How I Got 500k Subscribers in 2 Years: Build Your Very Own Pirate Ship and Buy CNN with Sam Parr

Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart and we're here to interview the game changers, the future makers, the co collaborators and creators who are here to collaborate with one another towards a better future for all of us. Enjoy the show. We've got a great guest coming up for you right now. Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart and today I am thrilled, excited and a little bit I'm kind of giggling my stuff right now because Sam Parr is awesome. Hi, Sam.

Hey, what's up, man?

It's good to see you, Sam, as you guys don't know, is from the Hustle Co, which I recommend you check out immediately and re question your, you know, reevaluate your whatever the hell you're doing before because it's kind of the best news show going on right now. It's like millennials plus Daily show plus Real news had a baby and called it the Hustle Co. And you should be on the list getting those emails because it's a way to stay involved in the world and if you care about things, you should do it.

That's right.

So, Sam, I had the pleasure to meet this individual at 2:12, which is a great conference. Do you have a blast at 212? It was pretty fun, right?

Yeah. I actually talked to Adam today, the organizer. 212 was one of the few conferences that I would ever pay money to go to. And it's not cheap, it's very expensive. And I would totally. I'm the cheapest guy ever. I would totally pay money to go. I'm going to pay money. I'm going.

You should pay money. You should give them all your money, I think.

Yeah, it was awesome.

It was in Denver. It was at the Four Seasons. There was amazing people there like Sam.

Who is bro, using the word life changing is not. I try not to use that all the time because it dilutes itself, but this potentially could have been life changing.

Yes, indeed. I think having those people in the same room together is a world shifting event for sure. Or has the potential to be. And knowledge applied is everything. So speaking of knowledge applied, you're one of the smartest people I've met probably in the last year or so. There's that gotcha. And when you get going, you just kind of just drop fire. So I just want to kind of wind you up like a top with the question, tell us about your hero's journey and where you're at and what's exciting for you right now. And I'll just Let you go and I'll jump.

Oh, my God. I don't even know where to start with all this. Oh, that's a cool picture you have back there.

Oh, you like it? This is Casey Neistat. My buddy Blake Jamison actually did that one. That's an original. And that's Mr. Buddha over there.

He's pretty cool. Yeah, those are cool. Okay, so where to start? Okay, I'll give you my two minute background. I'm from some St. Louis, Missouri, went to school in Nashville, Tennessee. Was there studying music, business, and I was on a track and field scholarship. I decided to work for a guy named Mike Wolf, who is the star of a TV show called American Pickers. Doing that, I learned about entrepreneurship and I decided to open up a chain of hot dog stands called Southern Sam's Wieners, as big as a baby's arm. So I ran. I quit sports and slacked off on school and started this hot dog stand because it was fun and making money. And I realized that it was really hard work going out there all day in the summer when it's really hot in the South. It's very, very, very hard. Physically demanding. And so I ended up starting a liquor store, an online liquor store called Moonshine Online that started making a lot of money while I was in college. And, like, great name, by the way.

Can we just like, clap it up for the name Moonshine Online? I'm sorry. Go on.

Thank you. It was a cool name. And so Ed started making like, you know, like a grand a day sometimes in college, and my phone going, ka ching, ka ching, ka ching. Because I had the PayPal app while I was in finance class. And I was like, screw this teacher right now. Of course, I wasn't very good at not spending it, so I didn't end up turning, leaving on top. So then I realized the Internet was the way to go. So I emailed this guy who worked at a company at the time called Air Bed and Breakfast, and I emailed him because I had heard of him because he was popular in the running community and I was a runner. And he told me that the Silicon Valley in San Francisco was the place to be. And so I applied to work at Air Bed and Breakfast. I applied to work at Uber Cab, and I met a lot of these guys, and they said, come out to San Francisco. It's the place to be. So I left school a little early and I moved out to San Francisco and I met a guy named John. I met him on. On an Airbnb. Obviously these companies Airbed and breakfast is Airbnb and Uber Cab. Uber. And so they. Those guys at this company convinced me to move out here, and I stayed at a. On an Airbnb at a guy named John's house. And he had started a company called Bunk, and it was a roommate matching company. And I was like, I've never met anyone that was my age who started companies. That's sick. Like, I'm gonna. Can I join you? And I. And so I sold all my stuff in Nashville and moved out here for good and joined this guy John, starting this roommate matching company. And we got into it, and within like 10 months, we had a very small exit where we sold it. And after selling it, I was like, what next? You know, what's the next big idea? So I hosted a conference called Hustlecon, and it was basically a TED Talk for entrepreneurs. And in order to make it popular, I created lots of content, specifically newsletter content. And one thing led to another, and this conference got pretty popular because of the content I was creating. And during this time, I'd read Ted Turner. He's the guy who started cnn. I'd read his biography. I thought, this guy's life is awesome. If I can create content that convinces these strangers to come off the Internet to this conference, I bet I can do what he did and create news. And so about two years ago, we launched the Hustle with the money that we'd saved from the conferences, as well as a little bit of funding. And it was like a Business Insider meets Vice style blog. But 18 months ago, we pivoted to email only, so. So right now, the Hustle as it stands, our eventual vision is to build the next great cnn, the next great media company. But as it stands now, we're a media company whose most popular product is a daily email. And what we do is each morning, we tell about half a million people all the business news information they need to know each morning. We have about 17 or 18 people working here. We're quite profitable and trying to build a big old media company.

And also the conference room space is a little bit tight at the moment.

So you might not. Yeah, so I'm taking this call while sitting. The toilet is down. I'm sitting on. I'm sitting in the bathroom because our conference rooms are all taken.

We just don't give a crap, honestly. This is the Hustle. And this is Sam Par. This is who we are. I love it. Yeah.

So we're in our bathroom.

This is why I couldn't stop laughing.

This is why it's a little dark.

I can't find a conference room. Are we gonna do a video? I'm like, yeah, it's a video podcast. Like, screw it, we're going to the bathroom.

Yeah. So here we are.

I love you. So. That's awesome. So, yeah, you blew my mind hole wide open with that mentor session at 2:12. And I just was really intrigued by this idea. Tell them how you grew so fast. You have this ambassador program. Kind of lay it out for people.

If you want to. Well, we grew fast using creating a great community and by creating content. So I don't have a media background at all. And because of that, I have an advantage, I think. And so one of the ways we grew really fast is by creating lots of content. So if you Google the Hustle Kindle or just Kindle Ebooks, I think will come up top in the first page. We basically grew really popular really fast by using some principles that I learned on how to make things pop, like make content popular. And we grew really fast by writing content on, like, becoming a really famous Kindle ebook author in a very sleazy and unethical way. And I could talk about that in a minute. But we wrote lots of articles where we took LSD and talked about how it impacted our microdose lsd, and we talked how it impacted our creativity and depression and productivity. Or we talked about living on Soylent for 30 days. And we got millions of people to our site within the very first handful of months of being a business. And that is how we got most of our initial traction. And the other way is we. I read a Tim Ferriss article maybe four years ago, three years ago, where he used. Where the guy who started Harry's.com, harry's Razor, he used an affiliate program in order to. Where people could get a unique URL. And if they got like two or three or four people to buy razors, they would get, like, a free razor. And so I read this article about it, and I was like, you know, we could do that for Hustle time, I bet. And we did it for hustlecon, and we sold a bunch of tickets that way. But then we're like, what if we did that for our email list? And so we created this ambassador program using this code that we built, or this program we built based off of the code from the original Harry's post, where if you refer four people, you join our private ambassador group. So we have private AMAs or interviews with guys like Tim Ferriss and folks like that. If you refer 10 people, you get stickers. If you refer 20 people, you get T shirts, 50 people, hoodies, and so on and so on. And that's, you know, we have about 4,000ambassadors throughout the world, and that's how that's been really helpful for us.

So as an ambassador, there's different tiers, right? So they kind of go up in their influence. Are there other kind of perks as well? Do they get like discounted tickets to events or how else do you kind of hook these people up?

Yeah, so. Well, one, they're hooked because of our mission. You know, like, our tone is very. No bull. And we don't really give a what people say about us. I mean, we're very like, this is how we feel about this issue. We think you should know. If you disagree with us, you can comment and we can have a discussion. So they like that attitude and so they're like, inspired to be part of it because of that. But also our branding is pretty good and so people love our stickers. We have really funny stickers that we don't sell. You have to earn them. And our ambassador group has a lot of really high quality people, and people love participating in that because people have met their boyfriend or girlfriend, people have met their business partners, people have met investors, and people run ideas by each other and they love being part of that. And then also, similar to sticker thing, we have a bunch of really cool swag. So people love our T shirts and our hoodies and our. We even have socks and hats. And so they can come to those or they can get those things. And if they want to come to Hustlecon, specifically if they want to come to hustlecon and meet all of our speakers, like the founders of Casper, Bonobos, Pandora, you know, all types of great companies, if they want to come and meet those people, they have to share with like a thousand people. And we've had, I don't know, four or five people refer at least a thousand people.

That's impressive. So these people obviously have big lists, right? These are probably influencers in their own right, kind of.

Some of them are like, they just hustled their ass off, some of them. Like, we had one guy who has like 50,000 students on his Udemy core, on his Udemy class list or whatever it's called. You know what I mean? So kind of they're not like always like big shots, but they have followings, I guess, sometimes.

But you've managed to create this ecosystem where people want to promote you and they love Your content and they love your brand. It wouldn't work without that being the basis of it. Yeah.

Now there's this great system that has to exist and then we just created the technology to empower them and people.

If you're not familiar with it, check out the hustle co. Sign up and check it out. I just think it's brilliant the way you guys do it.

So basically the way it works is someone will get their own unique URL. We're always changing. So I don't know exactly what it is now, but roughly three weeks after they've read our content, they'll get an invitation to join. And so if you sign up now, in about three weeks you'll get an invitation. If you consume our content. Yeah.

And you have to consume at least a certain number of emails in order to get that triggered, essentially. So it's like kind of choose your own adventure on an email list. I like it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're kind of like building like our entire, like we have our own ad network. We have like our own entire ecosystem within an email, which is kind of weird and cool.

I love that. Sam. So, all right, so you're here now. You're a half a million subscribers. That's amazing, by the way. Congratulations on that. You don't want to just, you know, overlook that that's a massive accomplishment and you want to get to be like CNN or whatever you perceive that to be like, what are some of the steps in between that you perceive this company taking shape and then what do you think are the pieces that are missing currently that you would need to do that?

Well, I have a few hypothesis, but I also have one belief which is it's okay not to know and I'll figure it out along the way.

Oh, totally.

Because that's kind of how life works. But my a few hypothesis are I believe that a healthy media company, you know, the buzzfeeds and the vices and the business insiders, you know, the really large impactful the Wall street journals and New York Times. I believe that a lot of these companies, in order to be healthy, need to have multiple revenue streams other than simple advertising. I think advertising can make a pretty good revenue stream. But in order to make hundreds of millions or billions of dollars a year, it can't be the only revenue stream. So I believe that we're going to have multiple products, including subscription, affiliate advertising, events and software sales that will allow us to become a huge company. Now in order to. It's kind of like a circle. We're going to have lots of content that's wonderful, free content, you know, kind of like traditional, like Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, like amazing content, whether that be video and tech space and podcasts. And then after that we're going to have these revenue streams which include affiliate revenue, advertising revenue, software sales and events. And then that will allow us to afford to provide more content and that content will give us more visibility into selling these other things.

What does it currently cost you to produce your content on a daily basis? Or do you have that metric? Is that a known.

We have, is it hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars?

I just have no idea.

We have a four person editorial team, including myself, four salaries as of now. It's probably like the smallest editorial team per like revenue and like viewer count that I could think of. I don't know, maybe. Casey Neistat has only one person who makes his content and that's pretty good.

He's got a big team too now. He's like putting up little pieces of office space. And I know you're a hustler, I know you work hard. So I knew you'd appreciate that. That's why. No, it was already there. But I'm happy that you picked it out. So, okay, so you have these four people and yourself. They're kind of looking around at different trending news stories or how do you guys mostly find your ideas for what to write about or to form an opinion on? Or are they just kind of news affiliated people already all on their phone? Like, what does a call look like?

One of our guys is okay, so what's cool about our company is right now we're at 17 people. In a year maybe we'll be at 40 people. But of our 17 people, only one, no two people have backgrounds in media. One is a guy from Vox, another guy is a writer who is from Funny or Die. So only one person is news related. So some of our best employees don't have any background, but they're all news junkies. But they're more so information junkies. So what we do really well is we find information that we believe is useful to our users and we make it incredibly engaging by being really good writers. So I guess you could say we're news junkies. But the way it works is our team starts working around 10:30 or 11:00am, sometimes a little bit later, and they read the, they read all over the news. They have sources tell them stuff and they get all their information out there. They have an editorial team around noon or an editorial meeting around 11:30 or noon, they talk about what's going on. They get their drafts done by like 4 or 5. They edit it and talk about more what's going on in the world. And they keep doing that until like 7 or 8pm and then typically they go and do their own thing. And then I see them on between midnight and one, like tightening everything up and making final updates. And then one person gets up at like 8am and sends email and they do it again every day.

That's wonderful. I mean that's pretty much almost a 24 hour news cycle at this point. You know, you kind of got the.

Best of the dog. You know, they work their ass off. They're like, they're incredibly hardworking, but they get to do cool stuff, which is they get to like have an, like, we're pretty hands off. They have their hand. They're impacting a lot of people every day. Pretty cool.

That's pretty brilliant. Yeah. And I was just gonna say, I mean, because you specifically called out cnn, I actually got to tour the nerve center in Atlanta, down in CNN headquarters in Atlanta and kind of do the whole tour and speak to some of the producers. I mean, you're talking like everything going on. It looks like a freaking rocket ship is being launched, you know, command center style. Everybody's on the phone all time. What did Trump say, what's on the Twitter, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff all the time. Is that something that, that you would be interested in checking out? Is this something you have checked out or you kind of.

I'm incredibly interested in it, yes. I believe.

See if I could dig up some contacts for those people. Absolutely.

I believe though that as of now, breaking news is a little bit of a commodity. You know, like a lot of people read headlines and they don't give a shit if it's coming from CNN or fox. Even though a lot of people think those are two opposite things, they don't necessarily care because they just read the headline that like if Trump died today, like you would see that headline from Seeking N in Fox and treat it, it would hold value. Yeah, right. But what really would hold a lot of weight is someone explaining to you the significance of that, of that thing, that event, and why it's important and why it matters and what matters. And that's where brain comes in. Right.

It seems like it's more story driven at the end of the day. Right. You want to be able to tell a really compelling story. It's not just what happened, it's why we think it happened. This way and what the does it mean to you?

Additionally, you have to tell it in a way that fits users behavior. Like do you have cable?

Sure.

Okay. Most people don't. Right. Most young people, I was hoping you'd say no. But most young people. Most young people do not have cable. Most people who are aged 20 to 20, 18 to 23, who live on their own don't have cable yet. That's where a lot of the resources go for the biggest companies in the world. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So they still want to advertise to those people and they still want to be in those people's eyeballs that are, you know, they're not spending money willy nilly. Or maybe they are, but in reality everybody's starting to switch in Netflix, they're starting to switch to Facebook, switch to YouTube and these types.

Exactly.

And you're a very data driven guy.

Yeah. Do you know what the average viewer age right now is for cnn?

I couldn't tell you. I mean you have to be. I would say it's probably 35 plus.

It's 68 years old. What?

Get out of here.

Fox News is a little bit higher, it's around 70.

So 68 year olds and 70 year olds are consuming most of the media, mainstream media content being created on cable. That's amazing. That's a shocking statistic.

And you know how much they make a year. News Corp, which owns Fox, you know, Fox is actually two companies, News Corp and this other company, they make like 10 or $20 billion a year.

Yeah, it's a serious amount of loot.

Off 70 year olds watching TV.

So you don't necessarily need to even capture that whole market. You don't need to be the juggernaut. If you could pull off a small piece of that, you know, a few percentage points, you'd be in really good shape.

If that's what we're aiming for. Yeah, yeah.

So what are you aiming for I guess is a better question. Again you talked about kind of what you want to do in the world and what you want to create. But who are the demographics that you think, you know, are you looking to grow with these demographics as they become more and more affluent? And that's kind of the strategy. Are you looking to people that are a certain age group now and have a certain income level now?

We know who we're trying to target right now. They're called Henry's high earning, not rich yet. You know, the 20 to 30, the 20 and 30 somethings. We live in big cities and make, you know, 50 to $150,000 a year and are going to be the shot callers in the next 10 to 20 years.

I like that. Not rich yet. Whoever came up with that, give him a raise, give him a promotion, because that's brilliant. I love acronyms.

I believe it's, it's an industry term that I got to take 100% credit for coming up with. Absolutely.

As you should. And you kind of have some more data driven insights. So I'm just going to wind you up again like a top. Just tell me some of the most shocking things you've learned as being a student of data because you're a relatively introverted guy. At least that's the way you started out.

Yeah, I guess I can be loud, but I'm actually only when I'm loud. I'm really loud, but it's just not that often. So what do you want to know?

Yeah, I just want to know the cool stuff like that, like 68 to 70 year olds are watching these, these news channels. Like what, what do people my age, 32 years old, you know, doing okay, care about the world, Just don't want to be inundated with, with the negativity in the news. You know, I don't want to know about the, you know, I would rather hear more stories about the 99% of people who aren't raped or murdered or stabbed or, you know, whatever happened to them this day. Not that I don't care. It has nothing to do with that. I just want more positive messaging in the world. Where do I go for news?

Well, so if you like, if you're a subscriber and you enter Gmail, you go to News the Hustle Co and you search our, for our thing, our email, and then you type in the word Trump. You will see that we rarely mention, mention Trump or any political news. A lot of people don't want to hear about that. Whether you're pro Trump or not pro Trump, you get sick of it. You know, I believe that people are really sick of it. And if they're anti Trump, then they're incredibly sad and depleted. If they're pro Trump, they probably are sick of people hating on him and not telling the truth. Whether that's true or not, that's probably the perspective or that is their perspective. And so we don't mention politics at all unless it's business related. One day we maybe we'll get into that, but right now we stay clear. And it was not, that was not my decision. I actually thought that was horse's decision. Really bad decision that we were gonna make as a company, but it turned out to be a great decision.

So you actually decided as a company not to be polarizing and not to go political?

Well, we're polarizing in that we take stance on things, but we're like South Park. We make fun of everyone, and we love everybody, and we love people from both sides. So, you know, we are kind of outsiders. I feel as though we're outsiders in many aspects. I'm not a media guy, but I'm based in Silicon Valley. And so all the tech people don't think we're a tech company. And so we're like, bastards. And we kind of take that mentality about it with all of our coverage in that we don't have a horse in this, or we don't have a dog in the fight, a horse in the race. And so we're going to tell people our opinions, which I think are somewhat reasonable, but we give you the information just so you can decide for yourself.

And you have this almost uncanny ability. This is one of the reasons I was drew to you. I was like, this guy's a genius. Because I want to be this good at this piece is that you really get what people are thinking, thinking and feeling, and it's almost like second nature to you. You just come up with it. So you're like, if you want to achieve an outcome in the world, or you want to create a message or a copy or whatever it is that you're doing, you just have this innate ability to be like, oh, they're thinking this, and they care about this, and they know this, and I can write that. It just comes out of you. And, like, where did that come from? Like, how does somebody replicate that is just a natural gift that Sam Barr has.

Or the gift of gab is what my father calls it. My mom and dad are entrepreneurs, and they're salespeople. And so they had to get the gab really, really good when I was a kid, and I learned that. And then when I was in seventh grade, the summer entering my seventh grade, I had a book to read. Like, you know how they give you summer reading? And I thought it was stupid, and I hated it. And I was like, I'm not gonna read this, but I'll read. I'll read something because I think that is valuable. And so I read this book called how to Win Friends and Influence People. And after reading that book, I said to myself, understanding how to manipulate people in a good way or in A bad way. But when I say manipulate, I mean a good way can influence people to do what you want them to do, is the most important skill set that you can ever learn, ever. And so I dedicated my life to like, what can I do to get people to do what I want them to do? Now that sounds really negative, but it isn't.

Well, I mean, a hammer can build a house. It can also cave somebody's skull in. It's what you do with the hammer, right?

That's a good analogy. Yeah, it's so, it's so I was like, I'm gonna use, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna try my hardest to be the best at this. And I don't really care about any other skill set. And I'm gonna make this, I'm gonna make this my skill set and I'm gonna try and be the best at it. Because I believe that if I can be the best at this, I can convince, I can do anything I want. You know, So I at the. I studied that forever. So I learned about persuasion and I studied how humans think. Then I'm a self taught copywriter. I don't do a lot of copywriting anymore, but I could get paid, I could be a copywriter for a living. I'm good enough at least to get by on that. And so what? Copywriting basically is using the written word to convince people to do stuff. And in order to convince people to do stuff, you have to have to understand how people think. And so I just spent years doing that. And so I just early on I was like, I can either work my off and getting something done or I can try to convince like a hundred people to help me do it. Would way rather do that?

Yeah. And it kind of shows the journey, right? It's like you started out as, this is stupid and boring and I don't get it. And then it was one to one. You had the gift of gab. You read the book, you said, okay, I can really dig my teeth into this. And then you're like, well, how do I get scale on that?

Right?

How do I get 100 people? And then you started with the written word and becoming a really expert copywriter, which is an ongoing thing, you know, it's just understanding that structure and why people do what they do. And just having written enough copy where you're really good at it is kind of that one too many. And now through media, I mean, you can influence millions of people.

Exactly. That's the goal, is to influence certain action that is so if you had.

The ultimate power of influence and you were the best influence in the world, what would you influence the world to do?

Well, we're trying to influence them to do all types of stuff. You know, like some days, like the other day for Napa, when the Nap or when the North North Cal fires were going on, we, you know, got people to donate. Right. But right now, in general, I'm trying to influence people to give it about what's going on in the world and how to understand what's going on and why it matters to them and why it's important. And so that's really what I'm trying to influence. Eventually, one thing that I. One thing that we've struggled with as a company is, as we've grown, is selecting which products would help us grow and which ones sucked and which ones were amazing. So we have this new vertical coming out soon where we're going to be reviewing products that help people start and grow companies. And so we're going to try to influence them to use this product or that product. And so that's one thing we're going to be doing because we've suffered months of setback and hundreds of thousands of dollars using the wrong tools for the wrong job. And so that's what we'll be doing now. But in general, we're just trying to. I want to give people the information they need to make better decisions throughout their day. At its core, that's the kind of the content that we create. It always comes back to that mission of giving them the news and information they need to make better decisions and be better people and succeed.

And I think you've read, you know, you realize at a young age that attention is the number one commodity, right? Money can flow from attention. Influence can flow from attention. Once you have the attention, it's how you direct it after that.

Yes, yes, exactly. And to me, at first I didn't, you know, I learned that, like watching Gary Vaynerchuk videos where he always talked about, like, attention. I didn't understand that's what it was, but I just. I just always thought it was convincing lots of people to do. To do lots of things. That's where it was. And how to, like, how to control the narrative. And I realize this all sounds incredibly negative, but if you use it, if you're a good.

I don't think it does. I think that if somebody, again, if somebody believes that they are evil, this is the thing. People tend to judge based on what they are, right? If they believe that they are manipulative and that they are not trustworthy and that they don't know how to lead people. They also believe that anybody in a position of power is also in that boat and has those same rights. That may or may not be true, but ultimately we tend to filter the world through our own perceptions and beliefs. That's just the truth. Right. So we're going to color whatever influence you may or may not have based on what we believe about ourselves.

And the very first article we ever wrote, and it got really popular, was I had a friend who wrote these self help books on how to get laid and he was a nerd. And he didn't. He never got laid yet he called himself a best selling author and made money off consulting. And I thought that was the biggest Crockett I'd ever seen in my whole life. I thought, dude, this is not only incredibly unethical, it's sleazy. And you should be ashamed to tell your mom what you do for a living.

Yeah. And that's when it comes down to values. Right. You had the values to back up what you were actually doing in the world. So when you come out into the world, I get really excited to see a guy like you with half a million eyeballs or earballs or whatever you want to call them, reading your stuff every day and actually influencing for the better. Good, Because I don't see cnn, you know, doing some of the work you're doing. I don't see Fox News doing some of the work you're doing. Even though they had the attention. It's directed to people whose time has come and gone almost.

Yes. Yeah, exactly. And what we wanted to do, the influence we were trying to persuade on that one, is to show people that a lot of these Kindle authors out there are bull. They don't trust them because they're just plagiarizing one another and the reviews are fake. And so the action that we were trying to influence there was for people to be suspicious about what they're consuming because it's crap a lot of the times. Not all the time, some of the times. And so we definitely are always trying to unveil what is and what is not. Bull.

I really love that you're getting into the review space too, Especially because that's a problem that I have. I'm always trying to figure out what's the best tool for the job. And it's just so time consuming. Right. Because all of them are okay. But to find the one that's gonna work for you and why that? You know, if you just have a trusted medium and I know Appsumo is doing, or Sumo I should say is doing this. I know you know Noah and you guys were at 212 together. So if you haven't connected with him.

I. Yeah, I know Noah.

Yeah, so, so yeah, like what do you, how do you see that rolling out? Like what would be your kind of sand par strategy for that? I'm really excited to hear.

I'll unveil a little bit. But basically if you Google, what's the difference between this product and that product, so specifically a software right now, Google when you get a chance, what's the best OKR software? What you'll see is one of three things. The first thing you'll see is like a website that just like lists a table that has like checkboxes next to like which features it has that doesn't exactly tell you the answer. The second thing you'll see is a Quora post where you'll see 4 to 10 long in depth answers. And if you look closely and do research on the author, you'll see they're the CEO of an OKR software and a software that company that offers OKR software. And both of those, the first one is not unethical because none of them are unethical, but the first one is not answering your problem because it doesn't actually tell you what's best. It just says like, well, if you need this thing, this, this has a box that's checked this box and you're like, I don't know, features, not benefits.

Right? From a copy perspective, right.

It's like, do I need that feature? I have no idea. Like when I was starting a company, I had no idea that I needed compliance software because I didn't know what compliance softw. So if you told me this had like a compliance checker on it on this HR thing, I would be like, cool, bro.

Yeah, nice story.

Or I could have read Quora and I could have saw that the person who was wrote this article was like, you know, I know him and so I know that he's the CEO of this company. And like that. Well, that's pretty biased.

Maybe a little biased. Yeah, exactly.

I don't know if that's best. And so what we're going to do is when you Google what's the difference between one thing or another thing? Or if you look up what's the best for a very specific situation, you'll see that we have answered it and some of our links will be in the same way that like, you know, if someone says like what their favorite book is and they get like a small percentage, like 5% fee if you buy what they recommend, you'll see that that's how we'll make money.

Affiliate links. Absolutely. And I've seen Brian Lamb do this at Wirecutter. I've seen a lot of different wire cutter.

Imagine wire cutter for work. I love it.

Yeah. And that's needed, right? That's necessary because there's just so much noise out in the marketplace.

Brian Lamb's the best. I don't know. You know him?

No, I just follow stuff.

Yeah, I just follow his podcast. That guy's awesome.

Yeah. So big shout out to Brian. Thank you for being you being a rock star. And I think he has a couple other properties too besides Wirecutter, because that's just crush. And I never like, I've looked at that business model. Like there's no frickin way I'm gonna be able to make enough money on Amazon Affiliate. But I guess, you know, if you, if you have the scale and you're getting those higher commissions, you know, you do a lot of Amazon affiliate.

Yes, but the thing about software and business services, instead of paying like $300 for like a comforter, which is what he'll recommend, you know, you have to pay like a thousand dollars a month for 24 months. And so the commissions will be. Are a lot higher.

Yeah, agreed. I think that's definitely a needed space. And so will a lot of these companies have affiliate programs already or do you have to kind of be like, hey, we want to refer your product and service? Because I run into that problem myself a lot. I want to recommend things that just don't have an affiliate program.

Some of them do. Yes. But if you have a big enough audience, which we do, basically we have an editorial. We'll have an editorial team and then we'll have a partnerships team. The editorial team works independently and they recommend whatever they want to recommend. The partnership team talks to the people who we've written about and gets and asks and works out a deal where we can get, you know, referrals.

And will you go as far to like set up a tracking system for them?

Definitely.

Okay, cool. Yeah, it's definitely worth it in your, in your circumstance. Awesome. So, yeah, I get it. It makes a lot of sense and I'm glad you're building that. I can't wait to see it finished. Are you gonna call it a subsidiary of the Hustle is gonna be its own thing or you're not sure yet?

No. Like I was saying before, I believe that, you know, a media company will have multiple streams of revenue. So Business Insider has Business Insider research. They also have events and things like that. And this will be. This is gonna be one of our streams of revenue.

Perfect. I love it. So, Sam, if somebody is really excited about getting into media in a non traditional way, what were some of the things that you had to learn the hard way about the way the world is, or about playing politics or about, you know, just growing a company in general that you wish you knew ahead of time where you were just beating your head against the wall trying to do something different, where you could have just gone with the flow a little bit.

So the cool thing about media nowadays is there isn't that many politics. So like, when I saw the word journalist, I was incredibly intimidated. I was so afraid to talk, to hire people who had, who were called themselves journalists or who had like a journalist educate journalism education or something like that. But the cool thing that people should know is that Casey Neistat, or whether you like him or not, guys like Jake Paul, just guys with like a cell phone or women with a cell phone, they are journalists. They're documenting the world. You don't have to like their opinion, but it's pretty an even playing field. Like, Casey Neistat is a talented dude with a camera. I don't think he went to film school, but some of his. If he chose to do news, it would be better than.

Oh, absolutely. And that's why CNN went and bought his property, his Beam app, just to get him like it was the whole piece, you know, 25 million bu do.

So he has this video where he talks about the immigration ban and he goes to the airport and he. And he talks to people whose family had been. Were on the plane that was on the tarmac. And I learned more from that than I understood the stories behind. I understood the issues before. People said immigrants from Syria can no longer get in the country. Okay, cool. Syrians can't come now. When I saw his video, I was like, oh my God, that's a moment. Her daughter is like, oh my God, I understand. Like, that's crazy. That kind of changes my opinion a little bit. And so, like understanding like that this one guy with a camera and YouTube can do more damage than Fox. And CNN is super important to anyone who wants to get into media, which is if you have a computer or a cell phone, you can reach more people than a lot of these media companies can. And I think that's amazing. I think that's incredibly important to learn because for the long time I thought, wait, so a media company? I gotta go and, like, find sources and I've gotta, you know, talk to my. How am I gonna, like, break these stories? Like, it's like, well, you don't really have to do a lot of that necessarily. I mean, you have to, like, make sure you get your facts right. But, like, anyone can do it. And it's pretty cool. That's awesome. A lot of traditional people hate that, but anyone could start a blog, and that is really cool. And I didn't actually understand that for a long time, and I came into the industry incredibly intimidated.

Yeah, it's like anybody can start a blog, which means everybody can start a blog. But then again, if you get to that place, like Casey, I. The reason I have him on my wall is he's definitely a hero and an influencer. He's from New York and all that good stuff. And then I look at somebody like that and I see him connecting with people at a really deep level and making it raw and real, and we don't know what's gonna happen. It's exciting. And it's also that deep connection that we all feel. It's not some processed whitewashed. Here's what we are still able to tell you after we've done all of our politicking. At the end of the day.

Yeah. After, like, all, like, 15 people on the team got their say into how.

You know what I mean, crafted every word. It's. I mean, yeah, sure, there's an editing process, but the guy puts out a video every single day.

Yeah.

How much editing, you know, bond, like, stylistically? Like, is you really gonna think about every word that was said? And maybe a little bit, but at the end of the day, you're getting pretty much what happened.

I think that. And I think that's cool that that took me a long time to learn. I was really intimidated for a long time about what medium, what that meant. Another thing for people who want to get into media, get really good at something, you know, like, I'm an okay writer, but I'm good enough to hold my own. Or if you're going to be good at film filming or podcasting, just get really good at your craft. Because if you are talented and you do have a good story and you do have a really good way to tell it, you'll stick out. Because like you said, anyone can have a blog. Anyone can have a blog. Therefore, everyone has a blog. That means there's a ton of shit there. So just get really good at something at, like, telling your story, and you'll stick out big time. And I think that far too many people don't look at what they're trying to do as a skill set, and you constantly have to craft that. You have to get better at your craft.

And then, Sam, for you, since you've been so generous in kind of telling us what's going on and sharing with the audience and just answer my questions, I'm just really grateful. Thank you. What are some of the ways we can support you, connect you to the resources, the opportunities, the people, the systems or crops we like to say, that are going to help you move your mission forward faster?

Hmm. Well, if you want to help us spread the word, I would love it if you could become an ambassador, so. And sign up for the Hustle. Besides that, I don't really have. I'm not promoting anything at the moment. You know, I really just want. I just want to spread the word about the Hustle. So you could always sign up, but at the moment, I don't have any needs, really.

No leadership challenges, no people you could really use? No connections you really.

Yes, I always. I always have leadership challenges. And one thing I've learned early on was that starting something and growing something requires entirely different skill sets. So I'm always learning about leadership and building a great culture. So if anyone can recommend books or resources or people who have changed their lives in regards to leading a team, please send that my way.

John King coming at you. Tribal Leadership. It's a great book, and I know John personally, so I'll see if he's open to talking. He's been doing this for a long time. He helped. He and Dave Logan from Landmark. They built huge consultancy together.

I know. I've heard of that. Yeah. So I need lots of help with growing. You know, when you go from, like, one to 20 people and, like, you know, 20 months, it's pretty hard.

And I'm gonna see about CNN to see if I can dig up a. A name or two there. We had a really cool tour, and they're really sweet, and they all gave us their cards at the end, and I don't know, maybe we can get you into a newsroom and really see how it.

I would love that. If you'll buy it, maybe we'll buy them.

Yeah, right.

Exactly.

I love it, like, the way you think. So.

Yeah. So that's what I need help with. And if, you know, we're always Doing more podcast or podcasts and interviews like this to spread the word. So if you are in the audience and you're part of that crew, then holler at me 100%.

And I have a secret weapon for that as well, which I'll tell you about after. Okay, so how can people get in touch with you if you have that connection or that resource for you?

My email is samthehustle.co. so my first name at our URL. Or I'm on Twitter hesampar. I don't tweet a lot, but I always check them. And I'm incredibly active on Facebook. I know that not a lot of people do that, but if you friend me on Facebook, I'm. I think Facebook and Messenger are the two greatest things on earth that. And I use them all the time.

I am with you 100%. And that is actually true. I mean, I met Sam. He didn't know me from a hole in the wall. We've been conversing here and there. He jumped on the podcast. I mean, Sam, you're just a rock star, and I want to support you as best I can. And I know everybody feels the same way. I mean, you're just. You're thinking at a level that most people never think at.

Well, that is. I'm happy I've tricked you.

You're considering cause and effect relationships. You do with such humility and modesty that I certainly don't share. But, you know, I'm glad it's working for you.

Thank you. I'm glad it's working too. Right on, brother.

Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate you, Sam.

Thanks, dude.

Catch you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Make More Marbles podcast for more tips, hacks and strategies to create an amazing, abundant life in your health, wealth, and relationships, whatever that means to you. Head on over to makemoremarbles.com check out our cooled explainer video about what we're about, and join our community of entrepreneurial game changers. We want to help you level up your life in every possible way. And don't forget to subscribe to us on itunes, Stitcher, or Google Play, wherever you listen to your podcast. And please do leave a review. Thank you so much. And we'll see you on the next podcast.