My First Million’s Sam Parr Shares the Secret to Leadership and Growth

So my name's Sam Parr. I host this podcast called My First Million. I think— so we have like 2 million downloads a month. Maybe top 5 most popular business podcasts? I don't know, maybe top 10.

You guys are top 10, I think, yeah.

Probably top 10.

Yeah.

I started this thing called The Hustle, which is a daily email that now is read by 2 million people a day. So 2 million subs— maybe it's over 2 million. I don't know the exact number. 2, 3 maybe, and it's open by well over a million. We have like a 50% open rate now, which is pretty wild. While there, we also had a subscription business called Trends. We had conferences, podcasts, but we sold it to HubSpot for mid-8 figures, and it was a bootstrap company. And this year, we probably would've done like $40 or $50 million in revenue this year, which I predicted that that was not going to happen. That's one of the reasons why I sold. And I was wrong, but whatever, shit happens, it's all good. Would you agree with me if I said podcasts is the hardest thing that you've ever had to grow?

Yeah.

Podcasts are— we— I don't know why ours is growing. That's the true answer, and that's a shitty answer. So there's a few ways to grow it though that I think work, that people who I love and know and trust— so my friend Jordan Harbinger, the way that you grow— or here's the ways that you don't grow, or at least I've not been able to make work. Buying ads on Facebook. At The Hustle, we got to about 250,000 subscribers, email subscribers, in like the first year or 18 months just from me blogging. And I could— and anyone who out there wants to do that, you can do that right now and it will work. And then after that, we bought ads on Facebook and we would get leads for $1.50. Now it'll cost like $8 or $5 on Facebook, but you can get on TikTok for $1.50. My partner Sean, is doing that with Milk Road. He's getting leads probably for $1.50. So that's easy. Those are really easy to grow. A podcast, it's harder to grow because if you wanna go buy, it doesn't really work often to get someone to buy an ad somewhere on one medium to convert them to a different medium. That's really, really challenging. So if you buy ads on Facebook to get them to download your podcast, it's like $10. It's like prohibitively Expensive. So you buy ads on Google, it's like prohibitively expensive. Um, and so the 2 best ways I think that work is you have to go and be a guest on lots of other podcasts. Of course, that's really hard if you don't already have an audience, so you just gotta beg people. Um, but ultimately you wanna do swaps. And so the goal to grow— the best way I think to grow a podcast, A, is just have good content. And like, what's good content? I don't know. It's like asking like, what's art? It's a really challenging question. Some people just have it. I wouldn't say I have it, but my partner Sean for sure has it. And so that has helped us grow a lot. But the second way that you can grow is you get— because if we believe that it's tougher to grow from one medium to another medium, it's— I would also say it's probably easier than to grow from the same mediums. And so our whole shtick early on was get on as many podcasts as possible. One way to do that is you advertise on other podcasts. And oftentimes with smaller podcasts, you'll find a huge arbitrage where you can buy really cheap ads. on someone's podcast, and you'll notice that it goes up right away, your downloads. Um, and the other way is to become a guest on there, on, on other people's podcasts. But here's another problem: measuring podcasts, it's so hard. It's like a billboard. Like, you've got— like, you'll buy an ad on another podcast, and you're like, did it work? And you're like, I don't know, do the numbers go up? Like, I can't, I can't tell you where necessarily the— it's like buying a billboard. It's like If I'm trying to do something in Nashville, it's like, well, I just bought a bunch of billboards in Nashville. Did our Nashville revenue grow? That's kind of what growing a podcast is like.

That's what marketing is, right? 50%, you don't know what's working.

I have no idea. So like, people are like, can you grow our podcast? I'm like, I don't know, man. I don't know if I can.

Actually, I mean, with Jordan as an example, he's spending like, it's like 7 figures a year to advertise on other podcasts. Yes.

So the way it works is, let's say that you— so with us, our CPMs, We could probably sell those for $50 per 1,000 listens, right? Is $50 fair?

$30 to $60.

$30 to what?

$30 to $60 for podcasts.

Yeah, $50 is on the high end, but we have a business audience, so like we could probably get $50. But let's just say that we would get $30. There's a lot of podcasts where they'll charge $20 and so, or $15 because they're brand new. And so what you're able to do is buy ads there and make money by having a 100% fill rate for your ad inventory on your podcast, and you make money on that split. So it's really reasonable to spend $1 million a year buying other podcast ads, and you make $3 million on your podcast ads.

And plus you're part of that HubSpot collective too. How's that been for you guys?

Yeah, so— You wanna talk about that? The Hustle was acquired by HubSpot, which is a large software company that sells to small businesses. They're like a, Depending on the size, 3 months ago they were a $40 billion company. Today they're a $20 billion company. So who knows what their worth is gonna be in a few months. But basically they bought us because they wanted to become a media company in order to not buy ads anymore and just use our platform. And so now The Hustle has like 100+ employees. It's called HubSpot Media now. And they also have like 15 different podcasts. I think the one that you guys might know best is There's one called Gold Digger and there's one called Entrepreneurs on Fire. And we're building this podcast network where we can promote one another, kind of like what iHeartMedia does. And that has been pretty effective. But again, it's hard to know. Like, our numbers have gone up significantly. When we were acquired, we were doing 600,000 or 700,000 downloads a month. Now we're doing over 2 million. So I can't say it's not working.

It's hard to know, but you know that podcasts work.

Yes.

Yeah.

I know it works. What's crazy is because when I walk down the street, depending on how many times I get recognized, that's how I know it's working.

You're known to be really good at growing audiences, promotion. And so there was one of the last few episodes you talked about in My First Million, you were talking about how Twitter's easy. It's relatively simple. It's not easy.

I think it's easy and simple.

Okay, how do you become Twitter famous? Everyone here is interested.

So, I'm actually, I stopped doing it because once I cracked the code, I didn't find it enjoyable. But I'm doing it right now. Does anyone pay attention to the NHL? Uh, does anyone know Chris Pronger? So Chris Pronger is like a Hall of Famer player from St. Louis where I'm from. And I met up with him recently and he was like, hey, I wanna get popular on Twitter. And he had like 5,000 people, followers. But like he had 20 years of experience and he's like the number 6 highest earning NHL player of all time. So like it's relatively easy when you already have like that type of experience. I was like, look, this is so simple. Come up with 10 things that you learned. And he came up with 10 things that he learned playing in the NHL. I go, great. Number 7 about making money, that's interesting. Tell me all about making money in the NHL. And he told me this long story and he's like, yeah. And I was like, well, how much money do NHL players make if it says that they make $50 million? He's like, well, you get this money here. this money here, this money here, but 30% goes to escrow. And I was like, wait, what's escrow? And he goes, well, basically when you get paid $10 million, 30% goes to run the league. And I go, when do you get that money back? He's like, you don't. I was like, okay, well, that's interesting. That's an interesting story here. Write a 10-thread, a 10-tweet thread about what like escrow is and also how if you make $10 million, how much does the player actually make? And the reason why that's interesting is that There's certain emotions that get shared. So shock and awe is one. Anger is another good one that gets shared a lot. And laughter is, you know, if you think something's funny, that gets shared a lot. And so that one, I was like in awe. I was like, oh, that's amazing. I had no idea about that. And so anyway, long story short, to get popular on Twitter, long threads explaining something about your life. If you're not that interesting of a person yet because you haven't accomplished a lot yet, read a book and just find like a really cool paragraph that you thought was interesting and you just paraphrase that in like 8, Or 10 tweets.

So that tweet, so that tweet, I think it got like 33,000 or 35,000 likes.

Chris went from 5,000 to, if you look up Chris Pronger, what's he at today? I just wrote another one for him that went live yesterday.

150?

Is he at 150?

Something like that.

So he went from 5,000 to 150,000 in 30 days.

Wow, okay. And it was just him posting, you didn't, were you like—

I wrote it. I would write, like basically he would talk to me and tell me a story.

Yeah.

And I would write out the outline, I'm like, there's your outline. And then he would go and fill in his words. And then I would like edit it and then he would post it.

Can you do that for us?

I find it to be incredibly boring and not at all fun because this game is so simple and easy. I actually do. It's a lot of hype. Unfortunately, I think it is worth it in many cases. So I do think you should do it. But it's like another guy that I helped get started was this guy named Blake. What's Blake's last name? Blake B. Anyone see him on Twitter? Blake Burge. Is that his name? Anyway, he He logged, like, we helped him create a Twitter account right there, and now he's got 300,000 followers, and this is like 2 years, in 2 years. And he, this isn't like a disrespect thing, he wasn't like a successful person that had all these crazy stories. Like, you know, he was still kind of finding out his way, and he just like would read cool books and just paraphrase what he read, things like that.

Yep.

I know a guy who owns 21 of them, collectively worth like $48 million. And I was talking to him about the numbers, and it was pretty interesting to me, and my wife works at Airbnb. The reason why I was interested in Airbnb was I make my living on the internet, and that's kind of boring sometimes because it's like cool, but I can't like take my mom and dad and like show— I used to host conferences, and that was like the one time where I'm like, look, mom and dad, like there's 3,000 people here. Even though we would reach millions of people a day, for some reason this 3,000 people were cooler because they could actually see it, and that was interesting. So I was like, what can I do to kind of experience that on a more daily basis? And Airbnbs are interesting. Short-term rentals are interesting because single-family homes often don't sell at like a cap rate. Like, they're not sold as an investment property. They're just sold at whatever the market rate is for someone who's willing to own it. But you can actually buy it and make like 30% cash-on-cash returns. And so it was interesting that there's this big arbitrage there. And so what I did, what I'm looking to do is buy as much farmland and ranch land as possible. Make the home, the house that's on it cash flow, and then building what she's doing, building more cabins and yurts along that. And I think it could be very lucrative, but more importantly, it's very fun. And so, at my place, we've built a big gym there. So, this one's for health and fitness nerds who can come and exercise. But then, I can see us having little putt-putt and golf courses on our properties. And so, that's what I'm doing now. The problem with that, It's very slow. Real estate is so slow. And so I'm like, I thought I was gonna get into this as like a job, but I'm like, you make decisions, you pay for it, and then you just wait like 6 months for it to like kind of work. And I'm like, what the fuck do I do now?

Sam, thanks so much.

Thank you.