Accidental Porn Gif Success
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Sam Parr shares a story about two developers who accidentally created a viral porn website while trying to build a gif search engine.
"I used to share this office called Founders Dojo, and there were these two guys - the most stereotypical Silicon Valley nerds. It was a skinny Indian dude and this white guy that looked like a jock but was actually the dorkiest dude ever. They were partners and it was a hilarious combination.
They created technology that would crawl the internet and find the most shared and popular HD gifs. They spent hours making the search incredibly fast - if you typed in one letter it would autofill with search suggestions instantly. They launched it and it did okay at first.
Then one day we get to the office and they had stayed there all night, sleeping under their desk. Their website was called 'The Worst Drug' and what happened was some porn guys got ahold of it. They discovered the most shared gifs on the web were almost all porn. They had disabled the safe-for-work filter and suddenly had millions of people coming to the website overnight.
They slept at the office for weeks trying to keep up with the traffic and increase the speed. Eventually someone in Romania offered to buy it - they flew there and it turned out to be some gangsters with guns. They came back and it was this whole ordeal. That's the one time I really saw product-market fit work."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.