Sam Reveals The Company He's Worked On For The Last 8 Month
I will predict and guarantee really that this is going to be a greater than $100 million a year revenue business, which means it's going to be worth something like low end $300, $400 million, high end billion dollars.
All right. We are live. Sorry, I missed last week. Had to do a thing, but today's a big day for me. I'm launching my thing. I'm finally talking about the thing that I've been working on. It's called Hampton. Joinhampton.com. Uh, I'm, I'm excited.
This is your Steve Jobs moment, dude.
Is it?
Every once in a while something comes along that changes everything. Triangle hand pose.
Yeah, I'm just going to start sitting like that. This is the first time that I've been working on something that I haven't talked about it, like within 24 hours of having the idea. And it's killed me. It's killed me. And I have hated it. I've hated it. I'm so nervous.
And so why now?
So I'll give people background. So my new company that I've been working on, I think I've been working on it since July, but I've had the idea for a long time and I like even interviewed people in this space. On the pod.
So by the way, that's the funniest part of this whole thing. You invited people onto the podcast, ask them every, hey, uh, how do you run your business? How do you grow it? What are the numbers? How much money does it make? How'd you start it? Where'd you hire from? Blah, blah, blah. And then you just launched a competitor like 90 days later.
It's not a competitor. So we had Chief on. This is not a competitor to Chief. We had Tiger 21 on, not a competitor to their, to them. But yeah, so I wanted to prove, because I, you, you remember how I said I hate the question when people say, how would you start if you could do it over again? Yada, yada, yada. And, and I would tell 'em, they go, well, it's easy for you. You have an audience. And so I was like, all right, well I'll just do it in front of you. And just to prove to myself this little chip I have on my shoulder that I can create stuff without an audience. So Hampton is, the URL is joinhampton. I couldn't get hampton.com. Uh, it's like owned by Holiday Inn or whatever the, the Marriott company or whatever it is. Um, but it's, it's pretty simple. It's a vetted network for founders and entrepreneurs. So basically if you're a founder, our sweet spot is like, if you're the CEO of a company, our sweet spot is like $10 million a year in revenue, but you need at least $1 million in revenue, at least $3 million in funding, or—
well, these are all or— explain what it does before you— these are the requirements. What's—
I'm going to, so what I'm saying is you need like, it's for a certain size of CEO, but basically you sign up, we vet you. And all, and interviewed all this stuff. And what you get is basically what you and I had. So before Sean and I started this pod, before he started this pod, him and I would meet once a month. It would be me, you, and like 5 or 6 other guys. And we would like, it was basically like group therapy for business. And we did it for a couple years and then we did it informally for a long time. And I've done it, I've done it informally with a bunch of people, but it kind of changed my life. And so we decided, my partner Joe and I, to create that, but for people who are all over the country. So if you're in Idaho and you have this company that does like $20 million in revenue, you're kind of like a freak. You're like an outsider in your community. And so what we did was we made this thing where you can sign up, get vetted, and we put you in a group of 8 to 10 people with an executive coach. We call them facilitators who guide conversations that you have once a month. And then there's a, a Hampton-wide community that you, um, can talk to other people anytime. And then we, we're, we host dinners. So we have like dozens of dinners. We have, uh, adventures. So like a bunch of members are going to a rally car event next week. And so we do all these things, but basically it's like, I hate using this, but it's almost like a safe space. So we have people like posting.
Oh man, wow. You went there. You must really care about this business.
I went there. It's like a place where you could like talk to your—
would you say that you feel seen?
You can, you can bring your whole self, but you can bring your work self and your personal self. But it's like a place where like, let's say you have to lay people off. You can, you can ask people publicly and no one's gonna make fun of you. Like, I got, I have to lay people off. How do I do this? Or you could be like, I'm bummed. I'm really sad. I have to lay people off. Or the opposite. You're like, I'm killing it. Money is coming in. How are you folks investing? And so when I had my group, I used to do one with you and I did one with my now partner Joe Spicer. Like he knew my net worth. He knew my relationship issues with friends and family. He knew when I was selling the company, I was like, dude, how do I not look stupid when I'm selling this, this company? I like, I feel very ashamed about X, Y, and Z. And so it's this place where you can, it's kind of like this pod, but more intimate. And, uh, That's kind of why we had the idea. I didn't wanna launch it publicly because A, I wanted the product to be perfect. Like I wanted it to be great. And B, communities like this, it's not like software where you just throw bodies at it and it doesn't matter how many people are using it. We had to like really be careful. So we've added all these awesome people and we like, it was very hand curated and it still will be, but like I wanted it to be like that early on.
And so, um, So I think you pitched it, you almost didn't do yourself justice there. You know when people come on the pod and you're like, uh, let me just do that for you real quick. That's my—
dude, this is my nerves, man.
Yeah, yeah. I feel like the nerves are getting the best of you because, uh, here's how I would explain this. I think you got the— I think you got one part right, which was most important, the most important thing, which was you were a customer of a product like this before you built this business. You didn't just build this business because you're like, oh, this might be a great idea. Uh, when we met, I don't know, 10 years ago almost, it was through something like this. We created a group. It was me, it was you, Jack Smith, who went on to sell his business for like, I don't know, $700, $800, $900 million. Uh, but at the time he, he wasn't in that spot. Um, a guy named Sieva who was at the time doing this kind of class notes college business that wasn't really gonna end up being that big. But his next thing, uh, Enduring Ventures, has turned out to be pretty big. It's a $100 million plus company now. Um, and there was a small group of us and we would meet twice a month. And there was one really important thing that it did, which was it gave you, like you said, the safe space. Now, what is it safe from? Well, for most CEOs, most of the time, um, I would, I would say most people think starting a business is hard or being a CEO is hard, but they think about the beginning, like, oh, it must be hard to like get the idea or get it off the ground. And like, as anybody who's actually done it knows, that's like 1% of the journey. Like the hard part is actually the climb. It's like once you've got your idea and you've got your— yeah. Like now 7 years of day-to-day with a bunch of unknowns and a bunch of like fires that are going to pop out of nowhere and you have to, you have to put out those fires. And just staying happy and healthy and sane and being who you are during that 7-year climb is actually the hard part. And so who helps you during that climb is, I think, the important part. And you know, the hard thing if you're a CEO is you talk to investors, you gotta tell 'em everything's great, everything is up and up and up. Um, we're crushing it. You talk to your customers, you need to tell 'em how great everything is. You talk to your employees or your teammates in the office every day. You can't be telling them about all your problems. Uh, you have to again, tell them how great everything is. So this was for us, this was the one group where you could just say how things actually are. This is what's going good. This is what's going bad. I don't even really know about this other thing. I got to figure that out. I've been procrastinating that just because it's like looming and I don't, I don't really know what to do. And it is this founder group therapy thing where you sit down with, you know, 6 or 7 other people.. And I would say it's like 70%, the conversation is like 70% tactics, 30%, dude, I've been there. Don't worry about this. Like the therapy, but the value is almost on the other side. It's like the connections that you make, the ideas that you get, the relationships, like Sieva ended up being one of my groomsmen, I think at my wedding, we invested in a bunch of companies from the mastermind and that made a bunch of money. Um, you know, had I not been in a mastermind with you, I wouldn't have seen how you built The Hustle and I wouldn't have known how to build The Milk Road, a business I didn't know I was planning to create 5 years later, but that blueprint was etched in my brain from those meetings. And so you get all these like kind of crazy, um, outsized benefits. And basically I think most people massively overrate the idea of a mentor cuz I think it sounds like the easy button. It's like, man, I wish that there was just some some genius who knew everything and had done everything, who could just tell me what to do and solve all my problems. And of course that doesn't really exist. Uh, but like, so mentors are pretty overrated, but peers I think are massively underrated. And what you've done is basically curate a bunch of people who are like you. So if you're in that kind of like, I've got a successful business, I'm on my 7-year climb, I wanna make this as big and as generational as I can. You want other people who have already done that or also in that journey with you doing that at the same time. So that's my sales pitch for you.
You've done it better than me. You've absolutely— thank you. You've done it way better than I did. It's just like, well, well, the other thing is I'm in the thick of it too.
I'm not doing this really for you. I remember the first piece of viral content I had was me writing how I set my, how I set up our mastermind, how we ran it. And how you should, like, if you want to do that too, here's how you should do it. And this was like, I had some crappy PDF somewhere, uh, but it's been downloaded like, I don't know, 10,000 times now. Wow. I don't even know where those emails are. I should go find them. But like, that thing has had like 10,000, 10,000 downloads now in a couple of years. And I don't promote this thing. It's just, I said it once on a podcast a long time ago at the very beginning of this and consistently people, it resonates. People are like, I want that. How do I, How do I set mine up so I can have my own version of, of what you have? Now, what you did, you made it easy. You made it a product. You were like, don't worry about figuring out how to find the right people, how to organize this, how to make sure the discussion's not a huge waste of everyone's time and it's super productive. You just turned that into push a button and if you're accepted in, you, you get all that out of the box, which is smart.
And I used your thing. I, I used that, uh, the down, uh, the list that you're talking about. I used, um, just my experience with our thing. And then I went and studied it. You know, I was talking to a lot of other of these groups and trying to figure out— I've been calling it speed of vulnerability. How do we like get people to be vulnerable quickly? And it sounds weird, but we have like people like crying at some of these things. And I'm like, yes, yes, got them.
Tears fuel me. Yeah. What's better than revenue? The tears of my customers.
Well, particularly men, like men are like, I'll have like some people afterwards are like, This was amazing. Why haven't other people done this? I'm like, yeah, dude, it's called therapy. Like, people have done this for years. It's just a lot of men in particular don't do this type of stuff.
That's why I haven't joined. I don't want to cry. Last time I cried, somebody gave me a titty twister and that I just decided after that day it's not happening again. Um, so they say, yeah, I've, I've been avoiding your, your emotional trap here, uh, for a little bit. By the way, this is not just something you studied, like, oh, there's these 3 companies that started in the last 10 years that do this. This is like on some Benjamin Franklin shit, right? Like this is, I think, Junto or Junto. I don't know what he called it. I don't know how you pronounce it, but like back in the day, this was like a Ben Franklin thing. Even every Friday he would go to this like one bar. You might know the story better than I do. I'll kind of butcher it. Do it. But he went to this bar every Friday and he invited a community of like-minded people and he called it, I think, a society, a club of mutual benefit, like benefit or something like that, which is basically meant it's a club of people who we are going to make each other better. Um, like I want sparring partners when it comes to business is kind of the way that, that, that you, you think about it or I think about it. Uh, but he was doing the same thing. His was a little less, a little less business oriented. So a little more like, uh, topics of, you know, society and law and whatever. Like they would just debate random things. Um, but he like attributed a lot of his success to doing this regularly, to having this regular recurring meeting with peers who played the game at a high level. And that makes, you know, iron sharpens iron type of thing. And so, um, yeah, this is not like a new idea. This has been around for a little while. How do you think about how this compares? So people have heard of, oh, YPO, they've heard of whatever these other ones, Tiger 21, Vistage, all, all these things. How does it compare? I, I know I, I have my opinion. You might have to be politically correct around how you say all this. Like, no, no, no, we're all different in our own special way. But like, I see you as the sexier, modern, more fun version that I would wanna be a part of. Is that not like it? Or is it, is it actually much different?
My whole career, my like 15-year internet career, it's been based on like taking old ideas and just putting new spins on it. And so like, That's what we did with newsletters. Newsletters have been around before the internet and we just put a different spin on it and people are like, oh, you created this amazing, interesting new thing. I'm like, no, not really. It's not that new. It just, we just like, you know, put a different logo on it and we had our texture. We added our texture to it and we did the same thing with this one. But like, I, if I make fun of these other companies, I'm just only joking because they, they serve a need. But like there's YPO. So YPO has been around since the '50s. It's a really big business. But YPO, it's like 50 and 60-year-old men. And we make a joke at Hampton where we're like, not a lot of people in our group, their businesses aren't inheriting 15 apartment buildings in South Florida. Uh, YPO exists for that. And YPO does have like a lot of like tech people and internet people, but it is a little, the age range is much older. It is a little bit more boys club.
YPO without Cialis. We're still workshopping some of the marketing. So we're, yeah, I can say these things because I Uh, it's not my business.
And they're cool and all, but they're just, they're just older. And so, uh, Hampton, it's, it's digital first. Uh, so like we have D2C companies who aren't tech companies and we're like, should we call it tech companies? And like, they're technically not tech companies, but they're tech companies if you call, if you tell your mom what you do. So they're like tech companies, internet companies. That's what they are. A lot of people who you recognize on Twitter are members. So that type of shtick. Um, uh, a lot of like just consumer software companies, a lot of B2B software companies, but almost everyone's software or internet based. Um, and it's significantly younger than a lot of, uh, of these older companies. And then compare it to like a mastermind, which I don't even use that word. Those are typically like 50, a lot of 'em can be like 50 grand and it's a little bit more internet marketing. So this is very much like a startup.
So let's do this. I think the best sales pitch, like with any community is who else Am I doing bad? No, no, no. You're doing good. I just wanna make sure I get you to the good bits, right? I'm, I'm your wingman here. I'm trying to get you laid here. So here, let me, let me help you out. The ad, it says on your website, your website's nice, by the way. I wanna talk about one thing in a second here, which is that you did this differently than your other stuff. You like hired a fancy design agency and you like picked a good name. You like built it in stealth. You like violated a bunch of your own rules, which I think is kind of interesting.
All of them.
I wanna hear about those in a second. But first, uh, it says the average Hampton member has $23 million in annual revenue, and then there's some minimum. Um, and like any community, the most valuable thing is who else is here, because that's what I would care about, right? Like, okay, you, uh, I like the idea. I always like the idea. It's like any— I like the idea of a party, but who's coming? And so who are— give me like, I don't know, 3, 4, 5, however many you want. Like, give me some stories of interesting members you've met that have made this like fun for you to, for even you to be a part of?
I'm going to give you two categories. One, the people who you know, and then two, the people you don't know. The people you do know—
covers everybody. That covers 100% of the pie chart, dude.
So like, uh, Pomp, Anthony Popoliano, who was on the pod a few weeks ago, he's a member. So Pomp has a media company and an investment company, and you guys have, if you listen to the pod, you know who he is. Patrick Campbell, bootstrapped his company ProfitWell to like a $200 million exit. Your friends, uh, Bump Health, you know Bump Health?
Of course.
I know Bump Health. They make, uh, yeah, they, well, you know, uh, what's the husband's name? Um, Leland. Uh, his wife Christine's a member. Uh, they, they bootstrapped their company to tens of millions in revenue and they create, uh, it's, it's a service for pregnant women.
Prescription products for pregnant women. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh, CB Insights, Anand from CB Insights, one of the most impressive people I've, I've ever gotten to hang out with. Very level-headed and, but like just quietly building. You know, CB Insights. Have you heard that Lil Wayne quote where he's like, real G's move in silence like lasagna? That's, that's a non. Austin Reef, he's in my group. So my former enemy, now one of my closest friends, Austin Reef from Morning Brew, is a member. Nick Huber, Sahil Sieva, all these types of people. But let me tell you about the people who you probably don't know. Have I ever told you about Brett Adcock?
I've— you've mentioned this guy because he took some flying car company public or something like that. But tell the story.
All right. Listen to this. So this guy named Brett Adcock, he started this thing called Vettery, which was a marketplace for talent, but it was very much like Hired. So if you're an engineer, you go through all these tests, they kind of like algorithmically and kind of manually match you with cool interviews. They eventually bought Hired. He sold it for $100 million. He took a bunch of his earnings from that and he started Archer, which he took public at the time for like $2 billion. Market cap now is like $600 or $700 million, but it was a flying car company. Basically, they kind of look like helicopters, but they're like unmanned, uh, flying things that United Airlines bought a bunch of. And he took time off between Vetri and Archer to study how it worked. He literally went to like University of Florida to like learn how this works. Now, his latest company, which I'm a personal investor of, is called, uh, Figure. And I went to his factory and he is like, and they basically are these robots that look like RoboCop. And instead of killing you though, they just, uh, you know, load t-shirts into packages for Walmart. Walmart's a hypothetical one. Uh, and they ship it, ship it off. So, you know, there's like millions of people who are doing this, who are getting paid to, yeah. Pick, or what do you call it? Pick and pack. There's 20,000 of these 3PLs in America. Did you know that? I didn't know there was 20,000.
Yeah, we could put it for our e-com store. We ran one, right? So I hired a bunch of people to to do this. I've done a lot of pick and pack myself because people call in sick to work.
It's crazy. So he's built these robots that could basically run, he calls 'em humanoids. And he is like, they can run for 20 hours a day. They charge for 4 hours a day and they're just packing stuff and it's all using robots. But he took like $20 or $30 million of his own money and he was like, I basically own two stocks or one stock, Archer, my publicly, my public company. And then all the cash that I have, I bought a house and then I put, invested all of it into Figure, my new company. This guy is like all in on it. It's pretty wild. Another interesting person we talked about, Anya of Rooted. She's the one-person meditation app. It's a panic attack app that does over $1 million in revenue. So it goes all the way from folks like Brett who are on their ways to be billionaires all the way down to Anya, who's got a million-dollar thing that she's slow growing slowly, but she owns 100% of it. Another interesting one, AJ Patel, another guy who's pretty under the radar, but—
Is that the jet ski? Zesty Paws guy?
Yeah, he bootstrapped Zesty Paws to a $600 million exit. Now he has a new thing called HighKey. We talked about him a lot. He's, he's, he's pretty baller.
And so how does it work? These people, you get put in a group of peers. Uh, so you get, you apply, you get accepted, you get matched into a group, and then you meet once a month with a facilitator who guides that discussion, right?
Yeah. And the meetings have these like, uh, like we've like, like we review each meeting afterwards and we like study what's the good, what's the bad. And then we've just shaped the, um, the format.
So what makes a great meeting versus a just okay meeting?
So what I learned from the podcast is basically these meetings are basically content. So I, I try to find juicy, good content. So a really good meeting, we do this thing called the business breakdown. Well, someone will like do a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, um, threats. What's the other T? Threats, uh, on their, on their business. And they'll explain how it works, what their CAC is, where they're getting customers and they just reveal everything and they're like, here's where we suck, here's what we rock, what do you think I should do? And here's the issue that I'm facing. And so that's a really good meeting when they do that. So Triple Whale, you, one of your, uh, best investments of all time, he's a, he's a, a member and they'll just explain how the company works and they're like on, on paper.
And this is no threats for Triple Whale.
Yeah. This, this, what I'm about to say is not for, for Max, this is for everyone. Uh, what they'll say is like, it's going well, but like we're sucking here, here, and here, or we're about to lay people off or we just got an acquisition offer and it's way below our valuation, whatever. And so they like, well, and so people will have all types of context on their companies to in order to give advice. So that's a good meeting. And then we've hired— how many do we have? We probably have 30 or 40 facilitators on staff, right, dude? And that's hard. Wrangling these people up is hard and like training them. So it's been like a— that's been the biggest challenge and that's our biggest cost is, is trying to figure out how to get these people to do stuff well.
Now let's talk about how you decided to start this. So again, I think if I had said, what is the Sam Parr startup method? I would have said, um, the first bit I think was, was kind of correct, which was sniff around for the opportunity. I think you are a world-class, you know, hound sniffer. Yeah, top 5 sniffer I know. Uh, so you're good at finding opportunity and that what that means is you talk to a bunch of people and you bluntly ask them, be like, is that a good business? And then they're like, well, yeah, I mean, we did this much of revenue. You're like, oh, I was just asking, but thanks for telling me. You do a good job of basically finding interesting models or, you know, that are businesses that you think are good businesses. So that part I think was straight out of a, straight outta your normal playbook. And so you did a good job with that. Then you were like, okay, I could see this business. And I think you even like talked to somebody who had bought a company like this, like in private equity. And you were like, yeah, why'd you buy it?
I cold call them.
How did they grow year by year? What's your plan with them? Um, would you buy another? Was this like a one-off outlier or are there other businesses like this? And you're, you basically got confidence. So there was some of your method.
Uh, dude, I called, I called the guy. And I was like, look, hey, uh, I just got— I found your number on the internet. I, I don't want to sound like a douchebag here, but here's who I am. So I'm kind of like legit, and I'm going to create something that I have a feeling you're going to want to buy. I don't know if I'm ever going to sell it, but I have a feeling you're going to want to. So it's— it, it makes sense for you to have a talk with me right now.
And I have a particular set of skills I've honed over—
well, thankfully it worked.
Like, taken speech.
Very humbly. I was trying to be very humble, but yeah. And he like told me a little bit about the business. He didn't reveal anything that I, I mean, I could have found a lot of it online. Uh, but he didn't, it's not like he like broke any like confidentiality stuff. But yeah, I did that and then I just created a Typeform and I created a Google Doc. I just wrote out in one page what my new idea is, who should join, who shouldn't join. And at the bottom was a Typeform and I sent that Google Doc to like 50 friends and like 20 of 'em signed up and I interviewed all of 'em. So I actually took a screenshot. Look at my calendar. You see my calendar down here? No, my calendar, it's like a zebra. There's like stripes basically. I did like 50.
Weird flex, but all right. Got that zebra calendar.
I got that zebra calendar basically. And like, there's no meetings on the day that you'll see, there's no meetings on the day we record the, the, the pod. But besides that, there's like 10 to 15 meetings every single non-MFM day. Yeah.
I would just call you one of those Bluetooth headsets. Like you were a telemarketer. Cause I was like, I think Sam is just doing these like 20-minute calls all day. Like for a while you were doing that, right? You were doing basically a 20, 30-minute sales call or discovery call, um, every day, all day. Cause we used to be completely unscheduled, right? Like we had that elephant schedule, it was just clear gray, nothing there. And I could call you anytime. We could have a little chit-chat.
It was fine.
And then all of a sudden you started this business. And you became the machine.
Was it hard? I became the machine.
Was it hard to flip that switch? Or in a way, I, uh, here's my suspicion. In a way you kind of missed that and it felt fun to go like super like hardcore about it.
It was awesome, but it was hard. It was like lifting weights, like during it, it like, I was proud to do it and I was happy to do it, but it was very challenging. And so I was like doing all these calls and I would interview people, figure out who is interesting, who's not interesting, who we should turn away, who we should accept. And then we just sent a Stripe link and we accepted payment. And then we said, all right, you have a 30-day delay. We went out and found the executive coaches, the facilitators, we trained them, and then the first meeting started. And we did that for about 100 people without any website. And we didn't create a website until around December. And when we created a website, that's months in, correct? Months in. No. Yeah. Many 7 figures in revenue.
Uh, uh, The way you talk about money is so funny. Many, many 7 figures. What does that mean? Humans don't talk like this.
Millions, millions in run rate. It was like, we were doing good. I was doing good. It was just me and Joe.
So basically he would go out and find the facilitators and I would go out and like find the, uh, by the way, there's a great story here because if you actually go to the website, ceomastermind.com, This same business idea that you're doing right now was a business I started at the very beginning of the podcast. Very loosely, I, uh, I was like, hey, this mastermind thing is really great. Uh, it's helped me a lot in my life. Anybody want to join one and create one here? Put your thing in. And I think I did, uh, $250 or $300 per month per person. So it was like 3 to 4.
Separate. That was separate. First was CEO Mastermind. So if you, I think I still have the website, CEO Mastermind.
It just says index.
Uh, I think, yeah, maybe I didn't renew or something like that. But, um, uh, yeah, something like that. Basically I had created this website. This is how I met Ben, by the way. Ben was the one of the 6 people that signed up for this in the first batch. I said, oh, I'm only having one group. And I made this thing on ClickFunnels and, um, they joined the group and I was the facilitator, uh, which was, uh, you know, bad move. A bad move. Because why did I quit? Because I was like, I don't really want to be facilitating this anymore. So I'm not going to do this business. And the obvious move is the same mistake I actually made in my sushi restaurant, which was the restaurant was actually quite profitable from month one, but I hated going every day at 5 in the morning to the fish market and picking up tuna and then making the spicy tuna mix. And I hated all this stuff. And any smart person would have just been like, well, you need to hire somebody to do that. And, um, in my head it was just like, if we hate doing this, everyone's going to hate doing this. This is terrible. I don't want to do this anymore. Get me out of here. And similarly for the CEO Mastermind thing, I was the facilitator, which was a bad move cuz really what ended up happening was I couldn't resist solving everyone's problems and everybody who joined was a fan of the pod, so they really just wanted to talk to me. They didn't really care about their peers. And so, uh, that was a mistake on my part. But I'll tell you, tell you one thing, Ben came outta that. So I got my win outta that, which was I met Ben, he became my business partner. The second thing was it is a great lesson in turning the intensity knob up. It's like for anyone out there who's like, oh, I had that idea. No, no, no. I literally had this idea. I was in the same position as Sam, had this idea before Sam, created the website, created the prototype, did the first round of it for a few months, and then decided, ah, I don't really care about this $6,000 a month right now. I don't really want to, I don't know if I want to grow this. I don't know how, how, I don't know. And I just sort of let it die on the vine. Fast forward 3 years. Sam tells me, he sends me that Google Doc if I wanna start this business. I'm like, oh, that sounds super familiar. I know that idea. That's, that's interesting. I actually, I, you know what, I always did think that was a good idea. But, and so, and then I got to see, I get to watch, it's like watching your buddy date your ex. It's like I got to watch Sam send me a chart every day of the ARR going up, like just exploding. Like, ah dude, we're gonna need bigger paper. 8 by 11's not cutting it. Bar charts going off the page. And I was like, this is a great example of when you turn the intensity knob up to 12, because you were willing to do the sales calls every single day, every, every 30 minutes, all day. Uh, you were immediately going out and hiring people so that this could scale and you wouldn't have to get bogged down in the operations. You could stay focused on growing it. You did all the things that anybody would, anybody smart would advise somebody to do. You were doing all those things and it was great to see. And I say this not to say, uh, that you, that you Winklevossed me or anything like that. That's not what, that's my takeaway. But I say it as a joke because I really, that is my takeaway, which is the difference between success and failure is often just turning the intensity knob up. Now at that time, I had just sold my company. I was still working at Twitch. I, I, I don't think I really would've gone and done that. I, I don't think I really even wanted to do that. But man, is it a powerful way to see like a, an A/B test. Here's somebody who does it as one of the 10 things that they're doing in a light intensity and isn't really fully committed, and versus somebody who's fully committed who turns the intensity knob up to 12. Same idea, using the same fundamental platform of this podcast as your launchpad for that, where, I don't know, maybe not the launchpad because you didn't promote it on here, but the credibility you had when you hit up those people, a lot of those people you mentioned were former guests.
Dude, I think This, uh, this business would not be good for you. In fact, I don't think this business is good for me to run. So I've hired, I, we got it to a certain size and then once we could, we hired a CEO.
And that's within less than a year, right? Which is unusual. But I think probably that you had a reason you wanted to do that, or you, you actually probably planned to do that from the beginning. Why is that?
Uh, no, I, we didn't plan to do, we, we, or we didn't plan to hire this person. Uh, we hired Jordan.
Did, did you think you would be the CEO?
Or did you plan on— No, like once it, once it started working, I was like, oh man, this is going to be significantly bigger than I think it can be. And also I don't have the skillset. It's a very operational heavy thing and you have to be very calm and patient and, uh, talk to people like really politely constantly. And it's a very people heavy business. So, you know, we have dozens of these facilitators and like wrangling them up and like figuring all that out, figuring all that out. It's quite hard., and I don't have that ability and I don't have the ability to run a really big company, which I think this is gonna be. So no, we, I don't think you could have done this. I, I know for a fact I could have done this or could not have done this. And you would've had to hire someone as well.
Hiring a CEO this early is hard. It's hard to hand over your baby. So I think people, I, I know when Andrew comes on, people always ask, oh, ask him about hiring a CEO. I, I don't know why. I think it's another one of these easy buttons people wanna push of like, again, it's like the mentor thing. Oh, this person will solve all my problems. Oh, if only I found a great operator, then I could have all of the ownership. And none of the work. This sounds fantastic. And of course that does happen. It's not that it doesn't happen, but I think a disproportionate number of people are interested in that. Uh, do you have anything interesting you could say about finding and hiring the CEO and how you know that they're the right person for, for this business and taking that big leap of faith of handing a working but early business to somebody else?
So when I, right, like 3 months before I was selling The Hustle, uh, about, like literally 3 weeks before I started, uh, selling it, before I got the email from HubSpot, I started talking to this guy named Jordan who is the chief growth officer at, uh, Motley Fool, which is, you know, like at the time, like a $500 million a year thing. And I was like, Jordan, I wanna hire a CEO for The Hustle. Uh, and I started recruiting him, went to his house, wined and dined him, and he was like, I'm in. And then I got this call from HubSpot and I signed an NDA and they're publicly traded, so I couldn't tell him. And then about a week before the deal closed, I was like, Jordan, I've got to back out of our deal. You like, I have to take this offer. And he was like, I understand. But, you know, I told them HubSpot still needs someone to run the organization within. Do you want it? And so he said, yeah. And so he ran it. And so now I think HubSpot Media, which is what The Hustle's called, it has like 100 people and he's done a good job. Then a year and a half later, 2 years later, he quit. And, and he was like, hey, do you want to— I heard you're working on this new thing. Can I consult with you? And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd be great. And I was like talking to him and he was like, do you need a CEO? And immediately I, I said, yeah, but I had this weird conflict with HubSpot. And so I just hollered at HubSpot and I explained the situation. I go, man, he, he bailed already. He wants to work with me. Are you guys okay with it? And so they said yes. And so we immediately got in a room and we just hashed out a deal where he's highly incentivized to grow the company. And he, uh, uh, was, is perfect for this because I, I think I've known like what he's about. But it was like a, I guess technically a 2.5-year process. And the takeaway from this is, I've, I've been recruiting this guy for 2 and a half years now to like come and work with me. And so it took a long-ass time.
And so when we sold the company, honestly, that sounds, sounds like, oh, that's unusual. No, it's not unusual. Often the best people are people that you kind of have this like almost, oh, maybe the timing's not right yet. And, uh, and eventually in a weird way, things do fall together later, much later, but those relationships get built over time and they see, you get to see them operate over time.
They get to see you operate over time and it builds a lot of trust.
So, It's pretty common. I think it's a good, uh, reminder not to burn bridges and not to close doors.
Well, that's what I was gonna say. You have to keep people, you gotta treat people right. So when, when we sold The Hustle, I gave him like a thank you check. I was like, you didn't work here, but I feel really bad. I just wanna give you this as a token of my appreciation.
He's like, this is literally a check that just says thank you, Sam. He's like, what, what are you gonna do with this?
When I say big check, I mean it was physically a large check that I handed over to him and I shook his hand in front of it. And, but dude, you got to treat people right. Like, you know, Steph Smith's another person who I've worked with for years. She went and worked at Andreessen Horowitz. And when I was starting this, I was like, just so you know, this thing's available. But anyway, this is a long game. And, you know, you talk to James Currier. James Currier's partner is someone who he met. James Currier is like, I don't know, close to billionaire guy. Who has an incubator and a bunch of other companies. He is partners with someone, I believe, who he's known for like 20 or 30 years. But you have to like, it's a really long game to recruit these people.
Yeah. And by the way, Stan, who's his partner, uh, they've been, they did businesses together for like, I don't know, 15, 20 years. Stan's currently not at NFX, which is where, where James is. The thing that they, I think, I think they co-founded together. Maybe they didn't co-found together, but they were, you know, they've been doing business together for 20 years. Naturally he would've been doing that, but he got recruited by Mark Zuckerberg and Zuck had been recruiting him for 10+ years and finally got Stan to agree to go to Facebook, uh, after 10 years of recruitment. And, um, and I think now he's left, but, but he, he worked there for, you know, 3, 4 years during, during that period. And, uh, and I think James was like, yeah, that's cool. Like, go for it. Go for it. Go on tour. Have that experience. That's great. Like our partnership is still intact even if you go do that, which I think is a pretty awesome thing. I had a moment like this recently where I, so I'm starting a new thing. I'm not talking about it yet either. So I'll come out of the closet soon.
Let's talk about that in a minute about why neither of us talk about stuff.
Yeah, exactly. So the plan was me and Ben are going to do this. Great. We just built and sold the Bill Crowde., um, that was a big win in a, in a short amount of time. We raised our fund together in like one month, raised a, raised our own rolling fund that can deploy, I don't know, between $7 to $10 million per year. We built a course business that's a 7-figure course business. We, you know, we've done like 4 or 5 things together now, me and Ben. And I'm like, oh, we have our team, we don't need anything else. But as we talked about this new thing, I was like, you know, there is one person that I would recruit to join this, uh, that I would give equity in this to, cuz I probably wouldn't give equity to anybody in this. Uh, cuz I'm like, I'm sure this is going to work. I think this is gonna be big. So I value the equity. So why would I give any money to anybody? I don't need anything from anybody. I don't need capital, don't need experience. I don't need, don't need anything. There was one person. And so I hit up this one person and I said, listen, I'm doing this thing. I think you're a perfect fit for it. And for that person, honestly, this is a perfect fit. It wasn't even like a sales pitch where I'm trying to convince you. It's like, Literally is a perfect match. Like, you know, the thing you really love to do, that's all we do. Um, you know that real, that problem with your current thing where you don't own any path to wealth? I'm offering you a path to wealth. You know, you'll own equity in this thing. Um, you know, you always want to feel special. Literally, I'm not recruiting anybody else. This is either your job or there's no job. Um, and I was like, you don't have to interview. This is, I know you, you've known me. This was something that can work.. And the person was like, wow, this really does sound perfect. But, you know, I'm hesitant because of this one visa thing, this logistical thing.
And I was like, oh, and this person called me a few weeks after they, they spoke to you.
And I was like, oh, well, all those things are solvable, blah, blah, blah. And so, uh, anyways, long story short, the person was like, you know what? I'm just too nervous about that. I don't want to, you know, I, I, I, I'm not certain. I'm not sure I'm ready to leave, blah, blah, blah. And in my head my reply was like, dear idiot, dear idiot, thanks for notifying me about your dumb decision.
Yeah. It's like, it's like, it's like when a cute girl, like, you know, like rejects you. It's like, well, I don't even want you anyway. Right.
Right. You have ugly ankles. And so that's how I felt. I was like, wow.
Yeah.
I can't believe this person didn't take this offer. Um, and so anyways, I like have this like 30-second reaction where I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe this person didn't make the offer. It doesn't make any sense to me. And then I was like, you know what? Life's complicated. I'm sure they have a bunch of stuff going on. Um, like, you know, it's not as easy of a decision. These are big leaps of faith that somebody would have to take. And you know what? I thought they were great before this. I still think they're great. I think that, you know, this decision, I think, is probably the wrong decision for them. But who knows? You know, life is long. Uh, I bet you, I bet we'll end up working together in the future anyways, because they are awesome. And I think we're going to keep doing awesome things. Eventually those things will intersect. And, um, and so I was like, okay, that was my like reaction. And it brought up two things for me. One is reminder to myself, don't let the in-the-moment reaction be the response. Right? So it's like, don't let the rejection or the feeling of, oh, it didn't work out. Like for example, for Jordan in this case, he could have, when you rug pulled him on the job offer, been like, F this guy. And when we sold the Milk Road, same thing. We rejected the people who we eventually sold to first at the last minute, and then they didn't get pissed. Instead, they just followed up like, you know, 45 days later or whatever, and we're like, hey, what's up? I didn't hear any news. Did you guys not end up selling? Like, we're still open if you would like to. And we went back and ended up doing a deal. And so I've learned over time that the real, the real ballers, you know, they don't react, they respond. And so don't let the in-the-moment reaction take away your future opportunities. That's the first thing. Um, the second thing is it highlighted to me that courage is actually massively underrated. And I was like, this is, I was like, this person is more talented than me. And in fact, often when I work with people, I'm like, this person is much smarter and more talented than me. Why do I get the job? Why do I get the CEO job? Or why do I have the most equity? It's like, cuz I think I just have one thing that a lot of these people don't have, which is I have a lot more courage and guts to go for things that I want., that more talented people end up overanalyzing and not going for. And it just highlighted to me the importance of having courage and having guts to chase after something that's good, even though there's some unknowns or some risks involved in it. And not talking about this person's specific situation, but just as a common trait of like, what's the difference between an entrepreneur and, um, and a, and a non-entrepreneur? It's not intelligence. It's not, um, charisma. It's not any of those things. It's often simply having the guts to go and choose to go do the thing. And so, um, it just highlighted that for me. I'm like, man, this is a person with double the talent I have, but they're going to get half as far because they're lacking that one thing. I hope they over time develop more of that confidence to go for it. Um, and wow, it made me go reprice how important that is., as an attribute. I can't find this client info.
Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application.
Every team can stay aligned.
No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot. Grow better. So I used to do this thing called HustleCon, which was like, you know, we did it 5 or 6 or 7 times and we would get founders of interesting startups to come and telling their story. And we would have 500 up to 2,500 people there. Uh, you spoke at a couple of them. And I used to tell these people, all right, your speaking slot's at 3. You have to come at noon for the mic check and we'll be backstage and whatever. And little did they know there was no mic check. The mics work perfectly. There is no mic check. Like you don't do a mic check.
Also the mic check could take 1 second. And so you, you getting them there 3 hours early was, was a tactic.
Yeah. The, the mic check, there ain't a mic check. We just gonna put this little lapel mic on and you're good. But I would tell them that because I was like, sick, I'm going to get— I'm going to get to spend time with all these like billionaire type people backstage. And the best part was I would get like 6 of them backstage at a time. And there was like a time where it was like this woman who started ClassPass, it was the guy who started Grammarly, the founders of Away, you know, the travel company, the Casper founders, the founder of WeWork. And I remember having them all back there and I would do what I do, which is I would just like throw a question out there. I wouldn't insert my opinion, but throw out a question out there and I would hear them talk. And people were complaining about like, there's this one person who was like, I have to fire my VP of finance. They're horrible. And they've been working with me, working with me for 2 years and I've known they've been horrible, but I'm too afraid to fire them because I don't want the confrontation. And there's this other person saying like, dude, I've been raising money this whole time. I gotta keep raising and I don't know if I'm ever gonna make anything from this, yada, yada, yada. And then there was a couple people like Max of Grammarly who, uh, it's just like killing it. But I get to like hear what he has to say. And I remember thinking at that moment, I remember thinking, A lot of these people are 20 or 50 times more successful than I am, but they are not 20 or 50 times smarter than me. I, I, I think that might be the case with a couple of them, like the Grammarly guy, Max, but most of the people, they're like, they're not, you know, we had the, uh, Tom from, um, Quest Nutrition who sold his company for a billion dollars. I remember hearing him say like whatever he was saying, I was like, I have those same thoughts. The only difference is, is that you are more courageous than me and you started your journey a little bit earlier and you're getting after it. And I remember that like being around that group and then being around our group that we had, it did a few things. One, it normalized success. And like another example of this is like sports. Like I don't think that Brazil is necessarily, or Argentina has genetically superior people that makes them good at soccer. It's just that they just grow up playing and they expect to be good and they work together and it normalizes that type of excellence. Another thing is, um, Um, it made me realize that the people who I admire, they're fearful. They are exactly like I am. You know, I heard this guy complain about not wanting to fire someone cuz he just hated the confrontation. The difference is, is that they do it anyway. And so meeting my heroes that way, it really, uh, made me realize that they shouldn't be on a pedestal other than the reason of like, they're just, they just did the damn thing. Not, they're not necessarily smarter. And so you and I have had people on this pod who are significantly more successful than both of us. And a lot of them, not all of them, they're not much better or sometimes they're even worse. Sometimes we've had some amazing guests on. I'm like, oh, this, this person's kind of an idiot. Uh, like there's been times where I'm like, but they've killed it. They, they've pulled it off. Andrew Wilkinson is another guy who I've talked about. I'm like, I feel like we're almost in the same ballpark of like patience of, of IQ and of like, you know, maybe one person's better or worse, but his success level's huge cuz he's just been doing it for longer and he actually like tried something that was against the grain. So anyway, that's one of the, like, the big expect— or the big things that I learned being part of Hampton and also being part of our group. And that's one of the reasons why we wanted to launch it was to, like, make, like, normalize this type of success. So if you're in Idaho, so we have this woman named Janessa who has a company called Simply Eloped. You'll, uh, all they do is they sell, like, wedding packages basically. Um, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but Simply Eloped, you can check it out. She's in Idaho, has, like, a $10 million a year business, $8 million a year business. And she's like, in my neck of the woods, like no one's doing what I do. So I think that like I'm at the peak right now. And so it's nice to be around other people who are killing it a little bit harder than me. And now I know I have like, I know what the next level is and the next peak. But, uh, yeah, that's one of the big learnings I have being around some of these successful people and we can move on and talk about other stuff, but I'm pumped this is out. Another thing that we're doing, by the way, we're do— my partner wanted to try PR. And TBD if it's gonna work or not, but it's miserable, dude. Talking to these journalists, it's horrible. I hate it. I told Michael, I'm never doing this again, man. Being around these people, you never know like what they're gonna take outta context or like if they're gonna come like angry. It sucks, man. I hate doing PR. I've never done it and I'm never gonna do it again.
Doing PR, I feel like is like, you know those scenes where it's like you take out a knife and they have a knife and it's like we're sort of approaching each other with this knife. We're gonna have to get really close if we're gonna, either of us wants to do this. And I hope you're not trying to do that, but I have to have my knife in case you do.
That's how it's a Mexican standoff, baby.
It's an old, in fact, we should, we should drop the hard J of journalists and just call them hernalists because, you know, this Mexican standoff is tough. It's tough to do, but I think there's, I think there's a lot of value, especially for something like what you're doing, because you're going to have this seed community of people who are like founder type people who probably listen to the pod. They know you or they know about the hustle and they trust you to build something awesome. Then you're just going to have a bunch of people who've got good businesses that are like, I don't listen to podcasts and I don't know what The Hustle is. Yeah. You know, no, I don't do that, but I do read the Wall Street Journal. And if the Wall Street Journal tells me about this thing, or if, uh, whatever TechCrunch tells me about this thing, in my mind, it's like credible. And, uh, and so I think, or, you know, you, you reach out to somebody to join, they're going to Google you. What are they going to find when they Google you, I think is an important question for people to answer. When you had done this, you did a really good rant a second ago and there was like 3 or 4 things I thought were awesome in that what you said. One of them reminded me of something I watched last night. So I was watching, I was going down YouTube rabbit hole and I was listening to, I watched this video that was a compilation of Martin Shkreli's greatest advice.
And which is probably pretty good.
Did not disappoint. Did not disappoint. So other than though, like the whole, Securities fraud, the law.
Besides that, besides that, he probably has 99 good things to say.
I am buying a lot of Shkreli stock because everybody abandoned— he became a penny stock. Everybody's abandoned. Everybody just sort of wrote this guy off. And I'm not saying that I would give this guy my money, but this is a very smart person who has very interesting things to say. He is very entertaining, first of all. And secondly, he's got interesting things to say and he's very, very intelligent. Did he do something wrong? Did he commit a crime? It sounds like it. I don't know. I didn't go look into all of it, but he went to jail. Would I, you know, trust him with everything in my life? Would I give him, you know, the password to my bank account? Hell no. But I do think that in general, people just write off people way too quickly.
What did he say?
And there's a whole bunch of interesting things. So in this compilation, it's like a 30-minute compilation, and halfway through he goes, he does this one thing. Somebody's like, Oh yeah, you know, something about being successful. And Martin's like, he's like, you know, he said, first of all, you don't have to want to be successful, right? Like, you, you get to choose what you want, what's success for you. Uh, I play this capitalist game. I like success, success in this way, and it's what matters to me. And he's like, so, so if you want to do that, he's like, you know, IQ, nah, like IQ is not the thing. He's like, there's like a minimum amount of IQ you probably need. It's not as high as you think. If you're watching this video, you probably got it. And he's like, uh, also bad news, your IQ is not going to change. So worrying about IQ isn't going to help you.
Um, he's a pretty IQ— he's, he, I think he's a high IQ.
He's a high IQ guy, but he's, he's, he's like, I've met a lot of people. And he goes, actually, the higher the IQ tends to run into one problem, which is they just overthink everything. They overcomplicate everything. And he's like, he basically described my favorite, my meme of the year, the midwit meme, which is basically like, you know, the idiot, the sort of numbskull on one side and the Jedi on the other. And then the middle is the, the sort of the midwit, which is the person who's got the high IQ, but the lack of courage and the lack of wisdom to know how to zoom out. And they overanalyze and over-assess everything. He was basically describing how this happens for most people. And I thought, man, it's so true what he's saying that like often the higher IQ, he's like, they, he goes, they just get in their own way. And I gotta tell you that shit hit different when he said that. I was like, it's so true. I know the times in my life where I get in my own way.
And like, what's an example?
Oh, tons. Like, I'll give you an example because I have somebody who's like a mentor of mine that I text all the time about my business stuff.. And usually just the act of typing it to this person, I'm like, I know what they're gonna say. Cuz they're the, they're, they're on the Jedi side of things where they're like, like I was talking to them about, um, I've given this example before, my e-com biz where I was like, I was like, okay, we got the Facebook ads up and running. Um, it's working. Um, you know, I'm thinking we should do influencers. I think influencers could be huge for us. And I'm thinking, um, we don't have Google, but people, you know, obviously there's a lot of search traffic. Look, I, I attached this PDF of, report of search traffic. And what do you think about SEO? I feel like SEO could be good because it's cheap. And then what do you think about— and I was just like saying all this shit. And then my Jedi friend was like, um, don't talk about— don't say the word influencers until you're making $400,000 a month on, uh, on Facebook ads. And I was like, oh, okay. He's like, because remember, like we said at the beginning, Facebook's probably gonna be the biggest driver. So if you can't get Facebook ads to work, none of this other stuff's probably gonna work. And the best way to get Facebook ads to work would be to, and I was like, focus on it. And he's like, yes. And so just having somebody who could just Jedi zoom out and be like, don't say, don't say all these words. Like, don't say the word influencer until you get to this amount of money. Then you're allowed to talk to me about influencer. Peter Thiel has the same thing he used to do at running PayPal famously is like, Was Peter Thiel a good manager? And people are like, no, like managerial skills or like soft skills are not what Peter Thiel's known for. But he did one really effective tactic, which was everybody in the company would have their one key thing that they're working on, their one mission that they have. And if you ever tried to talk to him about not your mission, he would simply get up and leave the room. Like he would be like, oh, you're talking to me about not the mission?
Bye. What did you say? Like Wilkins says, just a, a balloon floating away.
Blows up the hot air balloon, just turns on the fire, floats away. Bye. As he turns into a speck in the distance. And, uh, I've taken that like philosophy. I'm not as hardcore about it as I want to be, but like, that's how I feel when I talk to people in my company. I'm like, oh, remember that thing we wrote down that we said was the most important critical thing? The main thing. Oh, you're not keeping the main thing the main thing. Big problem. All right, great. And, um, and you see this all the time. Like the example I gave of the smart person who turned down the job that was perfect for them. Um, they needed the Jedi to be like, you want all these things and you just got offered all those things. Like, take it, figure out the rest after that. Um, you know, you know, that's, that's the Jedi zoom out. And so similarly, I think that being in these types of groups helps you with the Jedi zoom out because you will, you will get out of your own way about some part of your, your brain that's tangled up in a knot where you are overthinking, overanalyzing, overcomplicating something. It'll happen with like, yeah, I hired this guy and it's just not working out, but I feel like maybe I haven't put in the right position and blah, blah, blah. And then the peer group will be like, so you're saying that they're lazy, they misrepresented what they did before, and you've tried to give them the freedom to do something and they're just not doing— sounds like it's not working out. Maybe you should let them go. And then—
Yeah, you get obvious—
Well, I'm just thinking I'm going to do this— They become obvious. They're like, Do you think that in the 6 months it's gonna improve? No, I just, there's no way. So then do you think you should do the 6-month plan?
Right.
It's like, it's the just obvious, it's the common sense, but common sense is fairly uncommon.
And this is the first time I've launched something significant with an audience. And I remember talking to you with the Milk Road. I think you launched it January, a year ago.
Yeah. The first edition was like in end of December, January. Yeah. First edition came out there.
And You like were so excited and with this pod we don't hold back. And so you were just like telling me how excited you were, but it was live and then it was working and everything. But I remember you like forwarding emails or just talking to me. You're like, well, here's the Milk Road for Brazil. It's live already. They're just like, they send it 10 minutes later, but they just copy and paste it. And I actually met one of these guys the other day. He was like, yeah, I was one of the guys copying Milk Road. And he said like, he said the most beautiful thing ever, at least to our ears. He was like, But then I only did it for like a month or 2 months and I realized it was too hard and I can't, I can't actually pull it off. Uh, and I was like, awesome, that's exactly what we like to hear. But I remember you like, I remember you, uh, were like, yeah, this sucks. Like all these people ripping us off and it, I don't think it made any impact on the actual business, but it does like distract you and it gets your like cortisol levels going. And it was the same thing with us with this audience. And so there was a few times where I would throw like little Easter eggs out there. Like I would throw like a domain name. Like one time I just mentioned Marathon Ranch, which was like the URL of, of my Airbnb. And I didn't expect anyone to actually book it. Or I would mention like these other things that I had access to and I'd go and look at the analytics and I would see like, oh wow, 10 or 20,000 people came to the website. Um, I'm gonna not mention this because I've learned from Sean's stuff of like, let's not mention something until it gets to a certain size. And there's a bunch of other reasons, which is like, you don't want the community to get too big too fast and all that. But just the pressure of like, people talk about like they, they build in public. A lot of people who build in public, they do it as a marketing scheme. They do it to get traffic or to get awareness. You know, Buffer did this. Buffer was one of the first people I've ever seen where they revealed all their revenue and they also revealed all their salaries. And that was like their shtick. Like that's how we know about them other than their product's great and everything, but that's how they got out there. But once you and I were in the very fortunate position of having an audience, The name of the game for all, uh, for us a lot of times is just shut the hell up. Don't talk about shit. And I remember like being in, like seeing what you were going through and I'm like, I'm not mentioning a thing anymore about certain stuff.
Uh, well, I think, uh, I think you're right, but you're focusing a lot on the like competitive aspect of it, which I think is overblown and doesn't—
that's overblown.
Yeah. I think it's overblown. I think it's the pressure and the lack of flexibility, which is in the early days of something you You don't have a lot going for you, right? It's like, um, it's like, do I have a big brand name? No. Do I have a good track record of success and a bunch of customers? No. Do I have a well-established product? No, I just built it last week, right? So it's like, you don't have— where are the attributes? You don't have any of those attributes, but the one attribute you have is basically like speed and agility, the ability to, to change, be flexible, adapt, and, um, and, and, and, and turn on a dime., as you see, oh, the market actually wants this. And so the reason for me to not talk about something early on is, um, typically that— well, two things. One is with the podcast, you're inviting a bunch of guests over to the house. Uh, it's— I want to clean up the house a little bit, right? Because I'm going to get a lot of traffic from day one. Whereas before I had an audience, I wasn't going to get a lot of traffic from day one. Cool. I'll shout it out. Only 10 people are going to come to the site anyways. It doesn't matter how crappy it looks. With something like this, a bunch of people come, so you, you kind of don't want to put your, your worst foot forward there. But the most important thing is you don't want to go tell the world, I'm doing X, it's going to be the best thing ever, and here's exactly how it works, because you lose a little bit of that flexibility and adaptability. That's really your only attribute when you're, when you're young, right? So it's like a kid or a baby, like they're hyper-flexible and they can fall down. Like a kid can't sprain an ankle because they're, they're Everything is just too like malleable, right? They can learn 7 languages cuz their brain is like so malleable. A startup is kind of the same way when it's, when it's young, which is that the only advantage it has is that it's really malleable. So don't harden that too quickly by going and publicly announcing it when you may not have, you know, tested it enough to understand exactly what you want it to be and how you want it to work. That's my, my take at least.
And let me give you, let me give the audience 2 business ideas that I've discovered while working on Hampton. The first, have you heard of HARO? It stands for Help a Reporter Out. HARO. H-A-R-O. So HARO was launched, I think in like 2005. It was pretty early. And if you're a new startup or even just like a smallish startup and you want backlinks, it's based in— so you're a user, you sign up and you're a PR per— or you're a, you're a startup person and you're, or you're a PR person. And you get an email once a day, sometimes like 3 times a day. And on the other side, it's a journalist. So someone at Bloomberg says, I'm writing an article about the surge of, uh, interest in homemade bread. Uh, I need, I have a deadline tomorrow, so I need to get on the phone immediately. And so the recipient will receive an email of like 10 of these types of requests and they reply and they go, oh yeah, I actually am a bread maker, or I'm a bakery and we just switched entirely to selling HomeKit, uh, get me on the phone. And they do that because they want the link or they want the little bit of press. That company was acquired by— was it called Sision?
What?
Sision. Uh, and it's kind of like just kind of floating around. It doesn't seem like it's being innovated or anything like that, but I'm pretty sure they have like 1.5 million subscribers and people pay money to access it. I think that someone can redo Haro because we've had like reporters come to us and be like, hey, can you introduce me to like a founder who's doing this, this, and this? I have a story. I'm like, yeah, sure. I, we have hundreds of them. Um, I think someone can build that out in a little bit better, more interesting way and could have a pretty nice size company really quickly. So Haro, but redo it. Another one, I still, in our community, the number one most common thing that people talk about is, does anyone know of a good blank that can do blank? So does anyone know, like, has anyone used Triple Whale or a competitor? What do you think? Has anyone— does anyone know of a good lawyer? Right. Does anyone know of a good freelancer who could do blank? I think you can look at just all the categories and I would create niche websites for each or niche newsletters. So, um, uh, long-form copywriters. Here's the 50 people that we vetted and we like. You can pay access to view the list, or here's a bunch of graphic designers who turn around quicker than normal. They're cheap and they're reliable. This is this list, or lawyers or payroll software, whatever. And I think that you can build a pretty big business doing that because this is the most common problem that a lot of people are posting about in our community is vendors. It's wild. I'm shocked that it's consistently that.
I have a buddy who's doing something like this. Um, Julian Shapiro.
And so I don't know if this is up right now, but it's called Uh, while you're talking, I, I thought about making just like, people are always like, I need writers. And I'm like, I should just create Sam's List and it costs like $500 a month and I'll just update it with interesting people that we're vetting, uh, who are good writers and we approve of. But I think, I think you could do that.
So we might have to bleep this out, but, um, it's called the Pineapple List. So basically Julian was like, all right, he's in the growth world and he's been doing growth for a long time with Demand Curve and a bunch of things like that. And so he is like, basically I've interviewed thousands of founders to figure out which agencies they use. So which growth agencies, design agencies, content agencies are good that we use? And, and he's like, so all you got to do is you come tell me what type of agency you need, what your budget is, and then we will just give you— here's the top, you know, 1 or 2 or 3. And we charge you no money for that recommendation. We'll even, you know, kind of hop on a call and review some of these agencies for you. And the agencies pay them for that lead. This is a genius idea. I think this is going to work really, really well.. And, um, and yeah, I, I think this is a great idea and I think it solves an important problem, which is, uh, you know, in our founder group chats, what question gets asked all the time? Hey, anybody got a blank and blank that they love? Or, hey, anybody tried this? I'm looking at it right now. And then you get the, like, the real inside scoop of is it legit? Is it not? Is it, is it just okay? Is it great? Et cetera, et cetera.
Man, I think these can be big and they're, they're, they're not Uh, they're, they're hard, but they're really simple. And if you have 3 months of free time, just go pick a niche and go interview all the vendors in the space, as well as all the customers in the space, as many as you can, and get the truth about what they hate and what they love and create like a really vetted, highly vetted list. I think you could make a lot of money doing something like this. And it's, it's just a very crystal clear product market fit type of, type of solution.
Right. Um, yeah, that's a good one. All right. Do we wanna do anything else or should we wrap?
I think we should wrap. Thank you for putting my company, describing it better than I even could. I'm nervous, man. I've, I've never been this nervous, or at least I haven't been this nervous in like 4 or 5 years.
The business is already kicking butt. You already have a great community. This business is going to work. This is, there's nothing to be nervous about at this point. Um, also I think, uh, you know, I hope we did a good job of basically not only explaining what it is, Uh, but like hopefully some of the interesting things around it so that this isn't just like a 1-hour-long sales pitch about Hampton, but like, you know, some of the thought process that went into how did you launch it? What did you do differently this time? You know, I hope there was some good nuggets in there. You can let us know in the, in Twitter if we went too far or if it, if it was good. Um, and, uh, and the last thing I think is, you know, you've been working on this now for how many months?
Since July. So it's March, April now.
So 9 months, something like that. Um, you know, that's a long time, a long buildup. And so I think you deserve to have this episode to, to kind of talk through the whole, the genesis of it, how you went about it, how it's going, interesting stuff that's happened along the way, you know, uh, that, that is well, well-earned, well-deserved. And I guarantee you, I will predict and guarantee really that this is going to be a greater than $100 million a year revenue business, which means it's going to be worth something like low-end $300, $400 million, high-end billion dollars. Um, I think, I think that, that, that is like extremely high probability in my head.
Um, well, thank you. That's awesome. That, that makes me feel good. Um, I think it's gonna be really successful. You know, you know, it's true, dude. It, it, it, it ebbs and flows. And so I just want everyone to know that like I've built a success, a successful-ish company before with The Hustle. You know, we had tens of millions of revenue and it exited and all that. Every single day I wake up and I'm both one, I'm like, this is gonna conquer the world. And then the next hour I think this is impossible. How are we gonna get this done? So like, I want everyone to know that the emotions still there, that like it, it, it doesn't go away. You know, it doesn't matter how fit you are. Running a race is painful. It's a different type of pain, but it is always painful and is, and hopefully it's also rewarding, but it doesn't matter if you're lifting 100 pounds or 500 pounds. Going to 99 max, 99% of your max, it's challenging.
Yeah. It's good news, bad news. It's good news. Hey, that feeling is normal. Bad news, it doesn't go away.
When are we gonna, when are we gonna, when are you gonna launch your, or announce your thing? Do you know?
Uh, I don't know. A little bit of time. A little bit of time.
All right. Well, thanks for listening. If you're interested, joinhampton.com. I'll bring it up every once in a while on the pod. But, uh, yeah, just check it out. We're not gonna, we're not selling it too hard, or I'm not selling it too hard. The point, it's like a Harvard, it's like Harvard, baby. So we wanna, Our, our, our metric of success is how many people we turn down.
Yeah, exactly. So go ahead and apply just so you can get that big fat rejection and then we get that acceptance rate under 1%.
Yeah. Yeah. We need a lot of people apply so we have more people to turn down. I'm kidding.
Thank you for checking us out.
Joinhampton.com. Thank you everyone. That's it.