What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from ndhackers.com, and you're listening to the
Indie Hackers Podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses,
and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where
they are today? How did they make decisions, both with their companies and in their personal
lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so
that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet
businesses. In this episode, I sat down with Sam Parr, the founder of The Hustle. Sam had joined
me in a previous episode to talk about the story behind how we created The Hustle, which is this
massive tech and business newsletter with millions of subscribers that does tens of millions of
dollars a year in advertising revenue. We've kept up since that conversation. I spoke at his
conference last December. And Sam was just a really fun and interesting guy to talk to about
anything related to tech and business strategy, content, media, he just cut straight to the heart
of an issue. He's very no bullshit guy. He doesn't care about fluff. He doesn't care about tradition.
He just wants to know what works. And so there's a lot to learn from Sam. He's the first guy to say,
Hey, I'm not an expert. Don't listen to me. But the reality is he is an expert. He's built some
very impressive businesses and products. And I think his experience can really show just how
much leverage you can have as one or two people on the internet, how many people you can reach,
how much money you can make, how much of an impact you can have. So I hope you enjoyed this
conversation with Sam. So how are things going with COVID-19 and your revenue with everybody
kind of staying at home and reading a lot, but also advertising revenue, basically dropping
across the board with pretty much every media company? Yeah, so we make money in three ways,
advertising. So we have this daily email that goes up to millions of people that makes money via
advertising, we make money through events. And historically, that makes millions of dollars a
year. And then we make money through paid subscription. So advertising is doing fine.
We are going to grow it a ton. Now it's going to grow mildly. Events disappeared.
Yeah, I'm going to launch some courses and stuff like that to supplement, but gone. No fixed costs
for that. So we hadn't booked anything. So it's missed revenue, but we didn't miss money. We didn't
hire the people who we wanted to hire to do it. But so they got screwed. But besides that our
company, we lost money or we lost out on potential money, but we didn't lose. We didn't actually lose
money. My friend Jason Lemkin, you know Jason probably. Yeah, I don't know this for a fact.
I bet he lost $10 million because his event was going to happen in March. So we did not. So we're
good. And then trends are paid subscription just booming. It's good to hear. I mean, I think the
timing is perfect for your events. Because the last HustleCon was I think in December. I spoke
at HustleCon in December. And so you had like, like you said, a lot of leeway, basically a lot
of runway where you didn't have to hire anyone, you weren't sort of ramping up. But there are so
many events that are going to happen in March and April. Like I think I'm supposed to be in
Minnesota like microconf like this week or next or something, but that got delayed. So yeah,
I think you dodged a bullet with that one. Yeah, not good for those guys. But I dodged a bullet.
So give me an overview of the Hustle nowadays. You've got, like you said,
these three different ways that you make money. You've got trends, you've got your
newsletter, you've got your events, you've also got a podcast that you're funding in some way.
Yeah, well, you know that that's just me doing it. It's just like, yeah, that's me doing it.
So the costs aren't really big. The update basically is like, I think we're going to build
just a huge subscription business. And I don't remember what month you and I talked to last.
But I have almost a year now of having a subscription business for the hustle.
It's going to be so fucking big. It's going to be a big thing, I think.
Last time we talked, I was asking you what were your goals? And your goals were you want to build
a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a media empire? Is it still the same?
Yeah, no, well, I said I want to do that by 2025.
Right. So these are like your goals.
Yeah, like, it's awesome. I've learned so much about subscription businesses.
I am definitely not an expert. But I think I've learned why a lot of people are bad at it. And
I also learned that a lot of people, a lot of media companies, their goals are just like
bullshit, their goals are so little. And they're so bad at a bunch of stuff. And it can work out
way better than people think. Do you think being kind of a tech business in addition to a media
business, like you're not a very traditional media business, you're a little bit more modern,
you think that's given you the insights you've needed to sort of figure out what others can't?
It's a tripod, there's has three legs. So A, I know how to do content. So if it were just me
in my house, I could just write blogs that could reach millions of people. I don't know if it's a
talent or if it's a skill set, but I have that ability. So I have that. So that's like media,
but I don't I'm not like a media insider. Like I don't know a ton of stuff.
The second thing is like this tech product focus. But I'm not a developer. And I've never had a tech
company. So like, I know it. And I know, like, we run in that circle, but I know it. But then the
third thing is internet marketing, I know how to do sales really well. And so like, if you add all
three of those, it kind of has created something really cool. Let's get through this. The first
one is just writing and media. You said that without a company behind you, without people
behind you that you know how to reach millions of people through writing. I did it. I was the first
and only employee in the first month of business, we had almost a million people come to our website.
What do you know that other people putting out content don't know?
I learned how to become a writer. So I like locked myself in a room for a year or six months. And I
just like learned I taught myself the skills. I think that naturally, I was born with an ability
to have a conversation with someone. But I learned how to write. If you learned how to play guitar,
well, maybe like the people who are really good, they were born pretty good. But most people they
just like sat down and they play jingle bells. And then they played Happy Birthday. And then they
played Green Day. And then they played this and that like you progress and you improve, right?
You learn the basics. And then and so I did that. And so I learned it.
That whole process is invisible to the listeners and the readers. They just see like the good
writing and the good musicians and they're like, Oh, people are born with this. But they don't see
the people practicing and doing what you did to learn how to write.
Yeah, I've been blogging since 2010 10 years now. So I've been doing that. And before that,
I was always selling stuff online like eBay. So I learned how to write pages and stuff like that.
So yeah, I just learned. So that's how I got good at it was I learned.
I think being a writer is useful for pretty much any founder, though. Like on any hackers,
we've got this community forum, you have all these people coming on and asking questions and trying
to get advice and feedback and trying to share what they're up to. And it's funny to see so many
founders and see like the giant chasm between like the best writers and the worst writers and the
best writers can get hundreds of people to answer their questions and help them out being being a
good copywriter. Just being okay. Copywriter is the number one skill that you can ever have if
you want to make money. Why do you say that? Hands down without a doubt. Okay, so let me talk
to you through this. What does copywriting mean? Copywriting means a lot of people think it means
like just writing like cute stuff that makes people laugh. That's not what copywriting means.
Copywriting means understanding human behavior and understanding people's wants and needs and
manipulating that into getting them to buy stuff. Whether you're getting them to buy a product or
you're getting them to donate money or you're getting them to do anything. And in terms of
copywriting, oftentimes that comes in the form of the written word. But the reason why copywriting
is important is you can use it to meet a girlfriend. You can use it to convince an employee to join
your company. You can use it to convince loads of people on social media to get behind your movement.
You can use it to sell stuff. You can use it to get an investor. Dude, you convince people
every day. So if you understand what motivates people and then you understand how to communicate
it using words, it's like I'm going to a gunfight with like a magic sword that like shoots laser
beams. It's like it's unfair. It's like just an unfair advantage. Yeah, I mean, writing's everywhere.
It's in your tender profile. It's in your emails. It's in your job descriptions. You text people
all day. You email people. You message people on Facebook. Like all day, I do it. So give us some
tips, some copywriting tips for people who are complete novices to this. You haven't studied
copywriting like you have and who don't know sort of the basics of writing how they normally write,
writing how to convince people to buy things and do the things that they like them to do.
So if you're a complete noob, go and read advertising secrets of the written word by
Joe Sugarman. And if you really just want to be very lazy, just remember AIDA, attention,
interest, desire, action. That's pretty much the perfect formula. It's a pretty basic formula.
And once you master it, you can do more complicated stuff. But AIDA is like, typically the way that
you lay out any type of good sales argument or sales pitch attention, you grab their attention
interest, you tell them facts, get the interested desire, you tell them stories to make them desire
by showing them features and benefits and an action you specifically lay out which actions to
take. If you use the AIDA formula, that's probably the easiest way to sell stuff. And that's for
literally everything. It doesn't matter if you're making a website matter. That's the formula for
persuasion. And that's been around since like the 20s or the 30s, I think I was reading something
probably before that. Yeah, it's like the dawn of the advertising industry that like kind of
figure this out. But yeah, I'm sure people actually knew this well before that and maybe
hadn't put in those exact words, use that exact acronym. Right. If you want to go hit on a girl,
like what do they what's what do we always say? Like when we're young, we talk about pickup lines,
right? That's AIDA, that's attention. There's your attention. And then interest, you talk to
them and ask like where people are from and then desire you make them want you by like showing off
a little bit in action, you like ask them for the phone number. I mean, this is like AIDA.
So you got this tripod, the first part of it is copywriting. The second part of it is, I think
you said, copywriting, copywriting is different than writing writing. I don't I can't write like
a fiction book, but I can I can write long form blog posts as well. And I would say that I'm a
pretty good copywriter. And I'm a pretty good, like blogger, but I am I don't think I'm world
class at either. The third part, I think was tech. No, so like blogging in media, like I understand
media and how to get traffic. And then yeah, like marketing. Yeah, like tech and product.
I understand that stuff a little bit. Most media companies are based in New York. And for some
reason, they do a horrible job of like understanding customers and understanding like,
you are creating widgets for a group of people, and they have to desire and want it. Whereas a lot
of like media companies in New York, they look at it like just Google Analytics and like these are
just numbers on a board and we have to make them go up. And there's a lot of ways that you can get
those numbers to grow up in the short term that actually hurt you a big time in the long run.
I think that Silicon Valley has a lot of soft people who are not good at stuff. And they
put way too much emphasis on user experience, and it's got to be perfect. And sometimes that may
means that they're not aggressive enough about certain things. That said, I do think that if
you take a little bit of that, like it's all about the customer making them happy and pleasing them
and all that stuff. That's great. So let's put this in context. Your subscription business is
called Trends. You launched this I think around the last time you're on the podcast, which I can't
remember, maybe a year ago, you're on the show. And Trends is great. I've been subscribed to it
for a while now, right? It's great. Super cool. It's really high quality writing. I love the
newsletter. I haven't joined the Facebook group yet. But I just applied to join like 10 minutes
ago. Tell us about Trends. Tell us about how it works. Do you know your friends with Steph Smith,
right? Yep. So yeah, I thought you did. She's, she's everywhere. So she was one of our main
writers. And Trends is, it's like a weird thing. It's like, when I first so I was the first writer
for it. So the way that I have typically launched stuff is I do all the work. And then I do like an
okay job at it. But I'm pretty good at like getting the first set of customers. And then I'll hire
people who are way better than me. And they eventually run it. And that's what Steph does.
And so here, I just approved you so you can kind of poke around. And so I, the original
idea was I'm gonna do all these cool case studies on companies and explain how they work. And that
was interesting to me. And that's what we did. And so at this point, I mean, trends is going to be an
eight figure subscription business by the end of the year trends is it's a it's a content research
is like a research content product, but it also has a community with thousands and thousands of
interesting people.
And it's pretty nuts to build an eight figure business as fast as you built it. And I think a
lot has to do with the order in which you did things you started the hustle, which is this massive
newsletter and media company, before you built a subscription business. And I see most founders
doing things the other way around, they start a subscription business, and then they try to figure
out what their marketing is going to be how they reach people. How important do you think it was to
do things in the order that you did them in?
I wish I would have started the subscription business earlier. I the reason I started it this
way was a I was copying people who had done this before successfully, there's a few people who I
was just ripping off their strategy. So I definitely don't want to take credit for that. But it was
quite important. I mean, look, when you have a loyal audience, it's like, our audience is smaller,
but similar to like the Kendall Jenner girl, like she could launch anything she what's the who's the
girl with the lipstick thing on Kylie Jenner? Yeah, the billionaire. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So like she could sell anything and it will it will be successful. And it's definitely that kind
of strategy where we launch stuff. And it just works. Because for trends, we don't spend that
much money on marketing. And so our team's really small who works on it. It's only two people.
It's a subscription business. And it will make you know, millions of dollars a month, I think,
by the end of the year. So it's like, that's insane. Pretty awesome. And that would have
been really hard to do without the hustle. I mean, the day we launched, we got like 4000 subscribers
at $300 a year. Or maybe I forget the exact number, but it was good.
Let's talk about how trends works as a subscription business. You mentioned the media
companies based in New York, they kind of take a short term approach. They're not really good at
growing their audience or growing their subscription revenue because they make these like short term
decisions. What are some of the longer term decisions that you're making with trends that
are helping you grow the subscription business and the substantial monster that has become in
such a short time? So basically, the way that I tend to do things is it's like 50% science,
50% art. So I research a ton and I follow the data. And then also, I just make stuff up that
feels right. Before I launched it, I went and talked to a lot of people. So the people at the
athletic, the people at which is the athletic is like a $500 million valued subscription
content company, Motley Fool, which is quite big, and then loads of others,
Wall Street Journal, New York, I talked to everyone. And what I learned was that pricing
was important. I think you can actually charge a lot more money than you think for certain
subscriptions. And so we charge $300 a year and that's way too low, we're actually going to
increase it by a fair bit in the next three or two months whenever the one year anniversary of
launching is in June. And so that's important. Another thing is we did annual billing only.
And what annual billing only has allowed us to do is our cash flow is really good. And that was
important. A lot of startups, not only do they charge like $5 a month for the product, which
for most people is a massive mistake, not everyone, but most people, but also what they do is they
allow you to do like a freemium thing, like try for free. Nope, that's wrong too. I think for most
people, that is wrong, you want to charge up front. And so that's what we did. We made sure
to charge up front. Super smart. And the fourth thing that we did was we only did... Did I say
annual billing? Yeah, only annual billing, massive cash flows. And then the other thing was sales
pages. Most people fucking suck at sales pages. They are so bad at it. And we worked really hard
to have really good long form sales pages, which a lot of Silicon Valley people think that that's
stupid and doesn't work. And they are totally wrong. It does. For most people, it works way
better than not. And so we have a hard paywall as opposed to a website where you can see all
the articles and things like that. Yeah, I think it's almost a cultural aesthetic thing in Silicon
Valley to be against these long form sales pages. It's not a trendy thing here.
But if you go to Amazon and you go and... Now, long form doesn't always necessarily mean you
have a lot of text. Long form typically means you give the person a lot of information before
they make the purchase. And so that lot of information could be in the form of photos
or it could be in the form of a video. But if you go to Amazon.com and you look at the Kindle,
which... Or whatever Amazon is trying to pimp out, like the Echo. I have an Echo right here.
They're trying to make the Echo big. That's probably where the best sales pages are.
And if you go to the Echo, I'll go right now, I bet you there's 2000 words describing what an Echo
is on Amazon.com. So I don't know why people are so against long form sales pages, but they work.
Like, oh my gosh, go look at the Echo right now. I'm checking it out right now. The Amazon Echo.
Third generation. Yeah, it's huge. There's a ton. And they also have 61,000 reviews and you could
go and read all of them. That's so much copy. And this is only a $30 product. And typically,
the more expensive the price or the more expensive the product, the longer the sales
page needs to be. And so anyway, I just think that Silicon Valley sucks at this. I don't know why.
I mean, it's the concept of education based selling, where you're trying to inform your
customers and make sure that they understand more about the landscape and what you're offering,
and then they honestly end up trusting you more, especially if you're selling information or a
subscription to something like Trends, where essentially you're giving people information.
And if you prove to them that you can give them really good information,
they also understand more about why your subscription is great, or why your Amazon
product is great, then they're much more likely to buy. But again, I just don't think it's trendy.
I think it's trendier to copy what you see the hottest startup in your neighborhood doing and
just make a website that looks like theirs. Yeah. And oftentimes, even if they do succeed,
it's like they succeed despite themselves. There's so many better ways to do it.
Let's actually look up something interesting. So Mira, have you heard of this thing called Mira,
or is it called Miro? I haven't heard of it.
This whiteboard software? Miro. It's pretty cool. I signed up to it for today. It's pretty neat.
Let's see what their sales pages is. I think a lot of these companies do a pretty good job.
They have longish sales pages. But for most people, if you go to Product Hunt and look
at what the top products are, they use very web 2.0 flat design, all this stuff.
And it's...
It's more about fitting in than it is about what's effective. It's more about like,
what are other people on Product Hunt doing? Let me make sure my website looks the same.
Yeah, 100%. And I don't think that people think about this the right way.
So you went to all these different media companies. You went to The Athletic,
and Motley Fool, and The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
What did you learn by talking to them? And how did that help you launch trends?
Yeah, if you want to hear some interesting stories. Have you heard of this company? Did
I tell you about Agora? I told you about Agora, right?
No.
Okay, so Agora is one of the most interesting companies I've ever heard of in my life.
I'll give you background. They started in the 1970s. The guy who started, his name was Bill
Bonner. I may not be describing this accurately, but for most people, he's like pretty hardcore
libertarian. And arguably, the mainstream people might think that he's kind of like kooky and like
a conspiracy theorist. But he started this like, newsletter, which I don't even remember at the time
what it was called, but he basically just grew it over many, many years. And at this point,
Agora is a collection of roughly 50 different brands and 50 different newsletters. They do
about 1.2, 1.5 billion dollars a year in sales. And it's 100% privately owned. It might be one
of the most profitable, top 100 most profitable privately owned companies in America. And they
get sued a lot because they do a lot of unethical stuff. They promote newsletters on how to cure
cancer or how to cure diabetes. So it's a lot of fear mongering. And do you remember,
do you know who James Altucher is? Yeah. Do you know his newsletter, the Bitcoin thing?
I've seen his Bitcoin ads, a little controversial. Agora owns that.
Okay, yeah. So exactly what you're talking about. It's not the most ethical. It's not the most honest.
No, it's not. But you can learn from anyone. And anyway, I learned a lot from those guys. I went
and talked to them. I mean, they make so much money and they do it in a lot of unethical ways,
but there's still stuff that can be learned. What's the ethical stuff that they do that
you can learn from? I think James Altucher's product is mostly legit. I think his stuff's
legit. His marketing is a little hardcore though. They own this brand called Money. What's it called
Map Money Press? And it's all about interesting stocks and analyzes different stocks. I think
it's legitimate. Bill Bonner, the guy who owns the company, he's definitely a little kooky,
but he's got some really cool newsletters that I pay money for. And I find them to be very
fascinating and fun. I think it's a common pattern in everything you do where you're not trying to
innovate from the ground up, from first principles, what's going to work. Rather, you're looking at,
out of all the thousands of businesses and millions of people out there,
what's already working for people. And you just go talk to those people. And yeah, I think so.
Yeah, I do that.
I've noticed this pattern. And you mentioned it earlier too. Like, okay, maybe this isn't the
most innovative thing, but you've got to look at what other people have done. And I think that's
by far the smartest way to go. Even with Indie Hackers, I didn't come up with the idea for
Indie Hackers in a vacuum. I looked at what was working for Pure Levels' business, Nomad List,
and a few other businesses and just sort of copied the fundamentals of what's going on with them.
But I think that is innovative. Because what has ever been made that is truly original? I mean,
like, not even Tesla's original. It's just an electric car that's done better and differently
and is cool, right? It's not like he was the first electric car. To me, business is kind of like
writing songs where there's a handful of chord structures that just work. And most pop songs are
around 80 to 100 beats per minute. And they have a chorus, a bridge. And there's just best practices.
And within those best practices, I can make my art. And that's kind of how I view it.
How do those conversations go? Do you just email somebody at the New York Times and say,
hey, I'd like to pick your brain about how your business works? I never use that word,
pick your brain. But that's my pet peeve. But yeah. Yeah, I cold email people like crazy.
I tell them who I am. I'm lucky because at this point, some people know who we are.
I get in their face. And I'm very confrontational. Or I'll say like, hey, I'm going to build this
thing. Tell me how you do it. And I just ask questions. I'll be like, how much revenue you
guys do? What do you pay? And I also reveal information about my company to them. And they
can learn from me sometimes. And then also, I just kind of brute force my way to getting the answer.
That makes so much sense because I think people like talking about what they do.
If somebody emails me and asks me a specific question about how I do something that I do,
especially if I find it impressive or I'm proud that I did something,
I'm pretty likely to just explain it.
Yeah. So typically what I do is I flatter them because it's not bullshit. I'm genuinely
interested. And I think it's awesome what they did. So I would do it with you. I would say,
how many people listen to the Indie Hackers Podcast? And I don't know, would you tell me?
Yeah, I would tell you, of course.
How many people listen per episode?
35,000 downloads.
Wow, that's a lot. How many episodes do you do a week?
One a week. Although I'm pretty inconsistent. I've had periods where I do two a week. I've had
periods where I miss two or three weeks in a row.
Does it make profit?
Nope. We don't charge for anything. Stripe bought the company. We immediately shut off all of our
advertising. We make $0 in Indie Hackers.
How or why did they buy it?
Stripe's mission is to increase the GDP of the internet. And I think the most succinct way to
say it is that Indie Hackers inspires people to start companies. And those people go on to become
Stripe customers. And some of them make Stripe a lot of money and make a lot of money for themselves.
So the incentives are really aligned to basically help companies do well and inspire people to start
companies.
How many people work on the site?
My brother and I full time, Rosie Sherry as our community manager.
So wait, is Rosie Sherry one person?
Yeah, she's one person.
So only three people?
Yeah, it's only three. We've had some contractors. Like we have a guy that's my podcast.
How much do you pay someone to edit your podcast?
Let's see. I don't actually know. I think like 150 bucks an episode.
That's a steal.
So he's great.
So anyway, my point is, is that...
I'll just answer all these questions for you.
You just tell you what you need to know.
And it comes from a genuine place of like, I think what you do is so impressive.
And also, if I just kind of directly ask you what I want to know, and I'm not doing it.
I'm being aggressive about how I'm asking, but I don't think I'm making you uncomfortable.
And if at any point you said, I don't want to answer, I would be like, oh, it's okay.
Like, you know what I mean?
Right.
So anyway, I'm just, I think that if you just are a man on a mission or a woman on a mission,
you can definitely just get it done.
Before you start a trend, you had the hustle, obviously.
The hustle, for those who haven't listened to our previous conversation,
is an absolutely massive newsletter.
I mean, you've got millions of subscribers you're doing.
I think eight figures in ad revenue with the hustle.
It's a great base to launch a different product on.
It's a great base to launch trends on.
You even launched a podcast.
How's your podcast doing?
How many downloads are you getting?
And do you think that having the hustle sort of kickstarted the growth of your podcast as well?
I think we do a shit job of promoting it.
We're only 50% the size of you.
So in terms of downloads per episode, it's probably, it's what is there.
See, I'm like pretty ignorant when it comes to podcasts.
Is there a difference between listens per episode and downloads per episode?
I think all these stats differ depending on what podcast player you're looking at
or who your podcast host is.
But internally, I separate listens and downloads.
And I consider a listen to be somebody who downloaded the episode
and then listened to at least half of it.
We're like in the range of 15 to 20,000 listens per episode,
which I think is only okay.
I think it's like on the top, it's in the top, I don't know.
What would that be?
Like the top 40 maybe?
Yeah.
For a business podcast especially, it's like top 1% I would say of podcasts.
It's on the bottom half of the 1%.
And so it goes okay.
Podcast growth is hard.
It's tough.
It's so hard.
Very driven by word of mouth.
People recommend episodes to each other.
I've interviewed people who have big audiences and their episodes get okay downloads.
I've interviewed people.
We had just a great conversation and it really flowed.
And a ton of people recommend it to their friends every day.
And those episodes have gotten 100,000 downloads.
Yeah, it's crazy.
So I started doing it in earnest in December.
And it's fun.
You kind of get famous.
Isn't it weird?
People act like they know you and stuff.
People recognize your voice because they're literally listening to you in their ear,
have conversations for hours and hours and hours.
But it's cool because they don't recognize you on the street.
So you're like fake famous.
No one will really bother you.
But when they hear you talk, they're like, you're that guy.
It's awesome.
And how many followers do you have on, I'm looking you up on Twitter?
I don't know, probably like 23,000.
I'm not very active on Twitter.
You got, that's where it's at right now.
But like, so it's cool because like, yeah, 23, almost 24,000.
If you just tweet something like, I need help with like this.
I need to find a better bank.
It's my favorite use case for Twitter.
Advice Twitter, basically.
Something that I don't want to Google because I think my followers will have
a better answer, a better recommendation.
What should I do in this city?
Or like you said, you know, I need a bank.
What do you recommend?
Or what's the latest tool for equity?
You just get responses in like five minutes instantaneously.
If you have enough followers.
I asked people like which coffee I should order.
And I got like, I think 100 replies.
Anyway, I don't know how well we're talking.
Oh, podcasting.
Our podcast is pretty good.
It can be better.
I love it.
I think it's extremely well made.
Thank you.
I haven't talked to anyone who's sort of cracked the nut on podcast growth.
Although I have my own theories that a lot of it is similar to what helps
newsletters grow, for example, being newsier and focused more on like trending topics,
rather than being purely educational, I think can help with retention
and people not necessarily dropping it.
But yeah, I mean, I would love to sit down and like talk to you for an hour
about podcast growth and what you guys are doing and talk to other.
I don't know shit, dude.
You're the one like, I don't do anything.
I do nothing.
We do nothing for it.
I just hired an intern to help me grow it.
But we do nothing for it.
You know, you should talk to you should talk to Sonal.
If you want to from a 16 Z.
She runs kind of their media empire and their podcast.
And they do a ton of downloads.
And she's very thoughtful.
And that's like her entire job.
I'm doing the podcast and like 50 other things.
You're doing 50 other things.
She's a great person to talk to.
I would love to.
So you've got trends.
You've got your podcast.
You've got the hustle.
This is all basically one giant media empire.
If I look at what giant, but yeah,
I mean, it's giant for most people who are listening,
who are basically trying to start their own tiny companies.
And I think it's popular nowadays more so than it was in the past for people to kind
of start these small media companies by themselves.
Yeah, man, if people can build a much bigger media company with one or two people,
then they probably think it's crazy.
I mean, the written word is extremely scalable.
Yeah, look, I'm telling you this because I know people who do it.
And I've done it.
You can make $10 million a year.
You can make $50 million a year.
I'm not exaggerating.
$50 million a year with four people on an email list.
Or sorry, four writers.
Ben Thompson from Shatekari is one of the great examples.
I don't know exactly how many subscribers he has,
but I've heard it's in the many tens of thousands.
And they're each paying $100 a year.
And he's not even charging.
He's writing four blog posts.
He's not charging enough at all.
I know I have a friend, Kevin Van Trump is his name.
He no relation to the other Trump.
He just shared with Kevin Van Trump.
He has this thing called the Van Trump Report.
I met this guy at a conference.
He's like six foot two and like 350 pounds.
He's like this massive guy.
And he has a paid newsletter on ag tech, agriculture technology,
roadmap to better decision making for investors and ag tech professionals.
He makes about $30 million a year off this newsletter.
And it is just him.
That's unbelievable.
What would you say to somebody who is thinking about writing a newsletter right now
and they're trying to get started?
How might you start a brand new newsletter company today if you had nothing?
I would pick a very, very, very small but fast growing niche.
I would purposely know who I am trying to attract.
And more importantly, who I am not going to try to attract.
The whole point of this is you have to go niche.
So I would do that for sure.
I would not sign up for sub stack.
I don't think they do a good job.
I think that they can do great.
But I don't think they do do great at the moment.
What would I do?
I would then charge more money than I think I should.
I would charge like $500 to $1,000 a year.
And then I would make sure that the information that I provide was very utilitarian.
So it would need to be the way that I would say is I'm like,
it has to be like a vegetable sputtered in peanut butter.
And that it can be entertaining and interesting.
But at its core, it's got to be utility.
It's got to help you get something done better.
I would also try to make sure that I tailored it towards people
who are going to make money using the information that I provide them.
This way, it's a very easy justification, the cost.
What else?
I would charge like $500 a year, something like that.
And then I would just spend a fair bit of money on advertising to make it grow.
And then I would occasionally have blog posts,
which I would work very hard to make go viral.
And I would probably instead of posting on my own blog,
I would post on my blog and I would try to make it go popular on Hacker News
or Reddit or wherever the people are or your site, wherever the people are.
Or I would try to guest post for other people.
I love that you said, make sure that this is vegetable,
it's utilitarian in combination with making sure
that people can actually use what you're writing to make money.
Essentially, you want to sell to customers who have money
and you want to help them make more money,
which then allows them to justify paying this $500 a year or $1,000 a year,
which they're not going to pay for just writing something
that's purely for entertainment.
And I think it's a great time for that too.
I was just reading a report from Similar Web
that for the first time in a while,
business and finance coverage is getting more clicks and reads
than any other category, even politics.
And it's an election year, Donald Trump is president
and people are still reading more about business and finance
and they're reading about politics.
And so it's kind of a golden area if you want to write about stuff.
Yeah, it's awesome.
To help people grow their businesses.
Like you said, this guy's got his ag tech newsletter.
The hustle is all about business and tech.
Trends is specifically about business and tech.
Who are you not targeting with trends?
You said you need to exclude people.
You need to be for a specific niche.
Who is trends not for?
And who is it for?
We're going to start charging more money.
And we purposely, if you are a young college student
or you're just getting started in your career,
we're probably not the place for you.
We have a lot of people in Europe or Asia
who say, can you guys do some more coverage
in different countries?
And we're not for that.
We have to stick to what we know.
We don't know Asia.
We don't know Europe.
A lot of big corporations have offered to pay us
thousands of dollars a year in order
to do custom coverage for them.
We will be eventually.
So those are who we're not for.
It's a tough decision to make, to exclude people.
But also you have to do it to be focused.
And reading trends and paying for trends,
like I'm kind of squirrely in what you're saying.
Like I'm not in Asia.
I'm in the United States.
I'm not a fledgling college student.
I'm sort of mature.
It's easy for me to pay for it.
For example, I didn't think twice.
I put it on my Stripe sort of company card.
Yeah, that's why I pay for trends.
And that's what we do.
I mean, we know that that's how it's going to work.
And so it's like an easy justification.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of people charge
way too little for what they're doing
because they don't, number one,
target the right customers.
And they just don't understand that
if you target the right customers
that they just have a lot of income
to spend on stuff like this.
If I can read your business newsletter
and I have literally thousands of dollars a month
as my budget,
it's a no-brainer for me to spend
$300 or $400 on something.
I don't even blink.
Where people charging $5 or $10 a month
for these SaaS products
that they're building for years.
They're stupid.
They don't understand it.
I think so much work into it.
And I own a small SaaS company
that the product costs $5 a month.
And that's what the price is.
And that's what the price is.
I built one.
Yeah.
And the pricing is that.
And I'm like,
oh my God, this thing is never going to grow.
Well, you need like tens of thousands
of paying subscribers to make any money.
And even then, you're only making
like a small amount of money.
Whereas if you have like a thousand people
paying you $500 a month,
that's ridiculous.
It's way better.
And it's way less of a headache.
You have better customers.
You probably don't complain as much.
And you're not nickel and diming.
You're not getting nickel and dimed.
And also,
the way it works, I think,
is the person who could spend the most
money to acquire a customer will win.
Right.
And you can only do
if you charge a lot per customer.
Or you're going to lose a ton of money.
And you're like,
well, somehow people are going to stay
with this product for 10 years.
And I'll make my profit in year 789.
And I'm like,
oh, all right.
Well, I mean, maybe that definitely
could work, I guess.
But it's like scary.
So how are you spending money
to acquire customers for trends?
We aren't.
I mean, we drive people to a trial.
And we spend like 50 grand a month
at this point.
Not a lot.
The way that we get most of our subscribers
is through the hustle.
There's a great tweet the other day
from Dave Gerhart.
He said,
don't build a marketing team.
Build a media company for your niche.
And it kind of goes back to
what I was talking about earlier.
You build a media company.
Yeah, it's exactly what you did.
He wants to launch a podcast
under our name.
And I forgot to reply to him.
Is he legit?
I don't know very much about him.
In fact, I couldn't have told you
his name before I saw that tweet.
But he seems to have a following.
I thought it was an interesting tidbit.
So you have to do some of your
Sam Parr research to figure it out.
I need to.
He seems like a good guy,
but I don't know him.
Yeah, and that's another thing
I wouldn't do,
which a lot of people do.
They're so stupid.
I hate when people do this,
where typically it's journalists
or engineers who do this,
or Silicon Valley people.
And they're like,
it's a $5 donation.
Or it's $1 a month.
I'm like, first of all,
don't even fucking charge
if it's a dollar a month.
Just give it away, dude.
You're stupid.
Charge way more money.
And second, don't call it a donation.
If you are providing me value,
I will pay you for this thing.
I don't go to a restaurant
and you give me a steak
and you say,
oh, just pay whatever.
It's like, no, I gave you value.
You give me value back.
I'll give you more value
than you're going to give me back
in terms of money.
And at least my goal is to make your experience
far greater than this $20 steak.
But give me $20.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And I think the other thing about this is
when you charge money
for what you're building,
you get the right kinds of customers.
Because if people are paying you money,
then they must think
what you're doing is really valuable.
It must be making the money
or saving the money
or providing them
with a really great experience
if they're handing you money.
Whereas if you're making something free,
it might be valuable to people,
but not in a way
that actually is worth them
coughing over and talking to.
And so if you have all these free users,
they're going to be requesting
all sorts of stuff
that you probably shouldn't build
because it's just going to be stuff
that a freezer would expect.
Whereas if you have paid users,
they're going to be requesting things
that actually provide
monetary value to them.
And that's a much better train to be on.
That's the kind of river
you want to be flowing down
because it'll lead you to building
a more valuable business over time.
I agree.
And I think that donations
definitely work in some cases.
Not only do they work in some cases,
I think a lot of streamers
make a lot of money through donations.
And that's great.
Good for them.
I also think that some products
should be nonprofits or should be donation driven.
Totally.
I'm totally acceptable with that.
But if you're trying to make
a money making enterprise,
I just don't understand
why you would do that in most cases.
Well, people doing that
don't last for very long.
I mean, either they stop doing that
or their business just dies.
Or they're incredibly frustrated
for like three or five years
working on this thing
that doesn't make any money.
But anyway, you're paying for
some of your subscribers for trends.
But a lot of them are also coming
from the hustle, your main newsletter.
The vast majority of them.
Like 90%.
The vast majority is just word of mouth
from the hustle.
You've got your marketing machine.
It's kind of spurred up.
What's the best way
if you have a really well oiled marketing machine,
if you have something
that people are reading regularly
to convert them to a subscription product?
Do you send them to these
long form sales pages that you have?
Yeah.
So when we launched,
I collected 50 or...
I think I had 80 grand in pre-sales.
And what I did was...
I wonder if I could find it.
I created a Gumroad page.
And it just said like,
my name's Sam Part, the Hustle.
I'm going to launch this thing
one day, like in the next handful of months.
And I'm going to charge maybe 500...
I said what the price is,
but I didn't know at the time.
I just guessed.
I was like, I'm going to charge
around this much money.
And if you want early access,
you could have it now for a lifetime,
but you pay 100 bucks.
And I put this on our thank you page.
Show the page.
The page...
Oh, here it is.
I found it.
The page that you see
after you send it for the hustle,
which got a lot of people to see it.
And anyway,
thousands of people would buy it.
And so I eventually said,
all right, this has legs.
And then I talked to all the people
who purchased it.
Like I did customer discovery,
just normal stuff.
I kind of honed it on the idea.
And so that's what I would do.
If you had a...
Oh, another thing I did was I emailed only...
I emailed it to 500 people.
And I explained that story of like,
I'm thinking about launching this.
Right now, it's just me.
I'm doing this.
If you're unhappy, I'll give you a refund.
But just so you know,
I'm going to charge like this much money
for it a year.
And you can get lifetime access for X.
And then people gave me money.
I sent them sample reports.
They liked them.
And then I called each person.
And I just did normal,
just hand-to-hand combat learning.
I think if you build an organization
around writing,
which obviously any media organization
is going to be built around,
there's a sense in which it feels
kind of like an endless treadmill.
I mean, you have to really like writing.
Because essentially...
If you don't like it here,
you're not going to work here.
Yeah, it's true.
I mean, you can't work for you.
You can do it if you don't like writing.
Because even as the founder,
you're sort of getting
these projects off the ground.
And at the end of the day,
it doesn't matter how great your writing is.
If you stop sending trends next week,
you're going to lose your subscription.
You're going to lose all your business.
It's very different than a SaaS business.
It's hard.
What are your tips for hiring good writers?
What are your tips for building
an organization around writing
that can sort of run on that treadmill successfully?
Here, by the way, check this out.
Go to your chat.
Like I sent it to you.
You can see this for the writers.
I discovered it.
It's GumroadLink?
Yeah.
Hustled trends.
I collected 50 grand that way.
Okay, so this is just a simple Gumroad landing page
where you've got like, I don't know,
maybe like 15, 16 paragraphs
introducing the hustle trends
and talking about what it's going to be about.
And then at the end,
you say that you're planning to charge
30 bucks a month for this.
But if people pay for it now,
they can get it for a one-time lifetime
access fee of $30.
And I think you said you made something
like $40,000, $50,000 or something like that.
Yeah, it was like 50 grand.
Maybe it was 30 grand.
It was tens of thousands of dollars.
Crazy.
And it's super simple.
I mean, I could tell you were using
what you talked about earlier,
Ada and writing this.
I'll put a link to this in the show notes
so people can read through it.
What about the people who work for you?
Like you tell me about the writers.
You told me about Steph Smith, who I know.
How do you hire good writers?
How do you identify good writers?
How do you pay good writers?
Yeah, I was going to write a Twitter thread on this.
But I'll explain a little bit.
So to write a good writer or to hire writers,
I've hired a lot of bad ones.
I've hired a lot of great ones.
The first prereq is you have to like it.
You have to enjoy doing it.
It is very hard.
And a lot of our writers, they write for us all day.
And then they have personal blogs
and they write at home.
So I had I have one guy
and I was talking to who he works for us now on Zoom.
And he put a screen down
and there was like a big piece of paper like right here.
I was like, what's that?
He goes, oh, it's this manuscript I wrote.
And it was like 200,000 work.
Like, I was like, what the fuck?
So yeah, and so he's like,
I wrote this like screenplay or something.
So you have to like it.
Step one, you have to like it.
And then two, you have to be talented.
And talent is broken into two different things.
The first thing is,
can you literally get the words into my brain?
And to do that, you don't have to have good grammar,
but you have to know how to tell a story.
And then the second part of talent
is you have to have insight and talent.
And so the way that I describe this is,
first of all, you have the grammar part,
it doesn't have to be good,
but you have to be able to tell a story.
And the way that I find out people can tell me a story
is I call it asking about the bottom fourth of the resume.
So the bottom fourth of the resume is the bottom part.
It says what clubs they were part of,
where they went to college, what they studied,
what they like to do in the free time.
And so I'll say, hey, where'd you,
I'll ask you right now, where'd you go to college?
I went to college at MIT,
which I'd always wanted to get into since I was a kid.
And I ended up getting a degree in computer science.
Wait, computer science, what was your favorite course?
My favorite course was, I think it was six, 170.
At MIT, all the courses have numbers.
And I don't know why they do it this way.
It's basically just to make everything so esoteric.
But we ended up learning how to build a chess game from scratch.
Why is that an entire semester?
It's interesting because it's a game, man.
Games are super addictive.
And it's one thing to sit down and read a bunch of books
about theory and essentially programming knowledge,
not really apply it,
but it's another to have a challenge that you get on day one.
And you know what you're building
toward the entire semester.
And if at the end of it all, your chess AI sucks,
then it's going to lose against everybody else's chess AI.
And if it's good, it's going to win a lot.
I don't remember who the teacher was.
Because quite frankly, I rarely went to class in college.
I did everything for my dorm room.
So now, if I wanted to, I would keep asking.
I'd be like, you went from the dorm room.
Okay, and so if you can, I'm asking because I care
and I'm interested.
And if you can continue getting me interested,
then I know that you're probably pretty good at a story.
But shockingly, a lot of people would be like,
oh, you know, I didn't really have a lot of favorite classes.
I'd be like, dude, if you spent four years
and tens of thousand dollars at a fucking university,
you can't tell me what you had a favorite class
or favorite moment, you're boring.
And either you suck at telling a story
or you're just boring.
And in both cases, I don't want to be around you.
So I asked about the bottom fourth of the resume.
That's what I do.
That's how I understand storytelling.
The second thing that I like to learn about
is just general knowledge.
So like, do you just like to learn about stuff?
And so a lot of times, our writers,
if you talk to them about Trump,
if you talk to them about Corona,
but then if you talk to them about pop culture, about LeBron,
they just have general knowledge
because they just consume a ton of information.
And that interests them a lot.
And then the third thing that I like to do
is I call specific knowledge.
And so I'll ask them about a very specific thing.
So we had this guy named Brad, and he wrote about,
this is more, I mean, sad,
but there was a problem with rape in the army.
And he had a front page expose
where he talked about this poor lady
who was raped in the military
and how it was a really big issue and a big problem.
And I had him tell me all about what he learned about that.
And he became an expert on that topic.
And it just proved to me
that he could learn really quickly and become an expert.
And so I try to look for those three things
when I'm hiring a writer.
It's a combination of like,
in the moment, can they be interesting
and show you that they're interesting
and interested in things?
And also past history,
have they really proven a track record
of being able to dig into things
and actually become expert researchers?
I'm curious if you were to hire someone
who is going to write for trends,
which is very specific.
I mean, you're writing about tech,
and you're writing about the future of tech,
and you're writing about business specifically.
Like, would you prefer to have someone
who's an expert on those subjects?
Or would you prefer to have someone
who's like a great writer in other fields,
but you think they can learn
to become interested in this area?
An expert.
Yeah.
Someone who eats, breathes, and sleeps and stuff.
Me and Trung, this guy we hired, Trung,
we all like text late at night.
We were screwing around Masterclass.
And I'm like, dude, Masterclass is so amazing
because when you take the class,
they're not really not teaching you that much stuff.
But it's so inspiring.
The commercials are so cool.
When I'm watching this Judd Apatow thing,
the story part is actually more interesting
than him teaching me how to be funny.
And he's like, yeah,
that's probably how they get people hooked.
And then they also are probably willing
to acquire customers for like dirt cheap.
Like, this is how we were talking for fun, right?
Yeah.
And so that it's way easier
when someone's obsessed with this stuff.
That's why I like working with my brother
because we also have the same company.
We're just on Zoom all day,
especially now that we're just like stuck
in our apartment.
We're on Zoom for literally like
just eight hours a day.
And anytime either one of us sees
like a product or something,
we're not just talking about the product.
We're just dissecting how it works,
the psychology behind it.
We talk a lot about news.
We talk about the hustle.
We talk about advertising.
And I'm very curious about advertising
in your situation too,
because you've got this subscription business.
And quite frankly,
when most people think about content
and making money from content,
their mind goes straight towards ads.
Not buying ads,
but literally working with advertisers
to put advertisements into their podcast,
into their newsletter,
into their blog,
and making money that way.
That's how you finance the hustle.
It's the bulk of your business.
Do you see the future being?
Well, it won't be the bulk of our business
starting in June.
Subscription revenue is going to pass out revenue.
How much of that is because of COVID-19?
There's a lot of business to shut down.
Obviously, that means they're not going to...
Even if we hit our forecast, it would be bigger.
That's nuts.
Do you see that being like the case forever?
Do you see yourself getting off
of kind of the advertising drip
and then being subscription and going forward?
Not off, but it's going to be
a good supplemental revenue.
But subscription is going to be bigger.
That's crazy.
And it's a good place to be.
I mean, quite frankly,
I think it's a better business
to have your customers paying you
for the value you're providing.
It's awesome.
Advertising is this kind of weird
mixed incentive thing.
Yeah, and here's why it's awesome.
You can say whatever you want.
You only have to please your customer.
Advertising is good because it's fast money.
You can drum that up fast.
It's very profitable,
but it definitely hits the ceiling.
And you definitely...
Sometimes your hands get tied.
And so now we'll make money through advertising.
But what I love,
and you like this,
you might be different.
And you could be honest
because you work for Stripe.
But if you're New Zealand
and you have your own business
and you can do whatever you want,
no one's going to get you.
It's exciting, right?
You can say anything you want.
And that's how you have to do it.
When you have advertisers,
sometimes you can't say stuff.
Yeah, I think a lot of people
don't know this about advertising,
but they're not just
these objective observers.
The second they start paying you
to put basically their ads in your content,
they kind of feel like
they have a seat at the table.
They don't want you to talk
about certain subjects.
They make requests
and they end up changing
the nature of your products.
And I think some of the bigger
media organizations
like the New York Times
or like traditional media organizations,
they've, I mean,
it happens on YouTube all the time.
Yeah, we have certain videos
because of advertising.
We had this big client.
It's a huge bank,
one of the top,
I'll say 10 banks.
And fuck, I'll say it.
It was Goldman Sachs.
And they wanted to advertise with us.
And we let them.
And I like Goldman actually.
And so it's not disrespectful to them.
I understand why they did this.
But we wrote a story
about Fuck Jerry.
And we thought it would be funny
just to use the word fuck
in every single sentence.
Right.
And they were like,
no, pull that shit.
And we're like, no, we're not.
No, but we lost money on that.
Right.
And so I thought that was funny.
I thought it was cool.
And another time,
one time when Trump got elected in 2016,
right when we had first started,
I wrote the whole email in Trump's voice.
And I thought it was funny
and like cute.
And the advertisers didn't.
But we did it anyway.
But now when you have like a lot
of employees and stuff,
and you have salesmen on quota,
it's like, oh shit.
It's like, I don't care
about that advertiser, to be honest.
Like, I like them
and I want them to win.
But I care more about my salesperson
who needs this commission.
And so you definitely have
to sacrifice some things.
Yeah, you're going to be on a subscription,
mostly subscription revenue basis
in the future.
You're not really going to have
to answer to anybody.
No, we'll expand our advertising.
I think that, you know,
the New York Times,
I would have to look it up.
I bet New York Times makes 60%
of their money through subscription
and 40% through advertising.
So no, it's good and I'll do it.
But I try to position everything
in my life to come
from a position of fuck you
to where like I like will like someone
and respect them
and want to work with them.
But at the end of the day,
I can just say fuck you
and walk away.
And I think that's the that you have to
if you come from that perspective,
you can make your key stakeholder
significantly happier.
And that's what I want to do.
I mean, the idea behind why
most people become indie hackers
when I asked them about it,
they give me all these answers
about money and about creative expression,
about working from wherever they want
or time independence,
but it all kind of boils down to freedom.
People want to have control over their lives.
As a founder,
you're building this thing
that gives you control over your life,
but you also want to have control
over the thing.
And so if you have the ability
to, as you say,
say fuck you to anybody,
this basically means that
they don't control you,
that you're still going to be alive.
You're still going to be thriving.
Even if you have a confrontation
with one of your partners,
it doesn't matter.
You have the freedom to do
whatever you want.
Yeah, and look,
I don't have that many confrontations.
I know I'm trying to sound
like some alpha bully or something,
but I don't.
I get along with all of our people,
and I'm really happy
with the decisions we make.
But it is really powerful
when we negotiate with people
or if we have an employee
who is being a jerk
or we have a customer
who's being a jerk,
it's always, you know what?
Leave.
Like, we don't need anything.
And that is actually significantly better.
And it makes the people
who I want to make happy,
it makes them much happier.
Given the fact that everybody's
kind of at home on their computers,
obsessively kicking refresh on Twitter
and every sort of news story,
traffic numbers are crazy high.
I think Bloomberg reported
the number of their new subscribers
in March was up almost 200%.
Andy Hackers has been growing like crazy.
We had like 50% more comments
in our community last month
than the month before.
I'm sure the hustle is growing like crazy.
Trends is growing like crazy.
But at the same time,
advertising revenue is down.
We're going through the sort of adpocalypse
where basically companies
just aren't advertising.
It sounds like, you know,
you've revised your estimates downward,
but you're still going to grow your ad business.
How are you making ads work
when people just aren't buying as many ads?
We have B2B advertisers.
So businesses are still buying some stuff.
Not a lot.
I mean, not as much,
but it's still growing.
And look, if you have 800, 900,000 people
opening your email each day,
which we do,
you can make money off of that.
I mean, maybe you won't make as much
and it'll be 30% or 40% less,
but you definitely make money off that.
I mean, you know,
people are still buying whoops
or people are...
What's this called? A whoop?
Whatever this thing is called.
People are still buying desks.
People are still buying stuff.
And so they're...
Yeah.
So they're willing to buy,
I mean, advertising for sure.
It's just not as much stuff.
Do you think if somebody's trying
to start their own media company,
earlier you recommended,
you know, they charge $500 or $1,000.
Would you recommend against doing
an advertising supported media business
as a one person anti-hacker?
Depends what your aspirations are.
If you want to get huge
and be a huge company,
I think it needs to be part of the bit.
It needs to be part.
It doesn't need to be.
But if you're going to go...
If you want to be huge
and you want to be huge fast,
you either have to get your funnel down
so you can spend a ton of money
on advertising to buy new users
or you have to do content marketing
and it's going to be a little bit slower
and you got to build a brand
and that advertising helps.
And by the way,
like I'm not against advertising inherently.
I think that if you do advertising well,
it's awesome.
I mean, advertising is amazing
because I mean,
I discovered so many cool things.
I just saw like a new pair of Jordans
that looked awesome
and they sponsor this podcast.
It looks so cool.
And I was like,
Oh, wow, I just discovered something cool.
When I listen to Tim Ferriss' podcast,
I like I hear like that's how
I discovered Wealthfront
and Wealthfront has made me
a lot of money every year
because of I use them.
So no, advertising is great
when it's done well.
So I would say,
yeah, do advertising
if that's what you're willing to do.
I mean, if that's what
if that fits your values,
which it fits mine,
but just know that that ad revenue
that shit gets addicting.
And oftentimes,
new products that you want to launch
go directly against
your advertising revenue goals
and revenue targets
and it they conflict hard.
And so you have to make sure
it's that you're willing to draw the line.
And we've done a good job at that,
but you have to make sure
that you draw the line
and most companies cannot like
a lot of many companies
that are ad supported right now
like Buzzfeed.
I don't think they will ever,
ever, ever be subscription driven.
And that is going to hurt them a lot.
What do you think stops them
from being able to launch something
subscription driven
and doing what you've done with trends?
Fear.
They will do all the things
that we described before.
Dude, if you go to Vox,
they're asking for donation.
Are you kidding me?
Is that the stupidest shit
you've ever seen?
And they're also VC funded.
They've raised $150 million.
You can't tell me.
I get so infuriated.
You can't tell me
that you can't build something
that's worth more than $1 donation.
Get the fuck out of here, you idiot.
You guys, like,
you have this big ass staff
of talented people
come up with something.
Don't do this dollar bullshit.
Golly.
So the reason why they won't launch stuff
is because their journalists
they come from a place of fear
where they're too afraid to price high
or they're too afraid to charge for stuff.
And also it's really hard
in the consumer's mind.
The whole freemium thing
is hard for a lot of people.
New York Times and Wall Street Journal
do it well
because they're like the best.
But for most people,
it's really hard to do freemium.
They're like,
oh, why would I pay for it
when I get most of it for free?
So it's a lot better
just to make it all or nothing.
And third, they're ad supported.
And so the ad team
and sales team will be like,
oh, no, don't put that pay.
Well, we need more views
for the advertising.
And it would take a long time
for a company like that
to change their culture.
And that would be hard.
So you got to get up
on the right foot, basically.
Yeah, and a lot of writers
don't want their stuff
behind paywalls.
They want, which is weird.
I'm like, you guys, look,
you're either going to put it
where you're going to be ad supported
and I need you to just pump shit out
that gets paid for use.
Or you can do less stuff
and it might get seen
by less people, but it might be better.
And I bet you'll think it's better.
So like pick your battle.
And a lot of journalists
are fickle and hard to work with.
And that's probably why
they don't like it.
But fucking Vox,
I can't believe that shit.
But yeah, I saw you on Twitter
complaining about it.
And it's the first thing I thought
when I saw that was there's no way
in hell that Sam Parr, the hustle,
ever asked for donations
to support it
because you're going to find a way
to make money.
You're going to find a way
to provide value.
I don't even like Vox,
but I don't care.
Like I bet they do a lot.
I bet they even though I don't like them,
they surely have wonderfully talented
people who work there.
Like why is this so hard to understand?
You create something
that people like, like,
and then you say, all right,
it costs this much money.
Give me money.
I don't understand
why that's hard.
And also, if you raise 150 million dollars
from Excel, you better be able
to charge money for a product.
Get out of here.
So you haven't raised any money
whatsoever from venture capitalists
for the hustle.
You it's kind of your mission
not to raise from venture capitalists.
I tell my mission, I would do it.
Technically, I raised $25,000
from one firm.
Right.
Was it a VC firm
or was it like an angel or?
Well, no, I raised a few,
a little bit of money from angel.
But one of the guys who I met
had a fund and I like thought
that it was just his money.
He's like, Oh, no, it's too much fun.
So technically,
Oh, yeah, you did tell me this.
Yeah, you're almost almost
kind of sort of tricked.
But technically you have raised
what's the calculus there?
Why not just go out
and raise a ton of money if you can
and use that to accelerate your growth
and give away some percentage of your company
because I'm greedy
and want to own a lot of it.
Yeah, simple as that.
Yeah, it's just greed.
I just think it's going to be really valuable
and I want to figure out a way to do it.
I think that I grew up kind of like poor
and I it's really hard
for me to spend money.
Spending money is not something
that's easy for me.
I'm incredibly frugal,
probably to a fault,
definitely to a fault.
I should be more way
I should be on the offensive way more.
And so I'm like in my head,
I'm like, Well, what would I do
with all that money?
I'm like, I don't even like,
I'm just like so cheap,
like, I buy stuff used.
And I did every single computer
that we have in our company,
almost all of them I bought used on Craigslist.
And so like, I just I think I can get
a lot done with very little money
and also greed.
And very few people as well.
Yeah, how many people do we like 23, 24 people?
Not that not a lot.
Not a lot.
Well, listen, Sam,
it's worked out for you beautifully so far
and it seems like it's going to keep working
in the future.
What would you like to say
to any hackers out there who are listening,
who are inspired by your story,
who want to make money on the internet,
create things of value you want to charge?
What do you think is something
they could learn from your story
and take away as they sort of embark
on this journey of their own?
Launch something tomorrow,
do it fast and don't think about anything.
Just do it.
Just do it.
There's so many freaking smart people.
Your audience is probably incredibly smart,
way smarter than I am.
And the thing that holds them back
is fear of launching.
So I always tell people intellectually speaking,
creating a business is super easy
and straightforward.
Emotionally, it's really hard.
So the best way to overcome that
is just do it.
You just got to do it.
Just do it.
Sam Parr, thanks so much
for coming on the show.
Can you let listeners know
where they can go to learn
about what you're up to with the hustle
and with trends and where they can learn
more about you online?
Did I give you a discount code last time?
Should I give you another one?
I don't think I got one last time.
So another one would be great.
First one.
Okay, let me write it down.
We'll do indie.
You want to do indie?
Indie.
Discount code for trends.
Yeah.
Wait, what did I say?
I said indie.
Why did you correct me?
Did I say it wrong?
Indie.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
No, no, no.
I'm just repeating it.
So everyone knows.
I-N-D-I-E.
Wait, where...
I gotta find the slide channel.
Uh, can we make code?
I'm doing it.
We're doing it live.
Right now, right now.
So indie for 50% off for the first year.
Okay, so indie.
They can find me at trends.co.
They can find us at thehustle.co
and I'm very active on Twitter,
thus Sam Parr.
And don't email me
because I have 355 unread emails right now
and it'll be slow to get to.
But if you tweet at me,
I get back to you really fast
and I would love to hear from you.
All right.
You heard him.
Don't email him.
Send him a tweet.
Sam, thanks again for coming on the show.
Thanks, man.
You're awesome.
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As always, thank you so much for listening
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