StreamYard's 7-Person Exit
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Sam Parr shares a story about StreamYard, a streaming platform built by two founders with minimal employees that achieved massive success.
"StreamYard was started by two guys, Gage and Dan. They were basically making it a way for streamers to stream, but then eventually pivoted so it could be like a professional stream platform.
They launched in 2019 and it was just them two, and they got up to $3M in ARR. Then the pandemic hits and in one year they went from $3M to $30M annually recurring revenue - zero outside money, just these two guys.
They eventually sold that same year to Hopin for $250M in cash, and these two guys owned the whole thing. When they sold, they had scaled the company to $20M in ARR with 5 people, and by the time they sold they had $30M ARR with just 7 employees.
Really, it was built with 2-3 people, and then the second half they were like 'our customer service was just getting out of control and so we had to have someone manage like an agency who was doing our customer service.' They were already killing it, but they hit a lucky break with COVID that accelerated everything. But they were doing $3M with 2 guys like a year and a half into the business."
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.