The Hustle developed the voice that successfully speaks to millennials
How did Sam Parr get his hustle on?
You probably follow publications like Forbes, Inc, Business Insider on Facebook and maybe oftentimes you even go to their websites to check out what’s new. So let me ask you this: what you find there, is it really great? Is the content on there really worth your time?
I’d say it most probably isn’t. And more and more people are recognizing the lack of value in the majority of clickbait articles those publications offer. One of the people who caught onto this early on was Sam Parr.
Who’s Sam Parr? He’s just a guy who simply has the entrepreneurial DNA. Starting one business while still in college, then another one and so the story goes. Eventually, he decided to organize a conference about non-tech companies where he invited speakers-friends of his or people he admired to the event. And even though, he didn’t have a remarkable network or anything like that, he managed to get a lot of big speakers for the conference with cold emailing. And guess what? Because he had the right approach, he crushed it.
But that same conference gave birth to an idea in his head. Given that his primary goal was to consistently reach as many people as possible with the content that was being produced at the time, the conference which around 3000 people attended, wasn’t going to cut it. Sam noticed that email seemed to work out great when it came to getting those people to the actual event, so he thought that he can do the same with content but reach a much larger pool of people. And ladies and gentlemen, that was the moment The Hustle first came into existence.
At first, it was just him in his kitchen writing to some of his buddies. Slowly Sam started learning the ways of traditional journalism and copy-writing to improve his newsletter. Merging those two together and sealing everything off with his cheeky personality resulted in the casual, yet educational tone that is so uniquely distinctive for The Hustle.
Nevertheless, once the ball started rolling he thought to himself: “why not make this into something bigger?”. According to him, all of those publications mentioned above and their siblings frankly just don’t know how to speak to the younger audiences since they’re not on the same frequency that millennials are on. So knowing this and investing time to find the right content writers who are most importantly, great storytellers, resulted in The Hustle growing. And it grew quite quickly at that-only in less than a year, the digest got more than 100K subscribers. Whoa! Talk about accelerated growth.
So how did that happen? Well, first of all Sam had a very clear goal in mind-he wants 40 million millennials to visit The Hustle, daily. An ambitious goal, for sure. This will make every type-A driven person do the best they can to reach that goal, asap. But his success is also due to his background.
Before starting HustleCon (the conference he organized), he had a roommate matching startup, which was later acquired. At one point in his life, he also used to have his own hot-dog stand business and he did very well for himself with that too. But his dream was to organize big events, preferably about music and that’s how his previous experiences helped him make HustleCon into a success form the get-go. Later on, the same skills applied to making The Hustle the popular personal newsletter it is today.
Moving on to the massive success that The Hustle is. Firstly, Sam bet on email because he understood the potential it has and the large reach it offers. In the beginning, the digest consisted mostly of evergreen content type of stuff about tech & business. Later on, it clicked for him that everyone wants news and that’s the perfect opportunity to fill a gap on the market that was already there-mainly relevant news about tech & business delivered in a casual, chatty and funny manner. A gap that was created by those same big publications which nowadays either produce low-quality content or predominately speak to older generations.
That was the key that opened up his eyes about millennials and what he thought they would find interesting enough to look forward to every day in their inbox. By being a millennial himself, Sam knew that he had to have the right approach with this generation-delivering news straight to the point, without any unnecessary nonsense and it has to be written as if a close buddy of yours decided to shoot you an email. That’s it, the personal factor; the one element that seems to pop up every time we speak of extremely successful newsletters, whether it is theSkimm, Clover, the Lefsetz Letter or NextDraft.
His other nuggets of wisdom when it comes to making The Hustle such a fast growing organization and community, he shares in an interview with Valley Talks:
- His team knows how to create viral content because they understand emotions (anger & awe work quite well) and have excellent data they wholeheartedly trust. Also, they make it a priority to know how search engines work.
- Creating good partnerships. This also means convincing people to share their content, which is an extremely difficult job but a very rewarding one.
- Last but not least, their referral system that operates so well because of their awesome ambassadors. The idea behind it is pretty cool.
The last point is a very interesting maneuver. Sam has previously stated that the real inspiration for this tactic originated from the referral program theSkimm has. In it’s essence, this is simply brilliant. What The Hustle has done is setting up a software which is solely for the purpose of referrals and their active ambassadors get to be part of the private Hustle community when they get people to sign up. So for example, if 4 people sign up with their unique URL, this ambassador gets awarded with access to the community and later on they can receive a t-shirt and other cool swaggy things, depending on the amount of people they get to sign up for The Hustle. This. Is. Just. Genius.
Another interesting move on Sam’s part that brought a lot of attention and people to The Hustle was after the first HustleCon conference (where he raised 500k from tickets and attendees). He made an announcement in which he invited people to carefully observe how the company will “recklessly spend the 500k” in the next year. Later on he admitted that this was indeed true but it was also partially a PR stunt. Can this guy get any smarter?
The truth of the matter is that The Hustle is a very successful newsletter that is growing rapidly quick. That’s due to the fact that nowadays personal newsletters with quality content go a long way compared to scrappy clickbait articles on social media feeds. And let’s not forget, Sam is a real hustler in every sense of the word. His story is truly inspirational and many can learn from it. Understanding millennials, what they want, knowing how to engage them and doing all that successfully via email is an art. Combining the intimacy and reach that newsletters offer with the experience and vision Sam has, there is no way that The Hustle wouldn’t be one of the very successful companies of the current world.
