Every Business I Tried Before Making My First Million

alright everyone in this podcast we talk a lot about the successes but i wanna talk about the failure so here's about ten different companies that i started before i made my first million almost all of them they sucked it didn't work but i'm gonna to explain how much i made for each idea and the lesson that i learned i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less travel alright what's up sam what's going on let's set this up name of this podcast my first man when did you make your first meal so cash like cash million i made it when my wife worked at airbnb and it went public and right that that's only made our first and then about three months later i think it went later in december my company sold in february and then we made a lot leading up to that we were doing pretty good too but i don't think we had crossed one million okay so you made your first million let's call it thirty one years old here's all the businesses you tried before that before making your first million which i think is pretty fascinating i wanna go down this list it does it start in high school yeah alright go go far give me number one in high squad made twenty five hundred dollars one summer by buying graduating seniors old sports equipment and selling it on ebay and so what i used to do is i would just buy like people's like track spikes or you know whatever and i would sell it on ebay and i'll most time that i didn't buy it they would just give it to me they handed it to me and right on eb ebay i made twenty five hundred dollars so that was my first business where i actually started making an online money and this is flipping basically this is flipping assets that other people not only value they might even to not value to the point where they're happy you took it off their hands yeah and frankly i did this in college too which i didn't list here is when at the end of the college here i would i would stay a few weeks after the end of the school year and when people were moving out i said i have a storage unit you'd come in put it here and just give it me you're gonna throw it away just give it to and then i and i would resell it exact i saw people doing this in college with textbooks they would just say oh at the end of the year you don't wanna take all these heavy textbooks home you're done with that class well guess what the next semester there's bunch people that are gonna need that exact textbook though we're happy to buy it at use and so they would just go buy up people's tech they would just take people's textbooks and they each book was like you know a forty or fifty dollar you know future sale that they were able to pick up for free okay and then at twenty i started a hotdog dog stand whichever everyone makes fun me if for talking about you i have a hot dog stand you have a sushi restaurant there's sick of us talking about it but i had one called southern sam so we as big as a baby's arm basically i knew a guy named doc who had a hot dog stand he let me rent it from him with very little money up front i had i was able to pay him on the t as opposed to the first the month so he hooked me up and with five hundred dollars i went to restaurant depot and i bought a bunch of vienna sausages to get my supply and i was in business baby within a week of having this idea and i used to live in a bad neighborhood ride dell was my next store neighbor and he became my best friend he had served twenty years in prison for attempted murder and somehow we became best friend he had the he had the spare key to my house this was my guy and ride dell ended up working with me at southern sam's and we spent all day outside and it was a pain in the butt some days i would make fifty bucks other days i would go to a concert or like an outdoor place that was popping and i would make a thousand dollars and i did that when i was about twenty or twenty one this is summer in college or what were you doing i was in college i was in class and so i would work until three pm i would go to classes from three pm into eight pm and then i had a night session where i was out by all the bars and that would be like a nine pm to like one am that's amazing how did you have the idea to do the hotdog stand you just saw somebody else doing it i met a guy who had a car and i wanted to do something yeah did he tell you like i'm making three hundred bucks a night or something but would it saw the video online of a guys like how much money the home depot hot dog guys make they make one hundred thousand dollars a year the ad said and you were like in i was a man i was i was broke i i had by phd poor hard and driven i was would you do this again this one no man it was so hard it was so hard not now but like if you're were nineteen twenty and you needed to i learned how to sell so well man this is what inspired me in the copywriting i realized that you had to like wheel and deal a little bit you had a sc you had a flirt you had to do this and then i realized what if i could do this on the internet where i could write something one time and have an infinite amount of people come and read it and didn't have to sell constantly didn't have to stand there in the heat and didn't have to stand on the heat i will post a photo here i had these horrible i mean look at me i'm like the widest guy ever i had these horrible sunburn that when i took my tank top off it still looked like i was wearing a shirt just a white like peter there there's this there's this tweet tweet that's been going viral that's so they said flirt with everyone flirt with flirt with women flirt with men flirt with old people flirt kids just flirt with everybody it's non sexual but literally just be the most playful charming person you could be at all times like practice this muscle and i actually think this is a hundred percent true i know a couple people in my life that are like this i'm not really like that but i've been starting to do it just for fun just it's a little mini game you know when you're just living a pretty routine life you're just go to the grocery store it's either gonna be a forget experience or you try something to make it a little more fun i been doing this and it's kind of amazing know what i call you know not i'll be able say nonchalant be be don't be nonchalant be as hell yeah be try hard i i emailed my wealth manager at morgan stanley and i was like hey i made this trade and it like there's was like a commission of like a hundred something bucks at the end of it like the trade i was like is there like a magic button you got over there man like you got this magic button a push that makes all those fees go okay and that was what i sent with you the private wealth manager and he goes he just replied magic button pushed trades commissions reversed enjoy your trading and i was like just flirt it with everybody yeah like i could've have been annoying karen i could've just i could've just took it done nothing i could've have been a karen complaining just flirt a little bit and everybody likes to be flirt with so my next business after that i started this thing basically in tennessee at the time white whiskey which it's called moons moonshot moons moonshot technically means illegal whiskey but there is these companies making whiskey that wasn't a mason jar and it they called it moons moonshot and i started selling that online and i thought i was doing it the right way because i kinda like googled it and i talked to like a lawyer where i was like selling it as a novelty because it was kind of like a gift item i did that for about two or three months and then i went to my universities like entrepreneurship program with ed free legal advice and i was like hey i've made ten grand and like the last like you know thirty days or something selling this whiskey online i think i'm following the right rules but is there anything else i need to be doing and they're like yeah brother you gotta you better shut that down tonight and so that was like my second internet business which inspired me to get into the game of the internet and my lesson learned on that one was if you're gonna do something like this you better really do it right and you better pick something that aligns with your values around this time i was still drinking and i didn't even like alcohol i mean you know i had a love hate relationship and i like why am gonna start selling i i don't wanna do this is stupid anyway but you're gonna see there's a pattern it was definitely like a quick money which i think everyone who becomes a good entrepreneur they they do the gray hat gray hat area phase and this was my gray hat phase okay i like it you started it online did you learn about online marketing through this like were you i mean how'd you how'd you get the ten k where'd you where'd did you get your customers from i posted on forums like motorcycle forums like so basically like this is a whiskey that i was selling people were already searching for it because got drink drive of course that should've have been the name that people were already searching for this whiskey but it was very early and so i was able to rank super easily on google and i posted on message boards forms of people who wanting who people who wanted it and that's why made money nice alright so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they wanna hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business and really a lot of people who are listening they have a full time job and they wanna start something on the side a side hustle now a lot of people message sean and i and they say alright i wanna start something on the side is this a good idea is that a good idea and again what they're really just say is just give me the ideas well my friends they're in luck so my old company the hustle they put together a hundred different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it the side hustle idea database it's a list of a hundred pretty good ideas frankly i went through them they're awesome and it gives you how to start them how to grow them things like that gives you a little bit of inspiration so check it out it's called the side hustle idea database it's in the description below you'll see the link click it check it out let me know the comments what you think okay so now you moved to san francisco i think you you don't you just do like a cross country motorcycle ride to get san francisco as well i do it at a later date but this time i flew out there because i had a job offer at airbnb which got res scented when i got there because i'd lied on my resume about getting a dui ui and so i was out there i'm like what the hell am i gonna do i gotta meet people and so i started a thing called the anti nba book club and i tried monetizing it but i couldn't really at first and so what i did was i posted ads on craigslist and on reddit and i think i posted on facebook and i got two thousand people to sign up but here was the premise it was called the anti nba because i was very en of stanford students in berkeley students i was very en that they had this network and said i'm gonna read it one book per month we're gonna break it up into a quarter so a week a week a week a week and i'm gonna find an expert on that books topic and we're gonna come and discuss it with that expert i'll organize and get the expert you come it's free and i got twenty one hundred people to sign up to my emailing list and i had about twenty people show up every single week some of those people include ci who's now one of my best friends is one of your close buddies neville who's now who is the best man my wedding came from matt and so my best friends came to the anti nba book club and if and i posted a photo if you zoom in on the top left of the photo you're gonna see a ski ball machine i found an r arcade that let me host the book clubs for free in that place as long as we play ski ball and you were reading books now what kind of books were you reading in this is this like were the books actually useful for you in business or was selling white whiskey the right way to learn business i don't remember everything we read but it was like it was like tim ferris book the four hour workweek week so you know how like you wanna like if i was a tech techie i would've have built like club house or something actually cool but i didn't have like anyone discuss these books that i wanted to read but it was kind of a forcing function because i was like like i need to get good at business i better like get educated what i could do is i can get these people come to this book club and i'll just read one week in advance and take really good notes and i'll sort of teach it because when you do a book by the way and no one reads a book just the one guy who runs organize organizing it and so i was just going to organize it organize and talk about it okay what came next okay and then around that same time when i moved to san francisco i met a guy who had an idea for a room roommate matching app and i was like hey i don't have anything to do may i please join you and so i previously had a pickup truck in nashville where i live i sold it i had roughly five thousand dollars he had a little bit of money we put it together and we started with this idea called a bunk and the idea with bunk was it was a roommate matching party website and so we went to landlords who had two three four five bedrooms and we would say we're gonna post an ad on craigslist and we're gonna advertise this three bedroom as a one bedroom apartment meaning instead of a three thousand dollars three bedroom we're gonna advertise it as a one thousand dollar one bedroom and we're gonna get a hundred people who are interested and we're gonna host parties to help them team up and move into this apartment and potentially other apartments sounded interesting and it was somewhat interesting couldn't figure out how to monetize it roommate matching apps are one of like four businesses that every just graduated college kid tries to start that's one of them it doesn't really work so we got aqua hired roughly nine months later which basically meant we got a job and we got some bonus money if we like accomplish a couple things but what we did do that was interesting and i was not able to do this i was definitely like the marketing guy but we turned that idea into tinder for roommates and that was really dumb because most people when we launch when we got we actually got tens of thousands of people to sign up for via these infographics that i link to that we made but most people or many people who were using it we're just meeting it to date we shouldn't have just done tinder for tinder would have been way smarter and so that didn't really work out okay so i think that to win in business you gotta have essentially three components the first component is you need to have a money making skill meaning you have to have something that drives value this is either gonna be learning the sell learning to make things learning to hunt down interesting deals right you you know you need a money making skill what was your money making skill you were developing during all these across all these different little projects copywriting and also just like ten but like getting after it but copy routing was the the one in marketing marketing right learning to sell in your case the learning through sell learning to sell through getting website traffic and getting the web visitor to do what i wanted them to do cool the second thing is you gotta learn to be sort of ten and scrappy which comes not as a thing you want to do but as a thing you are forced to do because you really have no other choice but once you find that gear you now know you have it that's how i would describe it is that accurate because it sounds like it's what happened in your case too nobody wants to be scrappy to be clear right like feel the option to not have to tough it out you would probably have taken that but when you're forced to do it you learn okay i have this sort of animal inside i can do this and now i'm gonna use this and everything else thing i do whereas somebody who doesn't know if they could do that they're hesitant to go for it yeah and what's funny about that ten or sorry being scrappy is there's this chart where basically like you you start that way and you don't like it and then you like kinda get some a little bit of fancy but then once you already are fancy or successful you realize you should always be scrappy you know what i mean there's like a reason that like amazon has like the pizza roll where it's like you don't have a team of people that are like four people because small scrappy teams do significantly better in in many cases than bigger teams and so yeah so when we when we met it's actually hilarious if you had just taken a picture of both of our offices and you had said which of these two guys is a successful entrepreneur my office was like a museum you had a dude if you walked up to sean's office i'm not exaggerating you in san francisco we led by yosemite in the redwood trees they're huge you could drive use a cut a hole in it and drive a car through it sean's office as it as if they made a like a coffee coaster for your cup out of a redwood tree and it was the size of like eighteen feet long it was like a eighteen foot in diameter circle that was like a probably a half a million dollar table it was we had four stories we had an entire apartment built in with heated bathroom floors so if you needed to stay the night you could sleep there every every wall was made of one way one way mirrors so you could like see out but it couldn't see in jeff we had a chef there every single day we had a masse on fridays we had open bar so every friday we had so all these things it's a full it's a thirty thousand square foot office decorated by ken folk one of the fanciest designers in the world and that was my office i remember sam came over one time and he picked up of the ash which nobody smokes inside i don't know why we have an ash it's like illegal to do that and he picked up the ash flipped it over and he goes this is a seven hundred dollar ash because the sticker was still on it and i was like i don't know what to tell you i i don't know what i don't know what i'm doing here and i stole it it's like that the titanic got built and then they just plucked like a twenty three year old idiot and they're you drive and i was just driving that that company into the ground and you had this like half an office it was like literally like somebody's apartment it was an apartment that was seven hundred dollars means and have shared it yeah like like the bathroom didn't have a door like you just had to be like hey i'm taking a shit but like yeah was like it was like the craziest scenario even was just sitting over there he doesn't even part of your company just like another guy was just there and like the the the the wall like the there was everything was so strange like nothing made any sense you like didn't have wifi and you're were building this internet company and yeah you actually were the one who was building something successful and they at that period of our lives like you were actually onto to something and i was sitting here just like you know making things that nobody wanted and so you know your scrap was well deserved at that time and and and earned you some good things i had to go through my scrappy period at a different time so the third thing i would say so one was the ten side developing that scrappy mentality and being willing to be at the bottom and like survive at the bottom two is the money making scale and three is project selection so starting to figure out like almost through process of elimination what are all the bad businesses that you should not be in i was in the elimination phase for sure yeah you eliminated like hey i probably don't want one where i'm standing outside in the heat selling hot dogs because i'm gonna be capped at like how long i can stand outside in the heat that's probably not a good idea right so manual labor is not scalable you know another one that you did was like illegal business was like oh great lot of people want this moons shine but like it's only gonna go the bigger it gets the more likely i am to to go to prison fail and go to prison so that's probably not a good project to select so you are going through process of elimination project collection and so you go through this roommate matching app you're making apps now that's already better if i say like what's the sam park criteria now after that after doing all ten of these things what is a good project to be in for you i believe an ic guy which is like what's the world want what's the world pay for what am i good at and what i'm passionate that and i try to find that in the middle but i my goal and mean okay so that's like the woo stuff that i totally believe in but then the other side is can i get something can i bootstrap it to a hundred million in revenue in ten years okay but can i up it so there has to be some something you're answering underneath that that's like saying you know what my strategy and chest is check mate right like okay yeah i get it but how do you get there exactly so what do you look for that's gonna be a thing you can bootstrap so are you looking for i can see that somebody has done a similar thing in another space that i can recreate or apply over here seemed like though the hustle was very much that way yeah the news newsletter right you looked at the scam you looked at a couple of others you were like oh i get what they're doing and i could do that just in my way yeah so i like to i i call like a forgotten business so there's a lot of these businesses that i haven't even talked about on m mfa but basically like there's a bunch of businesses like hampton that are doing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit and what i tend to do when i look for mean hampton by only cup that's what might be doing for a very long time but before i started i research and i go and talk to the owners and i do diligence and i thought of it this way but then when ai started coming in play it really solidify it which is like something that can't be disrupted easily i also like looking at things that serious operators don't take serious because i think that there's less competition so like with the hustle people laughed at me when we started it but i was like well if do the math i definitely can get to a hundred million in revenue and i sold before i got there but austin reef who founded morning brew he only sold part of the business and still kept running it and they're in the eighty or ninety million revenue i think range now so like the math was right so i looked for things that can be real opportunities but the baller aren't taking it serious yeah what charlie mu says the secret to success is weak competition and so if i was to say from a afar i've known you for i don't know how long ago i know you twelve kilometers years long time three obama's and what i would say is i've noticed that what one thing you do really well is you're very good at sniffing out interesting things in spaces where other people are not not even looking which is you mostly just following your curiosity and taste but you go and you do a lot of research you do you come across nonchalant but you're pretty fucking s about the research i'm very you go you go really detailed you could meet them you like talk to the bankers you talked to a lot of people in a space to get a real like i a real idea of like what those companies look like and because i wanna eliminate the uncertainty like okay so entrepreneurship i've been thinking about this the reason i i i think entrepreneurship is almost philosophical to me and a lot of people is because entrepreneurship is sort of like how much uncertainty and fear can you take and still continue moving forward because entrepreneurship is basically like you work on the same thing for six twelve eighteen sometimes twenty four months and you're like i'd still see barely any progress is this going to work and right the price that you're paying for potentially a big outcome or potentially if for building a business or potentially being free it could take five or ten years and the ones who win are the ones who can handle that on certainty for a long period of time that is what entrepreneurship is ultimately in my opinion it's dealing with uncertainty and dealing with fear you have fear over hiring someone when you only have thirty thousand dollars in your bank you have remember when my first employee had a kid and i was like i like i had a kid i felt so much fear now this really has to sustain itself you have fear over finding your first customer and thinking i am promised one thing now i really have to work my butt off to like make it work out for them you have fear over getting hate and people making fun of them and so the name of the game of entrepreneurship is just can you handle the fear and can you handle what's worse is the uncertainty over potentially five or ten years beautifully said mon had a good addition to this what you said understand the difference between risk and uncertainty so he was talking about it with the stock market he goes basically the stock market stock market investors hate uncertainty like if they don't know whether your earnings are going gonna be good or bad they will just sort of assume bad right like you guys get a huge discount for uncertainty but it's not the same thing as actual risk and you know risk is like you know what do you have to lose uncertainty is just not knowing what's going to happen and so people think that entrepreneurs take a lot of risk but i i actually think that you are a good example of what most entrepreneurs really do which is their actual risk minimize it's like how do i win while taking the least amount of risk necessary to win i'm not trying to take risks i'm not trying to take unnecessary i'm trying to vaporize risk everywhere i can and whatever's is left over fine i'm willing to live with what's left and he he tells the story of richard branson so he says branson is seen is this like free wheel guns mister risk type of guy partly because of his look is brand etcetera goes when branson started his airline which is a very what people would think is a very risky business to be in most airlines fail even today most of airlines don't even make any money the the airlines at it that existed very razor thin margins and when he started virgin he called up i think it was british airways and he was trying to get one plane so he was like hey do you have like whatever a seven forty seven and they were they were telling them no we don't just give out we're not gonna sell you random guy on the phone like he called the customer sport we we don't sell you a seven forty seventies can you connect me to the person who does sell some like we don't sell some seven he's like do you guys have extra capacity of seven forty seven so you're not currently in in using your fleet like yeah we do he goes oh well would you lease one to me and basically he started virgin by leasing the plane not buying the plane which reduced risk he released it and he was only on the hook for the payments like after like if sixty or ninety days later but he was already gonna pre sell the tickets for the flights like the airline business works where you sell the tickets before you end up paying for the for the plane and the fuel and all the the actual cost of operating it and so he realized like actually well what's the worst case that that happens i just give them the plane back like that's all i'm on the hook to do is give them the plane back if i can't follow through on my commitment but if i can get it to work i will know ahead of time because i sell the tickets up upfront so it's actually a very like risk reduction approach to doing what other you'll see is taking massive risk and i say you're the same way where when i've seen you go into business you're looking to reduce risk everywhere possible so you're like do does another business like this already exist and work so i know that there's demand and i know the business model works can i apply it into this space where there's not a lot of competition or there's weak competition there's not a lot of other really smart super geniuses running around san francisco trying to do what i'm doing cool that's a way of reducing risk a third way of reducing risk is because you try to bootstrap it you don't take on external investment you try to do it where i can start this with pretty much no money so what do i have to lose just my time i'm not actually gonna be in the hole if i if the if this goes wrong that's another way that you reduce risk and the fourth one is can i use basically my copywriting skills to attract demand before i have to fulfill the service i would sell sponsorships before yeah i sold sponsorships i went tell but yes i i would i would pre sell as much as possible right and so you know and you would do bunch of research to reduce risk you would talk to the bankers to figure out you know what works in these businesses you talk to the x ceo the x employees to understand what works what doesn't work in this business and so i think you're a master risk reducer and so when somebody sees the business that you do they all sound kind of random but i would say like where you've come to i think at the end is you've figured out your money making skill you figured out how to be ten and scrappy and then lastly you've gotten better at project selection and and ultimately we'll we'll use the sort of risk reduction method to pick a project that you think is is like kind of a i wouldn't say slam dunk but like you're not hoping for this sort of one and one and a hundred outcome it's kinda like i have to fumble execution for this to fail today today's episode brought you by health hubspot because you're using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only text you in emoji first of all that's annoying and second you're missing a lot of the content but that's how most businesses are operating today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages just to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hubspot dot com you should hold your breath still on saying i had good project selection because in until thousand fifteen i started a business called itch juice a poison ivy treatment scratch your own as they say so stupid so there was this like type of lotion that mechanics use it was like a called a green scrub i forget exactly it's called but it it turns out it was also had the same ingredients as poison ivy treatment and i bought in bulk like a like a like a barrel that you would you would have at a mechanic shop and it looked was like twenty cents an ounce but that as poison ivy treatment it sold for like twenty dollars an ounce and i realized i could rank high on google and so i was i got in into poison ivy treatment business and i learned the same thing there or that i learned in the alcohol business which was and this this did this was starting to make money which is like do these short little get rich quick schemes that you jump into without like doing the e guy preparation of like what am actually passionate about they're stupid so i learned that one i feel like i was a lawyer who just stood up and told the jury my client is innocent and then at the very end you were like i did it by the way yeah it's like oh i told you just don't say anything now i think i did good at selecting new so i got rid of that and then i started working ten years ago i i think that the i have the same story where it took ten years for me to even figure out what a good business is dude i don't know how like i read about these prod who do who like are so mature when they're like twenty six twenty seven and i just i'm like am i well i just like slow to develop like when i see some of these smart twenty six twenty seven year olds i think to myself i still don't behave that way and i'm ten years older lower than that so i don't like when i was twenty six and twenty seven like i i didn't know anything i knew nothing and i actually felt this way about you and i was he's right stuff on a whiteboard and he's got these like frameworks way of thinking i don't think it frameworks i just like do yeah while i was sitting there being like why am i just on a whiteboard this guy's out there just doing it i gotta do what this guy's doing it it took it took me ten years to even figure out at at all what the hell is going on ten years and ten years you could say that look i said that in ten seconds it took me ten years watch that was so quick when you're in it ten years is like an eternity especially because you don't even know that if i knew by the way it'll take me ten years but i'll figure it out it would would've have felt so much better at the time it's like the tunnel is still dark and i don't even know where if and when the tunnel ends and i don't know how much like time i've got left to get there so it feels much worse in the moment so if anybody is out there who's in there kinda ten year tenure doing dumb stuff arc you know i feel you it's it's it's normal it still works just keep going so lewis and clark it's like one of my favorite stories ever but they basically they were sent out starting saint louis thomas jefferson was like hey louis hey clark do me a favor just walk in that direction and tell me to the end and what's it look like and what's on the end and they just go and back then obviously phones didn't exist males mailed didn't exist they were just walk around and they didn't know where they're going exactly and it took them two years so imagine that imagine sending someone off on a trip or two years and having no idea like what's going on if they're ever going to come back and that's why entrepreneurship kinda feels like it could've have took two years it creates took five years who knows but we're just gonna go in that direction and i pray and i hope that we're gonna find something that's like what the uncertainty feels like exactly and every year you're like now i know now and then you say that again the next year i'm like oh well last year we were so so dumb but this year now we haven't figured out and it takes a certain amount of self delusion to not be like hey man listen you said that three times already and now you do i really believe you this time and so you need you need dilution i think i you that's also why you gotta move to san francisco is because you'll be surrounded by success stories and you'll see them and you'd be like okay cool is not special i could it if you could do i could do and also everybody around you is similarly diluted which really helps because you sort of brain yourselves into this mode where you're gonna keep going keep taking shots and that that's a normal rational thing to do even though it's a completely abnormal irrational thing to do i think it's one of the biggest benefits of coming to silicon valley can i write off a just a a few tiny anyone so i did this thing called called the f disco taxi where we dressed up in disco outfits with a and we gave rides home for people on new eve just like before lyft yeah before it left or maybe like literally had lyft figured out yeah yep i did or two under two yeah we made eight hundred dollars that by i did a copywriting class at neville we actually hosted at your office i think we each made ten thousand dollars maybe made ten thousand dollars total and then another couple failures i bought some real estate and i learned that basically the way you make real estate is through doing the most due diligence upfront and looking at tons and tons and tons of property because you make your money when you buy and that is not my skill set and then of course i had the hustle the hustle started as a conference then to a blog then to a newsletter which worked we launched this thing called trends which was a fairly successful thing and then we expanded our events business events businesses horrible the way that we did it horrible we had hundreds or thousands of people coming to each event way better to go after smaller groups and charging a lot more but back then i couldn't even imagine the idea of someone being willing to spend two or three or four or five thousand dollars per ticket to a trade show and i wish i would have figured that out yeah so me and tyler the ceo of behalf came up with a little challenge for you it's the newsletter challenge now if you know me you know that i'm a big fan of newsletters i my own newsletter i also had a business that was a newsletter business that was amazing i wrote this newsletter about crypto we grew it to quarter million subscribers and we ended up selling it after year for millions of dollars and i want you to be able to do the same thing in your business so we're doing a challenge ten grand is on the line plus me and tyler will should be in your corner as growth advisors you would just need to go to bee dot com slash m m and you either start a new newsletter or you move your current newsletter over there and five finalist will get picked pitch me and tyler sort like shark tank and the winner gets ten grand so go to bee dot com slash m m that's speed dot com slash m m to enter the challenge today and then this podcast turned out to be a business we didn't really realize it you know i def i i started it hello and i didn't i definitely didn't think of it as a business that you join i still don't think we thought of it as a business for what the first two or three years for the first nine months i'm almost certain it made zero dollars right no i had a sponsor somewhere there that i mean round down to zero yes like yeah like ten twenty grand so i posted this photo i wanna want people to like understand this so sean came up with the podcast i think in july and then i think i joined him in september so he did a a a bunch alone and then i joined him later on i think sometime in december so we're talking six months in lance armstrong for some reason read the hustle and i became friendly acquaintances with him he wanted to use my office where sean and i were recording the podcast and so he came that day when john and i recording because he messaged me saying i need to use an office to for a meeting can i use and i said yeah we pull him into the podcast as we're recording and i posted this photo of me lance and sean sitting there and we only have two microphones and chairs and two chairs it's sean two chairs mike sean like sitting on like the arm of my chair and during the and during the episode what john wants the talk he has to like lead it to reach my microphone and the another episode we had someone like we had a guest call it it was like a digital guest it was me and shawn in real life had a guest for some reason one of us didn't have airpods and so we just like shared an air pod like what each had one in our ear and i think we were recording on an iphone like it was so jan even six months into it yeah which was funny too because it's not even like these were the early days of podcasting like pretty late in the game of podcasting someone to go and look at those old chairs that we use we pick these chairs because there is a podcast at the time called fighter in the kid and they use these bright red chairs the brightest red chairs and we figured they use it so it sticks out on a thumbnail don't even know if we did youtube at the time but we wanted those chairs and it is just a hilarious looking set honestly it got to be pretty one when we were in person together it was pretty amazing i we could be doing that oh was so good it would be the best it would be the best it was so much fun and we had like a we ran to best buy and bought like a video camera and and and we had an in intern record us and the shot is just you and i like it's dead on you and i talking and the guys that we were copying was theo von and brendan shop who obviously theo von theo von now but back then he was like a cameo like he came in as a cameo for the other podcast yeah good times it feels nostalgic going through this stuff doesn't it because you are with me for most of it or a lot of but doesn't this this is kind of fun to like look back and like it's crazy this the stuff that we've done yes i mean when you're in it you just can't wanna get out of it so bad right oh god i just want something to work anything is this gonna work i really hope this thing works and i just wanted to get out of it so bad and then now you're right you know you look back and i've really never had as much fun since as i did on the come up like the come up what's really it was a lot more i don't know high variance or just like unpredictable and like crazy stuff happen and it was fun things that i would never make the time to do now like you're never gonna go do sam's f disco now you're never gonna go do the hotdog dog stand now but actually those are pretty fun like kind of random projects great stories great photos great like memories of trying to pull it off that you were at the time you know too dumb to know it was dumb and now unfortunately you know you sort of have the curse of knowledge the the the further you go where you're less likely to go try random dumb things that might actually have high you know high high upside or high fun or high memories you know at they come at the end of it i we have a lot of like young guys sitting to this who are in their twenties enjoy it man it was it was such a blast it doesn't feel that way but i would say with a high degree of certainty if you do the same thing or you try really hard for ten years and keep taking risk you and i sean have dozens of friends from that same era and we have seen dozens of them like many many many of them succeed not always like total toll runs but we have many of those but a lot of base hits a lot of doubles a lot of life changing businesses have been built and it's so exciting to like look back and be like it works you just gotta get it and is i mean it it sounds corny but the the truth is at the time you think your success is about how hard you're working and maybe your idea or your team or your execution of the the individual thing and that's true like at the project level but at a personal level the only thing that's gonna determine your success is basically your rate of learning how quickly are you figuring things out are you adapting and learning and getting better at your next shot than you were at your last shot it's that rule of a hundred right like do a hundred try a hundred times and each time try to make one thing better if you do that is success is pretty much inevitable but at the time you don't think like that at the time you don't really realize that but looking back that's very much the case i'm sure there's some people who have a a way to get there a lot faster you know for both of you and i took ten years because we sort of through process of elimination got rid of most of the dumb things you did do one thing differently than i think most people did you'd never made the mistake of building something nobody wanted which is the maybe the main mistake id did i had a bunch of things that the business sounds great on paper if it works it's gonna be huge but nobody even wants the thing to begin with seed you that you don't you die on the launch pad whereas you made the opposite everything you made people wanted whether it was hot dogs whiskey whether it was like you know a way to get rid of their itch whatever it was you know you you had a way you you always made something that people wanted sometimes the business model was broken or the scalability was broken but i feel like you did the you did one thing really well which is you never made the the cardinal saying which i would say most entrepreneurs make which is you do something that sounds good on paper but nobody actually wants the thing you're making gainer you spend all your energy trying to convince them why they're wrong and why you're right and actually no they just don't want it they don't need you know what's funny i looking back i i like example the hustle i think we were at a hundred thousand subscribers in year one and then i think it was five hundred and year two and then a million and three something like that and that sounds lovely it didn't feel like it at the time it still felt like i was pushing a rock up a hill and so you're saying i made things that people wanted looking back i agree but when you're going through it like i remember ryan hoover launched a product hunt and people were talking about his product way more than like my product and i was like that that's what product market looks like not mine i've never experienced that what the hell and i look back at it and i did have it and so some of these things when you're in the thick of it you have to really work hard to try to come up with these lessons in this like at the time and you have to like sit by yourself to come up with these lessons in the time because there has been so many things looking back like hey had i only done this i would have had so much more would have worked so much better but i didn't learn those lessons in the process so for example i used to think that it i was like i wanna become a big company so i have to act corporate now i know you wanna act small as as long as you can or if you have something that is growing at like fifty percent a year don't mess with it that's a great growth rate whereas if you see other people or i saw all other the people at time growing significantly faster but but but they ended up like dying and blew up i was like i wanna grow that fast what the hell and i'm looking back i'm like no no that was that was a rocket that was fantastic was great it was bootstrap it was it was beautiful i think that that i heard this line that basically says vc is like rocket fuel and you know who deserves rocket fuel rockets not fast cars not cool cars not cars that you love rockets and i thing about rockets is most of them blow up and don't go anywhere a cool car a great car car you love that could be an amazing life and it could actually get to the destination eventually but it might go a little bit slower and i thought that was of an insult to me i said but i wanna rocket it and i wanted to work nonsense i wanted a car and i wish i would have like had the the confidence back then and learned that lesson that that was the way alright so that's sam's story made his first million at thirty one but instead of focusing on how we did it which we've talked about before it's the you know don't know ten fifteen things he tried before that the stumbles and fumble on the way to success i'm gonna do mine we'll do one next episode i'll do my i'll do my version of that where i tell you all the terrible terrible ideas that i had going up to finally making it i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ser of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale company if you're a cro or a head of sales just look to level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast