like i should create this and then i looked in the mirror and i was like yeah this ain't gonna work there's a reason your nickname is the vanilla gorilla okay like dream that one gonna work i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to at all in in like a days all on so sam i a question for look you have launched this business this year called hampton and i love the name i love the brand i go to the website love the website more than anything i love the idea me i'm jealous of this idea andrew wilkinson was said i'm so jealous that i didn't start this idea we're i feel like you got so much right and i know that the that in doing any idea whatever you you know there's something called the idea maze you go through you wander around you try to figure out the right path and you cup if you're lucky you pop out the other side with what you did with hampton where everything turned out right what i wanna know is what were the other paths you considered but ended up saying no to along the way because nobody sees that stuff that's on the cutting room floor i wanna know you know i love the name hampton were there other names that you thought about and like yeah how did you pick that one and like what was that decision process i wanna know target market like you i feel like you nailed the target market and you've nailed the value prop were there three other runner ups that you consider that you didn't have i kinda wanna see what goes on underneath the surface before this beautiful execution comes out well first thanks you're you you you hopefully only see the good stuff obviously there's all types of bad shit that happens on the on the back end where we're like this sucks but in general it's been quite pleasant so dude with this company it's so funny i purposely had on we had guess that ran these types of companies and i wanted to prove to everyone i'm gonna go i'm gonna do my research in front of people you left a paper trail right like you left public bread breadcrumbs as to exactly how you did this step by step and by the way i love that you're honest about this because you're definitely had guests come on and basically explain to you what the blueprint is and then you were like cool thanks gonna go execute on that blueprint and and i didn't hide it from them i i told them i i i told them before i wanna launch i wanna launch i'm thinking launching something like this and let's talk about it right so there was nothing unethical or evil about this but yeah i wanted to do it publicly so people could see so the so let me tell you first so i sold the hustle i think in twenty two yeah and or something like that and i had about six months or eight months or ten months i forget where i was just kinda fooling around and i was looking at different ideas the two ideas that lost i'm so thankful they lost one remember how i got super into airbnb i was like this is the thing i could do this so i bought one and i did it and it did okay but i was like this sucks i do i do not enjoy this this does this isn't in my zone of genius it's it's a pain in the ass and it seemed on paper like a good idea you had a you created this facebook group of i forgot you called like sam's short term rental bros or whatever the hell you call what was an str crew the str group short term rental crew and people piled in and they started explaining their blueprint i'm like yeah i own forty airbnb bs they make this much cash flow here's the pain points here's the plus sides this other guy is like oh i do the same thing with this angle and i was like dude this is fascinating sam doing his research again in public and then you were wandering around the idea maze you're like maybe it's over maybe the and maybe the exit path is over here in the short term rentals thing and it kinda seemed like a good idea on paper but you ended up saying no to and and it wasn't a good idea it wasn't a good idea for me it it it is a profitable thing whatever it was cool the second thing that i thought about doing was i thought about creating i've always wanted to create a trucking business i'm i'm passionate about truckers i'm passionate about blue collar workers my family i grew up at a trucking family sort of my they work in that industry and so i was like i'm gonna become a youtuber and i'm gonna create an audience of truckers and then i'm gonna build a product for them and then i started like doing it and i was like no hate this i'm not gonna do it you're like i love the idea of blue color workers yeah i the idea of it being a among yeah yeah it's like getting a neck tattoo too it's like the idea of if it's kind of neat but i know i actually want it and so then i was like look we had this thing called trends at the hustle and i got a lot wrong and i love the business model still i think i can do this and my partner my now business partner and i we had like basically a therapy group where we would like bitch to complain about everything going on and we're like i settled on that product you built a product launched it did not use your audience initially publicly you didn't use the podcast to promote it initially maybe you brand your brand name helped partly in private but you didn't do it publicly and you drove you you drove it to millions of dollars in revenue very early on so very successful thing that everybody listens podcast kind of wants that outcome so so you you know you're a or a walking case study go ahead yeah so hampton is a peer group so some people call a community i called a peer group basically there's three parts of the peer group so you have an eight person group that have like similar size or types of companies and you basically it's like a therapy group you just complain so it takes about six months like really like for it to like catch and be awesome but i have a six or a person group it's freaking awesome and you will do everything like you someone will make a presentation for every meeting and they'll say like here's my portfolio here's my net worth can you guys tell me am doing something wrong doing something right here's how my company works what am doing wrong what am i doing right and so i do a presentation so that's part one part two is we have a digital community where you can like post in there and see what the people are saying and you could like hey i'm trying to hire nanny what are your guys best advice for agencies that to use in the northeast things like that you could do personal stuff non personal stuff the third thing is events i think we host two hundred events a year at this point including retreats all these type of things so it's highly inspired by chief y vista these are large companies that are in the space so that's the business originally i was trying to go after marketing executives and then just executives in general dude i called i did fifty to seventy meetings with people trying to convince them to join and none of them wanted it hello to your marketing executive yeah anyway i'll go to your marketing today know one fucking wanted it i couldn't get and then eventually i was like i i need to charge like around ten grand a year in order to make this like a viable business know what fucking wanted it they're were willing to pay five hundred dollars and i created a group that was actually five hundred dollars and i was like dude this sucks i can't do this and then my and then we were like should we do doctors doctors would be cool but like what the fuck i don't know anything about doctors i tried to get a i tried to get in touch with the hunt and like no one wanted it and then i was like fortune five hundred ceos same problem like how do i get in touch with the fortune two five hundred ceo like i don't i don't know one like it it is really hard and then i did out the paper but as soon as they came into contact with reality they got punched in on the face and they ran they got the notes of the face well this one really punched me in the face the next one we thought about minorities for like you know my my wife is a minority and i like hear a little bit of the things that she goes through i'm like i should create this and then i looked in a mirror and i was like yeah this ain't gonna work i'm the opposite of minority this gonna look great on paper but yeah the old reflection doesn't go on the mirror yeah i remember when you told me that idea and i was like dude honestly it's a great idea i think it's underserved community i think they want that career development i think that i think that makes sense but i was like dude what are you gonna do when you're like hey i was like you you know are you gonna have sarah be ceo like what are you gonna do you're gonna be like i this white man who is running this kid like i don't know you possible but like i don't know if you google the word white bread you're gonna see a picture of sam park like it feels like it it would not have worked there's a reason your nickname is the vanilla gorilla okay like great like it one gonna work and then my partner was like dude let's just go for ceo and he'd been saying this whole time i'm like they will never pay for this but all long some people had heard rumors i was launching this so they ask to me like can you do this for us and i kept saying no and then finally we're like fuck it let's do it and then that obviously was the right decision but by the way i did a ton of research so i interviewed a ton of members of all these different groups and they're like i'm a tech guide but there's it's all like guys who own like eighteen apartment buildings in south florida in my group it kinda sucks like i love them but we don't like a line on business well it just sounds like it's better founder fit right like you know it's a true it's who our audiences on this podcast is where you had a reputation it's where you knew the relatable pain points it's you knew how to you knew where to reach him because you knew where you hang out you know it's like way better it was so much easier yeah it was way easier now let's talk about the names here's a good story about the names so the company called hampton a lot of people think that means the hampton up until i was like twenty seven i didn't know what the hampton were i thought i had read about it and like the great ga me i thought like it was like that i didn't even know what it was until i married a woman from that area and i learned about it so what i do is all of my llc are named after streets in my neighborhood of saint louis and there's a lot of really good names for some reason and so i just usually look at the map of where i'm from and i just look at the names so let me tell you some names that i thought about naming it none of these really fit but they could fit other things number one is mac i love that name mac so at one point i thought about having the mac running club the second one is i've always liked the third one is simpson that was a a street i grew up near and then last one check this out king's highway it's kings highway also i love kings highway i love kings highway and then eventually we settle about hampton because i grew up near hampton avenue and everyone thinks that it means the hampton it doesn't it means hampton and so sometimes peep people will say like i love the hampton referring to my company and i'm like no it's hampton so we said settled on hampton because had a good and i had a good sound to it by the way could you tell me in deciding a name is that like a one day process a one hour process a one month process for you and are you bouncing it off people or are you just going into a dark room inside what feels right in my soul like what's your what is the actual way of name gets picked for you i only ask like three people usually it's my wife my business partner and that's about it three people but actually there's only two even better did i just name too they might myself early really yeah no i don't really ask too many people because i just don't care that much like i just wanna like hear someone's got opinion but and also hampton dot com i don't think i'm ever gonna get you know who it owns that is marriott dan the hampton so i don't know if i'm ever gonna get that but check this out with branding if you ask me about this five over or ten years ago i've never a million yourself this was important but i actually do i hired a branding agency so i paid fifteen thousand dollars right out the gate and what i did was and i sent this to you i created this document and and and it says it just says one line it says elite but cheeky and the reason i was inspired by that was have you read felix dennis book yes how to get rich yes so felix dennis is this famous entrepreneur he's he's dead now but he was a wild guy he was basically a combination of richard branson and mick ja so he had like swag but he was like a legit business guy but he like was he was like elite in that he was great at what he does but he was like a silly person and he wrote in a very conversational way and i love that and so when i wrote out this branding document i listed what the business is who uses it whatever and then what i did was i listed a ton of ads that i liked so there's a bunch of advertisements from the seventies that's one of my favorite eras for ads and i found a bunch of g q ads porsche ads and rolex ads like rolex had this famous series of ads called the men who built the world wear rolex and they would do like a really cool expose on like an astronaut and you could see the astronaut he's wearing a rolex or dwight eisenhower the president of the united states he's got a rolex and it's the man who build america are wearing a rolex and so and then there's one with a wall street journal where it says money talks we translate and it's just this beautiful imagery and so i took that imagery and then i took the color british racing green you know what british racing green is i mean it's the hampton colors but it's like a famous color from like land rover and jaguar it's like these british racing colors that i love and i thought that because like when i think of a land rover or range rover or jaguar what do you got there there you go that that's almost so i i freaking love that color that's my favorite color i've got motorcycles in that color i've had a car in that color it's my favorite color and i took that color and i'm like we have to make the brand feel like these ads but be that color and i wrote a bunch of sentences that i would want on the website and that's how we selected the branding and dude hiring a branding agency is like a total hack what are some things along the way of making hampton that you could have done but you said no to and in retrospect maybe it was a good idea about it you don't know you don't know how order turned out but like what were the nose because we can only see what you said yes to we could see the the name you chose where you told us what names you said no to we could see the color you chose what were the things you said no to along the way was there anything else that was like a path you considered here's two really big ones so hampton gets let's just say these aren't the exact numbers but we'll use them roughly a hundred people a day who apply we accept a fraction of that and my partner joe and i we watch so in order to get into hampton you have to interview we watch one hundred percent of the interviews and we are the only people who click approve or deny that is it it was us too that is our job is to watch one hundred percent of the interviews so you said no to del that out we said no to del that out and we also here's what sucks could we turn down so many people and it's like we're turning down so much revenue and it fucking kills me i'm like adding up the numbers when i now when you asked me so chief cheap dot com there it's it's like this business i guess we're like them but they're for women executives you know why they grew so fast they grew to a hundred million revenue in four or five years they led in one hundred percent of the people who apply an interview we don't and it fucking kills me i see all this miss revenue and i'm like oh my god and so i'm picking in my head i'm like so a lot of people we've talked about this but kings ford charcoal was invented because ford had all this extra wood that they used to like their furnaces and they eventually turned it to charcoal that's how kings ford charcoal came about and so always in my head i'm like what's the charcoal i could make from these people who we've rejected or who don't fit our criteria at the moment and but we've said no to doing any of those ideas and so we're all what we said basically we're only focusing on ceos of this demographic of this type of business and we're only going to do that until we say otherwise and there's no time in the near future that we intend to say otherwise well let me tell you two things i think you could be doing so i can even give you two ideas i think you maybe should have said yes to number one i think if i go to your website right now i don't see that you say no of that many people or that you it's a that there's a cure that how heavy the curation is all the things you just said to me would make me want join because like oh they're really actually secured in the community these are actually high quality people the founders watch every single interview they let they accept in less than one percent of people they have a counter on their website of how many people they've said no to or how many how much revenue they've said no to in order to make the community solid because that comes first and we put our money where our mouth this we turn down this much revenue adam maybe maybe it's too too vulgar but like i think you could use that the second thing you got the elite part right now now now we have to make it cheeky yeah yeah exactly i just went elite douche so i don't know gotta work on the other part the other thing i don't think you did did great job of is your story so like would you do you value a founding story in or like the founder story in the founding story of the company you think that's important or useful i think that's incredibly important and i think i made a mistake because i wanted to make this not the sam par business and i think i've screwed up i think i should have leaned into that i think the way it works i did this with the hustle you can the founder can be the company or be the face for a period of time and you could phase it out and with this time i was like i'm not gonna be it and i screwed that up yeah yeah i think you should lean it to that because you know the the situations where you don't want the founder to be the the the face and the reason to join is when the founder has to deliver the service it's like the the law firm or the the specialty you know marketing exec it's like oh this guy's great but oh now i'm handed off to some junior person they're doing my marketing i want that guy on my account whereas with this you don't have to be the account you know you're not delivering the actual service so i think you could use it because the true founding story is that's how we met we made a peer group in san francisco when we didn't no shit when we were running our companies and there was there was least to fail or succeed and in that group came a billion dollar company hundred million dollar company a thirty million dollar company a fifty you two failures but one best manage wedding and a friend who you ended up investing in their thing and that came out of that and then this podcast came out of that which then has become one of the top business podcast podcasts blah blah like that's actually almost like your founding story as an entrepreneur and helped you when you actually sold the hustle successfully so from i remember in our peer groups it was like i'm gonna do the hustle it was an events business then no no next month no it's not an events business it's a blog business you said something that stuck with me and it was it pissed it pissed you off no no because you weren't wrong you were right in that i couldn't build a huge company that way but you were wrong in that i don't have to build a huge company in order to achieve my goals which was you go dude you're showing up to this fight you're showing up to this knife fight which just a knife don't even want you to have a gun you need to have a magic fucking wand and i was like well you're not wrong that would be nice to have that but i but i don't and so until that we're using our fist and silicon look valley if you go pitch for investors you're basically making a promise is gonna be a billion dollar company so i was like i don't think this gonna be a billion dollar company what i didn't know is you were like i'm not trying to build a billion dollar company i'm trying to build a company that makes me x millions of dollars and like and i could do it it can actually do that and that would change my life it'd be fucking awesome which is a different bitch so you are right but where where i was wrong was i shouldn't have aimed for that in the get from the get go right right but you are correct but so i think you know maybe using a founding story would be helpful for you because it's genuine that's actually you know the origin of i think you know a lot of this is like first firsthand experience how the peer group helped you and how blah blah blah and then how it also leads to all these other thing that group became you know one guy like you know a groom at your wedding another guy becomes a investment you make down the road blah blah like that's that's kinda how these tend to work so anyways that's my my two sets well thank you did you have you ever used a branding agency have i used i used a guy for the milk road not i mean he's an agency but it's like a guy one guy i you actually nailed i think you nailed that to be honest yeah i think i loved it it was a cool experience it definitely felt so indulge it's like okay now i'm gonna take a break from my zero revenue business to go through this mood boarding process with this designer and talk about how the brand needs to feel it's like it needs to feel like there's a user and a customer and there's definitely a part of my voice that was like shut up shut up you idiot you go go build your business but what we did the the the trade off we did was we actually with no road we wanted to do a brand right away and we said let's reward ourselves with the brand when we get to i think we said a hundred thousand subscribers on the on the list and i said today we're gonna make the brand and but when we get to a hundred thousand then we'll know like this is we can always re bran and we can we could polish it up that's what we did to reward ourselves i think in the future i would probably use an agency if i'm confident about the idea if i it's also just like i don't know it's a luxury item it's not a necessity but it's a luxury i think for some things it is a necessity like if you're e commerce brand or something you gotta get your brand right and you know another thing that i thought was a dumbest thing ever but i think it could be cool a naming agency i used the naming agency wants i i find a lot of value that now i think that it's like most agencies where a lot will suck but actually think that could be quite valuable what what naming how much of the money because this is one of my many rookie mistakes i hired a naming agency wants i paid them twenty five thousand dollars a lot of money and i hey they came in now let me tell you a couple things about them interesting one the people who work in a naming agency are actually awesome somebody who is drawn to that is a super interesting person and actually the move is to go vet branding agencies or naming agencies and then just pluck the most interesting person you have and like you're gonna run our whole brand come over and just come in house you're gonna run our brand that's what i should've have done and just just the ada audacity that they think that they can just name something dance they think that could be the job yeah who do you think you are it's like that's right so the got they come in and there's three of them i'm like it takes three to do this oh my god and so that's they three of them come in and they sit down and they say so tell me about tell me about the company and when i tell you i've never felt as much pressure in a pitch because i'm like this isn't pitching for an investor or a customer i'm like i need to give these creative because creative people like that they're very skeptical you know they see a bunch of corporate bs it's like i need to be cool and so clear and i need to capture the essence inside this business i can't just stay the surface left that's what they want they were they're like yeah but what is it and you're like i just told you what it is what do mean what is it so anyways i have this conversation with them and then i'm like i wanna know this guy's process and so i leave the room he comes i come back in smokes a months of weeds needs to style in the middle of the room he's moved our table to the side he's sitting in aisle the floor with the wipe i took our whiteboard put it on the ground and he's writing long sentences and i'm like this is not names like this is like paragraphs what are you doing and he's just writing out almost in first person this was awesome actually he's writing out in first person i i think we were doing a dating app at the time so he's he's helping us with a dating app he was just writing out like from first person almost venting as the customer and he's like i don't download a dating app i downloaded dating apps all of them every single one of them it's embarrassing and he's like i've tried them all i used them all and i hate them all but i used them i i hate use them and he's like i hate them because it's mostly me sitting there sending out messages that are not getting replies and i just and and and then the next message i sent i know this is probably not gonna reply that's a pretty hopeless feeling at least if i go up to a girl at a bar she rejects me to my face online coward these women are coward and he's like they don't even well so then he's he's just venting and he's like and he's scratching stuff out because he's like no that's not really true but it was almost like slam poetry it's like he was trying to like almost get into the feeling of the problem and then the solution and he was buddy he was doing it not in a business plan anyway but whether way i really actually like that process and i kinda hijack that so i've paid a very expensive twenty five k to learn that one process which is actually very useful as a copywriter to to like get to the essence of like what you're trying to do the name ended up sucking and like they did all these exercises where they would be like they put out these flashcards that were like branson you know elon musk einstein they're like pick two that you think fit and then they'd be like corvette rolex louis vuitton ba blah pick two and then i'm like dude what is this personality quiz and i was like i hated the whole process and then whatever the name was whatever was i mean i don't even remember was the name go the name i'm sorry it's very un end ending to it but how do you not remember the name that they picked that's say la that's what you should called the fucking app the app failed by the time they gave us the name we were like oh this a stupid idea we don't how to do this atlas move on i still think it's worth it by the way i still think it's worth it i think that's a lot of money though twenty five grand is a lot i think i paid my branding agency fifteen thousand yeah that's hard to when you once you start to fall into that hole you're like well so i want the best brand or just a mediocre brand like if and how much of my brand gonna be worth this is not worth an extra five k it's very hard to say no dude at least ridiculous is that the pod well let's let this recap real quick it took you you did your research in public it took you five false starts on figuring out who is the customer and the way you did it was you had an idea that sounded good in theory and they do it and try to contact them and be like do you want this and then you got like punch in the face five times and then one of them looked great but then like no founder of fit and you settled it on what was probably the obvious idea so that's like the first takeaway second takeaway away your name is awesome the name is awesome but you use streets around you okay don't know anyone else wants to copy that mine would be grand floral boulevard if which i don't think it's gonna make for a great start up name no sit sit san francisco has a bunch of good names too well that's why i used to live another the kid i think i we should show the deck that you made for the branding agency because you it this is not what they gave you this is what you gave them to get a good output you know because you garbage in garbage out if you give the bad instructions are bad prompt you're gonna get a bad result on the brand so i think that's cool to show and i think you know maybe one one other thing that i think people take away using a founder story i think a founder story is very powerful and i think i need to fix that so i just got like twenty five thousand dollars worth of advice for free so that's good i appreciate that you you got my ben alright is that it is that the pod that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looking back