The “Build A $100 Million Community” Playbook - Sam Parr, My First Million | INBOUND 2023

what's going on I think everyone's hung over from last night I was in the lobby of the hotel and it was like bumping last night yeah people are going to be hurting tonight y welcome everybody what's up thanks for making it out early in the morning so uh does everyone know who Sam par is over here anyone nice so if you don't know Sam par is a bit of a community building Powerhouse so he founded the hustle a News Leader newsletter reaching about 3 5 million subscribers a day is that right he a later acquired by HubSpot he's also behind the hustle Trends Community a paid group of tens of thousands of members on Facebook and the my first million podcast a leading business podcast with over you know millions of downloads a month his latest Venture is Hampton an exclusive Community for high grth Founders he's aiming to scale that to a 100 million in the near future and we're going to be talking about that so let's welcome s par thanks man thanks for being here so all those businesses I just listed there's a comment thread through them and that's a community what's the difference between an audience and a community and why Community I I I'll tell you guys a funny story um I was sitting up here with Brian hallan the founder and old CEO of of HubSpot and I was like Brian um you know my last company the hustle I wanted to scale to 100 million in Revenue but I bailed early and you guys bought us um I you know I want it was a good exit and I was like I just had to take advantage of it and so my next company I was like I wanted to find an idea that can get to at least 100 million in Revenue in like at least uh shorter than 10 years and he was like yeah I had a goal like that too uh I was like oh what was your goal he goes it was a a billion in Revenue I was like thanks Ryan Brian to show me up but um uh so my last company was uh the hustle and a lot of people called it a community and it it's that's not a community so um how many of you here have like blogs does anyone here just blog or you have like a Twitter audience or something like that that's an audience uh that's not a community to me and people use those words uh interchangeably and I think that's wrong because a community is when you have a bunch of different people interacting without an audience Creator or a Creator and you know that you have the one or the other if you quit creating content for like two or three weeks does more conversations happen when you're gone than when you were there if not you have an audience not a community and um when I started the hustle our idea was like it it seemed really stupid to people I was like hey I'm building this newsletter and I remember uh pitching it to a CEO of a company that you guys all know about and I was like yeah man I got this idea for this newsletter I'm not really raising funding funding but I would love your advice he's like man this will never get to more than $2 million a year in Revenue this is really dumb just come and work here and I was like uh yeah I don't think that's true like if you do the math I like if I I I know the math I can do this on Excel it's really easy if I can get 4 million subscribers that can get get to like 60 million in Revenue because I know my ad rates I know um then I can have other newsletters I was like I I have a clear shot to at least like 80 we sold early but one of my good friends and our competitors morning Brew they're at about 80 million in Revenue so like my prediction kind of came true although I wasn't the one that pulled it off and so when I was looking for a new business to start I really loved Community I think Community is a fun thing to work on um but what I love with bu with this type of business is I love finding these ideas that people dismiss and they think are silly and I'm like I think I could build a very very valuable company worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in this space and this is a community business is one of those businesses that people like they don't actually take seriously but but they will in in about five years when when we finally release some of our numbers but um Community is like a thing like how many of you have like a job at just like a big corporate company and they're like we need Community we need Community it's like a really ambiguous term it's it's kind of stupid the way people use that phrase and it's not really I don't think thought of as a series business but I I think that's what's going to happen with us I think a lot of people whenever they start a community they just like you know start a Facebook group and put a bunch of people in it and hope for the best like if there's someone in the audience that's done that what can they do to like Foster this community get people talking yeah so at the hustle we had this thing called Trends um it was it cost like 300 bucks a year and you would sign up and we I I would send you a Weekly Newsletter where we would like deconstruct cool businesses and explain how they work and say what we think is the future of this um and um uh like two days before we launched it I created a Facebook group for the subscribers and I just like we did it as an afterthought and then people started signing up I think I don't know how big it is now but at one point it was like 20 or 25,000 subscribers a ton of people started signing up and I just made it a rinky dink Facebook group but I what I did was I would post in there every single day for like a year is there any early Trends members here no no oh here you go here's one uh so there's like I think we launched it like in 2018 or something and I would post every day and then what I would do is I would get like some of my friends who I knew are really smart and I would write posts and I would say hey can you write this post or post it under your voice I wrote it for you and I would do that like constantly on a daily basis and that created like some initial traction and it took like 6 months and then eventually people started like commenting on their own um and it actually had its own culture and it created its own thing so now trend has you know thousands of members and and things are happening constantly but a lot of times when people launch communities they make a few mistakes the first thing they do and if you own one of these companies I'm I'm going to hate on you but I'm sorry um but basically like if you want us to create a community they're like well we're going to make it like um uh AR comp.com community and we're going to put it on like Circle or this other website or we're going to build our own app and in my opinion that's like the hardest thing ever to do is to get someone to go to a particular website on a daily or multiple times a day uh on that type of like Cadence in order to get them to comment it's so freaking hard and so what I tell people is if they're new to it but like big companies would never like buy into this but I think they should um but if they're new to it you have to start my opinion is you should start a community in the lowest friction place when I started it was Facebook uh groups now I I never thought this would be true but now it's slack but anywhere where people already are so maybe if you have um a lot of users who use WhatsApp or something like that to create these communities um where there is the least amount of friction also you need a leader and this is actually really hard with big companies because no one wants to sck their neck out and look stupid or like say something inappropriate or like be the face of this but you need a leader who embodies it's basically like a cult you need like your cult leader who like embodies like the rituals and the culture that you're trying to like get everyone else to buy into and that person needs to be commenting a ton uh and like setting just like a CEO of a company setting the culture of the of the group so the leader has to be in there all the time constantly how often were you inside of your community when you first started well I if my computer was open I was there I mean yeah like every like I don't have my phone on me right now because I'm doing the talk but I'm looking at my phone 100% like you know three times an hour just to see like what's happening and then like now we have a community manager who I've trained and they're on top of it but like you have to have I have my finger in the pulse all the time so you were kind of ahead of the game on newsletters everyone thought it was kind of a joke then you built it you sold it to HubSpot and now all of a sudden there's a bunch of newsletter startups out there yeah does anyone have a newsletter here A bunch of people a lot of people raising their hands right now it's way harder to do it now than when we started because there's so many of them but how do you see these trends that early like if every everyone says newsletters are stupid why did you start a newsletter company where how are you how are you seeing this how do you gauge it I just look at the math so newsletters are cool because I was talking to the writers of the hustle now the hustle uh we have 3.5 million subscribers and I think they said that 2 million people a day open it two million people two million unique people open it now you can't exactly measure it this way but kind of but basically that means that roughly um you have uh uh 60 million reads a month assuming we send 30 days I think we send only 27 but let's just say 60 million people a month are being reached and you have three writers and I remember doing that math and looking at BuzzFeed and I was like well when they had 60 million monthly uniques they had a like 150 writers this model seems way better and then I remember advertisers were like or people who weren't advertising were like well why would anyone advertise in this newsletter where they could advertise on a website it was like well why does it matter they're going to get the same amount of clicks so like I would just like do the math where I would just like well if it costs this much money to advertise per 10,000 readers or a click costs this much and I get this many eyeballs and I only have three people to do it and I don't have to when you have just a Blog you have to acquire new readers every single day um with a newsletter I'm like well and if I send daily I'm going to create a habit and they're going to come like I just can basically just use a pen and paper and just be like well here's the really simple math behind it this makes sense it sounds stupid because no one is taking it seriously but the math is the math and that doesn't lie and I think it's the same thing with Community like for us in order to hit 100 million in Revenue we need um about 10,000 uh paying members we we we're about in the thousands already and so I'm like well are there 10,000 people who will sign up for this of course there are like there's no doubt about that like I this is just a very easy math like a math thing the issue is just I think people like think it's silly because it's an easy word to dismiss because it's overused so you made Headlines by selling the hustle to HubSpot you had a sweet little exit and then roughly was like a year later you started like cryptically tweeting about a new Venture and it was involving a bunch of impressive Business Leaders uh can you tell us what Hampton is yeah so Hampton that's my new company uh join hampton.com and you could see it but basically what it is is when I was running my company it was pretty lonely because I couldn't like um I couldn't show too much fear or vulnerability to my employees like I could do some but I couldn't be like I don't know if this is going to work or I don't know how I'm going to pay payroll or I have to fire this person and I'm really nervous about confronting them like I didn't have that many people who I could like have this these therapy sessions with and so um I wanted and eventually I got that but I lived in San Francisco and like not everyone live I mean you know not that many people live in San Francisco and so what we wanted to do was make it so if you're the CEO of a company uh that does at least a certain threshold of Revenue you could come and join like we I call like it's basically a business Therapy Group and so what it does is we've had like six or seven thousand entrepreneurs or you have to be a CEO six or seven CEOs apply we go through the weit list and we try to make groups of seven or eight entrepreneurs or CEOs who have similar style businesses and similar size businesses you're put in a group of eight people and you meet monthly with a executive facilitator who leads these three-hour conversations we also have a digital component where you can talk to all members of the community and we've hosted um this year we're going to host like 150 dinners and we do Retreats um so you can meet and talk about all these important things that you can't normally talk about eventually we might have non CEOs we'll do coo or we'll do I'm sure some of you have heard of Chief I think that's for um VPS of marketing maybe we'll have other roles as well you you mentioned Hampton members get broken up into groups of eight what's the significance of that number why eight um at first I just made it up I just thought that that seems like a nice number uh so and if someone uh can't make it if they're sick or something like that Seven's still good still small enough group to be able to like talk and share it's like like sitting at a table of eight yeah it's like a round table I just I just made it up okay so you said see here's kind of interesting you said you wanted Hampton to hit 100 million in Revenue quickly you started it this year so we started working on it in um June about a year ago and we got to about 300 members organically I didn't tell any so the podcast my first million it has a really big audience and I didn't want to talk about it on the Pod because um I was going through a phase where I thought I was a loser and I was like I could only build a business if I tell my audience about it you know that I got to prove that I could do it and so I just try to grow organically by just like dming people and like doing Word of Mouth for the first 300 people and then March like 6 months ago we we actually announced it to the World um partially because of my ego and I wanted to prove my to myself that I was good and also because um we wanted to perfect the product that which is another thing about Community you can't just like throw a ton of people in there at the same time you got to like be very meticulous and slow about it a quick side note about that everyone says build in public why didn't you I you felt pressure to do that why didn't you do it because I was embarrassed and I didn't want to fail um good answer uh and um I want it to get big enough to it would be hard to copy us so what's your okay so you don't want anyone to cop You by telling what PE people what to do so what is your playbook to do this I think people want to know like what's your plan on scaling this big it seems like a community you can have like a hundred people they're paying thousands of dollars a year but how do you get it to a hundred million do and this is another thing well that's easy I told you 10,000 customers $10,000 the math is there for us it gets really tactical where we have like different chapters and you only interact with like a certain cohort of 300ish people and there's other ways that you can interact with a whole network but for like at a big company uh where your boss is like this word Community it sounds good like web3 is out community's in go and do that whatever that is um it's really hard for those people because in order to build a really good Community you have to be meticulous a community is sort of like an event I was talking to dares last night and he was telling me that one year they had 28,000 people here at this event and he's like but we had to scale it back because the experience was kind of a pain in the butt with 28,000 people and it wasn't ideal for everyone a community can do that same thing where if it gets too big and and too fast it sucks and there's no culture and there's no soul to it and so I think what a lot of people like if your boss is telling you to create a community what you really have to focus on is we have to meticulously let certain people in and you have to like um indoctrinate them with like the norms and the culture of what you're expecting uh how how they should behave how they should give how they should take and you have to really be very careful about doing that otherwise it just becomes a show um but like you can do this with hundreds of thousands or millions of people Reddit has did it has done it Reddit is like uh you know the eighth most popular website in America and they have sub communities that each have their own culture and they've done a really good job of doing that another one is um is anyone here part of the New York Times um crosswood P crossword puzzle or the New York Times um yeah you are or the New York Times cooking Facebook group is anyone part of that group you are did you see recently how they had like a Revolt how people like freaked out yeah so New York Times has like uh a 100,000 people in this Facebook group um all about cooking that's what it's about it's cooking in recipes and I guess that group of people is very passionate and they created this amazing culture and then the new New York Times uh I forget exactly what they did but they changed some type of policy and the 100,000 people or however many it might even be a million actually they like revolted and they're like we're not we don't stand for this and that's actually the sign of a good Community um is when they like can like band together and like revolt against the leader if they if they feel like because a really good Community is its own thing it's incredibly hard to own and to like dictate but that that's when you know you have it when they like band together and they like fight the man and uh that was like a good example of that so okay so let's get a little bit more technical be conceptual about communities and stuff like that let's get down to the Brass tax I think a lot of people when they talk about Community they start with like the software are we what software we supposed to use Circle a forum Facebook group you just went standard slack I I think that you should start a community where your people already are um so and everyone's on slack well if it's a professional group yeah it's if you're doing White Collar Tech nerds like I am slack if you're doing like some gen gen Z and it's like young guys uh Discord that's where they are if it's um you have an international audience they're on WhatsApp uh so yeah you go to where the people are that's my opinion dares uh CTO of HubSpot he actually dis disagrees well he he is in his opinion you should have it on your own own uh platform but he will also acknowledge that that's like incredibly challenging to do and very few people can pull it off so in my opinion I'm like I don't I'm not sure I can pull that off and I don't think most people can so I do it where where my customer already is all right so so in Hampton you put people in a slack chat in a group of eight and they also have a slack chat with everyone yeah but then there's all these Norms they have to introduce themselves in a very particular way um they and then and then we expect we have like um we have like founders of like companies that are like publicly traded and I was like can I can I boss this guy around and make him like the social chair like would he would like would this like big shot be willing to like take on the burden of like introducing other people and the answer was yes and so we've assigned like uh social chapters and social chairs and they like bring people in to the community and they like greet them and tell them what to expect so so other than slack is it just a slack Community do does the community get together do they do events what's going on yeah so what we what we do and I think you could do this for any type of company but we've found members in our major cities and we assign them as a social chair and we give them a budget um and we just say you're going to be the pitch to them is do you want to be more popular and thought of as like a thought leader okay cool um we're going to help you host dinners quarterly in your city and we'll have uh eight or 10 or 30 people however many will come at that dinner and you're going to we're going to give you the Playbook and you're going to lead discussions uh that we've spoonfed you um and so we will do like 200 of those uh this year is it just dinners um we do dinners and we do Adventures like when I was younger and I was trying to meet girls uh this one I read this book that said like if you take a girl on an exciting date she you know maybe she'll like you more because uh it's exciting and it like induces dopamine and so um we do things like uh rally car racing uh we we we call them Adventures so we do like adventurous stuff mountain bike things where like your blood gets flowing a little bit not just dinners like awesome stuff that you really really want to go to yeah and I assume you're doing that not only because you want to do awesome stuff but I'm assume that Fosters Community much better it Fosters community so we went Lobster diving in Miami uh two weeks ago and U you bring your spouse and it was a great and and we always try to get the spouses involved as well because we want to make it like a we want your whole family bought in but yeah we do we did Lobster diving the other day um we do all types of stuff does that create a lot of fomo for people to join that you're like Lobster diving one day I'm rally car racing the other day yeah which is like the like the second or third most important thing about Community is fomo um yeah like you it's very important to create that of if I'm not part of this I'm missing out and so it makes it much easier to sell or to convince people of some of the value awesome so we got about 10 minutes left and we took a bunch of questions from the audience so I'm just going to Rapid Fire a couple of these so where do you see Community going in the next few years is this like a thing that's going to grow drink what's going on the same thing that's happening with newsletters is going to happen with Community that's my prediction so um when we started the hustle that was in 2016 there was um before us there was the daily candy and mle fool had been doing some cool stuff and there was other smallish newsletters but there's no been no one who had very few people that had done it to the point of getting many tens of millions in revenue or millions of daily readers and then us the skim and morning Brew we none of us knew each other but we all kind of separately came to a very similar conclusion and then once we kind of got a little bit of success people were like oh this newsletter thing is really really cool let's we should also do that and that is one of the many reasons why it's popular and I think the same thing is going to happen with Community I think what's going to happen is um there's going to be a lot of paid communities for Niche uh professionals so for example uh there's one called um I always butcher the name but I think it's doximity it's a paid Community for doctors and they actually went public and um they have like a four or five billion doll valuation they're doing hundreds of millions in of Revenue I believe that um there's going to be a bunch of like substantial siiz companies maybe also to the point of going public for Niche communities so orthodontists or dentists or things like that for lawyers doctors um any type of profession that you could think of I think that there's going to be Niche communities um where you can like quote be in a safe space and like Express like things that like maybe your husband won't understand or uh you're you don't want to look silly in front of your co-workers by asking this question I think that's going to be very very very very popular in the next five or 10 years it sounds like social media went from like this Niche little thing where you can talk about anything and now it got so big everyone's on it you don't feel safe like sharing anything so like there's going to be more of these small micro communities is that your micro communities is absolutely going to be a thing and in my opinion monetizing a community that's free if you like own a product if you're like HubSpot and you want to have a free Community that's that's cool I think you should do that um but if you want Community to be the business my opinion you have to charge money and you should probably charge more money than you think um because then you could provide a better service so at Trends we screwed up I charged $300 that was really stupid uh I couldn't like provide certain Serv I couldn't afford to provide certain services and so I had to have like you know tens of thousands of members with a small staff in order to even make what Hampton's making already and it was just it was a cluster it was it's we screwed that up and so I think that micro communities will exist I think the paid is a significantly better route than advertising and I think there's going to be way more of them in the next five years let's start like technical we're talking about monetization so like if someone started a Facebook group and they charge 50 bucks a month that seems reasonable for some communities is that too much too little in your opinion you're saying way too little well it depends what the Services offering if it's like like there's this one Community um where it's like mostly stay-at-home moms who are sharing like giveaways there's this whole like giveaway Community have you ever seen that yeah we used to like do these giveaways at the hustle where like if you referred like five people to join our newsletter we would send you like a pair of socks and we would get like all these like uh people in like Nebraska signing up for us I'm like what the hell is this and I linked it back I'm like oh this is like a giveaway communities where these moms are like sharing um uh like give like contest and like that and I um I so if you're if you want to charge like $50 a month for like something like that then yeah I think that's fine but if you're dealing with something that's related to someone's job and you could and you and you could make the case that look just one conversation in here might make you a significant amount more money or might progress you in your career or make you a little bit more happier um if you could make that justification and that there an Roi will be there then I think you should charge way more money because not only does that give you the profit to provide a better experience it makes people appreciate it more we we saw Community with a guy who sold just high-end CCT cameras he just reviews them and he sells that membership to large casinos and stuff like that 1,200 members thousand bucks a year just one guy doing that whole thing how big was it it was about $1.2 million a year and he just maintained that consistently and just no one knows about it micro community no one really competes with them it's like a bunch of stuff I've seen like that and then like and the best part about those businesses is by the way I'm like a newsletter we had to write that damn thing six days a week that was a hard ass job I was just talking to her ERS they're here at this conference but they're actually going to go grab their laptop cuz they got to prepare for Monday s with Community you don't have to like make all the time it almost seems like newsletter and Community kind of go hand inand a little bit you kind of like see what's happening in the community they could because typically if you're a really good audience Builder you know what people want and you know how to evoke certain emotion and you need to do that with a good Community as well uh real quick question someone asked why did you choose the name Hampton what is that I I have not spent time really in the Hamptons I grew up in Missouri on a street called Hampton Avenue that's where that came from I I for some reason in St Louis a lot of the street names are really cool I I always thought there the names were really cool and so a lot of my llc's or projects I would just name them after streets and I named it Hampton because someone was like oh that sounds fancy and uh my favorite uh car is like this old jaguar in British gracing green and they and I was like this kind of looks like an old Rolex ad Hampton with this like British racing green yeah that's it and then uh what were some of the challenges you face while building Hampton's Community what's what what's the hard stuff that people miss and stumble upon usually well the hard part is like you want to grow really fast because you want to make more money but you have to delay that um and so the hard part is like being meticulous another hard part like it well it's not like software like with software you can throw a bunch of users in there and like some things are going to break but you can kind of fix it on the fly a little bit and you could scale up a lot easier and so like delaying that gratification um has been quite hard um another hard thing about Community is I'm like in fear every day of like is someone going to like say something bad or are we going to like get one step closer to totally this up because once a community is screwed up I think it's like impossible to bring it back so like if you have a dead community in my opinion just kill it and start over it's so hard to like Revitalize something that isn't working so is it is is a community a dictatorship or or like a democracy in that case you're saying you want to be the dictator it starts as a dictatorship um it definitely should start as a dictatorship um with us like we have core values and so like some of those values are like you can't talk about what you've discussed in your core group and if we hear about it we kick you out but eventually it kind of evolves to a democracy a little bit where people are allowed to like have their say and and uh but I think it has to start as a dictatorship cool we're almost wrapping up here so if someone's going to go and create a community they were thinking about creating a community what's kind of like instead of the technical First Step do they have to have do you have to have like a vision for it do you have to have what are the things you need to start a community for like a total beginner to start with you need to have some flavor so like and just like anyone who gets popular on the internet like you need to have something that different makes you different and it doesn't need to be that different like it could be like it could be like we are a community for de developers okay cool there's a million of them but we are a community for developers that are like a little punk rock or we are like we are the most helpful developer community in that everyone like we've set the culture that we will reply thoughtfully to everything like you need some type of stick um and so I think that's really important so like uh usually I think that like in my case Hampton like the I imagine the community has extended a little bit for my personality um but you typically need like a shtick like what makes this like unique and fny or interesting or special you need I think you need something like that so ultimately even even in Hampton while it's a club and they're joining to meet other members there is an element that they're coming to kind of hang out with you too right like no I don't think so like no we've made the product good enough and the community thriving enough um that um people don't want to come see me because I'm like one of the least successful people in the community because we've done a good job of like showing who's a member and we Champion them not me sweet I mean I could barely get in so we're wrapping up over here so where can people find you if they want to check out Hampton check out s par yeah I'm the S par on Twitter I thought it was it might be up here when we head off but thus SAR on Twitter thus SAR on Instagram and join hampton.com hopefully you guys still read the hustle even though I'm not part of it it's way bigger and it's way better so sign up for the hustle so Twitter at the SAR you find me at Nev Med and special thanks to Nick Gray for helping us out and then also we're doing a Meetup at the Creator Lounge 11:00 a.m. we're going to be there so if you want to hang out with Sam get a picture something like that meet us at the Creator Lounge anything else we're all good thank you all thanks everybody for joining appreciate it have a good morning

Channel: HubSpot

Views: 16,117

Keywords: HubSpot, hubspot crm, hubspot cms, hubspot sales, hubspot ops, crm, cms, what is hubspot, the hustle newsletter, sam parr, sam parr newsletter, sam parr copywriting, sam parr hampton, sam parr podcast, sam parr how to start a newsletter, sam parr my first million, sam parr the hustle, sam parr newsletter playbook, sam parr interview, sam parry, sam parr convertkit, sam parr noah kagan, sam parr teh hustle, sam parrini violin, sam parr my first milion

Id: fBUTbkD2RB8

Length: 29min 49sec (1789 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2023