calls out as the founder thinking of everything.
  • Copyright reads 2011-2020 under Legendary Software Labs LLC; the app has persisted for over a decade.

“nobody's actually afraid of public speaking they're afraid of public humiliation and there's no greater humiliation than digital humiliation”

Shaan Puri · 05:30

“an app that's been reviewed 800 000 times i mean it must have been downloaded tens of millions of times”

Sam Parr · 09:00
#app-store#privacy#solo-founder#business-teardown
teardown13:00

Santa's Club: ~$1M in Two Months a Year

Sam surfaces santasclub.com, started in 2020 by Will Evelsizer. It runs a studio of Santas doing 10-15 minute virtual visits — a video call where a child sits on Santa's virtual lap. It operates only two months a year, took roughly 15,000 visits in its first year at $35-75 per visit, and is now sold out on pre-sale. The hosts riff on extending it into 'Fairy Inc' with the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy, note Cameo should simply build it, and cite a listener who earns money doing paid Elsa cosplay calls.

  • Founded 2020 by Will Evelsizer; ~15,000 visits in year one.
  • Pricing $35-75 per 10-15 minute session.
  • Roughly $500K-$1M in revenue across a two-month operating window.
  • Currently 100% sold out on pre-sale — supply-constrained on Santas, not demand.
  • Obvious extensions: Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, other seasonal characters ('Fairy Inc').
  • Sam's verdict: 'not even a good bad idea, this is simply a good good idea.'

“in the first year he had 15 000 visits and prices range from 35 to 75 dollars per visit which means he's doing around 500…”

Sam Parr · 14:00
#seasonal-business#creator-economy#business-teardown#marketplace

insight· 2

insight26:30

SlideShare: The Biggest Business Publication Nobody Monetises

Sam argues the world's most-trafficked business publication is not the WSJ or Business Insider but SlideShare — 100-200 million monthly visits, run by roughly one and a half engineers, unchanged for years, with no advertising. LinkedIn bought it in 2012 for a reported ~$150M, did nothing, then offloaded it to Scribd for an undisclosed sum Sam guesses was ~$10M or less. His thesis: a B2B company could acquire it and run it as a nine-figure lead-generation asset.

  • Estimated 100-200M monthly visits with essentially no monetisation.
  • LinkedIn acquired it in 2012 for a reported ~$150M; sold to Scribd for an undisclosed, likely far smaller amount.
  • Staffed by roughly 1.5 engineers by Sam's read of LinkedIn profiles.
  • Content is marketing decks, pitch decks and strategy decks — implying high-value B2B visitors.
  • Core principle: UGC traffic past critical mass is near-impossible to stop or to catch up with.
  • Shaan had already tweeted it as a 'free $500 million idea'; both concede the missing piece was a relationship into LinkedIn.

“i'd hypothesize the largest business publication in the world is run by basically two people and it is called slideshare”

Sam Parr · 27:00

“it's just one of those like big opportunities hiding in plain sight”

Shaan Puri · 31:30
#acquisition#b2b#distribution#missed-opportunity
insight52:00

The YouTube Comment Scam Playbook

As the hosts commit to YouTube as their primary feedback channel, they dissect the two scams that dominate their comment sections. One impersonates the show using emoji in place of letters and replies to every comment inviting people to a WhatsApp group. The other is a manufactured testimonial thread: a top comment praising a fictional 'forex and crypto' mentor, then dozens of sockpuppet replies vouching for her, which votes the thread to the top of every finance video.

  • Impersonation scam: channel name spoofed with emoji characters, replies to every comment, funnels to WhatsApp.
  • Testimonial scam: a seed comment recommending a mentor, then ~80 coordinated replies vouching for results.
  • The vouching replies use a consistent script — skeptical at first, then a specific dollar transformation ('turned 2000 into 18 000').
  • Volume of replies pushes it to top comment on essentially every finance-related video.
  • Sam's read: it is a genuinely well-constructed scam, which is why it persists.
  • Context: the hosts note YouTube episodes now do 20-40K views, up from ~3,300.

“it's such a good idea it's such a slick scam it's a really well done scam and i can't stand it”

Sam Parr · 53:30
#youtube#fraud#audience#platform-dynamics