Newsletters and blogs seem like they’d be difficult to make money from, but that’s not necessarily the case. Sam Parr, former CEO of The Hustle, is proof that this method of landing subscribers and making bank works. But how did he get from being just another newsletter writer to selling his business for an undisclosed sum to Hubspot?
Starting From The Bottom
In 2014, blogging was all the rage, and everyone was doing it. People were figuring out what their niche was and how to get their content in front of the right audience. Enter Sam Parr, an up-and-coming entrepreneur who had an idea of who he wanted to write for but no idea how to let them know he existed.
Parr’s entrepreneurial spirit didn’t start with The Hustle, however. For many years, he was honing his skills as a marketer. When he was in high school, he was an athlete, selling his old clothes on eBay. Between 2010 and 2012, he even ran a hotdog cart. Yet he knew he could get something much more lucrative to do. And the internet gave him a way to do so.
Bunk – Find Your Roommate
Parr’s first foray into being an online entrepreneur was with an innovative app called Bunk. One of the things he found early on when searching for a roommate was how hard it was to find someone you matched with and would be able to live with. To solve this problem, he partnered with John Havel, whom he met while renting Havel’s Airbnb.
The two came up with Bunk, a way to make sure people would match with the person they were sharing a living space with. The idea was a hit, and by the time the duo sold off the app in 2013, it was doing a roaring business. The income from Bunk was what started him off with The Hustle.
A Chance Meeting and a Mailing List
The birth of The Hustle came from meeting entrepreneurs Elizabeth Yin and Erik Bahn in San Francisco. The pair had the name “HustleCon” and an email subscriber list of around 300 people. Getting the email list from them allowed him to market around 400 tickets for a revenue of around $60,000. But that was just the start.
The Hustle started off as a random blog site that covered some of Parr’s experiments with LSD and living on Soylent. While the experiments offered good traffic numbers, it wasn’t something he could monetize sustainably. No, he would need to expand his horizons and change tack with the blog.
A Relaunch With a New Focus
In 2016, Parr relaunched The Hustle, focusing solely on business growth, marketing, and tactics. In his own words, he blogged like crazy, covering as much things as he could that he thought his audience would find interesting. He grew the initial follower list first to 10,000 people, then all the way to 150,000 people.
The new focus was more monetizable, and people who were interested in what he was offering were eager to sign up for the content he was offering. Since he was so aligned with his core audience, it was easy for him to pick out the things his readers would have the most solid interest in and turn them into good stories.
Leveraging Facebook for Traffic Numbers
Parr was one of the earliest adopters of Facebook ads as a way to drive traffic to his landing page. Facebook was a brilliant way to do targeted marketing and was even more impressive in driving qualified traffic to his landing page and subscription signup. As a pioneer in the ad space, he usually faced a lot of pushback from traditional email marketers.
Many of the people who didn’t understand his method said he was stupid for not focusing on search engine optimization. Yet Parr wasn’t interested in doing things the way all the other marketers were. His approach was significantly different, and it showed in how he got leads to sign up.
Building Around Qualified Leads
Delving into Parr’s methodology, it was obvious that he wanted only people who were already interested in his stuff to end up on his landing page. This meant the landing page had lower bounce numbers and a lot more people who were already willing to sign up for his newsletter. What’s more, he wasn’t at the mercy of Google’s fickle algorithm.
Facebook was the perfect vehicle for this growth since it allowed Parr to outline the type of demographics he wanted on his site, including people who showed a preference for business content. Word-of-mouth was also a major part of his success, as entrepreneurial-minded subscribers shared the good word about his newsletter to their friends, who eventually signed up.
Expanding To Other Inbound Marketing Means
Parr quickly realized that Facebook was a good place to start, but there were other areas that could catapult his success forward. Facebook paid ads were working, but there were other places to get traffic from for free, one of which was Reddit. With a successful viral post on Reddit, he saw massive subscriber numbers for his newsletter and traffic for his blog.
Parr says that going viral is hard but simple. You have to appeal to a topic, and you have to develop a narrative around it. People like interesting things and things that anyone could do. It won’t work 100% of the time, but if you get it to work 30% of the time, that’ll get you enough qualified traffic to run a successful email newsletter.
What You Can Learn from Sam Parr
While Parr himself claims to be “semi-retired” today, he is still as involved as ever in what it takes to go viral. He runs a podcast about making your first million, has been interviewed countless times, and still has time to spend with his family. But what Parr does is teach others how to find the niche that appeals to them the most.
Everyone has that “sweet spot” where they have an interest that aligns with a large number of people. The same things that they enjoy and are passionate about can help them monetize an audience. Even if they only develop something that goes viral a third of the time, that’s more than enough to succeed as a modern entrepreneur.
