How Sam Parr Built a Media Empire - Cap Con 5

it's a 100 emotional game for me so i read all this self-help [ __ ] i meditate every morning i exercise uh i do all these vitamins it's pretty much only to do one thing i spend most all of my energy outside of like doing the actual work i'm making sure that i can keep my mood calm you really gotta care about this thing because internet people have the greatest [ __ ] detector there is and what's the best way to circumvent someone's [ __ ] detector you don't [ __ ] that's the best way look if you have a machine that turns one dollar into two dollars what do you do you load up a dump truck with as much money as you possibly can and you just back it into that machine i had that machine and i was still very conservative with how i was spending and i think that really hurt me and i was doing it from a place of scarcity mindset and from like there's no way this is like i had a lot of self-doubt like there's no way this is gonna work no way and now looking back and i also invest in a lot of companies now i like see i'm seeing patterns i'm like i should have defaulted to optimism the whole time because it was working all right what's going on this is my first time you're going to hear everyone say that's my first time doing this in years so i'll tell you a little bit about who i am and what we do but i'll tell you a cool story first but the summary is my company it's called the hustle does anyone read the hustle cool so we have some users here so it's a it's a daily email that goes out to millions of people and we give you the business news and information you need to know that's a very simple version i'll talk more about what it what that actually means but our first week of business we almost went out of business and so basically my company it's a media company we started as a conference a little bit like this and the way that we would get speakers i didn't have any money but the way we would get speakers i couldn't buy ads uh sorry not speakers uh attendees we would uh i couldn't buy ads so i didn't have any money and so i started blogging about the speakers and one thing led to another and it was incredibly profitable and it made a lot of money but i didn't want to only do conferences and so i read the biography of ted turner of the murdoch family of the hearst family and i was like sick i'm launching a media company i'm gonna be a media guy i didn't really know what that meant but that's what i was gonna do and so i launched this post saying i've got five hundred thousand dollars on building this media company from the hustle watch us blow all the money to make it happen and i had like this picture of me where like my eyes weren't even open and i was like kind of looked like a smug jackass but i was like that's cool that's the angle i'm gonna go with i don't think i'm entirely that but i was like it's gonna get clicks it's the story's cool like we're gonna be obnoxious it's kind of douchey but it's awesome and so we launched this and then the next week i'm like all right what am i gonna write and i had remembered the story about this guy that i knew and he was making sixty thousand dollars a month selling books on kindle basically about teaching guys how to uh meet and pick up women and i was like dude you don't know anything about this i've never seen you with a woman he's like yeah but i just find top selling books and i send them to the philippines they rewrite them so they get past the kindle like plagiarism thing and they go live and i pay five dollars to get a sexy looking title and i headline it and then i pay people to review it and it goes to the top of the charts and it's a recurring cycle then i put best-selling author on my linkedin and i get paid more money doing that i'm like oh my god that is very shady and kind of a really cool story and so my first blog post like we wrote about that and then i'm like all right we got to come out with a bang we got to come out hard here so let's just copy what he said and become a best-selling author and we weren't going to do it in the like the sex women or the picking up women type of space because we found out when we were doing research that romance novels does anyone here read romance novels you can admit it yeah i didn't think that many people so i didn't read it i didn't know much about it but i researched it basically has some of the largest liquidity in the amazon marketplace so basically uh loads of new titles constantly and people eat this up they love buying it and um they read it and so we decided to launch a romance novel uh and like we did we like did research and there's like categories of like people who want to have sex with vampires people want to have sex with people in the military and so we made a joke we're gonna make like it's a it's a werewolf who's in the military and uh and um so we find a book that like was doing really well i got a guy off fiverr to make a different title and a different headline for that and then we kind of skipped over the whole getting someone to rewrite it because we only had a few days to get this live and so we kind of rewrote it we submitted it we paid people to upvote it boom it got to the top of its category we made a joke and we put linkedin bestselling author in our category you know the whole joke uh was like yeah we're best-selling author you should pay us to consult with you and uh but the point was is that like this methodology we think is not right and it's kind of shady but we did it in like a funny way and so we launched this post on like a tuesday and immediately all the bloggers in the romance novel category which there's a lot of them they got super pissed at us they thought we were making fun of them we weren't making fun of them at all we just happened to pick that category and uh they were livid and they shared it like crazy it got to the top of tons of different subreddits it got to the top of the self-publishing subreddit self-publishing blogs were writing about it it was a it was a hit right away and i get all these emails and twitter messages and facebook messages oh this is so funny or oh i hate you you're such a douche like there's all types of stuff and i'm loving it then i get this email and it says in the subject line cease and desist and it's from a url i don't i didn't recognize who this company was and it was like this really like crazy email that said something like um the book that you are used to copy that the author reach out to us we own that we're the publisher of that and we're going to pursue this as hard as we can we're going to make an example out of you and in my head i was like [ __ ] like this was like the same day like i was like was i was crushing it and then i was like we're going to go out of business the very first like three days that we launched and it was the url was harlequin has anyone heard of harlequin books i don't know what that was hardly i had no idea harlequin is a massive publisher probably i don't know exactly how big they are but thousands of employees the largest publisher of romance novels in the country the author and she was right to do this was causing a fuss about this online and uh so i get on the phone with this lawyer and i'm like and i was uh i was i was scared i was like i get scared just thinking about it i was nervous i was like oh this guy's gonna sue me we're screwed i just had this douchey post where i wrote about how i've got 500 000 to start this business and i look like an idiot on this picture i'm like this blonde white bro he's got his eyes closed like i'm the opposite of what these people like stand for the total opposite what am i doing and i get on the phone and i'm like look man my point wasn't to insult you it just that just happened to be the category i chose and he goes yeah look that was an overly stern email just trying to scare you i understand what you're trying to do can you please just like put a comment at the bottom that says you know we we talked to harlequin we removed the book from the actual amazon page and we'll calm down the author and just like say you're sorry to her and i was like oh my god thank god it was like it was like a miracle so we got away with it but then uh like basically i realized there was a few things about this business and i'll talk all about it but basically the first is if i'm going to continue doing this which i am don't look as douchey as i was and it's not wrong to be authentic and like do that type of stuff but like that wasn't even me and i was just like playing this part in order to get uh attention and i totally just suffered the consequences the second is that the type of content that we were gonna write about we were going to be very authentic we were going to write like we speak and sometimes that's going to piss people off but that's okay i in my head i was like big companies won't do this because they got to go through 10 different committees this is just me at the time it's just me there is no committee i can do whatever i want and i should do whatever i want because that's going to help me stick out um and so basically i was like i'm going to be a missionary i'm not going to be a mercenary like i'm not a hired gun here i'm going to live this [ __ ] and then the third thing was this these ideas that i have of this style of content marketing i'm going to talk all about what that style is it works so that week so i just bought the url the hustle.com so we had no backlinks we had zero traffic that week we got like half a million people to our website and the premise behind our business is we're a daily email so we reach about two million people a day and we make money through a variety of ways one big ways is we have ads in the email native ads that we we went and sold and we make the ads and so we had to get those emails in the first place once you get them then you can build a huge business you got to get them first i didn't have a lot of money and so i was like i'm going to get all these emails via content marketing and so the third takeaway from this was like this works i'm going to continue doing this and we actually still do it so my company the hustle we um we do this still every single sunday so that post that kindle post that's been read millions of times but that's not even our most popular close to it now so we still do this so we've launched hundreds and hundreds of these style of posts not always but often they do really really well and they get they go viral but that week when we launched we i didn't have an email list and by the end of the week i had 10 000 subscribers and we actually did this methodology for the first year or so where i just i was blogging like a madman i would do sometimes five posts a day and we got about i don't remember the exact number but somewhere around 150 000 to 200 000 email subscribers in the first year without a cent spent on ads and that strategy still works by the way um and so uh we still do it and so my company is called the hustle so what we do is we have this daily email that goes out to about two million people it has a crazy high open rate so something like 45 unique open rate every single day um we also own this thing called trends so trends dot co so with the hustle we make money through ads we just sold the company and i'll tell you about that as well but um had we not sold this year we would have scared and this would be our fourth or fif i think this will be our fourth full year of business we would have done about 20 million dollars in sales um and advertising would have been an eight-figure business we didn't have uh so we make money through ads in the email we didn't have our conference this year we typically host conferences but we'll have tens of thousands of people so that doesn't exist anymore unfortunately but it would have event one day that would have made millions but not this year but maybe next year but uh we also own trends so this thing called trends.co and i could talk all about that but that's a subscription business and a paid community a little bit like this and we have a team of researchers and analysts and all we do is scour the web and we have lots of proprietary data and we try to look at really fast drawing trends and explain why they're going to be popular and how you can capitalize on them the company though uh and this actually would relate to a bunch of people here so uh does anyone use hubspot some people use hubspot so they reached out to us last october and they were like look we we want to be the one of the first people to build this this software business that has a media component to it and so we closed that deal and they bought us in uh january and so uh that deal closed late january so i sold the company and and it was for tens of millions of dollars we we didn't really raise any vc i owned most the company so it was a good outcome for me and uh yeah thank you um we we still do the stuff that we started doing we did the same thing of just creating lots of free content and having some paid stuff and getting most of our users without spending any advertising money which frankly is not the best idea right like if something works i should have spent more but i didn't really know entirely what i was doing and we didn't have a lot of money uh and so we have the hustle which is the daily email we have trends we used to host conferences and we also have a podcast that i'm actually the host of um called my first million gets millions of listens uh and typically is like a top 10 maybe top 20 podcasts in the business category by listenership but give it one more year i think it'll be top five soon and we did the same thing with that we haven't spent a lick of money uh we haven't spent a dime growing it but starting next month we are gonna start spending a lot of money to grow it um and so it's a cool business and what i can talk about uh ryan was saying about how we stand out in in [Music] uh popular categories and i can tell you it it basically all comes down to content and content is interesting because everyone physically can do it everyone here can write sentences on a blog post but it's really hard to get it right because everything that you're taught in english class in like eighth grade like you just don't pay attention to that and that's basically the secret but and so when we ever whenever we write blog posts we've been you know we've got blog posts that have been seen five million times 10 million times whenever we write blog posts i always start with distribution first so i'll try to explain this but it's basically uh it's basically a circle a cycle here of how i come up with ideas but the first part and and you could come you could start in a different part of the circle but then you got to go so i always start with distribution so before i even have an article idea i say who do i want to reach and where are they then i think what medium are they going to be coming from so are they going to be coming from search from facebook right now twitter is having like a resurgence so if you're go after tech people that's where those folks are if you're going after like nerdy types of folks which is who i am and where i was going after they're on reddit and hacker news if you're going after um fitness people maybe they're on i don't know i'm not i don't read a lot of fitness accounting maybe they're bodybuilding.com maybe they're on some fitness subreddit just like where are they going to come from then i think what's the headline and then finally and this is where most people start but this is my last thing most of the time what's the story and not only what's the story but what's the emotion i'm going to get someone to feel and sometimes i'll hear a story like last year i met this guy he was wearing a like a ramones t-shirt and cowboy boots and he was like really huge and he starts talking to me about newsletters and i was like and he had a super thick southern accent i'm from missouri he was from uh missouri as well and i started talking to him and he started like saying all the stuff about his subscription he's like yeah we got a pretty good subscription business too it's just me doing it we do about 30 million in revenue and i'm like what the [ __ ] and i'm like what and i i judged him i judged him hardcore i'm like you you he goes yeah we talk about commodities and a lot of hedge fund people buy it and i'm like what he goes yeah it's just me and my son and so yeah i'm like dude this is the craziest thing i've ever heard tell me everything and so that in that example i haven't published that much yet but i've talked about the podcast that started i started that one with the story because i'm like oh i just heard something i'm going to file that i know what emotion it just got me and then then i would think like all right now what's the heck what's the headline of that going to be and where is this going to get popular and i constantly think about that that cycle most people when they do content they just say like we need users write a blog post unfortunately it's not that simple and so i can talk today i think most of learning that we'll do is through q a so we'll talk more about it there but there's this whole cycle that i use for creating content and we've done it a bunch of times so we've published many many many thousands of blog posts and the type of stuff that we do there's a few different types of content that you can do the stuff the type of stuff we do we aren't optimizing for search so if you own a brand that you're trying to optimize for search what you're going to do is probably different than what i'm talking about what i'm talking about is if i have nothing i've got no backlinks to my site so i'm not going to rank really if i don't have a name no one knows me the step is the type of stuff i'm talking about is the stuff that that uh you use what i'm saying and i actually think that's a benefit overall because it pisses some people off if you do it the right way but this group group of people who you want to love you they're obsessed they they they it's meant i call it niches make riches i'm just appealing to this one group of people and i know that i am and i'm going to go super hard on those guys and it works so that's how we built the hustle to you know millions of daily users that's how the podcast it does the same thing we do the same principles for that we know that it doesn't appeal to everyone and we work really hard appealing to a very particular type of person and we've done that with trends which is an eight-figure subscription business so that's a little bit about the hustle um i'm happy uh ryan you want to come up and we could and we could go through some questions but um i wanted to give you guys some context uh on the business and uh hopefully that will help you have some good questions later i think that's where the most where the best learnings are but uh that's kind of the story so far give it up for sam par please um before we go over to q a i i have a couple questions that came up for me you said something about starting with the distribution of going to where the people are before you even think of the the content i was curious how that impacted your approach to the podcast it makes total sense for like a a blog but from the podcast where you're doing a lot of interviews and just talking about what's going on with your own investments like how does how does that approach yeah so let me explain to you how we do this for a blog and i'm gonna there's there's like ten five or ten different ways you can do it i'm gonna tell you the easiest way my favorite way does anyone here use reddit does anyone here not know anything about reddit yeah reddit's weird it's like the fifth most popular website in america and yet there's actually a huge amount of people who have no idea what it is it's basically a bunch of subreddits which are basically forums reddit is a is a list of different types of forms for different interests and people post links and they comment on those links that's all it is and so what i like to do my whole philosophy is i want to know what the people are already talking about what type of content is trending with my desired audience and i'm going to figure out a way how to make my version touch on that but be different here's the easiest way to do that let's say that i'm writing an article about the fitness industry i'm going to go to reddit the the fitness subreddit so reddit.com r fitness and there's 1 million members of that community i'm going to click sort by top post over the last month i'm going to get 20 posts and it's going to be people posting a thought like an idea like just a headline like what's your favorite exercise for hip mobility what's your favorite do-it-yourself home equipment or i'll see an article of someone posting something and so anyway that i scroll through the first 10 pages and i get the idea of what is popular with this group and so i can just scroll through that for 10 minutes and i'll understand what it is then i pick the one i want so i just saw a post that's like nine posts down it's what's your favorite diy uh i'm gonna say do it yourself dyi uh home equipment i click comments and i sort comments by most upvoted comments and i see one that says this is great but you forgot about using pvc pipe which is the most versatile pipe i'm making a lot of this up so i might get something wrong which is like the most versatile uh building material and you could use it to make kettlebells here's a picture of me that i made it a kettlebell and it's like really highly voted um so in my head i'm like boom people care about do-it-yourself stuff and this guy just posted this thing about his kettlebell i should do a whole post on how to build kettlebells using pvc pipe for eight dollars from home depot and that is an example of how i'll get an idea for a blog post for um my first million for the podcast we do similar types of stuff so i go to hacker news and i look at what's trending and then i click the comments and my audience hangs out in hacker news so that's why i do it i go to hacker news i look at what's trending i look at the con comments to get the vibe sometimes someone the article will say one thing like we think amazon doing this is a great idea the top post will be like i disagree i think it's a horrible idea and the people debating that and so i'm like okay i got plenty of material here about interesting ideas now what is my opinion of that and that's what a lot of times what we'll do for the podcast additionally um if we're trying to get big on youtube which we're starting next month i'm going to use youtube uh data to figure out what are people searching for and i'm going to be like do i have a strong opinion or a strong uh intel on anything that they're searching for and if yes that's what i'm going to start talking about in the podcast that said about the other half of the so that's we do that for some of the podcast stuff the other stuff that we do with the podcast is we just say whatever we think is interesting and that's where like some skill and talent i mean i'm pretty good at podcasting my co-host sean is like world-class uh and so that stuff is like the talent part that it's hard to explain but what's interesting about that is does anyone listen to the podcast all right we got a few listeners so what's what's interesting about this is you are basically inserting yourself into the conversation that people are already having where they already are rather than making one up which is what most i'll make one up eventually but but you're making one up from like your own perspective on something that people are already talking about correct at least to get started right then once now with the hustle we you know we got two million subscribers we we just like we can write a story about something and we're like this is kind of [ __ ] how this is happening and maybe no one has ever called that out and then that kind of can create a movement but in order to get going i had to tap into what was already happening yeah that i mean there there's actually like some relief in that because oftentimes the idea of content creation or audience building is thought of as you making it up or posturing yourself as an authority no something i'm living my life and i'm filing stories so here's an example you guys remember you may not remember this steve harvey hosted the american beauty pageant and he like said the wrong winner like he said like the winner is and he accidentally read the runner up does anyone remember that okay so in a very split second he goes look it's what the card said and then he turned it well i zoomed in on that card and everyone was like steve harvey you idiot i zoomed in on that card and like if you know anything about ux and design it was horribly designed i totally understand why you made that mistake and so that happened on a monday night by tuesday morning we wrote a post that said like don't blame steve harvey the design of that card was horrible here's actually how it should have looked like if you use proper design principles and that post ranked the next morning on google news when everyone was searching and that got like 500 000 views and so we just took something that i knew people were gonna be searching for but i just took a different take on it so i'm not trying to be better just different yeah and it's it's really hard to not have an opinion on something and give your commentary on it and if it is thoughtful then you insert yourself into the conversation that's already happening without trying to have to invent or posture yourself in order to get attention now sam i wanted to ask you you recently had the exit you recently were acquired i was curious being on the other side of that while you were building all of this and now being rewarded for a lot of that what has happened to your mindset or your approach to business has it changed has it been a difficult transition what has that been like has anyone read this book um it's i always am embarrassed talking about it because the title's stupid how to get rich by felix dennis yeah so i read that book when i was younger and he has some line in that book that says if i had to do it all over again i would get rich by the age of 35 and he says i i forget exactly what he says but something like i would i'd want to get 30 million dollars by 35 and then i would just want to coast forever because i dedicated my life to this and i wish i would have had more time to have a family do this that i read that when i was like 20 and then i read like this mark cuban story about how he sold his business at 32 and then chilled for eight years and then started his next big thing and i was like i was convinced i was like i read this at 20 and i was like by 30 i want to have a certain amount of money to where i never have to worry again and then i will figure out what i'll do after that maybe i'll do nothing maybe i'll do something i don't know but i just want like money i don't want that to be an issue ever again and we sold right when i turned 31 and so i missed it by a year but oh yeah but the goal was to hit that and i'm a big planner and so we're right on track and so in terms of mindset um it feels uh what was the question what was the mind how's your mindset change on the other side of the exit if at all yeah so i was poor for a long time i didn't i grew up poor and i was way too frugal with my business i should have spent way more money on growth if you have look if you have a machine that turns one dollar into two dollars what do you do you load up a dump truck with as much money as you possibly can and you just back it into that machine i had that machine and i was still very conservative with how i was spending i wasn't if i would hire people i would hire like a 50 000 employee versus 120 000 employee who probably would have been more productive i didn't wasn't nearly aggressive with ads once i realized the machine's working i didn't launch stuff fast enough and i think that really hurt me and i was doing it from a place of scarcity mindset and from like there's no way this is like i had a lot of self-doubt like there's no way this is going to work no way and now looking back and i also invest in a lot of companies now i like see i'm seeing patterns i'm like i should have defaulted to optimism the whole time because it was working defaulted to optimism yeah because i it was working and i automatically default to paranoia of like i got to work really hard to make sure this shit's not broken because it's gonna [ __ ] fail so i gotta prepare for that to fail and i gotta make sure it won't and so because i'm already like that most of the stuff that i'm involved in is pretty solid so i should have had more optimism and poured more money and resources and the things that worked and that's what i'm learning now that i have i don't have to have that scarcity mindset anymore so because of your paranoia you are plugging a lot of holes yeah i think paranoid is good which actually gave you like the foundation to have the machine that turned one dollar into the optimism earlier is that what you mean yeah so like if you're preparing for a fight in the ufc like you should go to bed every night this other guy is working harder than me i gotta work harder right that's healthy but you also have to it's weird you got to have this other side of like i'm the best i can do it this is going to end well i'm going to achieve my goal and i wish i would have had a little bit more of that confidence early on but i did the best i could i mean i started the company when i was 24 i knew nothing about media or i mean i didn't know anything about anything although most people here probably were in the same boat but i i just wish i would have had a little bit more confidence of of what the business could have become i think that our the business style that we had like i said we would have done 20 so hubspot bought us and we basically shut down our whole ad department so we went into the year with millions of dollars booked of ads they go no no like we make billions of dollars a year we don't care about this little ad business we want you because you have all these amazing users and we want them to eventually buy hubspot and they're right that's a smart move but um had i continue owning the business there was definitely a path to make 100 million plus in revenue and uh i i could i should have had a i should have aggressively i should have known that that was possible because looking back it is so was did that realization come after partnering with hubspot because you see that what they're really after is the users and they're not looking at it from a profit and loss statement which means that you have you had been looking at it from that perspective which made you protective yes so that aha of saying oh this company is more interested in the users that i yeah because for me it was easy intellectually it was easy emotionally it was hard like going to work every day and like even when things weren't working like like but intellectually i'm like look i know if i write 10 blog posts only three or two are going to work like that's okay intellectually i totally understand how to do this intellectually i totally understand how to get loads of users to my website that's that's i don't struggle with that that's easy for me just like maybe for wherever you go whoever's really good at what they do it's very easy for them to do that and when someone was like hey i'll pay you tens of millions of dollars for all these users i'm like what just go do yourself uh i'm like why are you what do i what are you doing uh you know what i mean so once i learned that yeah that was part of it and also you know once you have an exit i'm like um um i now know what's possible and i know the errors that i made and one of those was not going nearly nearly hard enough i was very conservative uh with what with our money um financially you were conservative yeah yeah so like i was famous people make fun of me so we had about 35 employees all of their computers i bought on facebook marketplace for 500 a piece we were making like tens of millions of dollars why the [ __ ] don't i just go to apple like it would have saved me so much time and why do you think that you were so conservative because i grew up poor and uh every dollar in that most every dollar in there that was mine you get an emotional attachment to that of that's my money not the businesses money correct and that's and there's a story it's not stupid it's reasonable but that's it wasn't unwise it makes sense it is certainly not optimal because because when you have a story about what that money means in the business account you're not freed up to actually deploy it in the way that you're talking yeah so we didn't raise venture capital if i raised venture capital i would have run the business way differently in it and uh tell me what you would have done differently how do you raise capital well so the thing is is a lot of people here and a lot of my friends who are speaking they bought ads early on for their businesses and that worked for them i think that for a lot of people that doesn't work because you're just kind of filling up a leaky bucket or maybe your product isn't actually that great and so because we didn't have money it forced us to make something that people organically liked and then the ad money that we put on it was a fuel on the fire it wasn't the fire starter that not to say that that other i mean both strategies can work but for us we had something that worked and once i knew it worked i should have spent way more on uh it is it fair to say that your product was the content in the newsletter because that's no not no it's our product was the attention so most people here have commerce businesses i would imagine but media the the enterprise value of media is basically equal to uh the quality of people who you have consuming your stuff multiplied by the number of people multiplied by your influence over them for example if you have a blog for 12 year old kids 12 year old kids don't have a lot of money to spend so you're going to need like 50 million of them and you're going to need to have a fairly large influence on them so a lot of them will buy a hoodie from you versus if you have an audience of only 20 000 doctors who run hospitals that doctor can make a decision to purchase a million dollars worth of equipment you probably only need like i said like 10 000 of them and you need to have like a mild influence over them and uh you know like 10 000 doctors could be you know more valuable than let's say 30 million um 12 year old or something like that and so with media you have to look at that equation um to to figure things out makes sense so you brought up at the beginning how you were scrapping to get an audience and to get attention to be you were not an expert in the field of going after tech nerds well i had been blogging forever you had yeah on my own personal blog so and i so prior to um at 24 you were blogging forever no i had been blogging so i was 18. okay uh and i've been storytelling for a long time so prior to starting my business i actually owned a chain of hot dog stands in nashville tennessee and it was called southern sam's wiener's as big as a baby's arm and and look i'm selling hot dogs like they pretty much all taste the same right like if i gave you like five different brands yeah it's [ __ ] fine it's just me it's fine so i had to figure out how do i sell this thing and so that's like with a i'm from missouri i'm not really from the south but like this shtick i realized i had to come up with sticks and i had to learn how to get people's attention and so i had this like marketing thing that if you put your baby's arm in a bun and put mustard on it you get and i let me take a picture you get a free hot dog and so and so at a young age i read the book um influenced by robert cialdini and i learned early on how to use my voice to influence people to get them to do what i want them to do and so i would use that to sell hot dogs and i just kind of took one day i took a course by my friend neville medora who at the time wasn't my friend i was just a fan of his and i learned about copywriting and i was like man i'm really good at selling if i just talk to someone if i learned copywriting i could like do this like to you know an infinite amount of people and so that's when i learned how to put that on text and be a copywriter and then once i understood how people thought copywriting sales copywriting is basically figuring out what motivates a human being and conveying or creating a solution that makes it easy for them to want to purchase it and once i figured out how to people think then i was like now how do i get someone to share this blog or share this content and then i just deployed that on the blog and i've been blogging and perfecting this and in order to learn how to be a great copywriter and be a great blogger what i was i spent years doing this uh i called it copy hour so for one to two hours every single day i would get the best of something so for example i did the catcher in the rye i did saturday live scripts i did movie scripts i did the best sales letters of all time i did great blog posts and i would print them out and word for word i would copy them by hand and the reason i did that was if you look at like how we learn how to play guitar or any instrument in america it's it's it's very easy you can go from knowing nothing to being a pretty good musician in like a year and the way you do that is you copy other people's songs so you learn to play piano you learn how to play jingle bells you learn to play this other thing then you move on and start learning how to play some like cool rock music that you like and you master that and then you're like oh i see all the patterns here this is amazing then you write your own thing and that's what i did with writing is i just copied other people's work to understand oh wow check out this thing that stephen king always does i just caught it and it makes me feel this the way this way and then after a while i was like all right now i understand how stories work i'm going to make my own stories and i'm going to use all these techniques that i've physically learned by writing them out by hand what i'm curious about in those early days at the hustle is not having any existing influence over tech nerds and getting their attention it what's interesting about that is oftentimes people who are who model your approach have the assumption that there's some expertise and you're speaking from a place of authority and you just went in with that with like in order just getting their attention i i i want to know going into that did you know that tech people were your people yeah that was the target market i didn't have authority in that like why should my opinion be better than anyone else's i i couldn't like tell you why other than i thought it was uh which isn't like you know it's an okay reason but um i was a tech person i am a business nerd and so i said earlier that i was a missionary not a mercenary so it's not like like if you were to ask me to start a blog on um uh we have uh kettle and fire here on bone broth uh bone broth is cool but it doesn't really interest me like i would have to go and become an expert but uh like i don't really care about that so i would be a hired gun for that and you probably probably wouldn't be as good with the tech stuff that was my life you know i cared about it i thought about it constantly um and so i became an expert probably i mean am i an expert i don't know but maybe because yeah people's perception maybe but because i kept doing it but i lived this life i care about it deeply i love it i was blogging about this stuff and then it just so happened i started making money from it from it so um some of the greatest people who i like in media ted turner he's obsessed with news he loves news rupert murdoch obsessed with news rupert murdoch owns all these newspapers that don't even make money and they're like why do you do that he goes i love it i'm obsessed with it i can't let this guy go like i love this newspaper um and i feel the same way about a lot of media stuff i'm obsessed with it i'm addicted to it media is a really weird thing there's a reason why rich guys like benioff and the facebook guy buy failing newspapers it feeds your ego and it feels awesome and uh hopefully sometimes it makes a profit and so i'm obsessed with media but it's difficult to come into the media game unless you are obsessed with something and i totally agree yes and for and for most people they are out thinking their interests like they're trying to target so perfectly that they're not actually following what they're obsessed about enough in order to get the attention 100 you have to be obsessed about it and often people who own businesses will say hey can you teach me how to use content to get users and i'm like i can but i can knowing what i know about you it's going to suck because like you're not even connected to this you really don't give a [ __ ] i don't know how you're going to even like a lot of people want to hire people out right away i'm like man unless you have a voice that comes from the top it might be challenging and also um you really got to care about this thing because internet people have the greatest [ __ ] detector there is and what's the best way to circumvent someone's [ __ ] detector you don't [ __ ] that's the best way and so it's really so like people will get into this business and they want to hire like someone on upwork just to do keyword fillers and it's like uh that's not gonna work maybe sometimes occasionally but typically that's not gonna work and you really need to care about it and i guess the ceo or founder doesn't always have to care about it but they gotta at least know how to find and motivate the people who are passionate about it so that that's what i wanted to ask you next because what you're saying makes total sense for a solopreneur or even a solopreneur with a with an assistant but when you try to scale that and build a team of 35 people it is difficult to protect that obsession so what did it look like for you to go from a person who's blogging about things that get attention and then building an infrastructure that is now a media company yeah building a content team's hard and we fire a lot of people so we hire pretty quickly and then we fire them right away if it doesn't work out and that's a lot in the media that's kind of normal and we hot when we hire people we're like yeah we're going to give you a chance within four weeks you know we'll know if this works and usually they're like yeah this doesn't work you know when we tell them it's not like a there's like some mean thing um and so uh we we i have a editor-in-chief his name is brad wolverton i recruited him from nerdwall and before that he was at the washington post at nerdwall he wrote about personal finance which is related to business so he really cared he's an amazing person at managing writers managing riders which i put myself in that category as the writer it's a huge pain in the ass everyone's a diva the best ones are divas and you have to put up with it because what makes them a good co-worker um or sorry what makes them a good writer and a creative person makes them a shitty co-worker and someone who's a pain in the ass they're like typically always late they get they will submit their stuff at the very last minute they won't know what they're doing on a wednesday even though they're going live on a friday that is it but that is normal those types of people often are very very good and so you have to be very patient at managing them you have to be very patient at saying what they can and cannot do so for example one time goldman sachs interviewed or sponsored our newsletter and we did a story on [ __ ] jerry [ __ ] jerry's this instagram handle that has all these followers and he was launching something interesting and so we wrote about it and uh one of the writers decided to put um the word [ __ ] in every sentence he's like [ __ ] jerry launch this thing it should be pretty [ __ ] good like and goldman was like yeah we're not paying you for that ad and i went to the writer and i was like i support that good job i'm down with that and so um like doing things like that you got to let creative people create as long as they are hitting the as long as they're following most of the rules hitting the deadlines and hitting their goals i i teach them how to do it and besides that i let them be free and that's what they like i saw you tweet out recently that you found a direct correlation between the number of downloads on an episode and the amount of research that you did going into the episode yeah that was like that was your growth hack that you could find a direct correlation yeah so the podcast right now it's getting like a million listings a month each episode gets like a low one will be thirty thousand downloads an episode a really high one will be over a hundred thousand downloads an episode is anyone here in the podcast industry um a couple people podcasts are [ __ ] hard it's the hardest thing i've ever grown um we're about two years in i think by year three will be we should be north of a hundred thousand an episode which would make us one of the biggest um it's hard and a lot of people ask how we grow and i'm like well the first two reasons you you maybe can't replicate and that's that we have the hustle so we have a lot of people to tell the second reason is like i said i'm good at it my partner on the podcast he's like amazing at it and so we have like talent um and uh but but we work really hard at researching and what we do is we have researchers now who help us my first million basically we um remember i told you about that guy who's got that 30 million a year subscription business with two people i like hear a story like that and then he tells me all of his numbers and i deconstruct how the business works and then i tell sean i'm like man i met this guy here's how the business works that's amazing it reminds me of this business and he'll explain what that does and so we're just nerding out and deconstructing different companies and what we do is we research a ton so we've got this huge document i spent an entire day researching a ton and then we get on the pod and then we just say do you want to talk about that or not and we'll talk about it and then that will lead to this that will lead to this and that will lead to this and we jump around and the reason that works is because i'm obsessed with this industry in business i'm constantly filing away ideas so i'm going to meet someone here i guarantee it who's going to tell me something so fascinating that like i'm never like oh i own this baby clothes business that sells baby clothes made out of bamboo we do like 50 million in revenue like huh and like i'm gonna store that there's a few of those here yes yeah or something like that like i know i'm somebody to tell me something they do something that's like so interesting i have no idea how it works uh and i'll file that away and then we're gonna do research and then he's gonna say something and i'm gonna be like oh you know that reminds me and that's usually how the podcast works but we're gonna go to q a here in a second but before we do that you've been very transparent at least on the podcast about the downsides of the entire journey too of the dark times yeah it's easy to look at somebody who i mean i know you didn't have your big eggs until you were 31 but but it's it's easy to look at someone in your position and and think life must be easy you've always had it easy you cruise to this exit must be nice now you're going to cruise till you're 40 until you have the next big thing you seem to have magic on everything you touch it would be easy to create that narrative would you tell us a little bit about the other side of the journey yeah i mean it's [ __ ] lonely a lot of times like it's yes it's the way that it works in my experience is ninety percent of the time things suck and ten percent of the times things are awesome but that ten percent they're so awesome that it encourages me to keep going to that 90 of [ __ ] can anyone relate to that yes so yeah like i'm all happy now you thought it was just you this whole time i'm in austin i'm uh like the weather's nice of course i'm in a good mood now i you know it's funny i go to therapy and i always go up friday at three she's like well you seem pretty happy i'm like dawg it's three o'clock on a friday of course let's move this [ __ ] to monday uh and so uh yeah so you're catching me at a good time no i mean look it sucked i i quit drinking i had a i definitely had a drinking problem yeah thank you um i definitely had a drinking problem because i was like there's so many nights where i'd be laying on the ground talking to my wife i'm like this isn't gonna work what did i do or most of the problems was this person at work is killing me do i have to fire them why am i failing them so badly do i have to encourage them what the [ __ ] do i do with this person i cannot figure this out anybody relates that yes most everything was people related to be honest or um when the pandemic hit like like a lot of people business like boomed right but the first three months i was like we're done we're done this is not gonna work ever again the bus i spent five years or four years on this and it's gonna go to zero i'm i'm done um and most of the times i would throughout a day it was like this [ __ ] sucks i want to quit i'm out i'm never doing this again and then one hour later i get a double mean hit from because i look at google analytics and be like this is the answer and in the back of my head like the thing at least in my business and i bet it is for most business building to like 100 million in revenue it's very doable in most industries and intellectually you can write down you do this you do this you do this you do this and then you just wait like 10 years you do that consistently eight hours a day every single day for 10 years uh it's going to require a little bit of luck that's for sure but if you if like you can have like a pretty good outcome if you do that for 10 or 15 years the issue is like every day the emotions of your emotions and handling them that is it's a 100 emotional game for me so i read all this self-help [ __ ] which some of it helps you know the whole naval happiness thing like i read all that stuff i meditate every morning i exercise uh i do all these vitamins it's pretty much only to do one thing to control my mood and make it so i can be calm and steady because i know that in the day it's gonna be like this like all this stuff like i should be really happy i should be really sad my goal is to to be able to just somewhere in between and so i spend most all of my energy outside of like doing the actual work i'm making sure that i can keep my mood calm i think like i think that's the work that is the word for most of us we know more than we need to know yeah you know you know plenty you don't yes most people you know plenty you know plenty but also the irony of what you're saying is it was the emotional rollercoaster that made you good at media in the first place like it's it's yeah you know like your biggest strength is also your biggest weakness right like i'm like i'm very creative and i'm really good at creating content it just so happens that that also makes me crazy in other aspects too you you do see a lot of deal flow now that your post exit because of the podcast yeah and we have like a little mini fund so i've probably invested 10 or 12 million dollars so far maybe 40 or 50 different startups and how do you identify either the entrepreneur or the business that is worthy of your capital so since selling to hubspot and even prior to that you know i run a media company a media company i don't run anymore but you it's cool and that your audience is there particularly on email and i kind of forgot to say that basically with our business email even now it's like the last channel that you can reasonably own you don't own facebook you know building a business on facebook is like building a business on an office building and the rent gets jacked up by the landlord every three months like there's you know they can do whatever they want i imagine i don't sell anything on amazon but i imagine it's the same you know if amazon says uh you know we kind of feel like doing this uh it changes with uh with email it's really like the last thing you can own so our big insight was like look if you're looking on your phone it's a four inch white screen who cares if you click the mail app or chrome like why does it matter and it just so happens that you can reach way more people with that mail app and so that's how we did email um and i'm getting it back to your question what was the question how do you identify the entrepreneurs or the business oh that's what i'm saying okay and so the audience is there the whole time but i got to go out and book these advertisers a lot of times and that's a pain in the ass you know you got to go uh kill kill what you want to eat so it's like we had sales people and they had big quotas and it was really stressful then we had trends and that was subscription and that was a lot easier and so i started learning about subscription businesses and everything like that then hubspot bought us and i started looking at their business and i'm like oh my god enterprise software is like so boring but so lucrative if you can nail a couple things right early on and it takes a really long time to nail those things but if you can and so i love investing in subscription revenue particularly enterprise businesses the when we invest we need things that can get really big so i try to find things that can um from year one to year two and then two to three uh they need to be i want them to grow three x a year for those first two or three years and if they can do that then there's definitely potential to break out so you're basically piecing together what you've seen in your past experiences to be able to identify who's got what it takes to be able to match the criteria yeah yeah yeah and if i talk to someone you can kind of figure out like if they have i look for grit so you can kind of figure out a little bit they have grit so like tell me all the projects that you worked on and if they have like projects that are jumping from thing to thing to thing i'm like oh no not a chance i'm out um but typically if they have one or two that they've stuck with for a long time i like that but i like the business i want if like a 3x trajectory for the first couple years is really important because there's a high correlation between that and getting uh an exit that that is meaningful you know i'm an investor i own a very very very small piece so that needs to grow it needs to become big in order to make it worth it for me so i look for 3x um are you comfortable with a high failure rate if you're looking for that amount of growth yeah so the first 20 things i invested in two inve one one of them i turned a fifteen thousand dollar check into six hundred thousand dollars and another one i turned 20 grand into uh at 10x so 200 000. so that's what's that 800 000 total um and that pay actually paid up until that point i had only invested like 200 or 300 000 of my own money and so those two out of the 20 paid for and that's typically how it works so that gave you a total return of like a 400 even though the others ended up being nothing they'll they can be something but they're still active they're still active got it they could definitely be something i want to turn it over to to the group now we don't have a mic runner so just throw up your hand we do have a mic runner ask and he shall receive sam prentice runs our fund he just bought a microphone company hey travis give me more water what's that can you guess could we grab a couple waters by the way we'll go right here and i'm an open book so you can ask whatever if i don't feel like telling you the transparent answer i'll just say we don't reveal that sam thanks so much man this has been super cool um this is on so my question is for the hustle it sounds like you really focused on creating these like viral content pieces that captured a lot of attention but how did you think about taking that attention on the blog post and then converting that into a email subscriber yeah so what we did was basically i had this and i actually tweeted this out it might be hard to find so i'll reshare today but actually um every single day i had a spreadsheet and the whole team would meet once a week but the team was like just three of us for the first year but basically i had a spreadsheet i said here's how much visitors we had and here's how many people gave us their email and i would track that and so early on it was about three percent so if you go to the hustle dot co right now it's just an email capture page that's all it is and then what i did was i was like all right everyone's going to come through a side door meaning a blog post that they're going to see on reddit hacker news facebook through a friend whatever and once they come to the side door my goal is to optimize the website so they give me their email or they go to the home page and so for us it was like three percent of people so what's um the first month we got like the first week we got like 10 000 users so what does that mean we must have had um what's that like five hundred thousand or a million view i forget i can't do i don't do public math but basically we um we i i could just calculate like if i get a million people a month three percent is 30 000 i can get those email subscribers and then once i got those email subscribers i would incentivize those people to share more and we created an ambassador program so i would send them a free sticker if they referred four people and that kind of created that flywheel so it was get them through that go for blog posts any blog post to sign up with just a pop-up and the pop-ups were all really funny so i found the principle of ada attention interest desire action i did that for um i see people writing so i'll say it again attention interest desire action just a very traditional sales technique and so my pop-ups followed aydah and so there's this huge pop-up and it said oh [ __ ] not another pop-up and then it said look now that i got your attention you come to this blog post to read blank and i would like put the title but the reality is each day we send out stuff just like this enter your email here if you don't like the email after a week uh call me and i put my phone number and i'll venmo you a dollar like i would do stuff like that because like who the hell says that right that's so weird and so i would get so many subscribers doing that uh little things like that and then throughout the years we changed the techniques you know that's just one example of a tactic the strategies for maine to stay remember remain the same of sticking out but that's like how i got the first bit gotcha that was that was gonna be my question is like did you offer a specific incentive topical to the post or did you just say hey if you like this check out yeah so like if a lot if i looked at my analytics that morning and a lot of people were coming from a subreddit called like kindles kindle and i so i knew what posts they're on i'd be like hey reddit kindle readers and then i would say what i said before yeah you could do that uh we used wordpress but we do that all the time or another tactic that worked really well is we use wordpress and they have this thing called like an ad inserter it's like a plugin called add inserter but i wouldn't make it look like an ad i would just make it like hey you got to the bottom of this post it just looked like the rest of the post um i worked my ass off to entertain you here if you liked it enter your email here it's the best way to help me but i'm actually going to be helping you because you're going to be able to feel the same feeling that you just felt every single morning and like i would write things like that and i would insert those onto every single post so it was always getting traffic or so the posts were always getting traffic through search or whatever and then they would always read that and uh that just builds up it just compounds all right let's go here to the middle of the room yeah the question is how does the media background impact the other businesses and investments that sam is a part of yeah so um my partner and my font had a blog called little things has anyone ever heard of little things so so it was a um a viral website that had 200 million monthly uniques and mine wasn't that big but we had a lot and what we're good at is using words videos audio to get people to go from knowing nothing about you to liking you and that's what we're good at and a lot of people are really good at coming up with cool products to sell and they're really bad at knowing this thing and so whenever i invest in stuff i think all right your product is interesting enough but how are you going to distribute it how are you going to get it into the hands of customers what's the plan and so i'm always in my head thinking distribution first and the reason why is i just go through this logical thing basically like a good product with bad distribution fails not always but a lot right um so like and then and then you have a bad product with good distribution definitely can win like look at heinz ketchup many people say well heinz ketchup sucks this other ketchup that's made of this like organic stuff or it's like in this from the small town that's way better it's like well they're not making any money hines is why because they're [ __ ] everywhere the pr is so even though this lady has this wonderful ketchup it's in no stores it's gonna fail now if you do good product with good distribution that's magic you know that's amazing but i always think in my head like does this founder um are they do have they have an idea on how this is actually going to get distributed whether it's like literally ketchup being distributed into a store or do they have like a are they if they're a sas company and their product is 20 000 a year uh are they is someone on their team a really good sales person who can hire a sales team and like run a sales team or are they a content marketing genius and they're gonna so i just invested in heat and sha'a's company heat and sha is a content marketing pro when it comes to getting small businesses that come to his websites via seo and i was like oh dude i'm in like i already know that you know how to get distribution if you can have a half good product you're going to win so i think about distribution constantly let's go to dj in the back st louis what's up i'm from south city st louis went to slew hi how about nice what year did you graduate i graduated in 08 so we missed each other the thing there what what incentives did you have for your ambassador program like when you got yeah yeah yeah at first it it's it's changed throughout the year at first we did a bunch of interesting things like we put like a t-shirt like we'll fly you out there the most so we it was like you share it five friends you get one thing 10 you get another thing 100 you get another thing and we knew that one email subscriber was worth roughly 10 to us and so we did the math of like all right how many do we need in order to versus still be a profitable deal and so at first we did all this stuff the best thing that we did we just had a really cool sticker and we designed tons of stickers and people would do everything for a sticker we tried this one thing where we created a candle called elon's musk that crushed it but then well you know that's like breaking rules and so they told us we can't sell elon's musk anymore um but a really really cool and funny sticker crushed it oh and by the way with the thing with the the ambassador program the way it works is most everyone who wants to do it will get to that first level of four and very few people only a couple will get to that thousand but the ones who get to the thousand will almost like get you as many people as that one and so we had a crazy good thing here which is like we're gonna buy you a tesla or something like that and those people would get like 30 000 email subscribers cool and then the last question is so you said your email rate was 45 unique open rate much higher 65 total open rate what was like the biggest that's a really high number what was the biggest it's like the highest i've heard of yeah yeah why yeah so we started sending once a week and then we started saying twice a week then we started saying three days a week and then we're like [ __ ] it let's just do six days a week the more we send the higher the open rate went up yeah yeah keep in mind so when we started it was like 28 when i sent once a week then i was like well let's do monday wednesday and then i was like what's your monday friday i was like let's just so that was counterintuitive and so um we send six days a week um first of all our product is daily news so that's habit creating but with if you own uh what's the most common niche here fitness let's just say health health yeah with a lot of health stuff you definitely can do just a an email that's a roundup here's all the latest and greatest health related like here's the 10 bullet points of what happened in the health world today or whatever like you could totally do that and the reason our open rate's really high is because um it was something that you it was a habit-forming thing that you needed every day and by the way if someone signs up to us we could we have we called it gold uh silver bronze and then we have copper which i don't know if copper is less than any of those but that's what we do uh and we know that like a gold person will stay with us for like three years and we know where those people are and then we and we know what type of content they like like we've studied this a lot and so anyway the open rate the reason it works is a couple things one it's daily and they it provides information that someone relies on every day so if you're going to create like a health thing just put like do like literally the utility stuff of like what um like here's the health roundup that you need to know the second thing do cute stuff like um riding from my couch with my cat whiskers who i told you about yesterday he's finally over his flu let's get to the stuff like like just doing like little like cute updates like that and then third like you can add in like the weather there's anything that gets you to rely on it and want to and so we would do like um tomorrow i'm gonna be in in in new york to meet with one of our biggest customers i'll let you know how it goes that's a cliffhanger so i can get you to come back tomorrow so we got you the news that's going to get you and then i would add in all these other things um second use a dedicated ip address so mailchimp has a shared ip address it's not horrible because mailchimp is reputable and they kick off spammers but you're ultimately sharing your ip address with a lot of people uh when you get big enough like ten thousand maybe fifty thousand people spend more money and get a dedicated ip address basically if you don't know what that means which i i'm not a tech guy but uh what it means is gmail microsoft and all these companies they they look at who the ip address is coming from and if it's someone that has a history of spam they send you to the spam box if you have your own ip address and you have a really high reputation we don't spam you have to sign up in order to get our stuff they know that we have a high open rate so like it's like this weird thing where you have like a relationship with them uh that helps the third thing is to be consistent at the same time all the time and don't miss um what else uh so have a dedicated email uh there's services um that you can whitelist so uh uh what's it called i figured exactly what it's called but look up like email whitelist services and basically it's called a return return path is it return path is anyone who i'm talking about is it return path yeah what did they change it to yeah like a few months ago so it used to be called return path we paid them 40 000 a year it sounds like a scam when they explain what they do it's not uh but basically they talk to the email service providers on your behalf and they say these guys followed all the rules there's also a service called litmus and you send your email the day before or right before you send it through litmus and it'll say here's everything that's going to trigger someone's inbox your photo doesn't have a tag you've used the word free porn like if some like sometimes we'll write about like uh we'll write about like uh pornhub making something like they decide to make free porn i don't know and like and so like whenever we write those stories we gotta like make sure like all right we gotta like make sure we use words that wouldn't be like a scam you know what i mean or like if we're talking about money we got to make sure that we and so we'll put it through litmus um i think that's it oh well obviously you know the first most important thing [ __ ] good content so get that all right let's do one mark come here thanks so much can you hear me now no just keep going no worries uh i want to touch back on distribution and how you think about or how the actual process is even if you create something that is even if you create something that is very good how does it actually get to those places right so you create that thing but for somebody who's a little bit newer how would it actually get to you know men's health or whatever it is so that those people actually hear it uh well i i would never start with men's health that's not what i'm thinking but it's important yeah it's okay i'm gonna make an example out of it um thank you the re the reason being is men's health editors i'm in the media industry now i know all these people who are writing they get all their [ __ ] from reddit or from like twitter uh and so then i'm just gonna go there first um and so what i mean is i like reddit right that's my is my preferred place but right now facebook groups are probably the second best at the moment um and so what i do is let's say that i what's your business uh home office accessories home office accessories that's great there's a whole subreddit on that and i will contribute there i'll take cool pictures of myself with my new desk and i'd be like just got this thing i think it's pretty cool ask me any questions about how it works or here's my review of this chair or whatever uh and then i would post 10 times good [ __ ] that does not promote anything that i'm a part of or at least i'm not selling anything and on the 11th post i would say i've been following here for a long time um i run one of these companies i think right it's amazing i'm actually doing a deal where some of these people can buy something from us for a discount or you'll say i've been reading this subreddit for a long time and i actually noticed something that everyone here is doing wrong and that one thing is very simple i'm making this up your elbows are in a horrible place on your desk i wrote a blog post that explains exactly why that's true and how you can fix it and so if you do a bunch of posts organically and provide value i don't remember i said about the [ __ ] thing i don't [ __ ] so i provide value a ton then i'm gonna do my thing and you can do that in a lot of facebook groups as well um i would also you could do it on twitter as well i imagine and then after uh i posted all there then i would probably email like the men's health stuff like that but i would think about in my head i think where is this going to get popular first and then i'm already putting in the pre-work to make it so i i can post in those places and get traction and then leading them to your site from there with your like hand and i wrote about this here etc yeah and then i would put and by the way you don't want to click on my site that's fine i just copy and pasted it here you know i just wrote the whole article here i do that a ton and then like but if you do want to read the links down here it always gets tons of clicks thank you sam parr thank you for being here anything hey are we is is there and we're doing questions after this somewhere no this is it oh the questions right now well i'll i'll be hanging out so i know one thing one thing i want to ask is there anything the group did not ask you that they should have how to hire writers that's very hard it's very hard um the answer is basically right now i just uh troll twitter and i troll linkedin and i troll publications that i love and i usually send someone in an email and i say or dm and be like you wrote this article i love it uh and that's all i say three weeks later i follow up it's like hey look i've got this thing going it's not nearly as prestigious as where you are now but it's pretty exciting for this reason this reading this reason i've been obsessed with you since this article that i mentioned let's talk worst case scenario you've got a new friend in the industry best case scenario you're going to join us and it's going to change both of our lives are you interested and i usually i'll do that constantly pretty cool one more time for sampara everybody thank you thank you um we're going to

Channel: Capitalism TV

Views: 12,290

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Id: i_GxOrL_yN8

Length: 70min 12sec (4212 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021