441: Business on Easy Mode - What We've Learned from Sam Parr

1, 2, 3. Hey! Coming up, we are going to unpack some of the businesses and philosophy of Sam Parr. We hope you guys enjoy this. The Modern Acre is presented by AgList. AgList is the only independent platform for farmers to find, discover, review biological products. If you haven't checked out AgList, the top biological companies and products are on the platform. You can search, discover biologicals that fit your context, fit your use case, and learn what's working for other farmers. All right, Tim, I'm excited for this episode. We are going to, uh, I had this idea to kind of talk about Sam Parr. So Sam Parr is one of the podcast hosts of My First Million. It's one of our favorite podcasts out there. It's like two guys just talking about business. Sam Parr's had a really interesting career and journey. He has interesting business philosophies and has done interesting businesses that we've always been watching and following. So I kind of want to unpack some of those businesses and philosophies with you, Tim. And discuss how we've kind of learned from them and how we think about them as well. But first, Tim, we have a big announcement. We're doing something that we've never ever done before with The Modern Acre, with our company and product AgList. So we are announcing that we are officially hiring our first hire. Tim, this is, can we just like take a moment?

It's happening.

It's happening. So we are hiring a head of growth at Aglist, and this is, this is really exciting. We've never done this before. Aglist, we launched one year ago and it's been a really big success. We've gotten, you know, dozens and dozens of biological companies signed up for the platform. We have hundreds of products on the platform. And, you know, Tim and I, this was a side hustle that we, that we started Aglist and we, we launched it. We had a successful launch. It's been continuing to grow, adding features. But Tim and I have full-time jobs. We have other things that we're working on, and we've built this really, I think, amazing platform that fills a need in the, in the industry. And we need to supercharge this, right? We need, we need someone to come to the table and help us grow this and participate in the upside of building Aglist. So the link to the job description is in the show notes. This will be a part-time role, start as a part-time role, uh, contractor role that's really commission heavy. So we're being upfront about, hey, this is, uh, this is for kind of like a side hustle, uh, part-time, uh, freelancer that wants to, that has some time to, to lean in and dedicate to, to growing Aglist and gets to participate in the upside that they create. So it starts as a commission heavy contractor role with the ability to move into full-time as we scale this. Aglist has been really successful. and we need to juice it a little bit more, and there's an opportunity to move into full-time at some point, and the possibility of earning equity participation in Naglist. I think we're looking for someone who has that founder mentality, that entrepreneurial mentality that wants to be part of, of growing something and building something. So there is a potential for that path as well, but the full description details is in the link in the show notes. But Tim, man, I can't believe it.

Yeah, super excited. I think it's a great way to start off the year. Looking forward to like, yeah, finding that right person that is in the right circumstance to really like lean into, to growing AgList and wrapping their arms around it. And there is the goal that you and I both have for the role is to have this grow and to be a full-time role, and this person really just lead, lead AgList and really own, own that product and us, us supporting as well. So we're super excited about finding the right person there.

Yeah, and you hit on it, Tim, right? It's someone who either is, uh, already an independent freelancer that has time to commit to this, or someone who has the ability to do a side hustle and lean into this on a regular basis, um, and someone who wants to build something. Yeah. Has that, has that founder mentality, has that farmer mode mentality, Tim.

Yeah. One of the perks, uh, for signing is you get a farmer mode hat.

Yes. Put that in the—

you gotta go back and put that in the job description, like sign up.

Yeah. As long as we're not breaking any regulatory requirements with, uh, all right. So yeah, check that out, guys. Um, we're excited. We're going to get into Agilis a little bit later in the conversation and kind of the inspiration we actually had from Sam Parr for Agilis. So we'll, we'll get into that, but be sure to check it out, share it with people that, you know, that love ag, love regenerative agriculture, biologicals that could be a potential fit for this job. Um, we, we appreciate you guys sharing it with your, with your network, anyone you have in mind. All right, Tim. Sam Parr. So just to lay the groundwork, Sam is a serial entrepreneur and he's best known for building The Hustle, a business newsletter/media company, and co-hosting My First Million. He's also the founder of Hampton, a CEO and founder membership community. I'm actually a part of Hampton, so we're going to kind of dig into that as well. So I participate, um, in that in a local San Diego, uh, chapter as part of the Hampton membership. So we will dig into that as well. All right, Tim, one of the things about Sam that's really resonated with, I think, both of us is kind of all over the place, right? He, so he went to a small school, ran track. He's not like this, you know, flashy, went, went the whole Stanford, Harvard MBA track and was an investment banker. No, he's been basically a hustler from day one. He did like random entrepreneurial projects in college. He had a hot dog stand. He did like reselling people's stuff after they left for school during the summers. Just like a total hustler and kind of slowly but surely iterated on different business ideas and then got into tech. Was really inspired by Tim Ferriss and "The 4-Hour Workweek" and then his, his big hit was The Hustle. It was a newsletter. And I think at the time, every— that was like a, you know, unpopular opinion or a, or not a consensus pick to make a, a big business out of a newsletter. And he sold that. And, uh, I just like how he plays games on his own terms, tries different things, has tried to like iterate over the years to do things he's more and more passionate about. And he loves fitness and he just seems like a guy who wants to do right by his family, be a good family guy, build cool businesses. So that's a little the stage of why we're big fans of Sam.

Yeah, I can definitely like resonate with his story, his journey, just being like scrappy and hustling. Like in high school, I resold golf balls that I found at the golf course and like sold them on eBay. So just like that kind of mindset of like, how do you make a buck early on? So it's been fun to follow his career and journey just because he's relatable from that aspect.

Tim, is that your, is that your like most out there business thing that you've done without me?

I've had so many crazy jobs. Like, yeah, prior to you and I working together more directly, like in college, I was, I was a manny. I picked kids up from ballet and took them home from school. I don't know who their parents were, why they would trust me with that responsibility. I hung Christmas lights on houses. I folded clothes in the mall. I took pictures on the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier. I was a little bit all over the place, Ty. I was just trying to hustle enterprise rent-a-car, like, you know, all the old gigs. I was all over the place.

You were all over the place. I really got my big entrepreneurial bug in college. I started a clothing company with my roommates in college, APOC Apparel. If you know, you know. So that was my really big bug for entrepreneurship and we were like literally we wanted to sell our shirts in the UU and like you needed to be like a club to have a table in the UU. So we, we somehow got a professor to be like our professor, you know, you have to have like some sort of professor sponsor. So we made like, I don't know if it was like an entrepreneurship club, we made up some club so that we could get it. We got it. And then we started selling our stuff in the UU. And dude, I was out in the UU just grinding. I would like, I was that guy that people are walking by and be like, yo, you want like a sweet shirt? Like, I don't know what my, my line would be, but just like slinging shirts at noon in the UU as a, as like an engineering student at college.

I love those stories. We had one, I don't even think you know about this one. Like in one semester in college, we all learned how to crochet in the dorm. Did I tell you this? And we were like crocheting beanies.

I remember some crocheted beanies. It's amazing.

We started a beanie company. Called Domiostasis, and we ended up just like, we would make beanies and just wear them ourselves. We didn't, I think we sold like a handful of them and then it morphed into like a Facebook page that turned into a band. So Domiostasis didn't last very long as a beanie company.

APOC Apparel, like, had mild success. We sold online. What I consider it, why I consider it a success was by the time we kind of like were seniors, every day I would see people on campus that I didn't know wearing APOC. And that was pretty awesome. Like that, that was like the coolest feeling in the world is like, dude, I don't know who you are, but you're rocking, uh, we, like we had a, um, our, our, our icon was a gnome and like a garden gnome, uh, smoking a, smoking a pipe. And I would see like some dude smoking a pipe.

Ty, what, what's that all about?

It was, it was just tobacco.

Just tobacco. Yes. Totally. Totally okay.

Totally above board. Uh, yeah, just a dude walking across campus wearing a gnome on his shirt. And I was just like, that is the coolest feeling. Like, I don't know if I can actually, I I don't know if I've recreated that high. Like, I think that, that is like one of the coolest experiences I've ever had. I guess doing like online businesses, you just like don't have that as much.

This could be like going through San Diego airport and someone's wearing a Farmer Mode hat. That could do it for me.

Oh, I would, I would be so pumped. If anyone can try to coordinate a Farmer Mode hat run-in in San Diego with me, I'd really, really appreciate that. Thank you. All right. So, so yeah, we— Sam did all these businesses and I think like he has a few philosophies. So I think the one thing we didn't mention is that he sold The Hustle to HubSpot. That was his big win, right? Like he had finally— he bootstrapped it, sold it. It was like The Hustle and Morning Brew were kind of like competitors at the time and he sold it to HubSpot in 2021 for about $20 million. So that was his really big success. And then the podcast, one thing that he's mentioned on a recent podcast, Tim, I'm gonna throw a few of his like philosophies. One thing he's mentioned is that like a lot of great entrepreneurs go through a gray hat phase. And basically it's kind of what we were talking about, like basically just doing stuff to make money that is like, doesn't have high meaning, high value in the world. It's like sometimes you're just slinging hot dogs. Sometimes you're, I think he sold poison ivy treatment and sold whiskey online and got in trouble for doing that. And like, I think there's actually, he thinks there's like something to that, right? When there's been entrepreneurs that have just like, you've earned your stripes, you've like, you've sold weird stuff on the internet and like you've grown, you grow, you grow out of that phase, but like there's something to that phase, right? It's actually like a feature, not a bug of entrepreneurs. And I love that. Like, yeah, I was slinging t-shirts of gnomes in college and you were hanging Christmas lights and then, you know, we started the podcast and we've done You know, Tim, we've, we talked about some of our failed business ideas. One of 'em was doing like wine, doing an influencer wine business where we like let influencers sell their own wine label. We handle all the backend and still, gosh darn it, that was still a good idea. I know. But the wine, the, the wine business. And then we had our NFT phase, right? Where like there was all this NFT craze going on and we said, let's do that and help it be part of our membership community. And so I, I just think that there's something to that of like sometimes the best entrepreneurs have their gray hat phase.

Definitely have had our gray hat phase, Ty, doing a bunch of different stuff. I love that thinking around, yeah, there's, there's something to that of just being, being a hustler. It's not going to be the, the ultimate meaning in your life, the ultimate purpose, but kind of for certain seasons in life, just hustling and figuring out a way to, to sell and to do stuff in, in different domains is super important as you accelerate your career.

Another philosophy he talks about is looking at things like, you know, business opportunities that serious operators don't take seriously. And basically this thinking that like there's, you know, riches in the niches or whatever the saying goes of where are people not looking? Where are the boring businesses that make a ton of money that no one's talking about? And I think that's like a really interesting philosophy. And I think there's a ton of that in ag. Like I think it groups like, what is it? The Stratovation Group that does like insight analysis for the biological industry. Is that, did I get that right?

I think they do like broader than biologicals, but yeah, it's like industry insights and research type stuff.

Yeah. And like no one knows about these guys like broadly, but a lot of people do and they pay them a lot of money for these insights that I'm sure is a highly, highly profitable business. And I just feel like there's a lot of these pockets in ag that we don't really hear about and talk about. They're not like ag tech selling to farmers. They're not input companies, but are like making money in these unique niches in ag.

Totally. It's like the, the picks and shovels type approach of like, what's the, the one thing that everyone's using that might be under the radar of like, yeah, unsexy, but everybody's using.

Yeah. He talks about sniffing out opportunity where others aren't, aren't even looking. And I think that was, you know, something that we have been thinking a lot about when we think about kind of more boring businesses or niche business opportunities and even how we came up with the idea of Aglist. And I think that's a good segue, Tim, to talk about The inspiration for Aglist. So, you know, I think we've talked about this before, but in early 2024, we, uh, Sam launched this side hustle project called Sam's List. And basically it was a way, I think it was probably right around tax season in, uh, 2024. And it, it's a, a platform where people can discover accountants and review accountants, uh, for their needs. Sound familiar? And, oh, he launched this and Tim and I were kind of both like, Wait, that's interesting. Like, I think it's, it's, it's easier than ever to launch a platform like this online. And he had this, you know, podcast where he has distribution. He has a big Twitter following, LinkedIn following where you could kind of promote this type of product. It doesn't cost a ton of money to build something like this. And so we became like fascinated with this idea of like, what could we do in ag that's like not that hard to build, that is, is fun and also serves a real need. Like there's a problem, there's a missing link in the industry. And so we went back and forth to him for a while talking about different ideas. What's something we can do? Let's launch a business under the Modern Acre and it should be fun. It should fill a real need and we can launch it quickly and let's just try to be aggressive with doing that.

Totally. I think like one thing that stuck out about Sam's list is Sam was very upfront of like, this isn't going to be like, you know, a venture-scale unicorn. It's not going to be the next Uber or the next Tesla, whatever. It's like, it's just the way that it's branded. It like looks like kind of 1990s and is like, icon is like the, the clippy icon for Microsoft Word back in the day. So it's kind of like fun and whimsical. And it's like, this is, you know, a side project. It has, it fits a market need where it's like hard to find these, these, uh, these resources if you're looking for a CPA and get these, get these reviews, but it's not going to be a mega business type thing. So like being upfront about that. So found that very interesting and like a parallel to what we were thinking about with AgList. And as we started looking around the marketplace of like where we could build, like biologicals just kept coming up. Like we were using them on our farm. We were getting a lot of inbound interest for the podcast from biological companies. We started following the space and just thought there wasn't really a great place to, to see all this information in one place. We obviously, we've talked to the Mixing Bowl guys about their landscape maps and the work that they were doing, but there wasn't kind of a unique independent platform. And so that's what we thought we could solve with AgList.

So we, we launched AgList and we like, I don't know if we talked about this. I mean, we like, we did some digging, like we tried to attend webinars that he was on talking to, like, I listened to every podcast where he talks about Sam List and I figured out he was using Bubble was the platform to build it on. So we used Bubble. I figured out he spent, you know, $10,000 to $20,000 to to get it launched. So we said, okay, that's kind of our, our, our budget to get this launched. And I think where we deviated, Tim, was some of the pricing model, right? And trying to figure out, hey, how can we have this be, uh, a sustainable business? How, why, why would companies pay to be on a platform and pay this price point? And, and, you know, focusing on relating it and comparing it to industry events and conferences for biological companies to attend to get their word out, their name out there. So we innovated, I think, on the pricing model from Sam's List, but kind of overall thesis was very similar. They, I think they've changed this, but they, they also had the like endorsement thing where it's like you just endorse, there's no negative reviews. But I think they have actually transitioned to reviews, which is interesting, but huge inspiration for us. We launched it, it's been successful, and now it's to the point where, yeah, we need to scale it up. So again, we are hiring our first employee at Aglist, the head of growth, and this is, uh, very, I think, unique opportunity where it's someone that can start as a part-time commission-based and grow into full-time, potentially grow into, you know, be a founding partner of what we're doing with Douglas. So someone who really wants to be part of the founding team. So super excited about that.

Totally. And this is like another page out of Sam's playbook where like him and his business partner, I think, got Sam's List off the ground. And then after a certain amount of time, they hired a role very similar to like what we're talking about with head of growth to bring someone in to really take ownership, put their arms around the business and really run it and lead it with Sam and his business partner's support. And so, yeah, it's kind of a similar, similar thought process there where we like, we ultimately want to find the next CEO of Agilist that can basically run, run the entire show. And it's a way to kind of transition into that.

You could be the assistant to the assistant of the CEO or something.

There's layers to this game, Ty.

There's so many layers. So yeah, on that note, good call out, Tim. So yeah, Dan kind of built Sam's List, got it off the ground, and then hired, hired someone to really run with it because his main thing is Hampton. So after selling, uh, The Hustle, I think what Sam does, Tim, really that's really interesting is he does a lot of research of like, I think he's layered up, right? He started with hot dogs, um, and has layered up of like business models that are really strong of like, how can I make hundreds of millions of dollars in annual profit? And some comp— some companies that do this are CEO groups that make hundreds of millions of dollars in net profit annually by being this CEO membership community. And so he said, I could do that and I could kind of do the, the new version of that. 'Cause some of the old, old ones are just, or some of the legacy ones are, they're not for the, the young next gen founder, right? So he, he launched Hampton and I think Hampton's a really interesting business model where you pay an annual fee. It's not cheap. I think it's like 10 grand. I think the first year is maybe 12 grand and then I, I recurring is $10 grand, um, and it's highly vetted interview process. So you basically apply. So there's this exclusive exclusivity around it where you have to apply to be a member. And then I think they only accept 4 to 5%. I think I just heard him say on a podcast.

I heard that too.

How did you get in? I, I sneaked through. I knew a guy. Yeah. So I, some, so I, I was really interested in this because Tim and I, we've talked about this, right? Is like, I, I work from home. You are basically my only like outlet, outlet, right? Um, you and my wife. And, um, I don't really have a ton of local friends that are other, you know, professionals, founders, CEOs. And so this was like really appealing to me. And so I, I interviewed, got in somehow. Um, and, uh, it's been really interesting and they, they originally kind of had it as like remote. So you would basically have a core group of 8 to 10 people. Where you meet on a monthly basis, you talk about your CEO problems, your company problems, your personal problems, um, and can work together on solutions. And then they've pivoted more to in-person. And I actually got the opportunity to participate in a, a local San Diego chapter. So that's been really cool to meet with people in person. But, uh, yeah, it's, I mean, it's a really strong business model, right? Of you just have, you, you have these people that pay these memberships fees and you have your employees to implement it, but it's not like a CapEx-heavy business other than they do throw events and things of that nature.

Don't worry, Sam, we're not going to do Hampton frag, but maybe.

Never say never. All right, Tim, let's wrap.

Super niche.

All right, Tim, I think the last thing I want to end on is he talked recently about entrepreneurs and founders, and I found this so true, is like ultimately to be an entrepreneur, to be a founder, you just have to, and maybe to be a farmer, You just have to be able to, um, stomach fear and uncertainty. And it's like, how much punishment can you take? We have gone through a heck of a past 2 years with everything we've done, me leaving Rivian and joining Polaris and you with the farm and launching Agilis, all this stuff. And there's good days, like overall it's been a huge net positive, but like, man, like there's some of those moments where it's like fetal position moments of like, what am I doing? This is so hard. Everything. Is close to blowing up. And like, I think I've just come to the conclusion, it's like, how much grit can you have and how much can you handle? And like, how many blows can you endure? I think people romanticize entrepreneurship and like, that's the reality is like, it is a super hard game and you just have to endure and be okay with that. And if you're like, if listening to this, you're like, that sounds awful. It's like, I do not recommend.

Totally. Yeah, like living with the uncertainty and variability, volatility of just like farming in general, building businesses. Like there's really good days, there's really bad days and like, yeah, you need that support system to like manage through it. And also, yeah, just kind of develop that tolerance of just like not letting the downtimes get to you. Like knowing that things are going to turn around and change and not like getting too bogged down with the negative things that happen. But like, yeah, farming especially, just like the stuff that's out of your control is like, If you dwell on that, it'll totally consume you of just like the look at the weather every day of like, how's this gonna impact the business? And you just have, have to kind of change your mindset to, to power through it.

I think the, yeah, the biggest takeaways I've learned from, from Sam is follow your interests, your passions, have fun with what you're doing, work on projects that are, that you're passionate about, but choose business models that make money and really think strategically about good business models, good business types, good unit economics, and then yeah, having grit. And I think those lessons pay off massive benefits if you can use them in your daily life. All right, Tim, we got to wrap this. This was fun. Big shout out to Sam Parr. Hey, if you're listening, appreciate you, Sam. I know he actually knows about Agglist and he's like, was pumped to hear that we that did AgList inspired by Sam's List. So that was pretty cool. But appreciate you guys listening. Again, check out that job description, Head of Growth at AgList. It's in the description. Share it with a friend. If you, if that person's you, reach out and apply. We appreciate it. We'll be checking all those applications.