What's up, everybody? This is Courtland from Andy hackers dot com, and you're listening to the Indy Hackers podcast on this show. I talked to the founders of profitable Internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? How did they make decisions, but that their companies and in their personal lives and what exactly, makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us come in for their examples and go on to build our own profitable Internet businesses? In this episode, I sat down with Sam Par, the founder of The Hustle. Sam had joined me in a previous episode to talk about the story behind how he created The Hustle,

which is this massive tech and business newsletter with millions of subscribers that does tens of billions of dollars a year and advertising revenue. We've kept up since that conversation. I spoke at his conference last December, and so I was just a really fun and interesting guy to talk to you about anything related toe tech in business strategy, content, media, you just cut straight to the heart of an issue. He's very no bullshit guy. He doesn't care about. Fluff doesn't care about tradition. He just wants to know what works. And so there's a lot to learn from Sam. He's the first guy to say, Hey, I'm not an expert Don't listen to me But the reality is he is an expert. He's built some very impressive businesses and products,

and I think his experience could really show just how much leverage you could have as one or two people on the Internet, how many people you can reach, how much money you could make, how much of an impact you can have. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Sam. So how are things going with Cove in 19 and your revenue with everybody kind of staying at home and reading a lot, but also advertising revenue basically dropping across the board with pretty much every media

company? Yeah, so we make money in three ways advertising. So we have this daily email that goes out to millions of people that makes money via advertising. We make money through events, and historically that makes millions of dollars a year, and then we have we make money to pay a subscription. So advertising is doing fine. It's We're gonna grow a ton now. It's just gonna is gonna grow mildly. Events disappeared. I'm gonna want Yeah, I'm gonna launch some courses and stuff like that to supplement, but gone no fixed costs for that. So, like, we hadn't booked anything,

So it's Miss Revenue, But we didn't miss money. We didn't hire the people who we wanted to hire to do it, but so they got screwed. But besides that, our company we lost money are we lost out on potential money. But we didn't lose. We didn't actually lose money. My friend Jason Lumpkin. You know Jason probably. Yeah. I don't know this for a fact. I bet he lost $10 million because he his event was gonna happen in March. So we do not eso were good. And then trends are paid subscription just booming.

It's good to hear. I mean, I think the timing is perfect for your events because the last Hustle Connell is, I think in December I spoke a hustle clown in December, and so you had, like like he said, a lot of leeway. Basically a lot of runway where you don't have to hire anyone. You are sort of ramping up. But there's so many events they're gonna happen in March and April. Like, I think I'm supposed to be in Minnesota micro conflict this weekend or next or something, but that got delayed. Uh, yeah. I think you dodged a bullet with that one.

Yeah, Not good for those guys, but I dodged a

bullet, So give me an overview of the hustle. Nowadays you've got, like, you said these three different ways that you make money. He's got trends. You got your newsletter. You got your events. You've also got Ah, podcast that your funding and play.

Yeah, well, you know that that's just me doing It's just like, yeah, that's me doing it. So the cost aren't really big. The update, basically, is like, I think we're gonna build just a huge subscription business. And I don't remember what month you and I talked to last, but I have almost a year now of having a subscription business for the hustle. It's gonna be so fucking big. It's gonna be a big thing, I think Last

time we talked. I was asking you what? Over your goals and your goals, where you want to build a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A media empire? Is it still the same?

Yeah, I know why I said I wouldn't do that by 2025 right? So these are like your knuckles. Yeah, like it's awesome. I've learned so much about subscription businesses. I definitely not an expert, but I think I've learned why a lot of people are bad at it. And I also learned that a lot of people, a lot of media companies were goals. And it'll just like bullshit. Their goals air so little and they're so bad at a bunch of stuff. And it can work out way better than people think.

Do you think being kind of a tech business in addition to a media business like you're not a very traditional media business, your look a little bit more modern? You think that's giving you the insights you've needed to sort of figure out what others can't.

It's a tripod there it has three legs, so a I know how to do content. So if it were just me in my house. I could just write blog's that could reach millions of people. I don't know if it's a talent or if it's a skill set, but I have that ability. So I have that. So that's like the media. I don't I'm not like a media insider, like, I don't know a ton of stuff. The second thing is like this tech product focus, but another developer and I've never had a tech company so, like I know it and I know like we run in that circle, but I know it. But then the third thing is Internet marketing. I know how toe do sales really well, And so, like if you add all three those, it kind of has created something really cool. Let's get

through those. The 1st 1 is just writing and media. You said that without a company behind you that people hind you that you know how to reach millions of people through writing.

I did it. I was the first and only employees In the first month of business, we had almost a 1,000,000 people come to our website.

What do you know that other people putting out content? I don't

know. I learned how to become a writer, so I like locked myself in a room for a year or six months. And I just, like, learned I've taught myself the skills. I think that naturally I was born with an ability to have a conversation with someone. But I learned how to write. If you learned how to play guitar well, maybe, like the people who are really good, they were born pretty good, but most people they just like, sat down and they played jingle Bells. And then they played Happy Birthday. And then they played Green Day. And then they played this and that, like you depressed and you improve right, you learn the basics. And and so I did that. So I learned

that whole process is invisible toe. The listeners and the readers they just see like that good writing and good musicians, and they're like, Oh, people are born with this, but they don't see the people practicing and do what you did to learn how to write,

because I've been blogging since 2010 10 years now. So I've been doing that, and before that, I was always selling stuff online like eBay. So I learn how to write pages and stuff like that. So, yeah, I just learned. So that's how I got good at It was I learned.

I think being a writer is useful for pretty much any founder, though. Like I on any hackers, we've got this community form. You have all these people coming on and asking questions and trying to get advice and feedback and trying to share it they're up to. And it's funny to see so many founders and see, like the giant chasm between, like the best writers and the worst writers and the best writers get hundreds of people to answer their questions

and help them out. Being a good copywriter, just meaning, Okay, copywriter is the number one skill that you could ever have. If you want to make money, why do you say that? Hands down without a doubt. OK, so let me talk to you through this. What is copyrighting me and copyrighting means a lot of people think it means, like just writing Ah, like cute stuff that makes people laugh. That's not what copyrighting meetings copyrighting means understanding human behaviour and understanding people's wants and needs and manipulating that into getting them to buy stuff. Whether that's your buying them, you're getting them to buy a product or you're getting them to donate money or you're getting them to do anything. And the reason why in terms of copyrighting,

often time that comes in the form of the written work. What? The reason why copyright is important is you can use it to meet a girlfriend. You can use it to convince an employee to join your company. You can use it to convince loads of people on social media to get behind your movement. You can use it to sell stuff. You can use it to get an investor. You, you you convince people every day. So if you understand what motivates people and then you understand how to communicate it using words, it's like I'm going to a gun fight with, like a magic sword. That, like shoots laser beams, is like it's unfair. It's like just a unfair advantage.

Yeah, I mean writings everywhere. It's on your tender profile. It's in your emails and your job descriptions

tax. People want you email people. You message people on Facebook like all day. I do it.

So give us some tips of some cooperating types of people who are complete novices to this. You haven't studied cooperating like you have and who don't know sort of the basics of, you know, writing how they normally right writing how toe convince people to buy things and do the things that they like them to

do. So if you're a complete nube, go and read advertising secrets of the Wharton written word by Joe Sugarman. And if you really just want to be very lazy, just remember eight. Attention interest, desire, action. That's pretty much the perfect formula. It's a pretty basic formula, and once you master it, you can do more complicated stuff. Ada is like, typically the way that you lay out any type of good sales argument or sales pitch attention. You grab their attention interest. Do you tell them fax to get the interested desire. You tell them stories to make them desire by showing them features and benefits and an action you specifically layout, which actions to take if use the aid of formula. That's probably the easiest way to sell

stuff, and that's for literally everything. It doesn't matter if you're making a website matter.

That's the formula for persuasion

that's been around since, like, twenties or the thirties. I think I was reading something about before that. It's like the dawn of the advertising industry that I kind of figure this out. Yeah, I'm sure people actually knew this well, before that. Maybe didn't put in the exact words. Use that exact acronym,

right? If you want to go hit on a girl like what did they what we always say, Like when we're young, we talk about pickup lines, right? That's Ada. That's attention. There's your attention and that interest. You talk to them and asked like where people are from and then desire you make them want you buy, like showing off a little bit of an action. Do you, like, ask them for the phone number? I mean, this is like Ada. So you got this tripod. The first

part of it is copyrighting. Uh, the second part of it is I think you said

I'll be writing. Copyrighting is different than writing, writing. I don't I can't write like a fiction book, but I think I can write long form blawg posts as well, and I would say that I'm a pretty good copywriter, and I'm a pretty good like blogger. But I am. I don't think I'm world class at either. The third part, I think, was tech. No. So, like blogging men, media like I understand media and how to get traffic. And then,

yeah, we're getting Yeah, like tech and product. I understand that stuff a little bit. Uh, most media companies are based in New York, and for some reason they do a horrible job of, like, understanding customers and understanding, like you are creating widgets for a group of people and they have to desire and want it. Whereas a lot of like media companies in New York, they look at it like just Google analytics and like, these are just numbers on a board, and we have to make them go up. And there's a lot of ways that you can get those numbers to go up in the short term that actually hurt you a big time in a long run. I think that Silicon Valley has a lot of soft people who are not good at stuff,

and they put way too much emphasis on user experience and it's gonna be perfect. And sometimes that means that they're not aggressive enough about certain things. That said, I do think that if you take a little bit of that like it's all about the customer, making them happy and pleasing them and all that stuff, that's great. Let's put

this in context. Your subscription businesses called trends. You launch this. I think around the last time you're on the podcast, which I can't maybe a year ago you're on the show, and trends is is great. I've been subscribed to it for a while,

all right. It's great

supercool. It's really high quality writing. I love the newsletter. I haven't join the Facebook group yet, but I just applied to join, like 10 minutes ago. Tell us about your friends. Tells

about how it works. Do you know your friends with Stef Smith, right? Yep. So Well, yeah, I thought you did. She's Ah, she's everywhere. So she was One of our main writers and trends is it's like a weird thing. It's like when I first So I was the first writer for it. So the way that I have typically launched stuff is I do all the work, and then I do like an OK job at it. But I'm pretty good at, like, getting the first set of customers. And then I'll hire people who are way better than me,

and they eventually run it. And that's what stuff does. And so here I just approved you. So you can kind of poke around. Um and so I, uh, the original idea. What? I'm gonna do all these cool case studies on companies and explain how they work. And that was interesting to me. And that's what we did. And so at this point, I mean turns is gonna be an eight figure subscription business by the end of the year. Transit's content research is like a research content product, but it also has a community with thousands and thousands of interesting people.

It's pretty not stability and eight for your business as fast as you built it. And I think has to do with the order in which you did things. You started the hustle, which is this massive newsletter and media company. Before you built a subscription business, and I see most founders doing things the other way around. They started subscription business and then they try to figure out what their marketing is gonna be, how they reach people, how important you think it was to do things in the order that you did them in.

I wish I would have started the subscription business earlier. I The reason I started it this way was a I was copying people who had done this before. Successfully. There's a few people who I was just ripping off their strategy, so I definitely don't want to take credit for that. But it was quite important. I mean, look, when you have a loyal audience, it's like our audience is smaller. But similar toe like the Kendall Jenner girl like she could launch anything. She what? Who's the girl with the lipstick thing on Kylie Jenner? Yeah, the billionaire. Yeah. So,

like she could sell anything and it will be successful. And it's definitely that kind of strategy where we launched stuff and it just works because for trends, we don't spend that much money on marketing. And so our teams really small, who works on its only two people. It's a subscription business, and it will make you know millions of dollars a month. I think by the end of the year. So it's like That's insane. Pretty awesome. And that would have been really hard to do without the hustle. I mean, the day we launched, we got, like, 4000 subscribers at $3 a year for maybe I forget the exact number. But it was good.

Let's talk about how trends works at a subscription business. You mentioned the media companies based in New York. They kind of take a short term approach, that really good growing their audience or growing this description revenue because they make these like short term decisions. What are some of the longer term decisions that you're making with trends that are helping you grow the subscription business and the substantial monster that it has become in such a short time?

So basically what the way that I tend to do things is it's like 50% science, 50% art. So I research Aton and I followed the data and then also I just make stuff up that feels right. Before I launched it, I went and talked to a lot of people. So the people at the athletic, the people at which is the athletic is like a $500 million value subscription content company Motley Fool, which is quite big and then loads others. Wall Street Journal, New York I talked to everyone, and what I learned was that pricing was important. I think you can actually charge a lot more money than you think for certain subscriptions. And so we charged $300 a year, and that's way too low. We're actually gonna increase it by a fair bit in the next Ah, three year, two months,

whenever the one year anniversary of launching is in June. And so that's important. Another thing is we did annual billing only. And what annual building only has allowed us to do is our cash flow is really good on. And that was important. A lotta startups. Not only do they charge like $5 a month for the product, which for most people is a massive mistake. Not everyone but most people, but also what they do is they allow you to do like a freemium thing, like try it for free. No, that's wrong, too, I think for most people that is wrong. You want to charge up front, and so That's what we did. We made sure in charge of front super smart. And the fourth thing that we did was we on Lee Did, uh did I say annual building?

Yeah, only Bill. Only annual billing, massive cash flows front

and the And then the other thing was sales pages. Most people fuckin socket sales pages there so bad at it. And we worked really hard toe have, like, really good long form sales pages, which a lot of Silicon Valley people think that that stupid and doesn't work. And they're totally wrong. It does. For most people, it works way better than not. And so we have a hard paywall as opposed Teoh, like a website recon. See all the articles and things right

up? Yeah, I think it's Ah. It's almost a cultural aesthetic thing in Silicon Valley. To be kind of against these long form sales pages. It's not a trendy. It's not a trendy

thing here, but you don't like like if you go to like Amazon and you go and now long form doesn't always necessarily mean you have a lot of text. Long form typically means you give the person a lot of information before they make the purchase, and so that a lot of information could be in the form of photos or it could be in the form of a video. But if you go to amazon dot com and you look at the Kindle, which or whatever Amazon is trying to pimp out like Echo, I haven't echo right here. They're trying to make the echo big. That's probably where the best sales pages are. And if you go to the echo, I'll go right now. I bet you there's 2000 words describing what Echo is on amazon dot com. So I don't know why people are so against long form sales pages, but they work like Oh my gosh, Look, go, go Look at the echo right now.

I'm checking it out right now. The Amazon echo dot their generation like huge as a

ton, and they also have 61,000 reviews, and you could go and read all of them. That's like so much copy. And this is only a $30 product, and typically the more expensive the price are the more expensive the product, the longer the sales page needs to be. And so anyway, I just think that Silicon Valley sucks at this. I don't know why.

I mean concept of education based selling, where you're trying to inform your customers and make sure that they understand more about the landscape and what you're offering, and then that honestly end up trusting you more, especially if you're selling information or a subscription to something like trends where essentially you're giving people information and if you prove to them that you can give them really get information. They also understand more about why your subscription is great or why you're Amazon. Product is great and they're much more likely to buy. But again, I just don't think it's trendy. I think it's trying to get a copy. What you see, you know the hottest start up in your neighborhood giving and to make a website that looks like there's

yeah, and oftentimes, even if they do succeed, it's like they succeed despite themselves, like there's so many better ways to do it like let's actually look up something interesting. So, like, Amira, have you had this thing called Mira or is it calm euro? I haven't heard of it. This like whiteboard software. Miro It's pretty cool. I signed up to it for today. It's pretty Me. Let's see what their sales pages is. I think a lot of these companies do a pretty good job. They have,

like, longish sales pages. But like for most people, like if you go to product hunt and look at what the top products are, they use like very Web. 2.0, flat design all this stuff And that's Ah,

it's more about fitting in than it is about. What's effective is more about, like, you know, what are other people in product on doing? Let me make sure my website looks the same. Yeah,

one 100%. And I don't think that they don't think that people think about this the right way.

So you went to all these different media companies. Went to the athletic and Motley Fool and The New York Times in The Wall Street Journal. What did you learn by talking to them? And how did that help you launch trends?

Yeah. You wanna hear some interesting stories? Have you heard this company? Did I tell you about Agora? I told you about a core right now. Okay, So Agora is one of the most interesting cos I've ever heard of in my life. I'll give you background. They started in the 19 seventies. The guy who started his name is Bill Bonner. I may not be describing this accurately, but for most people he's like pretty hard core libertarian and arguably the mainstream. People might think that he's kind of like kooky and like a conspiracy theorist. But he started this like newsletter, which I may remember at the time what it was called. But he basically just grew it over many, many years.

And at this point, Agora is a collection of roughly 50 different brands and 50 50 different newsletters. They do about 1.21 point $5 billion a year in sales, and it's what 100% privately owned. It might be one of the most profitable, like top 100 most profitable privately owned companies in America. And they get sued a lot because they do a lot of unethical stuff, like they promote newsletters on how to cure cancer or how to like your diabetes. So it's it's a lot of fearmongering. And remember, you know who James Alter is? Yeah. Do you know his newsletter. The Bitcoin thing

I've seen is Bitcoin adds a little controversial

basil or owns

that. Okay, Yeah, exactly. You're talking about the most ethical. It's not the most honest.

No, um, it's not, but you can. You can learn from anyone in any way. I learned a lot from those guys. I wouldn't talk to him. I mean, they make so much money and they do in a lot of unethical ways. But there's still stuff that can be learned.

What's the ethical stuff that they do that you could learn from?

I think James all teachers product is mostly legit. Um, I think his sub salakjit his marketing is a little hard core, though they have that they on this barren called money, what's it called map Money pressed. And it's all about like interesting stocks and analyzes different stocks. I think it's legitimate. Bill Bonner, the guy who owns the company. He's definitely a little kooky, but he's got some really cool newsletters that I pay money for, and I find them to be very fascinating and fun. Some

think it's like a common pattern and everything you do when you're not trying toe innovate from the ground up from first principles. What's gonna work? Rather, you're looking at out of all the thousands of businesses and millions of people out there, what's already working for people, and you just go talk to those people. And, yeah, I think so. I do that notices pattern, and you mentioned it earlier to like Okay, maybe this isn't like the most innovative thing, but you've you're gonna look at what people have done, and I think that's by far the smartest way to go. Even with Andy, hackers I didn't like come up with the idea for Andy hackers in a vacuum. I looked at what was working for pure levels business, no bad list and a few other businesses, and just sort of copied the fundamentals of what's what's going on with them.

But that's how it but I think that is innovative because, like what has ever been made, that is truly original. I mean, like, not even Tesla's original. It's just an electric car that's done better and differently and is cool, right? Like it's not like he was the first electric car. To me, business is kind of like writing songs where, like there's a handful of like chord structures that just work and, like most pop songs, are around 80 to 100 beats per minute. And they, like, have a chorus of bridge. And like there's there's best practices, and within those best practices, I could make my art. And that's kind of my view.

How did those conversations go? Use email somebody at The New York Times and say, Hey, I'd like to pick your brain about how your business

I never use that word Pick your brain But that's my pet peeve. But yeah, yeah, I called email. People like crazy. I tell them who I am. I'm lucky, because at this point some people know who we are. I get in their face and I'm very confrontational where I'll say, like, Hey, I'm gonna build this thing. Tell me how you do it and I just ask questions like how much revenue you guys do what you pay, and I also reveal information about my company to them, and they can learn from me sometimes and then also like I just kind of brute force my way to getting the answer

that makes so much sense because I think people like talking about what they do. Somebody emails me and ask me a specific question about how I do something that I do, especially if I if I find it like, impressive. I'm proud that I did something. I'm pretty likely to just explain it.

Yeah. So typically what I do is I flatter them because it's not bullshit. I'm genuinely interested. And I think it's awesome what they did. So I would do it with you. I would say How many people is in the Indy hackers? Podcasts. And, uh, I don't know what you tell me. Yeah, I would tell you. Of course. How many people are Episode 35,000 downloads? Wow, that's a lot. How many episodes do you do A

week? One a week, I learned pretty inconsistent. I've had periods where due to a week. I've had periods, right? I

missed two or three weeks in a row. Does it make profit? Nope.

We don't try to anything straight about the company. We immediately shut off all over advertising. We make $0 any hackers?

How or why did they buy it?

Stripes Mission is to increase the GDP of the Internet. And I think the most succinct way to say it is that Andy hackers inspires people to start companies and those people go on to become stripe customers. And some of them make stripe a lot of money and make a lot of money for themselves. So the incentives really aligned to basically help companies do well and inspire people to start companies

how people work in

the site. My brother and I full time Rosie Sherry as

our community. So wait, Is Rosie Sherry one person? Yeah, he's one. Still going theories and, incredibly, three people.

Yeah, it's only three of us, but we have had some contractors like we have. Ah, guy. That's my podcast

with one of your podcast.

Let's see, I don't actually know. I think like 100 50

bucks an episode does this deal, So he's great. So anyway, my point is, is that I'll just answer all these

questions. You just tell

you what you need to know, and it comes from a genuine place of like, I think what you do is so impressive. And also if I just kind of directly ask you what I want to know, and I'm not doing it. I'm being aggressive about how I'm asking. But I don't think I'm making a comfortable and any point you said I don't want to answer. I would be like, Oh, it's okay like you want. I mean, anyway, I'm just I think that if you are a man on a mission or a woman on a mission, you could definitely just get it done.

Before he started trends, you had the hustle. Obviously, the hustle for those who have a listen to our previous conversation is an absolutely massive newsletter. I mean, you've got millions of prescribers you doing, I think eight figures and ad revenue with the hustle. It's a great base tow launch, different product on. It's a great base. Lunch trends on you even launched a podcast. How's your podcast doing? How many dollars are you getting? And do you think that having the hustle sort of kickstarted the growth

of your podcast is, I think we do a shit job of promoting it were only 50% the size of you. So in terms of downloads per episode, it's probably what is there. See, I'm like, pretty ignorant when it comes of pockets Is there difference between listens, perhaps student downloads per episode?

I think all these stats differ depending on what podcast player looking at or who your podcast host is. But internally, I separate listens and add loads. And I consider listen to be somebody who downloaded the episode and listen to at least half of it

were like in the range of 50 15 to 20,000 listens per episode, which I think is only okay. I think it's like on the top, it's in the top. Uh, I don't know. What would that be like the top 40? Maybe.

Yeah, for business podcast especially. It's like top 1%

I would say of podcasts on the bottom half of the 1% rent. So it goes. Okay,

podcast growth. It's hard. It's tough. Are very driven by word of mouth. People recommend episodes to each other. I've interviewed people who have big audiences and ever so it's get okay. Downloads of energy people. We had just a great conversation, and it really flowed. And a ton of people recommended to their friends every day in those episodes have got $100,000.

Yeah, it's crazy. So I, uh, I started doing it in earnest in December, and it's been It's fun, like you kind of get like famous. It isn't it weird like people like, act like they know you and stuff.

People recognize your voice because they're literally listening to you in their year. Have conversations for hours and hours and hours, but it's cool. Example recognized you on the street. So you're like fake famous. No one really bother you. But when they hear you talked like you're that guy,

it's awesome. And how many followers do you have on? I'm looking you up on Twitter.

I'm probably 23,000 very active on Twitter

you got That's where it's at right out. But, like so it's cool because, like, you 23 almost 24,000 if you just tweet something like I need help with like this. Ah, I need to find a better bank like

my favorite use case for Twitter advice. Twitter basically something that I don't want a Google, because I think my followers will have a better answer about a recommendation. What should I do in this city? Like you said? You know I need a bank. What do you recommend or what's the latest tool for? It's easy. You just get responses in, like, five minutes instantaneously if you

have enough people, right, I asked people like which coffee I should order. And I got like, I think 100 replies. Anyway, I don't know how what we're talking. Oh, podcasting. Our podcast is pretty good. It could be better.

I love it. I think it's extremely well made. Thank you Haven't talked to anyone who sort of cracked the nut on podcast groups. Although I have my own theories that a lot of it is similar to what helps newsletters grow, for example, being newsier and focused more on like trending topics rather than being a purely educational, I think help with retention and people not necessarily dropping it. But yeah, I mean, I would love to sit down and talk to you for an hour about podcast growth and what you guys were doing

and talk to other. You're the one like I don't do anything. I do nothing. We do nothing for it. I just hired an intern to help me grow it, but we do nothing for it.

You know, you should talk to you should talk to you. So, Knoll, if you want to You from a 16 Z She runs kind of their media empire and their podcasts, and they do a ton of ballads and she's very thoughtful. And that's like her entire job. I'm doing the podcast on, like, 50 other things. You're doing 50 other things. She's a great

person. Talk to you. I would love to.

So you got trends. You've got your podcast. You've gotten the hustle. This is all basically one giant media empire. If I look at what but its giant for most people who are listening, who were basically trying to start their own tiny companies. And I think it's popular nowadays, more so than it wasn't in the past for people to kind of start these small media companies by themselves.

Yeah, Bennett people can build a much bigger media company with one or two people, then they probably think

it's crazy. I mean, written word is extremely scalable.

Yeah, look like I am telling you this because I know people who do it and I've done it. You can make $10 million a year. You could make $50 million a year I'm not exaggerating $50 million a year with four people on an email list. Our side

minute writers. Ben Thompson from Static Aries. One of the great examples. I don't know exactly how many subscribers he has, but I've heard it's in the many tens of thousands and they're each paying $100

a year and he's out for blood posts. He's not charging enough it all. I know I have a friend Kevin Band. Trump is his name. He no relation to the other trumpet. Just share Kevin Van Trump. He has this thing called the Van Trump Report. I met this guy at a conference. He's like six foot two and like, £350. He's like this massive guy, and he, ah, has a paid newsletter on AG Tech, Agriculture, technology roadmap to better decision making for investors and act tech professionals. He makes about $30 million a year off this newsletter, and it is just him.

It's unbelievable. What would you say to somebody who is thinking about writing a newsletter right now? They're trying to get started. How might you start a brand new newsletter company today? If you had nothing

I would pick a very, very, very small but fast growing niche. I would purposely No. Well, I am trying to attract and more importantly, who I am not going to try to attract. The whole point of this is you have to go niche. So I would do that for sure. I would not sign up for Sub Stack. I don't think they do a good job. I think that they can do great. But I currently I don't think they do do great at the moment what I do, I would then charge more money than I think I should. I would charge like 500 to $1000 a year, and then I would make sure that the information that I provide was a very utilitarian. So it would need to be the way that I would say I'm like It has to be like a vegetable smothered in peanut butter and that it could be entertaining and interesting,

but at its core, it's gonna be utility. It's got to help you get something done better. I would also try to make sure that I tailored it towards people who are gonna make money using the information that I provide them right this way. It's a very easy justification. The the cost, what else? I would charge like $500 a year. So like that. And then I would, like, just spend a fair bit of money on advertising to make it grow. And then I would, um, occasionally have a long post, which I would work very hard to make.

Go viral, and I would probably instead of posting on my own blawg, I would I will post on my block, and I would try to make a good popular and hacker news or read it, or wherever that people are or your site where people are. Or I would try to, um, gas post for other people.

I love that you said, Make sure that you know that this is vegetable. It's utilitarian in combination with making sure that people can actually use what you're writing to make money. Essentially, you want to sell to customers who have money, and you want to help them make more money, which then allows them to justify paying this $500 a year $1000 a year, which they're not gonna pay for just writing something that's purely for entertainment, and I think it's a great time for that to just reading report from similar Web that for the first time in a while, business and finance coverage is getting Mawr clicks and reads than any other category politics. And it's an election year. Donald Trump is president, and people are still reading more about business and finance, and they're reading about politics. And so it's kind of a golden area. If you want to write about stuff, that's all help people grow their businesses.

Like you said, this guy has got his Actiq newsletter. The hustle is all about business and tech trends is specifically about business and tech. Who are you not targeting? With trends, you said you need to exclude people. You need to be for a specific niche. Who is trends not for and he was

a four. We're going to start charging more money, and we purposely like if you are like a young college student or you're just getting starting, your career were probably not the place or not the place for you. We have a lot of people in Europe or Asia who say, Can you guys do some more coverage in different countries and were not for that. We're gonna have to stick to what we know. We don't know Asia. We don't know Europe. Ah, lot of big corporations have offered to pay us thousands of dollars a year in order to do custom coverage for them. We will be eventually so those air who were not for

It's a tough decision to make the exclude people. But also you have to do it to be focused and reading trends and paying for trends like I'm kind of squarely in what you're saying. Like I'm not in Asia. I'm in the United States. I'm not a fledgling college student. I'm sort of mature. It's easy for me to pay for it. For example, didn't think twice. I put it on my stripe, you know, sort of company cars. That's why

I pay for trend, and that's what we dio. I mean, we know that that's how it's gonna work. And so it's like an easy justification.

Yeah, and I think a lot of people charge way too little for what they're doing because they don't number one target the right customers, and they just don't understand that if you target the right customers that they just have a lot of income to spend on stuff like this. If I can read your business newsletter and I have, like literally thousands of dollars a month as my budget, it's a no brainer for me to spend three or $400 on something. I don't even blink when people charging five or $10 a month for the stash products that they're building for years, so much work into it.

And I own a small SAS company that the product costs $5 a month, and that's what the price that I felt. One. Yeah, and the pricing is that I'm like, Oh my God, this thing is never gonna grow

when you need, like tens of thousands of paying subscribers to make any money. And even then you're only making like a small amount of money, whereas if you have like 1000 people paying you 500 bucks a month, But that's ridiculous

raper and it's way less of a headache. You have better customers. You probably don't complain as much, and you're not nickel and diamond. You're not getting nickel and dimed and also, uh, the way it works, I think, is the person who could spend the most morning to acquire customer will win, right?

And what you can only do if you charge a lot

protested or you're gonna lose a ton of money. And you're like, Well, somehow somehow people are going to stay with us, probably for 10 years, and I'll make my profit in year 789 And I'm like, Well, maybe that could work, I guess. But it's like, scary.

So how are you spending money to acquire customers for trends?

We are. I mean, we spend ah, we drive people to a trial. Um, and we spend ah, like 50 grand a month at this point, Not a lot. The way that we get most of our subscribers is through the hustle

eyes. Ah, great tweet. The other day from Dave, Gerhardt said, Don't build a marketing team, build a media company for your niche, and I kind of goes back to what I was talking about. Media company. Yeah, that's exactly

what you want to launch a podcast under our name, and I I forgot reply to him. Is that a C legit? I don't

know very much about him. In fact, I could have told you his name before I saw that tweet seems ever following. I thought it was an interesting tidbit. So you have to do some of your Samp. Our research figured

out. I need to. He seems like a good guy, but I don't know him. Yeah, and that's another thing I wouldn't do which a lot of people do their so stupid. I hate when people do this where typically it's journalists or engineers to do this or Silicon Valley people. And they're like it's a $5 donation and or its $1 month. I'm like, First of all, don't even fuck in charge of your And if it's a dollar month, just give it away, dude, like your stupid charged way more money. And second, don't call it donation. If you are providing the value,

I will pay you for this thing. I don't go to a restaurant and you give me a steak and you say, Oh, you know, just pay whatever or like, it's like No, I gave you value. You give me value back like I don't give you more value than you're gonna give me back in terms of money. At least my goal is to make your experience far greater than this $20 steak. But give me $20 the

only mean Yeah, And I think the other thing about this is when you charge money for what you're building, you get the right kinds of customers. Because if people are paying you money, then they must think what you're doing is really valuable. It must be making the money or saving the money. Are providing them with a really great experience. If they're handing, you heading your money or is it you're making something free? It might be valuable to people, but, like not in a way that actually is worth them coughing over. And so if you have, all these free users are gonna be requesting all sorts of stuff that you probably shouldn't build because it's just gonna be stuff that, like a freezer would expect. Whereas if you have paid users, they're gonna be requesting things that actually provide monetary value to them. And that's a much better trained to be on, like that's the kind of river you wanna be flowing down because that a legion of building more valuable business over

time. I agree, and I think that donations definitely work in some cases. Not only do they work in some cases, like, I think a lot of streamers make a lot of money through donations, and that's great good for them. I also think that some products should be non profits or should be donation driven. Like totally, I'm poorly acceptable with that. But if you're trying to make money making enterprise, and I just don't understand why you would do that in most cases,

well, people doing that don't last for very long. I mean, either they stop doing that or their businesses ties are they're incredibly frustrated for like, three or five years working on this thing doesn't make any money, but anyway, you're paying for some of your subscribers for trends, but a lot of them are also coming from the hustle. Your main newsletter, like 90% vast majority, is this word of mouth from the hustle. You've got your marketing machine. It's kinda spurred up. What's the best way if you have a really well oiled marketing machine? If you have something that people are reading regularly to convert them. Teoh, A subscription product. Do you send them to these long form sales pages

that you have? Yeah. So when we launched, I collected 50 year. I think I 80 grand in pre sales, and what I did was I would if I could find it. I created a gun road page. And it just said, like, my name's Sam part the hustle. I'm gonna launch this thing one day, like in the next handful of months, and I'm gonna charge maybe 500. I said, what the prices, But I didn't know at the time. I just guessed I was like,

I'm gonna charge around this much money. And if you want early access, you could have it now for a lifetime. But you pay 100 bucks and I put this on our thank you paid show The page. The peo here is I found it the page that Ah, you see, after you sounded for the hustle which got which got a lot of people to see it. And anyway, thousands of people would buy it. And so I eventually said, All right, this has light. And then I talked to all the people who purchased it like I did customer discovery, Just normal stuff. I kind of honed it on the idea. And so that's what I would do if you had a Oh,

nothing I did was I e mailed. Only Im e mailed it to 500 people and I explained that story of like, I'm thinking about launching this right now. It's just me. I'm doing this. If you're unhappy, I'll give you a refund. But just so you know, I'm gonna charge like this much money for a year, and you can get lifetime access for acts. And then people pick gave me money. I sent them sample reports, they like them. And then I called each person, and I just did normal just hand to hand combat learning.

I think if you build an organization around writing which obviously any media organizations gonna be built around, there's a sense in which it feels kind of like an endless treadmill. I mean, you have to really like writing because essentially,

if you don't like, write something, I'm gonna work here.

Yeah, it's true when you that you can't work for you, you can't do it. If you don't like writing because even is the founder, you're sort of getting these projects off the ground. And at the end of the day, doesn't matter how great your writing is. If you stop sending trends next week like you're gonna lose your description, you lose all your business. It's a very different in the SAS business. It's hard. Uh, what your tips for hiring good writers? What? Your tips for building an organization around writing that consort of Run on that treadmill successfully

here. By the way, check this out of your chat like I send it to you can. Kind of You can see this for the writers. I discovered it. Ah,

come read Link. Yeah, hustled trends. I collected 50 grand that way. So this is just a simple gum road landing page where you've got, like, I don't know, maybe, like 15 16 paragraphs, introducing the hustle trends and talking about what it's gonna be about, And then at the end that you say that you're planning the Chargers 30 bucks a month for this. But if people pay for now, they can get it for a one time lifetime access fee of $30. And I think you said you made something like 40 $50,000.

Something like that. Yeah, I Yeah, it was like 50 grand, maybe was 30 grand. It was tens of thousands of dollars

crazy, and it's super simple. I mean, it could tell you're using what you talked about earlier, ADA and writing this up, willing to this in the show notes so people can read through it. What about the people who work? We work for you Like you tell me about the writers you told me about Stuff Smith, who I know. How do you hire good writers? How do you identify good writers? How deep a good writers

that like, yeah, I was gonna write a thing Twitter threat on this. So But I'll explain a little bit. So to write a good writer or to hire writers, I've hired a lot of bad ones. I've hired a lot of great ones. The first pre wreck is you have to like it. You have to enjoy doing it. It is very hard, and a lot of our writers they write for us all day, and then they have personal blog's and it right at home. So I have one guy and I was talking to who? He works for us. Now Zoom and he put a screen down and there was like, a big piece of paper, like right here.

I was like, What's that? He goes, Oh, it's this manuscript I wrote and it was like 200,000 worked like it was like, So stick? Yeah, And so he's like, I wrote this, like, screenplay or something. So you have to like it. Step one, you have to like it and then to you have to be talented and talent is broken into two different things. The first thing is, can you literally get the words into my brain?

And to do that, you don't have to have a good grammar, but you have to know how to tell a story. And then the second part of talent is you have tohave insight and talent. And so the way that I describe this is first of all, you have the grammar part. It doesn't have to be good. You have to tell a story. And the way that I find out, people can tell me a story is I call at, I call it asking the bottom asking about the bottom fourth of the resume. So the bottom forced the resumes. The bottom part, it says, What clubs? They were part of what,

where they went to college, but they studied what they like to do in their free time. And so I'll say like I'll say, Hey, where'd you? Uh, I'll ask you right now. Where to Go to college.

I went to college at M I T, which I'd always wanted to get into you since I was a kid and I love getting a degree in computer science.

What? Because computer science, What was your favorite course?

My favorite course was, I think it was 61 70 M. I t. All the courses have numbers, and I don't know why they do it this way. It's basically just toe make everyone sort of our esoteric, But we ended up learning how to build a chess game from scratch. Why is that an entire semester? It's interesting, cause it's a game man and games. They're super addictive. And it's one thing to sit down and read a bunch of books about theory and essentially programming knowledge. Not really apply it, but it's another have a challenge that you get on day one. And you know what you're building toward the entire semester. And if the end of it all your chest ai sucks, that is gonna lose against everybody else's chess ai.

And if it's good, it's gonna win a lot. I don't remember. The seizure was because, quite frankly, I rarely went to class in college. It had everything from my dorm room.

So now if I wanted to keep asking about what you went from the doorman, okay? And so if you can, I'm asking because I care. And I'm interested, right? And if you can continue getting me interested, then I know that you're probably pretty good of a story, but shockingly, a lot of people would be like, Oh, you know, I didn't really have a lot of favorite classes. I'll be like, Dude, if you spent four years and $10,000 at a fucking university, you can't tell me what you have a favorite class or favorite moment.

You're boring. And either you stuck it telling a story or you're just boring. And in both cases, I don't wanna be around you. So I asked about the bottom fourth of the resume. That's what I dio. That's how I understand storytelling. The second thing that I like to learn about is just general knowledge. So, like, can you just like, Do you just like to learn about stuff? And so a lot of times are writers if you talk to them about Trump, if you talk to them about Corona. But then if you talk to him about pop culture, about LeBron,

they just have general knowledge because they just consume a ton of information and that just there, that interest them a lot. And then the fourth thing or the third thing that I like to do is I call specific knowledge, and so I'll ask him about a very specific thing. So we have this guy named Bread and he wrote about this is more sad, But there was a problem with rape in the Army, and he had a front page expose where he talked about this poor lady who was raped in the military and how it was a really big issue in a big problem. And I had to tell me all about what he learned about that, and he became an expert on that topic, and it just approved me that he could learn really quickly and become an expert. So I tried out for those three things that I'm hiring a writer, um,

combination of. And the moment can they be interesting and show you that they're interesting and interested in things And also past history Have they really proven attracted there, being able to dig into things and actually become expert researchers? I'm curious if you were to hire someone who is gonna write for trends, which is very specific. I mean, you're writing about check and you're writing about the future of tack and read about business. Specifically, would you prefer to have someone who's an expert on those subjects, or would you prefer to have someone who is like a great writer in other fields? But you think they can learn to become interested in this area

and expert? Yeah, someone who eat reason sleeps the stuff me and trunk This guy we hired trunk well like tax late at night, like we looked at, were screwing around masterclass. And I'm like, dude, masterclass is so amazing because when you take the class, it's really, really not teach you that much stuff, but it's so inspiring. The commercials are so cool when I'm watching this John appetite thing, the story part is actually more interesting than him teaching me how to be funny. And he's like, Yeah, that's probably how they get people hooked. And then they also are probably willing to,

like acquire customers for like, cheap like This is what we this how we're talking for fun, right? Yeah, and so that it's way easier when someone's obsessed with this stuff.

So I like working with my brother because we also have the same coverages on Zoom all day. Especially now that we're just, like, stuck in our apartment run zoom for literally, like just eight hours a day. And any time you want that seems like a product or something. We're not just talking about the product, for just dissecting how it works, the psychology behind it. We talk a lot about news. We talk about the hustle, we talk about advertising. I'm very curious about advertising in your situation to you because you've got this prescription business. And quite frankly, when most people think about content making money from content, their mind goes straight towards ads not buying ads but literally working with advertisers to put advertising's into their podcast and to their newsletter into their blawg and making money that way. That's how you finance the hustle. It's the bulk of your business.

Do you see that? It won't be the long of our business starting in June,

remember, he's gonna pass out Avenue. How much is that? How much of that is because, uh, of Cove in 19 years? A lot of this is to shut down. Obviously, that means

they're not even more appetizing. And we had our forecast. It would be bigger.

That's not Do you see that being like the the case forever? Do you see yourself getting off of kind of the, uh, advertising drip and then being prescription and going forward?

Not off. But it's gonna be a good supplemental revenue. But strip description is gonna be bigger.

That's crazy. And it's a good place to be. I mean, quite frankly, I think it's off better business. Have your customers paying you for the value, providing sauce advertising. This is kind of weird, mixed incentive

thing. And yeah, and here's why. It's awesome. You can say whatever you want, but you only have to please your customer. Advertising is good because it's fast money. You can you convey drum that up fast. It's very profitable, but it definitely hits a ceiling. And you, definitely. Sometimes your hands get tied. And so now we'll make money through advertising. But what I love and you like this, you might be different. You know,

you need to be honest because you work for stripe like if you have. If you're New Zealand and you have your own business and you could do whatever you want, no one's gonna get you like it's exciting, right? Like you could say anything you want. And that's how you have to do it. When you have advertisers, sometimes you can't say stuff.

Yeah, I think that people don't know this about advertising, but they're not just these objective observers. Second, they start paying you to put basically their ads in your content. They kind of feel like they have a seat at the table. They don't want you to talk about certain subjects. They make requests and end up changing the nature of your products. And I think some of the bigger media organizations like the New York Times are, you know, like traditional media organizations. They've I mean, it happens on YouTube all the time. Yeah, well, on certain videos

because of advertising, You had this big client. It's a huge bank. One of the top. I'll say 10 banks and, uh Fuck, I'll say, it was Goldman Sachs, and they wanted to advertise with us, and we let them. And I like Goldman, actually. And so it's not disrespectful of them. I understand why they did this, but we wrote a story about fuck Jerry, and we thought it would be funny. Just used the word fuck and every single sentence.

Right? And they were like, No, pull that shit. And we like No, we're not know. But we lost money on that, uh, right. And so like that. I thought that was funny. I thought it was cool. And another time, one time when Trump got elected in 2016 right when we had first started, I wrote the whole email in Trump's voice, and I thought it was funny and like,

cute and ah, the advertisers didn't. But we did it anyway. But now, when you have, like, a lot of employees and stuff and you have salesman on quota. It's like, Ah, shit. It's like, I don't care about that advertiser, to be honest, like I I like them and I want them to win. But I care more about my sales person who needs this commission. And so you definitely have to sacrifice some things.

Yeah, you're gonna be on a subscription, mostly subscription revenue basis in the future. You're not really gonna have to answer

to anybody. Oh, we'll expand our advertising. I think that you know the New York Times. I would have to look it up. I bet New York Times makes 60% of their money through subscription and 40% through advertising. So no, it's it's good, and I'll do it. But I try to position everything in my life to come from a position of fuck you toe wear, like I like well, like someone and respect them and want to work with them. But the end of the day, I could just say fuck you and walk away. And I think that's the that you have to have you come from that perspective. You can make your key stakeholders significantly happier. And that's what I want to dio. I

mean the idea behind why most people become any actors When I asked them about it, they give me all these answers about money and about creative expression, about working from wherever they want or time independence. But it all kind of boils down to freedom. People want to have control over their lives. As a founder, you're building this thing that gives you control over your life. But you also want have control over the thing. And so if you have the ability that, as you say, say, fuck you to anybody, this basically means that they don't control you, that you're still gonna be alive. You're still gonna be thriving. Even if you have a confrontation of one of your partners, it doesn't matter. You have the freedom to do whatever you want.

Yeah, and look, I don't have that many confrontations. It's I know it's a song. I'm trying to sound like some Alfa bully or something, but I don't get along with, like, all of our people, and I'm really happy with the decisions we make. But it is really powerful when we negotiate with people or I like if we have an employee who is being a jerk or we have ah, customer who is being a jerk. It's always, you know what I believe like we don't need. We don't need anything, and that is actually significantly better. And it makes like the people who I want to make happy. It makes them much happier,

given the fact that everybody is kind of at home on their computers, obsessively clicking, refresh on Twitter and every sort of news story. Traffic numbers are crazy high, I think. Bloomberg reported the number of their new subscribers in March was up almost 200%. Andy Hackers has been growing like crazy. We had, like, 50% more comments on our community last month. In the month before, I'm sure the hustle is growing like crazy transits growing like crazy. But at the same time advertising revenue is down, we're going to the sort of apocalypse where basically, companies just on advertising. It sounds like you know you've revised your estimates downward, but you're still going to grow your ad business. How are you making ads work when people just aren't buying

as many as we can be to be advertisers. So businesses, they're still buying some stuff? Not a lot. I mean, not as much, but it's still growing. And look, if you have 809 100,000 people opening your email each day, which we we dio, you could make money off of that. I mean, maybe you won't make as much, and I'll be 30 or 40% less. But you definitely make money off that. I mean, you know,

people are still buying wops or people are what is called a walk. Whatever this thing is called, uh, people are still buying deaths. People are still buying stuff. And so, yeah, so they're willing to buy. I mean, advertising for sure. It's just not as much stuff.

Do you think if somebody's trying to start their own media company earlier you recommended, you know they charge $500 or $1000? Would you recommend against doing and advertising supported media business as the one person and a hacker

depends what your aspirations are. If you want to get huge and be a huge company, I think it needs to be part of the It needs to be part it doesn't need to be. But if you're gonna go, if you want to be huge and we want you want to be huge fast, you either have to get your funnel down so you can spend a ton of money and advertising to buy new users. Or you have to do like content marketing and kind of it's gonna be a little bit slower and you gotta build a brand and that advertising helps. And by the way, like I'm not against advertising inherently, I think that if you do advertising well, it's awesome. I mean, advertising is amazing because, I mean, I discover so many cool things I just saw, like a new pair of Jordans. I looked awesome and they sponsored.

This podcast looks so cool, and I was like, Oh, I just discovered something cool when I was in a Tim Ferris's podcasts. Like I hear Look, that's when I discovered Wealthfront and Wealthfront has made me a lot of money every year because of I used them. So no advertising's great when it's done well. So I would say, Yeah, do advertising, if that's what you're willing to dio. I mean, that's what if that fits your values which it fits mine. But just know that that ad revenue that shit gets addicting and often times new products that you want to launch going directly against your advertising revenue goals and revenue targets and it the conflict hard. And so you have to make sure that you're willing toe draw the line, and we've done a good job of that.

But you have to make sure that you draw the line. And most companies cannot like, ah, lot of many companies that are ad supported right now, like Buzzfeed, I don't think they will ever, ever, ever be subscription driven, and that is gonna hurt them a lot.

What even stops him from being able to launch something's description driven and doing what you've done with

the trends fear they are will do all the things that we describe before do. If you go toe box, they're asking for donation. Are you now? Is that the stupidest shit you've ever seen? And they're also I've ever seen every $150 million used to tell me I get stolen, period. You can't tell me that you can't build something that's worth more than $1 donation Get the fuck out of here, you idiot! You guys like you have this big last staff. A talented people come up with something. Don't do the dollar bullshit, Kali. So the reason why they won't lunch launched up is because they, they're journalists, are their fear. They come from a place of fear where they're too afraid of price high or the to place,

afraid of charge for stuff and also that it's really hard in the consumer's mind. The whole Freemium thing is hard for a lot of people here. Times and Wall Street Journal Do it well because they're like the best. But for most people, it's really hard to do. Freemium. They're like, Oh, why would I pay for it when I get most of it for free? So it's alright. Better just to make it all or nothing in third their ad supported. And so the ad team and sales team will be like, Oh, no, don't put that pay well. We need more views for the advertising and it takes a lot. It would take a long time or something like that to change their culture, and that would be hard.

You gotta get up on the right foot. Basically. Yeah, daughter, somehow get over the get over the fear.

And a lot of writers don't want their stuff behind pay walls they want, which is weird. I'm like you guys Look, you're either going up, put it. We're gonna be ad supported, and I need you to just pump shit out That gets paid for use, or you can do less stuff and it might get seen by less people, but it's better. It might be better. And I bet you think it's better. So, like, pick your battle and a lot of journalists are fickle and hard to work with, and that's probably why they don't like it. But fucking box. I can't believe that shit.

Yeah, I saw you on Twitter complaining about it, and it's it's the first thing I thought when I saw that was there's no way in hell that Sam part of the Hustled ever asked for

donor sites to support it. Because you're gonna find a way to make money. You gonna find a way to provide value. I don't even like box, but I don't care like that. They dio that they even though I don't like them. They surely have wonderfully talented people who work there. Like, why is this so hard to understand? You create something that people like, like and then you say, all right. It costs this much money. Give me money. I don't understand why that's hard. And also, if you raise $150 million from Excel, you better be able to charge money for a product. Get out of here.

So you haven't raised any money whatsoever from venture capitalists for the hustle you? It's kind of your mission not to raise

from venture capital. My mission. I would do it. Technically, I raised 25. $25,000 from from one firm,

right? Was it a VC farmer Was like an angel.

Er, it won't know. I raised a few a little bit of money from Angel, but one of the guys who I met had a fun and I, like, thought that it was just his money is like, Oh, no, it's through my fund. So technically, uh

oh, yeah. You did tell me this. Yeah, you're almost almost kind of sort of tricked, But technically you have raised What's the calculus there? Why not just go out and raise a ton of money if you can. And use that to accelerate your growth and give away some percentage.

Your company, because I'm greedy and want to own a lot of it. Yeah, temples that. Yeah, it just agreed. I just think it's gonna be really valuable, and I I want to figure out a way to do it. I think that I grew up kind of like poor, and I, uh it's really hard for me to spend money. Spending money is not something that's easy for me. I'm incredibly frugal, Probably to a fault, definitely to a fault. I should be more way I should be on the offensive way more. And so I'm like in my head,

I'm like, Well, what would I do with all that money? I'm like, I don't even like I'm just, like, so cheap. Like I buy stuff used and I have every single computer that we have in our company, almost all of them I bought used on Craigslist, and so, like, I just I think I can get a lot done with very little money and also agreed,

and very few people as well

Yeah, hiring people Do it like 23 24 people. Not that. Not a lot.

Not a lot. Well, listen, Sam, it's worked out for you beautifully. So far, it seems like it's gonna keep working in the future. I would like to say toe nd hackers out there who are listening who were inspired by your story, who wanna make money on the Internet, create things of value who want to charge what you think is something they could learn from your story and take away as a sort of embark on this

journey of their own. Launch something tomorrow, do it fast and don't think about anything. Just do it. There's so many freakin smart people. Your audience is probably incredibly smart, way smarter than I am. And the thing that holds them back is fear of launching. So I always tell people intellectually speaking, creating a business is super like, easy and straightforward. Emotionally, it's really hard. So the best way to toe overcome that is Just do it. Just gotta do it.

Just do it, Vampire, Thanks so much for coming on the show. Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn about what's left you with the hustle and with trends and where they can learn

more about you and give you a discount cards last time. Should I give you another one?

Ah, I don't think I got one last time. So another one would be great. 1st 1

Okay, let's let me write it down. Well, dio Indy, you want to Indy?

Um, Andy is gone. Code for trends.

Yeah. Wait, What did I say? I said indie. Why did you correct me if I say it wrong, Andy? Yep, yep, yep,

yep. No, no, no. I'm just repeating it. So everyone knows I n d

I e right where I can find the flag channel. Uh, teacher, can we make code? I'm doing it. We're doing it live right now, right now. So, Indy, for 50% off for the first year. Okay, So indeed, they could find me at trends dot co. They can find us at the hostel dot co. And I'm very active on Twitter. Thus, Sam par.

And don't email me because I have 355 100 emails right now, and it will be slow to get to, but if you treat at me. I get back to you really fast, and I would love

to hear from you. All right? You heard him. Don't you know? Send him a tweet. Sam. Thanks again

for coming on the show. Thanks, man. You're awesome.

Listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, you should subscribe to Andy Hackers Podcast newsletter. Try to send a new email every time. There's a new episode with my thoughts, my insides of my takeaways. So you could find that at Andy. Hackers dot com slash podcast, As always. Thank you so much for listening. And I will see you next time.