Filipino Support Boosts Mars
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Sam Parr shares a story about why Bruno Mars has billions of views on YouTube, highlighting the power of niche community support.
"I was watching Bruno Mars YouTube videos and they have like 1-4 billion views. Bruno Mars has 4 billion views and I was wondering why. I looked it up on Wikipedia and the YouTube comments - Bruno Mars' mother is Filipino. The Philippines has hundreds of millions of people, but in terms of their cultural relevance on a global scale, they're not exactly represented a ton.
When this American-Filipino guy got famous, it's kind of like Jeremy Lin in the NBA. There's a lot of Chinese people but there weren't a lot of Chinese basketball players. When Bruno Mars got famous, the Filipinos were like 'Yes! One of us is killing it' and they get behind that person.
It's the same with Bjork from Iceland - Iceland isn't incredibly relevant and doesn't exactly invent a lot of entertainment that gets recognized on a grand scale. When Bjork gets a little bit of love from America or Europe, they all pounce on that. It's like Nelly in St. Louis - my 65-year-old white dad is like 'Nelly's the man.' Everyone in St. Louis treats Nelly like our god, our mayor, because he represented us and we didn't have a lot of representation."
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.