How Did Sam Parr Start the Hustle With No Audience?

Sam Parr, founder of The Hustle, says a newsletter with no connections starts with writing, traffic, and email addresses. His first 200 subscribers were every person who had emailed him in Gmail, plus about 100 LinkedIn connections, added to the list without being asked. He then posted the articles on Reddit and Hacker News. He wrote only about 10 posts, each one explaining how a particular speaker did the work. He thinks the emails about the posts mattered as much as the posts, because they were written in a voice few newsletters were using at the time.