Facebook Changes Destroy Media
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A story about how Joe Speiser built Little Things into a massive media company on Facebook traffic, only to see it collapse when Facebook changed their algorithm.
"Joe started his first company, an ad tech company, and sold it for hundreds of millions when he was 25. His next business was PetFlow, a pet food company started before Chewy. To make PetFlow grow, he created a blog with pet content. Within a very short time, they were getting 10-20-30 million people a month to this blog.
They pivoted to focus entirely on the blog, and within 4 years they became the most shared website on Facebook - bigger than Viral Nova, bigger than BuzzFeed, bigger than HuffPo. They were getting about 250 million uniques a month and scaled to $90 million in revenue in 4 years.
They had 150 employees and built out a $250,000 studio in Manhattan for Facebook Live, thinking it was the next big thing. They got an LOI to sell the business and were literally 3 weeks away from selling for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Then Facebook put out their annual report announcing they were changing their strategy. The company that was going to buy them backed out, and within 6 months the business had to lay off everyone and shut down. They went from making $100 million a year to nothing in a matter of 6-7 months.
Joe posted publicly that he was set to make $50 million from the sale, and 3 weeks away from closing, it all went away."
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.