Penny Hoarder's Side Hustle Success
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Sam Parr shares the success story of how The Penny Hoarder grew into a $70M business.
"The Penny Hoarder started as a blog by this guy named Kyle. He started it in 2012 and would document all the side hustles he was doing. He would go on TaskRabbit and get people's groceries, become an Instacart driver, do Uber driving - and he'd talk about how much money he was making from each.
He got really good at getting traffic. Eventually Uber approached him saying 'for every new driver you refer to us, we'll give you $2,000.' Instacart did the same thing, TaskRabbit did the same thing, User Testing did the same thing.
He built this digital ad business. When he came to our event, he brought his dog. I asked how he got his dog on the plane and he said 'I fly private.' I was shocked and asked if he was crushing it that hard. He said 'Yeah, we bootstrapped it and we'll do about $70 million in revenue this year.' He owned 100% of the company and recently sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars.
The whole premise was talking about ways to make money, mostly targeting lower income people - like a mom trying to make ends meet with just 10 hours available between taking care of her kids. It was just a WordPress blog, that's all it was."
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.