How We Got Our First 100 Customers (No Bulls**t, Specific Details) (#534)

Shaan Puri

And then we were like, "Alright, fine. Deals like this... you know, this business is so freaking hard. Let's try this." In the end, I don't think it ever ended.

Sam Parr

up working but you got the customers and that's the. Of the episode

Shaan Puri

Yeah, we got them. Exactly. The subsequent failure is irrelevant. Okay?

Sam Parr

Alright, we're live, Sean. We're going to do a Q&A session today. We have a bunch of questions, and I have a feeling we're going to spend most of the time on one question. 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 personally, I have grown, I think, five things to between $1 million and $10 million in revenue. I've grown one thing to well north of $10 million in revenue—multi-million dollars per month. I've grown a bunch of stuff to thousands of users, and I've grown a bunch of stuff to hundreds of thousands. I've also grown one thing to a million. We'll go through examples, and you've done the same. How many did Bebo have or Blab?

Shaan Puri

Blab had like 4,000,000 users. Yeah, basically, we've done this a bunch of different times in a bunch of different ways. So when we get this question, "How did you get your first 100 customers?" I actually really like this question. This is a very different question than, 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. Because if you're at the start, it doesn't matter what somebody did to get to $10,000,000 in revenue. What matters is how they got to $10 in revenue. How did they get the ball rolling? How did they get the initial momentum? Because if you don't do that, by definition, you don't really get to step 2 unless you've done step 1. So this is the step 1 episode, and I thought it'd be fun if we take our own, like, just all the different projects that we've done and just try to label the method that we used to go and get those first 100 customers that got the ball rolling.

Sam Parr

do you wanna go back and forth

Shaan Puri

yeah let's trade off

Sam Parr

Alright, 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. I had an eCommerce store, and I originally got my first 100 customers by posting in forums, but I'm not going to mention that.

Shaan Puri

The statute of limitations, by the way, is that a real thing? The statute of limitations... like, is it a real thing? Maybe we need producer Ari to let us know. And by the way, show her in her sweater. Fantastic sweater! Okay, it's not a thing. Alright, so, correct. Do not tell people what you were doing. I thought after 10 years everything's forgiven.

Sam Parr

No, I'm not going to mention that, but alright. The first business I started was called **Bunk**. It was my first actual startup out of college. It was a roommate matching app—essentially, **Tinder for roommates**. I always say it was stupid; we should have done **Tinder for Tinder** because this was right when Tinder came out. It was like swiping, clicking yes or no, but before it became an app, we actually just had a website built on Weebly. We probably did about **$50,000 in sales** in a handful of months, something like that. What we used to do in San Francisco is target mostly transient people—people like me and Sean who moved there without knowing too many others. You want to rent a one-bedroom apartment, but you can't afford it. Instead, there's a four-bedroom apartment with one room left, and you apply to move in there. What a lot of people don't know is that back then, and I don't know if it's this way now, literally **100 people would apply for that one bedroom**. So, the way we got users was by finding landlords who had four-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments. We said, "Hey, we're going to host an event. It's not going to be a party... well, it was a party. It's going to be an event at your three or four-bedroom apartment, and we're going to have a bunch of prospective tenants there. They're going to team up and get their own place." Let's say it was a four-bedroom place for **$4,000**. We would create individual ads for a one-bedroom at **$1,000**. Back then, on Craigslist, you could use HTML to create beautiful images of what the apartments looked like. It said, "This is Bunk SF. We help people match with others. This is a one-bedroom in a four-bedroom, but we're going to help you team up." We would get about **10,000 users a week** coming to our BunkSF.com website, and that's how I got our first bit of users—through Craigslist.

Hubspot

Being the takeaway, by the way, is we already knew the seekers were there. So it was just a piggyback where people already were. I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned—no out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot: grow better.

Shaan Puri

So, the smart part there is using Craigslist because Craigslist already had a lot of search volume. Basically, instead of SEO, you use CEO. It's like, go to Craigslist and use that traffic. But then, hosting the event—what did you do in these events, by the way? Was there anything special you did? How did you get people to come? 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 called "Pizza and Forties," where you would invite a speaker to an event, but you would tape two 40-ounce beers to their hands. The rule—this is genius, by the way—this was so good! I remember when you did this, I was like, "That guy, Sam, is cool. I want to be friends with him." Literally, I had that thought, and then I looked...

Sam Parr

At my company, the name of the game was "Pizza and Forties." I didn't even drink, but we didn't have a lot of money, so we would supply Costco pizza and have beer. The speaker had to have a 40-ounce beer, and the interview was done when the 40-ounce beer was finished.

Shaan Puri

Right, it's like a TED Talk, but instead of 18 minutes, it was however long he thinks. If he finished the beer, if he wants to get off the stage... chug, baby, chug!

Sam Parr

and and you get a little bit more loosey goosey with the questions towards the tail end

Shaan Puri

And then you're fine. That was genius! So that one was marketable. Did you have to do that for the apartment thing, or was it as simple as saying, "Hey, come check out the..."?

Sam Parr

So, we would get like hundreds of applicants for a 1-bedroom for a 4-bedroom. We were very transparent in the ad. It said, "This is not a 1-bedroom; it's a 1-bedroom and a 4-bedroom." What we were doing was hosting a party with 50 people. Here are the types of people who are coming. Show up at this time, and then they would team up and get a place. 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. Yeah, we were just really transparent about it. I would literally ride my bike at the time to the house and be like, "Knock, knock! I'm giving you $100, please," or $300, or however much it was. That's how we made money. But no, it was very easy. Now, you can't do this; Craigslist has changed how they operate. But this, by the way, is exactly how Airbnb got popular. Alright, what's yours?

Shaan Puri

Alright, I'm going to give you my first business as well. So, I’m 21 years old and we are starting a sushi restaurant chain. I'm living in Denver. The way our concept worked was like a cloud kitchen. We didn't want to sign a 10-year lease and build out a physical location, nor did we want to raise $500,000. We had a mentor who suggested, "What if you did a delivery-only method and rented a commissary kitchen by the hour?" I remember we were paying $19 an hour instead of having to sign a 10-year lease with a personal guarantee and drop about $300,000 to $500,000 to build it out. For $19 an hour, we could start on Monday. I was like, "Wow!"

Sam Parr

years you're 15 years in the future I mean you you nailed it

Shaan Puri

Yeah, we were too early, but still... how do we get customers back? DoorDash and Uber Eats didn't exist, so where are we going to get customers for our delivery-only restaurant? I didn't know any better. Knowing what I know now, I probably would have just run local ads—maybe Facebook ads or Google ads—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, which was like 12 minutes long. It was like, "We need customers." So, we thought, "Hey, we got the kitchen now; we need customers." I said, "Hey, I don't know, walk around and ask people." What I did was go downtown and do a version of door-to-door, but instead of door-to-door, I did floor-to-floor. I went into a skyscraper because I wanted density. I thought, "Oh, let me just go to this big office building. There are thousands of people working in this one building, so I don't have to walk around all day." I could just go in the elevator, click 1, get out, talk to whoever I see, click 2, get out, talk to whoever I see, and then go up, you know, 30 or 40 flights in this building. What I realized when I was doing this was kind of amazing. I actually recommend this to pretty much anyone. When you have a new thing, you have all these ideas about why it's so great, but you haven't actually pitched it to somebody in a concise way where you have, I don't know, 30 seconds to a minute to get your foot in the door. Then maybe another minute to explain what your thing is, and then you've got to make a call to action and try to get them to buy. My pitch really sucked, but because I was going floor to floor, it was like... high.

Sam Parr

floor to 20 by floor to 20 though

Shaan Puri

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 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 kinda 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 he 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 alright 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 for the 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 gonna 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 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 of 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 1 I remember we made like $13 in the 1st 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 where we got our first first customers

Sam Parr

how much revenue were you doing in year 6 or not year 6 month 3

Shaan Puri

Year six, zero, dude. We quit in month three because what we realized was, we were like, "Alright, 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 then a little bit more the second month. By then, it was like, "Dude, we were so worn out from just the process of running a restaurant." We kind of had a realization: "Great, we can keep scaling this, but that means we're going to have to keep doing this." It was tough. We were waking up at 4 in the morning, going to the fish market, and staying there until 11 at night because we would do private caterings at night and do dishes. We didn't know anything. I was so stupid; I didn't realize you should hire people. We just did everything ourselves.

Sam Parr

You were looking at your partner's one day after work and you're like, "Bail!" And they're like, "Bail! We're out!"

Shaan Puri

We had a realization. We realized we were in the wrong business. Actually, the genius of this was the delivery part. People liked food delivery, but they only ate sushi every couple of weeks at most. So we thought, "Oh, you know what we should do? We've been telling everyone for a year we're going to create the next 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." Then we were like, "Alright, I think that's true. Do we want to do that?" I was like, "Yeah." We had the smart thought, which was, "Hey guys, maybe the first business idea we ever had in our lives might not be the best one. We're still young, and we haven't committed anything to anybody. What if we just switch to a different business altogether?" 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. That would have been a terrible decision for us.

Sam Parr

That's hilarious! Alright, 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 at Antiamba.com, and that's how I met Cieva. I met Ryan Hoover this way; some of my best friends. Dude, I just put another ad on Craigslist and I said, "I'm organizing a business book club." It was just from Craigslist, and I ended up getting 10,000 people signing up to my email list.

Shaan Puri

By the way, again, sorry. Can we name these methods? I will call the first one you did either "piggybacking" because you piggybacked off Craigslist, or "host an event." Maybe that was the method you used. For mine, it was literally door-to-door. 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 "the magnet." Is there something different to it? Because it wasn't just an event. What you did was find a bunch of like-minded people. It was a filter. The only people who want to do a book club for biographies and business books are going to be the type of business nerds that you wanted to be around and create a product for. So, like the selective filter, we're confident 95% of people are going to be like, "Hell no," but 5% are going to say, "Hell yes," because it's so niche to their obsessions. I think there's something smart there that's different than just hosting a general event. It's a magnet.

Sam Parr

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. Alright, I'll do the second one though. Alright, 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 from one of the books that we read at my book club called *Made to Stick*. It was by Dan and Chip Heath. I think they're experts on virality. There was something in the book where it talked about... I forget exactly the phrase, but my takeaway was that phrase I always say: "Niches make riches." The idea being, if you ever see one of these BuzzFeed articles, it'll be like "50 reasons why" or "50 things only Long Islanders will laugh at."

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

or 50 things you know you're an italian american or 50 ways you know you're from saint louis and the thing about those is they don't get a huge amount of traffic but the people in long island or saint louis or who are italian they will always click it they 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 what's a funny quote they would say and I would read yelp and I would find out in in let's say new york like what is a 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 we shared them out on facebook and twitter and I think instagram I don't even remember where and we tagged 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 a 100000 users just from that infographic just from those 5 infographics and if you Google you guys can Google typical roommates of la and you'll see humphrey de post or all the local newspapers of those regions shared it and that's how we got all of our initial customers from from those 4 I remember seeing

Shaan Puri

I remember seeing the San Francisco one. It was really funny. It would be like... you're making it sound almost like it was utilitarian, but it was actually humorous. I thought, like, it wasn't just a funny shop. It would be like the Marina, and then it would be like whatever. I don't remember exactly how you phrased it, but it would be like, "Here, you're gonna find Kelsey is blah blah blah." You would kind of make fun of them but also backhandedly compliment them. Then you would say, "You know, the upside is you'll always have Lululemon around the house." The downside... blah blah blah. You would kind of poke fun at them, and because of that, everybody shared it.

Sam Parr

own neighborhood they'd be like that's

Shaan Puri

So true! That's so true. That's so us! Oh my god, this is you. For others, they didn't like the other neighborhoods. It was kind of like our team versus their team. A lot of people shared this thing. I was living in San Francisco at the time, and I remember seeing that right when I actually moved there. I was like, "This is actually quite useful," because it's not info you really found anywhere else either.

Sam Parr

it was

Shaan Puri

like it was like it would be like say this

Sam Parr

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. He's wearing a Cubs shirt. It said "Average 1-bedroom rent," "Average 2-bedroom rent," and "Here's how much you would save if you had a roommate." It says $310 per month or 20 Merkle's fishbowls, which I guess is like a restaurant in that area. It would also 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 The Stretch, trying to get the waitress to play "Find the Water" or calling everyone "boss." They say, "Hey bro, wanna shot ski?" 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 to throw in as many brands as possible. 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. They were swiping millions and millions and millions of times, right? So that's how we got traffic and users to the app: roommates.

Shaan Puri

Alright, I'm going to tell you. I'm going in order here. So, my next business was a biotech business in Australia. Now, biotech is very... like, we're talking about scrappy startup stories. Like, how do you get someone to download an app? How do you get somebody to order food? Biotech is like science. The people in it are like...

Sam Parr

an alley and they're like hey man here's a needle do you do you wanna try it

Shaan Puri

Well, it wasn't like human body biotech; it was basically clean energy. So the idea was our technology involved coal that's underground. People think coal is really dirty because if you mine it, you bring it up to the surface and burn it. Yes, it is very bad for the environment. However, our technology was this method where you don't have to mine it. You don't have to bring it out of the ground, and you don't have to burn it. Instead, what you do is pump little microbes into the ground—little naturally occurring microbes. Their natural feeding process is basically that they eat the coal. They 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 your pipe at the surface, and boom, you have a flare of natural gas.

Sam Parr

natural gas company like a big company

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it was a startup company. So basically, the backstory was that a scientist in the United States had received $40,000,000 in government funding to develop microbes that would decompose ammunition. The government had wars all around the world, and part of the environmental cleanup they needed to do as a result of these wars was to find something that could decompose a lot of the ammunition and the waste products. What happened was that the CEO of our company realized, "Hey, ammunition actually has a very similar composition to coal. I wonder if these bugs could decompose coal." It was speculative, and we didn't know if it would work. It worked in the lab, but would it work in the field? Now, what are you going to do to get your first customers? To get a customer, you need someone who owns land that has coal. You have to have permits, and they have to let you do work on their land. There was so much friction. So, what we did was what I'll call the method of the no-risk offer. We asked ourselves, "Who needs this the most?" We concluded that it couldn't be someone who actually values their coal because we couldn't afford to buy it. If you own land with a bunch of coal, that's basically like owning fuel—very valuable property. We needed to go to people that had stranded coal, meaning they had coal that was uneconomic to mine. It would be too deep or the ground structure was too difficult. There was coal, but it wasn't good for mining. We got really focused on finding someone for whom this was excess capacity. I think they are like Airbnb; that's what they did, right? They sold excess rooms and excess space in your house. We took that same method and asked ourselves, "How do we make a no-risk offer?" So, we went to them and said, "Look, you're sitting on a bunch of coal..."

Sam Parr

what's that like who's an example for us

Shaan Puri

We would find landowners by conducting a geographic survey. We looked for stranded coal, meaning coal that is not economic to mine. Then, we would figure out from the property records who owns that land. We would knock on their door and say, "Did you know you're sitting on a bunch of coal?" They would often respond, "Yeah, but you can't really mine it. We did a feasibility study, and it didn't work." We would then 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?" If they were interested, they would ask, "Okay, tell me more." We would explain, "Well, look, we have this technology, but obviously, we need to prove it. It will only take us this much space, and here's the deal: we will do this all at our cost. This whole method costs you nothing. But if it works, we want a share of the upside." They would respond, "Okay, so you might make my land way more valuable, and I only pay you if you do it. If it doesn't work, I'm out nothing. Deal?"

Sam Parr

and so we throw in a tray of sushi

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So then we were able to do this. Now, this is something that Alex Ramosi did with his gym launch. If you listen to his story, what he would do is go to the gym owners and say, "I have a marketing program." They would respond, "I don't want to buy it. We've tried a bunch of marketing things. I don't have enough money to do this. I'm not going to buy your marketing program for $10,000." So he reworked his offer. He said, "How about this? I will increase your sales by $100,000 using my marketing method. All I ask is that any of the incremental revenue we bring in, we get to keep 15%." It's like, "Okay, so you keep 15%, but you don't get anything if you don't raise my revenue?" He would reply, "Yeah, if we don't raise your revenue by X, we get nothing."

Sam Parr

yeah no brainer

Shaan Puri

Did a no-brainer offer. Main Street did the same thing and grew really fast in the tech startup community by saying, "Hey, there are R&D tax credits available. We will do it for you. We keep 20% or 25% of all the extra tax credits you get. You're not going to do this anyway, so it's just free money for you." A lot of people use this no-risk offer method, and I think that's a very, very fast way to bypass one of the hardest parts of being a new company, which is that you have no relationships. Nobody trusts you; you have no track record. So, you need to offer them something that has zero downside and only upside.

Sam Parr

how many customers did you get doing that

Shaan Puri

Well, ironically, what ended up happening was we had like five interested customers. Then one of them was like, "Hey, hey, hey! If you're going to do this, I want to own this technology." Basically, they said, "Don't go to my competitors with this offer. They're going to have this benefit, and I want this." So then they came back later and renegotiated the deal. They said, "How about this? We'll give you $5,000,000 and the land, and we'll do the permitting for you." We were like, "Okay, what's the catch?" They replied, "The catch is if this works, we want to be able to buy 50% of the technology for $50,000,000." Then we were like, "Alright, fine. Deal's like, you know, this business is so freaking hard. Let's just try this."

Sam Parr

in

Shaan Puri

The end... I don't think it ever ended up working, or I'm not sure what actually happened because I left after that deal was signed. I was like, "Oh, I'm..."

Sam Parr

not interested microbiomes don't even like charcoal so turns out that no

Shaan Puri

They didn't even work in the lab, but I think it would have turned out to be kind of expensive. What actually happened is this field trial was going to take 5 years to complete. I wasn't going to sit around and wait for the conclusion of this. So, I think what happened was the guy who said yes got fired or took another job. The next person who came in was like, "I don't know, I don't want to fund this." I have no idea what happened; it kind of died on the vine.

Sam Parr

but you got the customers and that's the. Of the episode

Shaan Puri

Yeah, we got them. Expecting them, the subsequent failure is irrelevant. Okay?

Sam Parr

That doesn't matter. Alright, my next one. So, I started a conference series called **Hustle Con**. I ended up hosting this event maybe 4 or 5 times. The first time I hosted it, I decided to hold it in May, and I think the event happened in July—July 1 or July 15th. I had roughly 6 weeks between deciding to do it and the event happening. I think I made **$60** in revenue and **$50,000** in profit. The next year, I think it was something like **$180** in revenue, and my costs were only **$20**. So, whatever that is, that's what I made. Then I did it again, and I think I made like a quarter of a million in revenue and like **$200,000** in profit. After that, we hosted a bunch more events.

Shaan Puri

peak did like 600 k right

Sam Parr

Yeah, each event was doing like a couple of times. We got close to $1,000,000, and I made a ton of mistakes. The biggest mistake I made is that 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. I also charged like $300 to attend this event, so I screwed up the business. However, I did get a lot of hype right away. The way that I got hype was I actually found one of my old posts. This one is on Priceonomics. So, this guy Rohan, 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. He was going to give a talk on content marketing. What I would do is, I think I had eight speakers. I wrote a blog post every Tuesday and Thursday on each speaker. I would go to Hacker News and I would go to Reddit to figure out which subreddits would fit best for this article. Later on, in my second thing I'm going to talk about after you go, I ended up eventually running blog posts specifically that would get popular on Reddit in different subreddits. But at this...

Sam Parr

I hadn't figured that out. So, right away, I think on the first day of business, I got about 1,000 people to come to the website. After that, it would go from 1,000 to 5,000 on any given day. You would go to the website, and it would say a funny pop-up that would get your attention. It would say, "Give me your email." At hustlecon.com, you couldn't even purchase a ticket unless you gave me your email. You couldn't even see all of the details without it. So, I would collect people's emails. The way I had it set up was that I would write blog post number one and put it on Reddit. Then, blog post number two would also go on Reddit. The traffic would come, and when I got their email, they would go into a cycle where they would be sent blog post number one, then blog post number two, and I would keep writing blog posts number three, four, and five. I would keep emailing them to the past subscribers, so it was like a cycle. Those people would share just a little bit, and that's how I eventually got 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, and even 5,000 people coming to the website. I did another thing where I made the speakers look like heroes. It was like a glowing article about them, and they would share it within their company. Each employee would share it to be proud, and that's how I got 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, and 5,000 people. I think if you Google "hustleconnev blogs," my friend Neville Medhora, spelled N-E-V, wrote a blog post about how I made $60 in like six weeks. 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—just by doing that blogging. When I say "we," I mean me in my kitchen, just doing this in my crappy San Francisco apartment.

Shaan Puri

That's great! I remember reading those blog posts. They're really good. I highly suggest you go read those; they're detailed and specific. You literally have screenshots of what you wrote in certain emails, and I think that's really cool to see. I like when people share those specifics. Oh, do you hear that? Do you hear that? That's the dude... that's the thrill of the shill.

Sam Parr

Oh, I thought we had a pause. I thought we had a pause. Like, wait, what? Alright, you've got 90 seconds to thrill me. Alright, and for those of...

Shaan Puri

You who remember the thrill of the show, it's where we showcase something. But the way we do it is with value. We do it by entertaining with a little bit of story. So, I was going to talk to you about Shepherd, but the way I did it was I asked Marshall, "When are you launching this thing?" Because this is now a business that is coming up on, like, I guess I really should say, about $1,000,000 in profit a year. So, it's a very, very, very healthy business. How old?

Sam Parr

are they 4 years

Shaan Puri

yeah like less than 4 years old so 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 he goes well I did a couple of things but he's like what I did was I he's 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 did the sign emoji and they said hint it's an agency and he had a small twitter following about 10,000 followers at the time 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 giving him about it and then what he did next is like I'm gonna 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 it 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 my business was was doing good and he's like but I or so he's like he's like I had this business it was kinda struggling I was working all the time but we never really had any profits I realized I 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 cost I didn't really know what to do so I looked for where could I lower my cost 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 we 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 0 to profit margin of whatever 15% 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 supportshepherd.com to help you find equip amazing employees that are 80% less than the us equivalent he goes blah blah blah then he sent me the screenshot we could show 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

Sam Parr

normally an ad would get like a one to 3% click exactly

Shaan Puri

So, it's **10 times better**. Why is it 10 times better? Because, again, he kind of opened up the kimono and told the story. To support Shepherd.com, it says **1,300 people** clicked that link. From that, you can even assume that even like a **3% conversion** on **1,300 people** is going to get you, you know, your first **20 to 30 customers** to get the ball rolling. For a business like this, where each customer is worth **$1,000**, that was enough to really move the needle. Then, what he did was just keep doing the same thing. 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**. 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**. For the first three hours of the day, all he would do would be reply to people's tweets. Anytime somebody said something about Product Hunt, he would reply personally. Anytime somebody mentioned a cool product, he would say, "That's awesome! Do you want to post that on Product Hunt? I gave you access." He would manually brute force this in the mornings. Then, he would go to **Fast Company** and say, "Hey, do you want to cover Product Hunt?" They'd be like, "I never heard of it." So, he thought, "Damn, I really want to get press, but I can't. They don't want to talk about Product Hunt; it's not sexy enough." Instead, what he did was go to **Fast Company** and say, "Hey, I signed up **1,000 customers** for my side project in a weekend. Can I tell you how we did it?" He wrote this blog post; it's already written in this **Google Doc**. "Will you guys run this as a guest post?" If you go look, Product Hunt has a bunch of posts that he wrote. He would get to **100 customers**, then write the post about how he got to **100 customers** and get that posted somewhere on **Indie Hackers** or whatever. That would get him to **1,000**, then he would go write the post about how he got to **1,000**. 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**."

Sam Parr

a week and he did the work for them

Shaan Puri

And he did the work for them. 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." That method I saw was something somebody else did that worked really well.

Sam Parr

Alright, solid thrill of the show. Good job! You forgot the call to action: "Join Shepherd.com. Support Shepherd.com." Alright, what's your next one?

Shaan Puri

Okay, so my next one I call "pissing in the pond." Pissing in the pond is as good of a method as it sounds like. So what you want to do, like you said...

Sam Parr

niches like a horrible method

Shaan Puri

there's riches and niches similarly what you wanna do is not try to boil the ocean bad phrase you wanna 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 wanna do is say alright I'm small anyways to me when I have no customers 10 customers is a big win 100 customers is a a phenomenal win and so where can I go that is small but hyper obsessed and so what we did when we launched our ecommerce 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 may be 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 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 ecom biz we did I think 30,000 in month 1 in in revenue but I think 28,000 specifically and our ad spend was only maybe 500 or a 1000 so we did 2 try ads but most of the 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 a 100 100 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 are 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 because 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 our dev ops guy was like hey I built this app it's like four 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 beer who love who doesn't love beer and so we were kinda like maybe there's a thing here and actually to this day actually there is a business called untapp 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

Sam Parr

even drink beer do you

Shaan Puri

The guy who... well, I drink beer, but I'm not like a craft beer aficionado. I'm not the type who loves to go try new craft beers, all different kinds.

Sam Parr

Like drinking a Miller Lite... Ah yes, this is beautiful. You did a brewery.

Shaan Puri

tour once and the guy was like smell these hops and I was like no thanks I don't smell that

Sam Parr

have french fries

Shaan Puri

Exactly! I was like, "Can I just drink it? I don't care about all this." So, anyway, 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 it?" Again, if you go to the mass market, the 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 what I'll call the **booth babes method**. It's about how do you actually make a splash at an event? So, we weren't hosting this one; we were attending. We dressed up like it was Oktoberfest. We wore outfits like we were straight from Germany. We came and thought, "People probably won't just download our app if we say, 'Download our app.'" So, how do we get...

Sam Parr

these when you did this 23 24

Shaan Puri

And so, we... you know, our whole company was older, but we were all there, and they were down for it, which I liked. Our engineers were doing this, and so what we did was create a scavenger hunt for the conference. We were like, "Hey, here's a little card. If you can mark off all these things at this conference, we're gonna give one person, you know, whatever... some beer dream. It was like, you're gonna get a year supply of craft beer." It didn't even matter what the prize was; the idea was that people were going to wander around this place anyway. They were happy to play the game of marking things off as they went. So, we had our branded little scavenger hunt. They would do it, and at the end, we had a guy standing at the door. He would collect them and give them out, and he would collect them. On it, they had their email address, and so now we had basically, I think, we had 1,400 leads or something from the states. 1,400 leads of people who were so into craft beer that they would pay the money to go to this craft beer tasting festival type thing. Those became the first, you know, whatever... 700 customers, 700 people to download our app, and they really cared. So, that really cranked the engine to get something started.

Sam Parr

Seeing you at 23 years old at a fancy brewery reminded me of a time when I told Neville, "I go, Neville, I've never been to a strip club." Somehow, it came up, and he was like, "I'm gonna take you right now." I was like, "I don't really want to go to a strip club." He said, "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." I don't drink, so it was even worse. We went to the strip club, and I was so uncomfortable. I was rubbing my hands; I didn't know what to do with them. Then, these strippers came up and touched my shoulders, asking, "Hey, can I get you anything?" I was like, "Yeah, can I get some ketchup for these fries?"

Shaan Puri

like the waitresses

Sam Parr

Yeah, like, the food was only $6. It was $1 for fries and $5 for a sandwich. I remember texting my wife and asking, "How much do I tip?" because I kind of took up a seat but I didn't do anything. It was just the most uncomfortable I've ever been. It's like the first and only time I've ever been to a strip club was at 2 o'clock at the airport in Austin. And that just... can I...

Shaan Puri

Tell you the one time I went to a strip club. It's an incredible story. So, I've been there one time in my life, you know, maybe 22 years old, something like that. We go, and it's me... People know me, so I don't need to describe myself. But it's my buddy who's like the ladies' man. This guy was the big man on campus. You know how your dorm has an RA? He hooked up with the RA's girlfriend. It's like, that guy's a senior, and he was like, "Wow, this guy's just amazing."

Sam Parr

and so we go with this guy he's the man

Shaan Puri

And then we go with our other buddy, who is like Mr. Long-Term Relationship. He's been in a relationship forever and has never known this guy, not in a relationship, but he had just broken up. So we go to a strip club because, you know, like in Vegas, they're like, "Hey boys, you want some free drinks? Get in this limo." We're like, "Oh wow, what's the difference? I could drive you like 30 minutes away to a strip club." And then now you're here, and you have two 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 a strip club. So we go to the bar. Again, I'm uncomfortable. Let me just find a safety net. It's like, "We'll still 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 the stripper going into the back room. I'm like, "It's been less than like 2 minutes!"

Sam Parr

got cut

Shaan Puri

We're like, "What's he doing?" So we had several questions. 1. I can't put my finger on it, but why is he doing this so fast? 2. Why is he going to the back room? Isn't that for the high-tier stuff? Why isn't he just sitting here and watching the shipper? 3. Most importantly, why did he pick her? He had picked, objectively and completely scientifically, the least attractive stripper in the place. So, 15 minutes go by, and he comes back out. I'm like, "I have a thousand questions. What happens in the back room?"

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

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 did you pick her? Man, you could've picked anybody here. And he goes, "Oh, you could pick..." He goes, "Oh, 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."

Sam Parr

and neither of us have been to a strip club since

Shaan Puri

since never been again same

Sam Parr

can't top that alright I'll do one last one trench transyacht co we're gonna go from shipper to what the saas yeah saas is fast yeah I hope people have made it this far trends transat co was a paid research newsletter that I launched when we sold it 18 months after launching it I think it was doing 4 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 I did this like I 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 23 100% 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 in 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 gonna be able to catch the tidal wave instead of miss it I'm gonna charge $300 a year for this but right now you just spend a $100 and you get a lifetime of of access and so I got originally I got a 1000 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 presales and the way that I got the initial 100 users is the hustle at the time probably had a 1000000 emails and I just found the 300 engaged users and I sent them an email that basically explained the 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 did you do this what are you looking for what 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 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 or 500,000 by month 18 and so it worked and we built the product around just calling those people

Shaan Puri

Yeah, that's like you had a launch pad. You had an audience that you had built for years, and then you were able to do this. 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 build a launch pad along the way.

Sam Parr

So, just to recap, I did the same thing with Hampton. 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. Some people had known me, so I called and emailed people on LinkedIn, and I called people on Twitter. If you want to do this methodology, you could still do it that way.

Shaan Puri

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 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 run ads or do cold emails. I would go door to door instead. But also, some of it's in the specifics. For example, for Milk Road, I had an audience. I had a newsletter, and I had this podcast. I could have just mentioned it, but I layered on another tactic, which is what I call the "David Blaine method." You know, David Blaine will do this thing where he's like...

Sam Parr

I'm gonna freeze myself for a week

Shaan Puri

Yeah, watch me, you know, slightly torture myself and try to do something incredible. And he's like, "Alright, I'm gonna freeze myself in a block of ice. I'm gonna bury myself underground."

Sam Parr

I'm gonna hold my breath until I pass out yeah

Shaan Puri

I'm gonna... he literally did one where he's like, "I'm gonna hold on to these balloons and fly away." I was like, "Okay, dope." And he did it! He flew away like in the movie *Up*. So, David Blaine does this stuff. When we started the Milk Road, I thought, "Okay, if I told people that I'm starting a daily newsletter about crypto for those who want to read the latest news and info on crypto, I think people would sign up." But I wanted to juice it a little bit. So, how did I go a little bit further? I thought, "Let me do a stunt." I said, "I am funding..." and of course, 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. What I did was say, "I'm gonna put $1,000,000 in this wallet. You can go look at the address right now; here's $1,000,000 in a wallet. Then I'm gonna try to turn this into $10,000,000 through trading crypto." This is like, you know, Dave from Barstool does this with his "David Day Trader." Jason Calacanis tried to copy that and do "JTrader." 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. They'd be like, "I'm starting with this bankroll. I'm either going broke or I'm going to this level. I'm getting to this milestone, and here I'm gonna post all of my history." It never works out, but it's really fun to watch. That's exactly what happened. I managed to turn $1,000,000—because we bought it at, you know, peak crypto—into what became like $350,000 at the bottom. 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, 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.

Sam Parr

And the other version of this is what people now call "building in public." Before that, Buffer and ConvertKit did the stuff where they would share all their team's salaries and the company's revenue. It tends to work. I remember this guy named Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income. He was one of the first to do this. He would share his monthly revenue and where it all came from. I would go there every month to see what he was doing, and it totally worked.

Shaan Puri

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 a story? There's the hero, they have a goal, and they have an obstacle. Then, there are some stakes—there's something on the line. I think that's the way to juice that up. It's not just, "I'm gonna build in public, so I'll provide a monthly update." It's, "I'm gonna try to do X, and if I don't do X..." You know, there's a risk involved. I'm putting something on the line trying to get there, and I'm going to attempt to do this incredible thing—not just inch my way forward. If I said, "Hey, I'll show you some of the things I'm investing in," that'd be okay. But to say, "I'm gonna try to turn $1,000,000 into $10,000,000 or go bust," that makes people want to watch more. So, I think the David Blaine spectacle method is another one.

Sam Parr

I want to see you do that with your second trip to the strip club, Bill, in public, bro.

Shaan Puri

I'm gonna order as much food and free water as I can until they pick 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?

Sam Parr

alright we gotta end there that's the pod