Sam Parr talks to a college student who drove 35,000 new members to the FatFire subreddit with TikTok clips. The student wants to raise venture money immediately, but Sam tells him to skip funding for now, grow the audience bigger, and build products on top of it first.
We did this thing where we said we're gonna give 5 Gs, take our clips, download it, post it on TikTok, and get views. There's this kid who did it and multiple of his videos got like a million views. One video got so big that we drove 35,000 new members to the subreddit FatFire. I was like, reached out to this kid, I'm like, who are you? And he replies back with like Michael at umichigan.org. I'm like, wait dude, are you in college? And he calls me and I FaceTime with him and he's in his dorm room and he's really cocky, not in a bad way, but he's like, he's got chutzpah. He goes, man, I knew I was gonna do this. I wanted to prove to you guys that I could do it. I want you to pay me money to do this now, and I'm gonna do this for other people, and we're gonna change the media game, and I'm gonna raise money. And I was like, okay, hold on, dude, hear me out. You do not want to raise money for this. Here's what you should do. You are so talented at this that don't raise money for this. Get it big and start launching other stuff on top of it. And if you want to raise money, raise money for that stuff. Own that forever, and that's your piggy bank and your audience.
