How Sam Parr Built a Media Empire - Cap Con 5

It's a 100% emotional game for me. So I read all this self-help bullshit. I meditate every morning. I exercise. I do all these vitamins. It's pretty much only to do one thing. I spend most all of my energy outside of like doing the actual work on making sure that I can keep my mood calm. You really got to care about this thing because internet people have the greatest bullshit detector there is. And what's the best way to circumvent someone's bullshit detector? You don't bullshit. That's the best way. Look, if you have a machine that turns $1 into $2 $2, what do you do? You load up a dump truck with as much money as you possibly can and you just back it into that machine. I had that machine and I was still very conservative with how I was spending. And I think that really hurt me. And I was doing it from a place of scarcity mindset and from like, there's no way this is— like, I had a lot of self-doubt. Like, there's no way this is going to work. No way. And now looking back, and I also invest in a lot of companies now, I like see— I'm seeing patterns. I'm like, I should have defaulted to optimism the whole time because it was working. All right. What's going on? This is my first time. You're going to hear everyone say, this is my first time doing this in years. So I'll tell you a little bit about who I am and what we do. But I'll tell you a cool story first. But the summary is, my company, it's called The Hustle. Does anyone read The Hustle? Cool. So we have some users here. It's a daily email that goes out to millions of people, and we give you the business news and information you need to know. That's a very simple version. I'll talk more about what that actually means. But our first week of business, we almost went out of business. And so basically, my company, it's a media company. We started as a conference, a little bit like this. And the way that we would get speakers, I didn't have any money, but the way we would get speakers, I couldn't buy ads. Sorry, not speakers, attendees. We would, I couldn't buy ads, so I didn't have any money, and so I started blogging about the speakers, and one thing led to another, and it was incredibly profitable, and it made a lot of money. But I didn't want to only do conferences, and so I'd read the biography of Ted Turner, of the Murdoch family, of the Hearst family, and I was like, sick, I'm launching a media company. I'm gonna be a media guy. I didn't really know what that meant, but that's what I was gonna do. And so I launched this post, saying, I've got $500,000. I'm building this media company from the hustle. Watch us blow all the money to make it happen. And I had like this picture of me where like my eyes weren't even open. And I was like, kind of looked like a smug jackass. But I was like, that's cool. That's the angle I'm going to go with. I don't think I'm entirely that, but I was like, it's going to get clicks. The story's cool. Like, we're going to be obnoxious. It's kind of douchey, but it's awesome. And so we launched this. And then the next week, I'm like, all right, what am I going to write? Had remembered this story about this guy that I knew, and he was making $60,000 a month selling books on Kindle, basically about teaching guys how to meet and pick up women. And I was like, "Dude, you don't know anything about this. I've never seen you with a woman." He's like, "Yeah, but I just find top-selling books and I send them to the Philippines. They rewrite them so they get past the Kindle, like, plagiarism thing, and they go live, and I pay $5 to get a sexy-looking title, and I headline it, and then I pay people to review it, and it goes to the top of the charts, and it's a recurring cycle." Then I put best-selling author on my LinkedIn and I get paid more money doing that. I'm like, oh my god, that is very shady and kind of a really cool story. And so, my first blog post, like, we wrote about that and then I'm like, alright, we gotta come out with a bang. We gotta come out hard here, so let's just copy what he said and become a best-selling author. And we weren't gonna do it in the, like, the sex, women, or the picking up women type of space. Because we found out when we were doing research that romance novels— does anyone here read romance novels? You can admit it. Yeah, I didn't think it. Not many people. So I didn't read it. I didn't know much about it. But I researched it. It basically has some of the largest liquidity in the Amazon marketplace. So basically loads of new titles constantly. And people eat this up. They love buying it. And they read it. And so we decided to launch a romance novel. And we did research. And there's categories of people who want to have sex with vampires, people who want to have sex with people in the military. So we made a joke. We're going to make like it's a werewolf who's in the military. And so we find a book that like was doing really well. I got a guy off Fiverr to make a different title and a different headline for that. And then we kind of skipped over the whole getting someone to rewrite it, because we only had a few days to get this live. And so we kind of rewrote it. We submitted it. We paid people to upvote it. Boom, it got to the top of its category. We made a joke, and we put LinkedIn bestselling author in our category. The whole joke was like, yeah, we're a bestselling author. You should pay us to consult with you. And, but the point was, is that like this methodology we think is not right, and it's kind of shady. But we did it in like a funny way. And so we launched this post on like a Tuesday, and immediately all of the bloggers in the romance novel category, which there's a lot of them, they got super pissed at us. They thought we were making fun of them. We weren't making fun of them at all. We just happened to pick that category. And they were livid. And they shared it like crazy. It got to the top of tons of different subreddits. It got to the top of the self-publishing subreddit. Self-publishing blogs were writing about it. It was a hit right away. And I get all these emails and Twitter messages and Facebook messages, oh, this is so funny, or oh, I hate you. You're such a douche. Like, just all types of stuff. And I'm loving it. Then I get this email, and it says in the subject line, cease and desist. And it's from a URL I didn't recognize who this company was. And it was like this really, like, crazy email that said something like, the book that you used to copy, the author reached out to us. We own that. We're the publisher of that. And we're going to pursue this as hard as we can. We're going to make an example out of you. And in my head, I was like, shit. Like, this was like the same day I was crying. Crushing it. And then I was like, we're going to go out of business the very first, like, 3 days that we launched. And it was, the URL was Harlequin. Has anyone heard of Harlequin Books? I didn't know what that was. Harlequin. I had no idea. Harlequin is a massive publisher, probably, I don't know exactly how big they are, but thousands of employees. The largest publisher of romance novels in the country. The author, and she was right to do this, was causing a fuss about this online. And so I get on the phone with this lawyer, and I'm like, and I was, I was scared. I was like, I get scared just thinking about it. I was nervous. I was like, oh, this guy's going to sue me. We're screwed. I just had this douchey post where I wrote about how I've got $500,000 to start this business, and I look like an idiot on this picture. I'm like this blond white bro who's got his eyes closed. Like, I'm the opposite of what these people like stand for. I'm the total opposite. What am I doing? And I get on the phone, and I'm like, look, man, my point wasn't to insult you. It just, that just happened to be the category I chose. And he goes, yeah, look, that was an overly stern email. I was just trying to scare you. I understand what you're trying to do. Can you please just like put a comment at the bottom that says, you know, we talked to Harley Quinn. We removed the book from the actual Amazon page. And we'll calm down the author and just like say you're sorry to her. and I was like, oh my god, thank god. It was like, it was like a miracle. So we got away with it. But then, like, basically, I realized there was a few things about this business, and I'm gonna, I'll talk all about it, but basically, the first is if I'm gonna continue doing this, which I am, don't look as douchey as I was. And it's not wrong to be authentic and like do that type of stuff, but like, that wasn't even me, and I was just like playing this part in order to get attention, and I totally just suffered the consequences. The second is that the type of content that we were gonna write about, we were gonna be very authentic. We were gonna write like we speak, and sometimes that's gonna piss people off, but that's okay. In my head, I was like, big companies won't do this because they gotta go through 10 different committees. This is just me. At the time, it was just me. There is no committee. I can do whatever I want, and I should do whatever I want, 'cause that's gonna help me stick out. And so basically, I was like, I'm gonna be a missionary. I'm not gonna be a mercenary. Like, I'm not a hired gun here. I'm gonna live this shit. Then the third thing was these ideas that I have of this style of content marketing, I'm gonna talk all about what that style is, it works. So that week, so I just bought the URL, thehustle.co, so we had no backlinks, we had zero traffic. That week we got like half a million people to our website. The premise behind our business is we're a daily email. So we reach about 2 million people a day. and we make money through a variety of ways. One big way is we have ads in the email, native ads that we went and sold, and we make the ads. And so we had to get those emails in the first place. Once you get them, then you can build a huge business. You gotta get them first. I didn't have a lot of money, and so I was like, I'm gonna get all these emails via content marketing. And so the third takeaway from this was like, this works. I'm gonna continue doing this. And we actually still do it. So my company, The Hustle, We do this still every single Sunday. So that post, that Kindle post, that's been read millions of times, but that's not even our most popular. Close to it now. So we still do this. So we've launched hundreds and hundreds of these style of posts. Not always, but often they do really, really well and they go viral. But that week when we launched, we— I didn't have an email list. And by the end of the week, I had 10,000 subscribers. And we actually did this methodology for the— first year or so where I just, I was blogging like a madman. I would do sometimes 5 posts a day. And we got about, I don't remember the exact number, but somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 email subscribers in the first year without a cent spent on ads. And that strategy still works, by the way. And so, we still do it. And so my company is called The Hustle. So what we do is we have this daily email that goes out to about 2 million people. It has a crazy high open rate, so something like 45% unique open rate every single day. We also own this thing called Trends, so Trends.co. So with The Hustle, we make money through ads. We just sold the company, and I'll tell you about that as well, but had we not sold this year, we would have scared, this would be our fourth or fifth, I think this would be our fourth full year of business. We would have done about $20 million in sales. And advertising would have been an 8-figure business. We didn't have, so we make money through ads in the email. We didn't have our conference this year. We typically host conferences where we'll have tens of thousands of people. So that doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately, but it would have one day. That would have made millions, but not this year, but maybe next year. But we also own Trends, so this thing called trends.co, and I could talk all about that, but that's a subscription business and a paid community, a little bit like this, And we have a team of researchers and analysts. And all we do is scour the web. And we have lots of proprietary data. And we try to look at really fast-growing trends and explain why they're going to be popular and how you can capitalize on them. The company, though— and this actually would relate to a bunch of people here. So does anyone use HubSpot? Some people use HubSpot. So they reached out to us last October. And they were like, look, we want to be one of the first people to build this software business that has a media component to it. And so we closed that deal, and they bought us in January. And so that deal closed late January. So I sold the company, and it was for tens of millions of dollars. We didn't really raise any VC. I owned most of the company, so it was a good outcome for me. And yeah, thank you. But we still do the stuff that we started doing. We did the same thing of just creating lots of free content and having some paid stuff and getting most of our users without spending any advertising money, which frankly is not the best idea, right? Like if something works, I should have spent more. But I didn't really know entirely what I was doing. And we didn't have a lot of money. And so we have The Hustle, which is the daily email. We have Trends. We used to host conferences. And we also have a podcast that I'm actually the host of called My First Million. It gets millions of listens and typically is like a top 10, maybe top 20 podcast in the business category by listenership. But give it one more year. I think it'll be top 5 soon. And we did the same thing with that. We haven't spent a lick of money. We haven't spent a dime growing it. But starting next month, we are going to start spending a lot of money to grow it. And so it's a cool business. And what I can talk about, Ryan was saying about how we stand out in popular categories. And I can tell you it basically all comes down to content. And content is interesting because everyone physically can do it. Everyone here can write sentences on a blog post. But it's really hard to get it right because everything that you were taught in English class in like 8th grade, like you just don't pay attention to that. and that's basically the secret. And so whenever we write blog posts, we've been, you know, we've got blog posts that have been seen 5 million times, 10 million times. Whenever we write blog posts, I always start with distribution first. So I'll try to explain this, but it's basically a circle, a cycle here of how I come up with ideas. But the first part, and you could start in a different part of the circle, but then you gotta go. So I always start with distribution. So before I even have an article idea, I say, Who do I want to reach and where are they? Then I think, what medium are they going to be coming from? So are they going to be coming from search, from Facebook? Right now Twitter is having like a resurgence. So if you go after tech people, that's where those folks are. If you're going after like nerdy types of folks, which is who I am and where I was going after, they're on Reddit and Hacker News. If you're going after fitness people, maybe they're on— I don't know, I'm not, I don't read a lot of fitness content. Maybe they're on bodybuilding.com, maybe they're on some fitness subreddit. Just like, where are they gonna come from? Then, I think, what's the headline? And then finally, and this is where most people start, but this is my last thing, most of the time. What's the story? And not only what's the story, but what's the emotion I'm gonna get someone to feel? And sometimes, I'll hear a story like, last year I met this guy, He was wearing a Ramones t-shirt and cowboy boots, and he was like really huge. And he starts talking to me about newsletters, and I was like, and he had a super thick southern accent. I'm from Missouri. He was from Missouri as well. And I started talking to him, and he started like saying all this stuff about his subscription. He's like, yeah, we got a pretty good subscription business too. It's just me doing it. We do about $30 million in revenue. I was like, what the fuck? And I'm like, what? And I judged him. I judged him hardcore. I'm like, you? He goes, yeah, we talk about commodities and a lot of hedge fund people buy it. And I'm like, what? He goes, yeah, it's just me and my son. And so, yeah, I'm like, dude, this is the craziest thing I've ever heard. Tell me everything. And so, that, in that example, I haven't published that much yet, but I've talked about it in the podcast. That started, I started that one with a story, because I'm like, oh, I just heard something. I'm going to file that. I know what emotion it just got me. And then I would think, all right, now what's the headline of that going to be, and where is this going to get popular? And I constantly think about that cycle. Most people, when they do content, they just say, we need users. Write a blog post. Fortunately, it's not that simple. And so I can talk today. I think most of the learning that we'll do is through Q&A, so we'll talk more about it there. but there's this whole cycle that I use for creating content. And we've done it a bunch of times. So we've published many, many, many thousands of blog posts. And the type of stuff that we do— there's a few different types of content that you can do. The type of stuff we do, we aren't optimizing for search. So if you own a brand that you're trying to optimize for search, what you're gonna do is probably different than what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is, If I have nothing, I've got no backlinks to my site, so I'm not gonna rank, really. If I don't have a name, no one knows me, the type of stuff I'm talking about is the stuff that you use what I'm saying. And I actually think that's a benefit overall because it pisses some people off if you do it the right way, but this group of people who you want to love you, they're obsessed. They, it's meant, I call it niches make riches. I'm just appealing to this one group of people, and I know that I am. And I'm going to go super hard on those guys. And it works. So that's how we built The Hustle to millions of daily users. That's how the podcast, it does the same thing. We do the same principles for that. We know that it doesn't appeal to everyone. And we work really hard at appealing to a very particular type of person. And we've done that with Trends, which is an 8-figure subscription business. So that's a little bit about The Hustle. I'm happy. Ryan, you want to come up and we could go through some questions? But I wanted to give you guys some context on the business. And hopefully that will help you have some good questions later. I think that's where the most— where the best learnings are. But that's kind of the story so far.

Give it up for Sam Parr, please. Before we go over to Q&A, I have a couple questions that came up for me. You said something. About starting with the distribution, of going to where the people are before you even think of the content. I was curious how that impacted your approach to the podcast. It makes total sense for like a blog, but from the podcast where you're doing a lot of interviews and just talking about what's going on with your own investments, like how does that approach?

Yeah, so let me explain to you how we do this for a blog. And I'm gonna, there's like, 10, 5 or 10 different ways you can do it. I'm going to tell you the easiest way, my favorite way. Does anyone here use Reddit? Does anyone here not know anything about Reddit? Yeah, Reddit's weird. It's like the 5th most popular website in America, and yet there's actually a huge amount of people who have no idea what it is. It's basically a bunch of subreddits, which are basically forums. Reddit is a list of different types of forums for different interests. And people post links and they comment on those links. That's all it is. And so, what I like to do, my whole philosophy is I wanna know what the people are already talking about, what type of content is trending with my desired audience, and I'm gonna figure out a way how to make my version touch on that but be different. Here's the easiest way to do that. Let's say that I'm writing an article about the fitness industry. I'm gonna go to Reddit, the fitness subreddit, so reddit.com/r/fitness, and there's 1 million members of that community. I'm gonna click sort by top posts over the last month. I'm gonna get 20 posts, and it's gonna be people posting a thought, like an idea, like just a headline, like, "What's your favorite exercise for hip mobility?" "What's your favorite do-it-yourself home equipment?" Or I'll see an article of someone posting something, and so anyway, that, I scroll through the first 10 pages and I get the idea of what is popular with this group. And so I can just scroll through that for 10 minutes and I'll understand what it is. Then, I pick the one I want. So I just saw a post that's like 9 posts down, it's, what's your favorite DIY, I'm gonna say it, do it yourself, DIY home equipment? I click comments. And I sort comments by most upvoted comments, and I see one that says, "This is great, but you forgot about using PVC pipe, which is the most versatile pipe." I'm making a lot of this up, so I might get some wrong. Which is like the most versatile building material, and you could use it to make kettlebells. Here's a picture of me that I made it, a kettlebell. And it's like really highly voted. So in my head, I'm like, boom! People care about do-it-yourself stuff. and this guy just posted this thing about his kettlebell. I should do a whole post on how to build kettlebells using PVC pipe for $8 from Home Depot. And that is an example of how I'll get an idea for a blog post. For My First Million, for the podcast, we do similar types of stuff. So I go to Hacker News, and I look at what's trending. And then I click the comments. And my audience hangs out in Hacker News, so that's why I do it. I go to Hacker News. I look at what's trending. I look at the comments to get the vibe. Sometimes someone, the article will say one thing, like, "We think Amazon doing this is a great idea." The top post will be like, "I disagree. I think it's a horrible idea." And then people debating that. And so I'm like, "OK, I got plenty of material here about interesting ideas. Now what is my opinion of that?" And that's what a lot of times what we'll do for the podcast. Additionally, if we're trying to get big on YouTube, which we're starting next month, I'm going to use YouTube data to figure out what are people searching for, and I'm gonna be like, do I have a strong opinion or a strong intel on anything that they're searching for? And if yes, that's what I'm gonna start talking about in the podcast. That said, about the other half of the— so we do that for some of the podcast stuff. The other stuff that we do with the podcast is we just say whatever we think is interesting. And that's where like some skill and talent— I mean, I'm pretty good at podcasting, My co-host Sean is like world-class. And so that stuff is like the talent part that it's hard to explain, but that's what we do.

Well, what's interesting about that is—

Does anyone listen to the podcast? All right, we got a few listeners.

So what's interesting about this is you are basically inserting yourself into the conversation that people are already having.

Where they already are.

Rather than making one up, which is what most people—

I'll make one up eventually.

But you're making one up from your own perspective on something that people are already talking about.

Correct, at least to get started.

Right.

Then once now, with the hustle, we got 2 million subscribers, we can write a story about something, and we're like, this is kind of bullshit how this is happening. And maybe no one has ever called that out. And then that kind of can create a movement. But in order to get going, I had to tap into what was already happening. Yeah.

I mean, there's actually some relief in that. —because oftentimes the idea of content creation or audience building is thought of as you making it up or posturing yourself as an authority on something.

No. I'm living my life, and I'm filing stories. So here's an example. Do you guys remember—you may not remember this—Steve Harvey hosted the American Beauty Pageant, and he, like, said the wrong winner. Like, he said, like, "The winner is," and he accidentally read the runner-up. Does anyone remember that? OK. In a very split second, he goes, "Look, it's what the card said," and then he turned it. Well, I zoomed in on that card, and everyone was like, "Steve Harvey, you idiot." I zoomed in on that card, and like, if you know anything about UX and design, it was horribly designed. I totally understand why he made that mistake. And so, that happened on a Monday night. By Tuesday morning, we wrote a post that said like, "Don't blame Steve Harvey. The design of that card was horrible. Here's actually how it should have looked like if you—" use proper design principles. And that post ranked the next morning on Google News when everyone was searching. And that got like 500,000 views. And so we just took something that I knew people were going to be searching for, but I just took a different take on it. So I'm not trying to be better, just different.

Yeah, and it's really hard to not have an opinion on something and give your commentary on it. And if it is thoughtful, then you insert yourself into the conversation that's already happening without trying to have to invent or posture yourself in order to get attention. Now Sam, I wanted to ask you, you recently had the exit, you recently were acquired. I was curious, being on the other side of that, while you were building all of this and now being rewarded for a lot of that, what has happened to your mindset or your approach to business? Has it changed? Has it been a difficult transition? What has that been like?

Has anyone read this book, It's, I always am embarrassed talking about it, 'cause the title's stupid. How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis. Yeah, so I read that book when I was younger, and he has some line in that book that says, if I had to do it all over again, I would get rich by the age of 35. And he says, I forget exactly what he says, but something like, I would want to get $30 million by 35, and then I would just want to coast forever, because I dedicated my life to this, and I wish I would have had more time to have a family, do this, that. I read that when I was like 20, and then I read like this Mark Cuban story about how he sold his business at 32, and then chilled for 8 years, and then started his next big thing. And I was like, I was convinced. I was like, I read this at 20, and I was like, by 30, I wanna have a certain amount of money to where I never have to worry again, and then I will figure out what I'll do after that. Maybe I'll do nothing, maybe I'll do something, I don't know, but I just want like money, I don't want that to be an issue ever again. And we sold right when I turned 31, and so I missed it by a year. But, yeah. Aw. I know. But the goal was to hit that, and I'm a big planner, and so we're right on track. And so in terms of mindset, it feels, what was the question? What was the, how's the mindset?

How has your mindset changed on the other side of the exit, if at all?

Yeah, so I was poor for a long time. I didn't— I grew up poor, and I was way too frugal with my business. I should have spent way more money on growth. If you have— look, if you have a machine that turns $1 into $2, what do you do? You load up a dump truck with as much money as you possibly can, and you just back it into that machine. I had that machine, and I was still very conservative with how I was spending. I wasn't If I would hire people, I would hire like a $50,000 employee versus a $120,000 employee who probably would have been more productive. I didn't, wasn't nearly aggressive with ads once I realized the machine's working. I didn't launch stuff fast enough. And I think that really hurt me. And I was doing it from a place of scarcity mindset and from like, there's no way this is, like I had a lot of self-doubt. Like, there's no way this is gonna work. No way. And now looking back, and I also invest in a lot of companies now, I like see, I'm seeing patterns. I'm like, I should have defaulted to optimism the whole time. Because it was working. Defaulted to optimism? Yeah, because I— it was working, and I automatically default to paranoia of like, I got to work really hard to make sure this shit's not broken because it's going to fucking fail. So I got to prepare for that to fail, and I got to make sure it won't. And so because I'm already like that, most of the stuff that I'm involved in is pretty solid. So I should have had more optimism and poured more money and resources into things that worked. And that's what I'm learning now that I have— I don't have to have that scarcity mindset anymore.

So because of your paranoia, you were plugging a lot of holes. Yeah, I think paranoia is good, which actually gave you like the foundation to have the machine that turned $1.

Yeah, paranoia is good, right?

Flipped over into the optimism earlier. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, so like if you're preparing for a fight in the UFC, like you should go to bed every night, this other guy is working harder than me, I gotta work harder, right? That's healthy. But you also have to— it's weird, you got to have this other side of like, I'm the best, I can do it, this is going to end well, I'm going to achieve my goal. And I wish I would have had a little bit more of that confidence early on. But I did the best I could. I mean, I started the company when I was 24. I knew nothing about media or— I mean, I didn't know anything about anything. Although most people here probably were in the same boat. But I just wish I would have had a little bit more confidence of what the business could have become. I think that the business style that we had, like I said, we would have done 20— so HubSpot bought us, and we basically shut down our whole ad department. So we went into the year with millions of dollars booked of ads. They go, no, no, no. We make billions of dollars a year. We don't care about this little ad business. We want you because you have all these amazing users, and we want them to eventually buy HubSpot. And they're right. That's a smart move. But had I continued owning the business, there was definitely a path to make $100 million plus in revenue. And I should have had— I should have aggressively— I should have known that that was possible because looking back, it is.

So did that realization come after partnering with HubSpot because you see that what they're really after is the users and they're not looking at it from a profit and loss statement, which means that you had been looking at it from that perspective, which made you protective? Yes. So that aha of seeing, oh, this company is more interested in the users that I have.

Yeah, because for me it was easy. Intellectually it was easy. Emotionally it was hard, like going to work every day and like, even when things weren't working. Like, intellectually, I'm like, look, I know if I write 10 blog posts, only 3 or 2 are going to work. Like, that's OK. Intellectually, I totally understand how to do this. Intellectually, I totally understand how to get loads of users to my website. I don't struggle with that. That's easy for me. Just like maybe whoever's really good at what they do, it's very easy for them to do that. And when someone was like, hey, I'll pay you tens of millions of dollars for all these users, I'm like, what? Just go do it yourself. I'm like, why are you, what do I, what are you doing? You know what I mean? So once I learned that, yeah, that was part of it. And also, you know, once you have an exit, I'm like, I now know what's possible. And I know the errors that I made. And one of those was not going nearly hard enough. I was very conservative with our money. Financially, you were conservative. Yeah, yeah. So like, I was famous. People make fun of me. So we had about 35 employees. All of their computers I bought on Facebook Marketplace for $500 apiece. We were making like tens of millions of dollars. Why the fuck don't I just go to Apple? Like, it would have saved me so much time.

And why do you think that you were so conservative?

Because I grew up poor, and every dollar in that— most every dollar in there, that was mine.

You get an emotional attachment to that of, that's my money, not the business's Correct.

And that's— and there's a story about— it's not stupid, that's reasonable, but that's— it wasn't unwise. Makes sense.

It is certainly not optimal because, because when you have a story about what that money means in the business account, you're not freed up to actually deploy it in the way that you're talking.

Yeah, so we didn't raise venture capital. If I raised venture capital, I would have run the business way differently. I've been it.

And tell me what you would have done differently had you raised capital.

Well, so the thing is, is I A lot of people here and a lot of my friends who are speaking, they bought ads early on for their businesses. And that worked for them. I think that for a lot of people that doesn't work because you're just kind of filling up a leaky bucket. Or maybe your product isn't actually that great. And so because we didn't have money, it forced us to make something that people organically liked. And then the ad money that we put on it was fuel on the fire. It wasn't the fire starter. That's not to say that other— I mean, both strategies can work. But for us, we had something that worked. And once I knew it worked, I should have spent way more on advertising.

Is it fair to say that your product was the content in the newsletter? Because that's—

No. No. Our product was the attention. So most people here have commerce businesses, I would imagine. But media, the enterprise value of media is basically equal to the quality of people who you have consuming your stuff, multiplied by the number of people, multiplied by your influence over them. For example, if you have a blog for 12-year-old kids, 12-year-old kids don't have a lot of money to spend, so you're gonna need like 50 million of them, and you're gonna need to have a fairly large influence on them so a lot of them will buy a hoodie from you, versus If you have an audience of only 20,000 doctors who run hospitals, that doctor can make a decision to purchase $1 million worth of equipment. You probably only need, like I said, like 10,000 of them, and you need to have like a mild influence over them. And, you know, like 10,000 doctors could be, you know, more valuable than, let's say, 30 million 12-year-olds, or something like that. And so with media, you have to look at that equation.

To figure things out. Makes sense. So you brought up at the beginning how you were scrapping to get an audience and to get attention. You were not an expert in the field of going after tech nerds.

Well, I'd been blogging forever. You had? Yeah, on my own personal blog. So prior to— At 24, you were blogging forever? No. I had been blogging since I was 18, OK? And I've been storytelling for a long time. So prior to starting my business, I actually owned a chain of hot dog stands in Nashville, Tennessee. And it was called Southern Sam's Wieners as Big as a Baby's Arm. And look, I'm selling hot dogs. Like, they pretty much all taste the same. Right? Like if I gave you like 5 different brands, you'd be like, yeah, it's fucking fine. It's just meat. It's fine. So I had to figure out, how do I sell this thing? And so that's like, you know, with the— I'm from Missouri. I'm not really from the South. But the shtick, I realized I had to come up with shticks, and I had to learn how to get people's attention. And so I had this like marketing thing that if you put your baby's arm in a bun and put mustard on it, and let me take a picture, you get a free hot dog. And so— And so at a young age, I read the book Influence by Robert Cialdini, and I learned early on how to use my voice to influence people to get them to do what I want them to do. And so I would use that to sell hot dogs. And I just kind of took, one day I took a course by my friend Neville Medhora, who at the time wasn't my friend, I was just a fan of his, and I learned about copywriting. And I was like, man, I'm really good at selling if I just talk to someone. If I learned copywriting, I could like do this like to, you know, an infinite amount of people. And so that's when I learned how to put that on text and be a copywriter. And then, once I understood how people thought, copywriting, and sales copywriting, it's basically figuring out what motivates a human being and conveying or creating a solution that makes it easy for them to want to purchase it. Once I figured out how people think, then I was like, now how do I get someone to share this blog, or share this content? And then I just deployed that on the blog. And I'd been blogging and perfecting this, and in order to learn how to be a great copywriter and be a great blogger, what I was— I spent years doing this. I called it copy hour. So for 1 to 2 hours every single day, I would get the best of something. So for example, I did The Catcher in the Rye. I did Saturday Night Live scripts. I did movie scripts. I did the best sales letters of all time. I did great blog posts. and I would print them out, and word for word, I would copy them by hand. And the reason I did that was if you look at, like, how we learn how to play guitar, or any instrument in America, it's, it's very easy. You can go from knowing nothing to being a pretty good musician in, like, a year. And the way you do that is you copy other people's songs. So you learn how to play the piano, you learn how to play Jingle Bells, you learn how to play this other thing, then you move on and start learning how to play some, like, cool rock music that you like, and you master that. And then you're like, oh, I see all the patterns here. This is amazing. Then you write your own thing. And that's what I did with writing, is I just copied other people's work to understand, oh, wow, check out this thing that Stephen King always does. I just caught it. And it makes me feel this way and this way. And then after a while, I was like, all right, now I understand how stories work. I'm going to make my own stories, and I'm going to use all these techniques that I physically learned by writing them out by hand.

What I'm curious about in those early days at the Hustle is not having any existing influence over tech nerds and getting their attention. What's interesting about that is oftentimes people who model your approach have the assumption that there's some expertise and you're speaking from a place of authority. And you just went in with that, with like, in order, just getting their attention. I want to know, going into that, did you know that tech people were your people. Yeah.

You know that that was the target market. I didn't have authority in that, like, why should my opinion be better than anyone else's? I couldn't, like, tell you why other than I thought it was, which isn't, like, you know, it's an okay reason. But I was a tech person. I am a business nerd. And so, I said earlier that I was a missionary, not a mercenary. So, it's not like I, like, if you were to ask me to start a blog on, We have Kettle and Fire here on bone broth. Bone broth is cool, but it doesn't really interest me. Like, I would have to go and become an expert, but like, I don't really care about that. So I would be a hired gun for that, and I probably wouldn't be as good. With the tech stuff, that was my life. You know, I cared about it. I thought about it constantly. And so I became an expert probably, I don't know, I mean, am I an expert? I don't know. But maybe because, yeah, people's perception maybe. But because I kept doing it. But I lived this life. I care about it deeply. I love it. I was blogging about this stuff. And then it just so happened I started making money from it. So some of the greatest people who I like in media, Ted Turner, he's obsessed with news. He loves news. Rupert Murdoch, obsessed with news. Rupert Murdoch owns all these newspapers that don't even make money. And they're like, why do you do that? He goes, I love it. I'm obsessed with it. I can't let this guy go. I love this newspaper. And I feel the same way about a lot of media stuff. I'm obsessed with it. I'm addicted to it. Media is a really weird thing. There's a reason why rich guys like Benioff and the Facebook guy buy failing newspapers. It feeds your ego, and it feels awesome. And hopefully sometimes it makes a profit. And so I'm obsessed with media.

But it's difficult to come into the media game unless you are obsessed with something. I totally agree, yes. And for most people, they are outthinking their interests. Like, they're trying to target so perfectly that they're not actually following what they're obsessed about enough in order to get the attention.

100%. You have to be obsessed about it, and often, People who own businesses will say, hey, can you teach me how to use content to get users? And I'm like, I can, but knowing what I know about you, it's going to suck because you're not even connected to this. You really don't give a shit. I don't know how you're going to even— a lot of people want to hire people out right away. I'm like, man, unless you have a voice that comes from the top, it might be challenging. And also, you've really got to care about this thing because Internet people have the greatest bullshit detector there is. And what's the best way to circumvent someone's bullshit detector? You don't bullshit. That's the best way. And so, it's really, so like, people will get into this business and they want to hire, like, someone on Upwork just to do keyword fillers. And it's like, that's not gonna work. Maybe sometimes, occasionally, but typically that's not gonna work. And you really need to care about it. And I guess the CEO or founder doesn't always have to care about it, but they gotta at least know how to find and motivate the people who are passionate about it.

So that, that's what I wanted to ask you next, because what you're saying makes total sense for a solopreneur, or even a solopreneur with an assistant. But when you try to scale that and build a team of 35 people, it is difficult to protect that obsession. So what did it look like for you to go go from a person who's blogging about things that get attention and then building an infrastructure that is now a media company?

Yeah, building a content team's hard, and we fire a lot of people. So we hire pretty quickly, and then we fire them right away if it doesn't work out. And that's a lot— in the media, that's kind of normal. And when we hire people, we're like, yeah, we're going to give you a chance. Within 4 weeks, we'll know if this works. And usually they're like, yeah, this doesn't work. When we tell them. So it's not like some mean thing. And so, we, we, I have an editor-in-chief. His name's Brad Wolverton. I recruited him from NerdWallet, and before that, he was at the Washington Post. At NerdWallet, he wrote about personal finance, which is related to business, so he really cared. He's an amazing person at managing writers. Managing writers, which I put myself in that category, as the writer, it's a huge pain in the ass. Everyone's a diva. The best ones are divas, and you have to put up with it because what makes them a good coworker— or sorry, what makes them a good writer and a creative person makes them a shitty coworker and someone who's a pain in the ass. They're typically always late. They will submit their stuff at the very last minute. They won't know what they're doing on a Wednesday even though they're going live on a Friday. That is normal. Those types of people often are very, very good. And so you have to be very patient at managing them. You have to be very patient at saying what they can and cannot do. So for example, one time Goldman Sachs interviewed, or sponsored our newsletter, and we did a story on FuckJerry. FuckJerry's this Instagram handle that has all these followers, and he was launching something interesting, and so we wrote about it. And one of the writers decided to put the word fuck in every sentence. He's like, fuck Jerry, launch this thing. It should be pretty fucking good. And Goldman was like, yeah, we're not paying you for that ad. And I went to the writer, and I was like, I support that. Good job. I'm down with that. And so doing things like that, you've got to let creative people create. As long as they are hitting the— as long as they're following most of the rules, hitting the deadlines, and hitting their goals, I teach them how to do it, and besides that, I let them be free, and that's what they like.

I saw you tweet out recently that you found a direct correlation between the number of downloads on an episode and the amount of research that you did going into the episode. Yeah. That was your growth hack, that you could find a direct correlation.

Yeah, so the podcast, right now it's getting like a million listens a month. Each episode gets like, a low one will be 30,000 downloads an episode. A really high one will be over 100,000 downloads an episode. Is anyone here in the podcast industry?

There's a couple people.

Podcasts are fucking hard. It's the hardest thing I've ever grown. We're about 2 years in. I think by year 3 we'll be, We should be north of 100,000 an episode, which would make us one of the biggest. It's hard. And a lot of people ask how we grow. And I'm like, well, the first two reasons you maybe can't replicate, and that's that we have the hustle, so we have a lot of people to tell. The second reason is, like I said, I'm good at it. My partner on the podcast, he's amazing at it. And so we have talent. But we work really hard at researching. And what we do is we have researchers now who help us. My First Million, basically, we, remember how I told you about that guy who's got that $30 million a year subscription business with 2 people? I like hear a story like that, and then he tells me all of his numbers, and I deconstruct how the business works, and then I tell Sean, I'm like, "Man, I met this guy. Here's how the business works." He goes, "That's amazing. It reminds me of this business," and he'll explain what that does. And so we're just nerding out and deconstructing different companies. And what we do is we research a ton. So we got this huge document. I spent an entire day researching a ton. A ton, and then we get on the pod and then we just say, do you want to talk about that or not? And we'll talk about it, and then that will lead to this, that will lead to this, and that will lead to this, and we jump around. And the reason that works is because I'm obsessed with this industry and business. I'm constantly filing away ideas. So I'm going to meet someone here, I guarantee it, who's going to tell me something so fascinating that like I'm never like, oh, I own this baby clothes business that sells baby clothes made out of bamboo. We do like $50 million in revenue. I'm like, huh? What? And like, I'm gonna store that.

There's a few of those here.

Yes. Yeah. Or something like that. Like, I know I'm— someone's gonna tell me something they do, something that's like so interesting, I have no idea how it works. Uh, and I'll file that away and then we're gonna do research and then he's gonna say something and then I'm gonna be like, oh, you know, that reminds me. And that's usually how the podcast works.

But we're gonna go to Q&A here in a second. But before we do that, you've been very transparent, at least on the podcast. About the downsides of the entire journey too, of the dark times. Yeah, it's easy to look at somebody who— I mean, I know you didn't have your big exit until you were 31, but, but it's, it's easy to look at someone in your position and, and think life must be easy. You've always had it easy. You cruise to this exit, must be nice. Now you're going to cruise till you're 40 until you have the next big thing. You seem to have magic on everything you touch. It would be easy to create that narrative. Would you tell us a little bit about the other side of the journey?

Yeah, I mean, it's fucking lonely a lot of times. Like, it's, yes, it's the way that it works in my experience is 90% of the time things suck and 10% of the times things are awesome. But that 10%, they're so awesome that it encourages me to keep going through that 90% of bullshit.

Can anyone relate to that? Yes.

So yeah, like, I'm all happy now.

You thought it was just you this whole time.

I'm in Austin. I'm like, the weather's nice. Of course I'm in a good mood now. You know, it's funny. I go to therapy, and I always go up Friday at 3:00. She's like, well, you seem pretty happy. I'm like, dog, it's 3:00 on a Friday. Of course I'm in a good mood. Let's move this shit to Monday. And so yeah, so you're catching me at a good time. No, I mean, look, it sucked. I quit drinking. I definitely had a drinking problem. Yeah, thank you. I definitely had a drinking problem because I was like, there was so many nights where I'd be laying on the ground talking to my wife. I'm like, this isn't gonna work. What did I do? Or most of the problems was this person at work is killing me. Do I have to fire them? Why am I failing them so badly? Do I have to encourage them? What the fuck do I do with this person? I cannot figure this out. Anybody relate to that? Yes. Most everything was people related, to be honest. Or when the pandemic hit, like a lot of people, business boomed, right? But the first 3 months, I was like, we're done. We're done. This is not going to work ever again. I spent 5 years or 4 years on this, and it's going to go to zero. I'm done. And most of the times, throughout a day, it was like, this fucking sucks. I want to quit. I'm out. I'm never doing this again. And then 1 hour later, I get a dopamine hit from— because I look at Google Analytics and be like, this is the answer. And in the back of my head, like, the thing, at least in my business, and I bet it is for most business, building to like $100 million in revenue, it's very doable in most industries. And intellectually, you can write down, you do this, you do this, you do this, you do this, and then you just wait like 10 years. So you just do that consistently, 8 hours a day, every single day for 10 years. It's gonna require a little bit of luck, that's for sure. But if you, like, you can have, like, a pretty good outcome if you do that for 10 or 15 years. The issue is, like, every day, the emotions of, your emotions and handling them. That is, it's a 100% emotional game for me. So I read all this self-help bullshit, which some of it helps. You know, the whole Naval happiness thing. Like, I read all that stuff. I meditate every morning. I exercise. I do all these vitamins. It's pretty much only to do one thing, to control my mood and make it so I can be calm and steady. Because I know that in the day it's gonna be like this, like all this stuff, like I should be really happy, I should be really sad. My goal is to be able to just be somewhere in between. And so I spend most all of my energy outside of like doing the actual work on making sure that I can keep my mood calm.

I think like, I think that's the work. That is the work. For most of us, we know more than we need to know.

Yeah, you know, you know plenty. You don't— yes, most people, you know plenty.

You know plenty. But also the irony of what you're saying is it was the emotional roller coaster that made you good at media in the first place.

It's, it's, yeah, you know, like your biggest strength is also your biggest weakness, right? Like I'm like, I'm very creative and I'm really good at creating creating content. It just so happens that that also makes me crazy in other aspects too.

You, you do see a lot of deal flow now that you're post-exit because of the podcast?

Yeah, and we have like a little mini fund, so I've probably invested $10 or $12 million so far, maybe 40 or 50 different startups.

And how do you identify either the entrepreneur or the business that is worthy of your capital?

So since selling to HubSpot, and even Prior to that, I run a media company. A media company, I don't run it anymore, but it's cool in that your audience is there, particularly on email. I kind of forgot to say that basically with our business, email, even now, is like the last channel that you can reasonably own. You don't own Facebook. Building a business on Facebook is like building a business in an office building and the rent gets jacked up by the landlord every 3 months. They can do whatever they want. I imagine— I don't sell anything on Amazon, but I imagine it's the same. If Amazon says, eh, we kind of feel like doing this, it changes. With email, it's really like the last thing you can own. So our big insight was like, look, if you're looking on your phone, it's a 4-inch white screen. Who cares if you click the mail app or Chrome? Like, why does it matter? And it just so happens that you can reach way more people with that mail app. And so that's how we did email. And I'm getting it back to your question. What was the question?

How do you identify the entrepreneurs or the businesses?

Oh, that's what I was saying. OK. And so the audience is there the whole time, but I got to go out and book these advertisers a lot of times. And that's a pain in the ass. You know, you got to go kill what you want to eat. So it's like, we had salespeople, and they had big quotas, and it was really stressful. Then we had Trends, and that was subscription, and that was a lot easier. And so I started learning about subscription businesses and everything like that. Then HubSpot bought us, and I started looking at their business. And I'm like, oh my god, enterprise software is like so boring but so lucrative if you can nail a couple things right early on. And it takes a really long time to nail those things, but if you can. And so I love investing in subscription revenue, particularly enterprise businesses. When we invest, we need things that can get really big. So I try to find things that can, from year 1 to year 2, and then 2 to 3, they need to be, I want them to grow 3x a year for those first 2 or 3 years. And if they can do that, then there's definitely potential to break out.

So you're basically piecing together what you've seen in your past experiences to be able to identify who's got what it takes to be able to match the criteria.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And if I talk to someone, you can kind of figure out if they have— I look for grit. So you can kind of figure out a little bit if they have grit. So like, tell me all the projects that you worked on. And if they have like projects that are jumping from thing to thing to thing, I'm like, oh no, not a chance. I'm out. But typically if they have one or two that they've stuck with for a long time, I like that. But I like the business. I want— if like a 3x trajectory for the first couple of years is really important because there's a high correlation between that and getting an exit that is meaningful. You know, I'm an investor. I own a very, very, very small piece. So that needs to grow. It needs to become big in order to make it worth it for me So I look for 3x.

Are you comfortable with a high failure rate if you're looking for that amount of growth?

Yeah, so the first 20 things I invested in, 2— one of them I turned a $15,000 check into $600,000. And another one I turned $20 grand into a 10x, so $200,000. So that's— what's that, $800,000 total? And that actually paid. Up until that point, I had only invested like $200,000 or $300,000 of my own money. And so those 2 out of the 20 paid for— and that's typically how it works.

So that gave you a total return of like 400%, even though the others ended up being nothing.

They'll— they can be something, but they're still active. They're still active. Got it. They could definitely be something. I want to turn it over to to the group now.

We don't have a mic runner, so just throw up your hand. We do have a mic runner. Ask and ye shall receive. Sam Prentice runs our fund. He just bought a microphone company. Hey, Travis. Good morning.

Can you get me a glass of water?

What's that?

Can you get us a glass of water? Hey, could we grab a couple waters, by the way?

We'll go right here.

And I'm an open book, so you can ask whatever. And if I don't feel like telling you the transparent answer, I'll just say, we don't reveal that.

Sam, thanks so much, man. This has been super cool. Um, this is on. You're good. So my question is, for The Hustle, it sounds like you really focused on creating these like viral content pieces that captured a lot of attention. But how did you think about taking that attention on the blog post and then converting that into an email subscriber?

Yeah, so what we did was basically I had this, and I actually tweeted this out. It might be hard to find, so I'll reshare today. But actually, every single day I had a spreadsheet, and the whole team would meet once a week. But the team was like just 3 of us for the first year. But basically I had a spreadsheet, and I said, here's how much visitors we had, and here's how many people gave us their email. And I would track that. And so early on, it was about 3%. So if you go to thehustle.co right now, it's just an email capture page. That's all it is. And then what I did was I was like, all right, everyone's going to come through a side door, meaning a blog post that they're going to see on Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, through a friend, whatever. And once they come to the side door, my goal is to optimize the website so they give me their email or they go to the home page. And so for us, it was like 3% of people. So the first month we got like— the first week we got like 10,000 users. So what does that mean? We must have had, what's that, like 500,000— or no, 1 million views. I forget. I don't do public math. But basically, we— I could just calculate, like, if I get a million people a month, 3% is 30,000. I can get those email subscribers. And then once I got those email subscribers, I would incentivize those people to share more, and we created an ambassador program. So I would send them a free sticker if they referred 4 people, and that kind of created that flywheel. So it was get them through that, go for blog posts, any blog post, to sign up with just a pop-up. And the pop-ups were all really funny. So I follow the principle of AIDA, attention, interest, desire. Action. I did that for, I see people writing, so I'll say it again. Attention, interest, desire, action. Just a very traditional sales technique. And so, my popups followed AIDA. And so there's this huge popup, and it said, oh shit, not another popup. And then it said, look, now that I got your attention, you've come to this blog post to read blank. And I would like put the title. But the reality is each day we sent out stuff just like this. Enter your email here. If you don't like the email after a week, call me, and I put my phone number, and I'll Venmo you $1. Like, I would do stuff like that. Because like, who the hell says that, right? That's so weird. And so I would get so many subscribers doing that, little things like that. And then throughout the years, we changed the techniques. You know, that's just one example of a tactic. The strategies remained the same of, sticking out, but that's like how I got the first bit.

Gotcha. That was gonna be my question, is like, did you offer a specific incentive topical to the post, or did you just say, hey, if you like this, check out our ebook?

Yeah, so like, if I looked at my analytics that morning, and a lot of people were coming from a subreddit called like Kindles, Kindle, so I knew what post they're on. I'd be like, hey, Reddit Kindle readers, And then I would say what I said before. Yeah, you could do that. We used WordPress. We would do that all the time. Or another tactic that worked really well is we used WordPress, and they have this thing called like an ad inserter. It's like a plugin called ad inserter. But I wouldn't make it look like an ad. I would just make it like, hey, you got to the bottom of this post. It just looked like the rest of the post. I worked my ass off to entertain you here. If you liked it, 'Enter your email here. It's the best way to help me, but I'm actually gonna be helping you because you're gonna be able to feel the same feeling that you just felt every single morning.' And like, I would write things like that, and I would insert those onto every single post, so it was always getting traffic. Or, so the posts were always getting traffic through search or whatever, and then they would always read that. And that just builds up. That just compounds.

All right, let's go here to the middle of the room.

Do you feel like the media experience that you've had over the past decade or so, do you take that a lot of the time into your one or two investments or the deal flow?

You can say, "All right, here's my expertise. Here's where we can create interest and desire and action with enterprise." So the question is, how does the media background impact the other businesses and investments that Sam is a part of?

Yeah, so my partner in my fund had a blog called Little Things. Has anyone ever heard of Little Things? So it was a viral website that had 200 million monthly uniques. And mine wasn't that big, but we had a lot. And what we're good at is using words, videos, audio to get people to go from knowing nothing about you to liking you. And that's what we're good at. And a lot of people are really good at coming up with cool products to to sell, and they're really bad at knowing this thing. And so whenever I invest in stuff, I think, all right, your product is interesting enough, but how are you going to distribute it? How are you going to get it into the hands of customers? What's the plan? And so I'm always in my head thinking distribution first. And the reason why is I just go through this logical thing of basically like, a good product with bad distribution fails. Not always, but a lot, right? So like, and then you have a bad product with good distribution definitely can win. Like, look at Heinz ketchup. Many people will say, well, Heinz ketchup sucks. This other ketchup that's made of this like organic stuff or is like from this small town, that's way better. It's like, well, they're not making any money. Heinz is. Why? Because they're fucking everywhere. So even though this lady has this wonderful ketchup, it's in no stores. It's going to fail. Now, if you can do good product with good distribution, that's magic. That's amazing. But I always think in my head, does this founder— do they have an idea on how this is actually going to get distributed, whether it's literally ketchup being distributed into a store, or do they have a— if they're a SaaS company and their product is $20,000 a year, is someone on their team a really good salesperson who can hire a sales team and run a sales team? Or are they a content marketing genius and they're going to— so I just invested in Hiten Shah's company. Hiten Shah is a content marketing pro when it comes to getting small businesses to come to his websites via SEO. And I was like, oh, well, dude, I'm in. I already know that you know how to get distribution. If you can have a half-good product, you're going to win. So I think about distribution constantly.

Let's go to DJ in the back.

Where are you from? St. Louis. What's up? I'm from South City, St. Louis, went to SLU High. How about you? Nice. What year did you graduate? I graduated in '08, so we missed each other.

I got 2 questions.

One is, what incentives did you have for your ambassador program? Put the thing there.

What incentives did you have for your ambassador program?

Like when you got— Yeah, yeah, yeah. At first, it's changed throughout the year. At first, we did a bunch of interesting things. Like, we would put like a t-shirt. Like, we'll fly you out there. The most, so we, it was like, you share it with 5 friends, you get one thing. 10, you get another thing. 100, you get another thing. And we knew that one email subscriber was worth roughly $10 to us. And so we did the math of like, all right, how many do we need in order for us to still be a profitable deal? And so, at first, we did all this stuff. The best thing that we did, we just had a really cool statement. Sticker, and we would design tons of stickers, and people would do everything for a sticker. We tried this one thing where we created a candle called Elon's Musk. That crushed it. But then, you know, that's like breaking rules, and so they told us we can't sell Elon's Musk anymore. But a really, really cool and funny sticker crushed it. Oh, and by the way, with the thing, with the ambassador program, The way it works is most everyone who wants to do it will get to that first level of 4, and very few people, only a couple, will get to that 1,000, but the ones who get to the 1,000 will almost like get you as many people as that one. And so we had a crazy good thing here, which is like, we're gonna buy you a Tesla or something like that, and those people would get like 30,000 email subscribers. Cool. And then the last question is, so you said your email rate was 45%. Unique open rate, much higher. 65% total open rate. What was like the biggest— that's a really high number. What was the biggest? It's like the highest I've heard of, yeah. Yeah. What, what, why? Yeah. So, we started sending once a week. Then we started sending twice a week. Then we started sending 3 days a week. And then we're like, fuck it. Let's just do 6 days a week. The more we send, the higher the open rate went up. Yeah. Keep in mind, so when we started, it was like 28. And I sent once a week. Then I was like, well, let's do Monday and Wednesday. And then it's like, well, let's do Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I was like, ah, let's just— so that was counterintuitive. And so we send 6 days a week. First of all, our product is daily news, so that's habit creating. But if you own— what's the most common niche here, fitness? We'll just say health. Health. With a lot of health stuff, you definitely can do just an email that's a roundup. Here's all the latest and greatest health-related, like, Here's the 10 bullet points of what happened in the health world today, or whatever. Like, you could totally do that. And the reason our open rate's really high is because it was something that you, it was a habit-forming thing that you needed every day. And by the way, if someone signs up to us, we called it gold, silver, bronze, and then we have copper, which I don't know if copper's less than any of those, but that's what we do. And we know that like a gold person will stay with us for like 3 years. and we know where those people are, and we know what type of content they like. We've studied this a lot. And so anyway, the open rate, the reason it works is a couple things. One, it's daily, and it provides information that someone relies on every day. So if you're gonna create a health thing, just put like, do literally the utility stuff of like what, like here's the health roundup that you need to know. The second thing, do cute stuff like, Writing from my couch with my cat Whiskers, who I told you about yesterday. He's finally over his flu. Let's get to the stuff. Like, just doing like little like cute updates like that. And then third, like you can add in like the weather. Just anything that gets you to rely on it and want to, and so we would do like, tomorrow I'm gonna be in New York to meet with one of our biggest customers. I'll let you know how it goes. That's a cliffhanger so I can get you to come back tomorrow. So, we got you the news that's gonna get you, and then I would add in all these other things. Second, use a dedicated IP address. So, Mailchimp has a shared IP address. It's not horrible, because Mailchimp is reputable and they kick off spammers, but you're ultimately sharing your IP address with a lot of people. When you get big enough, like 10,000, maybe 50,000 people, spend more money and get a dedicated IP address. Basically, if you don't know what that means, which I, I'm not a tech guy, but what it means is Gmail, Microsoft, and all these companies, they, they look at who the IP address is coming from, and if it's someone that has a history of spam, they send you to the spam box. If you have your own IP address and you have a really high reputation, we don't spam, you have to sign up They sign up in order to get our stuff. They know that we have a high open rate, so like, it's like this weird thing where you have like a relationship with them. That helps. The third thing is, so you be consistent, send it at the same time all the time, and don't miss. What else? So have a dedicated email. There's services that you can whitelist. So, what's it called? I forget exactly what it's called, but look up like, email whitelist services, and basically, it's called Return Path. Is it Return Path? Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Is it Return Path? Uh, they changed the name. Yeah, what did they change it to? Canva, they got bought by Canva. Yeah, like a few months ago. So it used to be called Return Path. We paid them $40,000 a year. It sounds like a scam when they explain what they do. It's not. But basically, they talk to the email service providers on your behalf, and they say, these guys followed all the rules. There's also a service called Litmus, and you send your email the day before, or right before you send it, through Litmus, and it'll say, here's everything that's going to trigger someone's inbox. Your photo doesn't have a tag. You've used the word free porn. Like sometimes we'll write about like Pornhub making something. Like they decided to make free porn. I don't know. And so like whenever we write those stories, we got to like make sure like, all right, we got to like make sure we use words that wouldn't be like a scam, you know what I mean? Or like if we're talking about money, we gotta make sure that we, and so we'll put it through Litmus. I think that's it. Oh, well obviously, you know, the first most important thing, fucking good content.

So get that. Now let's do one more. Come here. Hey, thanks so much, Sam. That was some really awesome stuff. I wanted to touch back on the, can you hear me now? Just keep going, Tomás. No worries. I want to touch back on distribution and how you think about, or how the actual process is, even if you create something that is, even if you create something that is very good, how does it actually get to those places, right? So you create that thing, but for somebody who's a little bit newer, how would it actually get to, you know, Men's Health or whatever it is so that those people actually hear it?

Well, I would never start with Men's Health. That's not what I meant. Thank you. But it's important. Yeah, it's OK. I'm going to make an example out of it. Thank you. The reason being is Men's Health editors— I'm in the media industry, and I know all these people who are writing. They get all their shit from Reddit or from Twitter. And so then I'm just going to go there first. And so what I mean is I like Reddit. Reddit's my— is my preferred place, but right now Facebook groups are probably the second best at the moment. And so what I do is, let's say that I— what's your business?

Home office accessories.

Home office accessories, that's great. There's a whole subreddit on that. And I will contribute there. I'll take cool pictures of myself with my new desk, and I'll be like, just got this thing, I think it's pretty cool, ask me any questions about how it works, or here's my review of this chair, or whatever. And then I would post 10 times good shit that does not promote anything that I'm a part of, or at least I'm not selling anything. And on the 11th post, I would say, I've been following here for a long time. I run one of these companies. I think Reddit's amazing. I'm actually doing a deal where sub— these people can buy something from us for a discount. Or you'll say, I've been reading this subreddit for a long time, and I actually noticed something that everyone here is doing wrong, and that one thing is very simple. I'm making this up. Your elbows are in a horrible place on your desk. I wrote a blog post that explains exactly why that's true and how you can fix it. And so if you do a bunch of posts organically and provide value, I don't, remember, I said about the bullshit thing, I don't bullshit. So I provide value a ton, then I'm gonna do my thing. And you could do that in a lot of Facebook groups as well. I would also, you could do it on Twitter as well, I imagine. And then after I post it all there, then I would probably email like the Men's Health, stuff like that. But I would think about, in my head I think, where's this gonna get popular first? And then I'm already putting in the pre-work to make it so I can post in those places and get traction.

And then leading them to your site from there with, you're like, hey, and I wrote about this here, et cetera?

Yeah, and then I would put, And by the way, you don't want to click on my site? That's fine. I just copy and pasted it here. You know, I just wrote the whole article here. I do that a ton. And then like, but if you do want to read it, the link's down here. It always gets tons of clicks.

Thank you. Sam Parr, thank you for being here. Anything?

Hey. Are we— is there— am I doing questions after this somewhere? No, this is it. Oh, OK. These are the questions right now. Well, I'll be hanging out. I know a lot of other people.

So one thing I want to ask is, is there anything that the group did not ask you that they should have?

How to hire writers. That's very hard. It's very hard. The answer is basically right now I just troll Twitter, and I troll LinkedIn, and I troll publications that I love, and I usually send someone an email, and I say, or DM, and be like, you wrote this article, I love it, and that's all I say. 3 weeks later, I follow up. It's like, hey, look, I've got this thing going. It's not nearly as prestigious as where you are now, but it's pretty exciting for this reason, this reason, this reason. I've been obsessed with you since this article that I mentioned. Let's talk. Worst case scenario, you've got a new friend in the industry. "Best case scenario, you're gonna join us and it's gonna change both of our lives. Are you interested?" And I usually, I'll do that constantly.

Pretty cool. One more time for Sam Parr, everybody.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.