Sam Parr's Path to Millions, Ikigai, Value of a Dog, Being a Parent and More

The first conversation I had with you was about Sid. How important was Sid for you, and what would have life looked like if you didn't have Sid?

And I remember thinking, I've got so much potential. I was like, I can be the best at a lot of things. I, I know I have it in me to be great, but right now I'm a total loser.

What do you think made you successful? What is that one or two character traits or something that you did?

What do you think it is that made you You know, like Wall Street Journal has a sales letter that has sold like $2 billion worth of subscriptions. I found that out and I just copied it word for word and I go, oh, that's cool. This— the author is putting the hook here. They're putting a sales like line here. They're dragging me in with a story. That's great. And I did that with like hundreds of different letters.

If I want to be a copywriter, how do I be one? What are the step-by-step process of becoming a good copywriter?

Tell better stories. You think, well, this is like a hobby for a lot of people, so it's probably— they want it, but like they're not willing to spend like $30 grand a year on this, but they'll probably spend $10 a year. And then how many how many people are there and how long can I keep them on my list.

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Yeah, yeah, I, uh, I've done a handful of things. I've started a bunch of businesses. Not all of them have been successful. The ones you've named are the successful ones that people probably know. And I've angel invested in a whole bunch of companies, which I don't like doing, or I don't do anymore, rather, because I didn't like it. And yeah, I've done a bunch of weird things in business, but the things that you've named have been the most successful.

Why do you not like angel investing anymore?

It takes a really long time. You basically give someone money and you don't hear from them a lot of times. Sometimes you'll hear from them monthly, but it's just like a really passive thing that you don't have anything to do with. And I find that I'd rather put money in like an index fund and be able to see like what my returns are every month or whatever and like know that like it's like a steady return that I can sell at any point versus angel investing. I've got a couple of things that I've invested in that I think will give a 200 times return, which is good, but I have no idea until it actually happens, which might happen in 10 years. You know what I mean?

Yeah, no, I do. I, I've invested in, in a couple of companies as well as an angel, and the reason that I didn't like it is because of the lack of control. Uh, I don't know, it's not like I want control or I want to contribute anything, but yeah, it's just I feel like It's not fun. It's just not fun.

Yeah, I found it unenjoyable, which actually is a good sign. Like, investing should be, you know, unless it's your full-time job investing. Like, I invest all my money basically into VTI. It's a Vanguard index fund, whatever. And so I know your folks are in Asia. So Vanguard, that's just an index fund, whatever. It's the most popular index fund in America. And that's like the most boring investing there should be. And so I like boring and low risk as opposed to boring and high risk, I guess. If I'm going to take the risk, I want to be in control.

Sam, okay. So have you ever thought about putting your money in a Bangladeshi bank or an Indian bank where they have higher interest rates over there compared to Ireland or States? Have you ever thought about that?

I've not thought about that one time ever because I don't know anything about that.

In Bangladesh, if you put your money, if you just park your money in a bank and do a fixed deposit, or the government have their own scheme as well, you get a 9 to 10% annualized interest rate, which is great.

So here's why I don't do that. One, you are the first, that's the first time anyone has ever like brought that idea.

You shouldn't, you shouldn't do that, by the way. You shouldn't. It's not safe.

I never thought about it. And And, and I, what do we get in America? 8%, 7%, you know, the trailing 50 years. I'm okay losing a few points, but doing something that I'm more familiar with.

In America, you're so far from S&P, for example, it's still a risk. But in Bangladesh or in India, when you do it with a bank, it's a guaranteed thing. You're gonna get 8%. It's not gonna fluctuate. It's a fixed thing that you agree on day one. And that's what happens for the rest of the year.

Well, I just, I stick to what I know.

Yeah, no, good for you. So Sam, tell me, how do you come up? So you have had a lot of failed businesses and a bunch of successful ones as well. How do you come up with business ideas?

Have you heard of Ikigai? It's like this Japanese, Japanese. Yeah, it's like a, it's like a Venn diagram. And in the Venn diagram, there's what the world wants. There's what the world is willing to pay for. There's what I'm good at. And then there's what I am skilled at. And I work really hard to find things right in the middle, right in that circle. And I read a ton of books. I read— I don't, I don't purposely read a lot. I just read like when I find something I enjoy, and I find that a lot, about one book a week. And I'm trying to like expand a little bit of my circle, my, my skill circle, so I can kind of go into other things. But I basically just use that concept of Ikigai to like find new ideas. And I research like crazy. I talk to people in the space. I cold email people a ton. I get bankers on the phone who have bought and sold businesses in the spaces that I'm looking at. And it's a pretty intensive research process.

So if I want to know what the world wants, what do I do? Do I read a lot? Do I call bankers? Do I— when you say you research a lot, what does that look like? Just go to Google and search?

No, it's a little bit like, you know, it's a little bit like art. So like, you know, if you're writing a great song, you can think of a song title or maybe you'll find like a really cool guitar riff or maybe you'll think of like one cool lyric and you can, and you write this and then you start adding stuff to the song around those things. So typically like I'll go to a website and I'll use SimilarWeb and I'll see, oh, well, this website I never heard of has a ton of traffic. Or maybe I'll just see on amongst my friends, people are talking about one thing. Or maybe I'll, or maybe I'll like, I'll find one piece of data that catches my attention and that kind of kicks off the process. And once I see that data, I'll go to Glassdoor and I'll look at what the reviews are from employees at the company. And they'll say things like, it's growing so fast. Or they'll say, this industry stinks, there's no money in it. And then I'll go to I'll look at reviews on Trustpilot of like the company's product to see if there's any weaknesses or strengths. What are commonalities of things that people are complaining? If they're publicly traded, I'll go to, I'll go to the SEC website and I'll read all their annual reports. Specifically, I'll read their annual reports from when they first went public so I could see their trailing revenue before they went public. Then I'll use newspapers.com, which is a website that I pay $10 a month for, and I'll go and read old, old newspaper articles about the incumbents, like before there was even the internet. So like if it's, uh, some company that's been public for 40 years, I'll read about the founder in some local newspaper when he was 28 years old or something, just starting. And so I use like 30 different resources just to like get a full picture of the industry from beginning to the end. And I do basically a SWOT analysis— strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And I just read tons and tons of articles about it. I'll email the founders of the companies in the face. I have a good excuse where I have a podcast. So I'll say, hey, do you want to come on the podcast? And I'll ask them questions publicly. But sometimes before I had a podcast, I would just act like I— well, I didn't act, I was. I was just like some young guy who didn't know a lot, but I'm really earnest and I care and I'm being respectful. And a lot of times if I email them enough, they'll give me an opportunity just to talk to them for 15 minutes. I'll DM people on Twitter constantly and just get to know them and build these relationships where I'm asking people tons and tons of questions. And then After I ask them questions, I'll send them a document with my notes from their interview, as well as notes from other people's interviews. And then they'll see, oh, this person takes this seriously. I'll introduce them to 5 other people. And you know what I mean? Like, I just do like this, this, like, uh, this web of, of different sources in order to accumulate like a full, at least as good as I can, a full picture of, of an industry. And then I try to reverse engineer and break down the company and figure out exactly how it makes money.

Have you done the same thing when, uh, when you started Hampton, for example?

What—

yeah, what was the research process for Hampton look like? And yeah, what was that ikigai process?

I did that research publicly. So if you go to YouTube and you go and you type in the word my first million, you can see I interviewed the guy who started Tiger 21. That's a paid community for, uh, high net worth people. I interviewed the founder of this company called Chief, which is like Hampton, but for female executives. And I talked to them and then I saw that Vistage was acquired and I called people who worked there and then I found bankers in the space who bought and sold communities. And I went and had lunch with them and I was like, basically I called these bankers and I was like, hey, look, what I'm about to say sounds really cocky and arrogant and I don't want it to come off that way. But, you know, I have a reputation as a media person, so I've got a pretty big audience. I'm going to build a company in this space. I have a feeling that if I do it, you're going to hear about it eventually. And maybe there's a time when we work together where you're going to buy my company or I'm going to buy a company that you're selling or something's going to happen. And so maybe it'll be worth your time if you get on the phone now with me and we can build a relationship now. And I did that a bunch of times to a variety of people in the space.

Was it also effective before you had your first success? Let's say before Hustle, or is it easier now?

Yeah, it's easier now because people take me seriously. But I did this exact same thing. And so the guy Joe, who's my business partner now, he used to own a media company that was doing $100 million in revenue. And I cold emailed him and I said, I've started this thing called The Hustle. I have 100,000 subscribers, so I'm still early. But I've executed well. You could, you could Google the website and see what we're about. Would you take a few minutes of your day? Just let me call you and pepper you with questions. And we became best friends that way. And I did that with the founder of Business Insider. And this was even before The Hustle launched. And I said, this is who I am. This is what I've done in the past. I was 24 and he gave me the time of day because I emailed him 30 times. But yeah, I did it, I did it with the hustle as well. And I also watched loads and loads of interviews with other people in the space. And then I called the people who interviewed them and I got their intel and then I begged them to introduce me to the person they interviewed. So yeah, I did this a lot.

Nice. How— the reason that I ask that is because a lot of people, I'm sure they tell you the same thing. A lot of people tell me that I built my agency in 2018 when I knew no one in in Ireland based on cold email. So the first 18 clients, 17, 18 clients came from cold email and cold email only. I knew no one. I knew one person in Ireland who ran a web design firm, and then ours was an SEO agency on top of that. A lot of people now tell me that cold email or cold outreach on LinkedIn, cold anything doesn't work. It seems like it does, but at the same time, I still feel like If I didn't have 50,000 followers on Instagram, would you have replied to my text? Or if I wasn't verified on Instagram, would you have? And a part of me says probably not because I don't—

Well, the answer is no, I wouldn't have. But you only need one or two of me's or whatever you think I am. You only need whoever you think I represent. You only need one or two people like me to talk to and then they'll be like, oh, this person seems like a serious person. And then they could help you. Or also like, look, like there's two advantages that people have. The first one is if you're a young person and you like show that you're earnest and you try really hard, you know, it's kind of like if you see a guy on the side of the road with a broken down car and he's holding like, and he needs help, you're probably not gonna stop him. But if you see someone on the side of the road and they're pushing their car, you're more likely to like get out and help them pull it. Push. And so I always had that mentality where I'm, where when I was young and like I had no reputation, I was like, I'm gonna make sure these people see me like making progress and they're gonna be more willing to help me. And so if you're listening to this and you're young, you have that advantage where you say like, look, I would email someone and be like, I'm gonna launch this. All right, here's my progress so far. And then I would email a month later. All right, I still wanna talk to you. I know you're not giving me the time of day. Here's the progress I've made thus far since we last spoke. Okay, here's another progress update. And then after the 8th email, they're like, All right, fine, man. You're, you're clearly like taking this seriously. I'll help you. I'll call you, whatever. And the second advantage that people has is if they do have a reputation or some audience, and that's what you had, that's what I have now. But if you are in the third category, if you don't have any of those things, you could still brute force your way because you basically only need 3 or 4 people to take you seriously. And so if you email 50 or 100 people, you'll get someone.

Uh, okay, let's change topic a little. I know you, you're a fan of copywriting and you have been blogging for a long time now. I, I read your blog from time to time. I read that last— I'm not sure if I wrote anything after that. I— the last one I read was in December 2023, so I'm not sure if you updated anything after that. How has blogging helped you in your businesses, either to launch or to scale?

Well, blogging was my business And so I have a personal blog called theantimba.com. I barely even share it. It's just, that's just like a diary. And I just, I don't give two shits if anyone ever reads it. It's just fun for me to do it. But when I originally started, I started a, when I started my business career, I started a hot dog stand. I don't know if they eat hot dogs in Ireland or in Bangladesh, but it's a very American food. And, um, I got really good at selling meat to people on the street, but I was like, this is really hard. It's like 100 degrees. I don't know what that is in Celsius, but probably like 35 degrees Celsius. Just like stupid hot. And, um, I, uh, I was like, I want to figure out a way how to sell stuff to like an infinite amount of people. And I learned about this thing called copywriting where I could write text on a page and that could like go, it could be read by like millions of people and I don't have to like do it a million times. And so once I learned how to do that, I realized, oh my God, the written word is so powerful. And then I got really into blogging and I started this conference called HustleCon and HustleCon. I made like $60 grand in, in 60 days on it doing this conference. And then I made, I think, $200 grand like 6 months later off this conference. And the way that I made the conference popular was through blogging. And I was like, conferences suck because if it rains that day, I'm screwed. Like that's a bad business. But I wonder if I could turn the blog into its own business. And then I realized that blogs are actually a little bit challenging, but email newsletters are way easier because someone will give you their email one time and you can talk to them many times. And so I built the, the, the, my whole business was, I mean, email the way that I did an email, it was basically a blog, but in a, in someone's inbox. And so my whole business was blogging in a sense. Like to this day, I would say it's blogging. It's been like the greatest thing on earth. Now I tweet and I do podcasting stuff, but that's the same thing. It's like all based on the written word. It's like changed my life.

Do you think blogging is still— well, I'll tell you why I'm asking this question after a while, but do you think blogging is still powerful in 2024? Because a lot of the people now consume videos. And even, even audio alone doesn't seem to cut it anymore. I, I'm not sure if MFM was an audio-only podcast, but you were big on it.

It was audio only. Yeah. And then in fact, yeah, but our audio is still way bigger.

Yeah, I used to listen to— I, I think I still listen to the audio version more compared to the video one.

Audio is still like— we get, uh, millions of listeners on audio and we get like a million in video.

That's fair. The video is comparatively newer, so that's fine. The reason that I ask that is because do you think blogging is still powerful, the written form of content? Should people still start blogs?

100%, but you got to go back to the ikigai thing, which is like what you're good at. So for example, I don't love video. Like I don't personally enjoy doing it. I don't like looking at a camera and like talking, but some people do. And some people, not only do they love it, they're really talented at it. I don't think that I'm particularly talented at it, nor do I love it. But what I am talented at and what I do like is writing, the written word. Now blogging is sort of a, can be like a nebulous term, sort of like podcasting. So like, you know, you could be like, oh, you're a podcaster, but you, it's only on YouTube. And so that's slightly different than an audio podcast, but we all call it a podcast. Same with blogging. So when I say blogging, I mostly mean the written word. And I think it could be on a blog, which is like, you know, samparr.com/blog, or it could be on Twitter where it's all native on Twitter. But when I say blogging, it's the written word. And it's, yeah, it's incredibly powerful, man. Like, do you realize that, like, do you know WordPress? You know, like WordPress powers 40% of the internet, of WordPress powers 40% of all websites in the world. I think it's something crazy like that. It's either 40% of all websites in the world or 40% of all traffic in the world goes to a WordPress site. So is blogging still powerful in the traditional sense? 100%. And the people who say that it isn't, they just don't know what they're talking about. Now, YouTube, I think, is probably equally as powerful, but blogging is 100% still a viable strategy. Although I would say that audio perhaps is even more powerful than all three of those.

Why is that?

Because when you listen to someone on a podcast, typically someone's listening pattern when they find some podcast they like is they'll spend 30 to 60 minutes, sometimes once, sometimes multiple times a week, with headphones in their ear, and they're not usually doing anything else. And they're— they— you feel like you build a relationship with that person. There's so many podcasters— you said this to me when you— when we started talking, and I say to other people— there's so many podcasters who I feel like I know even though I've never talk to them. And there's been times on our podcast where we'll mention something in minute number 55, and we're not promoting anything, we'll just mention a cool book or something that we read, and I'll see that the next day it goes way up the charts. Or we've mentioned like a software product that we enjoy, and we'll mention it in minute 40, and they'll be like, we made $1 million yesterday because you guys mentioned us. And so like, I've seen how powerful it can be, uh, audio, how, how powerful audio can be.

I'll tell you a quick story about blogging. So my career, so I started as a freelance writer back in 2010 when I was in Bangladesh. I was in school and I used to get paid. It was, so it is Upwork now. It was oDesk back then and then oDesk and another platform merged into Upwork and then it became a public company. So yeah, I was paid $1 for every 500 words I wrote back in 2010. And, uh, and that, that, that type of blogging is the fucking worst though.

Like, it's the worst.

I'll tell you what happened next. So I then moved to SEO, and then I was like, what's the point of writing for other people? Let me create my own blogs. So then I started creating my own blogs on topics that I had no idea. It's the farthest thing from ikigai. I had no idea about any of these topics. I just started blogs on these topics because, because it had SEO search volume. And when I did the research, they were easier to rank compared to other blogs. I'll give you an example as well. So in 2016, this is how I started my YouTube channel actually. So I did a public case study type thing where I promised the world that I'll build a blog, rank it on Google, and then make money from it and then sell it. And I did that somewhat publicly and then also with a course. And I built this blog called honestgolfers.com. Till today, I have never touched a golf— I don't even know what they call it, golf bat maybe. So I built this blog, it ranked well, it started making $500 to $700 a month. And then I sold it for $15,000-ish when I was in Ireland. So in 2016, '17, I think I sold it. That's still live. And it gets a lot of traffic. I wrote about the best golf balls, the best golf bats, the best this, best that. People— so the blog, after the blog became popular, the golf companies started sending me shit because I was a popular golf blog. And I had no idea about any of these products, so I started selling those on like an eBay equivalent in Ireland. It's called Dundee. So I started selling those in Dundee, and then I became a big seller there selling golf shit. But I still had no interest about golf. The reason that I asked if blogging is still alive, if people should start blogging, is because I don't think that strategy works anymore in 2024.

Yeah, or at least it's really hard. The way that you— so when you— blogging gets even more intricate. So you basically think like, all right, so you want to blog, cool. How are you going to get traffic? Are you going to get traffic through search, through social, through what, you know, a handful of other categories? And the category that you choose to get traffic from somewhat dictates how you create your content. And so if you're, if your game plan is just to become like an SEO farm a little bit and you aren't passionate about it and you're not building a brand that people are willing to type in your website into the URL bar, I think it's going to be really, really, really hard to succeed in that way. If you're a blog where, like, for example, If you were— if a passionate golfer who truly knew what the hell he was talking about started a golf blog, he'll— they'll crush it. But if like the younger version of you tries to do it, it's going to be incredibly challenging because it's a lot more complicated, or rather a lot more competitive now. But if you are like— there's always room in the market for different. And what you did wasn't that different, but it just so happened that you did it at a good time when there probably wasn't that much competition. But when there's, but when you truly care about something, you will go to someone's blog because you can like tell that they know what the hell they're talking about. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

You have to have like real authority, I think.

Yeah. And Google has changed a lot. And with, I think Google now published, so I'm big in the SEO space. Google, I think this last year alone, 2023, they have published 4 major updates and a few minor ones, and a lot of them were related to authority. So they had that EAT thing— expertise, authority, and trust. If you didn't have— if you don't have any of those and you're starting a blog now, chances are very low that Google will rank you. You can say—

and by the way, like, my— so my, my old company was called The Hustle. It's thehustle.co. We have— I don't know, you know, I sold it 2 years ago, so I don't know the numbers, but I think it's something like 3.5 million email subscribers who open the email every— or, uh, every day of the week. And I believe you probably have HARefs or something. If you type in thehustle.co on one of those like search, you know, analyzer websites, we have a shit ton of backlinks and we have a really valuable domain name. And do you know how much effort we put into that? Zero. We put absolutely none. We just created cool shit that we love and we became experts on it. And now, and then we started ranking. And so we basically put zero effort into it, uh, at least into that, uh, in into like ranking and it worked really well. I mean, I don't know, can you, you'll have to look at our domain name and tell me, but we have a lot of backlinks.

Yeah, no, you do. In 2023, a unique thing started happening in the SEO industry. I think it's still happening a lot less though compared to when it started. News websites, generally websites that have a lot of authority, where selling links, articles, like you can pay entrepreneur.com, for example, or forbes.com to publish an article about you. That has been going on for years now, 4 or 5 years.

I hate that.

Yeah, but what started happening last year is a lot of the smaller news companies, let's say in India or in Asia or even in Europe, they started realizing that it is a lot easier for them to rank for keywords compared to a random blog. And, uh, what the SEO agencies started doing, and even individual bloggers started doing, they started paying these websites. So let's say indiatoday.com or one of these websites. You go to one of these websites, you pay them $300 to $400, and you publish an article about the 5 best VPNs that anyone should use. Then you put your affiliate links on those, and they rank pretty much within like the next week because they have high authority. Yeah, internet is ruined.

Yeah. And I hate that stuff. I hate that. That's a shortcut that I'm not on board with those things. I also think like, I think it ruins your brand as well.

SEOs are probably the most hated type of marketers in the digital marketing world.

Yeah. I'm not a fan.

If I want to be a copywriter, you have a copywriting course as well. If I wanna be a copywriter, how do I be one? What are the step-by-step process? Process of becoming a good copywriter?

So I don't like, in terms of copywriting, I would say I'm like a 7 out of 10, maybe a 6 out of 10. There's, I have a lot of friends that are 9s and 9s and 10s out of 10. And so I'm like a very self-taught person where I would say I'm adequate and I can get the job done, but I'm not the best. And the way that I learned was this thing through copywork, which is basically like if you wanna learn how to play a the piano, you don't like, you're not, you don't just sit at a piano and they're like, all right, write a song. Instead, you learn how to play Happy Birthday, or you learn how to play like a really simple, like a nursery rhyme, like a children's song or something that's like really easy to remember. And then eventually you scale up and you go and you learn how to play your favorite band. And then you learn how to play your second favorite band songs. And then after doing that for a couple years, you're like, I like this. I noticed these trends and patterns. I could feel the texture of the, of the different stuff, and I noticed that like these chord structures, they typically sound good together. I love this jazz bit. I love this thing from this rock song. I like this pop song thing. I'm going to combine these and I'm going to create my own style. And I do the exact same thing for writing. It's called copywork. So the way that I learned was I found American classic books that I thought had beautiful language and were really good at storytelling. And I literally sat down for a couple hours per day and I hand wrote it with a pen and paper and I just copied it word for word. And then I found the best sales letters out there that ever existed. You know, like Wall Street Journal has a sales letter that has sold like $2 billion worth of subscriptions. I found that out and I just copied it word for word and I go, oh, that's cool. The author is putting the hook here. They're putting a sales like line here. They're dragging me in with a story. That's great. And I did that with like hundreds of different letters. And this technique is in America. This is how we used to teach writing for years and years. And then it changed and we no longer do it. But in my opinion, copywork is the best way to learn how to write. So you find, let's say you want to learn how to write funny. You can even go and find like a movie script, or you can find a funny book or a funny article and you literally write it word for word. And you do that a ton of times and you start seeing the patterns and you start feeling it. And you could really, basically copy exactly how someone else did it. And you start being influenced by them. And then you'd be influenced by these 5 other people. Then eventually you have your own character. And that's the best way I think to write or to learn how to write.

Hmm. How important is it to write it on like a physical pen and paper?

So I believe, so I didn't know. So I always felt pen and paper was significantly better and I never knew why. And then someone shared this study with me where they actually studied it. And they said that like actually making the movement with your hands, had better results when they tried it in two different trials. They had one type and one not type. And so I guess there is some research behind it. I never knew about that, but I always felt it was a lot better.

Hmm. What? So let's say I'm a good copywriter or I'm a good video editor, I'm a good ex, whatever it is.

By the way, you could do this for video editing too. Like, I remember years ago I got really into like making like hip-hop music and I was all— I was always curious about like the samples, like, you know, like in Kanye West, you'll hear like samples from like old music and you like put, and I'm like, shit, how do you do that? And I, I would watch tutorials online and I would be like, all right, here's how Kanye West did it for this song. And I would just like copy that. And I'm like, oh shit, you couldn't like take this little part from this song and that's how he did it. Oh cool. I can do that too now. And I would do that. So you can do this with music. You can do this with video editing. You can definitely do it with coding. You can do it with so many different skill sets. Sorry, I interrupted you.

No, they're fine. Uh, so yeah, the— what I was asking is, let's say I'm a good X, whatever that skill is for, for someone. I'm a good copywriter, I'm a good video editor, I'm a good web developer, and so on. How do I find clients? Uh, what, what do you think? So if you were a video editor and you needed clients and you didn't have any connection, what would you— what would be the best way to find clients?

Every video editor that I have found that has done stuff for me, they usually make a video or like they'll just take a video or clip that I've made and they'll re-edit it and they'll send it to me and they'll be like, here's what I could do for you on a regular basis. And I've gotten good work for that. And I get, I get DM'd. I mean, I think you're more popular on social media than I am, but I get DM'd probably 5 times a day of like someone being like, I make video clips, can I do them for you? And I ignore all of them. But every once in a while someone will say, hey, your video clip that you made, it sucked. I redid it for you. Here it is. And that's how I've hired all the people who have hired.

So, uh, if I wanted to get new clients, uh, let's say for your favorite, uh, skill, SEO, uh, it's not something that you can just do and show people in, in a month. Maybe you can do an audit. Do you think that'll be the— that'll be a good way, just doing an audit or something tangible that they can fix immediately? And show them that?

Well, yeah, for sure. And then the second best way, yeah, like you do like a report and be like, by the way, your website, you screwed up all these parts. If you made these changes, I bet you'd get results. My agency can do it for you. But another way is to become a thought leader. So at least in America, Twitter is where a lot of business owners and a lot of tech and internet people are right now. If you just tweet out tons of like interesting things and teach people how to do it on, how how to do it on their own, a bunch of them eventually, if you do it for long enough and you tweet well, will come to you and be like, hey, just do this for me. You seem like you know what you're talking about.

Cool. Let's talk about your— I think you don't like talking about newsletters and I probably get it why you probably don't like talking about newsletters. I'll still ask if you can give us a quick, maybe 2-3 minute step-by-step breakdown of If I wanted to start a newsletter business, how would I do it?

Yeah, the reason I don't love talking about it is because I've like explained how to do it and very few people do. And there's been a bunch of people who— there's been a handful of people though who have done it and they've sold their companies for millions of dollars. And so people always ask, if you had to start from scratch, what would you do? I'm like, dude, I already explained how I did this whole thing. I would have done it the exact same way and I would have made like even more money. So with the newsletter, times have definitely changed from when we started and it's a lot more challenging, but all the tactics basically still work. When we started the newsletter, people laughed at me. They were like, there's no, no way this is going to be a big business. At most, you're going to make $1 million a year. And I was like, no, this can make like $100 to $200 million a year. Here's the math. And I sold my company early. But some of my— so I never got there, but I got to many tens of millions in sales and other people in the space who were my competitors who didn't sell, who I'm friends with now, they are doing $100 million a year. So I was right about the math, but I sold early. But the way that I would start is I would kind of remember the phrase niches make riches. And so the best way to do it is to go after a particular type of niche. In particular, like there's like a math equation. So the math equation is for newsletters, it's CPM. So it would be the amount that you can charge per 1,000. This is if you're gonna make money via advertising. So it's CPM. So it's basically how many, how much can you charge per 1,000 email sends? Meaning if you send to 100,000 people, so that's 100 CPM. If you could charge, if you're writing to like mothers, that CPM might be like $5 because let's say they buy diapers a bunch, but diapers are pretty cheap. But let's say that you're writing to people who are CEOs of airline companies and you're writing about like the airline industry. Well, a CEO of an airline would probably like, when they make purchases, it's like tens of millions of dollars, right? When they're buying airplane parts. So like the CPM for that would be like $5,000 or something like that. And then the other, so you have CPM and then the other thing is total market size. So like how many people would subscribe? Well, there's like in America, there's like probably 100 million moms. So that's pretty big, but your CPM's low. There's probably not that many airline CEOs or people who make buying decisions. And you do the math. You're like, what's, what's more valuable? Like this, you know, 5,000 people in the airline industry or 1 million moms? And you just do the math as to which one is bigger. And then of course you have to figure out what you're talented at and like what you're skilled at. And then the other part is how many times are you going to send? So let's say that you're doing a day, let's say you have a newsletter where it's, you're gonna write like an original story. That's really fucking hard to do every day. But you know what's a lot easier is news. News is way easier and people need news every single day. And the reason why that's important is you look at how many people will potentially subscribe, what's your CPM, and how often can you send an email to them? And you have to figure out things that optimize to create the largest number based off of that. If you're doing it on subscription, so at The Hustle, we owned a newsletter that was paid and we had a newsletter that was free. Our paid newsletter, when we sold it, was doing many millions of dollars a year with like 3 or 4 employees. And we, and for that newsletter, we made a lot of mistakes. We charged way too little, but we charged $300 for it. And so if you wanna do a paid newsletter, you have to figure out how valuable is the information that I'm providing? Like what, what's the potential outcome for someone for getting this information? If it's like how to get a job that pays $150,000 a year, if that's your paid newsletter, then you know that like your value, your value to them is 150 grand a year. If your newsletter is like how to tell better stories, you think, well, this is like a hobby for a lot of people, so it's probably, they want it, but like they're not willing to spend like, you know, $30 grand a year on this, but they'll probably spend $10 a year. And then how many people are there and how long can I keep them on my list? And so it's all just a math equation, to be honest, of how big the audience is. And then once you select which audience you like, how much you can charge them or how much you can charge for a CPM from an advertiser and how often you can send them an email, the next step is you have to figure out where do these people live currently? Where on the internet are they? Because I need to siphon them off from the location that they are into my location. For me, it was Reddit. We, the hustle was business and tech news. So it was like the Wall Street Journal, but for like a 28-year-old and it had a tech slant. And so for us, I was like, I think they're on Reddit and I think they're on Hacker News. So I'm gonna blog and create content for specifically that audience. I'm gonna try and get millions of them to come to my website and when the millions of them are on my website, I'm gonna have a popup and email forms that grab their attention and let them know that The Hustle is a daily newsletter and I'm just blogging to grab their attention. And then doing that, I got to like 500,000 subscribers in 2 years. And so for other people, maybe their audience is on Facebook, maybe their audience are in Facebook groups, maybe their audience is on Instagram. And so the name of the game is how do I figure out where that audience is and what content can I create that gets them to come to my platform so I can collect their email and then send them and get them on my list. And yeah, I mean, it sounds simple and it's straightforward. It's quite hard, but it's simple.

Yeah. Do you think still that's the best way though? If people have the opportunity or the option, should they go for paid ads compared to the organic grind that you just explained?

My opinion is you should always start organic, and once you've proven, once you've proven that your content is awesome and that people want to stay and subscribe to you for a while and that they love your brand, I like to use paid ads. So we use paid ads. We are— we spent tens of millions of dollars on paid ads. I like to use paid ads once I know it already works, and I'm going to use it as fuel to the fire. But a lot of people start with ads too early and it's like, dude, you don't even have a fire yet. You're just like wasting your fuel. Wait until you've— like you're just doing a shortcut that's actually going to cost you in the end because you're putting— you're paying dollars to advertise and to get a customer. It's sort of that doesn't really want your content. And it's sort of like, you know, like having a leaky ship and you're constantly bailing out water. It's like, make sure your ship works, then put more fuel on it. You know what I mean? And so I think that like if I had to put a number on it, I would say get to 10,000 or 20,000 subscribers and then do paid marketing. The reality is, is that those like hard— me saying just a number isn't exactly the reality. The reality is you kind of got to feel it. You got to like, are people— do people love your shit? Do they reply to you and say, I love this? If you tell them that you're going to be at a specific location, will they actually get out of their home and come and see you? Like there's a bunch of ways to test, like, do people actually love this? And once you know, all right, my content is good, my product is good, and I know exactly who the type of person is that I should get to subscribe to this, then do paid marketing.

And what's the other side of the equation? Like how easy or difficult is it to get a sponsor for your newsletter?

So, uh, for me personally, it was hard because I'm not a natural like enterprise salesperson. So at The Hustle, we were selling deals for 6 and 7 figures. Yeah. And you need to make sure that your advertising gets results. Like, so when you're building a newsletter that's advertising-based, you've got 2 customers, your advertiser and your reader. The reader's more important, but the advertiser is also very important. And so for me, I think that when we were at 75,000 subscribers, I personally got us to maybe $35,000 or $40,000 a month in advertising sales. And then I hired someone who knew what they were doing, who had previously sold big deals and knew the advertising game. And this person was particularly polished and things like that. And then they went and got bigger deals. And then we hired more people to have a quota that had a quota and they went and got more deals. And so hiring salespeople was amazing. Now, when we started, this didn't exist, but now there's all types of platforms like ConvertKit and Beehive and all these other agencies agencies that will monetize your newsletter for you. In my opinion, if you're just going to do this as a project or you don't want your company to be that large, you should stick with one of those things. If you want to build a really big business that can make tens of millions a year, you more than likely need a salesperson, and each salesperson will carry a quota of $500,000 all the way up to $2 million. And you just say, all right, uh, we have enough inventory, like we're scaling our inventory, AKA we're scaling how many times we send the email, or we're scaling, um, the amount of users that have subscribed. Now I need a quota-carrying salesperson of 800,000 and I'm gonna go and hire 15 of 'em and that will hopefully get us to, you know, whatever that is, 12 million in revenue. So it's all like math, do you know what I mean?

So what do these salesperson, or for example, when you did $35K to $40K a month, what did you do? Is it the same process of cold emailing, cold calling and asking if they wanna advertise on your newsletter?

If you look on Twitter, you'll see the first cold email that I sent. Like if you look, the Sam Parr and then like Wealthfront, because my first client was Wealthfront. And so what I did was like I tweeted out the exact email, or maybe I didn't even say it was Wealthfront, but it was Wealthfront. So you'll have to search on my Twitter feed. But I basically emailed this guy named Chris. I found him on LinkedIn and I go, Chris, what's going on? My thing is called The Hustle. I've got 75,000 subscribers. The truth is I haven't had a lot of advertisers because I've not tried. Would you like to be my first advertiser? I'll make a hell of a deal for you. You just name what you think is a fair price. I'll accept that price no matter what. And if you get results, you're gonna come and advertise with me again, and I'm gonna change the price to a more fair thing because I know you're gonna lowball me, but that's fine. Is this something that you'd be interested in? And they were. And then once I had that advertiser, I leveraged that company and I went to other companies. I go, hey, we just got this client, you know, we charge this much, which is below market rate. But again, we're new, come on in and get in early. And a really good marketer just wants results. And a really good marketer knows that a good platform or a good newsletter or any advertising platform The best results are gotten early because soon, if it works, the company, the newsletter is going to professionalize it and start charging market rates and they're going to try and upsell you constantly. And so if you find these good marketers, they'll know this is an opportunity I can take advantage of. And as a new newsletter with no ad revenue, you should say, yeah, take advantage of me, man. This is going to be a win-win because you're going to— you're kicking off my business. And so I just cold emailed a bunch of brands in that space and did that.

Cool. Uh, I know you've said on, on MFM multiple times that— I don't know if— I don't want to put words in your mouth because I'm not 100% sure if it was you who said it, but you have said this, uh, many times that being quick is, is very important. Being quick in the market is very important. If you have an idea, you should have something to test your idea within like next 48 hours or, or like 3-4 days. Why is it important to be quick in the market?

So it's, it's not quick in the sense that you don't need to be first necessarily. I don't think being first is that big of an advantage. It could be, but you could be a fast follower. I mean, there's people who started newsletters 4 or 5 years after I started mine and they killed it. So you don't, but we, we weren't first, but we were first-ish. We were like, we were like the, we were in the first wave of like 3 companies that did what we did. And but what I mostly mean is you have to be fast in that I believe that a lot of people when they're starting stuff, they make up all these stupid excuses as to why they shouldn't do it. And instead, what I've noticed is the longer they wait, the bigger their excuse list gets and the more fear they get. It's so— and so if you're like a new, a new person, a new entrepreneur, I just think that the second you have the idea, you should try to go get a customer within like 48 hours, because once you start reaching out to people, you'll notice that creates a little bit of momentum. You'll notice that even if you get turned down and don't get a customer, you'll learn a little bit, but you get emotionally invested and you get bought in. And I just think that action is significantly more important than planning. And if you're a more successful entrepreneur or you have a past or a track record of following through, then I think you can take your time. And I think that you can plan a little bit more. But if you're just getting going and you have an idea, I normally say, dude, do the least amount of work to get your first customer within the 48 hours. Because once you get that first dollar, it's like taking a drug and you want more of it. I just prefer the life of— there was this Spanish explorer when he came to America and the guy was an asshole. So he was a bad guy, but, you know, he like killed the Native Americans. But besides that, when he got to America, he burned his ships and he goes to his soldiers and he goes, I just burned these motherfuckers down. There's no way back. We're doing this thing now. We have to survive. And in a sense, I am on board with that, where it's like you have to lock yourself into a situation where you have to deliver or you're going to look stupid or you might lose money. And I tend to think people perform better that way.

Makes sense. What are some business ideas or name one that you wish people started but you don't have a solution for that, that itch of yours yet? Sorry, I just put you on the spot.

Well, the thing about like these cool things are like these cool ideas is like they're everywhere. They're absolutely everywhere. What's interesting me right now? I'm curious about— how about homeownership is interesting to me. I have this hypothesis, hypothesis, and I've invested in companies that have done this and they've all failed, but I still think it will work. I think homes will be, will be purchased online, that right now they're not. And I think that's going to happen. It has not happened yet. A couple of people have tried and none of them have worked really the way that I think it should work. So I'm very curious about buying homes, buying apartments, buying things like that online so that like anything that requires someone not to get out of their, their house to go see another house, I think that's going to happen. Also with homeownership, what's crazy about homeownership is once you purchase your home, there's so many things that has to be done in order to maintain your house, but there's no manual or there's no good way of knowing like what to do, like how often to change your air conditioning filters or like when the refrigerator needs maintenance, things like that. So I've always been curious about that. You're okay. I've always been curious about that. And I'm interested in someone who can make a manual for my house and just tell me what to do or come and just do it for me once a month. What else? I don't know, what have we talked about that's interested you?

Is it up? I know we had a client during COVID I think, who sold airplanes, like jets and airplanes, and also airplanes maintenance. So he used to do a lot of paint jobs on airplanes and it was all online. And he told me that a lot of, it's not easy to just test drive a plane that you wanna buy. It just doesn't make sense. So a lot of them, made the deal online, did everything, and then got the plane delivered, and then, uh, they test drove it and it had warranty and everything, so it didn't, it didn't hamper the whole experience. Um, so yeah, if they can do that, homeownership makes sense. So do you think it's like a— if people should build like a marketplace for, for people to buy and sell homes? Is that it?

Yes, I 100% think that, that, that will be a thing. It's not caught on. I think that in order to make some of these big ideas like that work, there needs to be an inflection. So like, for example, in America, we had regulation that changed during COVID that allowed doctors to see patients virtually. And so we saw all of these platforms pop up for virtual doctors. With Uber, the, the reason Uber worked was because there was an inflection with the iPhone. It was really easy. Your iPhone had a GPS on it, so it made it easy to do that. What we need for that to happen is a little bit of a cultural inflection, which is we need people to feel comfortable making large purchases online. That has not entirely happened yet, but it's slowly happening more and more. For example, I've bought many cars on the internet without ever seeing them in real life, and it was a wonderful experience. And so there's gonna be, I think there will be a cultural inflection. The one thing that I've invested in, um, that I think is just a mega trend, that's, uh, I almost am hesitant to bring it up because it's incredibly not accessible for the average Joe, but if, um, but humanoids. Do you know what humanoids are?

No.

So I don't know if this movie was popular where you're from, but have you ever heard of RoboCop? Do you remember that movie RoboCop?

Yep, yep. It was a TV show, I think, back in the days. I'm not sure if it was a movie.

Yeah, so it was like a guy who like was a robot and was a police officer. Humanoids are robots, basically. I don't know if they like— the creators like being called that, but they're robots and they do things like, for example, Amazon has hundreds of thousands of workers in a warehouse moving boxes, and humanoids are robots that have elbows, they have knees, and the reason they have that is so they can work within the conditions created for a human body. And they are, uh, they'll, they'll replace those people and move the boxes, or not even replace them because we have a massive, massive labor shortage. Um, but humanoids, I think, is going to be one of the big— next to AI, it's going to be the biggest trend in the next 10 years. I've invested in a company in this space. They just signed a deal with BMW to help build cars and assemble cars. But when you look at America, at least if you look at our GDP, like 30% of it is like human labor. And I think that humanoids are going to make a massive dent into that. I think that's a mega trend that I think is going to be a huge, huge, huge thing. A company I invested in. It's called Figure. I don't know what their URL is, maybe figure.com. If you just Google Figure robot, you'll see what I'm talking about. Uh, I think that it is just gonna be, uh, a world-changing company. But I think there's going to be many businesses in that space. If you remember seeing those viral videos of Boston Dynamics, do you remember like seeing those videos of— and like, they— the way that they presented it, I think, was a little bit silly. They presented them kind of like toys or like, oh, this is like, this is like a neat gadget. We'll see like if anything ever happens. Like the way that they present it is like, it's cool. It's a novelty, but we're there now where these things aren't going to be novelties in the next year or two. They're gonna actually be doing stuff like lifting boxes, assembling cars. It's gonna do, in 10 years there'll be personal, there'll be personal chefs like in your home, like cooking, maybe 20 years, but something like that. I, I think it's gonna be like, just the biggest thing in the world.

Do you think?

And by the way, Elon Musk said this, he goes, you think our car business at Tesla is big? Wait till you see what our robots are going to do.

Yeah, yeah, the Tesla robots. Elon, have you finished the Walter Isaacson book already?

No, I have been— I haven't read it because I don't want to be stressed out. Elon stresses me out like crazy.

Yeah, you shouldn't read that. I'll not spoil you for that. But yeah, there are a few fun conversations between Elon and the shareholders of Tesla about why the Tesla robot is gonna be—

Oh, what's he say? I, I haven't seen it. I've only seen like what he said in the public report.

It's the same thing. It's the same thing, uh, that he has been saying about the, the, the self-driving thing as well. Just a lot of over-promising and not delivering. So maybe it'll take more than 5 or 10 years, but yeah, he has been promising a lot with the robot side of things.

And these are like really hard things to make, by the way. So like, and it's hard to guess, but like I have a Tesla and drives itself and it's freaking awesome. Yeah.

No, it's a good book. You should read it. It's a big, huge book, but it's a good book.

Yeah. I just, uh, I don't wanna get stressed out, but I, maybe I'll read it eventually.

Is it too early to ask, uh, if being a parent has, has changed you as a person?

No, it's not too early. The answer is yes. Um, uh, yeah, it's, it basically, it felt like, um, It felt like my career was important to me, but I never felt like it was a vocation. I don't know if that word makes sense, but like a vocation meaning like a life's purpose. And then I had a kid and it changed to where my family is the life purpose and work is just a way to help them. And that's actually, I think, going to make me, uh, make my career significantly more successful. But yeah, it changes everything. Do you have kids?

No, I don't.

Yeah, like, it changes everything. And another— and it, like, it makes— made me feel more masculine, like I have to protect them, uh, and emotionally and physically and financially. Uh, yeah, it felt like it changed everything.

Nice. Uh, how important— I know the first message we had was about Sid, not, not, not, uh, your kid. I think I congratulated you on one of your Instagram posts about Naomi, is it Naomi?

Yeah, yeah, that's her name.

Yeah, so, but I'm not sure if you saw that, but yeah, the first conversation I had with you was about Sid. Uh, how important was Sid for you, and what would have life looked like if you didn't have Sid?

Yeah, so basically, uh, Sid was my dog. I had an 85-pound white pit bull. He died recently. He was 15. I had him for 15 years. I, um, if you— have you seen my tattoo of him?

Yeah, I did.

Yeah, so I've got a big tattoo of him. But basically, I got him 15 years ago because he, um, a guy I knew got in trouble for selling drugs and got arrested, and he was like, hey, can you watch my dog? And I was like, yeah, sure. And he just didn't get out of jail for a long time, so I was like, that's my dog now. And at the time, I was basically a, like, an alcoholic, borderline drug addict. I was in bad shape, and I got arrested one time, and I left the dog. Sid had to be by himself because I got arrested when I was out, like, running around the street. And, um, I came home one day after I was in jail for like 48 hours, and my dog had gone to the bathroom in the house and hadn't eaten, and there was no water. And I was devastated. I was like, I can't believe I let you down. I feel so bad, you know. I have a responsibility and I just totally screwed it up because I was selfish and I can't get my act together. And so I got my act together because I wanted to make this animal proud and because I wanted to provide and like, you know, do like what you're supposed to do as a man. You got to take care of your family, and he was my family, and I completely screwed that up. And I remember thinking, I've got so much potential. I was like, I can be the best at a lot of things. I, I know I have it in me to be great, but right now I'm a total loser and I just let down this animal that relies on me. And he felt like my family. And so that's kind of how I got my act together, was caring for this animal. And this is the same thing with kids, by the way. When you have other people or other animals or things, whether it's employees, children, pets, whatever, when you have people who rely on you You feel like this is a mission that I'm on to make all of our lives better, not just so I can buy these stupid things that I don't really want. And it just made me, um, laser-focused and go and be so much more aggressive about achievement, uh, not for the sake of achievement but for the sake of doing what I'm supposed to do as a man, which is take care of my tribe. And it just changed my life entirely. It taught me how to be patient. It taught me how to stick to my responsibilities. We used to, me and Sid, we've lived all over the country. We lived in New York, we lived in San Francisco, Missouri, Texas, Nashville. And when I didn't have a lot of money, I couldn't afford to fly with him. And so I would drive cross-country all of the time with him in the back of the car. And we would hang out all over the country. And it was just like, look, I made a commitment. I stick to it no matter what. And it just kind of taught me that that's the way to handle things. And I kind of do that in business, which is like, we don't need a contract. If I told you I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it. Uh, and it just, it changed my life. Having, having a thing that relied on me is the greatest thing ever. And that's why there's a lot of like solo entrepreneurs, like people who are doing things on their own. And I think it's really great and I understand why they love it and I love it too sometimes. But when you have employees, and employees particularly who have kids or who are married, you feel like I'm now married or I now have kids. Like, I remember when I was 26, my employee had a kid and I was like, I just had a kid then. That's what it felt like. It's like I have to do this great thing in order to make sure that this kid has food. And my dog Sid kind of taught me all that. I think that having a dog in your 20s is like the greatest thing on earth because the person you are when you're 20 and the person who you are when you're 30 That's like one of the bigger changes you go through in life. And oftentimes the friends that you have at 19 to 20 aren't the friends you have at 30. And there's only gonna be one person that's gonna be there for that whole evolution. It's your pet. And so I'm a big fan of dogs in your 20s.

Do you think you'll ever get another one?

Yeah. When he, you know, when he went away, it was the saddest moment of my whole life. I guess you could say I've been lucky. I haven't had a lot of death in my life. But it was the worst. It was the worst thing I ever went through. And so I'm still kind of like getting over it. And but yeah, I think that I like animals and I like children. And I think Sarah and I, my wife, the thing that we're going to give a lot of resources to are going to be pet dogs, dog no-kill shelters and kids. I think that like the way that we treat animals like, for one, like, the way that we treat, like, cows and pigs in America, I think, is a travesty. And so I try not to eat, like, red meat unless I know exactly where it came from. And so I would like to, like, help work with that. And, um, but the way that we treat, like, pets, if we— you, like, usually that's indicative of, like, how nice you are to other people. And so I would love to, like, um, we foster a lot of animals, and I would love to give, uh, money and fund shelters and things like that for animals. So that's going to be one of our big causes, that and children.

Nice.

Wait, I didn't even answer your question. So eventually I'm going to get another dog. I just got to get over it.

Yeah. One of the main reasons I think a lot of people don't want to get a dog is that exact feeling that you felt when Sid went away. They just don't want to feel—

Which I understand. I'm going through that now. But the thing is, I think It— that's life though, right? Like, you— like, a lot of people want optionality, and I think that I'm in that same boat, but I try to actually fight that and be like, no, man, like, it's good to have responsibility. It's good to have a burden on your back sometimes because that keeps you in line and it keeps you straight. And people die. Like, you gotta— you just gotta, like, fucking figure it out and gotta, you know, handle it. And so it teaches you a lot about life. It's, it's like a lot of people hated hearing me say this, but I'm like, no, man, having a pet, it, it's, it's not the same, but it's very similar to having a child, and it's a really good way to prepare you though. Uh, but, uh, no, I think, I think more people should get pets. It's an awesome way to like train yourself to be disciplined and get your shit together. It's kind of like, you know, like in the morning when you make your bed and you like feel like you've accomplished something, and then you're like, all right, maybe I should go work out, and you go and work out, you feel like you've accomplish something. And so you're like, all right, now I can do better at work. It's the same thing with the dog. It's like, I've got this responsibility, I'm succeeding at that. What more responsibility can I, can I take on?

I'll give you a silly example. So I don't have a dog. I have two cats. I live in a rented house and I live 3 months of the year in Bangladesh, which is a 14-hour-ish flight from Ireland. It doesn't really make sense for me to get a dog at this point, but I will, I think, either this year or next year. I'm not sure when. When I first got the cats, uh, cats are very laid back. You don't really have to be with them. It's very easy.

Yeah, I've had a bunch of them too.

Yeah, I remember, uh, when you eat, uh, but during my single life, uh, I used to eat a lot of crisps and chips and stuff like that, and I never washed my hand immediately. So I was watching TV, I'm eating crisp and chips, and I was like, yeah, let's, let's watch it after an hour, finish that episode of Friends or Office first. And then I started having cats, and then I was like, now I can't touch the cat because the cat will smell like crisps. A very silly example of how it made me slightly, quote unquote, better, uh, and like out of nowhere, just a random—

yeah, like it, it— but that— but those small things matter, you know? Those little things matter where it's like, uh, uh, you know, for me, I used to party a lot. It's like shit, I gotta be home. Like, if I go out at 7, I gotta be home at 11 so I could take them out. And so like, I'm not out till 1 AM doing bad stuff, you know what I mean? Like, but those little things matter.

Cool. What— so final question, Sam, uh, what do you think made you successful? What is that one or two character traits or something that you did? What do you think it is that made you successful?

Well, um, luck. Luck is real. I, I, I don't want to downplay that. I think I'm lucky that I was born in America. I'm lucky I was born in the era that I was born in. I'm lucky that I was born to parents that helped me and, you know, were supportive. And then like I got right— I got some timing things right, and that was just pure luck. So luck's, luck's a real thing. Um, I've got these, um, tattoos on my feet that say "Act Now." And I'm, you know, when I was a kid they used to say that I had ADD, or they would say I couldn't sit still, like it was a bad thing, but that was a great thing. Like the fact that I act really well, like, like I'm not particularly the most talented person at many different things, but I follow through like, like really well. Like if I say I'm gonna do something, I will put in the effort. If I tell you I'm gonna be somewhere, I'll be there at that time. So I follow through really well. I don't always execute that well, but I'm always following through. And because I'm following through, I'm usually one of the only people that actually try. And then I would say I'm pretty good at being focused. So like when a lot of my friends were starting multiple things or they would get a job and they would work on this other thing on the side, I would be like, nope, this is the one thing I'm going to do. And I'm willing to do that for a decade. And I think that like focus is what people suck at and they suck at being focused for an extended period of time. I got lucky. I sold my company when I was 4 or 5 years old, but I was willing to do that for 20 years. Um, um, and so I think that I've got a pretty good cockroach mentality where it's like, I'm like, I'll survive. I'm gonna like work through this and I'm willing to do it for a very long time. And I think that, that, that mentality has been very, uh, helpful. Maybe the last thing is like, I'm pretty like interested in skills. So there's this great book by Robert Greene called Mastery, and it's about acquiring skills and trying to be a craftsman and being fantastic at your skillset. I think the generalist can succeed. I view myself as a generalist mostly, but I try to like, if I, whatever skillset I'm interested in, I really try to like master it, become quite good at it. And I think that a lot of people don't spend enough time like being, trying to like actually like improve on a very particular skill and being okay with sucking at first, but just noticing like, look, if you do this every day for 40 hours a week, you'll get better. So it's the same with business. Like my thing will always suck in the beginning and I'm like, I know that that's okay, but I'm gonna perfect it a little bit all the time and I'm gonna get great at what I'm doing and I'm gonna do it for like 10 years. And I think that that mentality has helped.

Cool. Listen, Sam, thanks a lot for doing this and yeah, well, just thanks.

Yeah, well, hopefully, uh, do you want to send people somewhere?

Yeah, do you want to send people somewhere? So I'll mention a few. You can go to—

you could, uh, yeah, uh, Hampton, joinhampton.com. If you have a company that's doing a few million in revenue, that's good for you. I've, um, I, uh, I've, uh, I have my podcast, My First Million. You can find me on Twitter, @TheSamParr. And I don't know what else.

Yeah, that's pretty much all about it. Uh, do you think I should join Hampton? I'm not very big. I— we probably do $2 million a year-ish.

Uh, I would say yes, but we don't— we're only in North America at the moment.

Huh.

One day we're going to expand. Well, the reason being is Hampton, um, is a company where you're put into a, a pod or a core group of 8 people who you meet with on a regular basis, and it's really hard to do the hours, to do the scheduling with people overseas. And so I think in the next year, maybe 2 years, I'm not sure. We're going to do— eventually we'll do a concentrated— well, we're going to try and grow in Europe or Asia. I'm not sure where we'll go first, but we have to do like a— we have to get the businesses. Basically, we have to get concentration and density in one area and then expand and then expand. Otherwise, it's just impossible for people to hang out overseas.

Makes sense. Cool. Listen, thanks, Sam, a lot. And yeah, I'll see you in the podcast.

All right. Thanks, man.