How Did Sam Parr's The Hustle Start Out?

The above screen grab is from Noah Kagans interview with post-sold The Hustle Sam Parr. You can check it out here:

When you have a look through the video you can hear some pretty cool facts:

• multi-million dollar company after 1 year and no employees
• sold the company only after a few years 
• made content and an email list

The business model seems to be:

• create content on a blog
• make sure traffic is enough
• get a newsletter
• moniterise the site with ads, sponsorship and affiliate links

That seems to be the main story (spoilers of the video)

 But how did Sam Parr and The Hustle do that in the first year?

This is where the story becomes interesting because when you look back at the first year you find the following:

• unsure if $550,00 is revenue meaning profit or is revenue just sales
• The Hustle was launched on July 7th 2015?
• 300 emails collected each week
• 555,958 visitors over 2 months
• $10-$/day Facebook ads- roughly, for basic maths, $3650/ yr
• Sam does a lot of the writing and editing. John, the co-founder, takes care of all things tech and design and occasionally writes. And Kera, the head of operations, does all of the proofing

So there are 3 people here including Sam? Oh, and this info is from The Hustles website: https://thehustle.co/the-first-2-months-of-the-hustle

Please enter HustleCon

HustleCon started before the website. Its a convention for people wanting to know about startups without any tech or business knowledge. Or as Forbes puts the start of the journey:

"While the deal with Apartment List was in progress (a company Sam Parr and a co-founder sold) , Parr met Eric Bahn. Bahn had previously founded and sold BeatTheGMAT, and he became a mentor to Parr. Bahn told Parr about Hustle Con 2013, an event Bahn and co-founder Liz Yin were putting on. It was going to be a one day event with approximately 150 people attending. Parr attended, and loved it. After leaving Apartment List in 2014 Parr asked Bahn if he could organize another Hustle Con. “I put up a crappy website and started creating content,” Parr says. “In just 7 weeks somehow 400 tickets were sold and we made $50,000. I was shocked it went so well.”

HustleCon grew into a more education experience with limited seats, like a quick MBA.

Highly likely this was the seed money used to start The Hustle. Because Sam actually mentions salaries:

"Salaries have been our biggest expense so far, and it’ll remain that way for the next few years. We’ve spent about $13,000 for each of the last two months, most of which went to salaries. We pay ourselves very little. This will increase to $25,000 in the next few months when the new team members come on board."

So just on salaries at basic $13k/month there is $156k/yr. There is no mention of utilities, rent etc.

Oh, nearly forgot, there are 12 advisors/ investors that came on board roughly the same time as the team was being built. Some of the advisors/ investors were from Amazon and Nerdwallet to name a couple of the companies.

So at the moment a 1 person who earned $550,000 over 1 year had a team behind him, with experience and revenue to start :)

Why was The Hustle bought for so much?

It wasn't for the content even though the content was cool. The content is was kept people hooked and brought people from email to the site.

The visitors didnt really matter.

What does matter is the interaction of visitors with the content and that newsletter list. You may have Facebook ads but what if they are not converting to subscribers? Are those subscribers doing anything? What is the cost of each subscriber? So you need to remember funnels and track where people are going on your site- especially if you are paying for them.

The money is in the list especially when online. The list can be an email list or subscribers to a Youtube channel.But when you are online you are a click away from any site or video. So there has to be some way to get back in contact with people and how are you supposed to do that?

Youtubers and content creators know that building a list is vastly more important than anything else. If that list is highly intractable then the list becomes much more valuable.

But everyone has a growth primary factor. What is the reason to do something? To make money is an idea, but maybe $500/month. Everything that you do must therefore aim for that target of $500/ month.

• MrBeast did this. He wanted 10 million subscribers within a year. So most of his early videos were very focused on subscribers and getting people to subscribe
• Facebook wanted growth. Anything that caused growth got approved. Anything that deviated from that goal was shot down.

This is why The Hustle homepage looked like this, to gather subscribers:

But the articles could be found so that they could be SEO friendly:

As always we wish Sam Parr all the best

If you want to check out more articles, see the Jasonera blog here.

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