In this interview Sam Parr walks through the exact process he used to launch HustleCon and generate at least $100,000 in profit within an eight‑week, 40‑hour‑per‑week effort. He emphasizes that the email list is the single most important asset, built via a simple landing page (the "front door") and a steady stream of blog posts posted to Hacker News (the "side doors"). Each blog post profiles a speaker, often turned into an infographic using the principles from Made to Stick, which both educates prospects and secures speaker commitments before any audience exists. Parr details his pricing model: start with a high anchor ticket price (e.g., $250) and offer generous, time‑limited discounts to land an average sale of $100, using multiple ticket tiers (early‑bird, middle‑bird, late‑bird) that create spikes in revenue when each tier ends. He treats ticket sales like an e‑commerce funnel, calculating required traffic, conversion rate (about 3%), and average order value to hit the $100k target. He also describes the stressful sales cadence—20% of tickets sell in the first week, a lull follows, then another 20‑30% sell in the final days—making timing, countdown clocks, and frequent reminder emails critical. The overall narrative is a repeatable, data‑driven playbook for launching a profitable conference quickly.
Chapters
So let me explain to you guys a little bit about how I started my events and what I would, what I would do if I was starting again, which is basically if I was starting again, I would do mostly the same stuff. But I think everyone in the next, if you're listening, if you're willing to spend 8 weeks working 40 hours a week dedicated to this, I think you could make at least $100,000 profit starting probably in September because that's when I think events, conferences are going to be okay. So anyway, um, the, the biggest thing that you have to do here is your email list is the most important thing. So the hustlecon.com, I launched that website on June 6th. Okay. And within just a few weeks, we were averaging around 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors a day. And the email list jumped from about 200 people to about 2,500 people in 7 weeks. Keep in mind at the time I didn't even have a Twitter. So there was no Twitter. I mean, there was, but I didn't use it. And so what I would do is hustlecon.com was basically a landing page where I explained what the event is, and then you'd enter your email. And that was called the front door. The side doors were all these blog posts. So I would write 2 to 3 blog posts a week on each speaker. I would post that on Hacker News. People would come to the website via the side door. Only 5% of them would say, this is interesting, what's this website? And they would click the homepage and I would collect their email there. And then once I collected their email, I would send them a variety of, uh, other blog posts that I had written. And at the end of each blog post that I sent them, it would say, P.S., this person's speaking at HustleCon on, uh, August 1st and September, you can get a ticket right now for 10% off if you buy in the next 12 hours. Right. By the way, the next 12 hours, that code was working all the time. There was no such thing as next 12 hours. It was always the next 12 hours. The countdown clock, there's a simple plugin that you could buy and it just starts to show up. So sorry guys, I'm sure everyone knows this now, but I don't even— Shopify wasn't popular at that point. So, um, not everyone had that technology, but that's what we did. Pretty easy, pretty basic. And in doing that, I saw—
Give an example of the blog post, because I remember vividly the one you did about iCracked, which you kind of did as an infographic. I remember the one of Pandora. But explain what you did. And also, these were speakers. So you got speakers to agree, legit speakers to agree before you even had an audience or anything.
Yes, which is the second thing I'm going to talk about is how to land a speaker. But the blog post, I basically would just use Forbes, Business Insider, all these places and just write a biography on the person. But I would do it in an interesting way. And eventually what happened is we would create infographics. So I had John who worked there and I would say, John, here's the bulleted points of their life, turn it into an infographic please. And that's what we did. We had infographics. It could have been a blog post, which is what I used to do. This time we made infographics and it worked quite well. And it was basically, I read the book Made to Stick and I just copied that. So I took, information about their company and I made it really easy to understand. So for example, Pandora streams this amount of music per hour, which is the equivalent of X, Y, and Z. They— the reason why they are able to do that is they were one of the first people to launch on the iPhone. And then I like, I just tell that story. Pretty simple. I thought it was simple. Very effective. Now that's how we got our initial sales. Now the thing about sales for events, It's incredibly stressful. The reason it's stressful is typically 20% of your sales come in the first 5 to 7 days, and then 20%, sometimes more, 30% of your sales comes in the last like 4 or 5 days, which means that dead time. So you, you, you want, you have to kick, you gotta kick ass right out of the, right out of the gate. So your first launch series, you need to kick ass. Your first email launch series, you need to do really well. Then there's a fair bit of dead time and it feels we're failing, we're failing, we're failing. And then the last 10 days or so, you get a wave of sales and it all comes down to the last minute and it is incredibly nerve-wracking and anything can ruin it. For example, a pandemic, or if there was like a terrorist attack, if there was, um, um, um, um, bad weather, as simple as bad weather, you're fucked. And so you've been working for 7 weeks now, eventually in our case, a whole year on this event. And you're screwed. So it's very stressful. But the way that you can actually make more money, and this is something that I didn't learn until later on, for the tickets, you actually want to charge higher than you think. So let's say you want to make $100,000 and you want to get 1,000 people to pay you $100. You always charge $250 and then you give more, you give discounts in order to get to $100 average sale price. And so you want, in my opinion, you want to be very generous with discounts but you want to charge a lot of money. So it anchors it at a high— at a high perceived value. Yeah, correct. And one other thing that you want to do is you want to run this like an e-com site. So for an e-com site, you say, well, I want to make $100,000 this month. Therefore, I need to get, you know, 100,000 people to my— 100,000 high-quality people to my website, of which 3% are going to convert. I know 3% are going to convert because I'm constantly tinkering with my landing page. The average sale value is gonna be X dollars. Therefore, this is how you do it. Now I just need to get people to my website. That's what a lot of conference people don't do. That's what you should do. And it works quite well. And then finally, time is one of the best ways to create sales. So you have to give discounts early on and at the end. And the goal is you want to have 5, 3 to 5 tiers of pricing. So you want to have early, early bird, and then early bird and then middle bird and then you're late. Okay, seriously, this is the last reminder. You're late. Like you, because if you actually look, so can you actually see, um, if you log into that doc, I actually put a chart of my very first event, uh, from July of '24. You're going to see big spikes. Every single one of those big spikes was a new ticket tier ending. And there's a direct correlation between the amount of revenue that I made that day and the amount of like the tier ending and me sending an email blast reminding people. And I would email some 2 or 3 times a day in order to remind them. Wow.
