The Russell Brunson Show - Sam Parr Reveals How He Grew The Hustle And Why You Shouldn’t Take Outside Funding | #Marketing - Ep. 58

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show, I sit down with Sam Parr, founder of The Hustle, My First Million, and Hampton, to break down how he built and sold one of the biggest email-based media companies in the country. Sam shares how he grew The Hustle by writing viral blog posts on Reddit and converting that traffic into email subscribers, why he focused on building reach through a newsletter when everyone else was chasing social media, and the simple revenue model that made the company so profitable before selling to HubSpot. We also dig into how he’s now building Hampton, a thriving community for entrepreneurs at scale. Key Highlights: How Sam used viral blog posts on Reddit to drive traffic and convert readers into email newsletter subscribers The monetization model that turned The Hustle into a multi-million-dollar company through sponsorships and ads Why he bet on building reach through an email newsletter instead of chasing short-lived social media attention How Hampton creates curated peer groups and why operational excellence is critical to running communities at scale The pitfalls of chasing outside funding too early and how Sam thinks about businesses that compound over decades Sam’s story shows that you don’t need complicated models or venture capital to build something big… You need a great product, a smart distribution channel, and the discipline to keep it simple. If you’re interested in building an audience, a newsletter, or a community-driven business, this episode is exactly what you’ve been searching for! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sellingonline.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://clickfunnels.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Special thanks to our sponsors: NordVPN: EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://nordvpn.com/secrets⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Northwest Registered Agent: Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠northwestregisteredagent.com/russell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to start your business with Northwest Registered Agent. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn.com/CLICKS⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Rocket Money: Cancel unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠RocketMoney.com/RUSSELL⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Indeed: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job’s visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Indeed.com/clicks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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ClickFunnels, because you're one funnel away from changing the world. this is the Russell Brunson show what's up everybody this is Russell welcome back to the show excited to have someone who I've been watching for a long time over the last couple of years do a lot of really cool businesses a lot of things but this is actually the first time I've had a chance to meet him in person and talk to him his name is Sam Parr he's the founder of the hustle which a lot of you guys know but he's got a great podcast called my first

million another business called the Hampton I'm excited to talk about all those things with him but Sam thanks for jumping on and finally excited to get to know you and actually meet you in person for the first time. Hey, I'm excited to be doing this. I've, uh, you can check my account. I've used click funnels and I've, I don't know. I think I've got my two comma club record. I think I've made over a million on using click funnels.

So have you submitted to the award yet? We need to get it to you. No, I did not. I, uh, but I, I definitely have, uh, achieved a few things on click funnels. And so I'm happy you made that and I'm happy to be here. That's awesome. Thank you. I know it's funny on our side, it's like we've, I think we've, we've awarded over

3,000 to Comic Club awards now, which is like exciting, but the number of people who've never submit is probably double that, which drives me crazy because I like bragging about the number. So I'm going to add it to an hour at 3,001. I'm counting yours as officially in there now. So we've done, I've done over a million across a couple accounts, but I for sure did, like I used to use ClickFunnels. I still do as like my MVP. And, uh, and I've done six figures a couple times. Oh, that's so cool. Well, thank you for being a for for using the platform man i appreciate that so i'm first got it familiar with you guys with you specifically with your um with your newsletter to hustle but i'm curious like before that

i don't know your history prior to that like how did you get into entrepreneurship and get into this whole world back at the very beginning where the where did your path start i'm from missouri and in missouri all of my family were small business owners they didn't call it entrepreneurs they just um my parents actually started a fruit stand that was their uh kind of their first business and parlayed that into something a little bit bigger. But I grew up in Missouri. I was a division one athlete or I wanted in college or in high school I wanted to be a division one athlete and I became one. And so that's why I moved to Tennessee. I went to a small, I ran the 400 meter dash. So I used to be fairly fast, not anymore, but I used to be. And I, in college, I was studying accounting

and music business. And I knew I was going to start a business. I thought it was going to be like a blue collar like lawn care company. I wasn't sure, but my first business was a hot dog stand. And so I had eventually like a bunch of hot dog stands. I think did you write a book on how to like I didn't write a book. Perry Belcher wrote one, but I we had a client who's a multiple two column club winner who teaches people how to start hot dog stands. So it was kind of interesting. So I I probably bought one of those things. But I that's what I had. It was called southern sams. Wieners is the biggest baby. Weeners is big as a baby's arm. And I, uh, I would sell hot dogs like crazy. And then I learned about a company called Air Bed and Breakfast in 2012. And I called

emailed the CEO. And I was like, you guys can improve your site if you do this, this and this. And he was like, yeah, whatever. But that's awesome that you had the initiative to like have this list of how I could do better. Do you want to interview for like an entry level position? And I said, hell yeah, I do. Come. And he said, come to my office on Monday. And I lived in Tennessee. And he was like, I live in the Bay Area. And I was like, I don't even know what the Bay Area is. I've never been west of Missouri. I was like, I don't, Silicon Valley, is that like Hollywood? I don't know what that means.

And so I basically dropped out of school and I moved out to join Airbnb as one of the early employees. And I, how early was it in the company? Like, how many? Not that early, like 200 or 150 people. Okay. I think they had raised a series A maybe. This was in 12, 2012.

I think they were founded in 10. So they were two years in. Not that early, but early enough to be like an early adopter. and I back then so I'm completely sober now but back then I had a drinking issue and I'd been arrested for DUIs and fighting and all this stuff and I lied on my back on my resume like they said like do you have a criminal record and I said no and they caught me and so I had moved out to San Francisco to do my thing and the day before I'm supposed to start they're like we don't hire liars you're out and so I was out in San Francisco with nothing and I was like I got to make this work I dropped out of college like I got to do something and so I I started a small internet business that was acquired for like $100,000 after a little bit of time. And then I started this thing called HustleCon, which was a conference. And that conference led to me starting the hustle, which I ended up scaling and selling for many tens of millions of dollars in a fairly short amount of time. That's so interesting. That was the thing

that got you to move and then it fell apart. So the first business that you sold for $100,000, what was that business? It was some, so when I was, uh, interviewing at Airbnb, I stayed on an Airbnb and I met a guy who had an idea for a roommate matching app and I was like, hey, can I join you? And so we created a roommate matching app and it was basically Tinder for roommates, which is obviously stupid. It should have just been Tinder for Tinder because like Tinder wasn't that popular yet. We were like, oh, this is like a really interesting way, this swiping thing. That's kind of cool. Let's do that for roommate matching, which is the worst, like the worst business ever. Like dating would have been way better. And so I started a roommate

matching app. And I sold it. And I think we got like 30 grand up front and then like a salary and like some bonuses at the end of one year. He was funny as one of my business partners. His daughter just found her roommate on a roommate app. I wonder if it was your app. If it's still around. I think they shut it down. Or I don't know. This was in this was in 2014. There's one out there because like he literally this. He told me this like two weeks ago. He's like, yeah, we couldn't find some a roommate. So there's this app and we download it. So someone's doing it as a as a thing still, which is kind of interesting. There's like five or ten businesses that every entrepreneurial college kid starts.

It's like, it's like, yeah, it's like laundry, like on-demand laundry. And then it's like a roommate matching app. And then it's like a college Craigslist. It's like there's like five or ten things that like every like 21 year old whose entrepreneurial does. And that was, that's usually one of them. That's awesome. And then you went and started the hustle.

So the, the event in it used to call hustle con. How many is that what they told me about that event. Was that an event you ran for a while? Or was it just a one-time thing? No. So my goal was to, like, start a big company. I wanted to start, I wanted to, like, my goal was to make $20 million by the age of 30. That was my goal.

And I was like, how am I going to get there? I didn't know. I didn't have a plan. And so I created this event called HustleCon. And I made about 60 grand in six weeks. So it was basically like an entrepreneurial conference. And I was like, that's kind of cool. Let's do it again.

And so I did it again. And I made, like, $250,000 in a very short amount of time. And I was like, this is great. but conferences stink as your like as your business it stinks like you do it now with funnel hacker live and that's cool but when it's your main source of income it's not awesome and uh but i was like i but i grew my email list from zero to 10 000 people in like two months and i was doing some math and i watched uh you and i watched Andrew warner from mixer g do interviews and i saw like what you did with email i saw what my friend noah kega did did with email and i was like i'm pretty

sure I can build a media company with email only. And I pitched this idea to a bunch of people and some of them I called email like executives at media companies and they laughed at me. They're like, this is stupid. But I'm like, I don't know, man. I think I can get five million people on this email. And I think they'll open every day. And I think that can make like a hundred million dollars in revenue. I'm like, I'm pretty sure you could build like a 500 million dollar or billion dollar company with just email. And the premise was simple and we started it. And I sold the company in year four or five when we were doing about. 20 million in revenue, but my best friends had a company called Morning Brew, and they are now

in the 100 million revenue range. So my premise was right. But the early premise was social media is going away, like in terms of reach. So back then, if you posted an article on Facebook, you could get tons and tons of views. And I was like, no, that's going away. Everyone knows that. Email is like a pirate ship. And every email I get is a little bit of wind in my sale. If I just build this email list to be huge, I can own my destiny and I can create. an entire news company, media company, off the backs of this. I just have to create content that's so good that people want to read it every single day. And that's news, which I love.

And it's business news, which I also love. And I was like, let's do that. So cool. So walk me through the model of the hustle then because in my world, everyone understands building an email list to sell the products, but they're not doing it the way you did, right? You're building a media company, how you monetize it and all that stuff. I'd love to understand the model better. Here's the thing.

So the way you started is, not where you are now. You're a proper product builder. You have an amazing company. But like, I was inspired by you. I was like, all right, this internet marketing information product person, could I mix those tactics with like the Silicon Valley ethos? I don't know, like whatever you want to call it. I was like, because all the Silicon Valley guys, they pooped email and they thought that like long form copy, you know this better than anyone, they laugh at it, right? They think like, oh, this landing page is so ugly. This is nonsense. And I was, I was like, no, this guy is a bootstrap guy, he's building this big thing, which means every

centi spends has to be ROI driven. Whereas if you raise $100 million, you can blow a lot of money and not be efficient. And like, the efficient way is definitely the better way. And so I was like, what if I have a 1500 word text only email? And that's like someone's news. And if I can get a million people a day, if I can get a million subscribers and half of them open, so if I get 500 thousand high net higher net worth like coastal high earning income young people to read my newsletter man i think i can charge like 80 dollars a hundred dollars per 1,000 opens um and that was the model and so when i sold we were going to do about 20 in revenue and i'll maybe 14 or 15 million was going to come via advertising in my newsletter so the old analogy was basically if you'd go to

buzzfeed, you'd see ads on their website. My ads were just in the newsletter and I didn't even have a website. And so I had a team of 12 people and they were each a salesperson that had like a $1.5 million quota and they would sell ad space to WeWork, Salesforce, HubSpot eventually bought us because we used to sell ad space to them and we would sell so much of their software that they wanted to own the thing. And so that's how the business model worked. It was basically a cost per thousand cents. That's awesome. So then, it was every day you're sending out. Which is not a fun business model, by the way.

Like selling products is better. I think there's a hybrid where both sides could be cool, you know, having your own media and also having your own products. Yeah, which, which, I mean, but I just did what you did. Like I just, most things that I have done, I have just copied you. That's amazing. Okay. So when you're doing it, you're sending out just one email a day, 1,500 words. Did you have team that they were curating content or were you guys doing it through?

How did that the publishing side look like? I just wrote an email every day where it was like your smart friend tells you the business news that you need to know. And I would just write them. I would sell an ads and I was writing an email and I wrote I got good. Like people probably admire you and your writing and your content creation. But they don't realize that if you make it your job, you can create one or two or three blog posts a day. if you like really like walk down for sure like you just got to get you got to get what it takes weeks or months to get in the groove but once you get in the groove like I can bang it out and

so basically between like a 9 a.m. and like two I would build the business so I would grow our subscriber base I would sell ads and then from like three to like midnight I would write the email and so but really quickly I think in the first year of business maybe we did half a million in the second year we did let's say two and a half million in revenue so somewhere between 500 000 in revenue and or somewhere around 500 000 in revenue i hired a team and so i didn't have to write the email every day but we um we had like really great journalists so a lot of the guys who wrote for me or worked for me are all like pretty popular now so if you know trung uh if you know trunk fam on twitter he's got like a million followers on twitter we found trunk before he even had

Twitter and some of your listeners made me know Trump he's like a comedy guy on you on Twitter and then like I had another guy named Zach Crockett who he now is the host of a podcast for Freakonomics which is a popular um podcast anyway we hired really young like 23 24 year old ambitious writers who are really funny and interesting and we had them go and find the content and write it every day that's so cool then how did you how did you build the list like what was your process would that look like the first 100,000 so in one year we got between 100 and 150,000 subscribers and that was all organically. And so what I would do is I would go to subredits that I think my audience would be hanging

out in and I would write articles that would go viral there. For example, I paid my friend to live on soilant. Do you remember soil it? Wait, vaguely. Like the slim fast for nerds type of it was like a it was like a supplement that had like all of your nutritional like calories. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I bought it one time. It was gay. Yes. I 100% remember that now. Yeah. It's not that very good. It's not great. But it was like popular. And I'm like, well, I'm going to pay someone to live off that for 30 days. And I wrote an article like 30 days living on soil. And so I would just write timely great articles. And I would, but I would write them in such a way that I thought with a good chance that they were going to go viral in a particular subreddit where my customer was. And then I would get like half a million people to come to my website in like 30 days. And I had a really good pop up. that said like oh no not another pop up okay look while you're here here's what this is the hustle is actually a daily newsletter with news and business stuff but i wrote this blog post to get your attention now that you're here reading it you might as well give me your email like i wrote these

like really good posts and uh like we did another one where i had a friend that was plagiarizing people and turning his books into kindle books that he would sell and he was making like 60 grand a month and i was like that's horrible i don't like that but i'm going to write an article explaining how this is done because Kindle should catch this. And that article got like two million views and I got like 20,000 subscribers. And that's how I grew the first 100,000. So you're writing the article on the blog and then promoting it on Reddit and other places like that or you're posting the articles on Reddit, right? The first one. Okay. And then once I understood what my LTV was or my so I was earning roughly $10 per subscriber, something like that per year. And

And once I learned that, then we started advertising. And back then, I don't know what it is now, I could acquire an email newsletter subscriber for $1.50 on Facebook. Oh, wow. And so I wish I didn't know, I didn't understand math back to end. Like, I didn't understand, like, there's like a rare window when, like, you can acquire customers for cheaply. I was 25.

Like, I was silly. But I should have emptied the bank account into that. But I spent money on Facebook ads in order to grow from $100,000. to when we sold about two million. Okay. Dang, two million people. And then HubSpot bought it.

At that point, were you out of the business or were you tied into it after the purchase? I had a really good executive team that was doing all the work. And when I sold, I basically told them,

I'm like, I'm out. And they were cool with it. And I think they preferred it because like back then, I mean, I'm kind of a while. And I was really wild then. And so basically,

um, the, hustle. We owned a bunch of stuff, including our daily newsletter, but we also owned a bunch of podcasts, one of those podcasts being my first million. And they were like, just do the podcasts. And I said, yes, sir, that sounds good to me. And that unexpectedly blew up. Yeah. Interesting. If you've been following me for any amount of time, you know, I always talk about as you're growing and scaling your company, the most important thing is finding the who, not the how. Who is the person that can help you drive more traffic? Who is the person that could be your CEO?

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they just keep running the same way, but now they're just advertising their own stuff, or do they still sell advertising for other people? How did they ship when they took it over? So the year we sold, we went into the year, we were going to do, let's say, I think, $18 million in revenue. And so we went into the year

with like $4 million in revenue already booked for advertising. And I sold the company, on February 4th, I gave back all of that money because HubSpot was like, look, we're at the time, a billion dollar company. Like, I don't want your, like, yeah, they're like, I don't even want to report on our P&L what advertising is because I don't want an analyst at Morgan Stanley to think, oh, you guys are in the advertising business? What's this? And so they gave it all back.

And the way that they make money is just through leads in the same way that ClickFunnels probably click funnels makes money from your personal newsletter yeah and so that's what they do interesting and then they also it turned into this thing called hubspot media which is my uh the hustle but now they have like 30 or 15 podcasts of which my first million is one of them and it's one of one of the largest business or it's uh for sure the one of the largest business podcast networks but it might be one of the larger podcast networks in the country yeah interesting so then you So that podcast was already part of your business, and they acquired that as well.

It wasn't something you spun out later. No, no, no, no. I owned it. Or the hustle owned it. And at the time, I forget how big we were, like 600,000 downloads and views on YouTube a month, or maybe even 350,000. And over the last 12 months,

including some of our clips, like we've gotten like 90 or 100 million, so like it grew a lot interesting so they own they own that now like you're an employee of that or you're a partner on that or how does that that work? They so they own the IP I sold the IP and then they pay MFM Media

which my partner Sean and I own and so they pay us a perform like so based off of how many downloads and views it gets that's how much I get paid okay gotcha so I guess I'm a vendor or like you're a hired hired gun hired host yeah the way that i explained it to my family they're like wait do you work

there i'm like not really like uh and so i um i'm howard stern and they're serious radio like i have like a contract i have like a talent contract yeah that's really cool interesting you think you can do that for a long time or what what does that part of your life look like you know i've done it how long have i been doing it uh it was uh we've i started doing it in 19 uh i never didn't i didn't want to, I don't, I didn't want to be a podcaster. The podcast was Sean's idea. And I started doing it because one day, one of his guests didn't show up. And I was like, I'll just like step in and riff on with you. And we did good. But I'm sort of his, I'm like the straight man and he's like the, he does most of talking. And I never wanted to be a podcaster. But I don't know if I'm going to keep doing it for,

you know, I always say like, I'll reevaluate at the. end of the year but i i don't particularly like like it's really it's a lot of work how many episodes do do um we do it two a week it's how long have you been doing that a long time but 90% of mine are just me talking so i don't do i don't do many interviews so it's it's easier because i can just set up a mic and just go you know but do you do you write in advance what you're going to talk about no i hate doing that are you nervous you guys pre-write all this stuff in advance no no no no no no no so half the time we have a guest half the time we don't but if we don't have a guest i'll spend an hour in advance just like taking i just right here i just take notes i'm like here's like a bullet

and then like half the time i don't even bring any of this up i just we i follow you know we follow the energy but i find it very stressful the bigger the audience so like some of our episodes will get two million downloads and i find it incredibly stressful uh like i just don't want to say the wrong thing yeah do not get nervous about it interesting no i don't but it's Okay, this is interesting. So I don't know if you follow a personal involvement world. Do you know Earl Nightingale is? Of course. Okay, so I just bought his entire state from his widow. And so I had a chance to fly down. You did it with Napoleon Hill. Or you talked about this on Instagram. I saw this, right? When you did it with Napoleon Hill and this, right?

Yeah, like we bought Napoleon Hill's estate. Now we're buying this. Anyway, so yeah, I'm collecting. Anyway, yes, I'm collecting all these old books and people. But Earl's was fascinating because he was the radio personality voice for a generation, right? Like my dad listened to Earl Langale when he was growing up every night on the radio, teaching personal involvement. But what's crazy is the radio back in the laws were like you had to get things to prove before he could say him because there was no, you know, if someone's got a mic and they're hot and half of America's listening to it, you can't just say stuff. So what I acquired is these boxes and boxes of every one of his show. So he would sit down and he'd pre-write the entire show, if type out the entire

show, then he'd sit there and he'd read it over the air. So think about that, like, I like, we're so lazy nowadays. Like I'm saying, I have an outline or I have a couple of thoughts and I'd go. But for them. He had word for word so that the radio, so that the radio commission could approve it. And if he deviated from it, he could get in trouble for like saying things that weren't anyway. I was like it was so much harder back then. I think like I always, I always get like a little sense of being a fraud where it's like I need to like I want to be as someone who's making cool companies and occasionally talks about like this stuff I'm doing, not the other way around. like I talk and whatever.

Do you ever feel that way? Because, I mean, ClickFunnels is bigger than any company that I've built so far. So you kind of have some great street cred. But do you feel like I want to talk less and build more? Yeah. I mean, I, yes, I'd rather be building all the time. I'm very introverted too. So I don't, my natural default is not that.

But like the podcast is nice because it inspires people, gives them tools and motivate. and like yeah I use as a tool like train people for free on how to use just understand marketing understand business and understand you know like just from this alone people can understand like oh my gosh I can start an email newsletter I didn't even think about that you know so it's it's just it's a good tool to keep getting our members just different ways to use it because you know you could use the platform to do a million different things and everyone's got different models and how they use it so it's just inspiring people to like okay I could I could use it for this or for

this and anyway that's cool how big how big is this pod I actually have no idea I should probably find that out. We've been doing it for a long time. So I first started, it was called Mark in Your Car, and I would drive my work, my office back every day. It was like a five-minute podcast. I did like 350 episodes that way. Then we transitioned it.

And we transitioned. We finally hooked up analytics, but I'm not 100% positive. What's crazy, so our podcast, okay, so I think we have, someone will have in the audience, we'll have to look this up, but I think we have 800,000 subscribers on YouTube,

and including audio, every podcast that we, we do for sure gets 150,000 people watching it and then upwards of like, let's say, two million if it goes viral. And when we started, it was so janky that Sean would take one earbud and I would take one earbud if someone like, we would want to like talk to someone who called in and we would record sitting around a table on an iPhone. And now I'm recording just in my office.

I think I have $2,000 worth of equipment, nothing like crazy, maybe less. honestly maybe a thousand dollars worth and it's just insane it looks like you have a fancier one but it's just insane that a podcast can start so janky and and continue to be janky to be honest and it still reaches like so many people and that kind of as boggles my mind because i used to think that email is the strongest marketing channel i've changed i think podcast is because when you listen to someone in your ears for 40 minutes you are very intimate with them and there's been times where i've said stuff that I don't even remember and someone off the street will like tell me all about it and I'm like I said that and so it's just crazy how much people listen I completely agree it's like my

philosophy is same thing it's like if I move people from short form to long form like long form is when you get their their mind share you know versus the other things you're getting a glimpse of attention but yeah when someone spends 45 minutes of you twice a week it's it changed and I think about the podcast I go deep with like I feel like I have such close relationships of those people who I've never met, you know, and that's the power. In fact, it was interesting when we, we have our high-end masterminds, like we have a 50 and a $250,000 mastermind groups. And what's interesting is, like, the majority of those people were podcast listeners

for a long time first. It's not people who got me off email or saw an ad. It's like they went through some process, got on the podcast, listened to me for a year, and then they invested and came in. You know, like, that's the highest-end clients I found come off of the back of that. Yeah, it's like, I think I've always been surprised at how much influence the podcast can have. To this day, it still shocks me. Yeah. Okay, I want to ask you a little about your, I don't know how much this newer business or whatever, but it's interesting. So you

have a company called Hampton and I run masterminds in your circle and this is like a different variations, I think. And so I don't understand it completely. I love to explain what it is and and I probably a lot of fallups afterwards. Yeah. So I was trying to think of like what business to launch after I sold the hustle and I settled on this one because it kind of fits my preferences and my skill set, but basically Hampton is, if you're an entrepreneur of a company that does somewhere between 20 and 50 million a year in revenue, a lot of times you're lonely where you live and you want to be less lonely and you want to have a peer group of people who you can talk to you about the company, the company, and if it's, you've got to lay people off or if you're succeeding

and you don't know what to do with your money, if your wife and you are having issues, like these are issues that if you live in, let's say, Boise or Nashville, maybe you're a little bit of a freak, like amongst your friend group. Like, you know, some of your friends might work a little bit more normal jobs than you. And so you're like, I don't really have anyone to talk to. And we wanted to help solve that. And so what Hampton is, is we're live in 12 different cities. And the first thing that you get is a group of eight people who you meet with every single month with a facilitator who guides the conversation. And then you have your local chapter, which is one above that. So let's say in New York, I think we have 170 members

and we'll host 400 of events throughout the year. So you can meet other people in New York or Atlanta or L.A. or S.F., wherever we're in. And then we have the network, which is our online community. So you can post, like, who's got a good lawyer that they love and trust? And so that's sort of like the pyramid of value of what the products are. But the main thing is your core group that meets once a month. And my goal, I think I can get, you know, like one of my competitors is this company called Vistage. They have roughly 50,000 members. And it's, I think that a company, a company like Hampton, my goal was to find a company that can last for 100 years. Vistage was launched in 1963, YPO, which is a competitor, was launched in 1958. My goal is to like,

how can I create something that can last that long and also be a multi-billion dollar company. And so it's not going to scale quickly like a click funnels. But I think we can grow at like 30% a year for like, you know, 30 years. Interesting. I was in the EO for a little while. So that's my only version I've been in this kind of sounds similar. Similar. Yeah.

What's the pricing strategy? How do you guys charge for it? So at first I did what a lot of silly entrepreneurs do. I just made it up on what people are willing to spend. But now it's roughly $12,000 a year. Okay. Yeah. And then the growth, like, because if they're, if, it's just similar to EO, like when I joined EO, there's like a bunch of Boise, I think I call them forums or groups, whatever they were, right? Forms is your monthly group. Yeah. So for you, do you have to go city by, because you can't just launch it nationally.

You know, you get one dude, Nashville, one guy in Boise and doesn't work, right? Like, so you go city by city or how do you roll out the chapters? It's been a huge pain in the butt because when I launched the company, we, we were still kind of in the COVID world. And my customers were like, I would love to meet virtually like online for my monthly meetings. And we said, that's awesome. That makes it so much easier for me. And I launched it that way. And we had like 15,000 people applied to join the wait list really quickly. And so we created core groups. That's what we call it instead of form. We say core virtually. And then obviously the macro environment has changed. And over the last two years of us being in business, people have wanted in real life way more and so we basically have been like crushing it virtually

but now we're changing the whole business so we're going to destroy our company and build it all in real life and so we had a we've made a big pivot about four months ago to in real life and so we're we found the 12 cities that we have that have the most density and we've created core groups and chapters in those 12 cities. Are there people to fly into the cities to do that or no no no no they live there. They live there. And that makes it really hard. It's a huge moat if I can pull it off, but like it's really hard. Knowing what I know now, I would have launched city by city, like, no doubt. And I think had I done that, I think I would be at like 30 million in revenue in two years. But I, you know, I made a big mistake. And so we're fixing that mistake now and

giving our customers what they want. Interesting. How do you facilitate the monthly meetings with each group? Or who, like, is there a facilitator or do you facilitate or it was it look like? No, so we train moderators to, like, so we have, like, for example, in the first meeting, everyone does a life walk where they tell you the top 10% and the top, the top 10% and the bottom 10% of their life. So you can get to know them. And then in meeting two, you're going to do this other thing. And then in meeting three, you're going to do this other thing. And then a meeting four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, whatever.

It gets into a flow where we go through MIT's. It's called the most important thing. So you come, here's the most important thing I have on my plate right now. The group can criticize me. and I can ask questions and I can get feedback. That's what the typical meeting looks like and it's all moderated by someone. But in the future,

we're actually going to test having member-led groups. So there will be no moderator. So it's a group of eight people with similar sizes and types of businesses who lead their own meeting. Yeah. How long the meetings go? About three hours.

Okay. Interesting. What do you think? That's really good. What can you, what am I missing because you've been doing this forever well my model is different but yours is really interesting because ours are we do you know the groups will come like three times out to boise and we and I'm facilitating groups which I really enjoy because I get a lot of value from the

members but we don't have like the monthly in between stuff which I think is really powerful yeah the difference is is that you know I'm going to judge I don't know if this is the truth I have a feeling they're coming to learn from you. Is that right? I would say initially yes, after they are in the group, no. The group self-facilitate, like the way that I facilitate means, like, we're in this room, actually, and each person has a chance to get on stage and share the number one thing that's working for them and then get their feedback on questions.

And most of it's actually facilitated by everybody else. I just kind of hang out and take notes for myself. Well, then it sounds like actually our models are a bit similar. Yeah. And I would love to, like, share notes on like the best way to live. lead a meeting because it's an art and it's really hard. And so our thing was, I just like in the back of my head, I was kind of like, wouldn't it be funny if in the next 10 years, I can get 15,000 members to join. And if 15,000, like our average company does around 25 million in revenue.

So let's say each company has 100 employees and I'm able to get 15,000 people. That's 1.5 million employees of the companies who are members and I'm like that's kind of interesting like could I help these CEOs get just a little bit better and impact those 1.5 million people and that was kind of the math and I was like it's kind of funny I would be like it's like the Illuminati a little bit like you're like helping you're like helping me yeah and I was like I wouldn't be manipulating them but like I have insights into how they're all making decisions and I'm like that's kind of powerful and that's really fascinating and seems really fun and so that was the idea yeah how did you launch it for them is it mostly from the podcast the media

companies you launched these or do you have a different strategy how you're selling access to it all so uh originally i worked on it for about 10 months without telling anyone i would just dm my friends and see if they wanted to join and then uh i launched it on the podcast and on the first day we got like 100 000 people coming to the website it was a lot and um uh it was all through the podcasts and just like last month was the first time we started spending on marketing so we but we still spend I think we I think our budget's 15,000 a month like we're not spending anything and so it was all organic I've seen um there's a group called speakeasy that's that's uh they just launched a chapter here in Boisey and this may be helpful for you but they they actually

borrowed our office for it and so they did a free event that brought everyone in Boisey in they facilitate I don't know they do the whole event and at the end of it they're like hey if you want to be part of this then there's a monthly thing and they signed up like half the room signed up from that one one kickoff event here in our office and they're doing that city by city kind of doing it feels like you could do similar model I don't know how big the businesses um but they like so they have a Boise chapter now which is which there's not anything that happens in our in our neck of the world so it's kind of fun to see something like that happening um but I think they're in I don't know I don't know 10 15 20 cities right now but that's how they're they're filling initially just doing like one big free event everyone's inviting all their entrepreneur friends to come in the thing and they have a bunch of stuff happening and they make a pitch at the end and sign them all up at one i feel like you could do something really similar to that just hit you know these local events in each city growing isn't the hard part um you know the hard part is keeping the the the integrity of the community and of the core group and so because what we're asking for

is like pretty big so the way that i want to grow is through retention and so like a good retention rate is like 90% and you know I'm getting it's it's predominantly men and I'm getting like grown men in a room and they're like crying in the first like meeting like that's like a it's like a life-changing thing and it's like a pretty serious thing like this is like it could be heavy like I'm in a core group and like there's people have like gotten divorces and like we know about it before their spouse knows about it and we're like talking through the pros and cons like it's like a big deal and what we need to do is make sure that people come with the sense of seriousness. Like, you are explicitly saying that you are going to support your group and be there

and be there emotionally, be there to make introductions. Like, it's like a big commitment. And so that's hard. And selling that idea to someone is easy. Getting you to buy into this for a decade, it's like hard. You actually, you have a great book. One of your dot com secrets on like cult building or something like that is like it speaks to this but one another premise that we have and this is important for anyone listening which is like my opinion if you're a tech guy obviously go get go do AI but I'm not that and so I was like what do I think is going to like grow along with AI I'm pretty sure it's going to be loneliness and people craving in real life experiences I think they're going to like kind of go in tandem and so

So I think that a company like Hampton, which is, it's just like the newsletter. My newsletter, I said people laughed at it. In real life communities or whatever I'm building, people laugh at this too. They're like, this sounds like a cute project. I'm like, no, man, I think this can be a multi-billion dollar thing if you do it right. And that's kind of what I'm hoping and what I'm working towards. That's really cool. I remember when I did it, EO.

I did it, man, I did it right after the 2018 market crash. The group I got into, everyone is like on the brink of bank. and so I ended up staying because like it's just a bunch of people who are like they get together and drink and talk about how their wives that left them and their businesses failed and I was like on the upward as I had a bad bad group but I do remember the process was fascinating because they brought me in and it's like we did similar like a timeline exercise there's like three or four meetings I'd go to be trained before they let me actually into the group which was really fascinating thing that that's the time you show up like you know the rules and the standards and I don't know if

if you do similar stuff like that but I thought that was kind of an interesting way to get you prepped It's you know I think that like there's like businesses tend to have like one or or there's like three categories of problems I think that a business has like on one hand it's like a technological tech problem which is like can you actually physically like build this technology so it could be like a cancer curing drug like if you can physically build that then that's going to be the greatest thing ever or the second problem is like a demand problem which is like you've invented this interesting widget but like does anyone even want it you got to go and prove that out i don't know uh and the third one is like operational which is like for example yeah if you can get this cab or this guy to my doorstep in five minutes after i click like i'm ready to go yeah i would love that but it's really hard to pull off my business is in an operation we have an operational we have operational issues which is i can convince someone to sign up for this i just got to make sure that i make this a seamless smooth experience for all types of people and like having in real life meetings like you're just

describing like pre-training having it across the country that's really hard and so i'm still we're building we're building that and um once we build it i think it's going to be awesome are a bunch of your people still running the virtual versions then if they're not in one of the main cities or yeah but my goal is to like slowly pull them apart like i'm like if they love their group i'm like all right have fun but when you're ready like let's get you into an in real life group. Interesting. And people pretty the same for the virtual as they were as they are for the in real life. No, in real life retains way better. But their cost is the same though, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, we'll see like, do you know, um, have you heard of Vistage?

Yeah. Yep. For sure. So they do like 200 million a year in EBITDA. Really? Yeah. Uh, and then have you heard of World 50? No. World 50? World 50. is this world photography is actually similar to your mastermind but it's for fortune 500 uh executives they do about 180 million a year in ebida uh like communities like this like the ones you have like the ones i have i think people i don't know if you felt this way with some of your stuff where people were like dismissive where they didn't understand the math behind it um i don't think people understand that these things can be bigger than they appear yeah it's interesting i've never looked at it from like a way to because for the most part my higher end ones are tough because i'm i'm facilitating

the majority of it makes me think about yeah but you you you kind of have the best of both worlds right like you own click funnels which is highly scalable yeah and you have your masterminds which are scalable but very cash rich yeah and like frankly if i had to guess your masterminds make way more cash than a scaled startup so it doesn't really matter yeah interesting but yeah they can be these things can be big it's just it's a grind yeah is it um so with you promoting on the podcast like do you does HubSpot get a percentage of that since they on the podcast or is it just that you do whatever you want or like is there any you're getting no you can throw out all the businesses you want without having to worry about

yeah yeah yeah because like it's not like an ad like i'm the podcast i'm talking about my life uh like i'm saying i launched this thing here's what it is and um yeah i have a big audience but i can't launch all the businesses i want because i'm always nervous and maybe i'm wrong but i'm a nervous very much so of um like uh wearing out my audience like they'd get confused like wait does sam do this thing or does he do this other thing and he doesn't like you know what i mean but also I just think that in order to build like a kind of a legacy creating product or a company, you need to focus for like decades. You know, I think I sold my last, I'm very happy I sold the hustle because I was poor

and suddenly I wasn't poor. Like that was great. But like I true, I messed up the compounding part. Like having like a business that truly compounds is like the greatest thing ever. and like one decade in, two decades in, like you really can start seeing some of the benefits. And so I hope that will be the case with this. Is ClickFunnels something that you'll own forever? I think, I mean, ClickFunnels, so we had an offer four years ago that we turned down.

And at the time, it was tough because there was ClickFunnels and there was Russell and everything was like all together. Over the last four years, we split it separately. So Russell and the coaching business is separate. from the software. So in theory, I could sell one without the other. So there may be a potential that we could do that when we get bored, but right now we still really have fun. But I do, you know, I think I'm going to be in the Russell business forever, but the ClickFunnels business, you know, who knows what, you know, what could happen there. So. And you guys kind of did the right way, which is like, if I had to guess, ClickFunnels has allowed you to profit along the way. Whereas a lot

of people, myself included, I was a little bit of a martyr. Like I didn't pay myself. a lot of money because I was like, oh, the CEO should eat last and like, which is, which is kind of true, but like I paid myself like nothing, right? And so I was like, I have to sell in order to get paid. And obviously that, that was foolish. Yeah, we built, we built ours where we had to have X amount of money in the bank based on our hard cost. You know what I mean? That that was the number. Then everything above that we distribute out. So yeah, it's been, it's been nice. Yeah. And it's that, that I think allows you to do something for a much longer period of time. And it was nice because we never took on outside funding so we didn't we could do dumb

decisions or smart, you know, whatever it was, but we didn't have anyone we ever had a report back to, which has been, which has been really nice. A lot of friends I know who have taken on equity or whatever throughout the process and it shifts everything. They can't distribute all the profits. They can't, you know, like, then it's like as soon as you take that first round, then you have to work towards some liquidation event or else you kind of get stuck. Yeah, you're, you have a duty. And I think that, um, that makes it way more hard, like way more challenging and I always tell people I'm like most things in business are reversible most mistakes taking capital might be the one where it's like you

you kind of can't undo that maybe you could but it's so hard that you'd probably just start from scratch yeah it's funny like when we got started I don't know what you know it's my first time being a startup founder and we're like a year in and everyone was telling us I take money and all the you know we get hit up by everybody and then um do you know Rand Fishkin SEO Maas yeah so he came to Boise and spoke in an event about them raising cash and capital and told me he got screwed yeah but it was funny because he was i guess his best friend lives here in Boise and they were doing this little event so he was telling everyone the story about it like as if it was

this great thing because he was still actively running at maz at the time and then afterwards i had a chance to you know wait in line and ask him a question i was like kind told him what we were doing and he pulled me aside and was like dude do not take on and they gave me this warning i was like oh and then fast forward five years later he was out of the business he wrote the book lost and founder and like i read the whole story i was like um but it was because he told me not to was literally why we never did and uh i told them later i was like you have no idea like this one conversation shifted i think the degree of happiness my life so anyway it's kind of interesting yeah i i i'm i think i'm not like dogmatic against venture capital i think that some

companies need it i think the best analogy i heard was vc is rocket fuel and if you own a car it doesn't matter how fast it is or how cool that car is or how much you love that car. Cars should not run on rocket fuel. And cars are rocket fuels for rockets. And just know that if you're taking this fuel, you better make a rocket, not a fast car. And what I realized was I think I like fast cars a lot more than a rocket. And there's a world where you could have a ClickFunnels company and maybe have both. But I think that I also sold my company for a lot less. money than what you see big tech companies say in the headlines. And I made way more than most

of my friends who raised the money and sold for a lot more than me. And so like, could you have any anything before the sell, right? The acquisition was the, the first cash event. So the last year, so the first two years I basically paid myself, uh, $2,000 a month, like nothing. And my business had millions in the bank. And so I was full of. not to do that but the last year I started paying myself a lot and then my wife very coincidentally I told you the Airbnb story she worked at Airbnb as well and it went public uh like the year before or a few months before I sold and she killed it and so we did well there and then the sale put us in like a new a new stratosphere and so it was like overnight uh well like her thing happened in like

December and then I got the money in February. So it was like a three month thing where like life changed. And frankly, it took about four years to get used to it. And so I think there's like a big difference between people like you who make it along the way or have you ever had a big liquidity event or it's always been. No, yeah. So people like you who make it along the way versus people like me who it's it was like a lumpy. It was like a it was like nothing and then boom. I think that like the people like me are like broken more than like the people like you because you're like used to it because you're waiting for that that's that's interesting was it when the when the deal with hubs all that happened was it pretty quick or was it like

a longer term thing and it goes like all that kind of stuff you know what I mean like a traditional so it was pretty great I I'm very proud of myself for how I handled this and I would encourage everyone to do this but basically they emailed me in like October I think it was October and they were like hey what's going on like we would love to talk about a partnership and I replied back are you emailing me because you want to buy me just say yes and we'll cut to the chain and they replied yes and I replied that night I said great thank you so much for your honesty let's let's get to it here's a list of all the reasons why you should not buy us and I made a and I made a Google Doc and I

made a list of all the things that I think could have came out and due diligence Nothing major, but like in this month, we made a mistake and churn was high, or I don't know, or like, whatever. And I said, here's a list. Is any of this a red flag? And he said, nope, all looks good to me. And I said, all right, let's do this. And we signed an LOI like three weeks later. And then I closed.

So they initially contacted me in October. I signed a 90-day, what's that window called? Like a judicial window. And then we closed on the 90th day. That's awesome. It was very fast because selling to HubSpot, like, they care, they're a huge company. A, like they have resources to like, they have a team of people just for buying companies. B, they're worth so much money.

They care way more about their reputation. They're not going to like nickel and dime me over stuff. And so it was like, they were like, look, your company is small for us. Like we, you could tweet about us and heard our reputation a lot more than this company companies even worse. So we're not going to mess with you. And they didn't mess with me. They were wonderful to work with. And so the whole thing was like maybe four months from cold email to deal closing. Oh, that's awesome. And it was miserable by the way. It was so hard. Were you trying to sell that point or do you have any like that you're working towards or

you're just kind of just doing the business? Yeah, I was building a company to sell. I was building it to sell like um and i um i did not go to market but they people were always messaging me because we were one of the like hot companies because no one thought email was interesting and then all of a sudden they did think it was interesting and it was basically me and morning brew were the only two companies that were at scale so there was only two options if you wanted to buy a newsletter company and they sold uh business insider in december and i sold in february Interesting. Have you seen a lot of people since they've been hearing your story popping up newsletter

companies? Is it? Everyone. Everyone. Everyone. And it's so much harder now. Man. So we started you, I don't know if you like pay attention, but I don't tell.

You can tell me what ClickFunnels is open rates are. Like we started in Fort. I started Hustle got in 14 and I started the hustle in 2016. And open rates were way higher and the cost to acquire a customer on Facebook was way low. And then Word got out, like you've been talking about this for 10 years. I'd been talking about it for five years. People finally started listening. And the competition is way harder now.

It's way harder. I don't know what it costs to acquire a customer anymore, but I know it's a lot more expensive. And I bet open rates are way down. Yeah. Well, it's funny because I've been doing this for almost 25 years now. Back in the day, email is insane because you get like 95% open rates. and like 80% click through, right. Anyway, so I got spoiled for the first four or five years of my

existence. And back then, no one was running email newslet, you know, and, you know, so for me now, every time I see the numbers, I'm always like depressed based on my vision of what we did 25 years ago. But it still works. It still works. And I think email ads and flows. Like when I started it, it was not popular. But five years before I started it, it was very popular. Now it's right when I sold it was very popular it's since gone down a little bit but there's like all these platforms y'all uh beehive convert kit whatever so they've made it way easier but most newsletters are really bad or like they don't innovate like it's kind like it's a lot of people like there's a lot of people that just copy what we did or maybe they copy what you did I think when we came out we

are kind of I mean it's email it's not like we're flying to mars it's not like the most like innovative thing but like within our world it was very innovative and I think that there's still people still need to come up with some more interesting angles than what a lot of people are doing right now yeah for sure interesting well dude this has been really fun uh i feel like i want to hang out with you more often so and hopefully i would i would love to hang out with you like by the way this is like an honor for you to ask me questions i'm telling you i've read um dot com secrets i've uh like i was i've been following you since i was probably 19 i'm 36 now maybe how old was i like i remember you winning a Ferrari yeah that's crazy

So, like, and then I followed you way before, I, way before you launched ClickFunnels, and then I signed up for ClickFunnels right when you launched it. And it looked like you made it with Play-Doh. It was like all these bright colors. And it was crazy. And so I've been a fan and customer of yours for so long. Oh, that's so cool. Well, dude, I'm glad we finally got to meet up and hopefully we'll do more stuff in the future

and open the Hampton group here in Boise. I'll join it. It'll be fun. Yeah, man. thank you for everything you do and uh total honor and uh i think i said this when we were offline you were doing this because you like hurt your leg or arm or something so i hope you're feeling better oh yeah i was a wrestling tournament i tore both my biceps off of the bones so i had to get probably can't see him by a double arm surgery got them reattached and spend them four months

post surgery now and i'm doing all the rehab and stuff but yeah i'm feeling a lot better now i'm actually next week to start drilling start wrestling again so it's good um i'm and i actually got into wrestling a little bit because of you i follow you know i i i became uh acquaintances with ben ascran seeing him do his thing and um big he got in the ufc but i remember like seeing like wait russell brunson russells what's this about and i uh started following like bow nickel and all those guys so you've been a very inspiration with me oh that's crazy well very cool man well if i can ever do anything for you let me know and um yeah hopefully if you come back out to boise for one of nathan's events let me know too i'll be there

Thank you. Awesome, thanks.