Ukrainian Media Empire
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Sam Parr shares a story about two Ukrainian entrepreneurs who built a massive media empire starting at age 25.
"There are these two guys in Ukraine, Ivan and Dimitry, who started this company when they were 25. The holding company is called AMO and they've got three arms of the business.
The first part was AMO Publishing. They created these clickbaity news websites geared toward moms with headlines like 'Elderly couple divorces after 53 years of marriage, later man sees ex-wife dating in a cafe.' They switched to Facebook videos and got huge - 53 million followers on Facebook. They have AMOMama with 14 million followers, AMO Nostalgia, and AMOMews.
Then they created AMO Pictures and launched a YouTube channel called Dramatize Me. It has 2.4 million subscribers and 500 million views. They make soap operas that are 20-30 minutes long, and they dub them in different languages.
From there, they started launching apps. Their first big app helped women exercise during their periods. Then they launched Unimeal, a healthy meal plan app that costs $20 a week. Their latest is Mad Muscles, which gets 11 million visits a month and has 35,000 reviews.
These young guys started just 4-5 years ago and now have close to 400 employees in Ukraine. Nobody in America is talking about them, but they have this massive media empire. They're the scrappiest people I've ever seen - they just launch stuff and follow the numbers. When something works, they do a spin-off."
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.