#157 - Instagram Food Drops Making $200k a Week, Chrome Extensions That are Crushing It & Open Salaries

MFM #157

• Rewarding hustle: MFM is hiring two kids to do video production because they took the job without permission. They heard Sam complain about needing a recording studio and offered to do the work https://twitter.com/DylanJardon/status/1366274333858017282?s=20. 
• This is how you get the job you want. Don’t send a resume. Do the work instead. Don’t ask for permission.

Food topics

• The food companies of Instagram: Companies mycookiedealer.com, 1-900-Ice-Cream, and Allie’s Banana Bread are crushing it on IG with food drops that sell out in seconds.
• Why it’s big: These work because it’s at the intersection of many trends: cloud kitchens (no need for expensive restaurant infrastructure), DTC (no need to get costly distribution deals and shelf space) and have virality baked into them.
• My Cookie Dealer is estimated to be doing $200k per weekly drop. This is a potential $10m business today.
• Formula: Sam breaks down how these companies are going viral, and how you can copy.
• Make a side ingredient the main thing (cheese, cookie dough)
• Make it in an unusual color (rainbow bagel, rainbow kettle cork, green ketchup, cloud bread)
• Make it huge (huge sundae, massive pizza cookie, sushi-rito, massive KitKat)
• Frankenfood: combine two different foods (cronut, pancake cereal, donut cereal, cream cheese, bell pepper, desert burger, ramen burger, spaghetti donuts, fairy bread)
• Food allergy or remove stuff from it (vega ice cream, Banza)
• Make junk food or simple food ultra-fancy (tater tots, mozzarella sticks)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IFYt20QON8 

Tiller money

• Spreadsheet plugins: The guys have talked Chrome plugins and browser extensions in the past, but an overlooked niche is spreadsheet plugins.
• Plugins are great businesses because they are sticky and capitalize on an existing platform and user base. They can be light, simple tools that can gain huge adoption quickly. 
• Tiller Money (https://www.tillerhq.com/): Personal finance nerd Sam loves the simplicity of this plugin. Most people already manage their money on a spreadsheet, Tiller Money just makes it easier to do so.
• Supermetrics (https://supermetrics.com/): Marketing data plugin Sam uses. He predicts the business does 8-figures in revenue.

Open salaries

• Open salaries: Should companies publish employee salaries? Open salary data is becoming a legal requirement, starting with 🍃 Colorado: "From 2021 employers must disclose pay rates or ranges in job postings for jobs that could be worked in Colorado (including remote)" Source
• Open salaries is part of the culture of some companies. Buffer used it as a growth hack. The company continues to publish a lot of it’s financials and all employee salaries.
• Companies doing it now:
• Glassdoor shows average and anonymous salaries but can be inaccurate They were acquired for $1.2B in 2018. At the time did $170m in revenue with 700 employees 
• Founded by Rich Barton (we’ve spoken about him a few times before). Famous for saying “Information wants to be free”. Started Zillow, Expedia, and Glassdoor off this principle.
• Levels.fyi: A helpful guide to understanding what employees at top tech firms should be making. They even help you negotiate a salary. 
• Take: Open salaries tend to benefit employees (more transparency means higher, more equal pay) and is more detrimental to employers.
• Apple stopped doing it. Buffer has also said it’s not helpful anymore and was only good for initial growth.
• Pat Flynn published his income for several years, but eventually stopped as he started getting hate. 

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Editing thanks to Jonathan Gallegos (@jjonthan)