What's up, everybody?

This is Cortland from NDHackers.com, and you're listening to the NDHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

How do they get to where they are today?

How did they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal lives, and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses. In this episode, I sat down with Sam Parr, the founder of The Hustle. Sam had joined me in a previous

episode to talk about the story behind how he created the hustle, which is this massive

tech and business newsletter with millions of subscribers that does tens of millions of dollars a

year in advertising revenue. We've kept up since that conversation. I spoke at his conference

last December, and Sam was just a really fun and interesting guy to talk to about anything related to tech and business strategy, content, media. He just cuts straight to the heart of an issue. He's a very no bullshit guy. He doesn't care about fluff. He doesn't care about tradition. He just wants to know what works. And so there's a lot to learn from Sam. He's the first guy to say, hey, I'm not an expert. Don't listen to me. But the reality is he is an expert. He's built some very impressive businesses and products. And I think his experience can really show just how much leverage you can have as one or two people on the internet. How many people you can reach, how much money you can make, how much of an impact you can have. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Sam. So how are things going with COVID-19 and your revenue,

with everybody kind of staying at home and reading a lot, but also advertising revenue,

basically dropping across the board with pretty much every media company. Yeah, so we make money

in three ways. Advertising, so we have this daily email that goes out to millions of people that makes money via advertising.

We make money through events.

And historically, that makes millions of dollars a year.

And then we make money through paid subscription.

So advertising is doing fine.

We are going to grow at a ton.

Now it's just going to grow mildly.

Events disappeared. I'm going to launch, yeah,

I'm going to launch some courses and stuff like that to supplement, but gone. No fixed cost for

that. So like we hadn't booked anything. Right. So it's missed revenue, but we didn't miss money. We didn't hire the people who we wanted to hire to do it. So they got screwed. But besides that, our company, we lost money or we lost out on potential money, but we didn't lose, we didn't actually lose money. My friend, Jason Lemkin, you know Jason probably. Yeah. I don't know this for a fact. I bet he lost $10 million because his event was going to happen in March. So we did not. So we're good. And then trends are paid subscription just booming. It's good to hear. I mean, I think the timing is perfect for your events because the last HustleCon was, I think, in December. I spoke at HustleCon in December. And so you had, like, like you said, a lot of leeway, basically, a lot of runway where you didn't have to hire anyone. You weren't sort of ramping up. But there are so many events that are going to happen in March and April. Like, I think I'm supposed to be in Minnesota at, like, MicroConf, like, this weekend or next or something. But that got delayed. So yeah, I think you dodged a bullet with that one.

Yeah, not good for those guys, but I dodge a bullet. So give me an overview of the hustle nowadays. You've got, like you said, these three different ways that you make money. You've got trends. You've got your newsletter. You've got your events. You've also got a podcast that you're funding in some way. Yeah, well, you know, that that's just me doing it.

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