Sam Reveals The Company He's Worked On For The Last 8 Month

Shaan Puri

I will predict and guarantee that this is going to be a greater than $100,000,000 a year revenue business. This means it's going to be worth something like, on the low end, $300,000,000, and on the high end, $1,000,000,000.

Sam Parr

Alright, we are live! Sorry I missed last week; I 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]. I’m excited!

Shaan Puri

is your steve jobs moment dude

Sam Parr

is it every once

Shaan Puri

In a while, something comes along that changes everything. *Triangle hand pose.*

Sam Parr

Yeah, I'm just gonna start sitting like that. This is the first time that I've been working on something that I haven't talked about within 24 hours of having the idea. It's killed me. It's killed me, and I have hated it. I've hated it. I'm so nervous.

Shaan Puri

and so why now

Sam Parr

So, I'll give people some background. 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. I even interviewed people in this space on the podcast.

Shaan Puri

so by the way that's the funniest part of this whole thing

Shaan Puri

you invited people onto the podcast asked them every hey how do you run your business

Sam Parr

how do you grow it

Shaan Puri

What are the numbers? How much money does it make? How did you start it? Where did you hire from? Blah, blah, blah. And then you just launched a competitor like 90 days later.

Sam Parr

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 them. But yeah, I wanted to prove... because you remember how I said I hate the question when people ask, "How would you start if you could do it over again?" Yada, yada, yada. I would tell them, "Well, it's easy for you; you have an audience." So I was like, "Alright, well, I'll just do it in front of you." 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: joinhampton.com. I couldn't get hampton.com; it's owned by the Holiday Inn or whatever the Marriott company is. But 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 with around $10 million a year in revenue. But you need at least $1 million in revenue and at least $3 million in funding.

Shaan Puri

woah woah woah woah

Shaan Puri

all or

Shaan Puri

explain what it does before you the

Sam Parr

these are these

Shaan Puri

are requirements

Shaan Puri

what's what

Sam Parr

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, interview you, and all this stuff. What you get is basically what you and I had. Before Sean and I started this pod, him and I would meet once a month. It would be me, you, and like 5 or 6 other guys. It was basically like group therapy for business. We did it for a couple of years and then we did it informally for a long time. I've done it informally with a bunch of people, but it kind of changed my life. 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 $20,000,000 in revenue, you're kind of like a freak. You're like an outsider in your community. 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. Then there's a Hampton-wide community that you can talk to other people anytime. We host dinners, so we have like dozens of dinners. We have adventures, so like a bunch of members are going to a rally car event next week. We do all these things, but basically, it's like... I hate using this term, but it's almost like a safe space. So we have people...

Shaan Puri

like post the you went there

Shaan Puri

you must really care about this business

Sam Parr

I went there it's like a place where you could like talk to your your would

Shaan Puri

you say that you could feel seen

Sam Parr

You could bring your whole self. I mean, you could bring your work self and your personal self. But it's like a place where, let's say, you have to lay people off. You can ask people publicly, "No one's gonna make fun of you. Like, 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?" When I had my group, I used to do one with you, and I did one with my now partner, Joe Speiser. 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 company? I feel very ashamed about X, Y, and Z." So it's this place where you can... it's kind of like this pod but more intimate. And that's kind of why we had the idea. I didn't want to launch it publicly because, A, I wanted the product to be perfect. 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 be really careful. So we've added all these awesome people, and it was very hand-curated, and it still will be. But I wanted it to be like that early on.

Shaan Puri

And so, I think you pitched it, though you almost didn't do yourself justice there. You know when people come on the pod and you're like, "Let me just do that for you real quick." That's my...

Sam Parr

dude this is my nerves man

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah I feel like the nerves are getting the best of you because here's how I would explain this I think you got the I think you got one part right which was most import the most important thing which is 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 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 700 800 900,000,000 dollars but at the time he he wasn't in that spot a guy named ceeva 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 enduring ventures has turned out to be pretty big it's a $100,000,000 + company now 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 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 gonna 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 them everything's great everything is up and up and up you're crushing it you talk to your customers you need to tell them 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 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 gotta 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 the conversation is like 70% tactics 30% dude I've been there you know don't worry about this like the the therapy but the value is almost on the other side it's like the connections that you make you know the ideas that you get the relationships like you know ended up you know being one of my groomsmen I think at my wedding you know we invested in a bunch of companies from the mastermind and that made a bunch of money 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 kinda crazy outsized benefits and basically I think most people massively overrate the idea of a mentor because 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 but like some 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 my sales pitch for you

Sam Parr

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...

Shaan Puri

well well the other thing is

Sam Parr

I'm I'm in the thick of it too

Shaan Puri

I'm not doing this really for you. I remember the first piece of viral content I had was me writing about how I set up our mastermind, how we ran it, and how you should do it if you want to as well. This was like, I had some crappy PDF somewhere, but it's been downloaded, I don't know, 10,000 times now. Wow! I don't even know where those emails are; I should go find them. But that thing has had like 10,000, 10,010,000 downloads now in a couple of years. I don't promote this thing. I just said it once on a podcast a long time ago at the very beginning of this, and consistently, people resonate with it. People are like, "I want that! How do I set mine up so I can have my own version of what you have?" Now, what you did was you made it easy. You turned it into 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 a push of a button. If you're accepted in, you get all that out of the box, which is smart.

Sam Parr

And I used your thing. I used the down the list that you're talking about. I used just my experience with our thing, and then I went and studied it. You know, I was talking to a lot of other groups and trying to figure out... I've been calling it "speed of vulnerability." How do we get people to be vulnerable quickly? It sounds weird, but we have people crying at some of these things, and I'm like, "Yes, yes, got them!"

Shaan Puri

Your tears fuel me. Yeah, what's better than revenue? The tears of my customers.

Sam Parr

Well, particularly men... Men are like, we'll have some people afterwards who are like, "This was amazing! Why haven't other people done this?" I'm like, "Yeah dude, it's called therapy." People have done this for years. Just a lot of men, in particular, don't do this type of stuff.

Shaan Puri

That's why I haven't joined. I don't want to cry. The last time I cried, somebody gave me a titty twister, and I just decided after that day, it's not happening again. So, yeah, I've been avoiding your emotional trap here for a little bit. By the way, this is not just something you studied, like, "Oh, there are these three companies that started in the last ten years that do this." This is like on some Benjamin Franklin stuff, right? Like, this is, I think, Junto or Junto—I don't know how you pronounce it—but back in the day, this was like a Ben Franklin thing. Every Friday, he would go to this one bar. You might know the story better than I do; I'll kind of butcher it.

Sam Parr

do

Shaan Puri

It but he went to this bar every Friday and invited a community of like-minded people. He called it, I think, a "club of mutual benefit" or something like that, which basically meant it's a club of people who are going to make each other better. I want sparring partners when it comes to business; that's kind of the way that I think about it. He was doing the same thing, but his was a little less business-oriented and a little more focused on topics like society, law, and whatever. They would just debate random things. He 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. You know, "iron sharpens iron" type of thing. So yeah, this is not a new idea; it's been around for a little while. How do you think about how this compares? People have heard of YPO, they've heard of other groups like Tiger 21, Vistage, and all these things. How does it compare? I know I have my opinion, and 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 I see you as the sexier, modern, more fun version that I would want to be a part of. Is that not like it, or is it actually much different?

Sam Parr

My whole career, my 15-year internet career, has been based on taking old ideas and just putting new spins on them. That's what we did with newsletters. Newsletters have been around before the internet, and we just put a different spin on it. People are like, "Oh, you created this amazing, interesting new thing." I'm like, "No, not really. It's not that new. We just put a different logo on it and added our texture to it." We did the same thing with this one. If I make fun of these other companies, I'm only joking because they serve a need. But like, there's YPO. YPO has been around since the fifties; it's a really big business. However, YPO is like 50- to 60-year-old men. We make a joke at Hampton where we're like, "Not a lot of people in our group have businesses that are inheriting 15 apartment buildings in South Florida." YPO exists for that. YPO does have a lot of tech people and internet people, but the age range is much older. It is a little bit more of a boys' club.

Shaan Puri

ypo without cialis

Sam Parr

we're still ward shopping some of

Shaan Puri

the marketing so yeah I can say these things because I it's not my business

Sam Parr

And they're cool and all, but they're just older. So, Hampton, it's digital first. We have D2C (direct-to-consumer) companies that aren't tech companies. We're like, should we call them tech companies? Technically, they're not tech companies, but they're tech companies 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 you recognize on Twitter are members. So, that type of shtick includes a lot of consumer software companies and a lot of B2B (business-to-business) software companies. Almost everyone's software or internet-based, and it's significantly younger than a lot of these older companies. Then, compare it to something like a mastermind, which I don't even use that word. Those are typically like $50, and it's a little bit more internet marketing-y. So, this is very much like a startup.

Shaan Puri

let's do this I think the best sales pitch like with any community is who else is who else

Sam Parr

is here bad

Shaan Puri

No, no, no, you're too good! I just want to make sure I get you to the good bits. I'm your wingman here; I'm trying to get you laid. So let me help you out. It says on your website—your website's nice, by the way. I want to talk about one thing in a second here, which is that you did this differently than your other stuff. You hired a fancy design agency, you picked a good name, and you built it in stealth. You violated a bunch of your own rules, which I think is kind of all...

Sam Parr

of them

Shaan Puri

I want to hear about those in a second, but first, it says the average Hampton member has $23,000,000 in annual revenue. Then there's some minimum, and like any community, the most valuable thing is who else is here. Because that's what I would care about, right? Like, okay, I like the idea. I always like the idea. It's like any party; I like the idea of a party, but who's coming? So, who are... give me like, I don't know, 3, 4, 5—however many you want. Give me some stories of interesting members you've met that have made this fun for you to be a part of.

Sam Parr

I'm going to give you two categories: 1. The people you know 2. The people you don't know The people you do know...

Shaan Puri

covers everybody pop that covers a 100% of the pie chart

Sam Parr

Dude, so like, Pomp, Anthony Pompliano, who was on the pod a few weeks ago, he's a member. So, Pomp has a media company and an investment company. If you listen to the pod, you know who he is. Patrick Campbell bootstrapped his company, ProfitWell, to like a $200,000,000 exit. Your friends at Bump Health, you know, Bump Health.

Shaan Puri

of course I know bump health

Sam Parr

They make... yeah, well, you know what's the husband's name? Leland. His wife, Christine, is a member. They bootstrapped their company to tens of millions in revenue, and they created a service for pregnant women.

Shaan Puri

for pregnant women yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, CB Insights. Anand from CB Insights is one of the most impressive people I've ever gotten to hang out with. He's very level-headed and 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 Anand. Austin Reif, who was my former enemy, is now one of my closest friends. Austin Reif from Morning Brew is a member, along with Nick Huber and Sahil Sayeed. 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?

Shaan Puri

You've mentioned this guy because he took some flying car company public or something like that. But tell the story.

Sam Parr

Alright, listen to this. So, this guy named Brett Adcock started a company called Vettery, which was a marketplace for talent. It was very much like Hired. If you're an engineer, you go through all these tests, and they kind of algorithmically and manually match you with cool interviews. They eventually bought Hired, and he sold it for **$100,000,000**. He took a bunch of his earnings from that and started Archer, which he took public at the time for a market cap of around **$2,000,000,000**. Now it's like **$600,000,000** to **$700,000,000**. Archer was basically a flying car company. They kind of look like helicopters, but they're unmanned flying vehicles that United Airlines bought a bunch of. He took time off between Vettery and Archer to study how it worked. He literally went to the University of Florida to learn about this technology. Now, his latest company, which I am a personal investor in, is called Figr. I went to his factory, and they basically have these robots that look like Robocop. Instead of killing you, though, they just load T-shirts into packages for Walmart. Walmart's just a hypothetical example, and they ship it off. So, you know, there are millions of people who are doing this and getting paid. What do you call it?

Shaan Puri

pick and pack yeah

Sam Parr

Pick and pack. There are 20,000 of these 3PLs (third-party logistics providers) in America. Did you know that? I didn't know there were 20,000.

Shaan Puri

People who are busy for our e-commerce... So we ran one, right? I hired a bunch of people to do this. I've done a lot of pick and pack myself because people call in sick to work.

Sam Parr

It's crazy! So, he's built these robots that could basically run. They call them humanoids, and he's like, "They can run for 20 hours a day; they charge for 4 hours a day." 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 2 stocks or one stock, Archer, my public company, and then all the cash that I have. I bought a house and then invested all of it into Figr, my new company." This guy is like all in on it. It's pretty wild! Another interesting person we talked about is Anya of Rooted. She's the one behind a meditation app; it's a panic attack app that does over $1 billion in revenue. So, it goes all the way from folks like Brett, who are on their way to being billionaires, all the way down to Anya, who's got a $1 million thing that she's growing slowly, but she owns 100% of it. Another interesting one is Ajay Patel, another guy who's pretty under the radar, but...

Shaan Puri

bootstrapped zesty paws guy

Sam Parr

Yeah, he bootstrapped Zesty Paws to a $600,000,000 exit. Now he has a new thing called High Key. We talked about him a lot. He's pretty baller.

Shaan Puri

And so, how does it work? These people, you get put in a group of peers. You apply, you get accepted, and then you get matched into a group. After that, you meet once a month with a facilitator who guides that discussion, right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, and the meetings have these... like we've reviewed each meeting afterwards. We study what's good and what's bad, and then we've just shaped the format.

Shaan Puri

so what makes a great meeting versus just okay meeting

Sam Parr

So, what I learned from the podcast is that these meetings are basically content. I try to find juicy, good content. A really good meeting we do is called the "Business Breakdown," where someone will do a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Shaan Puri

correct

Sam Parr

What's the other threats on their business? They'll explain how it works, what their Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is, where they're getting customers, and they just reveal everything. They're like, "Here's where we suck, here's where we rock. What do you think I should do?" And here's the issue that I'm facing. That's a really good meeting when they do that. So, Triple Whale, one of your best investments of all time, he's a member, and they'll just explain how the company works. They're like, "On paper..."

Shaan Puri

no threats for triple whale

Sam Parr

Yeah, this... what I'm about to say is not for Max; this is for everyone. What they'll say is, "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. So, people will have all types of context on their companies 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.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

Dude, that's hard. Wrangling these people up is hard, and training them has been the biggest challenge. That's our biggest cost—trying to figure out how to get these people to do stuff well.

Shaan Puri

Now, let's talk about how you decided to start this. So again, I think if I had said, "What is the Sampar startup method?" I would have said the first bit was kind of correct, which was to sniff around for the opportunity. I think you are a world-class, you know, hound sniffer. You're a top 5 sniffer I know, easily. So you're good at finding opportunity. What that means is you talk to a bunch of people and you bluntly ask them, "Is that a good business?" Then they're like, "Well, yeah, I mean, we did this bunch 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 businesses that you think are good businesses. So that part I think was straight out of your normal playbook, and you did a good job with that. Then you were like, "Okay, I could see this business." I think you even talked to somebody who had bought a company like this in private equity.

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

why'd you buy don't

Sam Parr

call them

Shaan Puri

How did they grow well year by year? What's your plan with them? Would you buy... was this like a one-off outlier, or are there other businesses like this? And you've basically got confidence, so those are some of your methods.

Sam Parr

Getting confidence, I called the guy and I was like, "Look, hey, I just found your number on the internet. I don't want to sound like a douchebag here, but here's who I am. 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 makes sense for you to have a talk with me right now." I have a particular...

Shaan Puri

set of skills I've honed over

Sam Parr

well thankfully

Shaan Puri

it worked

Shaan Puri

like taken speech

Sam Parr

Very humbly, I was trying to be very humble. But yeah, he told me a little bit about the business. He didn't reveal anything that I couldn't have found online, but it's not like he broke any confidentiality rules. So, I did that, and then I created a Typeform and a Google Doc. I wrote out on one page what my new idea is, who should join, and who shouldn't join. At the bottom was a Typeform, and I sent that Google Doc to about 50 friends. Around 20 of them signed up, and I interviewed all of them. I actually took a screenshot. Look at my calendar. You see my calendar down here? No? My calendar is like a zebra; there are stripes basically. I did like... 5th.

Shaan Puri

weird flex but

Shaan Puri

alright got that zebra calendar

Sam Parr

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 podcast. But besides that, there's like 10 to 15 meetings every single non-MFM day. Yeah, I would just call.

Shaan Puri

One of those Bluetooth headsets, like you're a telemarketer. Because I was like, I think Sam is just doing these like 20-minute calls all day. For a while, you were doing that, right? You were doing basically a 20 to 30-minute sales call or discovery call every day, all day. Because we used to be completely unscheduled, right? We had that elephant schedule; it was just clear gray, nothing there. I could call you anytime, and we could have a little chitchat. It was fine. Then all of a sudden, you started this business, and you became the machine. Was it hard to flip that switch? Or in a way, I have my suspicion that you kind of missed that, and it felt fun to go like super hardcore about it.

Sam Parr

It was awesome, but it was hard. It was like lifting weights. During it, I was proud to do it and happy to do it, but it was very challenging. I was doing all these calls and interviewing people to figure out who was interesting, who was not interesting, who we should turn away, and who we should accept. Then we just sent a Stripe link and accepted payment. We said, "Alright, you have a 30-day delay." We went out and found the executive coaches, the facilitators, and we trained them. Then the first meeting started. We did that for about 100 people without any website. We didn't create a website until around December, and when we created a website, I actually...

Shaan Puri

months in correct

Sam Parr

Many months in, no... yeah, seven figures in revenue.

Shaan Puri

The way you're talking about money is so funny. Many, many 7 figures in revenue? What does that mean? These are like... humans don't talk like this.

Sam Parr

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 find the...

Shaan Puri

Yeah, here's a user story. 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 was like, "Hey, this mastermind thing is really great. It helps me a lot in my life. Anybody want to join or create one? Here, put your thing in." I think I charged $250 or $300 per month per person, so it was like 3...

Sam Parr

to 4 that was club ltv which was like the greatest name ever

Shaan Puri

separate separate first was ceo masterminds have you I think I still have

Sam Parr

the website ceo masterminds index I

Shaan Puri

I think, yeah, maybe I didn't renew or something like that. But yeah, something like that. Basically, I had created this website. This is how I met Ben, by the way. Ben was one of the six 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. They joined the group, and I was the facilitator, which was, you know...

Sam Parr

bad move

Shaan Puri

a bad move because why did I quit because I was like I don't really wanna be facilitating this anymore so I'm not gonna do this business and the obvious move is is the same mistake I actually made in my sushi restaurant which was the restaurant was actually quite profitable from month 1 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 hated all the stuff and any smart person would have just been like you need to hire somebody to do that and in my head it was just like if we hate doing this other everyone's gonna hate doing this this is terrible I don't wanna do this anymore get me out of here and similarly for the ceo mastermind thing I was the facilitator which was a bad move because 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 that was just a mistake on my part but I'll tell you tell me one thing ben came out of that so I got my win out of 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 I don't really care about this $6 a month right now I don't really want it I don't know if I wanna 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 so and then I got to see I got 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 is not cutting it the bar chart's 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 you know every 30 minutes all day you were immediately going out and hiring people so that this could scale and you wouldn't have 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 that you that you winkle vos 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 have 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 ab test here's somebody who does it as a 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 you know fundamental platform of this podcast as like you know your your launch pad for that where I don't know maybe not the launch pad because you need a promoter on here but you know the credibility you had when you hit up those people like you know a lot of those people you mentioned were 4%

Sam Parr

I think this business would not be good for you. In fact, I don't think this business is good for me to run either. So, I've hired... we got it to a certain size, and then once we could, we hired a CEO.

Shaan Puri

And that's within less than a year, right? Which is unusual. But I think probably you had a reason you wanted to do that, or you actually probably planned to do that from the beginning. Why is that?

Sam Parr

no I we didn't plan to do we we or we didn't plan to hire this person we hired jordan

Shaan Puri

but did you did you think you would be the ceo or did you find

Sam Parr

The CEO, once it started working, I was like, "Oh man, this is going to be significantly bigger than I think it can be." Also, I don't have the skill set. It's a very operational-heavy thing. You have to be very calm and patient, and talk to people really politely, constantly. It's a very people-heavy business. So, you know, we have dozens of these facilitators, and wrangling them up and figuring all that out is quite hard. I don't have that ability, and I don't have the ability to run a really big company, which I think this is going to be. So, no, I don't think you could have done this. I know for a fact I could not have done this, or you would have had to hire someone as well.

Shaan Puri

Hiring a CEO this early is hard. It's difficult to hand over your baby. I think people... I know when Andrew comes on, people always ask, "Oh, ask him about hiring a CEO." I don't know why. I think it's another one of these easy buttons people want to push. 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. Do you have anything interesting you could say about finding and hiring the CEO? How do you know that they're the right person for this business? And how do you take that big leap of faith of handing a working but early business to somebody else?

Sam Parr

So, when I write, like, three months before I was selling The Hustle, about literally three weeks before I started selling it, I got an email from HubSpot. I started talking to this guy named Jordan, who is the Chief Growth Officer at Motley Fool, which is, you know, at the time, like a $500,000,000 a year company. I was like, "Jordan, I want to hire a CEO for The Hustle." I started recruiting him, went to his house, wined and dined him, and he was like, "I'm in." Then I got this call from HubSpot, and I signed an NDA. They’re publicly traded, so I couldn't tell him. About a week before the deal closed, I said, "Jordan, I've got to back out of our deal. I have to take this offer." He was like, "I understand, but you know, I told them HubSpot still needs someone to run the organization. Do you want it?" So, he said yes, and he ran it. Now, I think HubSpot Media, which is what The Hustle's called, has like 100 people, and he's done a good job. Then, a year and a half, two years later, he quit. He was like, "Hey, I heard you're working on this new thing. Can I consult with you?" I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd be great." I was talking to him, and he was like, "Do you need a CEO?" Immediately, I said yes, but I had this weird conflict with HubSpot. So, I just hollered at HubSpot and explained the situation. I said, "Man, he bailed already. He wants to work with me. Are you guys okay with it?" They said yes. We immediately got in a room and hashed out a deal where he's highly incentivized to grow the company. He was perfect for this because I think I've known what he's about. It was, I guess, technically a two and a half year process. The takeaway from this is I've been recruiting this guy for two and a half years now to come and work with me. It took a long time, and so when we sold the company...

Shaan Puri

Honestly, that sounds... oh, that's unusual. No, it's not unusual. Often, the best people are those you kind of have this feeling of, "Oh, maybe the timing's not right yet." Eventually, in a weird way, things do fall together later—much later. But those relationships get built over time. They get to see you operate over time, and you get to see them operate over time. It builds a lot of trust. So, it's pretty common. I think it's a good reminder not to burn bridges and not to close doors.

Sam Parr

Well, that's what I was going to say. You have to keep people... you gotta treat people right. So when we sold The Hustle, I gave him a thank you check. It was like, "You didn't work here, but I feel really bad. I just want to give you this as a token of my appreciation."

Shaan Puri

he's like he's literally a check that just says

Shaan Puri

thank you sam he's like what what do I say to do with this

Sam Parr

When I say "big check," I mean it was physically a large check that I handed over to him. I shook his hand in front of it. But dude, you gotta treat people right. Like, you know, Steph Smith is another person who I've worked with for years. She went and worked at Andreessen Horowitz. When I was starting this, I was like, "Just so you know, this thing's available." But anyway, this is a long game. You know, you talked to James Currier. James Currier's partner is someone who he met. James Currier is just like, I don't know, a 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 understand, it's really a long game to recruit these people.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and by the way, Stan, who is his partner, they've been doing business together for like, I don't know, 15 to 20 years. Stan's currently not at NFX, which is where James is. The thing is, I think they cofounded together—maybe they didn't cofounded together—but they've been doing business together for 20 years. Naturally, he would have been doing that, but he got recruited by Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck had been recruiting him for over 10 years and finally got Stan to agree to go to Facebook after 10 years of recruitment. I think now he's left, but he worked there for about 3 to 4 years during that time. I think James was like, "Yeah, that's cool. Go for it. Go on tour, have that experience. That's great." You know, 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.

Sam Parr

let's talk about that in a minute about why neither of us talk about stuff

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, the plan was that Ben and I were going to do this great thing. We just built and sold the Silk Road, which was a big win in a short amount of time. We raised our fund together in about one month. We raised our own rolling fund that can deploy between $7 to $10 million per year. We built a course business that's a seven-figure course business. You know, we've done like four or five things together now, Ben and I, 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, and I would give equity in this to." Because I probably wouldn't give equity to anybody else in this. I'm sure this is going to work; I think this is going to be big. So, I value the equity. Why would I give money to anybody? I don't need anything from anybody. I don't need capital, experience, or anything. There was one person, 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." 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 literally a perfect match. You know that thing you really love to do? That's all we do. You know that real problem with your current situation where you don't own any path to wealth? I'm offering you a path to wealth. You'll own equity in this thing. You know you always want to feel special. I'm literally not recruiting anybody else. This is either your job or there's no job. I was like, "You don't have to interview. I know you; you've known me. This is something that can work." 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..."

Sam Parr

and this person called me a few weeks after they they spoke to you

Shaan Puri

And I was like, "Oh, well, all those things are solvable, blah blah blah." So anyway, long story short, the person was like, "You know what? I'm just too nervous about that. I don't want to... I... I... I'm not sure I'm ready to leave, blah blah blah." In my head, my reply was like, "Dear idiot."

Shaan Puri

dear idiot

Shaan Puri

thanks for notifying me about your dumb decision

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's like when a cute girl, you know, rejects you. It's like, "Well, I don't even want you anymore."

Shaan Puri

right you have ugly ankles and so that's how I felt I was like wow

Shaan Puri

yeah

Shaan Puri

I can't believe this person didn't take this offer and so anyways I 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 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 is probably the wrong decision for them but who knows the you know the life is long I bet you I bet we'll end up working together in the future anyways because they're they are awesome and I think we're gonna keep doing awesome things eventually those things will intersect and and so so I was like okay that was my like reaction it brought brought up 2 things for me 1 is reminder to myself don't let the 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 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 were 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 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 because 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 and a and a nonentrepreneur it's not intelligence it's not 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 it just highlighted that for me I'm like man this is a person with double the talent I have but they're gonna 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 and while it it may be act go reprice how important that is as an attribute I can't find this client info

Hubspot

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform. It shares its data across every application, so every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. **HubSpot: Grow Better.**

Sam Parr

So, I used to do this thing called **Hustlecon**, which was like, you know, we did it 5, 6, or 7 times. We would get founders of interesting startups to come and explain their story. We would have 500 up to 2,500 people there. You spoke at a couple of them. I used to tell these people, "Alright, your speaking slot's at 3. You have to come at noon for the mic check, and we'll be backstage and whatever." 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 at 3.

Shaan Puri

could take one second

Shaan Puri

and so you you getting them there 3 hours early was was a tactic

Sam Parr

yeah the the mic check there there ain't a mic check we're 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 gonna get I'm gonna 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's like I have to fire my vp of finance they're horrible you know they've been working me 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 maxim grammarly who is 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 tom from quest nutrition who sold this company for $1,000,000,000 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 1 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 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 because he just hated the con confrontation the difference is is that they do it anyway and so meeting my heroes that way it really 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 in this pod who are significantly sick 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 them like this this person is kind of an idiot like there's been times where I'm like but they've killed it they've they've pulled it off andrew wilkes 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 is huge because 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 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 have all they do is they sell like wedding packages basically it's a little bit more complicated than that but simply elop you can check it out she's in idaho has like a $10,000,000 a year business $8,000,000 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

Shaan Puri

and so

Sam Parr

It's nice to be around other people who are killing it a little bit harder than me. Now I know what the next level is and the next peak. But yeah, that's one of the big learnings I have from being around some of these successful people. 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, is my partner wanted to try PR. TBD if it's going to work or not, but it's miserable, dude. Talking to these journalists is horrible. I hate it. I told them, "I'm never doing this again." Being around these people, you never know what they're going to take out of context or if they're going to come in angry. It sucks, man. I hate doing PR. I've never done it, and I'm never going to do it again.

Shaan Puri

Doing PR, I feel like, is like those scenes where it's like you take out a knife and they have a knife. It's like we're sort of approaching each other's knife. We're gonna have to get really close if either of us wants to do this. I hope you're not trying to...

Shaan Puri

it but I have to

Shaan Puri

have my knife in case you do that's how it's

Sam Parr

supposed to be mexican standoff baby

Shaan Puri

It's an old... In fact, we should drop the hard "J" of journalists and just call them journalists. You know, this Mexican standoff is tough. It's tough to do, but I think there's a lot of value, especially for something like what you're doing. You're going to have the seed community of people who are founder-type individuals. They probably listen to the podcast; 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, "I don't do that, but I do read the Wall Street Journal." If the Wall Street Journal tells me about this thing, or if whatever TechCrunch tells me about this thing, in my mind, it's credible. And so, I think... or, you know, 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 it's an important question for people to answer. When you had done this, you did a really good rant a second ago, and there were like three or four things I thought were awesome in that. What you said reminded me of something I watched last night. I was going down a YouTube rabbit hole, and I watched this video that was a compilation of Martin Shkreli's greatest advice.

Sam Parr

which is probably pretty good

Shaan Puri

did not disappoint did not disappoint so

Sam Parr

Other than the whole security fraud law, you know, besides that, I'm telling you there's 99 good things to say.

Shaan Puri

I am buying a lot of Shkreli stock because everybody abandoned him. He became a penny stock; everybody just sort of wrote this guy off. 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. 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 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 others way too quickly. What did he say? There's a whole bunch of interesting things. In this compilation, it's like a 30-minute compilation, and halfway through, he goes, "Does this one thing..." Somebody's like, "Yeah, you know, something about being successful," and Martin's like, "First of all, you don't have to want to be successful, right? You get to choose what you want. What's success for you? I play this capitalist game; I like success in this way, and it's what matters to me." And he's like, "So, if you want to do that, he's like, 'Yo, 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, 'Also, bad news: your IQ is not gonna change, so worrying about IQ isn't gonna help you.'"

Sam Parr

he's a pretty iq he's he's I think he's a high iq guy he's a

Shaan Puri

High IQ type of guy, but he's like, "I've met a lot of people." He goes, "Actually, the higher the IQ, they tend to run into one problem, which is they just overthink everything. They overcomplicate everything." He basically described my favorite meme of the year, the "midwit" meme, which is basically like, you know, the idiot on one side and the Jedi on the other. In the middle is the sort of "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. They overanalyze and overassess everything. He was basically describing how this happens for most people, and I thought, "Man, it's so true what he's saying." Often, the higher IQ... he goes, "They just get in their own way." I gotta tell you, that 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... I get...

Sam Parr

in my own way and like what's an example

Shaan Puri

Oh, tons! Like, I’ll give you an example. I have somebody who's like a mentor of mine that I text all the time about my business stuff. Usually, just the act of typing it to this person helps me realize what they're going to say because they're on the Jedi side of things. For instance, I was talking to them about my e-commerce business. I said, "Okay, we got the Facebook ads up and running. It's working. You know, I'm thinking we should do influencers. I think influencers could be huge for us." Then I mentioned, "We don't have Google, but people, you know, obviously there's a lot of search traffic. Look, I attached this PDF report of search traffic. What do you think about SEO? I feel like SEO could be good because it's cheap." I was just saying all this stuff, and then my Jedi friend said, "Don't talk about influencers until you're making $400,000 a month on Facebook ads." I was like, "Oh, okay." He continued, "Remember, like we said at the beginning, Facebook's probably going to be the biggest driver. So if you can't get Facebook ads to work, none of this other stuff's probably going to work. The best way to get Facebook ads to work would be to..." And I was like, "Focus on it?" He said, "Yes." So just having somebody who could Jedi zoom out and say, "Don't say all these words. Don't say the word influencer until you get to this amount of money. Then you're allowed to talk to me about influencers." Peter Thiel has the same approach. He used to do this at PayPal. Famously, people would ask, "Was Peter Thiel a good manager?" and people would say, "No." Managerial skills or soft skills are not what Peter Thiel is known for. However, he did one really effective tactic: everybody in the company would have their one key thing that they're working on, their one mission. If you ever tried to talk to him about something that wasn't your mission, he would simply get up and leave the room. He would be like, "Oh, you're talking to me about not the mission? Bye."

Sam Parr

you say like wilkins says is this a a balloon floating away

Shaan Puri

just blows it there

Shaan Puri

hot air balloon just turns on the fire floats away bye as he turns into

Shaan Puri

A speck in the distance... I've taken that philosophy. I'm not as hardcore about it as I want to be, but that's how I feel when I talk to people. 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. Alright, great. 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. They needed the Jedi to be like, "You want all these things, and you just got offered all those things. Take it, figure out the rest after that." You know, that's the Jedi zoom out. Similarly, I think that being in these types of groups helps you with the Jedi zoom out because you will get out of your own way about some part of your brain that's tangled up in a knot where you are overthinking, overanalyzing, and overcomplicating something. It'll happen with, like, "Yeah, I heard this guy. This is not working out, but I feel like maybe I am put in the right position," and blah, blah, blah. 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 it? You know, sounds like it's not working out. Maybe you should let them go."

Sam Parr

yeah you get obvious

Shaan Puri

Well, obviously they come out of the six-month plan. They're like, "Do you think that in the 6 months it's gonna improve?" No, I... there's no way. So then do you think you should do the six-month [plan]? Right? It's like... it's just obvious. It's the common sense, but common sense is fairly uncommon.

Sam Parr

And this is the first time I've launched something significant with an audience. I remember talking to you about Milk Road. I think you launched it in January a year ago.

Shaan Puri

yeah the 1st year was like in end of december or january yeah 1st edition came out

Sam Parr

And you were so excited! With this pod, we don't hold back. You were just telling me how excited you were, but it was live and everything was working. I remember you forwarding emails or just talking to me, saying, "Well, here's the Milk Road for Brazil. It's live already." They just sent it 10 minutes later, but they copied and pasted it. I actually met one of these guys the other day. He was like, "Yeah, I was one of the guys copying Milk Road." He said the most beautiful thing ever, at least to our ears: "But then I only did it for like a month or two months, and I realized it was too hard. I can't actually pull it off." I was like, "Awesome! That's exactly what we like to hear." But I remember you saying, "Yeah, this sucks! All these people ripping us off." I don't think it made any impact on the actual business, but it does distract you and gets your cortisol levels going. It was the same thing with us and this audience. There were a few times where I would throw little Easter eggs out there. I would mention a domain name; one time I just mentioned "Marathon Ranch," which was the URL of my Airbnb. I didn't expect anyone to actually book it, or I would mention other things I had access to. I'd go and look at the analytics and see, "Oh wow, 10 or 20,000 people came to the website." I decided not to mention this anymore because I learned from Sean's stuff that we shouldn't mention something until it gets to a certain size. There are a bunch of other reasons too, like you don't want the community to get too big too fast. But just the pressure of it all... People talk about building in public. A lot of people who build in public do it as a marketing scheme to get traffic or awareness. You know, Buffer did this. Buffer was one of the first companies I ever saw that revealed all their revenue and salaries. That was their shtick; that's how we know about them, aside from their product being great. But once you and I were in the very fortunate position of having an audience, the name of the game for us a lot of times is just to shut the hell up and not talk about it.

Shaan Puri

shit

Sam Parr

And I remember seeing what you're going through, and I'm like, "I'm not mentioning a thing anymore about certain stuff."

Shaan Puri

Well, I think you're right, but you're focusing a lot on the competitive aspect of it, which I think is overblown and doesn't...

Sam Parr

that's overblown

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think it's overblown. I think it's the pressure and the lack of flexibility. In the early days of something, you don't have a lot going for you. 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, where are the attributes? You don't have any of those attributes. But the one attribute you have is basically speed and agility—the ability to change, be flexible, adapt, and turn on a dime. You see, "Oh, the market actually wants this." The reason for me to not talk about something early on is typically two things. One is, with the podcast, you're inviting a bunch of guests over to the house. 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, when I didn't have an audience, I wasn't going to get a lot of traffic from day one. Cool, I'll shout it out, but only 10 people are going to come to the site anyway. It doesn't matter how crappy it looks. With something like this, a bunch of people come, so you kind of don't want to put your worst foot forward. 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 young, right? It's like a kid or a baby—they're hyper-flexible. They could fall down; a kid can't sprain an ankle because everything is just too malleable. They can learn seven languages because their brain is so malleable. A startup is kind of the same way when it's young. 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 tested it enough to understand exactly what you want it to be and how you want it to work. That's my take, at least.

Sam Parr

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 2,005 it was pretty early and if you're a new start up or even just like a smallish start up and you want backlinks it's based and so you're a user you sign up and you're a pr 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 interest in homemade bread I need I have a deadline tomorrow so I need to get on the phone immediately and so the recipient will see 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 home kits 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 what's it called cision yeah what cision 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 and a half 1000000 subscribers and people pay money to access it I think that someone can redo harrow 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 100 of them I think someone can build that out in a little bit better inch more interesting way and could have a pretty nice sized company really quickly so harrow 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 newsletter so 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

Shaan Puri

I have a buddy who's doing something like this, Julian Shapiro. I don't know if this is up right now, but it's called...

Sam Parr

And while you're talking, I thought about making a list. People are always saying, "I need writers," and I'm like, I should just create Sam's List. It would cost like $500 a month, and I'll just update it with interesting people that we're vetting.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

who are good writers and we approve of but I think I think you could do that

Shaan Puri

So, we might have to bleep this out, but it's called the **Pineapple List**. Basically, Julian was like, "Alright, he's in the growth world. He's been doing growth for a long time with Demand Curve and a bunch of things like that." He’s interviewed thousands of founders to figure out which agencies they use—so which growth agencies, design agencies, and contact agencies are good that we use. He said, "All you gotta do is come tell me what type of agency you need, what your budget is, and then we will just give you the top one, two, or three." We charge you no money for that recommendation. We'll even hop on a call and review some of these agencies for you. The agencies pay them for that lead. This is a genius idea! I think this is going to work really, really well. I think it solves an important problem, which is, you know, in our founder group chats, what question gets asked all the time? "Hey, anybody got a [specific type of agency] that they love?" or "Hey, has anybody tried this? I'm looking at it right now." Then you get the real inside scoop of whether it’s legit, whether it’s just okay, or whether it’s great.

Sam Parr

Etcetera, etcetera. Man, I think these can be big. They're hard, but they're really simple. If you have three months of free time, just go pick a niche and interview all the vendors in the space, as well as all the customers in the space— as many as you can. Get the truth about what they hate and what they love. Create a really vetted, highly vetted list. I think you could make a lot of money doing something like this. It's just a very crystal clear product-market fit type of solution.

Shaan Puri

right yeah that's a good one alright do we wanna do anything else or should we wrap

Sam Parr

I think we should wrap up. Thank you for describing my company better than I even could. I'm nervous, man. I've never been this nervous, or at least I haven't been this nervous in like 4 or 5 years.

Shaan Puri

The business is already kicking butt! You already have a great community. This business is going to work; there's nothing to be nervous about. Also, I think we did a good job of not only explaining what it is but also sharing some interesting things around it. I hope this isn't just a one-hour long sales pitch about Hampton, but rather some of the thought processes that went into launching it. What did you do differently this time? I hope there were some good nuggets in there. You can let us know on Twitter if we went too far or if it was good. And the last thing I think is, you've been working on this now for how many months?

Sam Parr

since july so it's march so 9 months now

Shaan Puri

Like that, yeah. You know, that's a long time, a long buildup. So, I think you deserve to have this episode to kind of talk through the whole genesis of it. How you went about it, how it's going, and interesting stuff that's happened along the way. You know, that is well earned and well deserved. I guarantee you, I will predict and guarantee really, that this is going to be a greater than $100,000,000 a year revenue business. This means it's going to be worth something like low end $300,000,000 to $400,000,000, and high end $1,000,000,000.

Sam Parr

I think I

Shaan Puri

think that that is like extremely high probability in my head

Sam Parr

well thank you that's awesome that that makes me feel good

Shaan Puri

I was gonna be really successful you know it's true

Sam Parr

I... it ebbs and flows. I just want everyone to know that I've built a successful-ish company before with the hustle. You know, we had tens of millions in revenue, and it exited and all that. Every single day, I wake up and I'm both excited, thinking, "This is going to conquer the world," and then the next hour, I think, "This is impossible. How are we going to get this done?" So, I want everyone to know that the emotion there, 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. Hopefully, it's also rewarding, but it doesn't matter if you're lifting £100 or £500. Going to 99% of your max is challenging.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's good news, bad news. **Good news:** That feeling is normal. **Bad news:** It doesn't go away.

Sam Parr

when are we gonna when are we gonna when are you gonna launch your or announce your thing do you know

Shaan Puri

I

Shaan Puri

don't know a little bit of time little bit of time

Sam Parr

Alright, well thanks for listening. If you're interested, join hampton.com. I'll bring it up every once in a while on the pod, but yeah, just check it out. We're not gonna... I'm not selling it too hard. The... It's like a Harvard, it's like Harvard baby. So we want... our metric of success is how many people we turn down.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. So go ahead and apply, just so you can get that big fat rejection. Then you can get that acceptance rate under 1%.

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah. We need a lot of people to apply so we have more people to turn down. I'm kidding! Thank you for checking it out: joinhampton.com. Thank you, everyone. That's it.