The Ledger
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Parr: Approachable young women drive the highest ad click-through rates
“It has to be an approachable young woman, and I have found that that gets the most clicks amongst all demographics”
Sam Parr admits The Hustle could not grow organically if launched today
“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.”
Sam Parr seeded the Trends community by giving influencers free early access.
“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,…”
Parr orchestrated fake engagement for HubSpot's CEO during acquisition talks
“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…”
Parr: 80% of my Hustle exit proceeds went into the S&P 500
“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.”
Parr: Across 75 Hires, Female Candidates Negotiated Salaries Far Less Than Men
“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…”
Parr: Vice Media Offered $10M in Stock to Buy The Hustle
“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…”
Parr: The Hustle could have charged $30,000 annually for Trends
“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 …”
Parr: 'Girl-next-door' ad creative consistently outperforms traditional models across demographics
“The pretty next door girl worked significantly better. Significantly. It always works. And so that shocked me. It worked amongst both men and women.”
Parr: Event businesses should target small groups at high ticket prices
“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.”
Liu: AI-driven personalized news will spawn the next BuzzFeed or Hustle
“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 …”
Vice Media attempted to acquire The Hustle in an all-stock deal
“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.”
The Hustle generated $5.1M in revenue and $160K profit in 2018
“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.”
Startups need an enemy: Morning Brew used TheSkimm and The Hustle
“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.”
Parr: HubSpot canceled millions in booked ads after acquiring The Hustle
“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…”
Parr: The Hustle Paced $20M Revenue With Only Two Full-Time Writers
“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.”
The Hustle reached $12M in revenue and $1M profit before its sale
“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…”
Sam Parr: The Hustle Reached 2M Subscribers With Three Editorial Staff
“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…”
Andrew Wilkinson Uses His Private Jet to Aggressively Pursue Deals
“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…”
Parr: Overly Optimistic Financial Projections Crush Startup Team Morale
“And what it does is it crushes
Team morale, and it gets you in a losing state of mind, and it just sucks.”
Sam Parr walked away with $20M from his company sale
“At the end of the process, I walked away with about twenty million dollars.”
Sam Parr: I sold The Hustle without owning its trademark
“I sold the hustle without owning that trademark.”
Parr: A competitor grew faster because we refused to launch multiple newsletters
“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…”
Sam Parr: Major Media CEO Claimed The Hustle Wouldn't Top $1M Revenue
“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…”
Puri: Legacy press provides vital credibility beyond podcast audiences
“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…”
Ali: Cloning proven playbooks into new categories is underrated
“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.”
Parr reached his $20M net worth goal at age 31 after selling
“I sold my company. I achieved it at 31. I sold my company at 31.”
Parr: The Hustle reached 2M subscribers, generated $20M ad revenue before sale
“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.”
Parr: Satirical account Dr. Parikh Patel is a contractor for The Hustle
“Like, him, he, he's a contractor for us. He writes for us sometimes.”
Sam Parr: Never build custom software internally when off-the-shelf solutions exist
“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…”
Shah predicts SaaS companies will increasingly control their own distribution
“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.”
Parr: Unnamed beer-tracking app generates tens of millions in annual revenue
“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.”
Parr: Funny Business Writers Leave Media for Lucrative Finance Careers
“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 …”
The Hustle achieved a 98% completion rate on 30-question onboarding surveys
“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,…”
Parr: Regrets raising equity crowdfunding for The Hustle due to distracting investors
“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.”
Sam Parr: Ask writer candidates about the bottom of their resume
“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…”
Parr: If rebuilding his paid community, he would charge far more money
“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…”
Parr made eight figures selling The Hustle within five years
“Start as in we raised money to finish less than five years, and I made eight, eight figures.”
Parr: The Hustle scaled to over 1M subscribers by year three
“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.”
Parr: The Hustle made $30K to $40K per day sending newsletters
“There was that one point we were making, like, 30 or 40 grand a day.”
Parr: Imagined rejection email from journalist motivated him for eight years
“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 …”
The Hustle's 2020 educational course generated $300K in a single month
“We did an education like a course, and it made 300,000 dollars in one month, and it helped save us”
The Hustle ended 2017 with 250K subscribers and $2.2M in revenue
“We ended the year with 250,000 subscribers. We had 2.2 million in revenue. 400 K was events. 1.8 was advertising.”
The Hustle generated $8M in revenue and $1.6M cash flow in 2019
“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 generated $400K in revenue in its 2016 launch year
“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.”
Parr: HubSpot stock jumped from $350 to $460 after acquiring The Hustle
“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.”
Parr: Tim Ferriss Advised Using Pairing Metrics for The Hustle's Growth
“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, …”