Sam Parr and John are launching The Hustle, a media company funded with $500,000 raised from HustleCon, their first event that drew 600 people and made hundreds of thousands in revenue. They found attendees wanted authentic founder stories, not business tactics, so they're building a content company around narrative-driven stories updated weekly.
Yo, what's happening? So you're here because you want to see how we are about to spend half a million bucks over the next few months to launch our media company. Well, this is the video of how we're gonna do that, but just scroll down if you don't want to watch this and read the article. It has a lot of the same information. So last April, my co-founder John and I threw this conference called HustleCon. The idea was to get 600 people in the room and about 15 founders who could teach and explain how they start and grew a company even though they didn't know how to code at all. John and I had started a company in the past even though we don't know how to code, so we thought that this was kind of an interesting topic to address. Most conferences are actually super lame. They seem like one of those things where it's really forced, awkward networking, really bad coffee, and just a bad, bad, bad time. And the worst part is that a lot of these events cost thousands of dollars to go to, and no one actually really wants to be there. Everyone even leaves early. So HostCon actually went really well. We launched the website in late January, and 84 days later on April 24th, the event happened. In that time, we ended up selling about 600 tickets. Made hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, and had folks fly in from all over the world. To promote the event, leading up to it, we actually created content every single week. These were mostly infographics or articles, but they would dive really, really deep into how either we did something, like found our speakers, or how the founders who were speaking, how they accomplished whatever they were speaking about. Afterwards, we sent a survey to all the attendees to figure out what they loved, what they hated, just so we can kind of figure out how to make this better for next year. So the feedback was pretty good, but one thing that shocked us was that people said that they didn't come because they wanted to hear business tactics on starting and growing a company, but they actually came because they wanted to hear stories from these founders. That was pretty shocking because we had spent 12 weeks working on this big event on a very specific topic. It turns out people didn't even come because of that reason. So we set out just to create a big event, but we ended up making a full-fledged media company because of the content we created beforehand. It worked because most content floating around our Facebook page was a horrible mix of shitty clickbait listicles on BuzzFeed or Upworthy, or just completely shallow and meaningless articles that treat their readers like a bunch of morons. But with the content we created leading up to the conference, and even the talks themselves, we realized that we accidentally filled this huge void. We knew our readers were intelligent and wanted real, in-depth, relatable stories of people living epic lives. But they wanted the stories to have a lot more personality than just a lifeless Wall Street Journal article. As we build out this company, we're gonna be giving tons of updates, so you're gonna be able to see what's working and what isn't. You'll either be able to watch us go broke and starve, or if it does work, pulling a McDuck and swimming in pools of money. So here's what we're about to do. We've got about $500,000 in the bank from investors and from our profits from our last conference. We're gonna spend all of it over the course of a year to build out this content company and media startup. Here's how it's gonna work. We're gonna pick a theme a month, and then each week we're gonna dive deep on a very specific story within that theme. I guess it's kind of like a This American Life episode, but pulled over 4 weeks instead of 1 hour. So that's why we're launching The Hustle. If you're into this and you're kinda sick of reading all this crap content all over there that's floating around on your Facebook feed, Just enter your email in the box below, and if you really, really like us go ahead share this on your Facebook wall! Swimming through money pits? Like— ssscr— Pulling a McDuck and swimming through pits of money. Pools of money. Is it Mcduck? What's his name again? I can't remember... Scrooge McScrew, or— wait, what? That's not a whatever. I need a— wait, rich duck Disney. Scrooge McDuck. Yeah, OK.
