Hustle's $25k Bootstrap Story
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Sam Parr shares how he bootstrapped The Hustle from savings to a profitable business in its first year.
"When we started The Hustle, I saved up $25,000 to start it. With that $25,000, I made $60,000 in profit in 6 weeks. The first year in business was roughly $380,000 in revenue, and most of it was profit.
We were an LLC and I withdrew $2,000 a month in salary - that's how I paid my bills. My rent was very cheap, hundreds of dollars a month, and I lived off $1,200 beyond that. I lived very frugally.
Then we decided to raise money - $300,000 from investors at a 3.5 million dollar valuation. We had to convert from an LLC to a C-Corp. By the end of our first year, we had between $300,000-500,000 in the bank account.
When we started doing stock options, we signed up for Carta and got a 409A valuation. They valued us in the millions of dollars range. I was 24 at the time. On paper I was a millionaire, but I was still only taking $2,000 a month and wasn't saving any money."
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.