How The Hustle got its first 100k users:

My team and I wrote lots of blog posts that went viral.

I'd study where my potential users were (tech nerds) and what type of content would get their attention.

Here are some of the early ones.

We had no users at first. Each of these got at least 100k visits in first 7 days.

Google Has a Secret Interview Process… And It Landed Me a Job
- Story of a buddy that got a job interview from google because he was googling code questions and got a popup asking him to join google.


How Pandora's Founder Convinced 50 Early Employees to Work 2 Years Without Pay
- Pandora founder gave a 40 min talk at my event. Last 3 minutes he explained how he was broke and convinced people to work for free.


Part 1: Confessions from the Underground World of Kindle eBooks
- Had a bud making $60k a month copying authors who wrote books on picking up girls + selling consulting because of his success. I thought it was sleezy and was mad at Kindle so we plagiarized a romance novel and made it a best seller.


10 Amazing Entrepreneurs Who Had Accomplished Nothing By Age 30
- Simple. Obviously this would go viral because anyone over 30 would feel great reading this.


Soylent: What Happened When I Went 30 Days Without Food
- I thought the subreddit r/soylent would be full of hustle readers, so did this post to get popular there.


Getting Called “Sweetie” Helped this Entrepreneur Create a Multi-Million-Dollar Business
- founder of hint did a talk. This is one story from her talk. Plus, Hint wanted to promote it and drove traffic.


There were a bunch more. But these were the articles I personally wrote or was involved in in the early, early days when we had no or very small audience.

After a while, we had this guy working for us named Zach Crockett. He wrote 1 article per week. Prolly 50% went viral w/ +1m visitors.

This strategy would still work today...thehustle.co/the-secret-goo…
thehustle.co/how-pandoras-f…
thehustle.co/underground-wo…
thehustle.co/10-amazing-ent…
thehustle.co/soylent-what-h…
thehustle.co/hint-is-multi-… Here are the numbers when we first started

ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm back.

Last July I founded a new startup. Today I'm sharing it with the world.

It's called Hampton: a highly vetted membership community for entrepreneurs, founders and CEOs.

Why launch a community? I'll explain + why it'll be huge biz. Link to Hampton: joinhampton.com

I started The Hustle when I was 25.

I didn’t know a thing. Thankfully it worked and we had a successful exit.

One reason why was because I met monthly with other founders like @ShaanVP and @jspeiser.

These meetings changed my life.

ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm back.

Last July I founded a new startup. Today I'm sharing it with the world.

It's called Hampton: a highly vetted membership community for entrepreneurs, founders and CEOs.

Why launch a community? I'll explain + why it'll be huge biz. Link to Hampton: joinhampton.com

I started The Hustle when I was 25.

I didn’t know a thing. Thankfully it worked and we had a successful exit.

One reason why was because I met monthly with other founders like @ShaanVP and @jspeiser.

These meetings changed my life.

A bunch of cool charts on the Us stock market from the 1870s to 2022.

U.S. Stock Market Returns by Decade.

The average return of the U.S. stock market has been 8.4% per year over the past 151 years (1871 to 2022) Buy, Hold… Profit?

Once we zoom it out to look at 20-year periods, you won’t see any more flashes of red. In other words, The U.S. stock market has never declined over any 20-year period.

I sold The Hustle's first ads. About $100k worth.

Here's the 1st cold email I sent that got a sale. It was Wealthfront.

Maybe sent emails to 20 diff brands, 5-8 showed interest.

We had 93,535 subscribers. I charged them $26 per 1,000 sends. This took forever because 1) we didn't know anything 2) not many others doing it so we made it up 3) advertisers didn't typically buy newsletter ads. 4) i was doing it and had zero experience

Nowadays its much easier. Doing it again, i'd get advertisers MUCH earlier.

On the pod we did a recap on Sara's List.

Goal: show startups that:

- are stable-ish startups
- pay a very competitive salary
- w/ great benefits
- but can still make you a millionaire because the equity can 5-10x

Here's a 1 year update on our picks. 1. Flexport:

Value at pod: $3.2b. 2019 when Softbank invested $1B at Series D)

Now: $8B. $935M Series E in Feb. 2022.

Growth: 2.5x

I stopped drinking alcohol ~9 years ago this month.

Every year I share this post, which I wrote 1 year in.

Everything + more is still true.

If struggling w/ alcohol, it feels impossible to improve. Used to feel this way! But there's a way!

theantimba.com/6-things-learn… And a more in depth and updated video.

Before starting a new project w/ someone, I make us answer some alignment questions:

-what does success look like (specifically)?
-what lifestyle do we want?
-what will we give up to achieve this?

Doing this has been a game changer.

Why? Because when you explicitly say what you want, how you'll get there, and why you want it...it solves so many future fights + seeds out partners.

I never used to do this. I assumed the other person was on board, or was afraid to say my opinion.

Not anymore. And it helps.

Most all social media platform have superstars who get famous and became almost household names.

That hasn't entirely happened a lot w/ Twitter. Kinda happening with Trung, @SahilBloom and a few other biz nerds.

But I think it'll happen soon. I think people undervaluing Twitter What I think Twitter influencers will start doing:

1. hosting shows here
2. lots of live events
3. soon, build big subscription businesses on Twitter

Seems like such a clear opportunity. Most think its silly (like people thought about YouTube).

A story in 3 pictures (scroll down)...

Theres a company in England called Informa.

They own B2C publications, events, databases.

Example: they have a trade show, data services, content for people who buy and sell huge boats

They do ~$2 billion/year in sales.

And get this: they were founded in 1750.

Ok, so what? My next company will be focused on longevity. Creating something that’ll last a long time.

I’m biased towards media.

But, I’ve noticed that there are dozens of companies who create content, data, and thing like that for various niches thatve been around for 100 years.

The book that made the biggest impact on my entrepreneurial career:

How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis.

Yes, the titles cringe.

But it has the best writing, information, perspective and stories for those who want to make $ via starting a business. Dennis founded a magazine empire in from 1970-2000s. Created Maxim Magazine. Also started a +$1b co.

He also loved drugs, hookers, poetry, and beautiful prose.

Such a fun, life changing book (though few talk about it).

Blogs: very easy to grow. monetizes OK. hard to retain users.

Newsletters: easy to grow. monetizes amazing. tough to engage/maintain. medium to retain.

Podcast: very hard to grow. very hard to retain. monetizes good.

Communities: medium to grow, very hard to engage Twitter: super easy to grow. bad monetization. easy to engage.

My favorite tool for researching topics for MFM: SimilarWeb.

Why: you can see traffic to different websites, where the traffic comes, and what it does.

Super cool for getting insights.

And an awesome way to find surprisingly large websites.

Here's an example... I heard about CrunchyRoll. Its like Netflix for anime.

On SimiliarWeb I noticed that people who went to Crunchyroll also went to a site called Literotica.com.

I never heard of this site. Its a place to share and discuss erotic-ish stories.

Here's their traffic...

Copywriting is the #1 most important skill for business + making $.

Copywriting has made me or my businesses tens of millions of $.

The way I learned: copywork, a little known learning technique.

And after years of being asked, am finally sharing.

trycopythat.com Copywork is simple: the best way to improve your writing is by copying, word for word, writers you admire.

This is how we learn to play music instruments.

You see the recipe of good writing and it morphs your style.

In my opinion it’s the MOST effective way to learn.

Hi everyone, @imrichardfertig and I $50m worth of short term rentals (aka Airbnbs).

Hijacking Sam's account (at his request).

Since Sam is super bullish about Luxury Short Term Rentals (STR), he asked me to break down the investment opportunities. But first...

How does STR investing combine the best of two worlds: an incredible LIFESTYLE asset and a tremendous cash-flowing INVESTMENT?

I got started in vacation rentals in 1998.

My first RE purchase was a summer house in the Hamptons.

What surprised me most about starting/running a company:

Handling back office operations was my biggest energy suck.

I hadn't had a job before and didn't know about all the paperwork we had to do. I missed a few tax deadlines and other costly mistakes.

IT SUCKED. I talked to my buds @aspec00 about it. He had that problem, too.

So...he started a company to make HR, legal, and all the other boring stuff about a running company work well for dummies like me.

I invested in their seed round. I think they'll be huge.

abstractops.com/announcing-abs…

⚡️ANNOUCEMENT:⚡️

How I reversed engineered my way to a business that made tens of millions of dollars...

When starting The Hustle I studied so many business models.

I tracked them all in a spreadsheet. The goal: figure out what style of biz model fit my interests but also would help me succeed faster.

So many businesses seem cool from the outside but after diving deep you'll notice its not for you or needlessly tough to win.

Here's a simple example...

Hey Everyone!

Strip Mall Guy here (aka @realEstateTrent ) hijacking @theSamParr 's account for a minute - pretty sure he's aware of it, but here goes!

Wanted to share my journey of how I turned the strip mall world into a huge business! When I finished college, I knew zero about real estate.

I took a no-salary job at a small brokerage that specialized in those tiny little neighborhood strip malls.

Liquor stores, coffee shops, sushi places -- boring little businesses.

Boring gold mines, as I now call them.

I have this coworker named Edie.

She's one of the most effective, hardworking people I've ever worked with.

But it wasn't obvious at first that she'd be as amazing as she is.

Here's why... She's older than most our team. In her 60's when we hired her.

Our average employee was ~26 years old (our users are 20-somethings + we didn't have much $).

So she certainly stuck out at first.

I LOVE business building but get sick of my circle jerk bubble.

Community, media companies, "creator economy"...bores the hell outta me sometimes.

I love this interview with Raising Cane's founder @ToddGraves . A $1b/year chicken finger biz.

Why I like it:

• Todd seems simple...in a good way. Good product, sell for a profit, treat people well. Not fancy, but well done

• Canes has had same menu since day 1. Chicken fingers and fries. Never deviated. Focus.