How We Got Our First 100 Customers (No Bulls**t, Specific Details)
and then we were like, all right, fine, deal. Like, that's, you know, this business is so fricking hard. Let's try this. And, uh, in the end, I don't think it ever ended up working.
But you got the customers and that's the point of the episode.
Yeah, we got them.
Exactly.
The subsequent failure is irrelevant.
Okay.
Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel.
All right, we're live. Sean, we're going to do a Q&A session today. We got a bunch of questions. I have a feeling we're going to spend most of the time on one question. But the question is, how did you get your first 100 customers in your businesses? And what are the best ways that you've heard of? So I'll ask you, Sean, but, uh, I personally have grown, I think, 5 things to a million to 10 million in revenue. I've grown one thing to well north of 10 million in revenue, multimillion dollars per month. I've grown a bunch of stuff to thousands of users. I've grown a bunch of stuff to hundreds of thousands, and I've grown one thing to millions. And we'll go through examples and, uh, you've done the same. You've, how many did Bebo have or, uh, Blab?
Blab had like 4 million users. Um, yeah, basically we've done this a bunch of different times and a bunch of different ways. And so when we get this question, you know, how did you get your first 100 customers? I actually really like this question. This is a very different question than like, you know, what's your advice? It's like, forget the advice. Let me tell you literally what I did when it comes to how we grew our businesses at the very, very start. Cause if you're at the start, it doesn't matter what somebody did to go to get to $10 million in revenue. What matters is what, how they got to $10 in revenue. How did they get the ball going? How did they get the initial momentum? Cause if you don't do that, by definition, you don't really get to, you know, you don't get to step 2 unless you've done step 1. And so this is the, uh, the step 1 episode. And I thought it'd be fun if we take the, our own, like just all the different projects that we've done. And just try to label the method that we use to go and get those first 100 customers that are, that got the ball rolling.
Do you want to go back and forth?
Yeah, let's trade off.
All right. So the first thing that I grew, I'm actually not going to talk about it a lot because I didn't realize it, but I was breaking the law, but it was, I had an e-commerce store and I originally got my first 100 customers by posting in forums, but I'm not going to mention that.
Statute of limitations, by the way, is that a real thing? The statute of limitations? Like, is it, is there a real thing? Maybe we need producer Ari to let us know. By the way, show her in her sweater. Fantastic sweater. Okay, it's not a thing. All right, so, so correct. Do not tell people what you were doing. I thought after 10 years everything's forgiven.
No, I'm not going to mention that. But all right, the first, uh, my first business was called Bunk. It was like my first like actual startup out of college. It was called Bunk. It was a roommate matching app. It was Tinder for roommates, which I always say was stupid. We should have done Tinder for Tinder because this was right when Tinder came out. It was like swiping, like clicking less yes or no. Um, but before it became an app, we actually just had a website that was built on Weebly. We probably did $50,000 in sales in a handful of months, something like that. And what we used to do is in San Francisco, it's mostly transient people. So people like me and Sean who move there without knowing too many people and you want to rent a one-bedroom apartment, but you can't afford a one-bedroom apartment. And so instead there's a four-bedroom apartment where there's one room left and you apply to move in there. What a lot of people don't know is back then, and I don't know if it's this way now, but back then literally 100 people would apply for that one bedroom. So the way that we got users is we went and found people who had, like landlords who had 4-bedroom apartments and 3-bedroom apartments. And we said, hey, we're going to host an event. It's not going to be a party. It was a party. It's going to be an event at your 3- and 4-bedroom apartment. And we're going to have a bunch of prospective tenants there and they're going to team up and get their own place. And so let's say that it was a 4-bedroom place for $4,000. We would create individual ads for a 1-bedroom at $1,000. And we, and back then on Craigslist, you could use HTML. And create these beautiful like images of what the apartments looked like. And it said, this is Bunk SF. We help people match people. This is a one bedroom and a four bedroom, but we're going to help you team up. And we went, we would get like 10,000 users a week coming to our bunksf.com website. And that's how I got our first bit of users was through Craigslist. And the point being, the takeaway, by the way, is we already knew the seekers were there. And so it was just to piggyback where people already were.
So the, the smart part there is using Craigslist because Craigslist already had a lot of search volume. Basically, instead of SEO, you use basically CEO. So it's like, go, go to Craigslist and get, uh, use that traffic. But then hosting the event, what'd you do in these events, by the way? Was there anything special you did? Or like, how did you get people to— did you have to make it marketable or did you just make it normal? Because I know for The Hustle, you had these great little events that you use called Pizza and 40s, where you would invite a speaker to an event, but the, you would tape two 40-ounce beers to their hands. And the rule, this is a genius, by the way, this is so good. I remember when you did this, I was like, that guy Sam is cool. I want to be friends with him. Literally had that thought.
Right, right. It's like a TED Talk, but instead of 18 minutes, it was however long it takes him to finish the beer. If he wants to get off the stage, chug baby, chug.
And you'd get a little bit more loosey-goosey with the questions towards the tail end.
That was genius. So that one was marketable. Was your, did you have to do that for the apartment thing or was it as simple as saying, hey, come check out the apartment?
So we would get like hundreds of applicants for a one bed, uh, for like a 4-bedroom and we just emailed them and we are very transparent in the ad. It said, this is not a 1-bedroom, it's a 1-bedroom and a 4-bedroom. But what we're doing is we're going to host a party with 50 people. Here's the types of people who are coming, show up at this time. And then they would team up and get a place. And once they got a place, the landlord would tell us it came from us and we would take money from both the user and the landlord. And yeah, we were just really transparent about it. And I would literally like ride my bike at the time to the house and be like, knock, knock, give me your $100, please., or $300 or however much it was. And that's how we made money. But no, it was, it was very easy. But now you can't do this. Uh, Craigslist has changed how they operate. But this, by the way, is exactly how Airbnb got popular. Um, all right. What's yours?
All right. I'm going to give you my first business as well. So this is, uh, I'm 21 years old. We are starting a sushi restaurant chain and I'm living in Denver and the way our thing worked, it was like a cloud kitchen. So it was, uh, because we didn't want to sign a 10-year lease and build out a physical location and have to go raise $500,000. We had a mentor who was like, what if you did a delivery only, a delivery only method and you, um, rented a commissary kitchen by the hour? I remember we were paying $19 an hour instead of having to, so like the contrast was we were about to sign a 10-year lease with a personal guarantee and drop about $300,000 to $500,000 to build it out. Or for $19 an hour, we could start Monday.
You're 15 years, you're 15 years in the future. I mean, you, you nailed it.
Yeah, we were too early, but still it, and so how do we get customers? Back then, DoorDash, Uber Eats didn't exist. So where are we gonna get customers for our delivery-only restaurant? I didn't know any better. Knowing what I know now, I probably would've just run ads, local ads, maybe Facebook ads, Google ads, something like that for people looking for sushi. But I didn't know that at the time. And ignorance is a bit of a superpower. So the ignorance led us to Our planning meeting was like 12 minutes long. I was like, we need customers. So like, hey, we got the kitchen now. Like we need customers. Hey, um, I don't know, walk around and ask people. So what I did was I went downtown and I did a version of door-to-door, but instead of door-to-door, I did floor-to-floor. So I went into a skyscraper because I wanted density. So I was like, oh, let me just go to this big office building. There's thousands of people working in this one building. So I don't have to walk around all day. I can just go in the elevator, click one. Get out and talk to whoever I see, click 2, get out, talk to whoever I see, and I'll go up, you know, 30 or 40 flights in this building. And what I realized when I was doing this was, um, it's kind of amazing. I actually recommend this to pretty much anyone, which is when you have a new thing, you, you have all these ideas about why it's so great, but you haven't actually like pitched it to somebody in a concise way where you have, I don't know, 30 seconds to a minute to like get your foot in the door and then maybe another minute to explain what your thing is. And then you got to make a call to action and try to get them to buy. And my pitch really sucked. But because I was floor to floor, it was like, how do you— By floor 20, though, it was solid. I knew. And so what I realized was, okay, you go in, you can't just bother people in an office. You have to find the front desk lady. Her job is to greet a visitor. So I said, okay, that's the accessible person. She also had a lot of clout. And so I learned about basically a local influencer. So when people think about influencers, they think It's gotta be a celebrity, but actually in any pocket of people, there is somebody who is more influential than the rest, any tribe of people. And in an office, that's always the person at the front desk. It's the office manager, the secretary, whatever you wanna call it. And so I would go to this kind of office manager and I would say, I would say, hey, do you guys ever do— so instead of saying, hey, would you like to eat some sushi? It was like, no, I don't just eat sushi from strangers. I realized pretty quickly that was my first pitch. By floor 2, I was like, all right, I'm not saying that again. So floor 3 and 4, I realized, okay, I should actually ask them like, do they ever, do you guys ever do office catering for lunches or whatever for the group? And they would say yes. So I asked a question that had a very simple answer, a yes or no answer. If it was no, then I knew don't waste my time on this prospect. They're not going to order. But if it was yes, now I had one person who might order 50 lunches in one order, right? Like they would order bulk. And so I would ask them, hey, do you ever order you know, do you guys ever do catering for office lunches? Maybe a birthday or a big meeting or just every Wednesday. And they were like, yeah, we do it every Wednesday. And I'd be like, awesome. I said, when you order, where do you typically order from? Oh, we always do the sandwich place, blah, blah, blah. I said, awesome. If you ever wanted to try something new, we actually just opened up a restaurant and I would love to do a deal with you guys where we actually do it for free one time, right? So I created an offer. I was like, I'd love to bring you a sample tray just for you and you can invite a couple people in the office to try it out. If you guys like it, we'll leave a menu with you guys. If you don't like it, no problem. We'll come back, clean it up. And I created an offer. I created an opening question and I ended up getting my pitch right. And this one thing, we were profitable month one. I remember we made like $13,000 in the first month. And like, at the time, everybody said restaurants, you don't make any money. And we were like, we're doing it. We're making money. This is fantastic. And so this floor-to-floor sales and understanding who is the gatekeeper, who is the person I need to get on board and what is the, The sort of risk-free offer that I can offer them was the way we got our first customers.
How much revenue were you doing in year 6? Or not year 6, month 6.
Year 6? Zero, dude. We quit in month 3 because what we realized was we were like, all right, we were making, I don't know, tens of thousands a month. So I think we were doing like maybe $30,000 the first month and a little bit more the second month. And then by then it was like, dude, we were so worn out of the, just the process of running a restaurant. And we kind of had a realization like, Great. We can keep scaling this, but that means we're going to have to keep doing this. And it was, yeah, we were waking up at 4 in the morning, going to the fish market, staying there till 11 at night because we would do private caterings at night and doing dishes. And then we didn't know anything. It was so stupid. I didn't realize you should hire people.
We just did everything. You were like looking at your partners one day after work and you're like, bail? And they're like, bail. Like, we're out.
We had a realization. We realized we were in the wrong business. We realized Actually, the genius of this was the delivery part. People actually liked food delivery, but they only ate sushi every couple of weeks max. And so we were like, oh, you know what we should do? We've been telling everyone for a year, we're going to create the next, you know, this Chipotle of sushi. Actually, what we should do is just deliver whatever the hell they actually want. They want sandwiches, dude. They want burritos. So we should just deliver that. That's the business, not the sushi part. And then we were like, all right, I think that's true. Do we want to do that? I was like, And you know, we had the smart thing, which was, hey guys, maybe the first business idea we ever had in our lives might not be the best one. And we're still young and we haven't committed anything to anybody. What if we just switched to a better, to a different business altogether? And I'm so glad we had that conversation because most of the time, if something's working, you're making a little bit of money and you've been telling everyone for a year, you just feel like you need to stay consistent with it. And that would've been a terrible decision for us.
That's hilarious. All right, I'll tell you another one. So I'll skip the book club one, but I'll mention it briefly. I had a book club, theantimba.com, and I, it's how I met Sieva. I met Ryan Hoover this way. Uh, some of my best friends, dude, I just put another ad on Craigslist and I said, I'm organizing a business book club. And it was just from Craigslist. And I ended up getting 10,000 people signing up to my email list.
By the way, again, sorry, can we name these methods? I will call the first one you did either like, uh, piggybacking because you piggybacked off Craigslist or like host an event. Maybe that was the method you did. For mine, it was literally door-to-door and it's like, don't underestimate the fact that you can just by brute force, hand-to-hand combat, go get 100 customers that way. It'll only take you a few days to do that. And this third one you're talking about, the book club, we call it like the magnet. There's something different to it because it wasn't just an event because what you did was you found a bunch of like-minded people because there was a filter. The only people who want to do a book club for, for like biographies and business books are gonna be the type of business nerds that you wanted to be around and you might create a product for. And so like the selective filter where for, we'll call it filter, 95% of the people, they're gonna be like, hell no. But 5%, they're, it's a hell yes. Because it's like so niche to their obsessions. And I think that there's something smart there that's different than just hosting a general event. It's a magnet.
The learnings, by the way, for a book club, no one reads the book except me. I was the only one who read the book. I was just like teaching the book. Um, all right, I'll do the second one though. All right. So Bunk was acquired for a very small sum and we ended up turning it into an app called Roommates. We'll call this methodology made to stick, I guess, because I learned this. I, uh, one of the books that we read at my book club was called Made to Stick. It was by Dan and Chip Heath. I think they're experts on like virality. And there was something in the book where it talked about, I forget exactly the phrase, but it, but my. Takeaway was that phrase that I always say, niches make riches. And the idea being, if you ever see one of these BuzzFeed articles, and it'll be like 50 ways you, 50 reasons why, or, uh, 50, 50 things only, only Long Islanders will laugh at, right? Or 50 things, you know, you're an Italian American, or 50 ways, you know, you're from St. Louis. And the thing about those is they don't get a huge amount of traffic, but the people in Long Island or St. Louis or who are Italian, they will always click it. They will. And so the click-through rate is through the roof. And so we didn't have a budget when we launched the app Roommates. And so what we did was I stole that, that, that learning and I created, we launched in LA, Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco, 5 or 6 cities. And so what we did was we made an infographic where we called it the typical roommates of San Francisco, the typical roommates of LA. And I had never even been to LA or New York or Boston. I'd never even been there. And what we did was each image of the infographic, it was 18 people, I think, or 15 people. And it said, here's the people from the Marina, which is a neighborhood in San Francisco. Here's a typical roommate from the Mission, which is the hipster area of San Francisco. And in each thing we said, where do they shop? And we named 8 or 4 different places that they would shop. Where do they eat? What's a funny quote they would say? And I would read Yelp and I would find out in, let's say, New York, like, what is the most reviewed restaurant on Yelp in that area? And are people making jokes and saying that it's overhyped or whatever? And which stores are the most popular? And then what we did, we made those infographics and we shared them out on Facebook and Twitter and I think Instagram. I don't even remember where. And we tag those restaurants and those stores. And most people are like, oh, this is so funny. They totally know us, which we just stole it from Yelp, all the jokes. And they ended up sharing it. And we got something like 100,000 users just from that infographic, just from those 5 infographics. And if you Google, you guys can Google, um, typical roommates of LA and you'll see Huffington Post or all the local newspapers of those regions. Shared it. And that's how we got all of our initial customers from, uh, from those 4.
I remember seeing that. I remember seeing the San Francisco one. It was really funny. It would be like, like you're making it sound almost like it was like, uh, like utilitarian, but it was actually humorous. I thought like it was funny. Yeah. The shop would be like the marina. It's like, and then it'd be like, whatever. I don't remember exactly how you phrase it, but it would be like, um,, here you're going to find Kelsey is blah, blah, blah. And you would kind of like make fun of them, but also backhanded compliment them. And then you would say like, you know, the upside, you'll, you know, you'll always have, um, you know, Lululemon around the house. The downside, blah, blah, blah. And you would like kind of poke fun at them. And because of that, everybody shared it because for their own neighborhood, they'd be like, that's so true. That's so true. That's so us. Oh my God, this is you. And then for others that they didn't like the other neighborhoods, Same thing, right? It was like kind of like our team versus their team. And so a lot of people shared this thing. I was living in San Francisco at the time. I remember seeing that right when I actually moved there and I was like, this is actually quite— it was useful because it's not info you really found anywhere else either.
Like, uh, right. It was like, it would be like the real, the real take. So here's an example. This is Wrigleyville in Chicago. I've never even been there, but it's an image of a bro-y looking guy who I guess went to Indiana University and he's wearing a Cubs shirt. It said average 1-bedroom rent, average 2-bedroom rent. Here's how much you would save if you had a roommate and it says $310 per month or 20 Merkle's Fish Bowls, which I guess is like a restaurant in that area. Or it would say avoids Pilsen and Andersonville. So it creates like the tribe thing. Those are other neighborhoods. Occupation, a PE teacher or a weekend bartender at Deuces. You'll probably find them at Wrigley Field rooftops crushing Old Styles or doing 17 shots of Fireball. Secret spot, the back bar at, of the Stretch, trying to get the waitress to play find the water or calling everyone boss. Shit they say, hey bro, wanna shotski? So like things like that where we would make fun of people, but you'll notice we name as many brands as possible. The name of the game was throwing as many brands as possible and those are the people who share. And that is how we got, I forget exactly how many users we had, but I remember I got paid on how many swipes people did, and they were swiping millions and millions and millions of times.
Right.
So that's how we got, uh, that's how we got traffic and users to the app Roommates.
All right. I'm going to tell you, uh, I'm going in order here. So my next business was a biotech business in Australia that, um, go to Australia. Now biotech is a very like, like we're talking about like scrappy startup stories. Like how do you get someone to download an app? How do you get somebody to like order food?
Biotech is like science and people in it, you just go to an alley and you're like, hey man, here's a needle. Do you, uh, want to try?
Well, it wasn't like human body biotech. It was basically energy, clean energy. So the idea was our technology was there's coal that's underground and people think coal is real dirty because if you mine it, you bring it up to the surface and you burn it. Yes, it is very like bad for the environment. However, our technology was this thing where you don't have to mine it. So you don't have to bring it out of the ground and you don't have to burn it. Instead, what you do is You pump little microbes into the ground, little naturally occurring microbes, and their natural feeding is basically they eat the coal. They basically decompose the coal. Essentially, it's like they eat coal and they fart out natural gas. So their natural metabolism of it will release natural gas, which then bubbles back up to the, to your pipe in the surface. And, uh, boom, you have a flare of natural gas.
Was this like a company? Like a big company?
Yeah, it was a company. It was a startup company. So basically this, the backstory was This guy in the United States, this scientist in the United States had been, had gotten $40 million of government funding to develop microbes that would decompose ammunition because the government had, uh, there's wars all around the world. And part of the, like, the environmental cleanup they had to do as part of the wars was they needed something that would decompose a lot of the ammunition and the waste product of the wars. And so what happened was somebody realized, you know, the guy who, the CEO of our company realized, Hey, ammunition actually has a very similar composition to coal. I wonder if these bugs could decompose coal. And so, but it was speculative and we didn't know if it would work. It worked in the lab. Will it work in the field? Now, what are you going to do here to get your first customers, right? To get a customer, you need somebody that has owns like land that has coal. You have to have permits. They have to let you like go do shit on their land. How is this going to happen? It's like so much friction. So what we did was what I'll call the method of the no-risk offer. So what we did was we would go to, we said, who needs this the most? And we said, well, it can't be somebody that actually values their coal because we're going to go and we don't have the money to go buy this coal. Like we can't buy the land from them. Like if you own land with a bunch of, you know, coal, that's basically like fuel, like that's very valuable property. So we said, we need to go to people that have stranded coal, meaning they have coal that mining it would be uneconomic. It'd be too deep. It'd be too gnarly the way the ground structure is. So there is coal, but like, it's not good for mining. And so we got really tight on basically finding some for somebody for whom this was excess capacity. And I think, you know, like Airbnb, that's what they did, right? They sold excess rooms, excess space in your house. So we had took that same method. We said, how do we make a no-risk offer? So we went to them and we said, look, you're sitting on a bunch of coal. What's that?
Like, who's an example?
Like the landowner. We would find, we would do a geographic, we looked at the geographic survey, we would find where the, stranded coal was, meaning coal that's not economic to be mined. Then we would go figure out from the property, like records, who owns that. We would go knock on their door. We'd say, did you know you're sitting on a bunch of coal? And they'd be like, yeah, but like you can't really mine it. We did a feasibility study.
It didn't work.
And we would say, great. What if I told you there was a way that you could make this many dollars per square foot without mining the coal? And then, yeah, I'm interested. Okay, tell me more. And we said, well, look, we have this technology, but you know, obviously we need to prove it. It'll only take us this much space. And here's the deal, we will do this all at our cost to do this whole method, costs you nothing. And, but if it works, we want a share of the upside. And they were like, okay, so you might make my land way more valuable and I only pay you if you do it. And if I don't, if it doesn't work, I'm out, I'm out nothing. Deal.
And so we— and I'll throw in a tray of sushi.
Exactly. And so that we were able to do this. Now, this is something that, this is also how Alex Hormozi did his gym launch thing. If you listen to his story, what he would do is he'd go to the gym owners, he'd say, you know, I have a marketing program. They're like, ah, I don't want to buy it. We've tried a bunch of marketing things that I don't have, I don't have enough money anyways to go do this. I'm not going to buy your marketing program for $10,000. So he reworked his offer and he was like, how about this? If I don't increase, I will, I will, increase your sales by $100,000 using my marketing method. And all I say is that anything we, any of the incremental revenue we bring in, we get to keep whatever, 15%. It's like, okay, so you keep 15%, but like, you don't get anything if you don't raise my, my revenue. It's like, yeah, we, if we don't raise your revenue by X, we get nothing.
Yeah, no brainer.
Hormozy did her no-brainer offer. Main Street did the same thing, grew really fast in the tech startup community by saying, hey, there's R&D tax credits available. We will do it for you. We keep 20% or 25% of all this, all the extra tax credits you get. You're not going to do this anyways. So it's just free money for you. Um, and so a lot of people use this, this no risk offer method. And I think that's a very, very fast way to bypass one of the hardest parts is if you're a new company, which is you have no relationships, nobody trusts you, nobody, you have no track record. So you need to offer them something that has like zero downside and only upside.
How many customers did you get doing that?
Well, ironically, what ended up happening was we had like 5 interested customers and then one of them was like, hey, hey, hey, if you're going to do this, I want, I want to own this technology. Like if it sounds like basically don't go to my competitors with this offer, like they're going to, then they're going to have, you know, this benefit. I want this. And so then they, they came back later and they renegotiated the deal and they said, how about this? We'll give you $5 million and the land and we'll do the permitting for you. Um, but, and then we're like, okay, what's the catch? And they're like, the catch is if this works, we want to be able to buy 50% of the technology for $50 million. And then we were like, all right, fine deal. Like that's, you know, this business is so freaking hard. Let's try this. And, uh, in the end, I don't think it ever ended up working or I'm not sure what actually happened. Cause I left after that deal was signed.
I was like, microbiomes, microbiomes don't even like charcoal.
So it turns out that it didn't even work in the lab, but it was like, it's, I think it would turn out to be kind of expensive or what actually happened is this. Field trial was gonna take 5 years to do. I wasn't gonna sit around and wait till the, till the conclusion of this. And so I think what happened was like the guy who said yes got fired or took another job. The next guy who came in was like, ah, I don't know, I don't wanna fund this. And I have no idea what happened. It kind of died on the vine.
But you got the customers and that's the point of the episode.
Yeah, we got them.
Exactly.
The subsequent failure is irrelevant.
Okay. Yeah, that doesn't matter. Uh, all right, my next one. So, uh, I started a conference series called HustleCon. I ended up hosting this event maybe 4 or 5 times. The first time I hosted it, I decided to host it in May, and I think it went live, uh, the event happened in July, uh, July 1st or July 15th, but I had roughly 6 weeks between deciding to do it and it happening, and I think I made $60,000 in revenue and I I think $50,000 in profit. The next year, I think it was something like $180 grand in revenue and my costs were only $20 grand. So whatever that is, that's what I made. And then I did it again and I think I made like a quarter of a million in revenue and like $200,000 in profit. And then we hosted a bunch more events.
Yeah, it made, uh, each event was doing like a couple of times we got close to a million. And I made a ton of mistakes. The biggest mistake I made is I made it like a TED event, not like a trade show. Had I made it like a trade show, I probably could have made tens of millions per event, but I just didn't know what I was doing. And I also charged like $300 to attend this event. So I screwed up the business, but I did get a lot of hype right away. And the way that I got hype was I actually found one of my old posts. I would— this one is on Priceonomics. So this guy, Rohin, Rohin, He has a blog called Priceonomics, and at the time they were like the best bloggers out there. He was such a good blogger and he would go viral all the time. So he was going to give a talk on content marketing. And what I would do is I think I had 8 speakers. I wrote a blog post every Tuesday and Thursday on each speaker, and I would go to Hacker News and I would go to Reddit and I would figure out which subreddits would this article fit best in. And then later on in my second thing I'm going to talk about after you go is I ended up eventually writing blog posts specifically that would get popular in Reddit or on Reddit in different like subreddits. But at this point I hadn't figured that out. And so right away, I think on the first day of business, I think I got 1,000 people to come to the website. And then after that, it would go to like 1,000 to 5,000 on any given day. And you would go to the website and it would say a funny popup. That I would get your attention and I would say, gimme your email. And the hustlecon.com, you couldn't even purchase a ticket unless you gave me your email. You couldn't even see all of the details. And so I would get people's email and I would subsequently, like the way I had it set up was I would write blog post number 1, put it on Reddit, blog post number 2, put it on Reddit. The traffic comes, I collect their email. When I get their email, they go into a cycle where they get sent blog post number 1, then they get blog post number 2. And then I would keep writing blog post number 3, number 4, number 5, and I would keep emailing it to the past people. So it was like a cycle and those people would share just a little bit. And that's how I eventually got 2, 3, 4, 5,000 people coming to the website. And I did another thing where I made the speaker look like a hero. So it was like a glowing article about them and they would share it within their company and each employee would share it to be proud. And that's how I got 2, 3, 4, 5,000 people. And I think, I think the email list, if you Google HustleCon, Nev blog, so my friend Neville Medhora, Nev, N-E-V-B-L-O-G, he wrote a blog post about how I made $60,000 in like 6 weeks. And I list all the blog posts and emails that I sent. And that's originally how we got our first, I think, 10,000 email subscribers is just doing that blogging. And when I say we, I mean me in my kitchen, uh, just like doing this in my crappy San Francisco apartment.
That's yeah, that's great. I remember reading those blog posts. They're really good. I highly suggest you go read those. Uh, they're detailed and specific and you literally have screenshots of what you wrote in certain emails. And I think that's really cool to go see. I like when people share those specifics. Um, oh, do you hear that? Do you hear that?
That's the—
no, dude, that's the, that's the Thrill of the Shill.
Oh, I thought we had a pause. I thought we had a pause. I was like, wait, what? Uh, all right, you've got 90 seconds to, to, to thrill me.
All right. And for those who don't remember, the Thrill of the Shill is where we shill a thing, but the way we do it is with value. We do it with, we buy, we, by entertaining with a little bit of story. So I was gonna talk to you about Shepherd, but the way I did it was I asked Marshall, I go, yo, when you launch this thing, 'Cause this is now a business that is coming up on, like, I guess I really shouldn't say, but millions of dollars of profit a year. So a very, very, very healthy business.
How old are they? 4 years?
Uh, yeah, like less than 4 years old. So, uh, in less than 4 years getting to, you know, basically 8 figures in profit. Profit, not revenue, profit. So anyways, I was like, hey dude, I'm doing this episode about how you got your first 100 customers. What did you do for, for Shepherd? And he goes, um, he goes, well, I did a couple of things, but he's like, what I did was I, he linked me to the tweet. So he did 3, like 3 or 4 steps in a row. So tweet 1, I'll show this on the screen. He just goes, I'm launching a new business tomorrow. And then he did the shh sign emoji. And then he said, hint, it's an agency. And he had a small Twitter following, about 10,000 followers at the time. Um, not like a huge mega influencer, but enough. And that, that post itself has 350 likes. So that post itself probably got a bunch of people being curious, going inbound. And then what he did next, he's like, I'm going to explain it on my newsletter. So he goes to the newsletter and he writes this post and he goes, Today I'm launching this new business, but let me tell you a story. And he goes, a few years ago, my business is struggling. Here's why. So he does what I call the personal story tactic, which is instead of pitching the solution that you've made, you pitch the problem that you had and you tell a personal story where you reveal some information, you do some vulnerability, and hopefully other people resonate with the problem that you had. So he goes, uh, my business was, was doing good. And he's like, but I, uh, or so he's like, he's like, I had this business. It was kind of struggling. I was, working all the time, but we never really had any profits. I realized I always thought I could solve the problem with growth. And then finally one day I was like, maybe I should try to lower my costs. I didn't really know what to do. So I looked for where could I lower my costs? He goes, I heard about a guy who had hired somebody in the Philippines for less than $1,000 a month. Meanwhile, I was paying somebody $5,000 for the same service. So I did it. I did another one. Here's a picture of me in the Philippines. You know, we went out and met them because I was so amazed at how this worked. He goes, and so then that became my secret weapon. I was hiring overseas. And so now all of a sudden I went from profit margin of from 0 to profit margin of whatever, 15%. And that made the difference between the business sucking to the business being good. So I started doing this for a few friends just for fun. Finally decided I'm gonna make a business called supportcheffer.com to help you find equip, amazing employees that are 80% less than the US equivalent. He goes blah, blah, blah. And then he sent me the screenshot. We could share this on the screen. So this newsletter went to 12,000 people. It had an 11% click rate, which is the power of a story versus an ad.
And so normally an ad would get like a 1 to 3% click-through rate.
Exactly. So this is 10 times better. Why is it 10 times better? Because again, he kind of opened up the kimono and told a story. So to supportshepherd.com, it says 1,300 people clicked that link. And then that's where he got, you know, you can even assume even like a 3% conversion on 1,300 people is going to get you, you know, your whatever, your, I don't know the math, but like, let's say your first 20, 30 customers to get the ball rolling. And for a business like this where each customer is worth thousands of dollars, That was enough to, to sort of really actually move the needle. And then what he did was he just kept doing the same thing. And so if you want to hire people, go use Shepherd. That's really the shill. But I actually like this method a lot. I remember that Ryan Hoover did this amazingly with Product Hunt also. I remember him doing this. So he did the hand-to-hand combat where every morning he would go to Phil's Coffee in San Francisco at like 5 or 6 in the morning. And for the first 3 hours of the day, all he would do would be reply to people's tweets. So anytime somebody said about something about Product Hunt, he would reply personally. Anytime somebody mentioned a cool product, he would be like, that's awesome. Do you want to post that on Product Hunt? I gave you access. And he would manually brute force do this in the mornings, but then he would go and he would go to Fast Company and say, hey, do you want to cover Product Hunt? And they're like, I never heard of it. No. So he's like, damn, I really want to get press, but I can't. They're not, they don't want to talk about Product Hunt. It's not sexy enough. So then instead what he did was he would go to Fast Company and would say, Hey, I signed up 1,000 customers for my side project in a weekend. Can I tell you how we did it? And I wrote this blog post. It's already written in this Google Doc. Will you guys run this? And as a guest post. And then if you go look, Product Hunt has a bunch of posts that he wrote. And so it was like, he would get to 100 customers, then he would write the post of how he got to 100 customers, get that posted somewhere on IndieHackers or whatever, that would get him to 1,000, then he would go write the post of how I got to 1,000. Cause he's like the generically interesting story. People aren't that interested in Product Hunt, but they are interested in how a guy can bootstrap his side hustle to 1,000 customers in a week.
And he did the work for them.
And he did the work for them. And so again, it was a no-brainer offer to basically say, hey, it's written. Do you want to run this or should I go? You know, I like Fast Company. You guys should run this. If not, I guess I'll go ask somebody else. And that, that method I saw was something somebody else did that worked really well.
All right. Solid Thrill the Shill. Good job. You forgot the call to action. Joinshepard.com. Supportshepard.com. Supportshepard.com. All right. What's your, what's your next one?
Okay, so my next one I call Pissing in the Pond. And Pissing in the Pond is as good of a method as it sounds like. So what you want to do, like you said, sounds like a horrible method. There's riches in niches. Similarly, what you want to do is not try to boil the ocean. Bad phrase, you want to piss in the pond. Okay, so boiling the ocean is when you go try to get the mass market to care about what you're doing. Doesn't really work. What you want to do is say, all right, I'm small anyways. To me, when I have no customers, 10 customers is a big win. 100 customers is a phenomenal win. And so where can I go that is small but hyper-obsessed? And so what we did when we launched our e-commerce brand, was we know, we knew that there were Facebook groups dedicated to literally like comparing products in our niche. These weren't big, right? There were maybe 5,000 people total. And this is like, and Facebook, you know, it's like, that's a, that's kind of a small overall Facebook group. And what we would do is we'd go there and we would do the Marshall thing, just like he did with Shepherd. We would go tell our story, which was why we started this brand. So instead of saying buy our product, we would say, Hey y'all, wanted to share my story, the ups and downs that's gone over the last 6 months trying to launch a brand that does this. And then we would share like, here were some of the ups we had, here were some of the downs we had when we got screwed or we got scammed or we were so naive and people really started rooting for us and you can get people to root for you. And so that's how we, for my e-com biz, we did, I think, $30,000 in month 1 in revenue, about, I think $28,000. 1,000 specifically, and our ad spend was only maybe $500 or $1,000. So we did try ads, but most of the revenue that first month came from this group. And this was really good because who those 100 customers are actually matters. And if you can get 100 of the hyper obsessed people of a niche to actually give a shit about you and know about you, they are the ones who spread the word. They're the ones that other people look to for recommendations. And so it's actually quite valuable to go get, to go piss in that pond. And so you go to that group and the way you do it, that's acceptable where you're making the water warmer, not uncomfortable, is you tell a story of the ups and the downs you've had trying to build something cool in this space. Why you started, what worked for you, what didn't work for you, some of the big mistakes you made, and people will then root for you 'cause you're the underdog. Now let me tell you another example of this. So I can't believe we even did this business. I'm embarrassed to even say this is a business I was doing, but In our idea lab, we had a hackathon and in the hackathon, our DevOps guy was like, hey, I built this app. It's like a Foursquare, Foursquare was hot at the time. This is way back in the day. He's like, it's Foursquare for beers. And he's like, basically every time you drink a beer, watch this, you scan the label and it checks in that beer and it keeps track of all the different beers you've drank. And then everybody's like, starts laughing and we're like, that's awesome, man. That's cool. You know, the beer, who doesn't love beer? And so we were kind of like, maybe there's a thing here. And actually, to this day, actually, there is a business called Untappd that does this. And there's a, there's a version of this for wine. We were just the wrong people to start this business. Similar to the sushi business. I made the same mistake again, which was—
You don't even drink beer, do you?
The guy who— I drink beer, but I'm not like a craft beer aficionado, a guy who loves to go try new craft beers.
Oh, you're like drinking it.
You're like, ah, yes.
Yeah. Miller Lite. This is beautiful.
Like I did a brewery tour once and the guy was like, smell these hops. And I was like, nah, thanks. I don't smell that. Yeah. Do you guys have French fries? Exactly. I was like, can I just drink it?
I don't care about all this.
So anyways, um, we had this app called Beer Hunt. Okay. So how do you do it? There was a craft beer. So it was like, where do you get, again, if you go to the mass market, mass market is like me. They don't care about beer enough to care about this product. But instead there was a craft beer tasting festival or something like that in San Francisco. We went there and we tried to make a splash. This is also the, uh, what I'll call the Booth Babes method. It's how do you actually make a splash at an event? And so we weren't hosting this one, we were attending. And so we dressed up like it was Oktoberfest. We dressed up like in our, like, whatever, Lederhosen and whatever. We wore outfits like we were straight from Germany. And we came and we created, we were like, people probably won't just download our app if we say download our app.
So how do we get them to— How old were you when you did this?
23, 24. And so we, but you know, we were, our whole company was, is older, but we're all there and they were, they were down for it, which I liked. Uh, you know, our engineers are doing this. And so, um, what we did was we created a scavenger hunt for the conference. We were like, hey, here's a little card. Um, if you can mark off all these things at this conference, uh, we're gonna give one person like, you know, the, like, whatever, some beer dream. It was like, you know, you're gonna get a year supply of of craft beer. And it was like, it didn't even matter what the prize was. The idea was like, people are going to wander around this place anyways. They were happy to play the game of like marking things off as they went. So we had our branded little scavenger hunt. They would do it. And at the end, we would have a guy standing at the door. He would collect them. He would give them out and he would collect them. And on it, they had their email address. And so now we had basically, I think we had 1,400 leads or something from this day. It was 1,400 leads of people who are so into craft beer that they will go to this craft beer, like pay money to go to this craft beer tasting festival type thing. And so then that, those became the first, you know, whatever, 700 customers, uh, 700 people to download our app and they really gave a shit. And so that, that really cranked the engine to get something started.
Seeing you at a 23-year-old you at a like fancy brewery, it reminded me of a time One time I told Neville, I go, Neville, I've never been to a strip club, or somehow it came up and he was like, I'm going to take you right now. And I was like, I don't really want to go to a strip club. He's like, well, you have your flight at 5 PM. There's a strip club near the airport in Texas. It's 2 o'clock. Let's go. And I don't drink. So like, it's even worse. And we go out to the strip club and I'm so uncomfortable. I'm rubbing my hands. I don't know what to do with my hands. And I'd be like, and like these strippers come up and like, touched my shoulders and they're like, hey, can I get you anything? And I was like, yeah, can I get some ketchup for these fries? Like the waitress? Yeah. Like, and the food was only $6. It was $1 for fries, $5 for sandwich. I remember texting my wife and I'm like, do I, how much do I tip? Cause I kind of took up a seat, but I didn't do anything. It's just like, it was the most uncomfortable that I've ever been. It's like the first and only time I've ever been to a strip club was 2 o'clock at the airport in Austin strip club. Uh, and that just—
can I tell you the one time I went to strip club? It's, it's an incredible story. So I've been one time in my life, you know, maybe 22 years old, something like that. And we go and it's me, people know me, so I don't need to describe me, but it's my buddy who's like the ladies' man. This guy like was the big man on campus. He, you know, like your dorm has like an RA. He like hooked up with the RA's girlfriend and it's like, that guy's a senior, we're freshmen. It's like, wow, this guy's just amazing.
And so we go with this guy, he's the man.
And then we go with our other buddy, um, who was like Mr. Long-term Relationship. So he's been in a relationship forever and never met, never known this guy, not in a relationship, but he had just broken up. And so we go to a strip club because, you know, like in Vegas they're like, hey boys, you want some free drink? Get in this limo. We're like, oh, Wow. What's the trick? And they drive you like 30 minutes away to a strip club and now you're here and you have 2 free drink coupons that you can go redeem at the bar. So me and the ladies, man, we don't know what to do. None of us have ever been to strip club. So we go to the bar again. What do I, I'm uncomfortable. Let me just like find a safety net. It's like, let's go get a drink. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Drink, drink, drink. That's a good idea. And we go and then we turn to look for our friend, Mr. Long, Mr. Always Wifed Up. And he's not only not with us, he is holding hands with a stripper going into the back room. And I'm like, it's been less than like 2 minutes.
He got caught.
We're like, we're like, what's he doing? And so we had several questions. One, um, I can't put like, why is he doing this so fast? Number 2, why is he going to the back room? Isn't that like for like the, the high tier stuff? Like why isn't he just sitting here and watching the, the stripper? And 3. Most importantly was why did he pick her? Because he had picked just objectively, completely scientifically, the least attractive stripper in the place. And so 15 minutes go by, he comes back out and we're— I'm like, I have a thousand questions. What happens in the back room? How much does it cost? Do you have to tip on top of the cost? I have so many logistical questions, but most importantly, why'd you pick her, man? You could have picked anyone here. And he goes, oh, you can pick? What? He goes, oh, he goes, I thought it's like Harry Potter. The wand chooses the wizard. And he's like, to this day, the line, the wand chooses the wizard is like etched in my soul. It just applies to any situation.
And neither of us have been to a strip club since.
Since.
Never been again. Same.
Can't top that.
Um, all right, I'll do one last one. Uh, Trends, Trends.co. We're gonna go from stripper to what? The SaaS. Yeah.
Sassy to SaaS.
Yeah. Um, I hope people have made it this far. Um, uh, Trends, Trends.co was a, uh, paid research newsletter that I launched. When we sold it 18 months after launching it, I think it was doing $400,000 or $500,000 a month in sales. I think we had 20,000 users or so. And it was great, whatever. I screwed up a bunch of stuff with that, but we got some results. And the way that we got results is we started, and I did this like I would as a little skunk project. And if you actually see the link, I list to my original Gumroad project. I made a Gumroad page and I think it was like 400 words of me just writing like a story explaining. So basically the story was like in 1996, Jeff Bezos saw this amazing stat, which was that the internet was growing at 2,300%. Nothing grows that fast, Bezos said, unless it's in a Petri dish. And immediately then he knew that he had to start an internet company that sold something. And so that was how it started. And then I said, hey everyone, I'm Sam. I invest in a lot of companies, or I have this company called The Hustle, and I'm able to see a lot of interesting things. Next quarter I'm launching this product called Trends where I'm going to break down interesting companies and explain how they work and hopefully identify a handful of trends as shocking as this Bezos one that he found. So you're going to be able to catch the tidal wave instead of miss it. I'm going to charge $300 a year for this, but right now you just spend $100 and you get a lifetime of access. And so I got, originally I got, 1,000 or 2,000 people to sign up for this, and I'll explain how. But before we even launched this whole project, I ran Facebook ads against a, this Gumroad page, and it made $60,000 in pre-sales. And the way that I got the initial 100 users is The Hustle at the time probably had a million emails, and I just found the 300 engaged users, and I sent them an email that basically explained this story and linked to the Gumroad page. And then what I did was I actually got on the phone with all 100 of them and I asked them, why'd you do this? What are you looking for? What are your expectations? And then I went and made the first report based off of like some of their insights and what they wanted. And then what we did was people would sign up to the hustle and afterwards they would see a page that says, thank you. By the way, we have something coming soon and it would link to this Gumroad page. Now that's a little bit. If you're listening to this and you don't have an audience, you're like, wow, what the fuck? That's not really actionable. But I had to share, this is how we built, like, I think it was $400,000 or $500,000 by month 18. And so it worked and we built the product around just calling those people.
Yeah, that's like a, you had a launch pad, you had an audience that you had built for years and then you were able to do this. And I wouldn't recommend doing that just to launch a product, but if you don't really know what product you want to launch. It's not a bad idea to, uh, to build a launchpad along the way.
So just to recap, I did the same thing with Hampton and I would DM people on Twitter and you could say I have an audience, so it helps. I didn't use my audience, but I did use my reputation. So some people had known me. Um, so I, I, but I cold emailed people on LinkedIn and I called people on Twitter. So if you want to do this methodology, you could still do it that way.
Yeah. And we didn't mention a couple of the obvious ones. So ads, we kind of loosely mentioned it, cold outreach. There's a bunch of traditional methods to, to try to do this. We told you what we did, which was partly because we were young and dumb and we didn't know any better. We didn't know that you could just, I didn't know you could just run ads or just do cold emails. I would go door to door instead. But also, you know, it, some of it's in the specific. So for example, for Milk Road, I had an audience. So I had a newsletter, I had this podcast and I could have just mentioned it, but I layered on another tactic, which is what I called the David Blaine method. And David Blaine will do this shit where he's like, I'm going to freeze myself for a week. Yeah. Watch me slightly torture myself and try to do something incredible. And it's like, all right. He's like, I'm going to freeze myself in a block of ice. I'm going to bury myself underground.
I'm going to hold my breath until I pass out.
Yeah. He literally did one where he's like, I'm going to hold onto these balloons and fly away. It's like, okay, dope. And he did it. He flew away like the movie Up. And so he David Blaine does this stuff. So when we started the Milk Road, I was like, okay, if I think if I told people that, hey, I'm starting a daily newsletter about crypto for people that want to read the latest kind of news and info on crypto, I think people would sign up, but I wanted to like juice it a little bit. So how did I go a little bit further? I was like, let me do a stunt. And so I said, I am funding, and of course, you know, you have to have some money to do this version of it, but you could really, David Blaine puts his body through torture. I put some money on the line. So what I did was I said, I'm going to put $1 million in this wallet. You can go look at the address right now. Here's $1 million in a wallet, and then I'm going to try to turn this into $10 million through trading crypto. And this is like, you know, Dave from Barstool does this with his Davey Day Trader. You know, Jason Kalkanis tried to copy that and do J Trader. Like, people try to do a version of this where it's like, watch me try to run this bankroll up. I learned this from back in the poker days. I used to love when anyone would do this in the gambling or poker space and they'd be like, I'm starting with this bankroll. I'm either going broke, I'm going to this level, I'm getting to this milestone, and here I'm going to post all of my history. And it never works out, but it's really fun to watch. And that's what I figured. And that's exactly what happened. I managed to turn $1 million because we bought it like at peak crypto into what became like $350,000 at the bottom. And then now it's a little bit higher. But basically it's like, watch me lose money. But either way, watch me lose money is also entertaining. People will subscribe to watch me get my ass kicked, they'll watch me, they'll subscribe to watch me kick ass. And even better, they'll subscribe to find out whether I get my ass kicked or whether I kick ass.
And the other version of this is people call it now build in public. People do that. Before that, Buffer and ConvertKit did this stuff where they would share like all their team salaries. They would share all their team's revenue or the company's revenue. And it tends to work. I remember this guy named Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income. He was one of the first guys to do this. He would share his monthly revenue and where it all came from. And I would go there every month to see like what he was doing. And it totally worked.
The extreme access works, but I think the other one is calling your shot or basically creating a storyline. So it's basically like, what is the story? There's the hero, they have a goal, and they have an obstacle. And then there's some stakes. There's something on the line. And I think that's the way to like juice that up. So it's not just, I'm going to build in public, so I'll provide a monthly update. It's, I'm going to try to do X, and if I don't do X, You know, like there's a, there's a, like I'm putting something on the line trying to get there and I'm going to try to do this incredible thing, not just inch my way forward. You know, if I said, hey, I'm, you know, I'll show you, you know, my, you know, some of the things I'm investing in, that'd be okay. But to say I'm going to try to turn $1 million into $10 million or go bust, that people want to watch more. And so, you know, I think the David Blaine spectacle method is another one.
I want to see you do that with your second trip to the strip club. Build in public, bro.
I'm going to order as much food and free water as I can until they kick me out of the strip club. Can I make it over or under 6 hours before they realize this guy's just here for the fries?
All right, we got to end there. That's the pod.
I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.