The Hustle

“When we started the hustle, I saved up 25,000 dollars to start it. With that 25,000 dollars, I made 60 grand in profit in six weeks, which is pretty good. And the first year in business was roughly 380,000 dollars in revenue.”

“I have a million dollar line of credit with a company that provides line of credit for media companies.”

“The way our company is shaping now, I made a video in 2015, and I outlined what was gonna happen, and it is 100% happening exactly like that. Where, where's that video? What, how do I find that? It's on YouTube. If you google the hustle seed invest, I explain,…”

“Start as in we raised money to finish less than five years, and I made eight, eight figures.”

“By the way, if I had to start over, I would have done it differently. I would have charged way more money. Because I've learned the mistakes that you have to add a ton of people to build a big business and a ton of people for certain groups isn't necessarily g…”

“The last thing is when we interview them, I always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume, which is like the college classes and all the things that they take, because I want them to like entertain me during the interview. So in the same way that you are re…”

“I still regret, I actually regret doing that. And I wish I didn't do it. And I wish I didn't do it because when you do that, you now have a whole lot of people who are going to ask you questions and things like that. And it's quite distracting.”

“But I started this thing called the hustle, just sold it for mid eight figures to HubSpot.”

“We did in 2018 from that event series, which is just, I think we only had one, we did about 200,000 dollars in revenue and a 110,000 dollars in profit in 12 months from launch to the first year.”

“Our owner, you know, the company, this company now does a billion a year in revenue. There's like a billion plus in cash in the bank account.”

“Right now, the hustle, we have close to two million monthly or two million subscribers, of which like, 50, 60% open rate.”

“For the hustle, we get like 10,000 sign-ups a day, and we would ask them a question after they sign up, and we would do like, I would put two questions in, and then inevitably everyone at the company was like, Oh, that's already too many. I'm like, no, no, no,…”

“If you're smart enough to do this for business and you're funny, you now here's the, where the rub, you likely can get paid a ton of money as some type of analyst or some type of investor or some type of operator. And so it's really hard to retain those types …”

“I interviewed a guy to work at the hustle and he worked at one of these companies and it was like a tens of millions, maybe even close to hundreds of millions of dollar revenue business. And all it was an app where you could track all the beers that you drink.”

“Basically, I told you the goal when I started the hustle was by around 30. I wanted to make enough money that right up front, like my nut, would very passively spit off 50,000 dollars a month in perpetuity. So 50 K or the equivalent with big, including inflati…”

“And companies like The Hustle, I would pay them money. I think at one point we were paying them Maybe 50 to a hundred grand a month. And that's how many leads that they were getting us.”

“Where I think the future of kind of SaaS companies has, is going to be heading, which is more and more of them are going to control their own kind of distribution versus kind of renting audiences from other people.”

“So at the hustle, we found, I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but we found like, if you open five out of seven days right off in the first seven, five times the first seven, you're going to be with us and we're going to call you a gold perso…”

“A lot of people who have been there, done that will say the exact opposite, which is never build anything if you don't have to always use off the shelf, right? I fall into that category. Yeah. And I wish I wish a lot of this stuff had existed. I'd rather pay a…”

“And what we're seeing is that the people who fill that information in, and it's like a relatively long flow, they are Like, three or four times more engaged than other people.”

“Like, him, he, he's a contractor for us. He writes for us sometimes.”

“The pretty next door girl worked significantly better. Significantly. It always works. And so that shocked me. It worked amongst both men and women.”

“Had we made relatively minor changes, like not that different, like it wouldn't have cost us more money. We maybe would have had a few more people. And we are right now we charge 300 dollars a year. There's a world where it wouldn't have had to been that much …”

“This podcast was owned by my company called the hustle. We just sold it for a lot of money to this company called hubspot. And before we sold it, thank you. And before we sold it, we had a daily email that reached around two million people a day. And then we o…”

“Well, like for the hustle, we've done meetups forever. And then when I started my roommate business, we had meetups every single week for like two years. And so it was basically anyone who's ever looking for a roommate, you come that day and we'll have a party…”

“I started this company called The Hustle, which was a daily email that reached about two million people a day for business news. We just sold it to HubSpot for many tens of millions of dollars. And we are making, you know, twenty million dollars on ads.”

“You know, it was like 20, 40, 40, 70. So that's four years in, and then the year we sold, I'd paid myself close to 300,000 dollars.”

“And at this point at age 32, I'll make more this year from a couple like side investments, like a real estate deal that I did. I'll make more this year than collectively all of my salaries combined while working at the hustle.”

“I sold my company. I achieved it at 31. I sold my company at 31.”

“Mine was when I first started the hustle and I was the only employee blogging and trying to game Reddit and get all this traffic was the most fun I had because I, it created these dopamine rushes where like it sucked. And then like one of our articles got like…”

“So when we like years ago, or a couple years ago, we had Zoom was one of our advertisers, and this was before they went public. And the ad crushed it. It was so good. And we were like, damn dude, people love this product. They love zoom. And I ended up buying …”

“So we got to like 200,000 subscribers just through blogging and then we started doing paid marketing. And I think we paid a dollar 50 when we sold. It might have been like four dollars.”

“But anyway, we would do, I think we did 10 or 12 in one year and every single time it was like 20 and 30 grand and the cost was nothing. The cost was renting the venue, which cost like 3000 dollars and we would make like 20 grand.”

“Trends right now is making many, many millions of dollars in subscription revenue. And it's pretty simple. And there's like, I think there's only five people who work on it. So it's like a pretty profitable thing.”

“One time when HubSpot was looking to buy us, I saw that Brian Halligan, the then he's the founder and then CEO of the company he joined and I messaged like 80 people and I said, Hey reply to Brian, here's the message to say to him. And so many people commented…”

“So the hustle we sold for, let's say tens of millions of dollars, which is like, I think by most people, if you do, I think I was 3130 when we sold it, which is so like, that's six that I would say it's objectively successful, but compared to others, like it's…”

“Basically I started this company called the hustle. It was like a daily email and we sold it for, we bootstrapped and sold it for tens of millions of dollars.”

“That's like kind of underrated. And most people don't do where they're like, I see this person is successful. I'm just going to do the exact same playbook, but in a different product category or different sector.”

“I didn't have a trademark.”

“Had I not been in a mastermind with you, I wouldn't have seen how you built the hustle and I wouldn't have known. How to build the milk road, a business I didn't know I was planning to create five years later, but that blueprint was etched in my brain from tho…”

“I think there's a lot of value, especially for something like what you're doing, because you're going to have the seed community of people who are like founder type people who probably listen to the pod. They know you, or they know about the hustle and they tr…”

“I've built a success, a successful-ish company before with the hustle. You know, we had tens of millions of revenue and it exited and all that.”

“They get me in a room, they like send me a term sheet and they're like, well, buy your company for ten million dollars, but it's going to be all in stock. And I was like, well, show me the financials and like, let me see what's going on with your business. And…”

“I mean, if you look at the hustle, I don't know how many people we had when we sold the company, maybe 40. So we probably have hired 60 or 70 people. A lot of them are really successful now. Like we hired them when they were like 23 and a lot of them, maybe li…”

“A lot of times, particularly in trends, my one of the first communities that I built, I would seed it by having 10, 20, 30 people who I knew were impressive. And I just said, you don't have to pay anything, but you're joining this community. Also on this date,…”

“I originally started it as a conference and if I had five if I had 2000 subscribers, To my conference newsletter, I think I made 50,000 dollars in conference ticket sales. And then when I had 10,000, I think we did a 150,000 in ticket sales, something like tha…”

“And this CEO of a large multi-billion dollar media startup that everyone knows. I'm not going to call him out. He told me, I go, I'm gonna start this thing called the hustle. I think it could become a huge thing. He said, this will never make more than a milli…”

“I do have a non-compete, so I can't start like a business news email for another one year, I think.”

“The hustle didn't, we didn't even have an Instagram handle until like four years in. Like, I like, I was like, no, we're not even gonna do social media. We're doing nothing.”

“I sold the hustle without owning that trademark.”

“At the hustle, we thought about launching multiple newsletters and I was like, Nope, we're just gonna do this one thing. We're gonna do it well, because Scott Belsky, Told me to focus and to only do this one thing. So I'm literally going to say no to everythin…”

“At the end of the process, I walked away with about twenty million dollars.”

“I think your deal with HubSpot, though, is better than what we would have paid. Well, and it was like, we got to the numbers, and we would have been cheaper than HubSpot.”

“And you don't want to give them anything that's messy. Otherwise you'll look not buttoned up. And if you look not buttoned up, they'll say, what else are you missing? Or like, are you lying about something and you need to present things in a really nice orderl…”

“And what it does is it crushes Team morale, and it gets you in a losing state of mind, and it just sucks.”

“Women in particular were horrible at pushing back on their salary for what they should ask for. And, you know, my company was small. We, in aggregate, probably hired 75 people. But I noticed a small trend of women in particular did not push back nearly as hard…”

“Andrew Wilkinson does this. He throws his weight around. When he wants something, or he like sets his target on someone, a relationship, or a business he wants to buy, or whatever, He really throws his weight around in a way that I definitely don't, right? Lik…”

“Looking back, I should've spent way more, but I didn't, because I was being too cheap.”

“It has to be an approachable young woman, and I have found that that gets the most clicks amongst all demographics”

“Basically the hustle. We could have, I mean, we were at about two million subscribers when I sold. Now I don't know what it's at. Let's say three or three and a half. Basically three people on editorial. If we were selling ads. So when I ran the company, three…”

“I think we went from like 500,000 in revenue to 2.2 To like five to 12 or something like that. And we didn't make a lot of profit along the way. I think the year we sold, we did maybe a million in profit, but our cash flow was high. So I was able to add like t…”

“I built a iPhone emulator on our computer where we created this ring where we were constantly referring each other to these like new. So I basically had like 5000 dollars of free caviar.”

“All just so we basically, when we sold the company, we were going to do about twenty million dollars that year in revenue. And we had something like 35 people, but only two writers.”

“So we launched a subscription thing that within year one was doing like five million in revenue.”

“When Tim Ferriss invested in the hustle, we, I got to hang out with him for an hour or so, and I was telling him about how many subscribers that we were growing by. He's like, well, you need, like, a pairing metric. You need you know, not just top-line, like, …”

“When we sold to Hub, when we sold to HubSpot, I think the share price, I think it was 350 dollars, And then, like, the week they announced it went to, like, 460 dollars, or something like this. Anyone can go back and look at it. It was February of 21.”

“Dude, when we sold the company to HubSpot, one of the reasons we went into the year with millions and millions of dollars booked of advertising, and we were probably going to do twenty million dollars the next year. And they were like, yeah, just cancel all th…”

“So the first time I tried to sell, I hired a banker and we ended up getting an offer from vice and it was an all stock offer.”

“So in 2018, I think we ended the year at 500,000 subscribers. We had 5.1 million in revenue. About a million was from advance. And I paid my we had a 160 grand in profit.”

“We did an education like a course, and it made 300,000 dollars in one month, and it helped save us”

“And I think having an enemy, whether it's real or fake, right for us, it was the skin and the hustle. I think it's really, really important. You know, beehive has convert kit. And I think it just motivates everyone just a little bit more.”

“We ended the year with 250,000 subscribers. We had 2.2 million in revenue. 400 K was events. 1.8 was advertising.”

“We did about eight million in revenue, which would six 40 being from events. We did profit of 200,000, but we did cash flow of 1.6 million.”

“The hustle launched on four, 2016. And so that year we did 400 K in revenue. I think we had at the end of the year, we had like a 100,000 subscribers.”

“I don't think it would succeed. I think that it would, I would not succeed. I got to like 300,000 subscribers organically in like two years. Like it was so easy looking back on it. That would never happen again. It's, there's too much noise.”

“This like prestigious journalist, I asked her to come in freelance for the hustle. And she wrote a letter back to me and she says like, that's cute. Thanks. And like, it drove like eight years of like success for me because I was like, I'm going to prove this …”

“Like, I think that's a, there's going to be a very large business to be created there, right? Like Buzzfeed, you know, hustle, et cetera. Like, you know, all of these were like high growth businesses in that era. Of news. And I think now there's going to be a …”

“There was that one point we were making, like, 30 or 40 grand a day.”

“The hustle, I think we were at a 100,000 subscribers in year one, and then I think it was 500 in year two, and then a 1,000,003, something like that.”

“Way better to go after smaller groups and charging a lot more, but back then I couldn't even imagine the idea of someone being willing to spend two or three or four or 5000 dollars per ticket to a trade show, and I wish I would have figured that out.”

“Assume that 80% went into the S&P 500. Yeah, it's double. Is it up 75%? Yeah. I think the S&P, I mean, just whatever the S&P is up, 80% of my portfolio is up that amount.”