$20M by 30: Sam Parr’s Habits & Frameworks Revealed

When I started The Hustle, my goal was to get to $100 million in revenue. Look, if we get a million people to subscribe to this and we send daily news, I think we can make like $20 or $30 million a year.

It's how often you're emailing. So those total impressions, there's a lot of them.

And so we launched The Hustle. I sold it for many tens of millions of dollars.

It sounds like you were thinking like a billion-dollar creator when you created Hustle. Was that your first business, The Hustle?

So I owned hot dog stands in Nashville, and I had a roommate matching app before that, and it was like Tinder but for roommates. And that's really stupid. I should have done Tinder for Tinder. My whole vision for the business was let's build up this huge audience and make them love us, and then we'll create stuff and sell to them. And the first iteration of that was this thing called Trends.co. And I was really stupid because I charged $300 a year when I should have charged probably $30,000 a year and sold it to companies. But I still think you could build a pretty big bootstrapped business fairly quickly. In my mind, it's like an equation. It's, um, wow.

The idea of a billion-dollar creator is taking an audience which is insanely valuable, and many people don't monetize it in the best way, or they monetize it in a fantastic way, but then I don't realize like how much more valuable that is. And so, Sam, one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on, in addition to your rugged good looks and your ability to start a conversation with somehow roasting and complimenting me simultaneously, Uh, is I think with The Hustle, you built an incredible business in a very traditional way. And then in selling it to HubSpot, they're actually playing that billion-dollar creator playbook where they realize this audience is insanely valuable to them because of the lifetime value and like the enterprise value of HubSpot as a business. So each subscriber to The Hustle is worth significantly more to them than it was to you as a media business, I believe. I'm curious what you think about that.

Yeah. So I'll give you guys a little bit of background. I started this thing called The Hustle. We started it— I originally started it as a conference. It was called HustleCon. It was an event. It was like a TED Talk, but we would have like the founders of Casper and Away Travel or whatever startups were really big and cool in 2014 to 2016. And in order to make that popular, I created an email list. And in 2016, I was— one of my best friends, Neville, wherever he is, He was always bragging about how awesome newsletters were. And I was doing the math and I was like, look, if we get 1 million people to subscribe to this and we send daily news, I think we can make like, I don't know, $20 or $30 million a year. I was just doing the math. And so we launched The Hustle. I sold it in year 4. My goal was to get to $100 million in revenue. I sold it before we got there because I was like, I didn't have a lot of money when I started the company and I had a chance to have financial security. So I was like, I should just take it. And when we sold, I forget, we sold for many tens of millions of dollars. I was given a bunch of HubSpot stock, and the HubSpot stock tripled in price in 6 months, which very meaningfully changed the deal. But then it went way back down. So the target that we sold for was a bit moving, but it was mid-eight figures. And when we started, I thought advertising was a cool business. It's not. It sucks. It's a shit business. It can do well. One of my best friends now is this guy named Austin Reef, who founded this company called Morning Brew, and he only sold a portion of his company recently and he didn't sell the whole thing. So he's still running it. They're doing like $80 million in revenue. So the economics were such that we could have got there. I think the hustle in year one, we got 150,000 subscribers and we were emailing 6 days a week. Year two, I think we were at 500,000. Year 3 was 1 million. 4, when I sold it, was like 1.8 or something. Um, now it has— I think the last I heard it was 3.7 million subscribers, and the open rate is still like 50 or— now when I ran it, it was 50%, but I think Apple changed a bunch of stuff.

Yeah, it's so confusing now.

It's now it's like 60%, so I don't, I, I don't know how that compares to what when I ran it what it was. Um, and so I guess if you do the math, that's what, 1 point— maybe close to 2 million people a day opening it. And maybe at 3.5 million subscribers, I for— what could we do in revenue on that? Maybe, um, 50 or 40, maybe 40 million with that.

Because it's not just about the number of subscribers, it's how often you're emailing. So those total impressions, there's a lot of them.

Yeah, so it was a lot. Uh, I think when I sold it, we were sending— I think it was 70 or 80 million emails a month. And so anyway, my whole vision for the business was let's build up this huge audience and make them love us and then we'll create stuff and sell to them. And the first iteration of that was this thing called Trends, Trends.co. And it's kind of funny, I was doing all this research on what stuff to make to sell to them. And my research, some of my friends thought it was pretty good and they go, just sell that. And I was really stupid because I did that. But I charged $300 a year, uh, when I should have charged probably $30,000 a year and sold it to companies because the same amount of work that we were putting in for this $300 a year thing is like the same amount of work that a lot of people are doing for $20,000 a year. And so I really screwed that up. That was a dumb mistake. Um, and that worked really well within 10 months maybe. I think Trends was, I think we were doing $500,000 a month in subscription revenue. So we were on like a $6 million run rate and I think it was only 10 months old when we sold. You can go back and find all this. Um, but it, it, the plan would have worked and now HubSpot bought us and they were the first company to really go all in on this idea of they, they, they, Dharmesh and Nathan Barry are good buddies and they went on this idea of let's own these brands because basically HubSpot has many millions of people coming to their blog every month and they were like, We're probably— I don't know if this is true, but they were like, we own everyone searching for anything related to what you would buy or what you would look for before you bought HubSpot. And they're like, we just got to own this damn thing. And that's why they bought us. And they were the first to do it. And I know a little bit about the numbers. I don't know too much. I haven't worked there in a couple of years. Their plan worked. It worked really well. And what they bought us for, in my opinion, was a steal. And like if you look at the revenue that they've made from it and how much they're— I think they're valued anywhere from 10 to 20 times revenue, 8 to 20 times revenue. They got a hell of a deal. And I think now, I think, I don't know for a fact, I'm pretty sure they only have like 4 people running The Hustle.

Yeah. One question I have for you is you— it sounds like you were thinking like a billion-dollar creator when you created Hustle. Is that— was that your first business, The Hustle?

So, uh, I owned hot dog stands, uh, in Nashville. Uh, so I had that.

I love this.

And then I had a roommate matching app before that, and it was like Tinder but for roommates. And that's really stupid. I should have done Tinder for Tinder because when we launched it, Tinder wasn't even popular. We were— it was like swiping for roommates. And I think I made like $100 grand when I sold it. And then I started HustleCon. And then I did the hustle.

Okay, so you were thinking like, let me build a really big business from the— from jump?

What I wanted to do was I wanted to have financial security by the age of 30 because I didn't have a lot of money and I wanted to have, uh, I was— I had a scarcity mindset and I was always afraid of being homeless.

Yes. So what was, um, financial security to you at that?

$20 million by the age of 30. That was my number. Um, I, I met a rich person and they told me that they spent $60,000 a month. And I was like, I, in my head, I was like, 4% would be like $20 or $25 million.

You did your FIRE math.

Yeah. And, and so I just made up that number when I was 21 and that's what I wanted to do.

Yeah. Awesome. Okay. Uh, why do you think so many people start out building really small businesses instead of going for the big idea?

Like, well, it's just intimidating. It's intimidating.

Yes.

And you typically, if you're, Like, I lived in San Francisco and it was awesome because I got to meet all these people that were like working on Bitcoin in 2013. Even though it felt silly, it felt like some great idea. Or I had people that were helping make Airbnb huge. But if you live in St. Louis where I'm from, or maybe Boise a handful of years ago, you don't know that many ballers who are like reaching big. And I think that's the reason why, even though oftentimes it takes similar amounts of work to be really huge, typically I do think you often have to raise money if you want to do it in a fast way. And I think there's a lot of stress that comes with that. But I still think you could build a pretty big bootstrapped business fairly quickly. But it helps to have— it helps to have a role model who you're friends with and you're like, oh wow, you're not that much better than me, but you're so much— you're so much more successful than I am now. I have faith and confidence in myself and that takes like being around other people.

Yeah, I agree. And that's one of the reasons why we started this podcast is because we want people to dream bigger. right? And think about this. I agree with you, and I love that you said that, that it takes the same amount of effort, you know? Like, I feel like I worked— I mean, I know for a fact that I worked way harder when my business was making $250,000 a year than I do now, and it's an 8-figure business, you know?

So we did this survey. I have this new thing called Hampton, and it's like a peer group for CEOs, and we asked them what their net worth was, and it ranged from like your business has to do $2 million a year in revenue in order to get it. So whatever that you would value that at all the way up to like there's a bunch of people in the $800 million range and the, the median, the medium hours per week were this was the same for all categories of net worth.

Wow.

What was it? What was it?

In fact, we had a category of 100 to 100 plus. We're going to publish this in the next handful of days. The $100 million plus people who had the net worth, they on average were working like 40 hours. And then like the $1 to $10 million people were actually working a bit higher in the 55-hour range. That sounds right. But it was like the, the— it was very close to the amount of time worked.

Yes.

What do you see in that of it? I mean, you can't trend the data over time. Later on you will be able to as you do the survey. You know, year after year, I imagine. But do you think that's the trend where when someone's building that company from, say, $1 to $10 million a year in revenue, they're having to work a whole ton? And then as they get to scale, they're able to back off? Like correlation?

Yeah, yeah, a little bit. But also, in order to get big, you need to hire really high-quality people and delegate. And if you don't do that, you work harder and you don't get big.

Yes.

And so the confidence issue that I had that I don't have as much anymore was I'm embarrassed to hire someone who's older and better than me. And so a lot of times I would hire someone who's like younger and worse than me because I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, why would this person listen to me? You know what I mean? Like, what the hell do I know?

Because you're paying them. I mean, and they agreed to take the job.

No, I like—

you sound very emotionally stable.

Congratulations.

That's not— that's not an attribute I rank high in. If we were a video game, emotional stability would be like a 4 out of 10.

I mean, I, I relate to that, especially starting in business really young. I remember going to like my first Chamber of Commerce events when I was 18, doing web design, like running a web design freelance business. And then all the way along, I was just always the youngest person in the room. And you talk to people and you're like, wait, you want a job here? But then like, I would tell you like, okay, you could tell me what to do. That's fine. You know, like It's a real thing to have to get over.

Yeah, that's interesting. Forever.

I did not have a problem. Not at all.

I don't know why, but I did not sound like you have very healthy parents. I mean, I don't know what to say. Like, well, you've done well.

I don't know how healthy my parents were, but I went to law school. Maybe that has something to do with it. And I was building a law practice first, and then I got overwhelmed with work, so I hired an admin to help me, and then I hired another lawyer. And so I— and also it might have had to do with my first job out of like being done with college and law school was clerking for a judge. And they just give you a ton of responsibility and you just graduated. And I'm like, I'm telling these lawyers who have been practicing for 30 years what to do because I work for the judge. And I was like, why are they letting me do this? So maybe that's actually where I learned how to, you know, delegate and manage people, even if they're in charge.

Yeah, I used to do these events. We had this thing called HustleCon. We did it for 4 or 5 years. And I remember I used to, I had a lie that I would tell people. I would say, you're speaking at 3, but you gotta come at noon for the mic check. Just like this event, there is no mic check. Mic checks at conferences, they work. Okay. But we had a green room and it was just my, my opportunity to hang out with these amazing people. And so I would get to hang out with like the founders of Grammarly or back then when we thought WeWork was awesome, the founders of WeWork. And I said like, Casper and Away Travel and like all these like multi-billion dollar companies. I got to hang out with them. And what I noticed was that they would be maybe 10 or 100 times more successful than I am. They would freak out still. For example, Sam Yagan, he's the guy who started OkCupid. He was the CEO of, um, I think Match and now the company that owns Match. I forget. It's a public— I, it starts with an I, IAC.

Yeah.

IAC. And he was pacing. Back and forth in the, in the green room. And I was like, hey man, do you need something? Can I get you some water? Um, and he was like, snapped at me. He was like, just leave me alone. And I was like, hey look, Sam, like, I'm— I can help you. You seem really nervous. And he was like, I'm sorry, I'm just nervous to speak in front of these people. And I was like, but why? You have like 20,000 or 10,000 or something employees. And, and it gave me so much confidence that the people that I admire that were like ballers, they They were freaking out all the time. And I remember like I hung out with this. I remember when I hung out with this other company and they had just raised a thing of funding and they were in the New York Times and they were like, this woman was like the it girl. She was like so cool and successful, whatever. And she was telling me that she didn't fire this one person for the past 12 months, even though this person was imperfect for the role because she was just afraid of the conflict. And I was like, wow, really? Like, I admire you so much and yet you're, And so it was almost as if I had bad eyesight and I finally was putting on eyeglasses and could like see, like I was like, oh, this is awesome. Like I could be like really uncertain and not brave about certain things, but as long as I do it anyway, I'll be okay. So that gave me so much confidence because there was very few people that I met that were like 10 times smarter than me. There were a few that does exist, but like, for example, the founder of Grammarly, when I would hang out with this guy, I was like, oh, we just don't have the same amount of horsepower. I can't— there's no nothing in this world. There is no nothing I can do that I can keep up with you. But there was many others where I'm like, we're in the same ballpark.

Yes, that working in the government did that for me. I worked for Hillary Clinton for a time and seeing what a hot mess the office was like every Senate office. And like if you go to any of the congressional buildings and see how the setup is and what a mess it is, it will make you be like, okay, I see, first of all, why this is a mess. And then also it makes you feel like you can kind of do anything because it's you know, important people doing important stuff and there's mess everywhere. So, you know, thinking that you have to do it without the mess is all wrong, right?

It's awesome to see your heroes screw up and like be insecure and stuff.

Yes. And be regular. Like they're just normal people.

Yeah.

With their own stuff. Yes. I met a podcaster recently that has an enormous following, like millions and millions, tens of millions, and you know, this person has a lot of like social anxiety and won't do public speaking and won't go on other people's podcasts even though they have this super successful podcast. So it's interesting, you know, we all have our quirks, right? We all have things that are challenges for us.

Do you try to design around those quirks and let— or do you try to go straight through them and say, I'm going to overcome these?

Yeah. Oh, so I'm definitely of the mindset that I'm going to double down on what I'm great at and do absolutely none of what I'm bad at as much as humanly possible. So I hire for the things that I'm terrible at. Like, I'm not good at organization or building process and systems. Like, I know this is— I know I want a system, but I don't know how to build that system or what the steps are. So I have a lot of operations people on my team because I suck at that, you know? But I'm going to— I literally have worked myself out of every part of my job that is not what I'm great at.

You don't log into Slack anymore, like the company Slack. I think I overheard this the other day and So you're just not in the day-to-day anymore?

Yeah, I— well, I took it off my phone and here's the hilarious thing. So I took it off my phone because I was trying to stop— I have the president of my company who runs the day-to-day and— but I kept meddling and I was like, I'm not going to be involved. Like, it's fine. I'm just going to let you do it. But then I would see stuff and I'd be like, don't do that, do it this way or whatever. And I kept inserting myself. And then when I looked back, I'm like, it really— they didn't need that note on that graphic. Like, just Shut up, you know, but I can't trust myself to not intervene. And so in order to like let her do it, I had to take myself off of Slack. So I just took it off of my phone and then I tried to log in on my laptop today just to see what was going on. And I literally couldn't get it to load because I haven't been in there for so many days and there's so many messages every day that like it was—

your assistant changed your password.

Yes.

Who knows?

It was struggling to load. So I was like, this is my sign to I should just keep minding my business, you know? But this is, this is the thing that I want y'all to understand. Like, at an 8-figure business level, I'm not, I'm not, I don't need to be there every day for the business to run, for people to have success, for clients to get results. I don't need to be involved. I'm not even, not only have I outsourced the task, but also the decision-making, you know? Like, even my husband, who's the CFO, tried to come to me today with like an important decision that needed to be made. And I was like, that sounds like a financial decision. And I'm like, that sounds like it's in your department. I'm going to go shopping. Talk to you later. Let me know.

Different kind of financial decision.

But one of the things I will say that has been great for me, and I think this is where you're at, you're post-revenue, right? Well, at least that's how I think of you.

Like, what's that word?

Post-revenue or post-worrying about money?

Post-economic.

Yeah, post-economic. Yes, that's, that's the phrase that I was looking for. But I think part of my freedom comes from like my lifestyle is of a size that I don't actually have to worry about the revenue of the business to just like take care of myself. And that actually allows me to take some of the pressure off and not worry so much about growth. Like there was a couple of years we went from $2 to $5 million, $5 million to $10 in like a 2-year period, which was very stressful. We had to scale the team very fast, all those things. And I think I'm just in this phase where I'm like, I'm not worried about it. Like, I don't— we don't have to grow. We don't have to double revenue every year because it was all ego, you know? Like, that's what part of it is. Impact. Part of it is wanting to serve as many people as possible. But if I have to go so fast, it was somewhat ego-driven. And so therapy helps. And like being ambitious, but also being able to wait for the results and not feeling like it's actually much more abundant to say, I'm going to get there and it doesn't have to happen tomorrow. Like if it— if you're so desperate that it has to happen tomorrow or the next week, that's actually not thinking abundantly. That's like scarcity, right? Like there's not enough time, right? It's going to go— the opportunity is going to go away. There will always be another opportunity. So anyway, therapy is the point.

Sam, I'm curious for your side. When are you the person who sees like what you're great at and or any of those Yeah, I only got good at that recently. Okay.

In like the last 2 years, I tend to— the things that I suck at, I actually try my hardest to learn how it's done and what excellence looks like, even though I can't exactly execute it. For example, like we— the year we did like $12 million in revenue, I didn't know the difference between cash flow and revenue, like, which is like a huge deal. That's like really bad not to know.

I just saw Jay here in the front row put his head down.

Yeah, that's like a massive— massive issue. Uh, like, I didn't know the difference between the two, um, and I didn't know what the difference between a lot of different things were. And so actually, Kat, my friend Kat, she told me to take this thing called the 4-Day MBA. And I, uh, has anyone— with Keith Cunningham? Yeah, it's awesome. It's like an accounting class. And so like, I try to learn, like, even though I can't actually do the accounting on my own, but I actually try to learn how to do it. And I'm like, one of my— one of something I'm very good at. I'm really bad at a lot of stuff. I know how to hire really well and I know how to get them going and doing the right shit. And so I hire wonderful people and then I just like, I'm— I know enough hopefully about many things that I can kind of know that I'm not being like stolen from or something, you know what I mean? Like, it's really important for me to understand that.

Yeah, I think that I have been in the model of whatever I don't know or whatever I'm not good at, I'm going like, that's the skill that I'm going to hone and improve. And because early in my career I was trying to do like be a designer, a developer.

You're a great designer. Do you guys know how I know Nathan Barry? He had this book called Authority in 2013. Yeah, that's 2013. And I went and saw him speak at the Gumroad office. In San Francisco in 2012 or '13, and that is how I knew you, because you were designing icons, I think, right?

Yeah, app— iOS apps and all of that.

I thought you were great at design.

Well, thank you. This makes up for the compliment— or the comments earlier. So what I always had, that approach of trying to overcome all of the things that I wasn't good at, and now I I think I'm starting to make that shift where I'm saying, I don't know if it's like I'm stopping growing in those areas and I'm like, I'm going to hire other people, or that the growth that I actually need to do is to say this has to go beyond, much more beyond my skills. And so, you know, the growth to say, you do that, I'm not going to be involved.

Yeah. And just stay in your lane. I also wonder if you have to— I've had people say that to me before, like, I need to know what the team member needs to do every day in order for— to manage them. And I'm like, no, you don't. Why do you need to know? I don't know crap about design. I can't even log into Photoshop.

I don't know why. I like to understand a little bit because I want to know, like, can I push them harder? Like, what's reasonable and what's like on the far edge of reasonable? And when can I— because like when you run a company, I think a lot of you, there's there's times when it's like, all right, I'm going to push them super hard to get— they're going to be borderline quitting. And then like next month, it's okay to chill. Like, I know that like we're executing a bit slowly. You don't— I have to feel that pulse, but I always try to study that shit. So I know like, all right, this is unreasonable. Let's go there.

Okay. So two things that I do. One is just KPIs, right? Like you just track— every team member needs to have KPIs that they're tracking for. And so that's one thing. But the other thing is hire two. So like you can think like you might hire one person and you think they're amazing. This happened to me in my law firm. I hired my first attorney. I thought she was the bee's knees. I just liked her, you know? And then she also was executing. She was very smart, but she also like pushed back on everything and disagreed with me on everything, was very slow to get work done a lot of times. Then I hired my second attorney And I was like, the first one sucks, you know what I mean? But I didn't know that until I hired the second one. And the second one is crushing it and like executing so much more, so much easier to manage. And I'm like, oh, actually this employee thing is not that hard if you hire the right, the right person. So that was advice that I got from an older lawyer who was running like this multimillion dollar practice. He's like, before, you know, you're gonna, you need to hire two of everything, right? And when you hire the second one, that's how you know whether the first one is good.

This is something that I had not heard before. And I was at Anthony Pompliano's event in New York City, and I was talking to the guys who run sales for Ramp, the credit card company.

Yeah, they kill it.

They're very, very good. And so I was—

I started that company. That's going to be a big-ass company. That guy's amazing.

That's awesome. So it was like maybe 3 different sales leaders in the company. I think it was the chief of staff and 2 sales leaders that I was talking to, and I was asking them how they structure their team, how they commission, all of those things. And the different roles they have in their sales pipeline. They were also trying to convince ConvertKit to switch to Ramp. And so, you know, it was— I was trying to extract as much information from them as I could. But in that, I said something about like our migrations and implementations team for ConvertKit, how we have one person run that. She's amazing. And they were like, hold on, that sentence doesn't work. And I was like, what do you mean? We have one person that runs it and she's amazing. And like, I truly believe she's amazing at her job. And they're like, you can't know that she's amazing if you only have one person doing it. They're like, have a second person, compare them against each other. They each have their KPIs, and then you'll know if it's actually amazing. And so they were saying that in a, like a revenue organization, so sales, implementations, uh, account management, they're like, you always have to hire two people. And I hadn't heard that before. And now I've heard it twice in two weeks.

So now that's your new, your new focus.

There you go. I'll actually, I'm just going to talk to my chief revenue officer.

But that's the other thing too, is if you hire two, they push each other, right? They motivate each other. And they also have like a sort of, you know, work wife, you know, or work per— like a work partner that they can connect with, bounce ideas off of. And also, I think healthy competition is good, you know, so you have some competition of like, okay, I'm going to push because this person's really good and now I want to get on their level.

Yeah, I like it. I'm also interested in this idea that you have of like finding where the edge is for the team, because I think a lot of people not that you want to push people to burnout, but you also want to help sometimes. Okay.

Sometimes you do, right? Like, look, like, great. You know, they always say it's like people are like, you know, it's a marathon, not a sprint. You ever try to run at world record marathon pace? It'll feel like a sprint to a lot of people who aren't good. You know what I mean?

What I've heard is it's a marathon, a sprint, but professionals run marathons at 4.5-minute miles.

Yeah, it's really fast. So like sometimes you do, but then there's also chill time, you know, company, the energy will ebb and flow and you have to be good enough to understand that.

But I think there is a balance of trying for yourself and the team that you've built and helping each person individually know what they're capable of and building that, that resilience. And, and fitness is an interesting example for it because if we were all to go out and say like, okay, we're gonna, you know, run a 7-minute mile, I'd be like, oh God, I don't know. You know, but if someone said, hey, a year from now, like, we're going to build up to this point, whatever this fitness goal is, we're going to train towards it and build that resilience. And absolutely, you get to a point where it's like, okay, that, that is easy because we worked up to it. And so having people on the team who want— who know what they're capable of now, and they as individuals want that bar to be higher, and they're saying, hey, I'm not gonna, you know, get there tomorrow and absolutely kill myself in the process. But I'm going to see where the goal is and methodically work towards that. Um, like, that's a really good team.

I, I think that's very true. And I find that most people, especially like A-players, when they want to get better at their job and they want to be able to produce more and like have wins, so I think giving them that feedback and pushing them to do more, you know, is, is good and they want that. I think people will leave if they get bored in their job.

Does everyone here work remote? Does anyone here go to— raise your hand if you work at an office. That's wild, right? We have 3 people.

3 people.

3 people. I am nervous that people, cuz I like, I feel like I slack off so much like working remotely. That I'm very curious about how this is the first fully remote company I've had. I'm very curious as to how like you figure out the limit and shit from like being remotely. I feel so— I feel like a bum working from home. I'm going to go back to the office.

Yeah, I've had a remote team for a long time and I can tell when someone's slacking off because you just—

I can't tell you.

You can tell there's like a— there's a sense and a vibe and you're like not seeing the output of their work.

It's just lame is what it is. Working remote, I hate it. It's just super lame. I feel like such a bum. I just— I thought it was amazing. And in many regards, there's so many awesome stuff about it, but I just feel like— I feel disgusting. I feel like— like I'll wear like gym shorts half the time and I'm like, I have to put something nice on. I have to comb my hair. I've got to like do something to feel special and like— like, look, I'm a simple man. And my wife, like, we live in New York half the year. She'll like— she goes to the office and she's like, I love getting dressed up nice. I love walking around the street. I love looking at people and being seen and all this stuff. And so this is the first time in this whole post-COVID world where I'm like, yeah, I need an office. And I'm wondering how that's going to impact our productivity. WeWork.

I like WeWork.

I don't know if that's going to be a thing, but I like WeWork. But yeah, like, I loved remote at first. Now I'm like, I particularly for men, like, I like, I'll go 2 weeks without seeing another person in real life, you know what I mean? I'm lucky that one of my best friend, Neville, lives 2 doors up, but I won't see another human being for like 2 weeks because I'll just be in my room the whole time. Sorry, I don't know how we got on this.

I'm going to leave it to you to decide where to go from here.

Well, I'm a big fan of remote work. But I do run into those things where I will say like, oh, other than taking the kids to school, I have not left the house in 3 days or something. But I think that, I don't know, there's trade-offs in that. I like honestly the, the deep work at home for a long period of time and then like batching.

Yeah, I can dig that.

You know, things like this travel.

Yeah.

And I agree, like when you have school-age kids, you leave the house every day. You know, because you got to get them to school.

Yeah, there's been 2 weeks where I just haven't left the house and I literally have 600 steps. You're right.

Then you launch the health app and it just says like, no, man, no.

Maybe just go for a walk in the morning, you know, to start your day, just to get outside.

You need to help this man. I know you're trying, but try harder.

You want to talk about the The one of the prompts was which brands that are doing the creator, the billion-dollar creator thing that you like, because I had asked you, are there any good B2B ones? Did you have any answers?

Well, I— not to put it back on you, but I think you're doing it really, really well with Hampton. And we'll talk about other—

I need you when you ask me for an example.

Okay. So it's just a— it's a wonderful bromance that we have going.

And I'm stuck up here with these two.

I'm sorry, Rachel. Like, we'll get a better guest in L.A. I apologize. So with Hampton, I think is an interesting one, and we'll brainstorm some other, uh, other creators in a second. But what you've done of taking the audience that you have from The Hustle and then from My First Million, and obviously it's monetized through ads and these other things, but then you've said, okay, this attention that I have, I'm going to bring it together into a community of entrepreneurs. And you're basically building YPO or Vistage for like the current generation of entrepreneurs. Is that the right way to put it?

Yeah. So I'll give you guys background. So there's this— my new company is called Hampton. It's about a year old and I screwed up trends. It was this research thing. It was $300 a year. And like the day before I launched it or we launched it, I created a Facebook group and like people loved that Facebook group. And but $300 stinks because I couldn't make enough profit to provide a really high quality service. Like the P&L didn't work out. P&L, you see Keith Cunningham getting those accounting terms in there.

Yeah, that accounting class is paying off.

So like, yeah, so, so with— I studied this company called YPO and has anyone here heard of Vistage? So it's not very popular. Some people have, but it's not very popular, but It's a company where it's mostly middle America, but it's basically like someone who owns like an $8 million a year plumbing or HVAC company or something like that. You know, you may not have a lot of peers who are doing that, so you meet once a month with other people in the services industry or whatever industry you're in, and you just— it's like business group therapy. You talk about your challenges. And I saw that they were acquired for about $2 billion, I think, 2 years ago. And I, and I was already ruminating this idea of I wanted to Do Trends, but the right way. And I called the banker who— Gridiron Capital, I think, bought it. And I called, I found the phone number of the banker and I go, hey man, I'm going to sound like really blunt and rude here, but I just want to let you know, I mean, with nothing but respect, but I'm going to build a company that is going to compete with you. And I think it's going to be really successful. And I think it'd be wise of you if we became friends now. And I know that sounds really douchey, but I just think that that's what will happen. And would you love to— would you be willing to talk to me? And he did.

That's awesome.

And we became friends and he kind of told me how the business works a little bit. I told him my plans and he was like, he had listened to my— he started listening to the podcast. He's like, okay, I think you might be able to do it. Could we just buy you before we— before you launch? And I was like, no, but I told you we were gonna become friends. And so he explained to me how the business worked. And so with The Hustle, my biggest weakness was that we had all of these customers but we made such little revenue off of what I felt was the impact that we had. And basically, like, the— in my mind, media is like an equation. It's the quantity, the number of people that you reach multiplied by the amount of influence you have over them multiplied by the spending dollars. So for example, let's say you reach uh, let's say you're BuzzFeed and you reach just like most all of America, and it's just an article that they're reading and it's news. So like you're not exactly going to influence them that much, but you are reaching a lot of people and they're not going to buy that much stuff. Like versus you have, uh, a newsletter or a podcast or something that talks to, uh, 1,000 people who make decisions for Boeing or some other plane company on which product to buy for manufacturing the plane. You only need to influence like 30 or 50 of them and they'll make decisions worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And so you have to find that equation. And I was doing the equation in my head of how many people I impact, what I could influence people to do. And I was like, I need to create something so valuable that I can charge someone more than $300 a year. And so I loved the idea of community and peer groups. When I started the hustle, I told— I won't say his name, but I'll tell you guys privately when we're not on the record. But there was this CEO of this media company that you guys all know who they are, and I pitched him the company I was starting because I really admired this guy. He was my hero. I really looked up to him, and he took the time to talk to me. I was so thankful. And he goes, you know, look, this is never gonna make more than $2 million a year, probably only $1 million a year. And it hurt my feelings so much. Like, I was like, oh my god, dude, you were my hero, and you just like insulted me. I'm not— I'm worth nothing. And, um, um, and so anyway, I just like made all of these, uh, uh, mistakes with media that I wanted to create something really, really good and, and with community. And that's when we launched Hampton. When we, uh, my podcast, My First Million, we have between 2 and 3 million downloads a month now. Um, when we launched Hampton, we got roughly 5,000 applicants in the first 30 days maybe. Now keep— that's cool and all, not all those guys are gonna convert. Not all of them are even qualified to join, but it was a lot of people that went through this really long application. So hypothetically, that's what, $50 million of pipeline? That's not realistic, but you get the idea. It was like quite good. And so that's what I was thinking about. And so my opinion is it's not a matter of if, it's just a matter of when, when we're gonna get 10,000 people spending $10,000 a year, or maybe it's gonna be like 7,000 and 15,000— 7,000 people, $15,000. I'm not sure how that equation's gonna work. But with this business, um, it's— I have 100% confidence that it will get there. It's just a matter of is it gonna happen in year 6 or year 15?

Um, one thing I wanted to point out, you— so you said you called this guy your competitor for this new business that you're starting.

We're not exactly competitors, but sort of.

Yes.

We're— Hampton is for, um, tech-enabled company, which means like you could be a DDC company. It's not quite a tech company, uh, but that's who we, uh, uh, um, that's who our customer— whereas this is just more blue-collar companies.

Um, the reason why I wanted to mention it is I did something— I did the same thing. Um, I don't think it was douchey, but it could—

well, you could come off like an idiot. And I was like, what I'm gonna say is gonna make me sound stupid. I promise you, I only mean it with the utmost respect. I'm trying to be straightforward.

Yeah, well, I didn't necessarily say I'm going to be your competitor and you're going to have trouble, but, but what I did was when I started my law practice, I wanted to start a virtual law office, which was brand new back then. It was like not a thing. And there were a few lawyers who were doing it. And so I just called them. I just cold called them and said, hey, can you tell me how you're doing this? And like, is it working for you? And I basically was just doing market research. And they were all willing to talk to me. Some of them spent like an hour on the phone with me giving me the whole rundown.

Yeah, particularly if you're younger than them and they're like, you're like, you're a serious person. They'll like, they'll be like, oh, that's so cool that you care enough to like do this. Yes. Spill the beans.

They really will. So anyway, pro tip, just call people who are already doing the thing that you want to do. And surprisingly, they will be willing to often talk to you and help you out. So it's a way to shortcut the journey.

I actually had this experience with Ben Chestnut from Mailchimp. So they were a good guy.

I can't tell.

I think I've only talked—

I've only read about him.

Yeah, he seemed like a great guy.

Really?

So he—

he seems quirky and I like that.

Yeah, I think he's definitely quirky. Creators, entrepreneurs like it. It's pretty much—

yeah, he seems like he had the good type of weird. Yeah, but I wasn't sure if it was— if it was the good type only.

So TBD, we'll see.

But, uh, I'm not saying he does.

I just, it's an open question.

Yeah.

So they were Inc Magazine's like company of the year and we were at the Inc 5000 event that year and I saw that he was speaking. And so I emailed him and was like, hey, I'm going to be there. I'd love to get coffee, you know? And, uh, and I said a little bit about ConvertKit. Um, and he was like, oh, I know ConvertKit. Like you guys are doing great things. Like, I don't know, like, we'll see. And I followed up. He said, like, follow up during the event and we'll see. And I sent him a note halfway through and was like, you know, hey, like, your talk was great, whatever, if you have a chance to meet up. And he just said, like, yep, I'll be in the hotel lobby. Like, I'm checking out at this time. My flight's, you know, an hour later. And so I'll be in the lobby at this time if you want to meet for a bit. And he was fantastic. Like, he started to break down. We were thinking about launching a free plan. And so I was like, hey, when you launched a free plan, what was the landscape like?

Did he say don't do that?

No, he said that that was absolutely amazing for them.

Really?

And that now he talked about, you know, all aspects of it where they launched at a time where there wasn't another free plan. One thing that I didn't realize is how small they were when, like, 10 years in, they were still a pretty small business.

How big?

Like $3, $4 million a year in revenue. Maybe $8.

How big were they when they sold recently?

They were a billion ARR. Goddamn. Wow.

Wow.

So what, like, totally bootstrapped?

Yeah, it was 100% bootstrapped.

Amazing.

That's got to be like the top 30 biggest bootstrapped software companies.

I think so.

And maybe like Bloomberg would be up there or something like that.

Yeah. So, I mean, they exited for, I think, $12 billion.

Goddamn.

So there were so many things. First I learned, so there's that there's actually 3 co-founders, not 2, and they had someone who they were running an agency and they'd built this like MailChimp thing and they were running both and they had a bit of a disagreement of like, should we build this software product where people just like buy credits to send emails or should we keep going with the agency? And they ended up like going their separate ways and two of them went with the little software thing and one of them went with the agency.

Um, man, I feel sorry for him.

Uh, but it took a long time. Like they launched MailChimp, uh, in I think 2001. And I think when they launched their free plan in 2009, 2008, 2009, they were making single-digit million, like millions of dollars a year. And so one thing that I realized, like, okay, stick with it for a long, long time.

When did they exit? In 2020?

Like a few years ago.

2021, I think.

2021. So 20 years it took them.

Yeah, I think it was 20 or 21 years that it took them to.

But that's a, that's a nice, if you think about like if I think about my parents and how they— what they did for 20 years, you know, and that's a nice exit, right, to show for your 20 years of effort.

And was probably— I don't— you know them more than I do. I bet they were making 9 figures a year in income or—

Yeah, they, they did very, very well.

Net cash flow.

So, but one thing that was interesting about the dynamic with Ben is he was totally willing to talk through anything. And then at one point, the editor-in-chief for Inc Magazine comes up. He's like, hey, Ben, just want to say hi. Like, I worked on your article and all of that. And they talked for a minute and he was like, oh, by the way, do you know Nathan Barry? He's trying to kill my company. And like he said, it was this big smile on his face and like they laughed. He was like, no, but seriously, you should do a story on ConvertKit. And I was like, okay, that's awesome.

That's, that's, that's pretty awesome.

So maybe that answers your question about what kind of person Ben is.

I was only joking, by the way. I have only read like 2 articles about him and he seems awesome. Yeah.

So anyway, I think the takeaway from that is whether it's competitors or whoever else— actually, another competitor story. There's a company in the creator space called Flodesk that does email marketing in a similar industry. They're also bootstrapped. And I was speaking at a conference in Chicago where Rebecca, the co-founder and like head of product for Flodesk, was also speaking. And I just shot her a note and was like, hey, do you want to— I can't remember even what I said. Like, since then, like, hey, I'd love to say hi at the event. And she was like, yeah, let's grab breakfast beforehand. And we had a great conversation. And the way that I left it was like, hey, if you're ever going to sell this company, make sure you call me first. And she's like, yeah, I can do that. You know? And so just that idea of hang out with your competitors, the people you want to learn from, like so many people are willing to share. And they're all like, all these companies are run by great people.

And another, another person for as an example of this, like billion-dollar creator thing, have you guys ever heard of More Plates More Dates? Raise your hand if you've heard of this person. A lot of people. That's crazy. It's all men.

I was like, I got nothing.

So have you heard of this person?

No.

His name's Derek. We had him on the podcast recently. He, he does a really good balance of being like, like bro science where he makes like a dick joke, but he also like has some— he comes off quite serious, like he's well, well-read and well-researched. He does a really good job of balancing that, like being silly and dumb and being not dumb. And he only has 2 million subscribers on YouTube. That's a lot. But that's not that much for— he came on the pod and he has— it's More Plates, More Dates is a fitness-ish YouTube where he talks about steroids. And he would be like, here's Brad Pitt in this movie, here's him in this other movie, here's what I think the supplements he was taking. And then he would get a little bit more into like, here, men, you're losing your hair. Here's like some ways that science has shown that it could— you could help yourself. And then he eventually launched a supplement brand, but he also launched like a men's health clinic. And he came on our pod and on 1.9 million subscribers, I think he had— he's— he said he was doing around $8 million a month in sales at the moment. And selling—

what's the main driver of the revenue?

So he has supplements. Yeah, he has 3 or 4. One brand is like a pre-workout/protein, which is a very common thing. The second one is like a men's clinic, which means they'll— you can get— if you want to get hormone therapy, so testosterone, or if you want to get other types of like therapies that you need a doctor to give you, he has a team of doctors you can go to and you pay anywhere from $100 to probably $500 a month, I guess, depending on what, what you get. Now he's actually creating fragrance, fragrances, perfumes, colognes, because a lot of young men are like, I want to be more handsome, I want to attract more women. And I guess, I don't know how that— he somehow decided that's his thing where he's going to do cologne. And so he has a fragrance company coming out and it's one of the more impressive— I think he's only— he said on the podcast, I think he's 30 years old and these businesses collectively are doing about $8 million a month and it's growing like a weed. It's one of the more impressive content turned commerce business that I've ever seen.

Well, I mean, so just to be clear, $8 million a month is just shy of $100 million a year. He would need $8.3 million a month to get to $100 million a year. That's absolutely mind-blowing to do off of a YouTube audience of 2 million.

Yeah, which isn't that crazy. I mean, if you're really talented and you're good and you give it 4 or 6 years, Like it's conceivable that you could be in that ballpark, uh, you know, after, after a bit of time.

So maybe if we look at a couple other YouTubers, like, um, Ali Abdaal is a friend of mine and he has, he's talked publicly a bunch about a bunch of his numbers. He's got 2.5, 3 million followers on YouTube, maybe even more. Um, a lot in the like, uh, productivity, somewhat in the business space. Um, and all of that, he's talked, he shared his numbers publicly. He's making about $6 million a year, which is an amazing business, like absolutely mind-blowing business. But then when you think about like the scale—

Yeah, because it's that equation, you know, of what I was saying earlier. You really need to figure out how you can boost those numbers if your goal is to maximize that revenue.

Yeah.

So another example is Doug DeMuro. Does anyone know who Doug DeMuro is? He's like— his whole shtick is that he's like a geeky, nerdy, funny, lovable guy, but he reviews cars. But he does it like he'll review a super fancy $2 million car, but also a minivan. And he's very lovable and you like, like watching him. And so he created a business called Cars and Bids, and it's sort of like eBay Motors. It's a car auction website for car enthusiasts. That's his tagline. And so there's like cars from the '80s and '90s and early 2000s that aren't particularly valuable, like $40,000 or something, or even $30,000, all the way up to millions that people who are car enthusiasts are like, oh, I used to see my Uncle had one when I was a kid. I totally want to get one of those. That's the type of car that you would see there. I bought my car off of it. And, um, he is, uh, there was another business in the space called Bring a Trailer. Bring a Trailer recently exited for rumors around $600 million. Um, and it was a similar style business. They've, I think they were selling close to like $700 or $800 million a year worth of car, uh, $700 or $800 million of cars worth a year. Sorry, my English is all screwed up. Um, and so anyway, Doug started Cars and Bids, and I remember before he started it, we started talking about in the pod, and I was like, Sean, this guy, I think he's gonna launch something and it's gonna be great. And I found out because I stalked him on LinkedIn and I saw that he was hiring for this thing. So this guy's gonna launch something, it's gonna be the best. Then he launches it and we're like, it's gonna work. And then after only a year and a half or 2 years, he sold a portion of the business to TPG, um, the Chernin Group, um, whatever, TCG. And, uh, he told us in the pod how much money he made, but it was, he sold a portion of the business at around, I think, an $80 million valuation. And I think that give it, marketplaces are like one of the harder businesses to start, but once they work, they're like one of the hardest businesses to destroy. Hence Craigslist or eBay, which, uh, still crush. And I think that his business will be a potentially $1 billion outcome in the next 10 years. And I think that's a really good example of someone— his audience when he launched it wasn't particularly big either. It was big, but not, you know.

Well, I think there's something to being adjacent to an expensive transaction, right? Or dealing with a high-value clientele that matters a lot, where if you're taking a small cut of a $100,000 transaction or a $50,000 transaction, That matters a lot. Like, there's one that I came across recently. There's this YouTuber named Mike Patey who— he's out of Utah. He maybe like 15 years ago got into aviation, and so he learned to fly, and he's like a machinist and like understands— I think he's an engineer. And so then he started like modifying planes and then building his own planes, and now it's a whole bunch of world records for like— they call it short takeoff and landing. Like, have you ever seen a plane like roll down, you know, like maybe 20 feet and be in the air flying? But it's like a, you know, a plane that holds multiple people. Like, that's what it is. Or if you saw the Red Bull, right, where Red Bull landed the plane on that little helipad, it's that kind of thing. And so he is in this world. He's got 300,000 subscribers on YouTube, very much into aviation, doing these crazy things. And he started this other company called Best Tugs, which is a weird thing. T-U-G-S. All right.

Boats, right?

Yeah, not quite. So there's this thing with a plane where if you've ever been, you know, if you're at the airport, you see like that car that comes out to push the plane around, like the big airliner, the tug. That's called a tug. And so at the very smallest planes, you come up and you have this little tow bar that you like hook onto the front wheel and you just push the plane around like a little Cessna. And the big planes have like a car that pushes around, but you get these like small to medium-sized planes that it's too big to move around by yourself, but it's not big enough to move. And so off their YouTube audience, they made this product that, uh, is basically a little motorized thing. You just walk behind it, hook it up, and this This thing costs $6,000. I know because I just bought one for my airplane.

Right.

And, you know, if someone's spending $500,000 or $1 million on a plane, right, a $6,000 transaction is very, very cheap. And so he here is selling this product that they can sell for a huge amount of money off of the YouTube audience. And another friend who's a pilot came over, we were flying together and he was like, oh, you've got one of Mike Patey's tugs. Like, oh, that's amazing. Right. And so they've built this epic business off the YouTube channel because they're adjacent to like a very high dollar amount of transactions.

There's one downside to this whole like creator turned billion dollar thing. I mean, it's, it's, uh, the creator still has to do the work. And so like I'm on a content treadmill at the moment. Um, I took a 3-week break these last few days and that was the first time I've had in a long time. But has anyone, um, does, has anyone followed, um, Does anyone know this person named Craig Fuller? Do you know Craig Fuller?

Oh, FreightWaves.

FreightWaves. So you guys should check this person out. He's real low-key, never brags about himself, but it's this guy named Craig Fuller. He started this thing called FreightWaves. For some reason, I have no idea why, they reveal all of their revenue and all of their profit, uh, just like you. Uh, but I don't know why they do it, but they treat their company like they're publicly traded. And so you can just Google FreightWaves. It's a software and media company. But his side hobby that this guy has done, it's wild, is he bought this— he calls it a magazine. I guess it is still literally a magazine. He bought Flying.com, which is a very small niche, niche website for flying enthusiasts. Then he bought, I think, 80 acres of land in—

I think it's a lot more than that.

Is it 800? I get it by a factor of 10 to fit a runway on it.

It's got to be big.

I forget the number. Whatever the number is, I think he spent like mid-seven figures, I believe, on buying this land. And he was like, I'm going all in. Like, this is a big deal for me. And what he's doing is he's creating basically like a country club or like, you know, a club. You know how homes have— you know how homes have houses? There's houses, there's communities where there's houses around a golf course. His whole thing is he's doing it around an airline, like a strip.

Oh, I think I heard about this.

An airplane hangar. And he's creating like a flying club. So if you're, you know, Nathan Barry and you like, I would love a home that has a strip, this is what I'm going to do. And he's using flying.com, his audience now, which I don't think it's very big. I would imagine it's like 300,000 to 800,000 monthly uniques if I had to guess.

Yeah, maybe even less than that.

Maybe less. And he put the money down for the land, which was a big deal. And then he pre-sold plots of land and now has made his money back, and he's selling it to the flying.com audience. Now recently, I think he went and bought— how many more titles did he buy, like another like 5 or 10?

They bought a bunch of stuff.

So they bought more. So they bought like, uh, this— the flying.com of the trucking industry, they bought the flying.com of the yacht industry, the yacht industry. And so I—

you— the trucking industry would be what you drive your truck in?

You want to— I don't know, you want to park your truck? I don't know what the scheme is going to be on that one, but he bought a bunch of them. And so what he does is he makes profit. So I, if I had to guess, he buys them for 4 to 8 times EBITDA, and he makes profit to pay back the money it costs to purchase the titles. And he runs the company, and then he'll either raise money, which he did in this last deal, to buy either— to buy either property. So the yacht one or the marine one, that's a very easy one to make your We're gonna make— build homes around a nice marina. Um, but that's his whole plan at the moment, and I think it's going to work wonderfully.

That's interesting.

I mean, I think he's gonna— his name's Craig Fuller, F-U-L-L-E-R, and he like talks about it, but he has a pretty small following.

Yeah, I think a couple thousand followers on Twitter. Like, it's not—

maybe it's 100% gonna work.

I think horses would be another good one. That, that's where my ranch was purchased from, a community that was supposed to be built around equestrians, right? So like it was all these plots of land and it was like it has a room for a stable so that if you are a horse enthusiast, you want to have your horse at your home instead of—

1000 times better than selling a $20 t-shirt.

Yeah, you know what I mean? But this was actually a failed community. Like it didn't work.

And so the risk is huge.

Yeah. So then basically the people who owned my property before I bought it bought like 5 of the plots and put them all together and then turned it into this like fake 50-acre property.

Well, so I wonder what distribution the failed one had, right? Did they have—

right, they didn't have a community, right?

They didn't have a YouTube channel for horse enthusiasts, or they didn't own the biggest flying magazine, which is a pretty small niche still. But right, I think it's fascinating of going in and buying, you know, the flying magazine and saying, okay, here's a business, let's evaluate it at face value. Okay, we've got advertising. Yep, this is cash flow positive.

You don't need that many people to see, to spot trends. I remember when the Hustle— Zoom, the company Zoom advertised with us before the company went public, and I saw how many clicks we drove them, and I was doing the math, and I was like, a lot of people must be buying this stuff. This is insane. And I bought some of their stock, like, right when they, like, IPO'd. Um, and like, you— and at the time, I think we only had 500,000 people. Uh, you don't need that many people to start seeing, like, really interesting trends or people are buying this. This is wild. And that was a big learning for me.

What's one of the things that's interesting for some of the examples, not necessarily the flying one, but, but it doesn't actually have to be this really unique thing. Like Hampton is not that unique.

It's not unique.

Even ConvertKit is not that unique, right? What I'm doing is not that unique either. So I think sometimes people think like in order to come up with that billion-dollar idea, it has to be like some some idea that comes down to your head from God. And it's like, sometimes it's just like, oh, I see a version out there. Like, basically my business was because I went to conferences where everybody who was speaking was a white guy, and I was annoyed that there were no women and there were no people of color on the stage. And I went a couple years, and then I finally decided, okay, I'm gonna stop being pissed and just create the competitor that's better, you know? And that's— that is— has diversity and inclusivity inclusivity at the center of it. So I just created my version of it, um, which has, you know, taken off because it was a need in the marketplace. So it actually— it's like the same business that so many people have, but just the, the one unique insight or the one unique perspective is what helps it to take off. So you don't have to come up with the most amazing idea. You can just see what's out there and see like, how could I do that a little bit better? Or just come up with an offer like in Ali's case, right, he's a productivity expert. So like he just needs to come up with either a software or planner or something. And when he does, that's going to take off too.

Well, and sometimes people stick with it for a long time before they find the thing, right? Does anyone drink, um, Element, like LMNT? Uh, so Robb Wolf was like one of the pioneers of the paleo movement, maybe the main pioneer of it, right? He did a bunch of different businesses over time. He tried a lot of different things and they've been working on Element for 5, 6 years now and it is now really, really taking off and that's a fantastic business. Also, a little side note, Joel Runyon and I were nerding out about this, but if you think about different brands and the pros and cons of it, we have Liquid Death here up on stage. This is a very expensive product to ship. We're shipping water around. This is very expensive to move. But if you think about Element as a business, right, we're shipping little tiny packets of salt, right? These are electrolytes. And that is a much, you know, there's no shelf life. It's very, very stable. It ships very cheaply. And so there's a lot of these attributes. I guess the first point I was making is sometimes it can take a long time to find the right business, but that will eventually pay off. And then the second thing is there's a lot of these attributes that really do matter. And it's easy to be, to say like, oh, this person did this and it worked and that, but you like really pay attention and find the trends of, okay, what actually made something a good business instead of a tough business? Like this business is very challenging with margins when you're shipping it, but if it's sold in stores, okay, all of a sudden it's a really solid business.

Supplements seem to be huge. I was saying earlier about Nicole Cain, who is, she used to have a blog called Nicole Bitchy, which was like a gossip rag. Has anybody heard of it? Who, who's here? No. Okay. Well, anyway, it was a celebrity gossip blog and it was extremely popular. She sold advertising, made a ton of money, and then she decided she didn't want to be associated with like gossip about celebrities. And so she changed the model. She just closed that and created a new media site called XO Nicole, which is, you know, like wellness and lifestyle media company. Like just creating content and geared towards, I think, mainly women of color. And that did really well. She sold it. I don't know exactly how much she sold it for, but now she's created a supplement business called My Happy Flow. And it's all about like, you know, hormones for women and basically managing your period so that it's less painful and less stressful, whatever. All these, all these benefits to the supplement. Anyway, that business seems to have taken off and it's a subscription model too. So you like get it delivered. You know, and she works 2 hours a day, she told me. And she's got like somebody who ships it out, like a company that does that part. And it's very low effort and she makes a lot of money from it.

One thing you touched on of it being a subscription business, almost all of these that you see are businesses that have a recurring or a repeat purchase. There are exceptions, right? Like the airplane tug. You're going to hopefully buy that one time. Should last for a very long time. It says it's the best tug, so it should.

Or buying a plot of land, you know, to fly in. Although you could repeat that in different locations.

You could, yeah. And there's different things you could do there. But another example of someone who's doing this right now, like we've talked on the show about Paleo Kitchen, right? And they had this big exit, you know, blog to a consumer products company. But someone doing it right now is Suzy Bullock. Who has a blog called Hey Grill Hey. And so she is doing all these recipes, barbecue, grilling, built a massive blog making over $1 million a year off the blog. And then now she is building her own line of barbecue sauces and rubs and getting distribution in stores. And like, I don't know her revenue. I'd say it's like, if I had to guess, I'd say It's like mid-single-digit millions, so maybe $3 to $5 million a year. But it's one of those things where I'm like, okay, you have the audience, you've got the angle on the content, you're just starting to get the retail distribution. Like, I see how this plays out. And it's a product that if you like it, you're going to be buying it every couple months or every month. And I think that one is absolutely going to kill it.

Yeah. You know what's interesting to me? Coworking spaces. Like, obviously we worked in and do well. The Wing. They failed too, didn't they?

They did.

But it's interesting. I was just at an event for Miss Skittles is her name on Instagram, but her name is Mary Seats, and she has a coworking space called The Bakery in Atlanta, and it's focused around women, mainly women of color. And it does really well. It's very successful. And so her plan is now to scale it and now build a bakery in different cities. And this is like the fastest growing segment of entrepreneurs is, is, is women of color. So I'm interested to know, like, have y'all seen a coworking model work well? Because it is a subscription. And then she also does events there and she said it makes a lot of money.

I have not seen it do well. I just want to compare for a second the margins between like a coworking business and like, okay, I'll pay $300 a month, $500 a month, I don't know, to get access to this. But they've got to have a full building. They have to have staff. There's so many things. It's got to look nice. And then if we compare that to Hampton as a business—

Yeah, I would never get into real estate. It's just like, it takes money to make money with that. Whereas with this, you can start with $0.

Yeah, the way you win in real estate is that you buy the buildings and then you lease it to the company, to WeWork. And so it's basically what Adam Neumann did.

And it's like, well, here's what's interesting.

And it's a totally different sector. Skill set. Yeah, of like being like a financial analyst versus like inventing things on the internet. Well, one of the—

what she did that's different is she's not like in downtown Atlanta. She's a little bit outside of Atlanta, which means that there's a lot of great parking. It's in a place that's going to get less traffic, and I imagine it's less expensive to have the space there. So it's interesting. I don't know. I mean, she seems to be doing really well and plans to scale it, so I'm, I'm excited to to see her do it.

Yeah, that'll be good. One thing I'd love to do is take some questions, and we've got a mic that we can pass around. Who's got something that you want to ask, or, or if you have an example of a creator making the shift right now that you'd love to share, we're down to hear it.

Thanks, guys. So I know Nathan and Sam, you guys both work a lot around like email and talk about the importance of distribution. I'm curious how you see distribution developing over time, uh, namely like inbox service providers, uh, or Apple or Google basically taking more control. And then on the other side, social media, um, you know, obviously there's been a lot of movement. So how do you see distribution, uh, in the future for creators? And is it a problem where it's something that there needs to be alternatives, or do you think the existing tools get the job done? I'll give a very short answer. You're better to answer this. We— I, I, I have this— the first month that we made $1 million in revenue, I got this tattoo on my leg and it's a pirate ship and it says Bold Fast Fund because that was like our motto. And I used to say that the hustle is a pirate ship and every email subscriber is just a little bit of wind in our sails. And the reason being is that my opinion at the time, and it still is, was that email was the most— was the channel that you could own most, but you don't actually own it because Gmail accounted for— you would know the numbers. For us, I think it was 50 or 60%.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

And if they made a change, which thankfully the only change that Gmail has made in the last like 20 years is they've done promo— what are the 4 like folders?

Updates, inbox, promo updates, tabs.

That's like the only change they've made, really.

Hated that update.

Yeah, that's like the only thing they've done. But if they made another one, I would have been screwed. Uh, so my opinion is email's still number one. I forget all the other questions that you had asked. I'm sorry, but you can remind me. There's some really— I mean, there's a lot of— you also asked about social media and stuff like that.

You don't have to excuse yourself, Sam. You're good.

No.

So email is interesting because there's not a single inbox provider, but Gmail does absolutely dominate. And then Apple—

How much of ConvertKit is Gmail?

Of the subscribers? It's hard to say because you don't know about the number who are using like Google Apps for Domains, which is effectively Gmail. But if someone said it was 50%, I wouldn't be surprised.

And then Apple's like another 25%.

Apple is huge. And then a lot of those Gmail addresses are actually opened in Apple Mail. And so you get a huge range of things. So you're having these shifts, right, where the inbox providers— and this might be too nerdy, but the inbox providers are both saying keep your list very clean, unsubscribe anyone who's not actively opening, and then they are actively destroying access to all of your data too in order to do that very thing. Right. So Apple doing their privacy protection stuff where they're automatically opening a bunch of emails Um, there's things you can do around to try to understand, like optimize for clicks more than, than opens. Um, but it's, it's definitely a changing landscape. The thing that you still have, one is that direct access to the audience and right for, for Gmail or Apple to remove that access, they're actually hurting their customer, right? Cause if you think about it, they don't want to leave a door open for someone to come in and displace Gmail.

Right.

So they need to make sure that they're keeping each Gmail user really happy. But then the other thing is, I don't think those algorithms are going to change in a meaningful way because people aren't really like, if it's not broken, don't fix it.

And of all the channels, in my opinion, email is the easiest to acquire customers repeatedly and quickly and cost-effectively.

The other thing is that in which, which wasn't the case when we started.

Right now it's different. It's way easier.

There's no other channel that lets you actually segment your customer base, right? You can't really say, hey, I'm going to put this Instagram reel, but it's just for the business owners in my audience. It's not for the people who follow me for my fitness content or productivity, right? But email, you can 100% do that. You can actually change— like, imagine in Instagram if you put out a reel and it was actually different, like the middle section was different or the call to action at the end was different. Based on who is consuming it. You can't do that, right? But in email you absolutely can. So I think we're going to hold on to a lot of that, like ownership and value for a long time.

One of the things we're doing is we text as well. So like emails and texts, I feel like you almost have to like 360 surround your audience, you know, like so social media and then also text, then also email. It's like, how can I show up? How many touchpoints can I have with the same information? Because people are ignoring a lot of it or missing it or whatever.

So I would add into that to do retargeting. If you have email addresses for people, right? Say if you're selling a course and you know everyone who clicked through the sales page, retarget them down your funnel with more content about it. You know, they've been to your sales page, you know, they're a subscriber. You can send them like very targeted content across the social platforms. Tied exactly to where they're at in the funnel. You have to pay for it. And some people are saying like, why would I pay for that when I can email and reach this person for free? It's like, well, like you get to hit it from a bunch of different angles.

Exactly. And I find that, that we have to do that. Yeah, but I do. I love abandoned cart sequences. It's like my favorite thing.

Yeah, there's all kinds of different things.

It just works so well. I don't know why, but they kill it. All right.

Who else has a question?

Sam, quick question.

Congrats on your baby, by the way.

Thank you.

You're welcome. When you were talking about monetizing your newsletter and you gave that equation, like number of people you reach times your influence, can you share how you thought about quantifying your influence?

Yeah. So I'm like a nerd and I like started thinking about this math a lot. So the— it's so funny. I was just like drawing this out today. There's like a sub equation of influence. And I'm trying to work out what it is, cuz I like these like framework to, I try to oversimplify some things and it's fun, but typically the amount of influence you have on someone, I think it's often correlated with the amount of time they've invested into you, uh, consuming your thing. And so an example of that is I used to think YouTube was the number one best channel to influence someone. I've since changed to podcasting. Because I'm in someone's ears roughly 2 to 3 hours a week and it's very intimate. And I have noticed that I will do little Easter eggs where I'll say something in the middle of a pod, like contact me if you heard this, something silly and way more on podcast. And so for influence, it's, um, a really easy way to test it is how many people will show up to an event. Um, that's like a, that's a hard test in the sense that it's hard to pull off, but it's very straightforward. Um, but usually it has to do, I think, with the amount of time they've spent consuming your, your, your content and how, how, how far they go down that slippery slope. So usually, not always, someone who spends an hour, it's like a book. Uh, someone who spends 8 hours reading you will probably love you more than someone who has listened to you for 2 hours versus who has just seen one tweet. And in fact, I know a lot of friends that are famous on TikTok. When they try to sell stuff, they don't sell anything because they only have 15 seconds of someone's attention.

That's such a good point. That's why I think books are really powerful. I mean, books definitely— my book definitely blew up our business. And I think it's somebody has spent that much time— most the audiobook sold 3 times the amount of the hardcover. So you're in someone's ear for 8 hours. I, I'm reading the book and people tell me all the time that they listen to it like regularly. Like they've listened to the audiobook multiple times. So that's a lot of influence if you think about it.

So yeah, I think it's a time thing.

Yeah, and that's where like a podcast is great, just the sheer amount of content that you're producing, right? You can't produce that many books, but you can come out with new content every single week.

Well, that's one thing to think about, like what are you giving your audience to consume, right? So if you're not regularly creating newsletters it like, and a podcast, and, you know, maybe you're doing events occasionally and you're on social media or whatever it is, right? Like, what are those touch points that you're giving your people so that they can regularly be consuming something from you and learning from you or just getting value from you in whatever format? So that's one of the reasons why this podcast exists, because I would tell my client, my, my people all the time, like, always have something positive in your ears. Always have something that's like motivating you so that you can kind of stay motivated even when business is hard. And then I was like, well, I'm not really creating anything to help with that, so I'm just sending you to other people's podcasts. So maybe I should get back to actually doing it consistently.

Yep. I like that. I think you got the mic right back here. Hey, Ethan, thank you guys so much for sharing your wisdom. Honestly, question more of big picture. So you guys have been entrepreneurs and creatives manifesting your dreams for years, and I'd love to hear your insights about, um, like what the meaning is when you accomplish these things. How do you stay grounded? How do you, um, continue to build something new when it's— you've already done what 10 years ago you would have said Is it all, you know?

Do you do meditation?

Yes.

Yeah, I'm a yoga instructor, so I'm—

I love your vibe.

Yeah, I'm very curious about your answers.

Well, I'll say for me, I have a big mission, and my mission is to close the wealth gap for women and entrepreneurs of color. Thank you. So that's what motivates me, because otherwise I'd be like, I'd be like, eh, why do I work? You know? I mean, honestly, I think we all want intellectual pursuits. So I think I would still like write books and do things. But what gets me to show up and, you know, want to keep going with my business and what has gotten me through the really hard parts is having that mission and knowing that if I stick with it, I'm going to continue to impact more and more people and help more and more people, you know, close that gap for themselves. Like it's one entrepreneur at a time. So that's that. I think having a strong mission and why, it keeps you motivated long term and makes you want to keep creating.

Um, for me, it's, uh, a lot about— I just, I find it quite addicting to come up with an idea and turn it into reality and hope that I can kind of like kick my dent in the world. I find that to be a very addicting thing to like, to like bend reality into how I want it to be. I find that to be— it's almost like exercise. You're like, I want to lift this much weight. You train for 3 months, you hit it, and you're like, that was so exciting. I'm so proud of myself. I want to do it again. And then the other half is just like proving every like high school bully and girlfriend who dumped me wrong and making up for like years of feeling inadequate.

And it's a very honest answer.

There's definitely bottles of champagnes of all the grudges that I hold. Whenever I do something, I can rub in their face. I pop one of those bottles.

I'm just imagining in your house, Sarah's like, why do we still have these? And you're like, they know why.

Yeah, I'm plotting. Yeah.

I think for me, it's just fun. Right. Like the, the game of business that we're playing is— I just thoroughly enjoy it. And I really, I think about setting a big enough goal that achieving that goal is going to force you to change and become a different person. Not in the way of like, oh, now you're a douche or you've sold out in some way, but in the like, oh, I am now the— like I had to become the person that, that can achieve this level of thing. So I had this experience at our very first team retreat where we had 21 people on the team. We got together for the first time. We're in this big, like, living room in a cabin outside of Boise. And it was a great moment. I was sitting around looking at this, like, people were meeting for the first time and I was like, wow, I love this. And I realized they were all waiting for something. They were waiting, like, and I'm like, what are we?