The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 55 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Shaan Puri calls ZURU's Nick Mowbray the most impressive MFM guest ever
“Out of every guest I've ever had on this podcast, ever, he is the number one most impressive founder that I've ever had on the podcast.”
Parr: A 17-year-old podcast guest ran a $30M/year business
“Dude, we had a guy on the podcast the other day who was 17 years old who had a business doing thirty million dollars a year in revenue.”
Shaan Puri: Nick Mowbray is the most impressive entrepreneur on MFM
“I think the guy is the most impressive entrepreneur that's ever been on the podcast, and we've done it. 700 episodes, something like that.”
Shaan Puri says My First Million is his only permanent, non-exit project
“This is the only thing I do that I'm not looking to exit, right? Like, I'm not looking to sell this and like, then I'll be able to relax and retire. It's like, no, no, I kind of want to keep doing the pot. You'd have to pay me to stop.”
Puri: My First Million compromised its brand by overly optimizing thumbnails
“I think that we have made a mistake in, in part of our world, which is, I don't think, I think we kept the content pretty pure and sacred to what we want, but I think the packaging we've sort of tried to sell out and calculate and try to like maximize clicks a…”
Puri: My First Million edited out awkward exchange with Jesse Itzler
“We had to cut it out of the episode because he got so awkward.”
Shaan Puri: Cultivating a blunt persona enables asking intrusive questions freely
“Cultivating like an image of being, you know, sort of a don't give an F slash blunt personality has all these advantages because people just create new rules for you.”
Shaan Puri: Co-hosts should react big and sell each other's jokes
“There are several things like that where you got to kind of sell the other person's thing and it's not fake. It's just like be expressive, laugh hard, react big. That stuff works when it comes to content and people are very shelled up about that sort of thing.”
Hour-Long Podcasts Build Deeper Loyalty Than Ten-Million Visitor Websites
“Our podcast gets one or two million podcast downloads a month and compared to like a lot, like a website that gets ten million. I'm like, I think we're, we have a bigger, a big, we don't have a bigger, but we have a far more loyal following because people list…”
Podcast Clipping Agency Founded via Contest Hits $1 Million in Revenue
“The first, first winner, they Had a few million views on their like TikTok channel or whatever, and we paid them the five grand, you know, prize for our thing, but they've actually turned that into a business for other podcasts and that business will do like a…”
Sam Parr predicts My First Million will reach 3M downloads in 2022
“We're going to get to like the three million range by the end of the year. And once there I think we're going to be end up being like one of the big, I think we'll be like in the Dave Ramsey, Tim Ferriss category inside the next year and a half.”
Parr: Growing My First Million has been his hardest growth challenge
“Growing our podcast, we've talked about it a bit on this podcast, which people like and sometimes don't like us talking about it too much, but it's been the hardest thing that I've had to grow.”
Parr: YouTube is the optimal growth platform for podcast distribution
“I think YouTube is just the way to go. So, and that's what we'll be doing with this show is going hard.”
Shah warns that brand names reducible to an acronym lose their punch
“Anything that can be reduced in acronym will be, which my first million is often reduced to that. And then you kind of lose the punch because when it comes down to an acronym, anyone that comes like in immediate, like they're not gonna know what it is if they …”
Puri notes that early rebrands carry negligible switching costs for growing brands
“If you believe that this thing is going to get 10 times bigger in the future, which I do, then 90% of our future listeners haven't even heard about us yet. And so we're only offending a very small, we're only changing on a very small population of people for t…”
Shah advises evaluating rebrand alternatives before deciding to change names
“Don't decide to change the name, decide to come up with alternatives and then objectively measure those alternatives. Like, okay, Am I willing to give up the brand equity and go through the pain of changing a name because this one is just so much better.”
Sam Parr: My First Million Will Hit 1M Monthly Downloads by January
“So we're going to hit a million downloads a month by around January at 10% growth rate.”
Puri: Podcasts provide greater reach and mileage than CNBC appearances
“More people will listen to this podcast, and I'll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn't have the same, it doesn't feel the same. It doesn't get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does.”
Puri: $4M annual rolling fund generates more value than podcast ads
“You know, I started a rolling fund largely off of the audience from this thing that said, hey, I've listened to this guy a bunch. I trust him. He has a good track record. And so now that rolling fund is four million dollars a year that I get to invest into sta…”
Puri: Pre-made proof of work beats traditional resume job applications
“This is like, this is, you know, like, it's like the opposite of a job application. Normally you get a job app. You put a job up that you want to hire somebody to do X and then some people apply. And then you're like, are you kind of squinting? You're like, do…”
Steph Smith: 30-second podcast mention drove six figures for Internet Pipes
“Off that I'm pretty sure it's hard to tie directly. Like, but for sure, six figures.”
Puri: Spotify grew from 5% to 30% of My First Million streams
“We doubled on Spotify last month. Spotify is growing like crazy as a podcasting platform, and it used to be like five percent of our Streams. Then it became 10% of our streams. 15%. It's like 25, 30% of our streams now.”
Shaan Puri's initial business plan projected My First Million losing money annually
“When I started it, I was basically like, I'm going to lose. I plan, I wrote down in my plan. This will, this should lose about 10 to 20,000 dollars a year.”
Parr scaled Hampton to millions in revenue without podcast promotion
“You built a product, launched it, did not use your audience initially publicly. You didn't use the podcast to promote it initially. Maybe your brand name helped in private, but you didn't do it publicly and you drove it to millions of dollars in revenue very e…”
Puri commits to rejecting new startup CEO roles to maintain focus
“Well, I have to say no to starting a company. I sit on this podcast every week, and I come up with ideas for businesses. I got to say no to actually going and doing them, because if I now, I'm a CEO of a startup, I'm not going to be able to achieve this goal. …”
Puri: 'My First Million' was originally launched with Ishan Haque
“One thing that people don't know is this podcast was started actually not with me and Sam, me and you. I hit you up on Twitter DMs. And I saw that you were doing a, you were a podcast editor for somebody else I knew I think Corey or Angel List or something lik…”
Puri: My First Million took three years to reach 100k downloads
“I remember thinking we're going to hit, let's get to a 100,000 downloads per episode. So that's the thing, like per episode, I want a 100,000 downloads. By the end of the year. So it's like 12 months. Took me three years. So like, you know, now we do that, but…”
Puri: My First Million was started as an excuse to meet 50 SF founders
“When I originally started the pod, I literally wrote this in a doc. I've shared this before. I wrote most likely nobody's going to listen to this, but there's a hack really smart and interesting. Successful people are willing to go on a podcast. Even if it has…”
Sam Parr: My First Million generates 2M to 5M monthly impressions
“Our monthly downloads on the podcast are, Range between 1.5 and two or 1.3 and two million. And then the pod, the, and then the YouTube episode views are another one or two million. So we're in the range of two to five on any given month.”
My First Million gets ten times more audio downloads than YouTube views
“Our podcast has like 10 times more downloads. So they're like, oh, this little shitty podcast only has 10,000 videos on this thing or 10,000 views on this thing. And I'm like, yeah, we suck. Sure.”
Sean Puri wants to build a fanbase as obsessive as CrossFitters
“And I would say that if we succeed, we need to succeed in creating people that are as annoying as CrossFitters as our fans. I think that's my new goal.”
Parr: A $5,000 TikTok clipping bounty generated 30 million impressions for MFM.
“The best promotion we did recently was we just announced that we're going to give 5000 dollars to some person who takes our clips and turns them into TikTok videos and gets popular on TikTok. And we got, I think, thirty million impressions on TikTok in like, 2…”
Parr: My First Million averages 50,000 to 100,000 downloads per episode
“So we get between 50 to a 100,000, probably average.”
My First Million's TikTok bounty campaign generated 30M views in three weeks
“So far, the hashtag that we asked people to use has gotten thirty million views in three weeks.”
Parr: My First Million crossed two million monthly listens in December
“Now, we did, in December, we crossed two million listens a month, and we're like, now we're definitely, like, we're definitely too big.”
Parr: MFM's TikTok clip contest generated 15 million impressions
“We have in the ballpark of around 15 ish million impressions from these videos. And it's mostly young folks who created these TikTok handles from scratch, took our content and some videos have over a million. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of likes.”
Puri: My First Million paid an agency tens of thousands monthly for clips
“We also tried making our own clips, paying an agency tens of thousands of dollars a month to be making really awesome animated clips of our content.”
Parr: HubSpot gave My First Million a $1M annual marketing budget
“Hundreds of thousands of dollars a quarter. So hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe, maybe we could say like in the range of a million dollars a year.”
Shaan Puri sold podcast airtime as an NFT for 11.55 ETH.
“The auction closed, and I think it made 33,000 dollars. So I think it closed at 11.55 ETH which is about 30, 32, 33,000 dollars.”
Puri: My First Million is growing 20% to 25% month-over-month
“Our show is growing like 20% month over month, 25% month over month.”
Shapiro: Podcasts succeed by riffing on ideas rather than asking questions
“What's going on here that special is they're not asking boring interview questions. They're literally just riffing on ideas collaboratively. And making charge statements and letting other people respond to them. And the net effect is it feels way more like rap…”
Shaan Puri: My First Million Will Plateau Before Reaching 1M Downloads
“So I think we're going to probably plateau somewhere here in the six to 700,000 per month before we shoot through the million per month.”
Sam Parr: My First Million Ranked #8 On Apple And Spotify
“Our top rating, we are number eight in iTunes and in Spotify in the business category, which is pretty good.”
Sam Parr: My First Million Reached 630,000 Downloads In May 2021
“So this month, May is over now, but in May we're doing a podcast push. So we got about 630,000 listens.”
Parr: My First Million hit 520,000 monthly downloads in May 2021
“March, March, we did 338,000 downloads in April. We did 436,000 downloads. So that's a 30% gain about in May. It's tracking towards around 520,000, which is another 20 20% increase.”
Parr: My First Million will hit 1M monthly downloads by Dec 2021
“And we did the math. And we're like, if it grows, if the last 16 months repeats itself it'll be, we'll be at a million downloads a month by, like, December-ish.”