Dictionary.com $100M Exit
Share
A story about how Sam Parr discovered the founder of Dictionary.com through real estate research.
"I found this interesting story while researching real estate purchases. I discovered a guy named Brian Carringer who bought a house in Malibu in 2019 for $20 million. I hadn't heard of him, so I researched him and found out he's the guy who started Dictionary.com.
In 1995, he started a business called Lexico Publishing which owned Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com. He bootstrapped it and grew it until he sold it to IAC in 2005 for $100 million. Two years ago, IAC sold Dictionary.com to Dan Gilbert (Quicken Loans) for $100 million.
Today, Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com get around 40 million unique visitors a month and do about $20 million in revenue with just dozens of employees. They make money purely from ads. They've stayed relevant by doing things like Word of the Day, Word of the Year, and being culturally relevant on social media. It's what I call a 'forgotten property' - things that you forget even exist but quietly make money and are quite reputable."
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.