Sam Parr, welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast.
Thank you. I've been listening to you guys for a long time.
You are the founder of The Hustle. The Hustle is a daily newsletter for tech and business news.
It goes out every morning. It takes five or six minutes to read it. It's always entertaining.
It's very well written. And you've gone into something like a million and a half subscribers,
which is a crazy high number for a newsletter. We're going to talk about that later on for sure
for some purely selfish reasons on my end. You also run HustleCon, which I've heard nothing
but great things about. It's a yearly startup conference where some super successful founders
get on stage and share their stories and their expertise.
You've got a podcast now that you're producing called My First Million.
And I know I'm probably leaving a few things out. You do a lot.
So we're a media company. And we just... It sounds like I do all this stuff on my own.
We're a media company. And so we have loads of different products. So yeah,
you named a lot of them. But we also just released Trends. So Trends.co, Trends.co is the URL.
And that's our first paid subscription product.
I'm going there right now. What is Trends? How does it work?
Yeah, so the idea here is I really am fascinated with Forster and Gartner and those research
companies. And so we're building a research arm at our company. And so users can pay $300 a year.
And we have a team of researchers who go out and scour the web and look at millions of data points
as well as do traditional journalistic stuff like talk to people and dig. And we find really
interesting companies to profile and deconstruct and explain how they work very in depth.
But we also look at a whole bunch of growth signals, like how often people are searching
for something and what's the growth velocity of something. And we talk about that.
So it's almost like a... I don't know, Harvard Business Review or a more affordable Gartner,
but for growing and starting companies.
I like how you introduced it by saying that you like Forster, that you like Gartner,
that you like this stuff. What goes into deciding to launch another product like this when you've
already got so many things going on? Is it really driven by just things that you like?
It's not as much going on as you think it is. Maybe it looks like that on the outside.
But we have close to 30 employees. And I could see us growing to hundreds and then
thousands of people. And with a media company, a media company or an information company,
which is what we are, it's pretty much just a series of projects that are all built around one
brand. So the goal from day one, when we launched in 2016, was we're going to build a massive email
list. And we're going to monetize it through advertising in the email. And we're going to
bootstrap our way to do it. And all the profits that we make from the email, we're going to pour
into building ancillary products. And we're going to use our distribution on our email list to make
those popular. So the strategy was to do all this from the very beginning. But the specific
products that we've launched like trends, that just is a combination of testing loads of stuff.
So there's a lot of stuff that we products that we've tried that have failed, that most people
don't know about. And then there is a combination of what are what can we be world class at? What
can make really great revenue and profit? And what will our users love? And most importantly,
what do we find fun to work on? It's interesting that you had this whole plan laid out from the
very beginning. And it's a little bit counterintuitive because most people wouldn't set out
to say, Hey, I'm going to start an email list. And that's going to bring in a ton of money and
finance everything else. Because most people don't think that an email list can make a lot of money.
That's a total misconception. A lot of people think that but if you talk to any,
well, you do. So you know, if you talk to a lot of different commerce companies,
a lot of their sales come from their email list. It's one of the highest ROI marketing channels.
So the idea early on was I had seen this interview with this woman who started this company,
Daily Candy. It was a daily email with 2 million subscribers and it sold for $125 million in
revenue or $125 million it sold for. But this was in like 2004. But I was like,
email is mostly the same since 2004. It hasn't actually changed a lot. And so I just thought,
well, that strategy worked for her. It works for ecommerce companies. When I started email,
which I can talk about later, it started as a conference and it worked for our conference,
it was just an email list. And so we just thought, let's just put that on steroids and make it work.
And how well is it working today? How much money do you make from your email list?
Yeah, I mean, the email alone, email advertising alone is eight figures in revenue.
Whoa.
Yeah, it can grow. I think email advertising only can be a 30 or 40 or $50 million a year business.
And then add in our other things, our goal is to make hundreds of millions of dollars a year in
revenue. Let's talk about your goals for a bit because you're working hard. What's motivating
you to keep working hard to keep pushing to $100 million in revenue and beyond?
And what's stopping you from just retiring to a life of leisure on a beach somewhere?
Okay, just adventure. Really, I just I'm kind of competitive with myself.
I'm a former athlete. And I always people ask me this sometimes, I guess I could just kind of
chill and I chill every once in a while, I'll take three or four weeks off a year.
I don't know. Do you exercise? Yeah.
Okay, maybe if you lift weights, you're like, all right, I bench 200 pounds this week.
Like, I wonder if I could like work really hard in three months, bench 250.
It's like, are you a different person between 200 and 250? No, but it's just like a really fun
thing to push yourself and to try more because some people have personalities where it's just
it's never enough. And it's a really exciting to kind of keep going.
Yeah, I'm the kind of person where like, I get too sucked into that stuff.
There's any sort of number associated with my progress, weightlifting, revenue,
I started playing chess recently, I suck, but watching my rating go up as I get better is like,
I never want to stop and it's kind of its own reward.
Sure. Yeah, I think it's just like a human instinct
for a lot of people is you just want to push the boundaries. And so that's really what it is.
I really like the people I work with. So why don't I retire? Because I enjoy what I do.
Yeah, I don't know. It's simple. I just like going after things and pushing forward and I
enjoy the people I work with. Let's talk about your story a bit,
because I want to understand kind of who you are and how you got here.
You've called yourself in the past, a Midwestern small business owner
who learned how to use the internet. How did that transition happen?
Yeah, so I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. I went to college in Nashville, Tennessee.
Originally, I went for two reasons. I had a track and field scholarship,
but also the school I went to had a music business program. And this was right when I went to college
was right when the TV show Entourage had ended. And I was like, I want to be like Ari Gold.
So I'll study the music industry and be like the Ari Gold of music.
And while I was there in college, I met a guy named Mike Wolf. And Mike Wolf is this guy who's
on the TV show American Pickers. Have you ever seen that?
No, I've never seen it.
Well, at the time, I bet you've seen Pawn Stars, right?
Yeah.
We came on right after that. And it was kind of the same thing where Mike would go to Barnes
and all over the country and Mike would buy old motorcycles or gas pumps, things like that,
and explain the history around them and then sell them. Well, anyway, I saw him on the street,
and I was a fan. And I was just trying to get his picture in an autograph. And I eventually
kind of talked him into letting me run his or help set up his new store in Nashville.
And in doing that, I learned about entrepreneurship. And I was like,
well, I'd always been selling stuff on eBay. I'd always been making money on my own on the internet
or just like selling stuff in real life. And I was like, man, like this whole selling stuff,
it could actually become like a really like, this could be my life. It doesn't have to be just like
a little thing I do because I want to make like $1,000 next month. But anyway, I worked for him.
And then I decided to open up a chain of hot dog stand. So I opened up one hot dog stand.
It was like a hot dog cart. It's really simple. It was just like the only business that I could
afford to like start. And I did that and it started working. And then we grew and we expanded it.
And so that's kind of how I got that small business mentality. But I eventually started
an online store when I was like a junior in college. And it started making really good money.
And I was like, oh, the internet is totally 100% better than staying outside in the 100 degree
Nashville weather and selling stuff. I'm going to pursue that. And so I just kind of googled like,
where in America do the internet companies live? And they said San Francisco. So I left school and
a little bit early and eventually graduated. But I left school and moved out to San Francisco and
started a business that was eventually sold for a very small amount. And then after that,
I started HustleCon, which is our event now. And originally, it was a very selfish reason.
I just wanted to meet our speakers or meet other attendees and find someone to partner with.
But the way that I made the conference popular was I just created an email newsletter where
I would blog or write newsletters about each speaker. And that actually got more popular
probably in the conference. But the conference made like 60 grand in profit in like the first
six weeks. It was like, well, that's cool. Let's do that again. I launched the event on May 15.
And the event took place on July 1. So I did it about six weeks, took six months off. And I was
like, let's do that again. And this time it made like a quarter of a million dollars in revenue
or something like that. And the way in which I made it popular again was this email newsletter.
And at the end of it, I was like, look, okay, this thing has made like 300 grand in revenue
with not a lot of work. That's great. But I want to go bigger. And so that's when the idea of like,
we're using content to get people to come to an event. Can we use content to like build a huge
company, build a media company? And so that's kind of when we went all in on the hustle.
So personally, from everything I've heard, I want absolutely nothing to do with the conference.
People tell me all the time, Coraline, you should start at any hackers conference. I'm just like,
no, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to run. But I wonder if I'm wrong here.
Maybe you're hearing different things than I was. What convinced you to start a conference?
And should I start one? It depends. Conferences can be very lucrative. Specifically trade shows,
there's multiple companies out there that make billions of literally billions of dollars a year
in revenue, and hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit from conferences, specifically
trade shows. But the majority of people I've met, specifically the majority of people I've met in
the internet world are horrible at handling the economics of a conference and are horrible at the
logistics of it. And they spend way too much money. And they don't know how to market their event
successfully, or their event is just like every other event, or they just think of running it.
So if you can run an event successfully, let's say you wanted to make half a million dollars in
revenue with 40% profit margin, 100%, you could do that. It could be done. The problem with events
is most people will do a few mistakes. One, they host it at a hotel or something that has
like union labor or where they make you use a caterer. And that adds up so much. It costs so
much money to do those things. And it's really hard for a first time conference. The second thing
is people don't realize that in order to get like the big sponsorship money for conferences,
it usually takes a year or two of proving that you have a good event. And then finally,
people spend way too much money on things that don't matter, like name tags. If you have 1000
people at an event, you could very easily spend 20 grand just for name tags and loads of things
like that. And that is where people completely lose their shirt and lose a ton of money on events.
Is this all stuff that you knew going into HustleCon? Or did you kind of learn this on
the job as you ran the conference? When I started HustleCon, I was 24. And I so I didn't know
anything. So I kind of learned on the job. I've always been really good at seeking people out
who are experts. And I just grill them and I learn everything that they know. And I just say,
what are your biggest mistakes? What were the biggest mistakes? And I just try my hardest not
to repeat those mistakes. So I kind of knew this a little bit just because I'd read a ton
and I talked to people. I'm also naturally very frugal. So it was kind of in my DNA.
But I've learned a lot along the way. So I had I didn't have an experience. That's for sure.
Well, despite that, you decided to run a conference anyway. And your first time around,
you had I think six weeks from idea to the date of the event, which is insane.
How did you put something together so fast? And what was going through your head?
Well, it's not that hard, really. I mean, it's hard work, but it's not like intellectually
challenging. I mean, my first event, if you actually Google Sam par HustleCon, $40,000,
or I forget the name of the blog post, I think it was like I smoke at hustle con,
but Sam made $40,000 or something like that. And this was in 2014. And so you could see that blog
post. And I actually list out what my PML statements were. But it was quite simple. I
I spent maybe 10 or $15,000. And it was like $5,000 for a venue. I got people to donate loads
and loads of free food. I didn't have name tags. So like, my hard costs were actually quite low.
And in order to get speakers, I pretty much just cold email. I mean, I didn't have a network at
the time, I just cold emailed a lot of speakers. And I the truth is I kind of lied to them. I said
like, Hey, Joel, would you come and speak at hustle con 400 people are going to be there.
And these other speakers are going to be speaking. And of course, those other speakers hadn't
confirmed. But I did that same stick to all the other speakers. And thankfully, nearly all of them
said, Yeah, sure, I'll come. And so that's how I got the first speakers. And then I knew how to do
I'm a self taught copywriter. And I always kind of knew that email marketing was really effective.
And I always knew how to get traffic to come to websites. And I just said to myself, well,
if I get the product, which is these speakers, I can I can get the marketing and distribution
by creating lots of blog posts, collecting their emails of people who visit the website,
and then just constantly emailing them interesting stuff and eventually convincing them to come.
And so that was that kind of the methodology.
This is like the fire festival gone, right? You know, what would happen at the fire festival
actually worked out. Let's break this down. I'm looking at this blog post that you talked about
for people listening. It's called hustle con 2014. I went I spoke, but Sam made 40k from it.
Yeah, and just I have to preface this I say I was a lot younger and wilder when I wrote that I don't
write the same way or talk the same way as I did. There's a list in here and it's titled how did I
sell 400 tickets in seven weeks. And a lot of it is what you just mentioned basically writing and
finding blog posts, WordPress plugins, creating a trip campaign, what would you say is the most
important part here if you're going to do this again, starting from scratch with no connections,
no audience, start blogging and getting traffic and collecting emails, emails, emails, emails,
my first 200 emails where I just put like every person who had emailed on Gmail and like maybe
like my 100 LinkedIn connections, I just put them on the email list without asking. And that kind of
started it. And then I would post blog posts and post those posts all over Reddit and Hacker News.
And that's kind of how I got my first bit of traffic. Can you talk a little bit about what
your initial blog posts were about? You can probably you can actually see the blog posts
in that in that post. I only wrote like 10 blog posts, you can actually see them on that post
that you're referring to. Yeah, I would just write articles about each speaker and I would explain
how they do what they do. It was pretty simple, I think, but my emails that talked about the blog
posts, I think were kind of clever and interesting. And I kind of wrote in a way that not a lot of
people at the time were writing like. You've actually said in the past that copywriting is
one of the most underrated skills, one of the most important skill sets that anyone can develop.
It really shines through in everything that you've worked on from starting this blog to starting an
email newsletter, starting a media company, of course. How did copywriting become such an
important skill for you? Well, I learned I read this book years and years and years ago about
direct mail advertising. So basically like in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, before the internet was around,
these guys would just write these letters to people like saying like, hey, would you like to buy this
encyclopedia or vacuum? But they would say it in very clever or interesting ways. And I was like,
that's amazing. And when I was selling hot dogs, I realized that you had to have like a stick
or a story to get people's attention because like hot dogs are pretty much all the same.
And so I realized that copywriting was a salesmanship on paper that could scale to an
infinity amount of people. Once you write something forever, it can be seen by everyone.
And so I just started studying copywriting like crazy. And after I sold my last business,
I pretty much locked myself in a bedroom for six months. And I would get the best sales letters of
all time and I would write them out by hand to figure out exactly how they did what they did.
And I just kind of learned about copywriting and how to do it effectively. But what a lot of people
don't realize is copywriting isn't just sales. Copywriting is understanding what motivates people.
It's understanding gaps in the market. It's understanding where opportunity is. It's
understanding what people want and how to solve problems for them and then just communicating
to them how your solution will solve their problem. And once you master that, like it helps with
professional relationships. It helps with when I was a single guy with meeting women.
It helps with selling stuff for your business. It helps with relating to people.
I mean, it just helps in so many different ways.
You said that when you wrote this blog post, you were 24. It was a different era. You were younger.
How would you say your copywriting skills have evolved since then?
Less cute or less gimmicky. When I was first starting, there was basically a handful of hooks
that I knew worked really well. Some of them could be a little gimmicky. And I definitely
pounced on that. So you're running this conference. You are an expert copywriter. You're well on your
way to becoming one. You're able to blog. I wouldn't say I was an expert, but I understood
like the principles. You understood the principles and you're using them to write these emails,
these blog posts that I really like the idea behind because you're just doing profiles,
you said, of the speakers and how they were able to accomplish the things that they had accomplished.
And obviously that aligns with why people are coming to the event. You're not writing one thing
and then advertising another. Your writing is itself an advertisement for the conference.
And I really have to imagine that that played a pretty strong role in why your ticket sales are
so consistent, why you're able to get someone who will show up your first time around.
Let's talk about the second time around. How did that go? Was it more or less stressful than the
first time around? And were there any learnings you could apply from the first conference to the
second? I would say I wasn't sweating bullets the first time because I knew how to control my costs.
And basically I got to break even really, really, really quickly. And I didn't actually intend to
make money the first time. I just wanted to do it for fun and it happened to make money.
But my goal was just don't lose money. And so I got to that point of don't lose money really
quickly. And so I wasn't sweating bullets, like I'm going to lose everything. But it was nerve
wrecking like, are people going to like this? Am I actually going to be able to pull this off?
And the second time I did it, I realized how to find serenity and calmness
inside of chaos. Because events are chaos. With events, a lot of times a lot of people make like
the bulk of their revenue in the last two weeks. So like the last two weeks leading up to an event.
And it makes them sweat bullets. And I kind of saw that pattern in the first time. And I also
understood how to like control a crowd. So that helped a lot.
What about your blogging and your email strategy? Did that stay the same
for a conference number two or did it evolve in some way?
No, no different. I just did the same like, I'm probably like average intelligence,
I wasn't like smart enough to like figure out some clever way to get ticket sales.
I just said to myself, well, it worked the first time. If I just do it again,
it'll hopefully build off itself. And I'll just do it more and it'll double in size.
So it was very unsophisticated in terms of the growth from the first one to the second one,
it was just I'm just gonna do the same thing, but more. At what point did you realize that the
email list was perhaps a more promising business than the conference, which
itself was making a lot of money? I read this interview. I read like five
or six different interviews of people who had email lists that turned out to be like
huge companies. Like I read about the founding of Groupon. And Groupon for the most part,
early on, was an email list. That's all it was. And so I kind of realized that with phones getting
with phones on email getting more popular and everything like emails not like something that's
like secondary emails, the internet, it's like saying like, it's like people are like, man,
I couldn't believe an email can be so big. I'm like, that's like saying to me, I couldn't believe
a website could be so big. It's like, what are you talking about? Like, how can an email not
be big? It's just a tension. It's just a platform. It's not as simple as... I mean, it is simple,
but it doesn't have to be as tiny as a lot of people kind of write it off to be because
more people probably spend... I bet you people spend as much time in Gmail as they do Safari
or Chrome. And so very early on, after kind of reading about Groupon, Thrillist,
Daily Candy and a handful of other companies, I realized like, oh man, like email, a lot of
people are writing this off as a small thing. And all these huge media companies like Vice and
Business Insider are either multi hundred or multi billion dollar businesses, multi hundred
dollar, a hundred million dollar businesses. And they're losing traffic on because Facebook
is kind of turning back the dial. Email like is really consistent. What if I just built,
try to build a multi billion dollar company using email instead of just like a Facebook
or a website. And so I don't know, it just kind of was a natural progression.
I like the strategy of reading about other successful companies and trying to figure out
how they did it and using that to sort of inspire you and lead you down a particular direction.
Because you don't really want to invent the wheel. Other people have done it before.
And what's cool about you in particular is you aren't just reading about internet businesses,
but you're bringing your expertise from running these smaller real world businesses,
from running your hot dog stand, from working other jobs. And so you're sort of combining
like all this copywriting expertise and this other sort of older business knowledge because
businesses have been around forever. Well, that's like a huge mistake that people make
is they say like, Oh, well, we're a startup. Therefore, we're going to operate this way.
It's like, man, business is all the same. You buy low, and you sell for a little bit higher.
And then you make customers, you create customers and make sure that they're happy.
And you find talented people and inspire them to work with you.
I mean, that's like, as simple as it can get, right? And it doesn't matter if you're a business
that makes $1,000 a month or a business that makes a billion dollars a month. That strategy is true.
It just maybe you have 10,000 people working together to do it as opposed to just you.
And I always felt that in Silicon Valley, which I'm definitely embedded in,
that there was a huge mistake in thinking like, we're going to get all these video views,
or we're going to get all these users. And nine out of 10 times, it's like,
hey, so you got all these video views, how the hell are you supposed to be making money?
And for us, it was never, we just weren't going to be that type of company where it was about like,
kind of vanity Silicon Valley metrics. And so that's why I would say we're almost
running like a small business that is just trying to like double or triple or quadruple each year.
So tell me about this process of how you approached running an email business.
We determined that in the long run, it could be more profitable, more promising than just a
conference. Yeah, so we had just turned three years old last April. So a couple months ago,
or a few months ago, we've turned three years old. And so it seems like a relatively short
amount of time, I think. But in the first few months of us like launching the hustle,
originally, we were just a blog, where we would blog about cool stories, we describe
yourself as business insider meets vice. But then after a while, we're like, wait a minute,
what are we doing? We're getting away from our email routes, let's like, just not even really
have a website and only do email. So we started doing that. And we're like, well, what content
do our people love the most. And we were blogging about evergreen stuff. But eventually we tried
blogging about the news. And that's our taking off. And so in our first year, we got maybe 120,000
email subscribers, they pretty much all came from, we would blog about lots of different things,
get traffic, collect emails, and then put them on our email list where we would send them the news
they need to know each morning. And that's how we got our first 100 or 100 maybe that's how we got
our first 200,000 users actually. It was like crazy simple. And we just use MailChimp. At this
point, we have a really sophisticated CMS and software deal that we kind of built out because
we have engineers who work here. But at first, it was just an email, like a MailChimp newsletter.
And the conference kind of funded the whole project. And then once we hit 60 or 70,000
email subscribers, we started putting advertisements in the email. And then that's when things start
taking off. So who's we who else is working with you on this? How did you find them? And how did
you convince them to work with you? The so at first, it was just me. And then I convinced John
Havel, who was he actually had started the business that where I worked before, he kind of
convinced them to let me work for him. And then I became a co founder, except so we kind of switched
roles for the next one. I was like, John, I've been working on this thing for six months or a year.
Come and try this out with me. And so it was me and him for a little while.
And then we convinced friends from our old company, or where we had worked previously to join us.
And then my head of sales now who's actually not the president of our company, I went to high school
with them. And I just kind of emailed them I go, Hey, man, we're both young. I think at the time,
we were 25. Like we don't have a lot of responsibility. I have this business that makes
a little bit of profit, but I think we can blow it up. You want to give us a shot. And I just
kind of convinced them to come. And once I did that, revenue started growing. And I was able to
just cold email, like anyone I can find on LinkedIn who worked in the industry, and I was
just networking like crazy. And I would just convince try to convince everyone to come join us.
And our first maybe 10 employees were all really young people. They were either 20, 21, 22. Like,
I don't think in our first year, I don't think we had anyone who worked at our company that was
over 25. And so everyone was young, which means affordable, aka cheap, I paid myself 40 grand a
year, everyone else was probably paid 40 or $50,000 a year. So it wasn't very expensive.
And we just kind of like taught ourselves this business model and figured it out.
And now we're able to hire a lot more, basically talented and thus more expensive people because
it worked out well. The first like handful of hires, it was people who just cold emailed us
with their resumes, or it was friends. Let's talk about what was going through your head at that
time. Because now you're talking about building a media empire, you're talking about hundreds of
millions of dollars in revenue as your target. But right after you switched from the conference
and started hiring people, did you have your media empire plan already formulated?
Yeah, I had read the biography of Ted Turner. And I was like, I want to do that. So very early on,
that was the plan. Every once in a while, you're like, this sucks. I hate it. It's going horribly.
I don't know what I'm doing. I'm in over my head and you're like, I'm gonna quit or I'm just gonna
fire everyone and just pay myself a little bit like a nice salary and just make it a lifestyle
thing. And then other times I'm like, I want to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and just
go as big as possible. But no, the goal early on was let's make this huge, but without raising
venture capital, at least for a long time. You were living in San Francisco at the time, right?
Yeah, I still we have offices here and in Austin and I live in San Francisco.
Yeah, it's not a common thing to say I'm not going to raise money from venture capitalists
in San Francisco. If you're hiring here, especially if you're hiring locally,
it's pretty hard to afford people. If you're not raising VC, it's really hard.
How does you make it happen? I know you live pretty frugally, you hired cheaply.
But overall, like what else went into figuring out the economics of the business and making it work?
I didn't pay myself a lot. We had cheap offices. So our expenses were low, like,
maybe the first year, at the end of the first year, we are averaging $30,000 a month in expenses.
And with the conference revenue and profit, we kind of broke even the first the first year.
And then when the email started, I was like, All right, I got to hustle and get us to break even
just through email advertising. And so I went out and sold all the first ads when we were I was like
doing all the writing, me and john were doing all the writing. And then I went out and sold the ads.
And so in doing that, I was able to finance a team of like six or seven people that kind of
netted out to be 30 grand a month. Because we didn't have our a lot of money, we just got our
we learned our numbers like crazy. So I knew very early on what our lifetime value of a customer
was going to be, what our payback cycle from a client was going to be like how fast we can get
the cash, what we could charge customers, the business model that we have, not a lot of people
know how to do it. But some people do. And I just found those few people who do and they kind of
taught me like the economics of it. And I just mastered it like really early on, like our whole
team did. So even to this day, like, we track everything like a hawk because we just don't
waste money. And so I just like learn my numbers like immediately.
There seems to be a pretty consistent theme and something that you're really good at,
which is finding the people that you need to find and then convincing them to help you.
For example, you met a TV celebrity on the street and then convinced him to employ you.
And you met the people who understood the business model behind an email list and convinced them to
help you. How can other people do the same thing? Yeah, a lot of people tell me that that's kind of
a theme in my life. And I agree. As of today, my network is really, really, really strong.
I know a lot of people, which is interesting because I'm actually, I prefer just to be at home
alone. I don't actually like like going out and hanging out. So it's kind of like weird.
But I was always really good at doing that. And the reason why was, I think that I didn't have a
lot of pride around like, I was never nervous to ask questions. I know that a lot of people who are
my friends, they I'm like, dude, just go out and like email this person and ask him how he does it,
or how she does it. And people were always like nervous to do that. And I've kind of never been
like shy about that. My mom and dad kind of taught me that early on, like, just go and ask him cold
call this person ask him. So I think that it's you just can't be too proud. Because I think that,
I don't know, maybe they're afraid to look silly. I think the second thing is, I learned very early
in life, like before I was 10 years old, was that people who are more successful than you,
or who are experts at what they do, and you're not an expert, they love seeing you succeed. And they
love seeing a young person who will actually follow their advice. Most people do not follow
through on stuff. And from a very early age, I learned that, like, a high IQ wasn't going to be
like my specialty. And so if I could just brute force something into like a reality, that that
could kind of be like my shtick. And so I was always really good at like emailing someone,
and being like, Hey, what's your advice on this? And they wouldn't reply to me. And I would say,
I would email them four weeks later and go, Hey, since we last spoke, here's, here's,
here's the progress I made. So I kind of overcame the question that I had for you.
What do I do now? Can you tell me like how this thing works? And they wouldn't respond to me. And
I would just do that literally for months. And eventually, I would get ahold of them. So like,
for example, the guy who started Business Insider, who started Gil and MongoDB, his name is Kevin
Ryan, he started like four or five multi billion dollar companies, I like email this guy for like
months with that same shtick. And eventually, he kind of helped me. And so that kind of happened
with dozens and dozens of people in my life, I would just say like, I don't know what I'm doing,
I'm gonna go out and just get it done and try to figure it out. Hopefully, you can kind of help me
along the way. And if they said no, at first, I would just come back to him and say, All right,
here's the progress. What else? How do I what do I do now? And that has always worked.
That's like there's so many nuggets in there. It's so true that if somebody's an expert,
if somebody's kind of in a position to help you, and they see you making progress,
and actually listening to their advice, it's like way more fulfilling for them to keep helping you,
like even just like I've taught some people how to code. And like being a teacher is annoying,
man, because half the time, the people you're teaching just don't do the things you're trying
to teach them to do, like they just don't want to do it. But when they do, it feels amazing.
And yeah, you feel bought into them.
Yeah, exactly. Because it's like now you're invested. And now they're like, you kind of
you kind of want them to succeed, because they're following your advice. And you don't want someone
to go wrong after they took your advice. Well, there's this famous story I learned about
in sixth grade, I read this book called how to win friends and influence people. And they said
something like like Ben Franklin would always ask someone to do him a really tiny favor. And if he
if someone did them a did him a small favor, they were more likely to do big favors for him,
because they kind of felt bought into him. And I thought that was kind of funny. So I was like,
I'm going to convince these people to do just a tiny favor for me, like I would email someone
and be like, Hey, Groupon founder, what was your first year revenue? Like, I want to try and beat
that or something like that. And they would just say it was $1 million or something. And I would
be like, I would reply to them, like months later and be like, Okay, I didn't beat you. But I'm
pretty close. Thanks for the feedback. Well, now how do I do this other thing? And they would like
typically help me after hearing want or giving me one bit of faith, one bit of advice. Another thing
I think that if people want to learn how to kind of talk to folks and get them to help them,
they have to understand how to position it. Most people are like, Hey, what do I do? And the person
like the person giving advice is like, I don't know how to advise you, man. Like this is such
an open ended question. And so what I learned early on was you have to ask these people really
specific stuff. And you have to be very direct with them. So it's like, can I call you on this
day at this time, it will take 15 minutes, I'm going to ask you these three questions because
I'm struggling. If you want to do this, just say yes, and put your phone number and I'll do all the
work. You don't just just pick up your phone and that's it. And I think that kind of helped a lot
too. If you send somebody an email like that, you're pretty much directly communicating that
you're an empathetic person that you're considering how much time they're going to have to spend,
how much mental effort they're going to have to expand trying to figure out how to reply to you.
And then you're actively trying to make it as easy as possible. And if you're somebody on the
receiving end, one of those emails, like you really appreciate that because you like everybody's an
unknown quantity, there's millions of people on the internet, you have no idea if you're going to
get like a one in a million, like time wasting weirdo serial killer, right? And so if somebody
like is actually taking the time and demonstrating that they care about the interaction from your
perspective, then it really stands out. Like one of my best friends, his name is Julian. I've had
him on the podcast twice. He was like one of hundreds of people who emailed me after I started
Indie Hackers and his email was like way better than everybody else's. And he actually got me on
the phone. I hate talking on the phone. I barely even talked to my mom on the phone. But I talked
to him on the phone for like an hour because he was like so good at doing exactly what you're
saying. So I love this advice. So people take it to heart. It's like saying, if I emailed you and
I said, how did you make your website? You'd be like, I don't want to answer that. That is like
such a nebulous question. But if I said like, I'm not technical. So I'm just kind of guessing here.
If I said like, Hey, did you use WordPress or build a custom site? That's an easy that's an
easy question. You just say custom or something like that. And then the person will reply a few
weeks later, like, awesome, I followed your advice, check out the site. Thanks for the feedback.
End of conversation. But then you can email you like a week later. It's like,
okay, the charts that you have on your website, that's amazing. Where's that plugin or something
like that? Like, you know, you kind of like go deeper. Yeah. So the people email you for advice
nowadays. Yeah. And they asked me like, huge questions. And I'm like, man, I don't know. Like,
like someone asked me like an example, they're like, what do startups sell for? I'm like,
dude, that's like asking me what does art sell for? Like, it's just like, that's an impossible
question to answer. But if they email me saying like, hey, what platform did you start the hustle
on? I say MailChimp, but we use something custom now. And they say, oh, great, why? And then I'll
explain why. And that's a way easier question than like, how did you start the hustle?
Well, I am about to ask you an open ended question. Just to make it hard on you, Sam,
the hustle is now doing eight figures a year, you said, and advertising revenue up the back of your
newsletter, you started off at $0 just a few years ago, what's it like to go from zero to eight
figures so quickly? And what are some of the milestones along the way? The first milestone
was getting $30,000 a month in revenue. So when we did the conference, it was like really lumpy
revenue, you know, you make, let's say you we have a conference in May, we pretty much make all of our
money in between like March and May, and then you lose money the whole rest of the year. But you
we ended up being profitable for the whole year because we made so much in that time, but it's
really lumpy revenue. But anyway, the first milestone was making it that we were consistently
profitable each month through email. And that was when we hit $30,000 in revenue. And then the
second milestone that happened 10 months after that was when we hit $100,000 in monthly revenue.
And that was a huge deal for us. And then the first million in revenue per month is a was a
pretty big milestone. I think that along the way, you said how does it feel? It doesn't feel that
much different. Like, I remember starting my company and I was like, man, if I can get the
10 million a year in revenue, like, I think I'll be happy. And then you get there and you're like,
no, come on, how about 100? I'll be happy then I'll be less stressed then. And of course,
that won't be the case. So how does it feel if it was exactly the same? It doesn't feel any different.
Yeah, you're still the same person that you were, but with a more successful company.
Yeah, but it doesn't feel like a success. That's for sure.
Why not? You know how it is, man. Like, let's go back to the bench press example. When you bench
200 pounds, you're like, alright, I feel good about myself. But damn, that guy who's my same
weight just did 250. I bet I could beat that. And then you get to 250 and you're like, man,
200 is easy. How the heck did I think that that was like a success? That's not successful at all.
Do you know what I mean? You're like, okay, so every step it's like,
there is no arrival moment. You know what I mean?
Yeah, it's hard not to always be looking up. If you're running a million dollar company,
you're going to be looking at people running billion dollar companies. If you're a middle
class American, you're going to be looking at rich Americans. And you're probably not going
to step back to think about all the people who aren't as far along as you are. And plus,
when you improve so gradually, you just adjust. Or even if it's not gradual, if you get lump sum
$10 million in your bank account right now, you're going to be ecstatic. But after a year, year and
a half, you're just going to be your normal self. They've actually like researched people who've
won the lottery. And that's exactly what happens. We all just live on the hedonic treadmill. And we
are coming to anything over a long enough period of time. But that's one of the like, that's one of
the very few unilateral like truths about humans, which is no matter what you achieve or how much
better you become, after a couple months, that becomes the norm and you are no longer thankful
for it. Like you thought you would be I mean, that is that is the case, whether you are have
100 million dollars or billion dollars, it always feels that way.
And that's the biggest argument, at least in my opinion, for that cliche that you have to
appreciate the journey, not just being it for the destination. Because the journey is the thing
that's always there. The journey is what sticks with you. The journey is the day to day, you don't
want to be miserable for 10 years doing something just for like a pot of gold at the end of the
rainbow that's going to make you happy for six months. And the tragedy is that it's really hard
to believe this once, like before you've done it, like you just don't really quite believe that
story, even though everybody says that's what happens. And that's what it feels like. But yeah,
like if you're a business owner, you got to figure out a way to enjoy what you're doing,
you got to take the tasks that you don't like and cut them out of your day. And you've got to focus
on the things you like doing because that's pretty much the whole point.
Well, I think that's true. And then the other thing that I think a lot of people should do
a lot better and I work really hard is like in one regard, I care a lot. In another regard,
I don't care at all. If all this goes away tomorrow, I'll go to sleep like a baby the next
night. I don't care. Do you know what I mean? I'm really happy. But if everything goes away,
if the business shuts down tomorrow, it will not like I just don't I just don't care. And because
of that, it kind of makes me like appreciate it a little bit more. And it makes me happier with
what I have.
So very Zen way to look at it. I think for my part, there's a lot of things I want to do.
If I had 10 different lives, I would probably do 10 very different things in each of them.
And so if any hackers were to go to zero tomorrow, I think I would still be sad. I wouldn't quite be
as Zen as you are about it. But I'd also be excited about one of these other things that
I'm now totally free to explore.
Yeah, I think what I what I'm trying to say, though, is like, I can find happiness in any
situation. And I will have worked really hard to do that. So it's like, when I was poor,
and when I was not poor, there were both really exciting and fun. Maybe, maybe you have more fun
when you're poor, actually, to be honest, like when I was a poor, struggling entrepreneur, like,
that was always really exciting. It felt great, kind of in some weird way.
Okay, let's talk about the Sam of today. You're sitting on this eight figure business. It's a
media company. So you can work on all sorts of projects and take them in a ton of different
directions. And earlier, you alluded to the fact that you tried a lot of things that didn't work.
So let's dive into that a little bit. What are some of the things you tried that didn't work?
And why didn't they work?
So like I said, the plan from day one was to build up a huge audience using this email thing,
and then create more products that we could sell directly to the audience. And so
we did a good job of building up that audience. But then when we were thinking of ideas and
products to launch, I tried a couple that didn't work out so well. So one of them,
they were just called like project names. But let's say one of them was called jobs. And the
idea with jobs was, can we write editorial content about different companies and charge people who
are looking for jobs, charge them money, and kind of give them the inside scoop about different
companies. And so the theory was like, let's say I wanted to work at let's say, stripe, for example,
I could like go and do a ton of investigative journalism and interview people and find out the
truth of what what stripe is like. And maybe I'm just making this up. So don't get angry stripe.
But let's say that like what stripe they said, it's kind of overvalued. But so if you are trying
to get rich off stock options, it's probably not the right for right person for someone who's trying
to like get wealthy quick. But the work life balance is really good. And they have really good
benefits for parents. That's like a really like honest way of describing a company. And that would
that makes that company more attractive to certain people. And so the idea was can I charge people
monthly fees in order to tell them the truth about certain companies. And people didn't really want
that. I thought it would be cool. And maybe they maybe like someone could like figure out a better
way to deliver that. But yeah, we launched that and not a lot of people signed up for it. That's
for sure. What else? I've made like, loads and loads and loads of management and leadership
mistakes. But are you looking for just product mistakes? No, let's talk about those two because
those are pretty universal. Man, managing is like such a tricky thing, particularly for this audience
because a lot of people, myself included are people who just like building stuff like most
entrepreneurs are people who just like coming up with some crazy idea and like getting early
customers and like getting it off the ground. But then when you want when you have to scale,
you really have it's not about being a maker or being a contributor. It's about being a manager
and a leader. And the skill sets for managing and leading are way different than starting something
or getting users or, you know, the early stuff like that. It's way different. And frankly, I don't
I'm not very good at the the managing part. And so I was a horrible manager and I and I ultimately
learned how to hire people. And so I ended up hiring a president. So we have a company president
and he's the only one who reports directly to me. And he manages everyone or he manages like the
managers and they manage, you know, everyone else. And so that took me like, up until recently to
learn that so three years of just being a horrible manager. I think that that was like the biggest
thing I've learned that has been a contributor to making me happy and making our business bigger.
How do you find somebody good enough to run the people side of your business
and manage everybody for you? That's the hardest part of business is that the question that you
answered, I think is 100% the hardest part coming up with products and services that people like
that's not really that hard because you could if you wanted to, you could just copy other people.
So the question that you asked is like the hardest thing. The way that I've done it is,
I don't know, how do I do it? I interview loads of people, we talk to loads of people.
And I just know that most all of them aren't going to be a right, the good, a good fit. And I just
constantly search for that person. So just like, it's just like a numbers game of talking to a lot
of people. The guy who's our president now, he's one of my closest friends, and we kind of became
close friends by working together. Adam, he is driven by managing people like he love he's like,
he's a teacher, he was a teacher when he first started his career. And he just loves growing
people. And he loves the interaction with people. And he's a very much an extroverted person. So he
gets energy off that stuff. And so I kind of was vulnerable with him early on. And I said,
here's my weaknesses. What are your strengths? And they just so happen to be compatible.
The question that you're asking, it's really hard for me to answer because that's like the
hardest thing ever. It's so challenging. Yeah, one of the things that's always been tough for me
personally is that I've never been a full time employee. I mean, I guess I technically am at
Stripe, but like not really. But as a founder, you have kind of a slightly different perspective
than a full time employee. And so how do you convince somebody? How do you sell somebody
and doing something that you're personally not that interested in doing? One of my previous
podcast guests, you put it this way, he said, you kind of have to drink your own Kool-Aid before you
can sell anybody else on it. Yeah, you definitely have to let go as well. Like a lot of people,
me and I have imagined you're just like this, you're probably really anal, like things have to be a
certain way. The colors have to be a certain shade, if it's even slightly off, it's a huge deal.
And you kind of just got to let go of that. It's like, would you rather I'll be really crude here,
would you rather be super rich? Or would you rather have things your way? And I would have
preferred the first one. And I realized that in order to build a cool company,
you have to let go because it's just a lot better to have people who are experts at one or two
things, and let them go and be experts at those one or two things than for you to sweat over every
minor detail and go to bed at night angry and wake up angry and anxious. It's just I just don't like
living like that. And so I'm willing to make sacrifices to like, well, not everything's going
to be exactly how I want it. But as long as it's generally going in the right direction,
I can find satisfaction in that. There's another saying it's kind of similar. It's,
do you want to be right all the time? Or do you want to have friends? Do you want to have good
relationships? It's the same thing. Like, dude, you can build a really big like building big
businesses. Like if you don't want to innovate too much, it's not that hard. You just got to find
people and motivate them effectively and get out of their way. So explain to me this. You've said
this a couple times that building a business is not really the hard part. It's not that hard to
figure out what other people are doing and sort of copy them. What are your principles here? How do
you look at this? And how can other people have the same mindset? Because the vast majority of
early stage founders I talked to find that part really hard. They don't know what to work on.
They don't get their first users. They don't get their first dollar most of the time.
How do you see this whole process? Well, when I say hard, I don't mean that it's not going to
require a lot of effort. But I'm saying if your goal is just to build a business that makes a
certain amount of money, it could be a million dollars a year, or it could be a billion dollars a year.
Like if you wanted to, you can just go out and start like a janitorial service and cold call
every single school building in San Francisco. And you will get someone who will say, all right,
fine, your service can be the janitor service here. And then you got to go and hustle and find like
three janitors and contract them out. Like that's not like intellectually challenging.
It's fun. And it's hard work and that you have to put a lot of effort into it.
It's pretty black and white, I think. Now, some companies are like Facebook and Amazon.
And they kind of like do where it's like, oh, man, you guys are like turning everything on its head.
But if you just want to build a business that employs people and is fun to work at,
you can kind of just do some simple stuff. And you could do it really well.
And when I say things aren't that hard, that's what I'm referring to.
And so every once in a while, sometimes I'll talk to someone and they have this like crazy idea.
And I'm like, what's your goal here? And they're like, I just want to quit my job.
Or I just want to build a company. I'm like, why are you making it more complicated than it is?
Like, like, this is like a really simple business here. Like,
don't give away this thing for free and make money off the data.
It's like, just triple your prices and make tons of cold calls.
And you'll find people who want to buy your service as long as it's the product
matches their needs. And if it doesn't match their needs, ask them why it doesn't,
and then just alter and start offering that. It's really not challenging.
But the hard part is the emotional part. It's like, well, I'm afraid of failing.
Or I don't think I'm not confident enough to actually talk to someone about this.
Or I don't think I'm good enough. Or this person bothers me who I work with.
I don't know how to deal with the confrontation. Or I'm being a micro manager
and I am not comfortable letting go. That's the hard part, all those emotional parts.
What's your advice for an early founder who's trying to get over these emotional parts?
Who's perhaps trying to start an internet business and they're overcomplicating
all the stuff instead of just starting a simple business model?
How can they go about doing what you said, kind of with that janitorial service,
but on the internet?
I would say a couple things. The first thing I would say is things that appear
quite huge and quite complicated, like huge companies, started off very simple.
And as you go deeper in the process, you find the way and you find new opportunities.
So even if you want to build the next Facebook,
just always remember that even Facebook started as a very simple, like Harvard yearbook.
So go into most projects, knowing that you may be driving from San Francisco to New York,
and you're driving at night, your headlights only need to shine 200 feet ahead of you
in order to get there successfully.
So I always tell people, don't overcomplicate things at first.
Just do the simple thing, get your first customer, and then do that same thing
a hundred times in a row. It's really simple.
And as you grow bigger and see more opportunities,
then you're going to build something really complex, maybe, and really lucrative and huge.
The second thing I tell people is, know that the majority of people who you view as successful
have the exact same doubts as you do.
So because we host HustleCon, I've met the founders of WeWork,
I've met the founders of Away Travel, of Casper, pretty much like most every company,
startup that's like in the news right now, I've met the founders,
and they all have the same doubts that I had when I was starting my company.
And once I understood that these big successful people had this,
it made me feel a lot more comfortable.
And so I would tell people, accept that your fears are normal and that everyone has them,
but don't let them hold you back. And it's okay to be afraid, but you have to just do it anyway.
Could not agree more. I've talked to so many founders on the podcast, same exact story.
It's okay to be afraid. It's okay to be insecure.
Those are pretty universal feelings, but you can push through them anyway and get started.
And also your first piece of advice to start small and then go from there,
I think you are the perfect example of that from hot dog stand to media empire.
So thank you so much for coming on the show, Sam, and sharing your story with us.
Can you tell listeners where they can go and learn more about
what you're up to with The Hustle nowadays?
Yeah. So if you just go to the hustle.co and sign up, you can sign up for The Hustle.
You can go to trends.co and sign up for trends. Or you can just search me on Twitter,
Sam Parr. My handle is the Sam Parr, and you could follow me or tweet at me there.
And I'm pretty easy to get a hold of.
All right. Thanks so much, Sam.
All right. Thank you.
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