Making millions off of a newsletter

 In episode 3 of the My first million podcast hosted by Shaan Puri and Sam Parr, Shaan interviews Sam Parr, the founder of the hustle which is a daily email newsletter with a million and a half readers every morning. This episode was in July of 2019 and they are now up to their 133rd episode. Their podcast is centred around business ideas and entrepreneurship. This particular episode is one that i listened to a while back and found very insightful i thought i'd share. 

Sam Parr is the founder of the hustle which is a daily newsletter that goes out to almost a million and a half readers every morning. His email newsletter explains news in like 5 minutes very briefly. The way Sam phrases it is "your no bs friend explaining the news to you" which holds up even today. The hustle.co at the time according to Sam was generating 8 figures in revenue and his goal is to get it to a 100 million dollars by 2025. Sam says he earned his first million by buying and selling companies starting at a young age. He grew up in Missouri and moved to San Francisco to pursue his life as an entrepreneur.

They talked a lot about Sam's start and how he became to own one of the largest email lists in the world but the most interesting part for me in the podcast was when Shaan asked Sam how he would remake a million if he was 21 years old. Sam says he'd start blogging and write about one interesting thing each week for about a year, at which time he would have around 2000 to 3000 readers a day. He says he would buy a subscription at ahrefs to gain an insight as to what people are searching for. Then he'd write on those subjects. Afterwards he says he would create an email list of around 3000 people and start a course and sell it to them. He also goes onto say that making money is significantly easier than people think. You just have to be one step ahead of your audience. They talk about the same idea on being an expert vs a curious novist. They both agree the curious novist definitely works as you can relate and explain things much like an expert or even better.

Sam goes onto talk about leverage and he says most people think to make a million dollars, you have to work an equivalent amount of hours or have an idea that is equivalent to a million dollar idea. I had this view as well. But he goes onto say how that's not exactly how it needs to work and in reality a good execution or a correct leverage can be of value and it isn't necessarily tied to the amount of work you put in. He also says many of us feel that if you make money, it means you take it from someone else which isn't exactly true in a game where we can all be winners.

That being said they are huge entrepreneurs who may have forgotten how big a million can be but i also think their very real tone has a lot of truth in it. Maybe it actually isn't that hard to make a million but it is surely something most people have yet to figure out for themselves. Surely with a lot of time and effort, maybe anyone actually can pull it off.