Sam Parr

Shaan Puri says Moda Communities makes money by charging dealers for access to buyers. A dealer pays $1,000, $5,000, or $10,000 a year to list watches, cars, gold, and jewelry, and only after an interview plus a second member's vetting.

The founder started a Facebook group for watch buyers and sellers in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 2018, because he had nowhere good to buy and sell a watch. Puri messaged him and heard the company now has more than a dozen full-time employees and 600,000 members across 20 or 25 communities. Watch groups split under $10,000, over $10,000, and, he believes, a super-fan group above $100,000. The page says Moda runs 23 Facebook communities. Puri guesses revenue

Sam Parr says BNI is a networking group that puts local business owners who do not compete in one room to trade leads. A chapter can mix an accountant, an HVAC company, a realtor, a garage-door service, a lawyer, and a landscaper. The room is a shared opportunity: one member refers landscaping jobs, and another refers legal work. He used to watch chapters meet at the YMCA, about 30 people, and each person had to bring a lead, such as a new neighbor who needed garage doors.

He thinks membership is about 800,000 people, with dues in the low thousands of dollars a year. He has met the CEO, a woman from Texas, and the group had just been acquired. Shaan Puri says the price he heard was a rumor

Sam Parr says auto dealer 20 groups work by charging dealers a yearly fee to meet in small noncompeting groups and compare profit and loss statements line by line.

He believes the groups started in the 70s under the National Automotive Dealer Association. A dealer applies, pays something like six or eight grand a year, and joins a group of 24 people who are not in the same region. Members fly to the same city three times a year. Each person brings a profit and loss statement, sits with 20 others, and explains it line by line. Peers copy what is working or say what to change. The groups later opened to founders of HVAC companies, marina owners, and boat repair shops. Parr guesses the busines

Sam Parr says Sylvester Stallone regretted selling a Monet that Parr thinks is called Haystacks. In the 1980s Stallone bought it for $110,000. Years later he had bills to pay and sold it for $3 million. Five or ten years after that, the same painting sold for $130 million. Stallone called the sale foolish because art does not need upkeep. He does not have to move it, fix it, or repair it.

Parr's point is the mix of sides. Stallone is cast as a tough-guy star, and he also wrote a movie by himself and spotted a Monet before the wider market did. Bill Perkins agrees that Stallone is an artist and that people have more than one side. A public highlight shows one facet. The others can be a large

Sam Parr uses Amazon as the example of bad design beating good design. A fashionable designer thinks good design means colors and a flat layout. The Kindle page is mostly copy, a stack of reviews, and some photos. It is not a page that designer would draw.

Ethan Evans says the site is run by A/B tests, and the winner is whatever increases sales. The program is called WebLab. Thousands of experiments can run at the same time, and the system can still tell you what one of them did. Nobody cares about the pixels if they sell. Design VPs were hired to make Amazon prettier, and they lost those fights.

For a long time the hidden rule was load time, not layout. Amazon grew up on a slow internet,

Don't make it more complicated than it has to be. Figure out a need, and find a way to solve it. Your business might not be sexy, and it's going to be hard work, but it will make money. The hard part is all emotion. Hard part is making cold calls, being rejected, putting yourself on the line.

Start simple, get your first customers, and then look for more opportunities from there on.

Talk to a lot of people, knowing that most candidates are not going to be the right fit. Then be honest with your prospects, share your weaknesses and find out their strengths. Make sure you are compatible and can help each other.

Being a manager is very different from starting something, getting users, or growing something. Being a manager is rather hard for someone used to being a maker.

If you can't be a good manager, you need to hire someone who can do it better than you. It will make you happier and make your business better.

It's in our human nature to always want to chase more, to look up, to compare our success to someone else who has more. You will be a lot happier if you stop caring about the reward, and enjoy the journey.

Start small, follow through, and make sure what you ask is extremely narrow. Don't ask them open ended questions, ask something they can respond to right away.

Don't be too proud to ask questions. Cold call them and ask.

People who are more successful than you, or experts, they want to see you succeed. Ask for advice, but then actually follow through on it.

Be frugal and figure out the economics of your business, and find the people who can help you, and convince them to work with you.

Copywriting is salesmanship on paper.

Copywriting is understanding what motivates people, it is understanding gaps in the market, the opportunities, it's understanding what people want and how to solve their problems...etc.

Once you master copywriting, it helps in every aspect of life.

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.

Conferences can be very lucrative businesses, but you have be good at marketing, economics and logistics.

Avoid union labor and catering, and don't spend money on things that don't matter, like name tags. Plan that it would take a year or two to get where sponsors are willing to sponsor your event.

Start small, scrappy, and hustle.

At one point while being in school in Nashville, Sam Parr started an online store, and inspired by its growth, he decided to move out to San Francisco, to the hug of online businesses.

While in SF, he started Hustle Con as a way to meet interesting people to partner with. The conference made good profit, so he did it again. It was not a lot of work, and the way he grew it was a newsletter.

That's when he realized the Hustle was his ticket to building a huge media company.

Email list is one of the highest ROI marketing channels for commerce companies. Email can be a huge business.

Sam was inspired by "Daily Candy," a newsletter with 2 million subscribers that sold for $125 million dollars in 2004.

When they launched in 2016, his goal was to build a massive email list, monetize it through advertising, and to use the profits for building ancillary products, which they would distribute using their own email list.

Their focus was to create something world class, with great revenue, lots of users who would love it, and a product that would be fun to work on.