Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Sam Parr: How I Built One Business to Sell and Another to Keep Forever | Entrepreneurship | E373

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

After struggling with drug abuse, multiple arrests, and the loss of his dream job at Airbnb following a DUI, Sam Parr hit rock bottom. That moment became his wake-up call. Choosing sobriety, he rebuilt his life and founded The Hustle, scaling it into a multi-million-dollar media company acquired by HubSpot. Today, he leads Hampton, a private founder community helping entrepreneurs grow and connect. In this episode, Sam shares lessons on entrepreneurship, newsletter growth, and building legacy businesses that stand the test of time. In this episode, Hala and Sam will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:32) His Early Entrepreneurial Journey (06:19) Sobriety, Self-Discovery, and the Birth of Hustle Con (12:42) Launching and Scaling The Hustle Newsletter (19:25) Newsletter Growth and Monetization Strategies (26:14) Scale to $100 Million: Business Growth Ideas (33:18) Building Hampton vs. The Hustle (43:45) Success Habits and Life Lessons for Entrepreneurs Sam Parr is an internet entrepreneur, investor, and co-host of the top-ranked podcast My First Million. He is the founder of The Hustle, a media company acquired by HubSpot for a multi-eight-figure sum, and Hampton, a private community for high-growth founders. Sam is celebrated for his insights on entrepreneurship, copywriting, and scaling profitable online businesses through newsletters and community-driven growth. Sponsored By: Merit Beauty - Go to meritbeauty.com to get your free signature makeup bag with your first order. Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/PROFITING Airbnb - Find yourself a cohost at airbnb.com/host Deleteme - Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/PROFITING and use promo code PROFITING at checkout. Quo - Get 20% off your first 6 months at Quo.com/PROFITING Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Revolve - Head to REVOLVE.com/PROFITING and take 15% off your first order with code PROFITING Spectrum Business - Visit Spectrum.com/FreeForLife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Resources Mentioned: Sam’s Podcast, My First Million: bit.ly/MFM-apple  Sam’s Community, Hampton: joinhampton.com/about-us  Influence by Robert Cialdini: bit.ly/in_fluence  Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara: bit.ly/Un-Hospitality  Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals  Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter  LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new  Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Passive Income, Solopreneur, Networking

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He's the co-host of the hit podcast My First Million, and he's the founder of Hampton, an exclusive community of top entrepreneurs. Sam went from running a cheeky hot dog stand in college to later founding The Hustle, a business newsletter that sold for multiple millions to HubSpot, all before the age of 31. Newsletters are like a pirate ship, and every newsletter subscriber you get, it's like a little bit of a wind in your sales. What makes you want Hampton to be more of a business that you have forever? huge growth and huge money. If you do it right, it should compound. And so a business like Hampton,

I think there's an over emphasis on breadth of knowledge and not depth. I think depth is where real value is created. It's far better to be an expert at a very narrow thing than it is to be a generalist at a bunch of things. What are some of the big tactics that you use to grow your initial newsletter? We grew to 100,000 subscribers without spending one cent in marketing. One of the easiest ways to get popular for a newsletter. What's up, Gap Gang? Today I'm sitting down with one of the most scrappy and creative entrepreneurs in the game, Sam Parr. Sam went from running a cheeky hot dog stand in college to later founding The Hustle,

a business newsletter that sold for multiple millions to HubSpot, all before the age of 31. Now he's the co-host of the hit podcast My First Million and the founder of Hampton, an exclusive community for top entrepreneurs. Sam is redefining how creators and founders scale profitable businesses. In this conversation, Sam gets real about how copyrighting, sobriety, and community building shaped his entrepreneurial path. He also breaks down his playbook for growing newsletters and building companies that can hit the $100 million mark. And if you're new here and you want to level up your entrepreneurial game, make sure you hit that subscribe or or follow button so you never miss an episode of Yap.

Sam, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. What's up? How are you? I am so excited for this conversation. You're somebody who I look up to as a podcaster, as an entrepreneur, as a creator entrepreneur, and I know you've built and sold a multi-aid figure company. You now are running Hampton, which I'm really excited to talk to you about. But before we dive into all of that, I want to understand your upbringing, because from my understanding, you were an entrepreneur from a really young age and you did a lot of fun

things before you actually launched some of your more serious businesses. So talk to us about why you were such a young entrepreneur, what inspired you to be an entrepreneur, and some of the early projects that you did. I grew up in Missouri, in St. Louis, Missouri. You weren't raised in America. Were you? I was born in New Jersey. Yeah. Oh, you're born in New Jersey. For some reason, I thought you said that you had immigrated at a young age. Honestly, even if you're from New Jersey, you probably still don't know anything about Missouri. Yeah, I don't. I knew as much about New Jersey as you probably knew about Missouri growing up

because Missouri, where I grew up, very blue-collar, and my parents owned a fruit stand, and that is how I learned about entrepreneurship. But back then, they didn't call it entrepreneurship. It was just making it living. That's just what people did. And so for years, I thought that I was going to own a landscaping company or something like that, some type of blue-collar thing.

But when I was in college, but really maybe starting in high school, I started learning about the internet. I started selling stuff on eBay. And then in college, I started a couple of e-commerce stores. And I was like, this is so much better than blue-collar stuff. Because in college, I started a hot dog stand. It was called Southern Sam's Wieners as big as a baby's arm. And it was really hard work. I worked my butt off.

And it was so hot outside. It was awful. And then I started selling stuff on the internet. And it was so much easier to be in the AC. and I can make money in my sleep. And so when I learned about it, I left school and tried to join an early stage startup called Air Bed and Breakfast, but now Airbnb. And that was my start in the internet world.

Let's dive deep on this hot dog stand. It had such a funny name. It seems like you were always really good at marketing, really good at getting attention. What were some of the lessons that you learned from this hot dog stand endeavor? That was what inspired me to get into copywriting because I'm now, like a copywriter, that's kind of my schick. And I read all these books on how to sell, how to sell to people when I had a hot dog stand. Because hot dog stands, one isn't particularly different than the other. It's about who could sell it better. We had a

stick where you would get like a free hot dog. If you put your baby's arm in a bun and put mustard on it and let me take photo and post it on social media because the slogan was weeners as big as a baby's arm. And I would do all. these schicks or I would just riff with people. I would ask them questions and I would get them to laugh. Basically, it's almost like flirting a little bit. And I learned how to do that and I would sell way more. And I was like, the cool thing about the internet is I can write a bit of copy one time and sell to an infinite amount of people, not just the amount of people that are walking down my block. How do I learn how to do that to an infinity amount of people? And that's why I got into

copywriting. And that was my big thing from the hot dog stand was, A, I don't want to be outside doing blue collar work all day. It's very hard. And B, how do I learn how to sell, but via the written word? One of my favorite quotes is from Dan Henry, who's actually going to come on the show soon. And he goes, sell what everybody is selling, but say it better. Yeah, I would even say, say it better. I would say different. It's a lot better and easier to be different than it is better. I really learned the effects of differentiation, not exactly even just being better, because all of business as perception is one car particularly better than another car. I'm not sure, but we definitely perceive a Mercedes to be of higher quality than some other type of brand.

And so I think it's better to be different than it is better, in my opinion. So there's a lot of young men listening in in their 20s. I did some research on you and I found out that you actually got let go from your dream job at Airbnb or they didn't hire you because they found out that you got a DUI. And that's at you on your sobriety journey and you got more discipline after that. So looking back at your 20s, what would you have done differently? And for all the 20-ish-year-old men tuning in right now, what's your advice to them? It worked out well, so I don't know if I would change too much, but I went through years of pain. So basically, starting maybe around the age of 20 or 21, I was always born with an adjective personality,

and I started getting to drugs and alcohol, mostly alcohol, but I definitely liked to do some drugs, or I did. And I spiraled. There was a three-week period where I got arrested. like two or three times. I spent time in jail and it was awful. And I lied to Airbnb, or at least I thought I wasn't lying. On the application, they were like, have you been convicted of a misdemeanor? Or something like that. I was in the process of going through court and I hadn't been convicted at that time or something like that where I was in fact wrong, but I was hoping it was a great area and they called me out on it. And so the day before I was supposed to start at Airbnb, they were like, we don't hire liars. We call you. So I learned during that phase, I think for a lot of young men,

you know, I was 21, 22, women are a little bit different in that they have a different right of passage. For a lot of young men, there's not really a right of passage. There's no official period where it's like you were a boy and now you are a man. And when I was in my like 21, 22, 20 years old, I was like, I still feel like a boy, but I'm supposed to act like a man a little bit. I don't know how to do that. And I felt incredibly not confident with myself, particularly when meeting other girls, which is what every 21 year old guy cares about. And so I used a lot of alcohol to like cover that up. And then I realized they had a lot of issues that I was still working through as a kid. And I used a lot of alcohol to cover that up. And so once I

got sober, it took about 12 months of being sober to where I started to get very confident in my own skin and confident in myself and thinking that I'm good enough, good enough to like be loved by like a girlfriend or good enough to like succeed and make money. Because I always thought I had some type of like special sauce. And I was like, I could have something in me, but I don't know how to express it and I don't know how to reach or fulfill my potential. And I had all these demons that I would use alcohol to help cover up. And I just realized that being sober forces you to face reality. You know, you kind of have like beer goggles on where you like see the world blurry. And once you take those goggles off, you can finally see the world more clearly. And you have to face

stuff more head on and more direct and face the consequences of your action. It could be as small as approaching a girl. And a lot of times you want to have a drink in your hand or something like that to make you feel cool or make you calm and just doing little things like that like talking to a stranger doing that sober got me to start flexing this muscle of being confident and facing my fears and it kind of made me feel fearless after doing it for a couple of years it became like a high and so for a lot of young men I think that they shouldn't avoid fearful things they should acknowledge that they are fearful of doing a variety of things and they should do it anyway and I think that using drugs and alcohol it's a great way to hide those fears and to make it so you have fake courage but

It creates a horrible cycle. Well, this detour of not actually working at Airbnb led you to become a real entrepreneur, right? You then started HustleCon and the Hustle and everything like that. And you started Hustle with a community-driven event called HustleCon. What made you think of actually launching first with an event? And were you always really good at building community? And did you have experience with events?

Or was this the first time you ever did it? You know, what's funny is my process of getting sober. It keeps going back to like meeting girls, but I swear that's just like whatever like a 21 year old cares about. I wanted to meet people. I wanted friends, men and women friends. And I read a book and the book talked about how in order for a man to attract other male friends or potential girlfriends, you need to work on yourself and become like an interesting person and bring people along with you in your life. And it was like, this is how you'd be attractive.

You become an attractive person by living an interesting life, bringing others along and guiding them along this life that you want to live because now you will be associated with good times and all that. And so I started hosting events for that reason. For example, I had a book club that would meet every week. And I became the leader of the book club. And all I had to do was read one chapter in advance of the club and then lead the conversation.

And I got all these friends, all these people looking up to me and they came to me. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I am the center of attention. And I get to pick and choose my friends. and these people admire me. I finally feel loved and accepted. And that's why I got into hosting events. The reality is, is I'm pretty introverted. I actually like to be by myself a lot now.

But at that time, I was like, in order to meet friends, I want to host events. And so I had previously had a different startup that was like a roommate matching app, but it was set up like Tinder where you would swipe, which is obviously really dumb because I should have just launched Tinder, Tinder for Tinder.

This was like Tinder for roommates. So it was like a much smaller market. And I sold it and I made not that much money, but I was like, I'm going to host this event called Hustlecom, which is basically like a TED Talk for entrepreneurs, I'm going to host that to kill time until I figure out my next big idea. And that's why I hosted the event. I hosted it because I knew that events was a great way to become the node of a network and to meet all these amazing people. And I wanted friends. As desperate as that sounds, that's the truth. I always do things like

that host events just so that you can actually meet to people that you want to meet. It's such a great networking hack to actually be the event planner and the event host. So some of my best friends to this day, my best friends who are men and women. In fact, I was with my friend Lily when I met my now wife. I was like, Lily, this girl's beautiful. I'm going to go talk to her. I met all of them via my book club. And my book club, I created an ad on Craigslist. And I think I bought, what did I put it? I put it like on the San Francisco newspaper. And I was like, I'm starting a business book club. Who wants to come? And I had 2,000 people over the course of a year, sign up to like learn about the book club. And I met all of my now best friends via that book club. That's so cute.

I love that. I started a hip-hop blog when I was younger. I recruited all the girls from Craigslist, and a lot of those girls are still my friends to this day. Yeah, it's the best. Yeah. So then you started a newsletter called The Hustle, and that was something that you really scaled big.

You ended up selling it to HubSpot for, like, multi-eight figures. It became a huge deal. You sold advertising and things like that. What made you think of newsletters? I read that at the time people thought email was dead, which I was surprised because to me it was still like pretty early. But talk to me about how you envisioned the hustle and did it pan out how you actually planned it or did you go organically and see how it evolved?

You and I, I don't know how old you are, but what we are to the young 20-somethings, this guy named Andrew Warner was that guy to me. And Andrew Warner had this website called MixerG.com where he would interview entrepreneurs. And I would watch that every single day. It was like crack to me. noticed that he had a bunch of people on who had started newsletters. One of them was Ben Lear who started a company called Thrillist, which went on to become, it's like a huge billion-dollar media company. And I was like, I'm pretty good at writing. This newsletter

thing seems interesting. And it was a bunch of magical things that came together at once. The first thing was that, A, I liked writing. The second thing was I saw people talk about newsletters on Mixergy. And the third thing, at the time, people were building these large media companies on the backs of Facebook. And it was very evident. And if you're like or 21 years old listening. You don't even know what I'm talking about, but basically BuzzFeed got huge because they would have a Facebook

that would get all these likes on Facebook and they would share articles on Facebook and a lot of people would click the articles and go to their website, but over time, it started decreasing the reach. Zuckerberg would change the algorithm. I was learning this, and I made a very, what I felt was an obvious prediction

was that newsletters are like a pirate ship. And every newsletter subscriber you get, it's a little bit of a wind in your sales. And basically, I can build this massive media company just doing email and the model was so much better because, and this proved to be true, I was like, I could have two writers reach millions, literally two, three, four, five million people a day because all I'm doing is sending 1,500 words in a newsletter and I could put ads in that and I think I can make $100 million a year doing that. That was my math.

If I get like five or six million subscribers, I think I can make $100 million a year and potentially keep going and build a multi-billion dollar, but for sure, a multi-hundred million dollar company doing that. And so I did all the math and I went and told all these media people, these media execs, who I would call the email, I'd told them this idea. And they were like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Newsletters are dumb. And I'm like, guy, why does it matter? If I'm looking at this phone, who cares if I have to click the Gmail app and read the news versus go to Chrome and browse a website? Why does it matter? Your attention's there or it's not. It doesn't matter. And they're like, well, advertisers don't

want to advertise in newsletters and this and that. And I was like, but why? This does not make sense to me. And so in the first year, I got 100,000 subscribers to sign up to the hustle. The second year, I think, it went $100, $500, a million. When we sold, it was like, I think $1.7 million, something like that. And then revenue went, I think, $300,000, $2.2.2,000, $5,12, and then $18. I think we were going to do $18 million the year we sold. And along the way, we got really lucky on a couple things. One, all the people who said we were stupid for doing this, it became true. Subscribers were listening or subscribing to these things. And so we got lucky. There was no competition. It was us, Austin Reef at Morning Brew, who's now one of my best

friends, and the founders of the skim. We were the only three people in this whole industry doing what we were doing. And so no one was catching on. It was insane. I'm like, are you guys watching us do this right in front of you? How do you guys not see us doing this? Yeah. And then the second thing, advertisers started buying into it. And so now, huge companies, they have this massive budget, you know, where they advertise all over the place. They purposely deployed money now in newsletters back then. They didn't do it. And so we had to convince them it was a good idea. And every year, it got easier and easier and easier. And so we started just gobbling up all this advertising budget because they wanted to advertise in newsletters, but there was only three of us in

the whole field. We captured this beautiful momentum. We just grabbed this tidal wave, and it was awesome. So we got really lucky in that regard, but it was so funny. Austin, like I said, he's not one of my best friends. His company, they're doing close to $100 million in revenue now. I sold my business early, so I wasn't able to get there. But the premise was right. But what was funny is Austin lived in New York, the skim, they lived in New York, and I lived in San Francisco. Us three, we didn't know each other. But we all had the exact same insight all around the exact same time. And we all had the exact same predictions. And those became true, but very few people believed in us early on. That's so exciting, so cool to hear. And now I know that you're in podcasting. I know Morning Brew has a little podcast network going on. Do you feel like podcast is the next evolution of what newsletters were? Or do you think of them differently? They're way different in terms of skill set.

So my skill set, I don't think of myself as a great podcaster. My partner, Sean, on the podcast, MFM, he's fantastic. He is built for that. I am built for writing. I'm a great writer. They're different skill sets. But I do think if I had to rank the order, the power of a media business, or if you're, what's the Bieber, who had to make a business.

I think Road. I think it's Road. Road. Sorry, Haley Beaver. I forget the name of your company. I knew exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. If you're like her or you're the Kardashians, if you're what I did with Hampton, the order of influence, like the most powerful channels, in my humble opinion,

number one is podcast because you're in someone's ear. oftentimes many hours a week. Number two is YouTube. Number three might be newsletter. And then number four would be like a blog. That's the order of influence. Because the equation for media value is the quantity of people times the power you have over them,

meaning how influential you are, times they're buying power. And so what that means, so like there's a world where having low influence over 10 million moms who live in the Midwest is equal to having a newsletter that impacts 1,000 people who work in the buying department for the parts department at Boeing. Do you know what I mean?

Who buy a billion dollar or $10 million deals for like parts? And so that's the equation. And so in my opinion, podcasts are one of the best ways to have influence. It's also one of the hardest. They're like the hardest thing on earth to grow, in my opinion. But once you capture someone and you're in their ears for 50 or 100 minutes, it's the week, you have real influence over them. What's up,

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A lot of the creator entrepreneurs that listen to the show, everybody is hot on growing their newsletter. So what are some of the big tactics that you use to grow your initial newsletter? We grew to 100,000 subscribers without spending one cent in marketing. It was all through writing blog posts that would go viral on Reddit or Hacker News. And so one of the easiest ways to get popular for a newsletter is to make a decision on where your market already exists and what content can you create that gets popular on that channel and then you siphon them off into your newsletter. For example, we knew that a lot of people who were in, do you remember what Soylent is, you know, Soilent? Is it like a food or something?

Yeah, yeah, I've heard of smelling. It's kind of like slim fat. for nerds. It's like a meal replacement for like engineers. And the hustle was a tech and business newsletter. So I was like, well, a lot of like nerdy engineers are going to want to subscribe because that's who I am and that's who I'm writing for. And so I wrote an article about how my friend, I paid him $2,000 to live on Soylent and only Soilent for 30 days. And I was like, okay, so this is content that those types of people will like. It will go viral in the subreddit called Soilent on Reddit. And so I would create content that would go viral there. And that's how I got

my first 100,000 subscribers. So if you want to kickstart, you have to find out where's the audience are we living and what are they consuming and how do I break into their attention and bring them over to my platform. The second thing that works really well is we took an unserious game, which is newsletters, very serious. And because of that, we crushed it. No one at the time, other than the skim and morning brew. And arguably, I know how Austin operates. It was really just him and I are our companies that were taking it the most serious because what we did was we calculated how much money each subscriber is worth to us. And then we went and spent money on Facebook ads to acquire a customer to bring them

onto our platform. And at the time, no one was doing that. So I would highly recommend, first of all, you should get to like tens of thousands of subscribers organically so you know that your content is good enough to keep someone. Then you do a bunch of calculations to figure out what's your customer worth. Then you decide how much can I wait to get my payback from buying ads? And then you go and buy ads anywhere you can where you can acquire customers. for the value that you have already pre-determined.

Does that make sense? Yeah, totally makes sense. And then talk to us just for people who are unfamiliar in terms of how you monetize your newsletter. Like, what were the different avenues that you monetized it? We got our first probably 15 million in revenue from one source only, ads in the newsletter. And our theory was we could get to something like 40 or 50 million in revenue

via ads in the newsletter. That was wrong, by the way. the number is way higher. You could definitely get to like $100 million just on advertising. And then I was like, once we get to like, I don't know, hundreds of thousands or a million subscribers, we can launch different paid newsletters and paid communities. And that's what we did.

We owned this thing called Trends. I totally screwed up. I charged $300 a year for. I should have charged way more money. That's not a good pricing structure. And so we are making millions through that. But the year we sold, we are probably going to do $18 million in revenue. We are probably going to do probably $12 to $13 million, just an $1 million.

advertising and then another six via subscriptions. I know with podcasts, it's really standardized in terms of the CPM, right? So the average CPM is like $25 to $35 in that realm. We made no money, by the way, on podcasts. Really? Yeah. With the hustle or with... So the hustle owns my first million. You made no money? Do you want to know how much money my podcast made this year so far? How much? Guess. In sponsorships. How many downloads do you have per month? $400,000. Oh, I don't know. I don't know, seven figures, maybe, right? I made $1.2 million already this year in sponsorship, just on my show, because I have a podcast

network. Yeah, this year. So, so far. That's great. Okay. So you're killing it at monetization. I'm really good at that. We were not good at it.

So I sold my first million to HubSpot. I think we were doing 300,000 downloads a month, 370,000. I think we did the month we sold. Now we do many millions a month. We were doing something like $10,000 a month in sales. God, that's so crazy. It's so crazy how you could specialize. We specialize in newsletter advertisements.

We did not specialize on podcasts. And my team, we did not know how to do it. We still had to learn how to do it. It's so funny. I meet people like that every day where I'm like, you get this many downloads and you only make this much. To your point, you just really need to know what you're doing. We didn't know.

I didn't know. So how are newsletters still just out of curiosity in terms of, is there like a standard CPM or because there was no competitors where you guys just selling it flat rate and whatever you wanted? I was still doing HustleCon every year, but I started the hustle, as it is now, in 2016, in April of 16. And by that June, that was when I first started selling ads, that June I made $30,000 that month. And I sold the first ad to this guy named Chris at Wealthfront. Chris Martinez, you probably haven't heard of me since then.

Thank you for buying my first ad. And I think I made up the number. I think I said, how does $20 per $1,000? sound to you. And I said, if that doesn't work for you, I'll give you your money back. And that's what he accepted. So for some reason, we stuck with $20 per 1,000. And so we had multiple ad units in the newsletter. I think we just called it a native ad. It was in the email, and that would be 150 words. I think we charged $25 to $30 per 1,000. And then we had other ad units that would be cheaper. I would have to do the math. But each time we hit send, maybe we were making,

who I don't remember, $45 per 1,000 cents. And so on a million subscribers, you're looking at something like $45,000 every time you hit send. It's crazy. It's so similar to podcasting. You've got basically add slots in your newsletter. It's the same thing. The difference is, newsletters were so much easier to grow. Podcasts are very challenging to grow. If I said, hey, I need you to create a new podcast from scratch. You can't use your name and it has to be a new industry. It would be really hard to do that. It would. It is.

My podcast, MFM, we're pretty popular. Every day, I'm like, I can't believe this works. Like, it still shocks me. Now, if we were to do that with a newsletter, if you told me you have to go do that with a different newsletter, I'd be like, yeah, it's going to take me six months, give me like a quarter of a million dollars and I could get to 100,000 subscribers.

Easy. Like, it's not that hard. It's far more formulaic. Podcasting is oftentimes, in my opinion, a little bit magic in a bottle. It is. I feel like it's great timing, getting on the right platforms. But now with YouTube, I feel like it's a little bit... Way easier.

Yeah, it's way easier. Okay, let's play a game. Let's play a game called Pass to $100 million. So I know on my first million, you're often, like, riffing with shine on $100 million business ideas and past. So I'm going to give you an idea for a business that an entrepreneur listening in might take on. and you can say, is this scalable to $100 million or not?

And then what your pass to that $100 million would be. Okay? We're talking about newsletters. So a newsletter just for the construction industry. My general answer is most businesses can get to $100 million in revenue. You just got to tinker. You also have to figure out the right business model, but also you have to figure out the right time length.

So if you give it enough time, almost everything can get there. So for construction, B-to-B newsletters are so much more profit. than everything I ever done. So I would copy this company called Industry Dive. Industry Dive is a B-to-B newsletter business that sold to this company called Informa for maybe $800 million, I believe. And so what I would do is I would start with construction. I don't know what the Tam is, but I would imagine I could create a daily newsletter that sends six days a week for construction companies. I would probably target someone who's the decision maker on buying products that equal, I think, tens of millions of dollars. So, for example, if you own a company that builds

500 houses, or you, like, create, like, a subdivision or something like that, I would create a newsletter where I would act like it was a high school yearbook. And so what that means is that that industry, I don't know how big it is, but I would make it feel very small. And my editorial philosophy would be name as many names and as many companies as humanly possible. I would be like the yellow pages, because in that industry, they're not used to probably getting a lot clout or whatever, and they probably would want to see their friends or businesses or people who they recognize or themselves in this newsletter. And so they would be more often to tell their buddies. It would make me feel like a high school yearbook where it would be like, um, Derek in New Jersey

who runs a 500 person company, he has said the following about the current market. I would get like a quote from him. And I would probably have a 1500 or daily newsletter for business owners of construction companies. And I think I could probably get that business to five million in revenue. And And I would create more newsletters that are tangentially related, but not exactly the same thing. So instead of construction companies, it would be like plumbing or something. Plumbing. Yeah, plumbing is a great example. And the reason I would do this is because the vendors of those companies, so if I created an HVAC newsletter, the vendors of an HVAC company, they have to spend a certain amount of money, the people making the actual AC, they need more customers. And there's not that many places that you can spend money for average.

advertising to reach that demographic. It's a very hard group of people to reach. So my business would be, which industries can I enter where there's enough people buying ads, but it's really hard. They can't spend it on Facebook. And so that's what I would do. And then I would layer in a paid community and a conference. I know for a fact, I can get to $100 million in revenue because other people have done it. So we were just talking about CPMs for newsletters. And the hustle was pretty broad. So you had like a $20 CPM what you're talking about. But because this is niche, you might be able to charge, yeah, a couple thousand CPM because they're getting exactly who they want instead of three out of the thousand people

you're targeting on a broad newsletter. It's very easy to do the math. So the math is basically, I'm just making this up. I don't know anything about this industry. But if I had an HVAC newsletter that sent a daily newsletter that talked about the industry and news for the HVAC industry, my friend owns a HVAC business in Missouri that does $100 million in revenue. And I have to imagine he buys $30 million a year worth of HVACs that are air condition units

that he installs into people's home. And so I would go to the advertiser that says, I reach people like this. How much are you willing to spend in order to sell HVACs to a client that would potentially buy $30 million a year worth of your company or of your products? So it's a no-brainer that you spend a million dollars a year

to reach this audience, you know, whatever. So good. Okay. So let's go to the next one. A car wash franchise. Well, I would want to have a schick. So in order to build that, I would have to say, who am I going after?

Am I going after families that have children and their children are going to come and sit in the lobby? Am I going after dads who have high-end weekend cars and they want them super highly detailed? So I would make a decision like that. And then I would sweat through every single detail of the user experience. And so let's say that my schick is, this is going to be family friendly. So that means I would paint that. car wash in a very colorful way. And I would have chauch skis. I can't say that word. I would have

stuff all over the place that kids could play with. I would have coloring books. I would make it a place where you want to go because your children can sit and jump off the walls and have fun for 30 minutes while you get your car cleaned. The model for that would probably be franchise, get as many units as I possibly could, but I would probably sell founding or annual memberships in order to fund expansion to new cities. And I know that you like blue collar roll-ups. I don't like that. You don't like them. Oh, I thought you did. I think it's cool. I think it's cool, but I think it's so much work. Okay. You'd rather build a newsletter and make $100 million. Even though I'm a yuppie, I think the grass is always a greener. I think it's very romantic to hire blue-collar guys,

enjoy being with the everyday man, but the reality is this I don't probably want to be around them as much as I think I do. I didn't mean to ruin your... No, no, no. I want to hear the truth. I thought you liked blue-collar roll-ups, but you're not Cody Sanchez, apparently. I like the idea of going out hunting, but I don't want to go sleep outside in the cold. It sounds romantic, but in practice.

It's way easier to sit on your laptop and write newsletters. Have you ever been around a bunch of blue-collar guys? I grew up with them. They're a bunch of degenerates. I don't want to spend too much time with these morons. Yeah, I hear you. They're hung over all the time and stuff like that. It's hard work.

Okay, so let's do the next one. An AI-powered personal trainer app. I think this might be the hardest of all of them. Coincidentally, it's also not the least blue collar, but it might be the hardest of all of them. That's a hard space. How would I get it to $100 million in revenue? You have to have a co-founder that has a huge Instagram audience

or YouTube audience who's a fitness and influence. So in order to make this work, I would have to either be the famous influencer, which I'm not, the fitness influencer. That would be cool if I was ripped enough to be a fitness influencer, but I'm not. And so I would have to be the nerd who actually creates the product. And then you'd have to team up, I would find someone to be like, I'll give you half the company. But to get distribution for those for an app, it's one of the hardest things I think to do. So I would probably have to team up with someone. Hey, young improfitors, I got a question for you. Are you still running your business on a

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So you actually built Hustle and Hampton very differently. From my understanding, you really built the hustle to sell it, whereas Hampton is more of a legacy business that you want to run for a long time. Is that accurate? My dream is that my daughter will work at Hinton. My daughter is going to be too soon, and my dream is that she'll work here. That's so cute. What makes you want Hampton to be more of a business that you have forever compared to the hustle?

My now current co-founder, Joe, he's in the other room here. When I was in my mid-20s, he was the wealthiest person who I knew. And at that time, I asked him, how much does he spend every month? I think he told me $60,000. And I, like, Googled how much money do I have to have to be able to spend $60,000 a month and never work again? And I think the number was like $20 or $25 million. But I was like, I'm going to have a goal. can I make $20 million by the age of 30?

And so I built the hustle in order to hit that goal. So I knew I was going to sell it. That was the plan the whole time. And I did. I hit the number by 31 because I sold it when I was 31. So I was off by a year. That's awesome. But that was my goal because I grew up feeling poor.

When I ran the hustle for the first handful of years, I paid myself like $2,000 a month. I felt very poor along the way. Because of my alcohol stuff that I had to eat prior, I literally felt like a homeless guy some days. And I was like, I want to not be fearful and I don't want to feel insecure. So I built the hustle to sell. But what I noticed is my goal isn't really money anymore.

But the people who are really wealthy, and when I say wealthy, I mean money, but I also mean relevant or largely impactful to the world, they do the same thing for many decades, a lot of times. And so I realize that huge growth and huge money, if you do it right, it should compound. And so a business like Hampton, I think that it can last 50 to 100 years. And I think that if I love something enough, which I do, then I should never want to sell it. I should want to keep on doing it for a long period of time. And so it was a combination with Hampton.

I wanted to last for so long because A, I'm not motivated by money, but if you want to make money, like you have to be able to do something for many decades. B, I want my children to work here because I think it would be so exciting to be able to have an excuse to spend time with them. And the last thing, see, is that I just like doing it. I enjoy this. My company, the way that I set it up, it's just an excuse for me to have fun and be around people who I love

and, like, co-workers who I'm inspired by. And if I do that right and make this my playground, I don't want to get rid of it. I'm actually a member of Hampton, and so I joined about a year ago. I've absolutely loved it. I thought it was such a genius idea when I came across it.

There's other things out there, but not at the scale and the quality that you're doing it. what did you feel was the gap or the need for entrepreneurs in terms of community? Because there's so many masterminds and conferences out there. What did you want to do differently? Well, thank you for being a part of it. And thank you for saying that it's really nice.

The gap was basically there's YPO, which is a company that does what we do or we do what they do. And they probably have 30,000 members. But the majority of members are a little bit more blue collar. Not blue collar, but old school. So it's people who have inherited a family business or who own real estate companies. and that's wonderful. That's great. And then there's Vistage. Have you ever heard of Vistage? Vistage is a company in our space. They probably do $800 million a year in revenue. They're huge.

Oh, wow. It's massive. It's a massive company. And they do what we do or we do what they do. And they are mostly for blue collar. So like someone who owns a plumbing or HVAC business. And what I noticed is that for the internet space, a lot of these communities, they were a little borderline scammy or a lot of them are like kind of broie, which I didn't particularly identify with. And I just thought that, there was nothing for people who were in the internet space, who were young, or at least young thinking, and who already were past survival and now so more thinking about thriving. So someone like you, no matter what happens, you're going to go somewhere. You're going to kick ass in life. But you've probably been building this business for a handful of years and you had your head down for three, four, five years, however long. And then you looked up all sudden and you're like, oh my God, this is amazing. It's kind of working. I still feel scared

that I can go out of business or I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing, but it's working. And the unfortunate situation is after years of having my head down, I finally have looked up and I've realized I've outrun all my peers and there's no one around me. And I need other people who are like me. Otherwise, I'm making $5, $10, $20, $50 million decisions all by myself. And that's when mediocrity tends to creep in because you don't have anyone to push you.

You'll talk to your team and your staff, but they're not going to be honest with you. They don't want to be fired. your spouse, your husband, your boyfriend, your wife, your girlfriend, they don't really know everything about your business. They know about your personal baggage, but not about your business. And the people who know about your business, who you work with you, they don't know too much about your personal baggage because you don't want to mix that. And so you're making all these decisions by yourself without anyone to push back. And so the gap was we wanted to solve that problem for this very particular internet type of young thinking entrepreneur. And I know that there's specific requirements

to get into Hampton. So what made you want to put those requirements in place? And how do you make sure that people are engaged in the community through their journey of joining Hampton? We put requirements in place because it kind of stinks. We turn people away all the time. We actually turn way more people away than we let in. But you have to have requirements in order to make it great.

We had a rule early on was we will never trade off cool, meaning I don't want Hampton to be something people want to join because it's cool. I want them to be something that they join because it has utility. Talking to one another, a lot of women know this, and they've been trying to convince men for years, talking about your issues helps. That makes you feel better, and you could actually solve problems, and it feels good to get it off your chest. We want people to come to Hampton because we're solving that problem.

We're helping them make more money, or we're helping them build a better business or feel better about their life. Now, how do you get people engaged? When I first started the company about three years ago, I was like, I don't want to build the business off of my reputation. I want to build the business so it could grow without me. And about six months ago, I kicked myself in the head and I was like, that's the stupidest thing ever.

Use my brain. What am I doing? And so lately, I've been leaning in way more to where it's sort of like a cult and you need a cult leader, unfortunately, and I'm a little bit of that leader. And so to get people more engaged, we've noticed the more I lean in with my personality, the more people get bought in. And so we're kind of leaning in on that more than we ever have to get people engaged. One way we get people engaged is every single person who applies to Hampton, who fits our requirements.

We spend a lot of time interviewing them. And what a lot of people realize is back here, we have our staff, they're actually watching all of the interviews. And then we have a meeting at the end of the week to talk about who we want to let in, who we don't want to let in. So we go through this huge vetting process. Oh, wow. So when I was interviewed, other people were watching that at the same time? Yes, we record all of them. And we tell you, Corey, I don't want people.

I knew that people were reviewing it. I thought you meant live, like, watching it or something. No, no, no, no, no, no, not live. But me and my co-founder, we've had tens of thousands of people apply. We have watched 100% of all the interviews. Wow. 100%. I'm not exaggerating, 100%.

And we have these meetings over here in our office over here. Well, people, like, we like debate. Like, should we let this person in? Should we not let this person in? What's the situation? I don't entirely understand their business. Let's Google it and, like, research it to figure out if it's legit. we do that for everyone. And because we do that, I actually think we need to tell that story better

about how much work we do on every single person we invite. But once they realize all the work we do, I think they take it a lot more serious. Yeah. And quality control. I mean, it's helpful for people in the community because everybody that you're engaging with is somebody who's really done a great job in their business and has value to share. So that is awesome. Can I ask you a question really quick? Of course. Who's been the best person you've ever had on? The best person. that I've ever had on the show ever. My favorite interview that I've ever had is Gary V. Yeah, he's cool.

I interviewed him in person at his office. When? Probably about a year ago. That's awesome. Because I'm a marketer, we just had so much to riff on, and it's somebody that I've really looked up to. Who's your favorite? You know, Gary, I've probably hung out with him three or four times.

I'm not friends with him. I would say we're acquaintances, but I admire the hell out of him. I've had dinner with him a couple of times. and I am like star-struck when I'm with him. He's amazing. So I would say he's one of my favorites. Jesse Itzler was really special to me.

He's pretty cool. Darmesh, who's the founder of HubSpot, he's a multi-billionaire. Oh, I got to try to get him. Man, Darmesh is a special human being. Darmesh is a person who I admire through and through all facets of life. Most recently, we had Will Guder on. Will wrote this amazing book called Unreasonable Hospitality. And he used to run this restaurant called Eleven Madison.

It's one of the best restaurant in the world. you know, the TV show The Bear, how they have like a fancy, it's like they looked up to Will in that show in order to see how to run a restaurant. I had him on recently, and I loved talking to him. He kind of blew my mind and changed my opinion that my business and everyone else's business should be all about hospitality.

And so that was really good. That sounds so interesting. I'm pretty sure he's on our list of coming up, so I'm excited about that. Somebody who I interviewed recently, this was my second time interviewing him, Grant Cardone, even though he gets so much slack online. I love him. He's always so nice and he's so smart and he just always makes for such a

great interview. So it's just funny how sometimes people just get a bad reputation online, but then in reality, they're like amazing humans. I've never met him, but I do agree. He does not have a wonderful reputation. Yeah. You're like, no comment. I've never met him. If he met him, I feel like you'd change your mind. That's kind of how I feel about it. I haven't met him, so I can't say what he's like in real life. But that's cool. I'm happy that you get to talk to them again and you get to meet people you admire. Okay, so I'm going to ask you two questions. You can answer them however you like. It doesn't have to be about anything that we talked about today. So what is one actionable thing our young improfitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

One thing. Your biggest piece of advice. I have to say two. Can I do two? Yeah, that's fine. The more the merrier. I think the first one is to pick a good spouse or partner. I picked, or she picked me a little bit, but my wife, this sounds like it was a financial decision. It wasn't, but she was the most profitable thing that I've ever done. Picking a really good partner, a life partner, it's not a financial decision, but it's the greatest financial decision I ever made because she's kept me on track and helped me up when I wanted to quit, which was often. So that's really important. But the second thing, a mistake that I made, I read a lot. I read a ton of books. When I was younger, I tended to,

to read one book over and over and over again, and I would master the techniques. And I think that's a significantly better way to consume information. And so if you're listening and you tend to read a ton of different business books, I would stick to only three or four classic ones, so like Robert Chaudini's book influence

and a few others like that, and I would master them. And I would consume no other books. Like I wouldn't read any extra stuff. I would just master the one or two books every single year that could really move the needle for my business, so good that you could teach it back to someone. That's really, really good advice.

Reflecting on my past of how I've consumed books, the ones that I've read over and over again are the ones that I've actually implemented in real life in terms of the advice that I read that actually sticks. There's an over-emphasis on breadth of knowledge and not depth, and I think depth is where real values created. And I tend to read for entertainment, so I justify that breath is good,

but the reality is that it's far better to be an expert at a very narrow thing than it is to be a generalist at a bunch of things. And so I think that you should not follow your ego and read to read lots of books, but read to master one or two topics. Okay, what is your secret to profiting in life?

And this can be beyond business, finance. What is your secret to just having a wonderful, successful life? I set goals in these categories every year, family, fitness, finance, and fun. And if you're religious, you can add a faith. You can do faith. I get pretty intentional about setting goals in those categories. And I meet with my wife once a month where we talk about them and to figure out, are we on track for what we wanted to accomplish this year? For example, I love gilded age architecture. And I was like, I really want to go on a tour. Let's make a point to do this. Or I really wanted to visit this region of the

country and I wanted to see this one like a monument. I've always wanted to do that. We have to schedule it and we have to do it. But then, you know, there's finances and then there's fitness. And so I have those four categories where I create goals and I'm pretty relentless about getting after it and hitting those goals. I think an issue a lot of people make is they don't write down goals. And if they do, they don't write them down the right way. A goal needs to be timebound. It needs to be achievable. And it needs to be super specific. I think that writing down goals is sort of like if you went to a trainer and you were like, I want to be fit. The trainer wouldn't just tell you what to do. They would say, well, do you want lots of muscle?

Do you want to be able to do the front splits? Do you want to be able to run a fast 5K? Like, what do you want to do? Because if you tell me what you want me to do, then I can create a plan and we can get you to where you want to go, but I can't optimize for a goal that doesn't exist. And so I don't think people do goals setting the right way, but I think they should. Yeah. I also think that that consistency in terms of like meeting with your wife once a month about it and going back to it. A lot of people set goals, but then they never go back to them. Well, because oftentimes people set too many goals and they don't remind themselves enough of them. And they aren't focused. And I think a lack of focus, I tell my team, distractions are loud, really loud. You can't listen

to them and goals allows you to put blinders on and focus on the one or two things that you set. You don't go to a grocery store while you're hungry. You can't look at new opportunities. and stuff like that while you're like scattered and like you have to be focused. I think focus is a huge underrated trait. I think that's a challenge that I have in my life, but I'm like all about focus and patience. Sam, this has been such an awesome conversation. Thank you so much.

I feel like I've got so much to cover with you. I'd love to have you come on another time and just talk about, I had like 20 other questions to ask you. I like talking with you. If I'm invited back again, I would love to do this again. You make me feel very comfortable. You're really good at that. You're a very good podcaster.

It's hard to find people who do that. that. You're very talented. Thanks, Sam. Thank you for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast. Thank you. You know, yeah, Bam, I knew that Sam Parr was going to be an amazing interview, but that totally exceeded my expectations. Now, in this episode, we focused a lot on entrepreneurship and his journey, and I hope he comes back on because I really want to dive deep on copywriting, community, networking, and all that good stuff with Sam. When I think about this conversation, one of the biggest takeaways that I have is be different. He talked about differentiation. He talked about how he believes it's better

to be different than just better. And that's a testament to his own journey. He launched an email newsletter when everybody told him it would fail. He got really good at it and he scaled it so big that HubSpot bought it for multi millions of dollars, like $30 million. He won by zigging when everybody was zagging. The other lesson that I learned from him is that you've got to be the node of your network. Being the node of your network gives you power. He built community with HustleCon, and he also built community through a book club that he launched via Craigslist. And he did this for a silly reason. He just wanted to make friends. Later, that book club generated almost all of his best friends he told us. And so it's just so powerful to think about being the node of your network. And lastly, one of the

most important lessons, I think, from this conversation is that when it comes to being an entrepreneur, you don't need to just build for an exit. So many of us feel like in order to be a successful entrepreneur, you've got to exit your company. You can build to sell and you can also build to run. You can create a legacy company that you just love to run forever, one that you can pass down to your kids generation after generation.

You do not only need to sell your company to be considered a successful entrepreneur. And I just think that's such an important thing for us entrepreneurs to hear because so often we feel like our success is tied to our exit. Well, that's it for today's show, Yeah, fam. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode.

If you listen, learned, and profited today, make sure you drop us a review on Apple, Spotify, or CastBox, wherever you listen to the show. If you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And be sure to drop us a comment. Give me your favorite takeaway from today's episode in the comments.

I'd love to hear from you. This is your host, Pala Taha, aka the podcast, Princess, signing off. I don't know. I don't know.