WP Beginner's Plugin Empire
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A story about Saeed Balkhi, who turned a WordPress tutorial blog into a massive WordPress plugin business.
"Saeed owns this thing called WP (WordPress), it's called Awesome Corp. He started as a blog called WP Beginner, which was just a blog on how to use WordPress. Now he owns tons of WordPress plugins. I don't know exactly how big it is, but I bet it's worth half a billion dollars, of which he probably owns most of it. It probably does many tens of millions in revenue and probably tens of millions in profit.
He has this amazing business that's basically a monopoly and prints cash. Then he does interesting things with his cash - like he owns about 40 gas stations. But they're triple net leases - he just owns the buildings that other people operate in, and they pay for all the maintenance.
His mentor taught him one thing: don't spend the first derivative money. When cash comes in from your business, you don't spend that money on life expenses. You only spend the second derivative. So if a million comes in, that million has to be invested into something, and then the income from that investment is what you get to spend. He said if you do that, you'll never go broke.
For example, before having a kid, he bought a gas station. The gas station makes money each month that pays for the kid's expenses. That's how his brain works."
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.