Business Insider's Growth Pause
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Sam Parr shares a story about Business Insider's early growth challenges and how even successful companies go through long plateaus.
"I remember when we were running The Hustle, I looked up to Business Insider. Henry Blodget wrote an article about 6 years into the company where he made a funny joke saying they 'eked out a net profit of $21,100 on revenues of $4.8 million - basically enough to buy a MacBook Pro.'
When you look at their traffic graph, it looks like this nice exponential arc going up. But when I zoomed in on the picture, you could see it broken down by month. In February '09 they hit an all-time high, and then they didn't surpass that until December '09. For 10 months, 2 years into the company, their monthly traffic either went down or didn't go up.
When you do that every single day, every single week for 10 months, it feels miserable. Then you zoom out and see it has gone up, but these graphs are never smooth. Sometimes for 2 years, 3 years, 4 years it'll be pretty bad, and then after a while it starts picking up if you do a handful of things right. But that requires extreme faith and it's very hard to manage your emotions every day when it's like that."
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.