#3 - Making Millions off an Email Newsletter?! Sam Parr from The Hustle Tells All

a big ceo of a huge media company that you know of told me this business will never make more than two million dollars a year and it wasn't until like six months ago where was like man there's like a path to make literally a hundred million dollars a year in revenue alright we are here with sam paul the founder of the hustle the big daddy of the the publisher of the podcast how does it feel to have a podcast on your on your network now well i'm excited and i hope people will like it we have to wait to see the numbers first that's what i'll be excited for most i know i know alright so for those who don't know the hustle is a daily newsletter goes out to about a million and a half readers is that right million and a half yeah we could say that and we're growing every morning so people like to start their day with it it's the way i think about it is like you get an email and it tells you the news and i like the way you describe it which is it's like you you know you're no bs friend just explaining it to you so it's a it's a simple way to understand what's going on in the world without spending a whole lot of time doing the research yourself it's like we did the research for you yeah as if i'm me sam part are gonna tell you sean the news each day right and and because you spend five minutes on in the morning you save an hour of doing the that you know reading and research and finding out what's important yourself and what to make of it and then you know you're at work you're at the water cooler you sound part yes and we have more stuff coming up but that's our big thing now okay okay yeah something that launched today i believe right a little beta launched yesterday okay alright so we are we're gonna get to that in a second but let's start with the the question we always start with sample how did you make your first million by starting and selling multiple companies which the biggest one being a news operation that emails millions of people a month and tells them the news they need to know each morning alright you said starting and selling multiple businesses so different different way of looking at it is when did you know you wanted to make a million bucks not for a very long time my mom and dad our entrepreneurs i thought that that's just what you do to make a living i didn't really think about money a lot other than i knew that i wanted to start businesses because that was like my hobby like when you're a teenager you mean yeah but then when i got older they're only like a year or two or three years ago did i realized that money was something that's nice to have a lot of but it's like not as nice as i thought so for years i was just doing this because it was fun and exciting and it just so happened the output the result was income okay like a lot of people say that they say you know i'm not doing it for the money the money is sort of a byproduct and i like that i think that is a great way of looking at it but i also know you you're my friend you think about money a lot you ask about money a lot we talk talk i talk about it but when i ran i talk about it all the time but i was a track and field athlete in college i talked about that all the time too it was just whichever the career i have or the vocation that i have at the time that's what i'm obsessed about and so to me money is it's kinda like bench pressing three hundred pounds once you get past a point which is lower than you think it's not really that important to be able to bench three hundred fifty pounds it's just like you're obsessed with it right because you as my buddy can bench four hundred pounds so it's like man i wanna i wanna beat you i wanna compete with you and i wanna compete with myself gotcha and when when did you like first start doing business was this you know are you a kid i aid stand type of thing i was selling stuff on ebay track field shoes my old clothes i would sell them on ebay and then i would sell stuff on craigslist and you were doing it because use yeah you came up with yourself you saw somebody else sell it on ebay i came up with myself and i thought it was a really cool venture i just it was just like a i have an addictive personality and this was my adrenaline rush i started youtube channels that it got millions of millions of views like the first year or two three three years that youtube existed and that made money and i just love scheming what what kind of channels so it this was in two thousand and nine i don't know how youtube was around then yeah i think youtube started maybe two thousand four thousand five but so it was like the third or fourth year of youtube of an existence and i noticed that when you would type in a certain phrase on youtube it would autofill fill and i would just look at all the words that would be autofill filling and i'm almost embarrassed to say this but i will but if you typed in like street fights it would be like street fights and it would autofill fill with like black guy beats up white guy or street fights white guy fights black guy and so i would was kinda scam and i would create these videos with these clickbait titles and the thumbnail would be the only image that existed so it was a video with just this because youtube didn't have that filter to like catch that since video was nothing yeah it was nothing but if you i can go and find it somehow and it probably has ten million views and then i would charge a bands money ten fifty dollars a month to have their music as the background and so so you didn't even have a fight because i used to search for these i used to watch kim slice yeah the same the same stuff like street fight like big black guy knocks out little white guy i have a video that's title that that has five million views and don't you remember on youtube years and years ago when you would click these certain videos and you'd hear these horrible electronic like music yes so those people paid me money to put my app ads or put their music on the background and so how how old are you in and is going on i was a senior and freshman in college so like it was like some time around two thousand eight yeah okay alright so you you started the kind of keyword yeah keyword word arbitrage because since then i actually learned this from you i went to one of your workshops that you and neville did and for those who don't know neville is a good buddy viewers neville the best man of my wedding is more of my one of my best friends yeah and he he's kinda famous for this copywriting course right so talk a little bit about that because i think this is something that's extremely underrated i added it to my arsenal copy most important skill set anyone can have because copywriting routing is not writing copywriting routing is understanding how other people think and feel and how to use words to get them to do what you want them to do specifically the written word but it can translate to anything right copy is sales copywriting is it's copywriting it's meeting a girlfriend it's talking to a friend and trying to let them know you care about them it's it's trying to sell something it's it's just the idea of understanding other people's perspective and then trying to figure out if you could solve that or empathize with that and communicating that you have the tool to fix their problem mh okay so perfect example the first business that i knew that you did i didn't know the the youtube street fights that i didn't know about the ebay stuff but i didn't know about the hotdog dog stand yeah southern sam's the name of the hotdog dog stand it's not just southern sam's what's the what's the slip southern sam's the wiener as big as a baby's arm so a hot dog is a commodity like they pretty much are all the same i mean little variance but i bought them vienna sausages which a lot of people buy and it was like how do you just stick out how do you stand out and i thought that would be a funny slogan and the idea was if a parent put their baby's arms one of my bonds and we put mustard on it and we take a photo they get a free thing a free sausage and that was like the stick and was this like pre social media this was in two thousand and ten to two thousand and twelve so it was around but i if instagram was around it was barely around okay so we got we got southern sam winners as big as your baby's arm yeah the best name i i started a restaurant too but it was it nowhere near sort of the fame or appeal is that so and so i love that how did it do so i just tweeted about this today actually because someone would ask me if i had to make money today with a thousand dollars i started it with five hundred dollars i was only able to afford the first day's ingredients and the first day did okay but it took me about a week to get a thousand dollar day with like fifty percent margins most days i would make between one hundred and five hundred days if i would go and work all night or go to a concert i could make one thousand a five thousand dollars a night it was really hard work in nashville in the summer it's a hundred and ten degrees some days it was horrible it was really hard but it was really fun but it paid like i got paid and and you were the one manning to stand for a long time and in the beginning i was there all the time but then i hired friends my friend carly my friend red i would give them an hourly like i'm minimum home wage you know i was thinking on my way over here i was like what should i say in the intro and i was thinking i was what do i really believe because when i started doing this podcast the beginning i would do like a radio host intro which is not me it's me playing like a radio host was like hey ladies you and gentlemen welcome to the show yeah doing what you think you should do you have and now i'm like well what do i what would i actually say about you like if i was just explaining this to cell phone when i say and i was like the thing about you is if this was lord to the flies i haven't even read the but i understand the premise we all get dropped down an island and sort of we're all starting from scratch just just us in our our bare hands if you took everybody i know in san francisco a lot of great entrepreneurs investors successful people but if you put us all on an island and it was like here's a race to ten thousand dollars i think you'd win oh thanks i think you you'd win the the thousand dollar lord of the flies silicon valley edition and and so the and the hotdog sand is like a perfect example of of this which is just like very straightforward fundamental thinking i have this much money i can i you know wanna get my money back quick what do people want what do people need where should i stand i should go to the concert that's where people you know are drinking in and wanna bite to eat and just doing the basics and not trying to be sort of the genius inventor is that a good characteristic characterization that's my mental model of use that as that how you see it too one hundred percent so i'm from missouri i'm from saint louis missouri a lot of people think i grew up as a hi i kinda did but i grew up in a city mh my parents started a fruit stand that eventually became a produce brokerage my father's a not educated i was not that kind of a student i was just like a a redneck like kid right and so i just did whatever and i just i i will do whatever it just so happened that i learned how to use the internet so i would say i'm i'm i'm basically like a midwestern and small business owner that just learned how to use the internet right internet is your corner instead of your neighborhood corner right versus like this idea like the mark zuckerberg i will never i don't understand how they think i'm much simpler blur right and so when you're you're doing the hot stand hilarious name good results you know paid paid the bills for for a period of time at some point you jumped onto to the internet yeah because the hot inn was was more like the kid in missouri and the stuff you do today is a lot more like the kid in san francisco yeah and so what i was doing in the evenings after selling stuff so i worked for this guy named mike wolf have i told you this no have you seen this tv show american picker yeah mike wolf was my boss so when i was in college he was i loved that tv show american picker i saw him walking down the street i thought he was cool i was a huge fan and i walked up to get my photo taken with them him and i just became friends with him and he asked me to run his store in nashville to work there and help set a shop up it's all i did okay hold on pause i went up to him to ask take a photo them and i became friends with them this is a sam paul thing that you do and i want to people listening to know how the hell you do it because that's how we became friends you literally emailed me be like hey sean heard great things about it you never heard anything about me her head about probably not we had never met the what point is you just reached out cold and you were like hey i got this big dinner i need to host for like eighty people like next week can i borrow your office for for free it's gonna have all these awesome speakers you're gonna love it you gonna attend the dinner and i was like yeah sure and we became really good friends since then and so you have this this gift of of be framing people kind of out of the blue so tell me what actually happened when you met him on the street i caught the gift of ga okay that's my parents called the grown up let's see he i i had my dog sid with me mike's a big dog guy i walked up to him asked for a photo he start talking about my dog i go oh yeah thank you like yada out of dog stuff and i'm like by the way what are you doing here oh i'm opening up the shop amazing who's gonna run it i'm still looking mike i'm your guy i know we just met but i'm your guy like let me do this and i would probably set it in that that exact tone and he was like yeah like i don't know baby ed i just started heck him and just like joking with him a little bit and he's like yeah okay well here's my wife's number call her right and so i called her and then i found out that the place that i met him at it was a jeans store and i like jeans a lot and he was we're going we used to go to the same store the next day i was i went into the jeans store and there was a guy who worked their named matt i go matt mike wolf was here the other day once he coming back and he goes well he's got some clothes there he's gotta pick up tomorrow so i go okay here's fifty dollars text me when you think he's gonna come in tomorrow i'm gonna show up and so he did that and i just waited on the couch form and i go mike what's up man look here's the deal out let me run this thing or let me let me help you set up he goes alright five you're ed and that's how happened right at that point he's like okay it's gonna take more effort to get rid of this kid yeah to just give him what he wants yeah so that's kinda how that happened but anyway while working there i like met all these amazing people because mike's a celebrity and he would get all these cool people coming in and kid rocks manager or something like that came in i started just just messing around and talking to him he said that there's this new law that allows small time dis in tennessee to create whiskey in the same way than in the nineties craft beer was allowed to be created and i was like oh that's kind of interesting and because i worked at mike wolf store i knew that like a american and vintage stuff is really popular and moons shine is american vintage all this kinda like there was a trend shout out too yes so we have new products coming alcohol trends but it was like moons shine was like popular and there's always like moons sc shows and it was basically moons shine means illegal whiskey this whiskey that the kid rocks guy told me about it was called popcorn sutton it was it's illegal they could sell in stores but they they only would make it in small batches and so what i did was i created an online store called moons shine online and i would try to get customers from all over like places that weren't the south that weren't used to this this novelty whiskey and i started selling it online wow and i was doing i mean i it was awesome do i even need to ask you sold what we sought alcohol online probably did pretty well yeah i i mean it i would be in like finance class and my this was pay i had paypal on i don't even know if had an iphone but it go ching ching and i said my finance teacher i'm like i just made a thousand dollars while i was sitting here in class like what do i do right and so it was good it was making what did they say they're like well he was like need to talk to a lawyer because i don't know what you're doing is legal so i talked to a lawyer and they're like yeah you're kinda breaking some laws here so so the moon moonshot online didn't last long okay so so the blackberry with paypal installed had to had to go go quiet for a bit yeah and so he was like yeah like you gotta like jump through all these hoops and i was like okay well don't know if i wanna do that but i googled like where in the country do internet companies live and online it said san francisco so i emailed the founders of airbnb i asked for a job they said can you come to our office next week i was like yeah i'm here already and so i bought a ticket and flew out here i interviewed there and but while i was here i met a really cool guy named john h and he had started a business because i i stayed on his air airbnb that's i met gotcha and i was like i was like this is so cool there's people my age doing cool stuff i'm coming out here and so i moved i went back home a few days later sold the limited possessions that i had left school and i moved out here and we started bunk a room roommate matching app that was sold after ten months for tiny amount of money and then i started my current company and how important was it to get out here like what happens if you don't move it because this a lot of people right now nothing would have happened nothing nothing would have happened differently or nothing would have happened at all i would not be where i am what would you be doing working in hotdog dog stand or started a long company and or was it obvious to you and others at the time like when you were saying i'm gonna go out to san francisco it seems like that's where the internet it was not i told my mom about airbnb and at the time three hundred people or two hundred people work there so it wasn't like small but it wasn't well known and she was like is this a scam what does this airbnb thing you stand on people's homes as a can there's other company called uber cap and it's kinda like that but like with cars and she's like what are you talking about do they offer health insurance that's all i care about and i was like i'm i'm doing this guys i'm i'm i'm i'm doing this and they they gave me i sold my car i that gave me five thousand dollars and then they gave me a thousand dollars to i like my i hadn't graduated college yet but i was like my graduation gift and they go alright come we'll help you do it and i i gave me a grand and i moved out here and so they supported me but they they they didn't know what i was getting into you don't even know this our stories are are so they're very different but there's like parallel parallel tracks everything you're saying i literally had a moment like that in my life which it's it's for another day because i wanna this is your story but how support gonna is like a really unfair advantage absolutely i also having a level of like you gotta have a little fuck in your system and you had enough fuck it to to say alright i'm just gonna go out there don't know i don't have the whole thing figured out i'm gonna go and i'm gonna figure it out i know enough that that's where i need to be tony robbins says this really good phrase i like which she says proximity is power which is just like if you know nothing else just get close that's cool of the stuff you like get closer to the people you like just hang with them more the proximity has its own power go to the place you want just be near it proximity power and i've seen that play out many times myself your story reminds me of that well the thing is is that you and i both have a lot of buddies that are really wealthy their children probably aren't gonna be willing to take a lot of risk because when you grew up wealthy you kinda know what there's to lose and all the stuff but the way i grew up like i was a little bit of a wild man and like sometimes i would get kicked out of my house and i would literally sleep outside yeah so it's like the worst case scenario is like i just sleep sides it's like this this this is no big deal or the worst case scenario is i go and like sell bottled water in the corner like i can make it work like the downside isn't is really really low yeah or the worst cases i call my mom and be like hey i don't ever want you to support me but like can you give me like three hundred dollars i can get just come and stay in my room yeah there's a get out of deal free card did you ever you know i remember when i was doing my very first startup i was living in colorado kind of a similar situation i won't do the whole backstory story but i got into a spot where we had one thirty grand of just prize money because i would just go pitch in these business plan competitions that's amazing pitching so i just win the business competition so we rolled up thirty grand in like a month of prize money and then my dad was also like okay if you're gonna do this not gonna go to med school i took the mca if you're not gonna go let's take you know some of that tuition and he gave me like i remember it was twenty grand or something like that he's like that's kinda last you the year so i got thirty grand from this twenty grand this and there's me in two to cofounder that's like such a good dad oh yeah it was weird and he was he was not even trying to be helpful he was like you've been so lazy your whole life that like i finally see you switched on i think this is a terrible idea you're doing a sushi restaurant like that's a terrible idea but tuition but yeah but you're you're actually waking up and doing something every day without anyone telling you to do and and he you know he he gave me this line that's in life it's a lot more about motion than it is direction so you know imagine you're on a beach and you wanna get to this island the island is where all the fantasies come true and if you could see the island you would say that's the direction i need to go problem is from where you're standing you can't see where the island is you just think this island just gotta move so you gotta go you gotta get in the boat and start pad and then as you go you'll realize hey actually i it it's over there and you it's he's like it's much easier to move a boat when you actually have some momentum you can just put your paddle in the water and you'll actually turn and you'll start going in the new direction and that's literally what happened in my life so so i give them credit for that but i remember we were living pretty frugal frugal you're a frugal frugal and and you're mister frugal and so i wanna get into that i remember one time the way we were living it was like kind of embarrassing we it was three of us in a one bedroom apartment in colorado and every everything we would need we would buy and return so it's like hey we need a camera for this photos shoot to take our menu pictures i can still tell you yes like best buy fourteen day policy but you don't need this and you know we would go buy this dslr camera and return it for days later ten times and i remember we would see sleep on air mattresses and we knew that target had a ninety day return policy on air mattresses so i remember going and returning my air mattresses so embarrassing of like damn i i'm this poor that i'm just like but your pair what your parents poor or their frugal we were like middle class just normal it was just that i couldn't go to them for at with an ask because when you go with an ask you gotta have a little i go to a bank it's like you gotta have a down payment of some kind of successor moment i feel you at this point i didn't feel like i had my down payment of i know what i'm doing look it's working just give me a little money this was like hey i'm taking a leap of faith you already gave me a little money i need to stretch that dollar because i don't know if there is another dollar after this did you have any sort of when you were living in frugal did you have any moments like that that were the sort of no i grew up kinda poor that my parents started a thing that like made up a a pretty good living for them and they paid my high school tuition and they i got a car that was five thousand dollars f one fifty truck but it's not like i was like pulled up from my bootstrap like from nothing right but i've never the the thousand dollar gift that i got from graduating college was the most money that they've ever that i've ever at like i've i've yeah and that to me it was like a thousand dollars yeah no it was so and and then they gave me like a like a credit card that had like hundred dollar limit on it like they're like here's this for emergencies and i remember i cut it up right when i got here i was like i'm i'm doing this i was like i'm going on the i'm i was like i'm gonna i'm literally gonna be homeless before i have asked for help and so you lived pretty like a spartan lifestyle for a while when you were starting up the hustle tell us about that because i think people gotta know what sometimes what it takes yeah sometimes you don't have to sacrifice but there are sometimes situations where before it builds up and gets big you know you gotta you gotta live that sport and lifestyle i'll tell us about that yeah so i do well now but if people are like you know you know it's only been our company just turned three years old the day it's only been three years and you're doing good and i was like well i've been grinding since like taking risk since like sixteen seventeen eighteen and up until a few years ago like i i didn't have any money and so for the longest time in san francisco i had a six hundred dollar rent maybe and i did that because i was i was scraped together some money after selling something and i rented a four bedroom house i furnished the whole place with used or free furniture and craigslist and then i rented it off to people like the other three bedrooms and that ultimately paid for my rent which means that on just living expenses i was able to only spend about a grand a month and so because of that the first couple years my w two income was only about fifteen thousand dollars and so that was the first couple of years of the hustle yeah and then let's give people a sense of the numbers today you know don't have to say the the specifics but you know what what should we be thinking about when we think you know how how is the doing what doing our business is very profitable it makes eight figures in revenue really fat margins my goal is to get it to a hundred million in revenue by two thousand twenty five and i think we'll get there so it it potentially maybe not be uber but it'll be a nice sized business it'll it'll be a hundred million dollar business the companies like ours could probably sell for any in the huge number the huge range of twenty to sixty million dollars and we haven't taken any venture capital right so you raised money but you raised it sort of from from the ro x in a way yeah but they weren't in the ro x at the time tim ferris was like looked on the block for me and became friends with them that way so he ended up investing the founders of bleach report the founders of nerd wall and loads of other people just like that like thirty six people scott be one of the early uber guys loads of people like that all collectively put in some sum between twenty and hundred thousand dollars from meet seth and collectively we raised about a million dollars and then you also raised from the community yeah so what we did we the hustle started as a conference a conference with the newsletter and i realized the newsletter could be a way bigger business but then i realized a newsletter could actually lead to an even bigger business but in the meantime let's use this newsletter to make profits and once we hit two hundred thousand users we said we always got emails of people wanting to invest and we go let's just let anyone invest and so i thought that we would get a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and ninety days we ended up getting close to three hundred and fifty thousand dollars and forty eight dollars wow alright ladies and gents if you wanna make that first million you have got to be organized our sponsor monday dot com is back to get you there with a weekly dose of the monday dot com motivation you know keeping a clean desk making to do list and using a calendar those aren't just things that adults do they're things that wildly successful teams do to hit their goals in other words being organized makes achieving your dream of swimming in that money vault that much closer visit monday dot com backslash pod backslash million that's right two backslash monday dot com backslash pod backslash million to get ten percent off of money dot com and you can use their customizable templates that will help you get organized it'll increase your workflow it'll manage your workload and get you one step closer to hit your goals and so we raised a little bit of money from our users as well looking back logistically speaking i didn't need any of that money right we've always been profitable it's huge cash flows but tim ferris gave me money now he's my friend and i could text them and ask for advice and that's kind like a cool trade off right and and with the community money was that worth it because mostly don't do that because there's looking back no issues that was not worth it why why do you say that i have grown to be much more private than i was in the past and i hate having people that know my business gotcha and just a second on the origin of the hustle and the hu khan the the conference really because it started as a conference before it was a newsletter yeah and it started before you somebody so i randomly met eric bond and elizabeth the end and these folks are successful entrepreneurs eric had a business called beat the gm that he sold for i don't know how much but if i had a guess eight figures elizabeth had a another business called launch bit that had a nice exit and so met a guy who introduced me to them and we just became friends and i had like a really small exit in two thousand and twelve or thirteen and i emailed eric i go what do i do now and he said i got this thing i put on i put on this thing called hu khan it was kinda like a conference but in reality it was like a meetup up and like a hundred people came it made like four thousand dollars or i forget some number like that it's just basically a website in an email list of two or three hundred people do you want it just do something with it and give me like ten percent the profit i said in so i launched i relaunch hustle khan on june first of two thousand fourteen hosted that conference six weeks later and it made like sixty gs and the whole idea behind it was i'm not trying to make money i'm just trying to meet interesting people and so i would cold email all of these speakers and i would say like hey do you wanna speak these other fifteen speakers are coming and of course so they hadn't right they that they weren't coming and they would say yes then i i'll go to the other fifteen and i'd be like hey you know i would just do the same right stick with them and they all started coming and then i became friends with them and they would teach me stuff and i would learn stuff just hanging out with them i'd be like i need to come by your office so we could talk about the talk but i talked about the talk for ten minutes in the next fifty minutes i just would ask them questions and so i hosted this event and the way in which i made it popular was by doing email marketing and i knew that email marketing was effective because of just like studying it and teach teaching myself how to be a copywriter and so that first event in six weeks made about sixty gs and i only spent eight grand or some low number like that on the event so i was like oh that's cool so took up money and actually for six months i drove my motorcycle around the country and camped and hung out and then during that trip i was like let's do this again the next time it this time was eighty days that's when i met i think yeah that's when i met you that event did about quarter of a million in revenue on thirty or twenty thousand in expenses and then it was like okay this is cool but i don't wanna run a conference forever i just read the biography of ted turner the guy started seeing and i was like that guy of southern and i'm kinda southern he like it's kinda wild like i am i could do that i'm already doing that kinda like i could start a media company and so that's when we said let's do a media company and then the first six months of the hustle which started in two thousand fifteen it was just a blog yeah but then remember that it was you you're were just telling really great stories but it was like long form long form blog stuff and i was just blog about like funny stuff or interesting stuff like taking lsd or living on silent for thirty days just stuff like that and it got loads of traffic but it it it was clear that wouldn't not be a huge that wouldn't be a huge business so we relaunch on april nineteen of two thousand sixteen so that's why i say we're about three years old and that's when we decided let's go all in on email let's build this whole thing on email and then it became very clear that if you study the history of gru po of daily candy of thrill people may not even know what the last two are but anyway i was man so some of these like billion dollar companies all started with an email list like let's do that let's build up this huge email list and then start creating more products and use that as the distribution channel and i think we could build a billing dollar company that way and that was the idea and i remember pretty early on there was a temptation from not even really you didn't seem tempted but other people were tempted to say jump on facebook jump on video jump on yeah this snapchat i knew from day one that would be a horrible idea it's like my i have always wanted to be independent and i felt that building an audience in the back of facebook was like building a business and a rented apartment where the landlord raises the price every quarter like that's a horrible idea and so i called my email list my pirate chip and every subscriber was a little bit of win in our sales right because like i said i'm a i'm kind of a simple i'm a simple guy and if you look at like the economics of like building something on facebook or someone else's platform you're like so where's the profit come from well if you do this like i don't understand that that's that's that doesn't really make too fancy for me yeah i was like that does not make sense to me and i don't wanna do that that's all we didn't and i think that's paid off because now you have i mean this gotta be one of the biggest daily emails in the world yeah i think so i think we gotta be up there i only know of maybe two or three people that can compete and who who's that who can compete there's a scam i mean they claim to have six or seven or eight million they're pretty big and then there's a maybe a handful of one off things that aren't confirmed that i but i would guess and when you were doing this and it started to make money that was also pretty counterintuitive i mean unless you really knew the email game which i didn't by the way i do nothing like until like i didn't i didn't know anything i didn't know what like basic words were like an rfp or man i knew nothing right i i knew i didn't know what cpm meant i didn't i didn't know i didn't know how like to i doing our accounting i didn't know the difference between cash flow and revenue like i i didn't know anything and do know things now or are you just hired people who know things i know a lot of things yeah yeah i i do i know how to read a balance sheet and do a p and l statement i know how to make money i don't know how the out i don't know how to code i cannot code at all and we've have a tech team a nice sized tech team and we built all own custom technology i just i'm really good at being like what's the simplest solution like what neat should exist and like hey guys can you like it it would be cool if this existed can you do you don't how make that happen and they would just say yeah and make alright great show me in a week and let's see right and what was the the first milestone where you were like holy shit the speech actually not just it's working but this thing's actually gonna be really big well the first week of our existence we got a million people coming to the website mh and i was like that's awesome that is great and we got on the front page of reddit it and we had like two or three thousand concurrent users on real time analytics google analytics i was like sick that's awesome how good is it to watch this addict it's addict it's hugely addict and then i was like this is not gonna this cannot be big i thought that and someone once told me a big ceo of a huge media company that you know of told me this business will never make more than two million dollars a year we could do that a month now and what what was that person wrong about what didn't they get they were a new york media person who was kinda of fancy and they didn't they're like email is such a small thing like an email newsletter a like you don't even have a website like there's no way advertisers are gonna want that and i'm like well but if you think about it if you just look at how much they're gonna pay per click on all these other platforms who cares if it's on your email or on a website or like does it matter as long as i get like traffic to their stuff like who cares and it's like well it doesn't work like that as like okay well and so i kinda believed it i didn't think that it would work and then once we started growing i was like oh this is crazy and then it wasn't until like six months ago where i was like man there's like a path to make like literally a hundred million dollars a year in in revenue on this i kinda knew a little bit that it could be big daily ka do the company that i'm modeled a those after early on they claim to have twenty five million in revenue and ten million in net income a year so i was like well if we just do that that might happen and they're still around they're doing they sold for a hundred and twenty five million in comcast and then comcast screwed it up and shut them down gotcha okay yeah and so looks like a little game called remake my first million if you had to remake a million bucks so you i take away your business as it is today you can't do that again that this exact business you can't do it again you're twenty one years old though i give you back that youthful energy and time what would you work on what would you try to do you just let's say you don't have capital you don't have network you don't have a lot of those pieces you're you you're you but you're twenty one what would you do again or would you do differently at this time if i was twenty one twenty two i would try to get a quick win and try to get like a couple hundred thousand or maybe a million dollars in my bank by like starting a business that made a hundred grand a month and try would try to sell it and own all of it and i think that that is significantly more possible than most people think so so i'm i'm twenty one i'm listening to this i say alright sounds pretty good be more specific what do you mean what what's i twenty one today start blogging and when i say start blogging i would say learn one new interesting thing each week and then just blog about what you learned do that every single day every week for a year try to get two to three thousand people a day coming to your site through search the way you find out what the write about is you go to h a reps dot com and you buy a subscription and that would teach you what what's to write because will tell you what people are searching for try to rank for those words build up an email list of five thousand people and then create a course and sell it to them mh i like it and i like the looking up the keywords it's like having the answers to the test like here's what people wanna know yeah just answer it just answer it and answer it by learning on your own and then just teaching people what you learn there's two ways to to teach or to create content one is to be the expert and the other ways is to be the curious novice and so the second one one hundred percent works right a lot of people count themselves out because they just assume i'm not the expert but in reality the only gonna be one step great yeah just gotta be one step in front of your audience and that one step could be you just read you just read a book over the weekend right so if i was a twenty one year old kid what i would do is go on yelp find pick a very specific niche like irrigation services scaffolding rental lawn cutting service pick some niche in a town like nashville denver or something like that and try to start a business that beats all the other people in yelp i'm quite obsessed with the idea of consolidating local businesses so and so you boring stuff right well it's not boring it's like people don't like to hear the obvious and it's i was almost the obvious as ours the basics dude because the people are super fancy man like me and ramon him and i have started or funded like five or six companies that collectively make ten million dollars or something like that and it's like the most simple shit on earth and if i told you that this company makes us much money you'd be like what that is so stupid ramon owns this one that i participate on a little bit as well that sells dog ramps what's the dog ramp a dog ramp is when you have a dash hound or look how have a dog do you have like a chihuahua i have a multi he said us was for wiener dogs yeah is that that's a dash hound okay it's the fancy word sausage dog you know wei dog when you have these small dogs and they wanna get on your bed they can't get up so it's just like a all it is a piece of wood and it flips up so like a ramp up like a like a miniature handicap ramp and your dog can get up there and that makes sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a day and why are people scared of these businesses or do they just assume it can't be you know can't can't here's why i think about this all the time because i struggle with my team they don't understand leverage so they think that in order to make let's say a million dollars you have to work in equivalent amount of hours that in their head they think is a million dollars or you have to have an idea that is the equivalent of a million dollar idea right when in reality you could just have really good execution which is not tied to the amount of time in what you spend on something you could have pretty good execution like what hundred percent effort for a short amount of time and that if you leverage it correctly it creates significant amounts of value and they so they overthink stuff also i think they feel guilty it's like guilty how like the way i compare it is like when your mom makes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich it always stays better than when you it because you see also how simple it is you're like oh this like isn't that like i yeah this is like it's gotta be way like the other people must do it way different because this isn't that like this can't be that easy janet it and that's kinda like the idea and people like over overthink stuff i also think that we hang out with a lot of high iq people and i think the smarter you are the more disadvantaged you are at some of these money at some of these like simple things and it's also fear right people are afraid p pb and j businesses are are can be great businesses if you apply leverage and that's the that's sort of the difference where your same hot dog stand idea could've have been a big business if you're just a product more leverage more stands more locations yeah tries it out and the way you create leverage like if you just have to like set things up in a in a very particular way so like you just hire key people or you use the internet and you realize well i can do the same thing but i just put two zeros on the back of my ad spend like wow i just i'm not doing any extra effort but i'm getting like ten times the amount of money and that i think you had a business that you bought a saas company or for the much and i also own a saas company it's like a thirty thousand dollar a month saas business and all you did was raise the prices is that correct yeah all we did so far was just went in and changed a three to like a six and that was it that's all we did you're like i can't code but even i know how to do this yeah most people both don't price this up effectively we bought a company literally all that was zone was double the price and revenue doubled same amount of people sign up every day is super simple i love it this is why i call you the the lord of the flies man that you would find the way to make the money and i what i would like to do is buy more software companies than ten x the price i think that that's possible as well so you have all these experiments in your head but one experiment you guys just launched it just trends and i wanna hear about it because i like trends but i don't fully get trends yeah a lot of people about it a lot of people who haven't experienced it i don't think are gonna get it yeah yet and and that's because we aren't what is it yeah so basically the idea is it's a premium publication a paid publication a paid weekly email and we have hired a team of analysts as well as myself and we crawl the web and look at millions of bits data and we also talk to people like you and other experts and we just explore various industries and we do d contracting of various businesses and we just show like where are cool opportunities and where the white space in loads of different industries so it's if i'm somebody who is looking for my next opportunity or my next year the way that we explained it is like look if you start a company you can make it win or at least do be mildly successful with enough effort like you could if you like i willing to spend twenty years on something you could probably get a little bit of success out of it but if you start something on a small ripple that can eventually become a wave or tsunami like it's just gonna the products will get pulled out of you like it's just gonna push you down this hill and get life will be a lot better so it's just like let's explore some of these waves while they're still kinda small and what they're doing gotcha so you guys are transporting spotting early these business opportunities as well as looking at just in companies and saying like well here's how they work what if you applied that to this thing so like we interviewed the guy started one eight hundred got junk brian and he said yeah one eight hundred got junk here's how it works here's the economics we're like that's amazing we're like where else can this work and he was local irrigation services and we go awesome thank you we went and interviewed a bunch of people and we got the data and we chose alright here's this is like a cool idea nice and so if trends works the hustle becomes this thing that it's got the daily newsletter we tell you what's going on you got trends which tells you about the big opportunities that are coming i'm trying to steal soft banks playbook so in the late eighties early nineties masa son he started what was called basically the pc magazine of japan he started a a publication started that's a good example right pcs was the wave yeah he started the magazine just the magazine then he started the conference which is now called ces mh and then with he created ces soft he bought it okay he bought it with the profits from the publication and then he was also selling software and then he started investing in the companies that he saw that were advertising with them so i just wanna do that same thing because i think like working at soft inc would be a really cool job nice going after soft bank wow picked you picked the big blue whale it seems like you like see his life you're like oh man he gets to hang out with cool people he gets to invest his money like that let's just do that yeah that's pretty good okay so when you think about like when somebody listen to this podcast talk about the podcast for second because this is a new product essentially that is being published on the hustle by the hustle yeah hopefully there's a hundred thousand people listening to this right now that came from our email list if you're listening to this and you one of the thousand just tweet at sam so that he knows he knows you're listening alright so so why do a podcast i guess why why didn't you do a podcast earlier is a better question because i didn't know anyone that could do it well and you and i shoot the shit all the time you're very successful you're amazing at asking certain questions you're also amazing at like saying these weird phrases like when you're were just talking about your father and talking about like motion versus direction and so when you said you're gonna do a podcast i was like let's see if we could partner with him and we gotta do that i also think that podcast podcasts in general are a horrible business if that's your only stream of revenue right but since we have all this other stuff it's like yeah let's do that yep it's just sort of it's found money on top of the the existing audience that you we have today yeah and i think that the good thing about what you guys do is that i think you guys capture just a fraction of the value you create so given people the news every morning in a in a super simple digestible way and then you capture you know it's free for them and you capture just a tiny amount of that value on average yeah so with trends we're gonna be kept capturing a little bit more and this is now another component that we can actually give for free capture a little bit of the value and hopefully people will sign up for maybe three percent of people listening will sign up for our paid services gotcha okay cool and so i wanna close it out i wanna do bonus a segment about money money okay this is the money around i'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions related to money and you're gonna tell us about how much money were you making at age twenty one twenty five and i usually say thirty but you're twenty nine so we'll do twenty nine so twenty twenty five twenty nine twenty one i had just i joined a company after we had a little exit my salary was fifty to sixty thousand dollars a year with a bonus that was nice sized i was able to save twenty five thousand dollars with that salary in san francisco you saved twenty five thousand on a fifty thousand salary fifty sixty thousand salary plus bonus yeah plus bonus i think my bonus has maybe came out to be like eighty grand like total compensation okay gotcha that's good twenty five lower because i started the company when i was twenty five the conference made sixty gram about fifty grand in profit the second conference made some number of around two hundred thousand dollars in profit that all stay in the business other than a draw i did of two thousand dollars a month and then twenty nine your company's doing really well now what do you pay yourself i pay myself six figures i pay myself just something nowhere between six and seven figures below seven figures above six figures i didn't pay myself six figures from the company until last year for a long time it was it ramped up from like forty to sixty to a hundred and then i started giving myself meaningful bonuses based off performance i make more income from my investments so selling other businesses rental income things like that i make more money that way and so last question a lot of people have a number in mind this is the number that they want the number where they feel like they've hit it they've they've made it as of right in the number can move i think when people hit the number they make a new number but right now what's your number i think that an old guy who i love stuart all i don't know if you know him he's a good friend but he's a big time investor invested in he was twitch a seat investor does he like being called an old guy who you left no but he's like seven years old i just like calling him that i don't know he's he's he's a good guy he told me that the first unit you make makes life different and i what's the unit and he goes ten million like he goes you get one unit that's when life changes so one one unit well where your liquid is a big deal it goes probably ten and then a hundred is like you're set forever ten is like be cool and you're fine right don't go mike tyson yeah and you're fine yeah like a hundred is your set ten is like like life is never gonna be the same but you could still ruin it if you like really do something bad so that's your number right now one unit a unit getting liquid that said i don't think i'll be happier with it i know i won't be happier with that right you're not gonna be happier with ten million dollars i i don't think i think i would be i think i think it's not so much happier i think happier is kinda of the wrong word the money won't make you happy it's the fact that you did it the fact that i did it as well as the lifestyle so i think money i i have this thing that money is just stored time so so when i give you money i'd like to unlock some of your time to go do something for and when you give me money it's because you're you want some of my time and that's sort of how money works money is just time frozen into a piece of paper and when you give it to somebody else t out you get their time and so the thing you know if i had a unit that would make sure that i'm the one unlocking other people's time nobody's really unlocking my time unless i'm choosing to do so yeah you could just do that with a lot less money than you think i choose to work i could not work i do it because i like it it's a choice what i'm saying is that most people and i put myself in this bucket right now i don't dictate how i spend every hour of my day it's not all my choice there are several things that are things that i don't wanna be doing in my time so with the day that i can do sort of what i want when i want where i want the way i want that will be sort of the ultimate freedom and i agree with you i don't know if money it'll be it could be lower it's a lower number than you think what's the number depends why how much you spend but like i don't spend a lot of money i could say fuck you to everyone in balance and be fine i'm a spend that's the problem man maybe when i hit a hundred grand i'm like a hundred grand liquid i was like that's fuck you money well i was willing to say fuck you yeah you live a fuck me lifestyle and you can have fuck money like fuck yeah that's exactly right if you're willing say fuck you even a ten thousand or what thousand a hundred gram liquid made a difference yeah that's my that's the number i'll give you a hundred grand liquid made a difference and i and i was wanting to say fuck off yeah you know i i i like this this segment the money around because money's is this weird taboo thing i remember when you messaged me on facebook once and you were like i hope we we're just like you were just like much you make and i was like you know we knew each other but like we hadn't talked to about it before no most friends i'm very open and i like here here's how much cash i have right and you asked me all these questions and i was like this is kinda cool because i was like it's first i just admire the balls of hey you know yeah you know just to ask but the second thing was i was like this is how we can kinda help each other get ahead is information can we unlock some information so that you understand how people are playing this game because the pie is very very big and so the weird it's not a zero sum game a lot of people think that like if i make money that means i took it from someone it's like no that's not exactly how it works like if i created create a piece of art i didn't take this from anyone i just created this valuable thing that someone's gonna give me something for right and even if you are taking money from somebody else there's so many players in beginning yeah as long as he yeah yeah like we we're we can all win and so it should it's whenever i ask people it's never out of jealousy of like i wish i was lower than or i wish i was bigger than it i do wish i'm and have more than than what i have sometimes but it's not of like i want you to be lower than me it's like oh man what could you teach me right yeah and i've learned from you and you've heard for me in that in that regard so alright sam where can people find you aside from subscribing to the hustle subscribe to the hustle the hustle dot c yeah go to trent dot c o trends c sign up thinking what about you personally where do they personally don't email me because i won't reply more likely than not but tweet at me and i will reply the sam par awesome thanks sam so much great episode we're gonna do a spartan race tomorrow yeah we're running eight and a half mile i don't know if we're gonna run but we're walking at eight a half miles yeah we're got a long stroll tomorrow alright good good stuff man great talking to you