HustleCon

Sam's first HustleCon: $60K revenue from a 200-person list in 7 weeks

Sam launched his first paid event with no website, no Hustle, and just a 200-person email list. In the first 6 weeks of selling, the event generated about $60K in revenue and roughly $50K in profit.

“I had, um, a 200-person email list. So there wasn't like this, oh, it's easy for you, you had the Hustle. No, no, no, it didn't exist. Uh, there was no website, there was just a domain name called HustleCut. Um, and I hosted this event, and the first 6 weeks, it made about $60,000 in revenue and $50,000-ish in profit.”

The front door / side door funnel for selling event tickets

Sam's HustleCon engine: a landing page ('front door') captured emails directly, while 2-3 speaker blog posts a week posted to Hacker News were 'side doors' that funneled readers in. Each blog post he emailed ended with a discounted ticket CTA on a (perpetual) countdown timer.

“what I would do is hustlecon.com was basically a landing page where I explained what the event is and then you'd enter your email and that was called the front door. The side doors were all these blog posts. So I would write 2 to 3 blog posts a week on each speaker. I would post that on Hacker News. People would come to the website via the side door.”

Steal thisRun a landing page as your front door and SEO/community blog posts as side doors, then convert side-door readers into your email list.

HustleCon's margin secret: never pay speakers (except Casey Neistat)

Across 300-500 speakers, Sam paid a fee only once, to Casey Neistat. Everyone else spoke free; at most he covered an economy flight, like a $350 ticket for Match.com's CEO that the exec even had to chase him to reimburse.

“I paid Casey Neistat money to speak at HustleCon, which is no surprise. It's like you could just Google what a speaking fee is. But besides that, I've had probably 300, 400, 500 people speak. Not once did I ever pay for another speaker. Not one time.”

People don't want the content, they want the Harvard label

Shaan argues HustleCon talks get only ~2-3K YouTube views despite people paying ~$1,000 to attend, because attendees come for the network and serendipity, not the content. Like Harvard's free online courses, people want the experience and label, not the information.

“Turns out people don't want the Harvard education, they want the Harvard label. In the same way, people don't want the content from HustleCon. They want the experience and the network and the kind of serendipity that can happen by going out there and getting amongst it with a bunch of other people and putting yourself in that position.”

Host the party, don't attend it

Shaan's networking philosophy (crediting Sam's HustleCon): the fastest way into a new space is to host the event yourself, since speakers and every attendee end up knowing and feeling grateful to you, a disproportionate reward for the extra schlep work.

“And I have this philosophy, much like you, which is that, you want to host the party, not attend it, right? Like what you did with HustleCon was great. Like, yes, it was more work, but the rewards are like, yeah, totally disproportionate to how much more effort it is to just host the event. Like all the speakers know you, they like you, they're grateful to you because you brought a bunch of cool people together. Every attendee starts to know you and your brand.”

Steal thisTo break into a new industry, host the event instead of attending; do the schlep work of organizing and the network forms around you.

Revealing HustleCon's $300K profit attracted the wrong crowd

Sam recounts blogging that his first HustleCon did $300,000 in nearly all-profit revenue. The attention it drew didn't attract the people he wanted, which is why he warns Shaan against publishing his personal financials.

“one time when I did HustleCon, I like wrote a blog post saying like, the first HustleCon made like, you know, in one year we did $300,000 in revenue and it was like all profit. And I was using that money to like grow a business and people were like, oh nice, you have that much money. I was like, well, I mean, like it's the business. And I felt like that attention was actually really— I didn't— it didn't attract the type of person who I wanted to attract.”

Trade shows make money on the transaction, not the talks

Sam explains the trade-show economics: speakers exist only to pull in like-minded people, and all the money is made over the transactions that happen between vendors and buyers. Without transactions (like a pure conference), there's far less money.

“So you need people to gather in order to transact. If you don't have that, it doesn't make a lot of money. HustleCon was a good conference, but it's not massive because there's no transactions. You have to have that transaction because you have to justify it to the vendor that if you come, you're going to get more business. Therefore, it's very easy for me to say it costs $5,000 a day for you to attend.”

Steal thisDesign events around vendor-buyer transactions, not speaker line-ups; use speakers only as bait to assemble the right crowd.

Host the party, don't attend it

Shaan's recurring theory: you get little reward for attending an event, but capture huge goodwill, relationships, and opportunity by being the one who organizes it. Summit, HustleCon, and Web Summit all started by convincing a few legit people to come, then letting the dominoes fall.

“You get no rewards pretty much for attending the party, or very little rewards for attending the party, but you get all the rewards if you host the party. And Sam, you did the same thing with HustleCon, where if you do the sweat to organize and you can convince just that first couple people of legit players to come in, there becomes this domino of legit people who will come in”

Steal thisStop attending events. Host one: convince a few legit anchors first, then let them recruit their peers.

Shaan sold a failing company in 90 days by running a tight process

Shaan describes selling a company that wasn't in hypergrowth: he proposed the sale himself, ran a focused 30-60 day outreach process, got a term sheet 45 days in, and closed the whole deal in 90 days. He gave a HustleCon talk titled 'How to Sell a Failing Company.'

“I basically took the meetings that, you know, some people had been interested, other people had never even heard of us. And I started knocking on those doors and taking replying to the people who already showed interest. So by the time we got ready to do it, it was just a relief that the deal closed”

Steal thisTo sell a non-hypergrowth company, run a fast, tight process yourself; time is the enemy of every deal.

Shaan ignored Andrew Yang's emails twice before he ran for president

Shaan recounts getting a 2015 email from an unmemorable 'typical Asian name' pitching a HustleCon talk, ignoring it, then a 2017/18 follow-up asking him to review a book and interview the sender, who was running for president. It was Andrew Yang; Shaan didn't reply.

“He emailed me again in 2017 or '18, and he goes, I'm running for president. And this is Andrew Yang, it's Andrew Yang who it is. I'm running for president. "Do you wanna interview me and read, would you please review my book and talk about it on The Hustle?" I didn't reply. I forgot all about it.”

Sam's remake playbook: blog, rank, build a list, sell a course

Asked what he'd do at 21 with no network or capital, Sam lays out a concrete playbook: learn something new weekly and blog it daily, use Ahrefs to find what people search, rank for ~2-3K visitors/day, build a 5,000-person email list, then sell a course.

“Start blogging. And when I say start blogging, I would say learn one new interesting thing each week and then just blog about what you learned. Do that every single day, every week for a year. Try to get 2,000 to 3,000 people a day coming to your site through search. The way you find out what to write about is you go to Harefs.com and you buy a subscription and that will teach you what to write because it'll tell you what people are searching for. Try to rank for those words, build up an email list of 5,000 people, and then create a course and sell it to them.”

Steal thisBlog daily on what you learn, use search-volume tools to pick topics, build an email list, then monetize with a course.