#108 – Keeping It Simple to Build a Multimillion-Dollar Business with Sam Parr of The Hustle

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2019

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) describes himself as a midwestern small business owner who discovered the Internet, and his journey from running a hot dog stand to building a media empire seems to prove that. His current business, The Hustle, generates 8 figures in annual revenue from newsletter advertising alone, a feat Sam attributes to great copywriting, relentless experimentation, and the massively underrated power of email. In this episode we talk about how founders can build profitable businesses by resisting the urge to make their tech businesses more complex than they need to be, why it's important to borrow lessons from businesses in other industries, and the art of getting help from others by swallowing your pride and making specific requests.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/108-sam-parr-of-the-hustle

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sam Parr, welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast.
0:03.3	Thank you. I've been listening to you guys for a long time. You are the founder of The Hustle. The Hustle is a daily newsletter for tech and business news. It goes out every morning. It takes five or six minutes to read it. It's always entertaining. It's very well written. And you've gone into something like a million and a half subscribers, which is a crazy high number for a newsletter. We're going to talk about that later on for sure for some purely selfish reasons on my end. You also run HustleCon, which I've heard nothing but great things about. It's a yearly startup conference where some super successful founders get on stage and share their stories and their expertise. You've got a podcast now that you're producing called My First million and I know I'm probably leaving a few things out you do a lot so we're a
0:20.8	media company and we expertise. You've got a podcast now that you're producing called My First Million. And I know I'm
0:37.7	probably leaving a few things out. You do a lot. So we're a media company and we just, it sounds
0:42.5	like I like do all the stuff on my own. We're a media company. And so we have like loads of
0:46.8	different products. So yeah, you named a lot of them. But we also just released trends. So trends.com,
0:53.2	trends.coms.co is the URL.
0:55.1	And that's our first paid subscription product.
0:58.1	I'm going there right now.
0:59.1	What is trends?
0:59.9	How does it work?
1:01.1	Yeah.
1:01.4	So the idea here is I really am fascinated with Forrester and Gartner and those research
1:06.9	companies.
1:07.9	And so we're building a research arm at our company.
1:10.5	And so users can pay $300 a year. And we we're building a research arm at our company. And so users can pay
1:12.2	$300 a year. And we have a team of researchers who go out and scour the web and look at millions
1:16.9	of data points as well as do traditional journalistic stuff, like talk to people and dig. And we find
1:22.4	really interesting companies to profile and deconstruct and explain how they work very in depth. But we also look
1:28.5	at a whole bunch of growth signals, like how often people are searching for something and what's
1:33.2	the growth velocity of something. And we talk about that. So it's almost like a, I don't know,
1:39.8	Harvard Business Review or a more affordable gardener, but for growing and starting companies.
	...

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