Why You Should Start a Business For Older Adults

0:00you've got this whole population of older adults who are basically in this position of like wanting to get started and they don't know how and i think that's where a lot of startup opportunities are like how do you lower the barrier to entry make older adults feel comfortable make them feel like they're not going to be ridiculed for being there they're not going to get taken advantage of for being there but like activate some of those behaviors that they've been saving up and they just need like a little nudge to start doing the stuff they always thought they were gonna do [Music] uh what's up man good to uh good to see

0:37you how you doing i'm good dude the sun is shining uh the northeast has finally decided that it's spring it's like i think it's 70 out i've got some trees in the front of our house and um they were pissing me off because they looked dead like dead winter and now all of a sudden i'm looking at my window and they've got this like amazing you know white blooming flowers on them and so i'm pretty excited it feels like it feels like springtime here spring is in the air uh are you in miami or montreal right now i'm in miami okay so i'm in miami i'm looking out on on the

1:11water i'm feeling inspired what uh what do you want to talk about today well i want to start with a quick recap on how bitcoin week was because you just experienced that i had to miss it you know we're on like full baby watches you know um and so i couldn't exactly play the political capital of like hey sweetheart i'm gonna go you know down to bitcoin week and party with my friends for a week while you're uh 36 weeks pregnant or whatever we're at now so decided not to play that card gonna save it for nft week in the fall in new york well we missed you i actually didn't go

1:45to the bitcoin event um i know there was 25 000 people who went to that event which is wild i will say that our buddy bobac had a pass that was one of those they were called a whale pass okay and they were literally seventeen thousand dollars for the pass only at bitcoin week will they charge you seventeen thousand dollars to get a quote-unquote whale pass to get access to the event and people are paying for it were people paying in bitcoin i'm not sure i mean i assume so i assume the i just got my tax bill right like it's so it's tax season we're filming

2:27this on april 13th um and you i was just texting you about the pain and ask that is crypto taxes and trying to figure out what to use and there's like all these different software tools that have come out that are trying to solve this problem my general opinion on is that like most of them aren't quite there yet um i've used and tried several of them i used coin tracker this year and i thought it was quite good actually on recommendation from alexis a prior guest um who i think was like a precede or seed investor in it i thought it was quite good one of the things that

2:56shocked me which it shouldn't have shocked me but it did is um like i invested in a company and i invested in bitcoin um i was making a ten thousand dollar investment in a company and rather than doing it in cash for some reason i didn't think about it i was like i'm just gonna send you bitcoin because it's a crypto company and that's a freaking taxable event and so i didn't invest ten thousand dollars i invested ten thousand plus whatever the taxable gain was on that ten thousand dollars from whenever i bought it which was at a really low cost basis and so like i was so annoyed at myself

3:29because i literally just didn't think about it and the company i invested that in is a dud and so it's probably going to zero like can't write it off yet um and it's just like i just had never thought about it that that's a taxable event for all of these things so people when they're like oh i bought this car in bitcoin or i bought you know my pass to this thing in bitcoin maybe they're just not declaring that stuff but the reality is those are all taxable events right now yeah so my reaction to that is i know people who have a bunch of apes and

4:00a bunch of punks and who've so who basically set up individual wallets and who are not paying taxes on it so they're selling these eights for hundreds of thousand dollars they're not paying taxes on it so i mean i think it's a terrible idea like obviously the uh irs is gonna i think they're gonna figure this out at some point yeah um and that's scary i was like dude how do you sleep at night like how are you sleeping at night today's episode is brought to you by market or hire with marketer hire you can get expert marketers on demand it's easy and fast what's marketer hire

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5:23taxes are one of those interesting um it's one of those interesting things right because it's sort of a spectrum like you have on one end of the spectrum is like perfect compliance you pay every single dollar that you could possibly buy the rule book um the other end of the spectrum is like pure fraud right you just don't pay a dollar in taxes and you like wait for them to come for you and then somewhere in the middle is you know what feels like the pareto optimal solution where you're like yeah i'm gonna try to find shelters and do intelligent things to like not have to pay every dollar but

5:55i'm also not gonna get in trouble because it's all legal right and that's like everyone complained about donald trump not paying taxes a few years ago and like his whole thing that is like the most common thing in the world the real estate tax loopholes i mean we have friends who are like literally making multiple millions of dollars of cash income a year and paying zero dollars in taxes because they have all this depreciation off their real estate portfolios it's like a well-known loophole that was created by the us government in order to incentivize people to build and develop property and so it's just it's interesting to me

6:28because i do think that tax is one of those things where you kind of just need to decide where you're going to exist on that spectrum and then have a strategy and like clearly you're friends with nft thing i would argue that's closer to the you know pure fraud end where you're just like there's clearly taxable events that you're just not going to declare um but it's going to be really hard for the government to figure out and have the resources to police this stuff i mean the complexities of understanding wallets and flows for a massive fraud are high enough like when they had to go through that big

6:58bitcoin you know scam the thing where that couple stole you know four billion dollars in bitcoin that was so complex for them to do for this massive scam now imagine doing that for a random person with like you know ten thousand dollars in gains like does the us government really have the resources to go police that yeah so i i don't know about that and but i will say one thing i will say i'm excited for the day when wallets do a better job at predicting and basically being like your tax man or tax woman on the shoulder and being like hey sahil you probably just so you know

7:32if you invest this you know 10 grand in bitcoin like you're gonna owe x amount of dollars in taxes that's actually a brilliant yeah it's a brilliant point it's a brilliant idea there i think coin tracker is trying to do that where like it's not integrated though like right now coin tracker i think will let you do it where you can like put in what you're about to do and it'll tell you what the tax implication would be but it is a really cool idea to integrate that into the wallet so that it's telling you in real time here's the likely tax implication of doing this yeah and i

8:04think that's where wallets are going like wallets are going from wallets to smart wallets and they're gonna be building a lot of this predictive technology into it i hope um that's where i'd imagine they're going do you think it's a just like from a startup idea standpoint do you think that is going to be a incremental software solution that then sells into all the wallet companies like somebody focuses on just building that tax software piece um and it they sell it into metamask sell it into rainbow sell it into phantom like go to all the wallet companies and sell it in there or do you think it's going to be something that

8:42the individual companies have to build so to me a wallet is very similar to how search engines were when the internet started so in the beginning there with the when the internet started i'm sure you remember there was like excite.com ask jeeves lycos yahoo all there were so many right and you know what do we use today 90 of people use google um some people use bing because it's the default on on uh on windows i'm consistently shocked by how many people use bing by the way when you look up the stats on it it's like sociopaths i'm convinced it's only sociopaths that use being full

9:24disclosure i used bing today and i'll i can point proof i get my point only sociopaths use bing i i i'll talk i'll talk about it i'll explain why at the end but my point about wallets being search engines is that eventually google you know i remember the first time i used google was this like magical experience where if you put like restaurants in new york city you actually got amazing results um and you actually got the results you wanted and then that basically built that trust between you and the search engine and then you said goodbye ask jeeves and hello google forever that is what's going to happen

10:02with uh wallet so we're in the same experimentation zone i would say with wallets like people are trying different types of wallets one wallet is gonna win and i believe that the that consumer experience like google didn't go and like uh license the technology to do the predictive technology for you know when you type in uh new york it you know it predicts city um they built it from scratch so i think a lot of it is going to be built from scratch and it's going to be these unique consumer applications but i will say for people listening it's a massive opportunity right now to be experimenting with wallets

10:43yeah it's super interesting um and by the way i just pulled it up while you were talking about it being 126 million unique u.s users apparently like half of the us still searches on bing which says to me that half of the us is sociopaths like you well that's a good segue so i'll explain why i use bing today so and you know i'm slightly embarrassed to say this but i got a i got a pc uh the other day is everything okay no honestly i got a pc and are you going into finance it's weird saying that i got a pc because i run a

11:21design agency and like we have a bunch of some of the most amazing designers in the world and like they love mac um and i'd love mac too but i got a pc to try it out and i will say that windows 11 is almost as good as mac os i know this is gonna be people are gonna hate on me but until you try windows 11 it's actually a fantastic product and windows like machines like for what you can buy for like a thousand fifteen hundred two thousand dollars it's like so so amazing and so quick so i'm loving my uh windows experience and microsoft edge which is their browser

12:02comes pre-installed with bing which is why i use bing today ah okay so that's got to be the whole driver of these numbers then yes um i wonder how many people opt-in to bing versus like just get defaulted into negative yeah yeah negative 100 i do i mean i do remember just like i'm a big fan of funny marketing campaigns um and like creative marketing campaigns and i did think when bing first came out and they did that like bing challenge where you would search you know six things or five things and then you would click which search results you liked more and it would tell you if you liked being more

12:32than boring than google i thought that was like a pretty creative and neat way of doing it so um interesting to know zigwen other people's zag on getting the computer greg i'm proud of you um i i'm a reformed you know private equity guy so being on a mac is like the biggest joy in the world now after spending you know as many years as i did on a pc working in excel well so i actually don't remember that the bing challenge but that's actually a really brilliant idea and i'm a big fan of like you know marketing stunts like that um that speak to the core of the product i

13:07think that's really smart it reminds me of do you remember the pepsi challenge yeah i was going to say they ripped off the pepsi challenge yeah what was that from what i remember i actually went to a town you know i grew up in montreal and there's this town across the border called plattsburgh new york and we used to go there to like go to like walmart and all these american and get like american food and like candy and like bad things for us basically um and i remember going to the shopping mall in plattsburgh and there was the pepsi challenge this is like in the uh mid 90s i would say

13:44um and they basically uh you know they're like hey kid you want to try this do the challenge i was like okay and they basically gave you a cup of like i think it was like a blind taste test it was a blind taste test yeah and it was you know it was awesome it was fun it was interactive and yeah and it was an intro introduction to pet to pepsi and it's and it was smart is that a lot of people have this brand loyalty to coke and it challenged that yeah the the classic though with it was they missed um because what ended up

14:22happening was that it showed that people preferred pepsi and they used it as this big win it turned out that pepsi is like a little sweeter i'm not i'm not a big soda guy but pepsi's a little bit sweeter and so i guess like in the small amount that they were giving you you were more likely to pick pepsi but then people actually preferred coke for like drinking a full amount that you would actually get and so it was like they they missed on something but we're sitting here and we're still talking about it so clearly they did they did something right and they're i mean

14:47they're a massive conglomerate now and they own a bunch of different things um i do want to talk about before we have our guest on um i know you had an idea that uh that you texted me business idea that you wanted to jam through so we can either talk about it now or we can wait for the guest and we can jam through it with him um whatever you prefer i don't know if i can wait i want to get right into it so let's go i texted we have a group chat idea of the day we basically come up with an idea of the day it's actually a really

15:14good forcing function to do with your friends like go and create a group chat with your friends call it iod idea of the day and just be like hey everyone we're going to come up with an idea some some days are going to be good some days are going to be bad but just like put it out there and get feedback so that's highly recommend doing this highly recommend doing this one of my um idea of the day group chats um has now led to a micro sas platform that we actually built and are rolling out um and that i think is going to be like a multi-seven figure win so ideas

15:45of the day big hack so i i texted on the weekend um actually i talked about it on the pod so on the pod i talked about i think it was yeah it should be coming out soon but i talked about uh on the my first million podcast i was talking about how [Music] uh i have been having trouble getting my security deposit back from my apartment rental and how i wanted a service i would pay for a service to basically send a lawyer's letter to get my uh to get my security deposit back and that got me thinking that there's a business idea here so

16:28here's the idea the idea is actually let me pull up the the text thread and i'll read it to you exactly so idea of the day a modern day security deposit platform for real estate the tenant posts the security deposit the landlord sees it the tenant has the option to put the deposit into alternative assets equities or crypto the tenant is happy because inflation isn't eating away at the deposit the landlord is happy because the landlord splits the upside with the tenant for example if the security deposit appreciates by 20 the landlord takes 10 percent the tenant takes 10 minus the fees from the platform if the security deposit depreciates the

17:14tenant is on the hook to give at least the original security deposit back this could be a wedge into a much larger real estate platform so what this idea is basically doing is taking something that's like super old school i literally had to give it a check i wrote out a check to my my landlord and i said here's this money give it back to me later and he you know he has this money it's sitting in a separate bank account he's not happy because he's not making money off that money like he could theoretically make money off that money and as you know inflation is at

17:488.7 or whatever percent and i'm not happy because when i get it back years later it's worth so much less so this is an idea that basically creates this internet platform that we can go on i can see what's happening you can put smart contracts in into it so i don't have this situation where i can't get my money back what do you think of this idea so there's a handful of things i think about it so first off the sheer it triggered me to go down a rabbit hole a little bit on understanding security deposits i haven't rented in a few years and so i'd kind of forgotten this whole

18:21like archaic system and it depends on where you are um but generally speaking they'll ask for at least one month rent generally more you know i've had friends who have had to pay like they're doing a multi-year lease they have to put down a year of rent up front which is insanity but in in certain markets sometimes it's like first and last month rent that you put as a security deposit the sheer numbers on the dollars that are sitting in security deposits in the us are insane there's 45 billion dollars tied up in security deposits sitting in stable checking accounts so there's generally regulations in some states that say that the dollars

18:57from security deposits have to sit in um have to sit in checking accounts in the for the most part there have been advancements now recently in legislation that have allowed for like more creative insurance products and different kind of takes on this so i think the arrow of progress in terms of like unlocking these dollars is moving in the right direction but the like pure just market size is massive like at any point in time they're being 50 billion dollars 45 billion dollars that are sitting getting zero percent um it just strikes me as an opportunity so that's that's my first reaction is like it definitely seems

19:33like there's a large enough size of the prize i also think there's probably a few ways you could go about it i think one way would be like oh i'm going to try to build this big venture-backed platform in the space and like go create the alternative to security deposits there have been a handful of companies who have tried to do this like there's a company called abelego i think that i found that was like starting to try to do you know a security deposit alternative like a completely different type of product um i think effectively most of them what they're trying to do is like they take

20:03on the underwriting of the tenant and say like okay we'll assess their risk and we'll stand up for the security deposit you know in some in some manner with you know a smaller amount due from the um due from the tenant that sort of to me is like the exact same thing as a security deposit um and it's just someone else's bearing the risk versus versus the landlord and so you can go with lower amounts i think that your idea is more interesting than most of those because it plays to this kind of just like general theme of people wanting more control and more diversification and more access and

20:38like gamifying more of these things and so when i look at it like just on the surface i think there's something interesting here i think it just comes down to like how creatively do you go about building it out and then how do you build it so i mentioned the venture-backed one you could do that i also think if you were like a hustler you might be able to go to like 10 buildings and just say hey let's par i'll partner with you let's do like i'll build this software out you can have a much more creative way of doing this um and it'll be a it'll be an

21:07attractive attraction point for you to drive drive-in tenants as well yeah i think you know one of the things that was sort of initially stopping me from this idea just to open open source my thinking was in certain states or certain provinces or whatever like i know that yeah like you said it has to stay in a checkings account the but i don't think that should stop you from like going after this business so for example like airbnb uber like if you look at a lot of local laws like you can't you know pre pre the app store like you couldn't like rent unless you're playing your hotel tax uber like

21:49you're getting in a car with a stranger like these people aren't like don't have licenses i think you know so the reason the reason they do that by the way is that they want um they're protecting so that the law is there to protect the tenant from loss of those funds so they don't want landlords taking all the money having this like year of float or whatever however many years afloat and going and doing stupid going bankrupt and then they they're not able to give the tenants back their money what i think could be interesting would be on that point you basically go and take like for a

22:22year of time or multiple years of time the landlord will have an average amount that ends up getting used out of that security deposit and what ends up getting returned say you you take the amount that on average gets returned and that goes into a checking account and it is there and so like on average your entire pool of funds is going to get fully distributed back to people and then the remainder is either the landlords or the tenants to play with and i think it's more interesting if it's the tenants it's like here is your kind of like net and you have a dashboard and you can see it

22:55and you can kind of like do funny upside things with the remainder of your deposit that's sitting here and the rest is gonna sit in this safe thing so that you know you know you'll get it back like no matter what that would be the other kind of like flipped model take on how you could do it yeah i like that and i think that's really creative and i think these are the sorts of like don't be like how i was on saturday and have an idea that like might sound like it's not possible like keep going you know like try to be creative um sometimes also you need to like build

23:26the prototype to just like test the boundaries and see see if it's it's doable so i really like this idea if anyone listening likes it i know you like this idea too so um you know maybe yeah i think there's like i think it's super interesting i mean it's like it's just like as a mental model on this whole thing or a framework to think about it it's like this is cash that's literally just sitting around doing nothing yeah and anytime there's a massive pool of cash sitting around doing nothing there's an opportunity there and i don't know whether it's this specific idea or if it's like doing more

23:58creative insurance products around this or if it's um you know finding a way to gamify the investment around this like there's probably a hundred different angles you could take on it but there's a 45 billion dollar pool of cash annually that is just sitting around doing nothing and i bet if you went and surveyed a bunch of tenants and a bunch of landlords you'd learn a lot about what their like willingness would be and what their risk tolerance would be on doing something more creative with this yeah and i think you know the framework for how i think about it is like i'm always trying to

24:29trying to do a temperature check as to how people are feeling about certain things and like right now with inflation people are just like really feeling it and that's um everyone like every single one so there's tons of opportunity to create products that speak to that anxiety that people have around inflation and that could be a really really good lens to come up with and generate a bunch of cool startup ideas that might actually work i had never thought about the thing that like you get the money back say you get the full deposit back a year from now and it's just worth a lot less because

25:02of inflation like i just never thought about that because inflation was generally you know one percent like now the calculus on that has changed um so it is uh it's an interesting point yeah i mean i got back my [Music] my uh you know my security deposit actually the other day and i was like what am i going to do with it like i can't even buy like what i i can't even buy much with this money yeah it is interesting like i i um i haven't thought much about inflation just personally like i still view cash the same way as i did um because to me i

25:35think of cash as like a call option on future interesting opportunities um i like having more cash than anyone would say makes sense and the reason i do that i think of it as the same as free time by the way it's like now when something cool comes up i'm not like having to reshuffle out of equities or out of crypto or out of different things i just have cash sitting there that i know that i can draw upon like if we want to go invest and build some business or we want to go do something and hire some devs like it is a legitimate call option on going and

26:03doing any of those things free time is the exact same way if your calendar is like back to back i showed you my picture of my calendar from a year ago if your calendar is like that what headspace do you have to go pursue the cool idea that comes up you have none and so i um i'm kind of funny about cash like i probably any financial advisor you would talk to would you probably say like i have too much cash sitting around and probably too much free time sitting around as well um but it's part of my like general mental model for how i think about being able to go pursue

26:31these opportunities that do come up i like it's contrarian but i like it i i think it makes a lot of sense i think in our space also having there's just you know there's opportunities and and you can you ha you know especially now with the down market like you can go and like invest heavy and do really well uh yeah so i like it john it's also john's in the way of jonah yeah oh cool let's bring him in super excited what's up john nice to meet you sal yeah nice to meet you welcome on to the show thank you for joining us yeah thanks for having me

27:05let me set the stage a little bit so i've known john for a really long time but what i wanted to bring him uh on today is he runs a company called the live ventures and what alive ventures is is a venture studio that incubates products for older adults did you see what peter thiel said about warren buffett at the bitcoin conference what was the quote it was so absurd right uh guy i do need to pick it up now yeah pick it up that quote greg it's so i'm gonna pull it out i mean you called me a sociopath i think he called warren buffett and he called him a sociopathic

27:47grandpa yeah wow so i saw that and [Music] i hated that to my core because for a few reasons first reason is that i don't think we as a society respect older adults the way we should um and that was an attack he was he was trying to attack warren buffett but what he really was doing was attacking older adults in my opinion and by the way that's a that's a western culture thing um you know like my mom is from india india has a very um strong culture of taking care of your parents when they get old japan has a very strong culture of taking care of your parents as they

28:34get old the us for some reason doesn't have that culture like nursing homes became a thing we send people off so it is a cultural thing too greg absolutely so that yeah i don't like that at all and then i saw that and i pinged john and john and i actually they check out and the live ventures actually have been sort of incubating some some products for older adults and what i like about alive ventures is alive ventures is and john i'd love you to explain it but um is thinking about how to create products to make the lives of older adults happier and healthier and what i wanted

29:13to use this time for with john is just to like talk through some startup ideas um because i actually think that not only you know coming up with startup ideas for older adults is like good for the world it's also like a really good business like there's so much opportunity to build like everyone's focusing on like gen z and millennials but like older adults like huge opportunity by the way i don't know if you guys know this but my dad um is a professor is a researcher at harvard and spent i would say the vast majority of his career actually he's a demographer and the vast

29:49majority of his career has been spent on population aging largely in the developing world and so like spent a lot of time on japan obviously with their kind of demographic curve um and the aging population but he writes and talks and researches a lot about aging populations and the impact it has on economy so it's like very down the fairway this this exact conversation so he's going to be excited to tune into this one too yeah you know it's interesting because i think that there's been now a couple of decades of research by demographers by economists by sociologists that you know sort of raise a flag about

30:24that challenge um sort of inverted pyramids demographically and sort of the idea that you know older adults are no longer economically productive and so they're sort of a drain on social resources and that therefore when there's more of them and there's fewer younger people working to pay taxes or to create wealth or grow the gdp then you know you're isolating productive economic activities down to a group that's actually smaller than the group that's going to consume them this is actually exactly my dad's field of research it's called he called it the demographic dividend it's like the ratio of working age to dependent age populations um and when that ratio is

31:08very high you can experience a really robust growth curve like sub-saharan africa right now east africa et cetera when it's very low like in japan where you have tons of old people that are going to be relying on a smaller working age population it's a very challenged situation economically yeah yeah so undoubtedly that's true and i think people have you know at least had some surface level familiarity with that with if not you know sort of deep knowledge like like your dad i actually think though that um the way that that problem is framed is actually not that helpful for resolving it right i mean maybe from a policy

31:46standpoint it might be but not from a creative standpoint from an entrepreneurial standpoint from an investment standpoint because what ends up happening then is is we sort of see aging as a problem in older people as a problem that we have to solve rather than like an opportunity to think here's a vastly underserved population right as entrepreneurs i think we like to identify opportunities where like people want stuff and what they can do to get that stuff is inconvenient it's too expensive you know for whatever reasons they're just like not fulfilling that want or need and then we make businesses to go you know serve that um i think so much of

32:29you know and this is very understandable but so much of the way that um like the the philanthropy that work on aging the economists that talk about it they basically are trying to provoke urgency to say if we don't deal with this we're going to be we're going to have problems oh also you ought to be more empathetic towards older people you ought to respect them more you know older people are really challenged because they're increasingly sick and frail and alone and i need you to solve for them being sick like please invent more medical devices please you know encourage more people to take care of them and that's certainly

33:08important work but i think like the untapped resource is all of the creativity and innovation that comes from people that are like you know what i know how to do i know how to find people who want to do things like meet and connect with cool people uh who want to do things like have a a service that they're excited to go tell their friends about and participate in and capture some of the value there who want to build brands that people you know are excited to participate in and that to me is like where the real opportunity is where the white space is because very few people are competing there so

33:46many people are competing for gen z and millennial attention and you've got this like really crowded field but like if if i asked you right now think of um you know a soho house for older adults that you can imagine the coolest older people that you know wanting to go to you probably would have a really tough time thinking about that if i said think of a cool new app that's launched that recognizes that there's you know 30 million older adults in the united states who are re-entering the dating field that is going to like serve their needs and and help them connect with other interesting people that they can develop

34:26romantic relationships with i doubt you can think of anything there yeah it's super interesting just as like a general framework of what you're laying out this whole idea of like find these large underserved populations and it's like it's super unsexy as you said everyone wants to build the new like app for gen z you know greg we filmed an episode talking about this party app and it's like you know for teenagers and like college kids basically and parties in these cities and it's like super sexy to go build that you want to go build that but the reality is just from a sheer numbers perspective there are 46 million

35:01adults aged 65 and older in the u.s that's supposed to grow to 90 million by 2050. yeah and so like if you're just going to play numbers actually and you know what you want to like play the rising tide that's a pretty damn good tide to play from a rise as it's rising over the coming years yeah and two-thirds of the wealth in the country is controlled by older adults people

35:22over 65. yeah and when it's not sexy to build there as you said the competition is less fierce it's like i don't know if you guys have ever seen this it's one of my favorite investing frameworks um it's a matrix a two by two that is like complexity of building something um and then whether it's boring or sexy and you know like everyone wants to build the sexy stuff but the competition is super fierce so like the complex the highly complex and highly sexy things like spacex crazy crazy high competition everyone wants to build that thing then you have the like super complex but also really

35:58boring stuff like salesforce which has built this you know enormous enormous company around it because it exists in this place where it's boring but pretty complicated to actually go and build so this is like i think it's a really good way to think about these kind of ideas yeah and i i think we make those things sexy as entrepreneurs by just by like being bold enough to recognize that opportunity and then knowing that you can build a cool company around it right like think about stripe like what are they solving that's sexy they're solving like one of the most boring problems ever totally but most of us think that's a really cool

36:31company like we would have loved to have founded stripe um or you know even even uber is like basically a logistics service which you know people don't think about uh most people i think like growing up and being like you know what i really want to do when i get old i want to be an entrepreneur and i want to create a really good logistics management company but you know we made that cool um so i just think there's a there's if we think about it in the right way there you're right there's all this economic opportunity there but it could just be like fun work that yeah on

37:03understanding people and it's starting it's starting like i feel like the tides are now shifting a little bit with older adults and building and entrepreneurs are starting to realize it so you always say uh alexa ohanian who we've had on the pod always sees the future but he's been investing the last two or so years in a bunch of old startups for older adults and i think he probably i mean we should have him on to talk about it again but i think he probably realized it you know when his folks started getting older and also when he moved to florida which has uh just you know

37:38a lot of infrastructure for older adults and maybe not necessarily the right infrastructure um so and then the other thing i want to add to this you know i agree with you sahel about you know how do you build for underserved communities um one of the interesting things is we can actually take a lot of the formats that have worked for gen z or millennials and add the add nuances for this particular demographic so you don't have to that's that's why i think there's so much opportunity here is like you can actually like tinder you know you meant john you mentioned dating like tinder actually has a in hinge and

38:19a lot of these platforms have really great interfaces the problem is it doesn't speak to that particular audience in the way that they want to be spoken to so i'm wondering john and i know i texted you before this and i was like hey could you you know bring on some ideas or some some spaces that you find that you think there's a lot of opportunity can you talk more about some yeah just one or two ideas that you have on your mind today's episode is brought to you by market or hire with marketer hire you can get expert marketers on demand it's easy and fast what's marketer hire

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39:40yeah um i've got i've got a lot um so you know sort of as a as a context setting thing one of the things that i think a lot of people don't think about that's really interesting about today's uh group of older adults is in many ways they're a go first generation and that makes it a lot like millennials or gen c and what i mean by that is these are people who grew up with an idea of what life was going to be like when they were 60 or 65 which they expected to to die maybe at 68 or 72 and that's kind of what they

40:17internalized in terms of like what is my life going to be like when i get there they're also the generation that sort of grew up the the last vestige of this social infrastructure that we had where like the with the idea that you take a job and you work there for a long time and you you know form community by going to church or being on the pta and like as all of those things have dissipated they were the ones who sort of counted on that to know like how am i going to get my friends well i'm going to get my friends and my relationships from my job that

40:46i've been at for 30 years i'm going to get like have my participation opportunities based on like going to the local vfw hall and you know communicating and as that's disappeared they're now in this place of thinking gosh i still have 20 or 25 years left of my life the world's been changed i don't have anybody to ask of like what does it mean to be doing it right right now and there's that same level of anxiety that i think millennials felt when the world changed and you're like i can't ask my dad like how to date well on tinder like he doesn't know anything about that you

41:21know he's not going to have any advice so we're figuring it out and we're also constantly worried that we're doing it wrong somehow we're missing out on opportunities so that's where older adults are yeah not to mention sorry to interrupt you not to mention like one of the things i've noticed with my parents with my wife's parents like this discomfort with spending what you've saved and built up over your life is a fascinating phenomenon to me like i consider my parents um i don't know moderately frugal i would say um but they have this like built up that they've saved for retirement and now there's this thing of

41:55like oh we don't want to spend it down and my whole reaction is like spend that down man like i i don't want it when you die because that's not going to be fun for me like i don't want to get a pool of money when you die it's just not what i want and i'd rather you live and have the most fabulous last 25 years of your life that you can possibly have but there's like if you've lived a certain way for 50 years and you've lived frugally and that's why you've built up this nest egg it's very hard to mentally shift into like a consumption mode of

42:24splurging on yourself and doing the fun things and spending the little extra it's just like a challenging thing and so i do think to this whole point like companies trends communities things that start to like unlock the way that older people are thinking about spending and living those last years of their life in a um you know productive healthy but also really exciting way are going to be really interesting yeah and you know the other thing that's exciting is that same principle i think is true not just with money but with time so you have this generation that basically deferred a lot of like living to say i'm gonna wait until i retire

43:00right i can't do that now i'm busy raising a family i'm busy saving i'm paying a mortgage i'm accumulating stuff i go to work 50 hours a week and then one day that's going to go away and then i'll do all of this stuff but what happens when you get there is then you're like i don't really know how to spend my time in a way that i love like i haven't really cultivated what value means to me and how i use my time so i need to get started so you've got this whole population of older adults who are basically in this position of like

43:30wanting to get started and they don't know how and i think that's where a lot of startup opportunities are like how do you lower the barrier to entry make older adults feel comfortable make them feel like they're not going to be ridiculed for being there they're not going to get taken advantage of for being there but like activate some of those behaviors that they've been saving up and they just need like a little nudge to start doing the stuff they always thought they were going to do from a from a product standpoint i think what might be helpful for folks is is to have a framework around this so

44:04i think when i hear both of you speak what i'm hearing you say sally you're saying like hey older adults sometimes have issues spending money and john what i'm hearing you say is sometimes older folks have challenges spending their time in the ways that they want to spend it like the format i would use for that is some you know some sort of calculator or budget so like imagine if you had a a calculator or or a me a me budget that you have to spend like it hooks up to your credit cards and it's like you have to spend a thousand dollars a week on

44:42stuff for you and maybe it's like experiences or maybe it's experiences for your kids or you have to spend a certain amount of time doing xyz and creating a whole platform around spending money and time specifically for older adults like that's that's an idea what do you think of that have you seen greg the the fat fire reddit community yeah yeah that is fat fire is like so fire is like financially independent retire early or something i think is what it stands for and fat fire is like so fire was the thing that rose that was like you know people who wanted to save just enough

45:20money and then basically quit when they were 30 or whatever age and live the rest of their life very very frugally that fire i was originally alerted to by sam parr our friend who um had been a big fan of it and basically this was like you're going to do that but you're going to do it in like a lavish lifestyle way so you're going to make enough money that you can you know then go live in a in a um you know in a more extravagant way maybe not like insane yachts you know planes but like a very very nice lifestyle and um it made me think when

45:50you were just talking there about like that idea but for older people because i don't think that community really exists like fat fire is really like our age it's like mid 30s 40 year olds that are doing this but older people like that same community you could probably build if you could figure out the right way to go find those people of like this core niche community of people who are trying to figure out how to like retire really lavishly and or maybe it doesn't even have to be crazy but retire in a way that is um you know in line with the way that they want to live their last 15 20

46:22years of their life yeah yeah exactly like we've you know we've sort of built up a financial planner industry for a really long time and that's about you know calculating down how much money do you need to have in order to meet your monthly nut we haven't done anything like that that's like you know you're gonna need friends when you get that yeah that's my that's the thing it's like you need the commute the calculator i think is great greg the challenge with it is like my parents i could show my parents a calculator and show them hey you got to spend this much it doesn't change the

46:54psyche when you see it you're just gonna be like okay my financial planner told me i can spend this much i know you know wealth advisors have been telling you that it's like the community aspect to go to your thing it's like that is what brings people out of their shell a little bit when they start seeing like oh it's not weird for me to spend this and then you have a community where you can ask about like well how are you navigating the discussion about your spending with your kids and what they're thinking about with the will or you know all of these different considerations and you can now come in

47:21and like you could be selling affiliate things you could be selling leads off that community i mean if you built a community of like 2 000 high value um older people around something like this that would be an extremely valuable community because the investable assets of that community would be massive they'd be highly likely to spend on interesting and like cool experiences opportunities whatever i bet you could build a seven-figure community around older people that are looking to like understand how to spend and live in a more kind of glamorous way for the remaining years yeah yeah for sure for sure um and i i think it absolutely would be an

47:58interesting startup if you could layer in some of these you know other things like once you have a lot of free time you're going to want to have people to spend it with are you good at going out and making friends do you know how to do that you're probably not right you're going to have to get intentional about how you go mate make friends what the world built to help you do that decades ago was like senior centers that you don't want to go to because you don't like bingo or zumba you want to do things that make you feel like modern and alive and an interesting

48:29person so how are you going to do that like and it's not a switch that you're gonna flip so you gotta start practicing it before you get there in order to have you know those sort of relationship assets uh to be able to spend into when you get there so i think i i think there's just like a whole bunch of startup ideas that are that are around friendship making for older adults about romantic relationship making for older adults there are even things like if you're if you've been in a 30-year relationship in a marriage but now all of a sudden you're an empty nester and you're not worried about the

49:04kids anymore and and you haven't really made your main priority the relationship now you want to rekindle the spark you know with your partner now it's just like the two of you again like how do you start re-dating your husband uh after you've been together for 30 years and like what are some of the ways that you could do that right um so i i think those sorts of things that recognize the time of life that you have a bunch of people who are generally really wise and super experienced at living but now they're in this whole new context and they need some easy ways to

49:39start participating in that context that doesn't make them feel like you don't know what the hell you're doing shut down and rather it's like open up start talking to other people start learning from other people um and uh and sharing that back have you have you guys seen chief.com yeah so chief.com last week just raised 150 million dollars at a 1.1 billion dollar evaluation led by it's a community for uh women in the workforce largely for professional women exactly and there's like an app associated with it where you know there's different groups there's um uh now there's a physic a few physical spaces in new york and la and sf i think

50:26um [Music] and and at the core of it though you're right it's like this community of like-minded women who have a goal in mind um and that goal you know is making friends and and being supported in their career and personalized do you think a chief.com for older adults could be a a similar multi-billion dollar opportunity i definitely think that um and i i think there's there's multiple businesses to be built that way some like chief could be sort of you know professional community by older people for older people but also could really be intergenerational right there's there's chief is an example of that but you know there are all these

51:11ways we're rebuilding um [Music] opportunities for mentorship and for learning from one another and you have semi-retired or retired people who just know so much and are desperate to share that and then you have a bunch of younger people who are craving more sort of real-time in-the-moment advice that you can't really google you know like things like negotiating a job offer you can read like about what the negotiation strategy is but if you don't have an older mentor in your life it's hard to just be like yeah but i think in the meeting i'm going to be freaked out like how do i how do i call myself down and have the

51:54right conversation some of us are lucky that we can ask our parents that or have other people but there's so many people who don't right so what if like you know there's a linkedin like service where there's video connection to mentors like that on a on a part-time basis that's disrupted disrupted to this whole huge growing coaching industry you know um yeah there's a massive business to be built here actually um you guys know what ypo is yeah young president's organization and then they had um like they had offshoots of it but i just looked it up it uh it did a hundred million dollars last year it's a

52:31non-profit technically and so you can look up their numbers publicly like on causeiq.com um that's crazy like there is a big business ypo is so dated and dead like the whole concept of it but literally what it is is like higher performing you know people over the course of their life get brought into this community they do events they do trips that you have to pay for they do you know different gatherings there's a network you know that you can access etc but the idea of going and doing this um for older people that are kind of transitioning in their life and that are at that point when they're trying to

53:06transition is super interesting um and you can do it on such a micro level like if you went and built the chief.com or the ypo for older people yeah it doesn't have to be that you go you know national with it out of the gate like you could pick a couple of small kind of cities honestly like do it where a bunch of retirees are it's probably a good idea like go to boca and and spring something like this up and you could probably go get a thousand people pretty quickly like go host an event there that is specifically targeted for older people and get signups through that and probably pretty

53:35cost effectively get a pretty cool group of signups but like starting this completely bootstrapped as like a um an interesting cash flow-like business to own i think there's like a pretty big opportunity here because you can charge the people a lot for the membership and if you host cool events that it's like yeah paying for access we always talk about nfts as paying for access but like these people aren't going to do that necessarily but you can you know charge a thousand dollars a year for access to this like really exclusive cool application only community of older people and you know do these very cool gated

54:10events um you know screenings cultural things like ways where you can come in and meet people it's like what ypo did or what ivy connect was this company that tried to do it with like ivy league college grads yeah um similar thing like trying to create that whole vibe i bet you could build a really big business around this yeah well i think you didn't say this but just in in sort of explaining it i think what really smart entrepreneurs are trying to do because people have have tried to do that before but they've focused on i guess what i would say the supply side right it's really easy to recognize hey

54:44there's tens of millions of older people they know a bunch of stuff like it's an underutilized asset right so let's just gather them up and then we'll have that asset the place to focus is really on the demand side right so like who wants that who wants that and how do you structure it in a way where you know who the customer is what they're gonna pay for it why they would buy it what they would do to participate and make it cool for them and so that's kind of the the way that i would try to build that is to recognize um not that we we've got something

55:15because we've collected all of this wisdom it's really more who needs wisdom how do they need it how can we give it to them there's like you know we're basically going to arbitrage the wisdom because we can get it cheap from people who have more free time but still make it an attractive exciting participation opportunity for them where they feel well compensated by it but it's like you know way less than hiring a full-time business coach might charge you or something like that i just think doing it like community first as like call it the dusk social club or something like that like dusk of your

55:51life uh make it really cool and have this cool vibe to it where it's like something that their kids would you know have participated in and that they think is cool but they don't think that exists for them like when you think about what opportunities exist for you when you're a senior if you have you know some financial means it's like golfing you know like an old country club or a stodgy you know set of things and you all of a sudden make this feel elevated and cool there's a community built around it really interesting people cool events i bet you could spring something up pretty quickly in a

56:23in a small locale and build out like a really interesting cash flowing business to just to own like not maybe it's not a billion dollar company that you want to go raise money for and do that but i bet you could build like a very cool business that you could tack on a bunch of tier point john ancillary revenue streams to from like you know affiliate stuff where there's gonna be a ton of people that find value in this community that you're building yeah yeah for sure another another i think really big opportunity greg i know you've done some writing in the past about like unbundling things and how

56:54that creates a lot of startup opportunity i think the unbundling of like the senior living facility you know has so much opportunity because mostly that business is like we're going to vertically integrate housing your social calendar uh you know nutrition health you know all because the idea is if we can get you to live here then we put those services on top but they're massively expensive it surrenders control of a lot of those things to like yeah maybe i like you know the apartment i would get but i hate your your you know saturday events um that's not interesting to me at all right so think about if you could if you

57:37could change it where there's more of a way where you could find access to housing stock that's more individualized right that might even just be um sharing rooms together um when you want to move to a new city but then you get you you know that there's some way that's still like digitally or um you know some combination of in-person and digital there's going to be other people there for me to talk to there's going to be stuff for me to do right it's just unbundled now i for sure i i i think that's brilliant you should you you should write a post on it um

58:15and get that out there i think unbundling happens when a certain me you know medium channel gets just too big and often if it gets too big plus it gets really kind of old like the unbundling of craigslist where it got too big plus it got really old um there's like double opportunity um it sounds like the unbundling of senior living is is a bit of both it's gotten really big plus no one's really innovated on in such a long time so i think that uh oh and the other thing for startup entrepreneurs it's easier to take off a piece than to build like a whole thing

58:57so i also like that piece of it i mean definitely like craigslist it's like when you when you bundle it like that it just pushes you to lowest common denominator for so much stuff so that's why those services are like bingo because you're trying to think like well what's something relatively unoffensive that everybody can do if you if you let vertical communities exist within it then you can you know be an older adult who loves uh watching horror films and you know build a community around that or whatever your interest might be it could be really cool just as like an ancillary idea to this unbundling of the

59:32nursing home like what if you built a platform that was like culture or experience as a service for nursing homes like if you just play the numbers game right there's 45 million americans over over 65 there's going to be 90 by 2050. it's a huge population of people that are going to be in nursing homes um nursing homes are being built at an insane pace right now to fill that and for the most part like when you think about nursing home like what experiences and culture they're providing it's like someone comes in and plays the guitar or they do bingo night or whatever and i imagine a lot of these

1:00:05nursing homes would love to outsource um the entire experience and culture of what they have to some company that will just like create these amazing best-in-class experiences in culture building and so i wonder whether you could go and sell that in like do a b2b sale you probably could go to like some of the chains that like are sort of regional nursing home chains that have you know five or ten facilities in a region and say like hey we're going to be providing you know one to two monthly uh really cool experience or culture things you can use it as your marketing by the way as a

1:00:36nursing home to acquire new customers on your end and it could be a really cool just like straight cash flow business again where you're like coordinating you're basically an event coordination business but you're selling it to a population that has you know really high willingness to pay and and it would create a bunch of value i think it's a it's a good business idea um and i think there's opportunity there and but i will say right before this i was on a call with someone from disney and hearing the disney folks talk about their experiences and how they design experiences like disney would never like outsource

1:01:12like programming you know what i mean so what i'm what i'm what i'm excited about with some of the alive venture stuff um and some of the opportunity in the space is is really like from the ground up like what is a core user experience that not and and the other the other problem with older adults is we bucket older adults into this like massive category it needs to be subdivided like you know right totally it has to be granular and it has to be community based to your point like go find these little niche communities i mean i was talking about what the example of the big community

1:01:52here that's like high you know wealth um high wealth seniors right like it's people who are going to have a bunch of money to spend they want to go do this vibe cool thing that's like probably a very small proportion actually relative to the larger proportion of people that will be in this 90 million so i completely agree with you it needs to be niched down yeah i mean certainly we talk about older people as this hugely monolithic population right and it's it's just like 65 and over and we would never say like all 20 to 50 year olds in the country like the same stuff you know

1:02:27like if you're a soccer dad in iowa who's 47 are you looking for the same kind of experiences as a 23 year old new professional living in new york city unlikely right so i think there's just there's a lot of basic stuff that i think creative entrepreneurs are really good at i just think that by and large they haven't been attracted to the space kind of going back to the earlier point because we've made it unsexy and because we've also like it's so patronizing the way we look at older people that we're like uh they just need help with like incontinence or they just need help

1:03:03with um you know preventing dementia and those things you know are important and and necessary too but like a lot of it is just trying to do the things that we love to do our whole lives and do it you know in in better ways but with people who who know how to do that you know who know how to make something cool who know how to create a vibe to it who know how to focus on a community not like somebody who just happens to be the marketing director for a senior living facility and like is selling to the children of these people to get them to pay 12 grand a month to

1:03:38move them into facility and then be like okay now make it cool too for like the people that live there like they don't know anything about that but i bet you guys have done you know a lot of really cool things in your life and had a lot of cool experiences and if you were working on it and trying to think about what would be something that i could imagine myself being really excited about when i'm 67 i think we'd have just way cooler stuff have you guys heard um either one of you greg probably right up your alley have you heard of this business silva

1:04:08s-y-l-v-a with silva.com yeah they're like it's kind of interesting they're they're basically going and acquiring like micro communities um and then they have like they'll take over all of the kind of like back end of running and nurturing and building these communities um so they're kind of like rolling up these niche micro communities around things it's sort of interesting it's like greg it's sort of like micro acquire for communities so you can go build little micro communities you know 500 like i have a friend who um built a community of like 500 people um paying a little bit of money a month and got an acquisition offer for like six figures

1:04:49for the community from silva um it's sort of interesting like all of a sudden there's actually liquidity on these micro communities that you can go build so the idea of going and testing something within a senior world with some micro community that you identify and that you go build something for specifically um there's actually like a liquidity path on the back end of it too to kind of nurture and continue to grow it yeah so i'm i'm curious i mean you guys work more in web3 than i have i think we probably all think you know this generation of older adults are probably not the ones buying nfts and

1:05:32they probably don't know what it what a dao is they're not used to it maybe they're technology-phobic and that's probably true if you compare you know attitudes or experiences against you know gen z people but like that's not going to be true seven or eight years from now right if you're building a company so i'm just kind of curious if you know if you're thinking about it from a web three angle like how do you bring what we're learning about community and about participation and about you know distributed ownership models to like older adults in a way well i first want to myth bust a second

1:06:13there's this myth that older adults like don't get crypto not interested in crypto not interested in nfts and it's the complete opposite i i also want to myth bust something about myself maybe i you know i actually spend more time with 82 year olds than i do 28 year olds and you know my idea of a good time isn't going to like live or nikki beach in miami beach but is to go you know hang out in a jacuzzi with you know an 87 year old man who's he's going to tell me amazing stories about his life as a concert promoter living in in brooklyn and

1:06:59the place i live today is this island in the miami area and it is predominantly older adults who are retired and we have a ton of programming on this island i believe today or tomorrow there is a whole event around crypto and they brought in this guy not me but they brought him this guy who's coming in talking to people about crypto and that wasn't like a top-down thing and there's not that many events this is like people were like hey we're interested in crypto we're interested in nfts like teach us so what when i saw that event i was like there's probably you know we

1:07:47were talking about wallets before you came on john there's probably an opportunity to build like a wallet for older adults or there's probably a set of financial products that could be created for this demographic that's genius that um i actually i'm curious if anyone's doing that because the amount of capital that has flown into that for gen z like for kids you know like banking for teens banking for 10 year olds there's like crypto for toddlers you know raising at a 250 million posts like it's absurd the amount of money that has flown into all those by the way those people are so high churn that these these companies

1:08:27are deploying so much money into customer acquisition because a customer comes on and it's freaking 18 year old they change their mind every day so they're switching versus like a high loyalty sticky older customer like this um i think it's really interesting and it would be like a unique set of tools that you needed to build out for them too um you know to make the product make sense i mean my parents asked me constantly about this stuff i have to imagine they would appreciate a product that like is built for them integrated into their life where you're kind of abstracting away the complexity of all the all the noise in the

1:09:00background yeah and if you built a really cool interface for that and you showed that you know you have some understanding of when you're in a later life situation how you're thinking about assets and spending down versus buying new and you just did that even in a way that showed you have some stickiness with the community like could you really not sell that to a fidelity or a prudential or a vanguard you know for lots of money and you know get out of that business because they're not going to do it themselves um and like i don't know i just think if you're you know even just

1:09:37opportunistic about what's a two or three year play um to build a company that creates massive value for like the financial services industry or the retirement planning industry like there you go john can you talk more about or can you talk about aarp like i vaguely know what it is because i've seen like their magazines and i know they're super big um but can you talk more about like who they are what their role is what their business model is and their you know if someone is is building a business for older adults today like should they be working with them or how they how should they be

1:10:20thinking about aarp well i don't work for aarp so i i don't you know i'm certainly not the authority on them i'm happy to talk about it just as a sort of casual observer so it used to stand for i believe american association of retired persons and then they recognized that a lot of the audience they wanted to have didn't really that didn't resonate with them and people were retiring later or never retiring and so they just made it aarp that stands for nothing anymore um and i think this was a dozen years ago or more um it's just an acronym without any you know further elaboration but they

1:10:59actually i believe have the nation's largest circulation magazine it's like 39 million subscribers and they've got two sides of it one is a is a not-for-profit that does a lot of like advocacy and policy work um and then they have another side which i believe is a for-profit business which contributes to the non-profit that you know sells products to older older people um advertises through the magazine you know all of that so they've done this this really big audience aggregation but yeah a lot of people like they don't look forward to getting the aarp card in the in the mail you know first of all like who even like opens

1:11:40their mail anymore i don't know if they send it to you digitally now or not um but like that's that's the thing with all of this like people build for older adults in such a way that they don't want to be associated with the brand they might want like the discounts that you get from aarp so they join but nobody is like gonna wear an aarp sweatshirt out to you know an event and be be proud that they like it and so i think again like if if we thought about older people as being cool in certain ways that younger people aren't and we built a brand that like spoke to

1:12:19that that they were excited about then you've got people being like you know i'm part of i'm part of chief people like saying i belong to chief you know they don't generally like saying i belong to the senior center i belong to aarp yeah it does seem like unbundling aarp is an interesting idea yeah like how do you take the components of it that have done well i mean the magazine circulation is fascinating like could you not create a much cooler version of that and circulate paper you know physical printed magazines that are like dope really cool card stock like high high high quality but much cooler and

1:13:01not the like i remember the first time an aarp magazine arrived for my dad and he was probably like it was you know several years before he would have actually been retired and it was early and i remember him like kind of cringing he was like oh you know now i'm old because this thing showed up so it definitely wasn't like a point of pride and something cool in the way that it could be right you could like attach and stick to people um that i mean it seems like a cool opportunity actually to your point on like any business where people there's tons of people and they they

1:13:30made 1.7 billion dollars last year um in revenue and like any time that's the case and no one is proud to say they're affiliated with it that seems like an opportunity just as a mental model for sure for sure right if you flipped it in a way like as we grow up a lot of our life is looking forward to being older than we are like when we're kids like i want to be 16 so i can get that driver's license and drive and be independent or i want to go to college or like i can't wait till i'm fully an adult and i don't have to deal with my

1:14:00parents anymore and then we stop treating older people like that but there are things that i think you know later life brings uniquely and so if you could build a brand around that that's like oh no young dude you you can't be part of this yet you haven't earned your way in this is for people who've you know who've really lived so look forward to to get into the age rather than having that kind of cringe experience when it comes that's like signals like i guess my life's over now it's just declined from here um you know that just seems like again it's something build a business that people

1:14:36want to participate in you know rather than one that they're ashamed to be a part of yeah well i have so many takeaways from this discussion just like on little frameworks and mental models that i feel like we went through and talked about in the context of a bunch of different ideas like one of the biggest ones for me is find you know large underserved communities like these large growing markets where it's just it's not sexy it's not the place where everyone wants to participate and go and create something that is uniquely for them go talk to 100 people within that market and you'll immediately know what it is

1:15:09like what pops out is the common trend that they're all saying they struggle with or that's a pain point etc and go build something for that little niche you can test things very quickly by building a little community around it to steal one of greg's you know common themes that he likes to talk about and there's a huge opportunity to go do that i think with within the senior community as that population grows and as they're looking for things and looking you know in that transition and tipping point of their own lives for new communities and new ways to engage with others so i those are the big ones for me greg

1:15:40biggest thing for me is just because there's a bunch of people fishing over here doesn't mean you need a fish over here and in fact over there might be where all the fish are um older adults you probably don't wake up in the morning and think about how do i build a dating app for older adults and just but turns out like there's a huge opportunity there and beyond opportunity like you're doing good you're doing good so um this is yeah this is a great reminder so yeah thanks john i love that analogy it it i'd be careful with it because in my world it sort of means another thing

1:16:22because there's so many scams targeting older adults that when we think about fishing um right we want to make sure that you know we're not talking about fishing that way um but this was really fun guys i really enjoyed you know thinking with you both and um and seeing you know sort of where your brains go when you when you start thinking about these audiences yeah there's a bunch of cool opportunities in this space it'll be interesting to see what our community thinks of these and and hopefully jam on a few of them i mean i do think there's a bunch of really cool cash flowing businesses that you could

1:16:50spring up pretty quickly around this space so um doesn't have to be the massive you know vc-backed techcrunch article but there are some really really big opportunities here and hopefully some bright entrepreneurs that go and pursue them where do where do people learn about a live ventures um and what you get you guys do so alive ventures.co is our website uh we put out a campaign just recently um uh sharing some of the insights that we've gotten uh both from a market perspective and from talking to hundreds of older adults um that we call growing older better um so that's just alive interest dot co slash growing hyphen

1:17:31older hyphen better free insights that's where every great startup idea comes from so we'll take it i love it thanks guys thank you so much for joining us john this was great really enjoyed it cheers man thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode email us at hi trwih.com leave us a review at apple or spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast until next time we will see you soon join our free community at trwih.com [Music]