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Shaan Puri
Co-host, My First Million, My First Million

Super niche businesses making millions in 2026

📅 Aug 17, 2026 My First Million 58 MIN 36166 VIEWS 415 SEGMENTS · 5 SPEAKERS
140+ real business ideas database: https://clickhubspot.com/dsb1 Episode 852: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) ask 3 founders to tell them the juiciest number behind their businesses and get advice live. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:31) Raghav Gupta, Posha (19:30) Nick Saltarelli, Mid-Day Squares (38:25) Shreyas Parab, DayDream Dental — Links: • Posha - https://www.posha.com/ • Mid-Day Squares - https://www.middaysquares.com/ • DayDream Dental - https://www.daydream.dental/ — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community...

What Shaan Puri said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Shaan Puri hosted Shoot Your Shot in San Francisco, where three founders pitched their businesses. Raghav Gupta of Pasha, a cooking robot company, reported 1,000 real-world deployments, $8 million raised from Accel, $1,500 per unit, and $2 million in monthly bookings. He argued cooking will become leisure like driving, and that his robot cuts kitchen time from 60 to 10 minutes. Nick Saltarelli of Midday Squares, a chocolate and PB&J snack brand, sold $40 million worth of $2.49 bars in the last year, raised $22 million, built his own plant, and secured Costco Canada with a record-breaking road show of $160,000 in 14 days. Shreyas Parab of Daydream, an AI dental insurance billing service, said his company adds $1 million in ARR monthly, has raised $11.5 million, and will finish the year north of $10 million in revenue, adding $50,000 take-home pay per dentist.

Key takeaways

  1. Pasha has 1,000 robots deployed in real homes and does $2 million in monthly bookings, selling at $1,500 per unit.
  2. Midday Squares sold $40 million in the last year at $2.49 per bar, roughly 60 bars consumed per minute.
  3. Daydream adds $1 million in ARR monthly, raised $11.5 million, and will finish 2026 with over $10 million revenue.
  4. Midday Squares broke Costco Canada's road show record with $160,000 in sales over 14 days, after a two-and-a-half-year price negotiation.
  5. Daydream adds $50,000 in take-home pay per dentist by fighting insurance companies, charging 2.5% to 3.5% of collections.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
$40 million Sales of Midday Squares in the last 12 months metric 20:24
$2 million Pasha's monthly bookings metric 4:51
$22 million Total funding raised for Midday Squares metric 23:06
$11.5 million Total funding raised for Daydream metric 40:59
$1,500 Price of a Pasha cooking robot price 4:36
$160,000 Midday Squares sales in Costco road show over 14 days metric 33:18
$8 million Funding raised for Pasha metric 3:41
$50,000 Additional take-home pay per dentist using Daydream metric 57:27
1,000 Pasha robots deployed in real homes metric 2:31
60 Midday Squares bars consumed per minute to hit $40 million in sales metric 20:24

Chapters

  1. 0:00Introduction to Shoot Your Shot
  2. 1:34Pasha cooking robot pitch
  3. 4:51Pasha's business model and traction
  4. 9:00Pasha's future vision and community advice
  5. 19:36Midday Squares pitch
  6. 30:06Midday Squares growth and Costco deal
  7. 38:27Daydream dental AI pitch
  8. 58:11Closing and call to action

Questions asked in this interview

12
  1. 2:52We thought that if Waymo and Tesla and Zoox can use computer vision and AI to take you from point A to point B, why can we not use the same technology to cook a fresh meal for you?
  2. 7:12Have you seen this trend of one-pot meals?
  3. 13:09How do you think we should leverage community to continue to grow Pasha?
  4. 27:06And people started getting interested like what the hell are you guys doing?
  5. 32:22And so I looked at the buyer who we had started to develop actually a good relationship with him and I'm like, if we do the road show and we break the road show record, like the most sales ever in 14 days, will you give us 19.99?
  6. 35:13So the keywords... why are the keywords key?
  7. 39:58So we have AI calling the insurance company to get the status of these claims, AI submitting the claims, and AI voice being like, 'Hey, you did not approve this. Why not?
  8. 40:59So before, you know, people would be doing this work manually, right?
  9. 44:02I want to give them the third door, which is like, hey, if I handle this back office BS for you, would you want to still be a dentist and own your practice?
  10. 46:14Everything it feels like. You know what I mean?
  11. 46:59she knows more about them than she does about me, right?
  12. 52:24Do you know what he's talking about?
Shaan Puri 0:00 ↗
All right. Today we're playing Shoot Your Shot, where we let founders come in, sit in the hot seat, and pitch us their business. We got founders that have million-dollar businesses all the way up to hundred-million-dollar businesses. They get 15 minutes, and in it, they start by telling us the one big number, give us the pitch, and shoot the shot. They get to ask any questions that they want.
We've done this in New York City. This time it's in San Francisco. Whether you're listening on Spotify or YouTube, if you're working out right now, whatever you're doing right now, you need to stop and go to Spotify or go to YouTube. Look us up on My First Million and let us know in the comments which city you want us to go to next. All right, let's do it.
All right, Sam, what's up? We are doing a new episode, new format. We're calling it Shoot Your Shot. And we basically go from city to city. We invite founders from those cities to come and shoot their shot, to come pitch us. We got business owners that are doing a million dollars a year to hundred-million-dollar businesses that you're going to see in this batch of founders. What should we expect?
Sam Parr 1:02 ↗
Well, the best part about this podcast, the reason why people listen, the reason why we even do it, is we talk to like unique people. They tell us stuff that we don't normally see. And it's going to range from like people who are like way established and like killing it all the way down to people who are just getting started. And we don't actually know who's coming.
Shaan Puri 1:17 ↗
We don't know who's coming. This is blind to us. These are all people who listen to the podcast, right? People who listen to this podcast, it's founders, entrepreneurs, business owners. It's like an audition. It's like American Idol but for business, I guess. All right, let's do this. So, shoot your shot. Let's get the first founder in here. Who do we got?
Raghav Gupta 1:34 ↗
What's up, dude?
Shaan Puri 1:35 ↗
Here he comes. What's up?
Raghav Gupta 1:39 ↗
What's up, dog?
Shaan Puri 1:41 ↗
All right. Have a seat. So, you got 15 minutes, but take your time here.
Raghav Gupta 1:45 ↗
Excited to be here.
Shaan Puri 1:46 ↗
What's your name?
Raghav Gupta 1:46 ↗
Raghav.
Shaan Puri 1:47 ↗
Raghav. Okay. And your company is Pasha.
Raghav Gupta 1:51 ↗
That's right. Pasha.
Shaan Puri 1:53 ↗
Okay. Where are you from?
Raghav Gupta 1:54 ↗
I live in San Francisco, the Bay Area to be precise. I grew up in India and we've been here for five years now.
Shaan Puri 2:00 ↗
How old are you?
Raghav Gupta 2:01 ↗
I am 32.
Shaan Puri 2:02 ↗
Is this your first company?
Raghav Gupta 2:04 ↗
It is my first company. I did run a project before this where we were trying to build micro wind turbines. But everything that I've learned about Pasha has been at Pasha. Everything I've learned about building a business has been primarily at Pasha. So we have one rule, which is we are shameless numbers guys.
Shaan Puri 2:23 ↗
Okay. And so we ask everybody, give us a big, juicy, impressive or interesting number. Doesn't have to be that big, but an interesting number that would hook us. Go ahead.
Raghav Gupta 2:31 ↗
So we're amongst the 1% of robotics companies you have ever met that are actually shipping a real product in real homes, in real kitchens, with 1,000 real-world deployments.
Shaan Puri 2:44 ↗
Okay. So, you're in the 1% of non-bullshitting robotics companies. You've shipped a thousand robots. What do your robots do?
Raghav Gupta 2:52 ↗
We are putting a private chef in every home. And we're doing that by building cooking robots for homes. We thought that if Waymo and Tesla and Zoox can use computer vision and AI to take you from point A to point B, why can we not use the same technology to cook a fresh meal for you? Takeout is expensive. Cooking at home takes forever. There's no way for you to eat food that is fresh, that's delicious, that doesn't take 60 minutes of your time in the kitchen, that doesn't cost $25 per serving. And where the alternatives...
Shaan Puri 3:25 ↗
Dude, my diet right now is man kibble. You know what man kibble is?
Raghav Gupta 3:28 ↗
I know.
Shaan Puri 3:29 ↗
It's three lbs of ground beef with rice that will last me for three or four days and soy sauce. So, I'm on board with this. Did you raise funding?
Raghav Gupta 3:38 ↗
We are backed by Accel.
Shaan Puri 3:40 ↗
How much did you raise?
Raghav Gupta 3:41 ↗
Eight million.
Shaan Puri 3:42 ↗
$8 million. And how long ago did you start it?
Raghav Gupta 3:44 ↗
We started the company eight years ago. This was right out of my parents' ground floor. This was back in India. It was still a project. We formalized the company about five years ago.
Shaan Puri 3:57 ↗
Is this the thing, by the way? This is the robot.
Raghav Gupta 3:59 ↗
Yeah, that's the robot. And it's...
Shaan Puri 4:01 ↗
Can you give us like, what is there, like a demo? Can it do something? Can it cook us something?
Raghav Gupta 4:05 ↗
So, what we did was we just cooked spaghetti alfredo with mushrooms. The food's ready.
Shaan Puri 4:10 ↗
I haven't eaten it. This is perfect.
Raghav Gupta 4:12 ↗
And you know, you need...
Shaan Puri 4:13 ↗
This looks good. By the way, I don't know if the camera should have already seen this. This looks amazing. So, did it come out like this?
Raghav Gupta 4:19 ↗
We cooked using fresh ingredients. Fresh olives, fresh garlic, fresh milk, fresh butter, fresh pasta, and then we put some fresh parmesan cheese on top and it was all cooked on Pasha.
Shaan Puri 4:32 ↗
That machine did all of this.
Raghav Gupta 4:35 ↗
Yeah.
Shaan Puri 4:35 ↗
How much does that cost?
Raghav Gupta 4:36 ↗
$1,500, which is less than a month of takeout for a family of four.
Shaan Puri 4:44 ↗
Okay. Okay. And so what... So this is, I mean, give it a score here.
Raghav Gupta 4:48 ↗
Great. I mean, nine or 10.
Shaan Puri 4:49 ↗
Yeah. This is very good.
Raghav Gupta 4:51 ↗
Yeah. As I said, a thousand customers already use us three times a week, which is more than the oven. Because you're numbers people, our M6 retention beats DoorDash, HelloFresh, any other food service out there. Last month alone we clocked $2 million in bookings. We did that again this week.
Shaan Puri 5:10 ↗
Already finished this. That was great. It's supposed to just be a taste.
Raghav Gupta 5:14 ↗
Yeah.
Shaan Puri 5:15 ↗
So, walk me through this. The viewer, the listener won't know this, but the viewer will see what you did. But tell us, because it looks just like a bowl of...
Raghav Gupta 5:25 ↗
Can you grab a couple of the things in the back? It looks like basically there's ingredient containers. So, here is a pan. It's a pan that's dishwasher safe. There's a detachable stirrer, detachable spatula. There are containers where you put ingredients. There is a drawer which is super cool which has spices. There is space for oil and water. And most impressively, there's a camera that looks at change in color, texture, consistency, make sure it is mimicking a human chef's intelligence so food can be cooked perfectly.
Shaan Puri 6:00 ↗
How did you train this?
Raghav Gupta 6:02 ↗
So in the early days we had chefs alone training Pasha. Now we have our customers training Pasha. We possibly have the world's largest culinary vision data set for cooking food. And we are taking the Tesla approach. Waymo spent 500,000 hours of supervised driving and $20 billion in venture capital to crack self-driving. Tesla did it a different way. Tesla said we'll release something that's useful to consumers, also use it to collect tons of data and then put robot taxis out.
Shaan Puri 6:32 ↗
Wait. Wait. So, how does that work?
Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So, hundreds of episodes the team at HubSpot went through. They pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable ideas that we have brainstormed and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show.
If a customer is that good at cooking, why do they even buy this? And how do they train your thing?
Raghav Gupta 7:03 ↗
So customers buy this because they want a freshly cooked meal.
Shaan Puri 7:08 ↗
This can only cook one-pot meals for now. One-pot meals?
Raghav Gupta 7:12 ↗
No, one pot. Have you seen this trend of one-pot meals? If you go to like Reddit or TikTok, there's like a whole category of cooking called a one-pot meal where you're just going to put a bunch of stuff.
Shaan Puri 7:22 ↗
I called that a crock-pot growing up. So you're not going to make cheeseburgers. So, it's not going to do a steak. It's not going to flip burgers. It's not going to bake a cake. Anything that requires spreading out like pancakes is something it won't do.
What are the most popular two or three things that people cook with this?
Raghav Gupta 7:41 ↗
So, the data changes as we change our customer base. But our Indian users cook a lot of paneer. Our Italian users would cook a lot of risotto and spaghetti because it's so hard to cook risotto at home because you have to continue to stir. Our Thai Vietnamese users would use it to cook Thai red curry, Thai green curry.
Shaan Puri 8:01 ↗
So, not to be a hater, but basically is the robot just taking up the easiest part of cooking, which is just stirring?
Raghav Gupta 8:08 ↗
The robot is taking away the stirring. It's taking away the regulation of heat. It's taking away you being there to add ingredients at the right time. It's taking away you monitoring the food because you know an 8-year-old needs to know what charred onions look like, what brown onions look like. So all the intelligence and all the babysitting is being taken away. It does not cut down your time in the kitchen from 60 minutes to zero. It cuts down your time in the kitchen from 60 minutes to 10 minutes.
Shaan Puri 8:40 ↗
So give us two things. Give us the big idea. Meaning you said something like it's already used more than the oven. So do you have this sort of vision that like, hey, look, our kitchens all come with these appliances, these three, and now here comes number four. It's going to be in everybody's home. That means it's this big. Get me excited about the big idea here.
Raghav Gupta 9:00 ↗
So 10 years from now, nobody's going to be cooking because they have to. They'll only be going to cook because they want to. Same way nobody's going to be driving because they have to. They're only going to be driving because they want to. Cooking is going the exact same way. DoorDash is something you will only order when your robot at home cannot cook the meal that you want to eat or when you're ordering corporate lunches. Cooking will become a leisurely activity, something that you only do for joy, but not Monday through Friday when it's a chore. And we are the company that's building the future where every house will have a robot chef that cooks food for you so you don't have to.
Shaan Puri 9:38 ↗
That's pretty cool. Okay, so how much revenue are you doing? What's your run rate right now?
Raghav Gupta 9:43 ↗
So, we did $2 million in bookings last month and...
Shaan Puri 9:46 ↗
$1,500. Why are you saying bookings? Just because you don't have the devices yet. So, it's pre-sale.
Raghav Gupta 9:50 ↗
So, we have about 1,000 units shipped on the field and a long pre-order wait list that we're trying to fulfill as fast as we can. We're making sure our manufacturers can scale with demand. We're making sure our recipe library can scale with demand. We're making sure reliability, supply chain, logistics, all of that is just scaling with demand.
Shaan Puri 10:11 ↗
This is awesome. So the current bottleneck is manufacturing these things.
Raghav Gupta 10:14 ↗
It's manufacturing, it's also operations. So whenever you ship a hardware product out in the early days, you always need to handhold people. Something or the other can go wrong. And you need a service infrastructure for people to have support if something goes wrong. It's the same bottleneck that Waymo has.
Shaan Puri 10:35 ↗
Where did you get the two million in bookings? Is that just viral demos on social media basically? Did you do anything to get customers or it's just people like the novelty, people want? And did they give you the cash already?
Raghav Gupta 10:45 ↗
Yeah, they give us the cash already. There are three ways that we drive demand. The first is organic word of mouth. Every paying customer gets us at least one more paying customer without us spending a single dollar on marketing. Second, Pasha is built for the camera. So, a random nobody would get Pasha home, shoot content, post it online, and overnight they become internet celebrities. We had this creator who had 11,000 followers. Within six weeks, she got X number of followers. Guess what X is?
Shaan Puri 11:17 ↗
I don't know.
Raghav Gupta 11:18 ↗
She went from 11,000 to 450,000 followers. And all that changed was that she was not shooting Pasha content and she started shooting Pasha content.
Shaan Puri 11:27 ↗
Have you seen the Matic?
Raghav Gupta 11:28 ↗
Yes.
Shaan Puri 11:29 ↗
Have you seen the Matic, Sean?
Sam Parr 11:30 ↗
Yeah. Yeah, I've seen it because of this exact reason. Fancy Roomba. It's awesome. And there's like one viral moment. There's probably a few actually. One, it sucks up a sock and it opens up its latch and it throws it out. And it's huge though. Like I live in New York City. This sounds awesome. My wife complains about how much time it cooks and I'm like, 'Dude, just make man kibble. It's fine.' And I would definitely rather eat that. But that's huge. I can't use that in New York yet.
Shaan Puri 11:55 ↗
You can't use it because you don't have counter space, you mean? Or what?
Sam Parr 11:57 ↗
Counter space.
Shaan Puri 11:58 ↗
Okay.
Raghav Gupta 11:58 ↗
Yeah. So, you're absolutely right. And the good thing is that the market is so huge that there are enough people with space to put this in their kitchen. We're working on the next version of Pasha that will be miniaturized, that will fit in Manhattan apartments, but the version after that will actually replace the range in your home.
Shaan Puri 12:17 ↗
Oh, that's interesting.
Raghav Gupta 12:18 ↗
And cook four dishes at a time.
Shaan Puri 12:19 ↗
So, I got a question. This can't cook meat, right?
Raghav Gupta 12:21 ↗
It cannot cook steak, but it can cook meat as long as the meat has been cubed and the size is one cubic inch or smaller.
Shaan Puri 12:30 ↗
Okay. So, you can put chicken in there cubed and then it cooks it.
Raghav Gupta 12:32 ↗
Yep.
Shaan Puri 12:32 ↗
Hey, what do your parents think?
Raghav Gupta 12:34 ↗
They're extremely proud that I was able to break out of the family business, which had nothing to do with tech, and I used my education well to actually make a big impact in the world. They're extremely proud and happy.
Shaan Puri 12:49 ↗
They're supportive. They like it.
Raghav Gupta 12:50 ↗
Yeah.
Shaan Puri 12:50 ↗
That's badass. What was your family business?
Raghav Gupta 12:52 ↗
My dad runs a food grain business. So they grind wheat and you might have heard of this thing. It's called an atta chakki.
Shaan Puri 13:00 ↗
Okay. They grind it.
Raghav Gupta 13:01 ↗
Yeah, they grind wheat and then they sell fresh flour. So fresh food has been something that's always been close to my heart from the very beginning.
Shaan Puri 13:07 ↗
What do you need help with?
Raghav Gupta 13:09 ↗
You guys have built great communities. You with MFM and you with Hampton. We feel community is going to be a big lever of growth for Pasha. How do you think we should leverage community to continue to grow Pasha?
Sam Parr 13:23 ↗
Let me say something really quick. I think people use the word community and audience differently. So for example, MFM is an audience, meaning if we quit doing this, the audience eventually is going to go away. Sean owns a brand that has a community. It has a community online where lots of his customers are talking and interacting, and that's a community. And I think you'd have to determine which of those two are you actually talking about.
Shaan Puri 13:49 ↗
Yeah. The best thing I heard of this is if everybody was together, which way would the chairs be pointing? So an audience is all the chairs point at the stage. The community is the chairs point at each other. So for example, to your question, what's that air fryer brand that went crazy like just like the...
Sam Parr 14:04 ↗
Ninja?
Shaan Puri 14:04 ↗
Yeah, maybe it's Ninja, but like basically the air fryer in the last like five years had like a big renaissance and actually did too. Yeah, Ninja Creami did too where there's a community of people that are sharing recipes and it works because I think a little bit more than yours, the user can kind of figure out like create new things rather than like the app only lets you do 14 items, pick one of the 14. And so if you have some element of UGC, user-generated cooking in this case, user-generated recipes that they could share and they could kind of get props for from one another. I think that's the key and you have to find, you know, a hub for them. Is it on Reddit? Is it on Discord? Is it on Facebook? Is it on Instagram? How are you going to get people to share this stuff? But I would study what the air fryer community did. I would study what the Ninja Creami did. And I would try to replicate as much as I could of the factors of that success.
Sam Parr 14:55 ↗
Yeah. Like for example, I used to love this app called Aptive. It was a fitness app and they had a Facebook group and I was very active on the Facebook group and same with Peloton. I'm sure they have a Facebook group where you like talk about your favorite instructors or like has anyone tried this type of workout? Another one is Ladders. That's another fitness app that they have this like community. So that's their customers talking together. It's super valuable. And so what I would do is for every, I would put like something in your, when you ship it out like you just, I don't know if it's like mostly moms, I would, and what age they are might choose Facebook. If it was nerds I would choose Reddit. Whatever. Facebook groups though I do think are still the best.
I think the other question is what's the bigger benefit you're attaching yourself to? So are people buying this fundamentally for time savings? So then you would say, well, is this for people who really value their time? Maybe it's a busy professional, the working mom, etc., etc. And you need to create metrics and success stories and attract that type of person. Go to those influencers who are going to spout that kind of religion. Or is the religion about foodies, people who love food but they've been limited by skill. I would love to cook risotto. I would love to eat risotto, but I don't know how to cook risotto. And that skill gap is getting bridged by this thing. And it lets me indulge my foodiness. And it's not about the time savings. It's not about brutal like efficiency, utility, it's about enjoyment. And so I would try to figure out, and the easy answer is going to be, oh, it's both. It's all. But in order to really get a community going, you want to have a beachhead. You want to have like an initial persona that you're targeting. And really, it's like what's the happy ending, the dream outcome for that person, the kind of inner itch that they've been waiting to scratch that your product is helping them do that. Your product's not the hero. It's the tool that the average person uses to become a hero themselves. And so which one is it? That's something I would kind of ask myself because that'll change a lot of your marketing, a lot of your strategy.
Shaan Puri 16:41 ↗
But my gut tells me you're not going to have a customer acquisition problem, right?
Sam Parr 16:45 ↗
I don't think that's ever going to be the problem.
Shaan Puri 16:46 ↗
Your marketing team is like a total of one person.
Sam Parr 16:49 ↗
I don't think that's going to be the issue. Your constraint is not going to be getting people to buy. It's going to be does this thing actually work and can I get it in their house.
Shaan Puri 16:55 ↗
Yeah. But it'll change your product strategy. Like if your product strategy is about utility, man kibble, like he wants health and he wants convenience. So he's willing to sacrifice presentation, taste and other things maybe along the way but you would create a different product like you would literally have different pieces of the robot, different constraints on the manufacturing side versus if you were trying to make this beautiful parmesan-topped impressive thing when friends come over. Yeah, I cooked this for the family. I was never able to do that before. Maybe making it easier or harder to manufacture, right?
Raghav Gupta 17:28 ↗
I think community is important primarily because it's not growth necessarily it drives but over time I think your CAC comes down because you know your K factor just jumps up, people start talking about you, second engagement increases and so retention increases and if retention increases...
Sam Parr 17:48 ↗
Of the best community builders in the world, how many of them use phrases like K factor, engagement, stickiness and CAC?
Shaan Puri 17:54 ↗
Not this early at least. You get magic first.
Communities from the soul, you know what I mean? And so you got to like have two different parts of your brain. There's metrics guy, startup founder, go raise money from Accel, and there's feelings guy. And there's feelings guy, there's soul guy. We're going to do this because it's awesome. We're going to do this because it's the right thing to do. We're going to do this. And eventually cool. Yeah. But right now, it's like cool that eventually gets popular does not talk about K factor. It talks about silly. It talks about emotion. You know, these types of words, not K factor. Don't worry about that. Just get the 1,500 people who are using this, get them to log into Facebook groups every single week to talk about, to either complain, to celebrate, to nerd out. And then you also need lore. So lore would be like for us it would be like no small boy stuff. Like we say these silly phrases where no nerds in a room are be like how do I get people to like us more? You know what I mean? We just make up dumb stuff. Like we used to call this show, this episode, the denim dungeon just because I wore denim. Like do that silly stuff that doesn't math. Who cares? But you just do the stuff where you create lore or you create catchphrases, shared stories, a common bond, us versus the world. And that sounds silly when it comes to cooking, but like you could still do it, right? So you create this, you create lore and you repeat it constantly, constant. And you have a face, whether you or if you have someone else at your company. You seem very charismatic. I think you could do it, but you have like every cult needs shared language, rituals, and a leader.
All right, we got to wrap up. Yeah. Raghav, thanks for coming.
Raghav Gupta 19:20 ↗
Yeah. Pasha.
Shaan Puri 19:21 ↗
Pasha.com. You got the URL. Good job.
Raghav Gupta 19:24 ↗
Amazing. Thank you so much for the time.
Shaan Puri 19:26 ↗
All right, we appreciate you. God bless.
Raghav Gupta 19:28 ↗
All right, see you, dude. Thank you.
Shaan Puri 19:31 ↗
All right, we have another one. Who we got? Bring them in.
Nick Saltarelli 19:36 ↗
Yo, what's going on, boys? Here, I brought you guys.
Shaan Puri 19:39 ↗
What's good, boys? You sound like a hockey player.
Nick Saltarelli 19:42 ↗
All right, we got... spend too much time in the locker room. That's the problem.
Shaan Puri 19:46 ↗
So, I know you. So, this is Nick. I know your product because I've been addicted to these things. I actually had to wean myself off of them. I was like, I needed a midday break of eating Midday Squares. But do you know Nick well or no?
Sam Parr 19:59 ↗
I never, I don't, I've just met him a second ago. I just lurk on X.
Shaan Puri 20:02 ↗
Yes. Well, I have these in my office at Hampton because my co-founder is obsessed with them and I started eating them. They are awesome.
Nick Saltarelli 20:08 ↗
I appreciate that. I appreciate that.
Shaan Puri 20:10 ↗
Midday Squares is your company.
Nick Saltarelli 20:12 ↗
Sure is.
Shaan Puri 20:13 ↗
That's you and your wife.
Nick Saltarelli 20:13 ↗
I got two other partners. Yeah. I got, shout out to my wife and my brother-in-law. So, we did this all in the...
Shaan Puri 20:17 ↗
Got to talk about his wife. She's amazing.
Nick Saltarelli 20:20 ↗
She's the beast.
Shaan Puri 20:20 ↗
Okay. So before we start, we want you to start with the one big number.
Nick Saltarelli 20:24 ↗
We basically sold $40 million worth of $2.49 chocolate bars. That equates to about, let's just call it roughly 60 bars per minute have to be consumed every minute in 365 days a year for you to hit that number. So...
Shaan Puri 20:39 ↗
Wow. $40 million in the last 12 months.
Nick Saltarelli 20:43 ↗
Yeah.
Shaan Puri 20:44 ↗
60 of these bad boys every minute. Every minute of the year.
Nick Saltarelli 20:48 ↗
Every minute of the year. 365 days a year.
Shaan Puri 20:49 ↗
If I'm not wrong, wasn't Kim Kardashian spotted with these in her bag? Is that true?
Nick Saltarelli 20:54 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. She...
Shaan Puri 20:55 ↗
Not paid, right?
Nick Saltarelli 20:56 ↗
Not paid. She's hooked us up two times on her social. And I think that's the beauty of like when you're hustling and we make it a point to be in with all the chefs. And so we're not looking for the direct connection to celebrities. That's what everybody's doing. So we've made it a point over the last decade to become friends with chefs. And that's so Chef K, shout out Chef K who cooks for the Kardashians. I mean, we were sending her product for years and years and years.
Shaan Puri 21:23 ↗
No, the influencer strategy. So cool.
Sam Parr 21:26 ↗
Who influences the influencers and then you actually influencing them is a lot easier.
Shaan Puri 21:31 ↗
But you find who the chefs are of celebrities.
Sam Parr 21:35 ↗
There's a lot of chefs on Instagram and TikTok that you can see who they're cooking for, athletes and other chefs.
Shaan Puri 21:40 ↗
And you just DM them say, 'Hey, can I send you some?'
Nick Saltarelli 21:42 ↗
Yeah.
Shaan Puri 21:42 ↗
What's special about the product?
Nick Saltarelli 21:43 ↗
Well, what is the product? Okay, so we started out as chocolate bars and a crazy thing happened, you know, since we started this business in 2018. Chocolate went parabolic. The cost of cocoa and that means we lost like 27% of our gross margin overnight. We were killing it and chocolate, we were paying $4,000 a kilo for cocoa butter went up to 32,000 just to give you...
Shaan Puri 22:07 ↗
So there's like a cocoa crisis.
Nick Saltarelli 22:08 ↗
Cocoa crisis.
Shaan Puri 22:08 ↗
What? Why was there the cocoa crisis?
Nick Saltarelli 22:12 ↗
So, it's the cycle that happens all the time, which is super interesting. It starts off with like a real mismatch in terms of weather will come in, disease will spread, then there won't be enough cocoa coming to the ports, and then corruption kicks in though. And corruption usually takes about two years. I got stories. I went into the Ecuadorian forest, so like if you ever want to go there, we could go there. But basically, you know, when your back's against the wall, I remember we started this thing with like no economics kind of like, I'm not comparing this to Tesla in any sense, but build the product, no gross margin, nobody wanted to manufacture this thing. Then we went to a big kitchen and then we built the plant and we had finally reached profitability everybody and then we get smashed by this cocoa thing.
Shaan Puri 22:54 ↗
Did you raise money or is this whole thing bootstrapped?
Nick Saltarelli 22:56 ↗
No, no, we raised money through quasi-equity and our government. So shout out to the Canadian government's super pro in agricultural manufacturing. So they were able to give...
Shaan Puri 23:04 ↗
How much in aggregate have you raised?
Nick Saltarelli 23:06 ↗
22 million in total.
Shaan Puri 23:07 ↗
You raised $22 million.
Nick Saltarelli 23:08 ↗
I built our own plant.
Shaan Puri 23:09 ↗
Yeah.
Sam Parr 23:10 ↗
They're a great follow on social. In fact, I've stolen many things from your social strategy. So you guys, his wife in particular, they make this incredible content. So they got sued by whatever Hershey, who I forget it was, Hershey.
Nick Saltarelli 23:22 ↗
I can't confirm nor deny. I can say this stuff. They got a cease from someone being like, 'You can't use the color orange.' You know, like stuff like that. It was orange. It was like a ridiculous...
Shaan Puri 23:31 ↗
I'm sure we could all play two and two together.
Sam Parr 23:32 ↗
Yeah. Reese's was like, 'Hey, get off orange.' So, instead of just sort of taking the disadvantage, they said, 'How can we turn this into an advantage?' And they came out with this campaign where they were making videos talking about how they're just this independent company.
Nick Saltarelli 23:44 ↗
They actually made a diss track.
Sam Parr 23:45 ↗
They made a rap diss track. They made a music video. Him and his wife. And it's like ridiculous, but it kind of works. And they tell the story. And they tell the story about their plant. And they tell the story about the good things and the bad, which I think everybody only tells the good. And there's a lot to learn from y'all's strategy, but also you guys have a lot of like natural charisma and storytelling.
Shaan Puri 24:04 ↗
Named it Midday Squares because it's perfect.
Nick Saltarelli 24:06 ↗
Thank you, man. I think it was me and my wife brainstorming, riffing. I shout out to 5-hour Energy. So I listened to the podcast and 5-hour Energy and he was so methodical about like, I want my product to be what it is. And we were, we really, so the big gap that we saw was that the afternoon market's just as big as the morning breakfast market except it gets nearly no attention. So like everybody's crowded into breakfast and nobody's really focused on the afternoon part for adults. Yeah. Specifically.
Shaan Puri 24:35 ↗
And so was this a form factor that already existed that people were already doing these like kind of square, what? I don't even know what this is. It's half...
Nick Saltarelli 24:43 ↗
A dual-layer square. Yeah.
Shaan Puri 24:44 ↗
What's the bottom?
Nick Saltarelli 24:45 ↗
Peanut butter base.
Shaan Puri 24:46 ↗
Okay. Peanut butter base. You got jelly on top. This is a PB&J one.
Nick Saltarelli 24:49 ↗
Or this, that's PBJ. This is also PBJ strawberry. But you also have chocolate, right? And so...
Shaan Puri 24:55 ↗
That's where it started the business.
Nick Saltarelli 24:56 ↗
Chocolate is where it started.
Shaan Puri 24:57 ↗
Where did the initial idea come from? You're just sitting around and why this?
Nick Saltarelli 25:00 ↗
So my cousin was super high up at Smucker's and he was just always pushing me to get into this game, you know, and we would always riff back and forth. And finally through a few of his friends and stuff, I started getting data and it was the data that really sprung to me was chocolate was growing at a ridiculous rate. So chocolate that wasn't using palm kernel oil at the time and refrigerated was growing. So like the refrigerated category of grocery stores, fastest growing section of a grocery store. So that's why you keep seeing refrigeration pop everywhere. Like fresh pet at the pet section. They're starting to put fridges in the...
Shaan Puri 25:37 ↗
Oh, so every category started to have a refrigerated item. And we were talking about this with vitamins, right? Like those liquid vitamins that you put in the fridge versus in the cabinet. Oh, wait. So, go back. Your cousin's at Smucker's.
Nick Saltarelli 25:50 ↗
Shout out by the way. That's my cousin.
Shaan Puri 25:52 ↗
And he's like, you got to get into this jelly game. And so you're studying the data. You notice this trend of refrigeration in different categories. So, you notice chocolate's on the rise. There's not a refrigerated chocolate.
Nick Saltarelli 26:03 ↗
Yep. You see a gap, you see an opportunity.
Shaan Puri 26:05 ↗
Big time.
Tell us how much money you put in of your own money to do it. And then if you could remember each year's revenue leaving...
Nick Saltarelli 26:12 ↗
Oh, 100. Yeah, 100%. So basically it took about 60 grand. Me and my partners basically put this together. We put in 60 grand. So we created a constraint. We couldn't use Facebook ads. We had to get to a million dollars of revenue and we couldn't use Facebook ads. That was constraint number one. And number two, it all had to be in our city. So we couldn't like just spray and pray. We had to, we chose Montreal is where we came from. We're like, we got to get to a million dollars here and if we get here, then we can go to the next level where we can really start to take this serious.
Shaan Puri 26:39 ↗
That's dope.
Nick Saltarelli 26:40 ↗
It was the first one on Facebook ads just because hey, we don't have a lot of capital, so we're not going to be able to reserve this much money to burn there.
Shaan Puri 26:46 ↗
Or was it, I get the Montreal one, which is like, look, let's try to get people that we can see, feel, and touch here to love it.
Nick Saltarelli 26:52 ↗
Yep. Because if they don't really love it, we don't have it right yet before we earn the right to go to other cities.
Sam Parr 26:58 ↗
I'm a contrarian. I think Facebook creates a lot of false positives for early business at least early on.
Nick Saltarelli 27:04 ↗
Yes.
Shaan Puri 27:04 ↗
So, what did you do to get Montreal on board?
Nick Saltarelli 27:06 ↗
The content, man. It was, so this was, and this is where the brilliance of my wife and my brother-in-law. So it was really simple going out. None of us had social followings. That's a really important piece, right? Because a lot of people feel intimidated when they're getting into this thing like you got to have a pre... we had no followings. And so, for the whole summer, we just started posting. When you're making food products, you usually end up in really cool environments. You know, we were in labs with like food scientists and different manufacturing plants where we were testing stuff. And so we just all told each other like everybody when we're doing something, cameras on, tell people what you're doing, but don't reveal what you're doing. Just show the environment. And people started getting interested like what the hell are you guys doing? You know, especially all of us had not come from this industry.
Shaan Puri 27:49 ↗
Okay. So it was like pretty young guys are like we don't know what the hell we were doing. You're saying your friends, your own natural social networking mind was like, 'What's going on? Why is Nick suddenly in this like lab wearing a hairnet, you know, testing different?'
Nick Saltarelli 28:03 ↗
Yeah, because we all, my wife was in fashion, my brother-in-law was like a gym buff going around colleges, and I had typically been in software my whole career prior to that. So to see us with like hairnets doing stuff was like, 'Okay,'
Shaan Puri 28:14 ↗
So you use content, you use story to get it going.
Nick Saltarelli 28:17 ↗
Yeah.
Shaan Puri 28:17 ↗
Tell us about the ramp. So, you start off year one, what'd you do?
Nick Saltarelli 28:20 ↗
This is where the magic happened. Okay. So when we turned on the jets in September, so September 2018, we sold our product on our website for 50 cents. And there was two reasons. Okay, so you could buy one square for 50 cents and the idea was it was all a content play. So we didn't want to actually make money, but we didn't want freebie people. So you had to get your credit card out, actually do a transaction, and we hand-delivered everything for five months. So it was all in Montreal.
Shaan Puri 28:50 ↗
He's an animal. So we did.
By the way, Nick's the only one who's not based in San Francisco doing this thing. He flew in for this, too. This guy is the ultimate hustler.
Nick Saltarelli 28:58 ↗
Yeah. Ben messaged me. He's like, 'Do you any chance you're going to be in San Francisco Monday?' I'm like, 'Yeah, of course.' He's like, 'Here it is.' I'm like, 'Okay, perfect. I'm flying on Sunday. It's the only way, man. You got to make opportunity.' So yeah. So we're getting in the car. We do deliveries for like five months. Here's where the magic happened on content. We would wake up in the morning every morning. And this I took, I think I took do things that don't scale and we just went way too far with it. So in the morning all of our orders would be ready and we would literally go on people's Instagram. So if you had a dog named Chuck, we'd be like, 'Shout out Chuck.' And we would wear these crazy outfits and we took Polaroids of ourselves. Okay. Just meatheads.
Shaan Puri 29:38 ↗
Yeah. Complete like customer.
Nick Saltarelli 29:40 ↗
And we would take a Polaroid picture and we would show up to their house and this always happened. Okay. So we would show up to the house and be like, 'Wait, why are you doing the delivery?' And then we would do, and so you would get to hang with the customer. We would get more content out of it. So we'd be filming the whole experience.
Shaan Puri 29:54 ↗
Oh my god.

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Puri, S. (2026, August 17). Super niche businesses making millions in 2026 [Interview transcript]. My First Million. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3003460/

MLA

Shaan Puri. "Super niche businesses making millions in 2026." My First Million, 17 Aug. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3003460/.

BibTeX
@misc{puri2026_3003460,
  author       = {Shaan Puri},
  title        = {Super niche businesses making millions in 2026},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, My First Million. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {aug},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3003460/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}