Greatest Hits #6 - Sam Tells All, Again - Selling for 10s of Millions after Making Millions with an Email Newsletter

this episode is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network but what is the hubspot podcast network that's right it's a new thing by hubspot they started with our podcast and now they're branching into more and more podcast with experts in different business areas so you might have a podcast by marketing or sales or operations or customer service and we're gonna go over through the d different podcast on this network some are more entertaining some are more informational some are a good mix of both that's what we try to do here and hubspot goal here is to have on demand mentors so if you're an entrepreneur your a startup or you're scaling up you're gonna be able to hear practical tips and inspirational stories by listening to the different podcast on their network which by the way i think this is a smart idea too many brands just try to sell you their thing hubspot they i love their approach here they're like let's put out great valuable free content and help more companies succeed and the more companies that we help succeed the more will eventually come back to us sort of like a good karma kind of thing so listen and learn and grow with hubspot podcast network hubspot dot com slash podcast network alright we have another greatest hits episode and what we're gonna do is we're gonna air this episode that sean did about eighteen months ago and i'm gonna talk over it and give commentary people seem to like this and over the next couple weeks we're actually gonna do this where we do commentary over lots of different interviews whether it's ours or not and well you're genes it's gonna be pretty good but today we've got a good one and i say that with hesitation why because it's about me i'm sam par i started the hustle i don't actually think that you know like when i started hustle con this is like this big event we have i would i always had a rule like i'm not gonna talk at my own event that's kinda lame i think it's weird and i always thought it was weird to kinda talk about myself a lot on this podcast because it's not supposed to be about me but by the numbers this is like a pretty popular episode and a lot of people wanna know how to make money off of newsletters and we just sold our company for tens of millions of dollars like eight weeks ago or something like that so people have been asking about this and we're on our fourth or fifth or sixth installment of this and this is like the fourth or fifth or sixth most downloaded episode so here we are we're gonna play this episode in this episode i'm gonna explain how i started the hustle so when hustle sold we were we had millions of subscriber we were doing eight figures in ad and subscription revenue and it was a great company and i'd loved working here and i love to building this company so i'm gonna talk to you about how i did it and i'm gonna give an update this interview was eighteen months old maybe maybe twenty months old and i'll talk throughout and kinda give me an update on how things turned out and let's see how it goes so let's get into the interview we're gonna be launching a ton of new stuff by the way so we've been doing this little series where we where we do a recap on the greatest hits but we've got this cool thing where we're gonna splice together different people's interviews and different bits of content throughout the the youtube and podcast world and sean and i are gonna like roll together themes on so for example like we'll talk about how stuff is not or is rarely overnight success and it takes a long time so we're gonna have interviews with people explaining how long it took them to make stuff even though you assume that it happened much faster than it did so that's one example that's gonna be cool so in order to know when those are live you gotta hit the subscribe button though so hit the subscribe button on itunes and also hit the follow button on spotify the more you do that the more followers we get which means the higher and the ratings that we go and the higher the ratings we go the more listeners we get and the more listeners get the more we can do this please do that let's start the show yeah i feel like i could rule where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a travel never looking back 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 i 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 like it we have to wait and 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 it's on 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 your 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 and you sound smart yes and we have more stuff coming up but that's our big thing now okay okay yeah and something that launched today i believe right a little beta launched yesterday okay alright so we are we're gonna get to that a second but let's start with the the question we always start with sam 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 are 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 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 realize 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 asked about money a lot we talked about talk i love 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 alright let's talk about money real quick so a lot of people talk about money and i find it to be fun to talk about but i like talking about specifics so i talked about a certain point for me so i'll give you the points in my life where money kinda felt differently the first was probably when i saved twenty five thousand dollars i remember when i saved twenty five thousand dollars i was only spending three grand a week or sorry three grand a month maybe two grand a month wherever it is it was almost like twenty five grand could last me close to a year if i made no income and i was like hell yeah i'm rich so i felt like rich then i remember when i saved a hundred thousand dollars and i felt really rich i was like oh my gosh and then a million like they say a million is like a big deal that didn't really feel like that big of a deal ten million felt like a big deal and i'm not worth a hundred million dollars but maybe i will be but a lot of people say that like the so i i i put down twenty five a million sorry twenty five a hundred thousand a million ten million and then maybe like the next thing is like a hundred million i mean but if you're are interested in money i think there's two things you should do there's this great subreddit called fat fire it basically is so you heard of fire i think that stands for financially independent retired early there's like lean fire which is like people who wanna save up like five hundred thousand or a million dollars and they wanna live off two or three or four percent of that so forty grand a year fat fires people who wanna do that but they wanna save a lot of money and live pretty lavish so they wanna be able to save ten million and live off three four five hundred thousand dollars a year and that kinda of changed how i thought about money and then there's this another book called how to get rich it's horribly titled and i i'm embarrassed to talk about it but it's written by this guy named dennis felix sorry felix dennis this his name and he started a publishing company in the seventies and eventually he launched a bunch of stuff including like maxim and magazine he he did a lot of stuff so he died in his early seventies and right before he died he wrote this book about his things he learned about making money and he was worth like seven or eight hundred million dollars when he died so he was like a wealthy guy who happened to write a book on this not he didn't get rich from the book so i think it should read those things and those are the numbers that are interesting to me we actually talked about what's your number but yeah i like talking about money it's interesting and my perspective about it has basically mostly stay the same that like i think it's important and i think it's great to have and and and and by the way i don't have kids i think that when you have when i have kids my perspective will change because it's like i wanna provide for them but for me i was most happy or like the biggest difference i remember it's like probably twenty five thousand saved and then hundred thousand saved so that's an update on that 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 personally started 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 adventure and 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 two or 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 i think youtube started maybe two thousand four two 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 streak 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 me 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 ads or put their music on the background and so how how old are you and this is going on i was a senior in freshman in college so like it was like sometime time around two thousand eight yeah okay alright so you you started the kinda of keyword yeah keyword 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 of viewers neville the best man in my weddings is more of my one of my best friends yeah and he he's kinda famous for this copywriting course right so let's talk a little bit about that because i think this is something that's extremely underrated i added it to my arsenal copy the most important skill set anyone can have because copy routing is not writing copy 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 copywriting is sales copywriting is persuasion copywriting it 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 by the way if you wanna learn more about copywriting it's so funny when i was into this stuff in like two thousand ten eleven twelve it wasn't as popular but right now it's like really popular and i think that's good part of me is like i'm like an angry karen i'm like well i did it first but part of me is like well finally like everyone cares about this stuff because it's actually really important and it is i still believe it so if you wanna learn about copywriting there's a book called ad week guide the it's it's bio a guy named joe sugar it's called the that the ad week guy to copywriting and believe or the handbook for copywriting but joe sugar is the guy another great book i think is david og vs i like confession of an ad man he also has another book called og advertising and those are all really great and then one of my best friends so i just mentioned neville maduro he has a course called copywriting course it's awesome just type in neville copywriting course you'll see it so if you wanna learn about that those are great resources okay so per perfect example the first business that i knew that you did i didn't know about the the youtube street fights i didn't know about the ebay stuff but i didn't know about the hotdog stand yeah so name the name of the hotdog stand is just other sam's what's the what's the southern sam's 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 variants 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 buns and we put mustard on it and we take a photo they get a free thing a free sausage and that was like the s and it was this like pre social media this was in two thousand and ten to two thousand and twelve so it was around but if instagram was around it was barely around okay so we got we got southern sam's winners as big as your baby's arm yeah the best name i i sort a restaurant too but it was nowhere near this sort of the fame or appeal as that so 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 days 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 the 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 like what do i really believe because when i started with this podcast the beginning i would do like a radio host intro which is not me it's me playing like a radio host like hey ladies you just know him i'm welcome to the show yeah doing what you think you should do fantastic you have and now i'm like well what do i what would i actually say about you like if i was just explain this to myself i say and i was the thing about you is if this was lord of the flies i haven't even read the book but i understand the premise we all get dropped down an island and sort of we're all starting from scratch just just us on 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 i you'd win the the thousand dollar lord of the flies silicon valley edition and and so the and the hot dog 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 characters that's my mental model of use that is 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 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 basically like a midwestern and small business owner that just learned how to use the internet right the 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 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 hotdog 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 walking down the street i thought he was cool i was a huge fan and i walked up to get my photo taken with him and i just became friends with them and he asked me to run his store at nashville work there and help set a shop up and so i did okay hold on pause i'd went up to him to ask take a photo with them and i became friends with them this is a sam paul thing that you do and i want to be listening to know how the hell you do it because that's how we became friends you literally emailed me being like hey sean heard great things about it you had never heard anything about me about you 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 can attend the dinner and i was like yeah sure and we became really good friends since then by the way i knew who sean was and i admired him for before and i still do this all the time i reach out to people on a regular basis i think you should too i think i like to think about what's gonna be interesting in twenty or thirty years and we're gonna say to ourselves i can't believe that that was allowed and there's a few things i i think i think privacy people are gonna say i can't believe people will just give out their information really nearly like that the second thing though that you should take an advantage of today i think in thirty years we're gonna say can you believe that you could just guess someone's email and email them because you can you can email like jeff at amazon or maybe it's bezos and you can email you can you can it's very conceivable that if you spend six months at this you can reach jeff bezos via email by just following up consistently and that's wild to me and you gotta take advantage of that now before that loophole closes i i think it will close eventually one day 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 called the gift of ga okay that's what 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 probably said 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 beer 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 and i go matt mike wolf here the other day once he coming back and he goes was 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 for him and i go mike what's up man like here's the deal let me run this thing or let me let me help you set up because 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 and 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 you yes so we had new products coming called 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 how was it doing i mean i i it was awesome do i even need to ask you sold what we sought alcohol online probably did pretty well yeah i mean it i would be in like finance class and my this was pay i paypal on i don't even know if i had an iphone but to 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 was like you 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 this 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 like okay well i don't 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 him 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 that 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 by the way alright so we're in pandemic or post pandemic time do i still think that i kinda think that i kinda think that you still should move to a major city if you don't if if you're like young and you know like go west young man type of thing i think you should i don't think you need to be in san francisco anymore although i still recommend but i do think you should go to new york san francisco la or austin for sure if you're trying to make it in business i think that it is inspiring to physically see people around you i think someone like me who has a network i don't need to do that because i can just call people but i do get inspired being around people like physically being around them although now i have a network so i can kinda call people and still kinda get in on stuff but if you're a nobody i mean i i i don't mean that to be offensive but like if you don't know a lot of people and you're you're totally fresh and new a rookie that's way better than a nobody because that's what mean i don't mean nobody but you know if you're a rookie you still move to one of these cities highly recommend it 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 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 cab there's other company called uber cap and it's kinda like that but like with cars then 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 was 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 having support we're 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 i 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 has 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 to 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 for 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 grow 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 outside it's like this this this is no big deal or the worst case scenario is as i go and like sell bottled water in the corner like i can make it work like the downside is is really really low yeah or the worst cases i call my mom be like hey i don't want you to support me but like can you give me like three hundred dollars i can get i just come 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 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 buying competition that's amazing pitching so i'll just win the business helicopter 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 a twenty grand or something like that he's like that's kinda last you the year so i got thirty grand from this twenty after of and there's me in two two c cofounder that's like such a good dad 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 it's your choice 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 ellen is you just think this island is just gotta move so you gotta go gotta get in the boat and start pad and then as you go you'll realize hey actually i see it it's over there and you it's he'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 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 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 on air mattresses and we knew that target had a ninety day return policy on air mattresses so 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 sense i go to a bank it's like you gotta have a down payment some kind of successor money 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 alright boys and girls time to talk about this week's sponsor the hubspot crm platform if you're looking for a crm because your business is growing it's getting complicated and you need something to organize all your customer conversations relationships check out the hubspot crm platform it has things like analytics tools and some cool called conversational intelligence and that means you can have transcripts you can monitor the different conversations that are happening that makes it easy to manage and coach your team provide feedback and create sales playbook for everybody to learn from so if your business is growing and you're scaling your company up and you wanna scale the company without scaling complexity check it out at hubspot dot com 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 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 enough 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 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 a five 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 was like i'm gonna i'm literally gonna be homeless before i ever asked for help and so you lived pretty like a spartan lifestyle for a while when you were starting up the hustle too 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 spartan 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 your day there's only been three years and you're doing good and i like well i've been grinding since like taken 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 mh and so because of that the first couple of 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 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 hustle doing 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 may 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 decks in a way yeah but they weren't in the ro decks at the time tim ferris was like looked on the block for me and i 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 the 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 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 monday 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 the 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 up and ask for advice and that's kind of like a cool trade off right and and with the community money was that worth it because most of people 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 still con i randomly met eric bond and elizabeth and these folks are successful entrepreneurs eric had a business called beat the gm that he's 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 sex exit and so i 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 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 and like hundred people came it made like four thousand dollars or i forget some number like that it's just basically a website and 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 count 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 and i'll go to the other fifteen and i'd be like hey you know i would 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 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 and 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 what i met you mh 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 had 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 is kinda while 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 immediate company and then the first six months of the hustle which started in two thousand fifteen it was just a blog okay really quick one hundred percent if you're sitting there a lot of people are listening and they're just sitting there and they wanna figure out something to do you can do this exact strategy and make a great company not only a great company it's pretty fun i mean it's hard work it's not like software where you can just go to sleep and you're making money in your sleep i mean you kind of are if you hire good people but so it's hard work i mean like an event paying a butt it's just a pain in the butt so many capacities but you could do this right now and we actually did a whole podcast where we broke down the economics of this so if you're interested google my first million events there's a youtube video that we did and then there's a a podcast right i show all the financials and what you should do is do an event make it b b though not be to so you don't wanna do something sexy you wanna do something a little bit more boring like if it's like i don't even know i mean it could be like in nursing home industry good whatever industry you work out like whatever you for your your job you could do this for that or whatever your profession is so if it's like user research product management ai software like whatever whatever your profession is or industry you could do this you create an event you get people to come you charge a little bit of money and then you eventually you can make hundreds of thousands you can make millions of dollars doing that then you turn into a blog sponsors this sponsored of the blog then blog people come to the event it's such a good little flywheel business you could one hundred percent in three to four years make your first million office whether they're off selling the company or just making a million dollars plus in profit yeah but remember that it was you you're 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 soy for thirty days just stuff like that and it got loads of traffic but it it it was clear that would not be a huge that wouldn't be a huge business so we relaunch on april nineteenth 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 let's built this whole thing on email and then it became very clear that if you studied the history of group po of daily candy of thrill list people may not even know what the last two are but anyway i was like 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 a distribution channel i think we could build a billion 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 and every subscriber was a little bit of winning 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 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 that's that's that doesn't really make sense too fancy for me yeah let's just narrow this down and call it the what it is it's called focus there's basically two ways i mean i guess there's a bunch of ways but the two easiest ways that a small nobody start up you know one two three four five people can crush a huge company the first one is speed you can move faster you don't have bureaucracy you can just do whatever you want you could come up with an idea you can launch it the next day the second is focus i think an agile team of one to thirty people who you know small can one hundred percent out work and out maneuver and out compete a huge multi thousand dollar or multi thousand person company without a doubt no question in my mind so it's called focus i talk about focus all the time i've stolen that idea from other people i have no idea how people can have multiple projects at the same time i can only do one thing at a time and to be honest like that's one of the few things so i'm gonna say i i think that way is just better than most every other way if your goal is to make something big and make it big fast like that does not make sense to me and i don't wanna do that it's all we didn't and i think that's paid off because now you have i mean this is 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 i 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 knew nothing right i 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 was 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 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 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've built all our own custom technology i just i'm really good at being like what's the simplest solution like what niche should exist by the way building your own technology for a new newsletter business nowadays is stupid and it's not simple don't do that if you're gonna build a newsletter business use mailchimp chip to start and then go to like constant contact or hubspot or something like that don't build it yourself yeah just start with hubspot to be honest don't build it yourself that was actually dumb so there it is a few years later me telling you that and i'm like hey guys can you like it it would be cool if this existed can you do you know how to make that happen and they would just say yeah and like 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 in 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 news 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 web site 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 i was like okay well and so i kinda believe it i didn't think that it would work and then once we start 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 can do the company that i'm modeled 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 sold for a hundred and twenty five million to comcast and then comcast screwed it up and shut them down these numbers are still true by the way it's actually bigger than i thought i think that there's definitely we don't do advertising anymore but i see people in the space who are making thirty forty fifty million dollars a year in sales with the newsletter business to one hundred percent still do this it's harder now so if you're gonna copy this model which i think you should don't do something mainstream the hustle kinda of mainstream it's like a tech like a generalist type of thing do something a little bit more specialized so do start with a more special niche audience and then expand from there and make sure it's b to b and i think you can do really well gotcha okay yeah and so looks play 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 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 let's talk about that real quick if you're young listening to this a lot of times you you wanna go go big you know you're like i got the synergy i wanna raise all this money and i think a lot of people should i mean like if you're if you're capable i think you can do that but i also think if you're young if you can kinda get a fair bit of money issues out of the way at a young age your life life's different i mean let's just do the math let's say that like you we make eight percent that's a little ambitious it's between six and eight percent a year but for the next five or ten years that could be as high as fifteen for the way the economy is going but let's say it's like seven ish percent a year just s and p five hundred boring stuff if you have a million dollars at doubles every ten years if you have five million dollars at age thirty you're looking at ten at forty or twenty at fifty it doubles up fast man and it's maybe not enough to retire right away but you get that win into you and you act different this is why startups can sell secondary so you have a startup up you raised twenty million dollars and the vcs are happy to let you walk away with three million of that because when you have a little bit of money you think a lot bigger and it's a lot smaller than you think you know like i said earlier twenty hundred thousand dollars made a difference get a million bucks in your bank at age twenty five thirty it's freaking life changing that's rich i know that we have a billionaires on here and all these fancy people but you get hundreds of thousands of dollars in your twenties that is very good and that's why i think a lot of people should start something relatively small that can build up and these things build up fast so in three four years you start something small in a very short amount of time you could have something that's making hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit and kinda solves the money problem for you so you can create something even larger what what's get 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 right about is you go to h a reps dot com and you buy a subscription and that would teach you what to write because i 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 come 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 is 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 what how have a dog do you have like a chihuahua i have a multi he said it was for wiener dogs yeah is that that's a dash hound okay it's the fancy works sausage dog you yeah wiener 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 is a piece of wood and it flips up so like a ramp up like a like a miniature handicap ramp and your dog and get up there that company is gonna do forty million this year by the way that's the update how's that holy moly 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 get going 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 an 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 which 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 so they overthink stuff also i think they feel guilty it's like guilty how like way i compare it is like when your mom makes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich it always tastes better than when you it because you see also how simple it is and you're like oh this like isn't that like i yeah this is like it's gotta be way better like the other people must do it way different because this isn't that like let's keep you that easy janet it and that's kinda like the idea and people like 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 our our whole podcast is is about this at this point by the way guys like just yesterday i recorded an episode where we met this guy who created this bump box or box bump or something like that they do forty million sales it's a box that sells pregnant ladies and babies who have ladies who just have babies you like pay fifty bucks a month and you get like products that are met for the baby's age so like if you're eight months pregnant your gonna get itchy so you get like itch cream and then when your baby's is like three months you know the baby is i don't know what babies are doing the teething then you get some type a teething thing and that doesn't sound like a revolutionary thing it's probably worth two hundred million dollars and they own the whole thing the world is big small things can be big so small like niches can be quite lucrative quite large i just told you about a freaking dog ramp business that's gonna sell forty million dollars of freaking dog ramps we talked about a soap opera business that sold for ten million i just told you about a baby bump box that is gonna crush it i mean there's four hundred million people nearly in america i know if you're not you're not america maybe you're in india maybe you're in australia there's you're europe there's a lot of people out there you can make a lot of money on a lot of stuff that appears quite small trust me and it's also fear right people are afraid these 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 hotdog dog stand idea could've have been a big business if you're just apply more leverage more stands more locations yeah tries it out and the way you create leverage is like if you just have to like set things up in a in a very particular way so like you just hire keep people or 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 it's 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 promotion 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 the 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 mostly both don't price or some effectively we bought a company literally all that was zone was double the price and revenue doubled same amount of people signing up every day is super simple i love it this is why i call you the the lord of the fly has been that you would find the way to make the money and if i what i would like to do is buy more software companies and 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 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 yeah 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's the white space and loads of different industries so it's if i'm somebody who is looking for my next opportunity or my next this has become pretty big by the way re the trend is almost two years old it's basically an eight figure subscription business or around there and there's a very clear path to make it much much larger by launching different types of verticals so this paid off i i learned a lot from it i got a lot of parts wrong we should have charged differently i should have maybe branded it a little bit more higher end this totally work there's so many of these now there's all these different people copy cutting it but this worked so pat my pat myself on the back on that one i'm not gonna lie this one totally worked i didn't explain it well in this episode because i was still figuring out we had actually launched like the day after this episode of the day before turned out to be pretty good so tri c sign up the community ended up being a lot more successful than i ever thought i didn't think that was gonna be important the information was good but people prefer community shocking shocking to me and yeah it's a great great business i i love trends so in the podcast ended up becoming this you notice how i'm being interviewed here we don't really do that anymore because all we do is d different ideas it worked 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 are i wanted 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 right it's just gonna push you down this hill and it's 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 early these business opportunities as well as looking at interesting 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 one eight hundred got junk here's how it works here's the economics we're like oh that's amazing we're like where else can this work and he goes local irrigation services and we go awesome thank you we went and interviewed a bunch of people and we got the data and we shows 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 started the magazine then started the conference which is now called ces mh and then with he created he 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 him so i just wanna do that same thing because i think like working at sop 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 money like that let's just do that yeah that's pretty good okay so when you think about like when somebody listening to this podcast let's talk about the podcast for a 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 you're 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 podcasts in general are a horrible business if that's your only stream of revenue but since we have all this other stuff it's like yeah let's do that yep it's just sort it's found money on top of the the existing audience that you 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 giving 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 captured 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 them 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 bonuses i think my bonuses 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 so just 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 six 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 the number can move i think when people hit their 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 and he was twitch seed investor does he like being called an old guy who you live no but he's like seventy 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 go 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 you're 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 hey look at least i'm consistent that's what i said earlier and i i i i think it's true 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 i could 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 kind of the wrong word the money won't make you happy update it's true such a such a stupid thing to say people listening to me playing oh you're complaining you're not happier i get it i i'm such an idiot right now the way that i'm the way that i sound but it doesn't make you happier unfortunately i i i think money does make you happy though but my opinion was like that hundred that first hundred k got me amped after that less amped but i there is a sense of accomplishment you know it's like like i said earlier it's like bench pressing you know you hit a number and it's like if awesome it feels great for a minute and then it's like okay what's next so i'm but i'll i'll i'll fully link now acknowledge how silly this sounds so hopefully you can experience this and agree with me but until you do trust me i get it 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 me 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 this actually changed my life and sean talked to being about this and and i caught it being a time billionaire i think the that should be the goal here is time not money time time time if you've got a if you could make a little bit of money but then you gotta grind and dedicate eighty years to doing something who don't wanna do and doesn't make you feel better about yourself or you're not proud of or is not fulfilling i don't think that's worth it i'd rather be way less have way way way less money but be able to do whatever i want my time that's the only thing you can't get back and how do you know this to be true yourself would you trade places with warren buffett he's ninety years old richest man in the world ninety years old would you trade places with him i bet you wouldn't and every person who has money says they would give it all back to be young again so time i totally i'd rather be a time billionaire than a cash billionaire 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 long 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 on my time so 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 still be it could be lower it's a lower number than you think what's the number it depends on how much you spend but like i don't spend a lot of money i could say fuck you to everyone and 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 i was what to say fuck you to yeah you live a fuck me lifestyle and you could have fuck money out kinda like fuck yeah dude i still give sean trouble for this it is about how much you spent i still don't spend a lot of money i'm like he was making fun of me when it came to my house because i had sold some clothes online for like ninety three dollars and then i went to target to return something for like eight dollars and he made fun of and i like clip coupons still i don't spend any money why because i don't spend anything i don't spend money on stuff that doesn't make me happy also whenever i buy something i always try to make sure i own it and it doesn't own me sean spends a lot of money and i it tease him for that and he spends it because he just doesn't really care he's like like if this saves me time i'm gonna do it and so our philosophies are the same like if this saves me time i'm gonna do it if this makes me happier i'm gonna do it it doesn't make me happy to waste though and so instead of like you know buying something fancy and i mean like alright this saves me time to store it or have someone just take care of it instead i'm like i'm just not gonna get in the first place because it just doesn't make me happier so i still stand by this that's exactly right if you're wanna say fuck you even a ten thousand or what does a hundred gram may liquid made a difference yeah that's mine that's the number i'll give you a hundred grand liquid made a difference and i and i was willing 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 we we're just like you were just like how much you make and i was like you know we knew each other but like we hadn't talked about it before no most those friends i'm very open and be 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 at first i just admire the balls of hey you know 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 create a piece are 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 the game as long as i yeah yeah yeah like we we're we can all win 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 have more than than when i have sometimes but it's not of like i want you to be lower than me it's like oh man what could do you teach me right yeah and i've learned from you and you've learned from 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 trans sign up what about you personally where 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 i don't know we're gonna run but we're walking at eight a half miles yeah we get a long stroll tomorrow alright good good stuff man great talking to you i crushed sean in that race by the way i crushed everyone in that race but alright that's the episode i just brag about myself a lot but i wanted to say thank you for listening that's the episode i'm gonna keep doing this i think people like this my handle is thus sam par in twitter let me know we have some really cool ones they're gonna be a little bit more well produced and we're gonna keep doing this a few topics that i'm gonna cover are things don't happen overnight they take a long time so i'm gonna aggregate a bunch of interviews to people explaining that topic so and you're gonna see a lot more of this stuff it's gonna be really good so please go to your itunes your spotify click subscribe click follow click all those buttons i'm telling you if like like you're listening this right now and you hear people explain this all the time that they need this it makes a huge difference so go do it leave a review let me know what you think we'll see you on the other side my first million this is sam par out yeah i feel like i could rule to work know i could be what i want to from at all in it like the days off on a road less travel never looking back well