2022 Trends, Scaling The Hustle, & How To Make Your First Million

Chris Ronzio (01:37):

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Organized Chaos. I'm your host, Chris Ronzio, and today I have with me a special guest, Sam Parr. Hey, Sam.

Sam Parr (01:44):

What's going on, man? How are you?

Chris Ronzio (01:46):

I am great. So I'm excited to talk about this idea of your first million. You've got a podcast by a similar name, My First Million, so can you tell us what is the show all about?

Sam Parr (01:58):

So the show, I joke, the name's horrible. It's a really bad name. It started as one thing, but it's a little bit different now, and basically it's my cohost Sean and I brainstorm different business ideas and do business breakdowns, which A, doesn't exactly encompass... That's not entirely what we do, but we do more than that.

Sam Parr (02:20):

And B, that makes it sound so boring because it's part entertainment. We're kind of funny I think, or at least people think we are, and we also have some big name guests on who'll come on who are in business, and we ask some questions that a lot of people are embarrassed to ask. But a lot of people listen to us because we brainstorm and break down different businesses.

Chris Ronzio (02:40):

It's totally entertaining, and I think what's cool about it is it's kind of like a couple friends hanging out and just talking about random business stuff just like anyone would, but you get to be a fly on the wall of your conversation, so I love it. But in terms of building a first million something, you've done this a few times. The Hustle of course has millions of subscribers. Was it two million that I saw?

Sam Parr (03:04):

Yeah.

Chris Ronzio (03:05):

And of course the business is also valued in the multiple, multiple millions of dollars, so we don't have to share specific numbers. But The Hustle's become a amazing story and a fast growing media outlet. It didn't happen overnight, but I want to unpack just your journey in getting to your first million, whatever it was. So let's start from the beginning.

Chris Ronzio (03:25):

I saw that you had a hotdog stand, a roommate matching platform, a online liquor store. So you're like the epitome of entrepreneurship. What else did you have going on in the early days?

Sam Parr (03:39):

I was just doing stuff. Right when YouTube launched, I was one of the early people that hit over a million views on YouTube. I did it in the scammy way, so I'm not particularly proud of it. But I saw early on that that was going to be a thing, and so I pounced on that. I should have stuck with it. The second thing, I always was selling a ton of stuff on eBay and Craigslist. I crushed it on there.

Sam Parr (04:03):

Then in college I opened up hotdog stands and we eventually had multiple locations. So I've always just been doing stuff. I've always had some type of little thing going.

Chris Ronzio (04:14):

So did you decided not to be a hotdog mogul though at some point?

Sam Parr (04:19):

Well, I was doing this in Nashville, Tennessee and it was fun. When you're 20, 21 years old and you walk home with a $1000 of cash in your pocket which I would some days, that was like, "I'm rich." We would jokingly call it hood rich because I would have basically $1s and $5s, but like a [inaudible 00:04:39], and I would just always have a ton of money on me, and that was awesome.

Sam Parr (04:43):

But it was incredibly physically demanding. And I was like, "Oh my God, I can't work like this for a long time. It's so challenging. I got to figure out a better way to leverage my abilities." And that's when I learned about the internet.

Chris Ronzio (04:58):

My first real business was selling VHS tapes at sporting games, and it was the same thing, $5s and $10s cash. You can't do that for too long. So how did it bridge into The Hustle? Where'd the idea for The Hustle come from?

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Where The Idea For The Hustle Came From?

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Sam Parr (05:15):

So I had a business that was a roommate matching thing, and we sold it. And I didn't sell it for a ton of money, but I was in my early 20s, 22, 23, 24, and I had a little bit of money, many tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousands, maybe a $100,000 or something to my name, and I was like, "Well, that's obviously not enough to live off of, but that's a cool start. Let's start a business."

Sam Parr (05:39):

And so I had this conference called Hustle Con. It was like an entrepreneurial conference, but all the speakers were people who had founded huge companies, but they weren't technical. So like the woman who started Stitch Fix, which is a multi-billion dollar company, the folks at Casper, all types of companies like that.

Sam Parr (06:02):

I just did the conference to meet people and maybe I could partner with someone after. I was like, "Maybe I'll just meet someone. I don't know. Maybe this might lead to something. I'm not sure what it's going to lead to, but I'm just going to do it." And in order to make it popular, I created a newsletter. And that newsletter, I would write all the time. And that newsletter got really popular, and the conference made a lot of money too.

Sam Parr (06:20):

I didn't expect it to, but it did. And I was like, "That's kind of funny. Let's do it again." So I did it again and it made even more money. It made like a quarter of a million dollars in profit in four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks. And I was like, "Okay, I don't want do conferences forever because that's really hard, but this newsletter thing that I made, maybe that has legs. What can we do with that?" And that's how The Hustle came to be.

Chris Ronzio (06:43):

So originally, the newsletter was just supporting the conference. It was to help you sell conference tickets?

Sam Parr (06:48):

Yeah.

Chris Ronzio (06:48):

What was the content of the newsletter originally? Similar to today, or was it different?

Sam Parr (06:52):

No. It was different. It was entrepreneurial, so I would just write articles about the speakers, but I would do it A, in a funny, interesting voice that was wrapped in copywriting. I was a self taught copywriter, so I knew how to write to get people's attention. And B, I did something interesting early on. I was like, "If I send an email, let's say I get a 50% open rate and then a 5% click-through, if I send an email to 1000 people, that means only like 50 people are clicking my thing.

Sam Parr (07:22):

Whereas I have 500 of them just viewing the article or viewing the email. I should just put all the content in the email." That's what I did back in 2014, 2015, and that was considered unique and original at the time. That is where I was like, "Okay, this could be cool." And then I was like, "All right, let's start a blog where I just write these stories a bunch of times a week," and then that's what I started doing.

Sam Parr (07:48):

And then I said, "Shit, this is hard to come up with this type of stuff all the time. Let's do something even more. Let's do news. There's news every single day. I could do that all the time. That's easy." So in 2016, we only did news.

Chris Ronzio (08:02):

So you started this newsletter. Do you remember when you did the first conference? How many people attended the conference? How many people were on the newsletter, just so everybody can get some context of the size?

Sam Parr (08:15):

Hustle Con's newsletter was one thing. That started with zero. And after six weeks, I think I had 3000 or 4000 subscribers, and 350 people came to the event, and I think it made $60,000 in revenue. And that event, it took six weeks from deciding to do it and then doing it. So in like six weeks it got... Maybe it was 2000 subscribers, but it was somewhere in the range of 2000 to 4000 people signed up for the email.

Sam Parr (08:50):

If you Google Sam Parr Hustle Con and you could see my first email drip, I actually show all the stats to the website. So right away, we were getting 1000 people who would to come to the website because I got really good at posting it on Reddit and hacker news. And then I took six months off where I traveled the country, rode my motorcycle, and then I did it again.

Sam Parr (09:07):

This time I think we sold 600 tickets, but probably 450 to 500 people showed up. And at that point, the list had 10,000 people. So basically I would work for six weeks hosting this event, take time off, and then do it again. So depending on how you look at it, it could either have been it took 12 weeks to get to 10,000 people, or it took nine months depending on how you want to measure it. But I wasn't working in between conferences.

Sam Parr (09:40):

So when I launched the daily newsletter, we had about 10,000 subscribers. And then at the end of the first year of doing the daily sends, which is what The Hustle is, we had a 100,000.

Chris Ronzio (09:51):

Wow. And so was it just you at this time at the beginning?

Sam Parr (09:55):

Yeah.

Chris Ronzio (09:57):

So here you are, you're writing newsletters, you're putting on these events, and then you're just taking extended periods of time off. Did you have these big ambitions to build this into something huge, or did you just think, "Let me rinse and repeat and do this for a while and take some money off the table?"

Sam Parr (10:13):

It depends what your definition of huge is, but I wanted to go bigger than just an event, that's for sure. Originally, I was like, "I want to employ thousands of people." And then I started thinking about it more and I read a couple books and I learned about a few different people like Mark Cuban and a few other folks. And I noticed that there was this trend of the people I admired where they were able to secure some type of financial stability and financial freedom by their early 30s.

Sam Parr (10:46):

And in doing that, that allowed them, while they were still young and had energy, to restart, but on even bigger problems because they didn't have to worry about day-to-day finances. And I really admired that way and I was like, "If I could crack that code, which I think I can, I'm good. That's the life I want." And so I knew I wanted to hit a certain number by the age of 30.

Sam Parr (11:09):

So because of that, I was perfectly fine selling the company for let's say many tens of millions as opposed to trying to build a multi-billion dollar company.

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Hardest Part About Getting Those First Email Subscribers?

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Chris Ronzio (11:18):

That's great that you knew what your goal was when you set out. So you built this list of 3000 or 4000 people in a handful of weeks, which I think for most of our listeners would be the most difficult part to imagine. Because once you've got some momentum, once you've got 10,000, then you can see it going to 100,000 or a million.

Chris Ronzio (11:37):

But getting those first 3000 to 4000 people is no easy task. How did you do that? How did you stir up the momentum to get the first people?

Sam Parr (11:48):

I know that people think that's the hardest part, and it's kind of hard. But doing it for four years or five years, sending an email almost every single day for many, many years and growing from 100,000 to many millions is way harder, because that consistency is really, really tough. It's really hard to do something because you lose focus, you want to give up. That was really the hard part.

Sam Parr (12:11):

The exciting part was going zero to 3000. And the way that I did it was I basically thought early on, "Where are the people who I want to subscribe to my newsletter? Where do they live?" And in my case, I thought they live in a couple subreddits, and they live on hacker news. Hacker news is kind of like Reddit, but for geeky, Silicon Valley people like me.

Sam Parr (12:32):

And I thought, "Okay, so they live there. So then what would get their attention?" Well, a headline that mentions these 20 topics would probably get their attention. Great. I'm going to write those articles. If I can get a million to come to my website... I'm making these numbers up. If I get a million to come to my website and I can get 3% of them to convert, that's 30,000 emails. Great.

Sam Parr (13:00):

I know that 18 different titles, there's a chance some of those can work. So how many of those do I got to write? And then I just work backwards, and I just banged it out constantly.

Chris Ronzio (13:09):

So what were the metrics that you were watching? You mentioned conversion rate and how many people get to your website. What were you laser focused on in terms of metrics for your business at the beginning?

Sam Parr (13:19):

For the first one to three years, every week at first it was just me, and then we had a proper meeting where it was like, "All right, Monday morning at 10:00 AM, did we grow our subscriber base by at least 3%?" If yes, great. What do we do now? If, no, why didn't we do that, and what do we got to do to get there? I wanted to grow with 3% every single week until at least 200 and something thousand people.

Sam Parr (13:49):

And then I looked at the open rate. The open rate had to be at least 50%. And so those are basically the two metrics, but then of course you have to go upwards, which is in order to grow by 3%, you need this many website visits, you need this conversion rate. You need this many people to click on an article, this many people to click on an ad, things like that.

Sam Parr (14:17):

And I cared about the rest of the funnel. We had it's called F1, F2, F3, F4, funnel one, funnel two, funnel three, or funnel four, and I would meticulously look at like, "All right, I need this many people to see this site, this many people to see this page to this page." But it was all rooted in growing my total subscriber amount by 3% every week.

Chris Ronzio (14:38):

And so at what point did you hire someone else? I saw some video where you were talking about a New York Times writer that you tried to hire so maybe you could share that story, but when did you finally hire someone?

Sam Parr (14:51):

So the first year of business, we made like $500,000 and it was mostly from all those conferences, and then I hired a couple people. So I made money through conferences, and then I launched The Hustle, and then maybe a few months after, I was able to hire someone. The first hires were some writers to help me write.

Chris Ronzio (15:13):

So that was just taking up the most of your time I guess, and that was the thing you needed to offload first?

Sam Parr (15:19):

Yeah. And the thing I hated the most. Writing's hard. I like the result, I don't always like doing it. And then the seventh, eighth, ninth employees were salespeople to sell ads in the newsletters.

Chris Ronzio (15:31):

I don't think anyone would expect you to say that writing was the thing you hated the most in starting a company with a daily newsletter with as much writing as you've done. So were you aware of that from the beginning, or did you just burn out over time?

Sam Parr (15:45):

I was aware of that. It's hard. I like it. I don't love it. I would actually say most of the time I don't like it. But when you have a deadline every single day, it forces you to come up with good stuff. I did it a little bit out of necessity, but there's a small group of people who just are obsessed and they love it, and that's the type of person who I had to hire.

Sam Parr (16:13):

It was someone who was obsessed with it. I didn't enjoy the process. I enjoyed the results. There's a lot of people who enjoy the process, and I had to hire the process people.

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How Sam Parr Would Build The Hustle Today

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Chris Ronzio (16:26):

So knowing what you know and going through that experience, if you had to build a new media company today, what would you do differently maybe, or how would you build The Hustle today if you were starting today?

Sam Parr (16:39):

So the strategy would be exactly the same, but the tactics would be different. So if I had to start today, I would do the same thing. I would blog like crazy, and I would get a certain amount of people to come to the website by posting on Reddit or whichever communities my people lived in, and then I would get them to convert to an email and I would start sending emails regularly.

Sam Parr (17:03):

When we started doing paid advertising to grow, we spent money on Facebook and we were able to acquire new email subscribers for like $1.50 at first. You can't do that anymore. That window has closed. You can do that on TikTok. So instead of advertising on Facebook, I would be advertising on TikTok. But I would do the same thing where I would be writing blog posts and writing... Something we didn't do because this wasn't a thing then, is I would be doing Twitter really hard too.

Chris Ronzio (17:33):

So when you would go into these Reddit, subreddits and post about the content that you had, how did you tow the line between being self promotional or it being great content that people actually wanted to read? What would a normal post look like from you?

Sam Parr (17:50):

I did two things. Eventually, people started posting our stuff on their own so you could find our articles all over and we are not the ones doing it. But I would do a few things. The first thing is I had different personas. So I would have a female persona where it was actually me, but I would write stuff to appeal to women, and I would have Reddit usernames that were subscribed to female centric subreddits, and I would comment on a lot of posts.

Sam Parr (18:21):

So I would have a female one, I would have a biohacker one, I would have someone who's into book publishing. I had a bunch of them. And very consistently, I would comment and post stuff not related to me at all just to build up karma, which is literally the upvoting system on Reddit, and to be a contributor to the community. One out of 10 or one out of six on my posts would be self promotional.

Sam Parr (18:51):

The way that I would find ideas is I would go to the Reddit, the subreddit, and I would click view most popular for the trailing month, and I would get a trend. I would check the trend of what the most popular articles are on that subreddit, and then I would click the comment section on each article, and I would look at the most upvoted comment to see what people were saying about it, and those comments would give me ideas.

Sam Parr (19:15):

So an example is maybe there's a do it yourself home gym subreddit, and someone wrote about the best stuff that you can use at home to work out. And the top comment was like, "I actually use PVC pipe to build kettlebells and it's my favorite thing on earth," and that was the most upvoted thing, I would be like, "Oh, I should just create articles only on PVC." I don't even know if I'm using that right. You know the white plastic tubing. I'll make an article on that.

Chris Ronzio (19:44):

That's so interest interesting. I am just imagining my marketing team listening to this, and just totally redoing their strategy about their posting stuff online, so thank you for that.

Sam Parr (19:55):

Well, the idea was I just wanted to know what topics and what emotions are popular already in this area, and how do I fit my voice into that framework?

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Copywriter Is The Most Important Skill To Learn!

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Chris Ronzio (20:07):

Well, you clearly have a knack for finding those trends, and I know we're going to get into that. But before we do, you're basically in the business of being a great copywriter. Between the blogs and your podcasts and the newsletter, you're great with copy. You know how to catch people's attention. A lot of business people when they're starting off, they think they want to outsource the marketing and not worry about that.

Chris Ronzio (20:33):

How important do you think it is for startups, for business people, to embrace copywriting even if they don't like it or love it, like you said?

Sam Parr (20:41):

I think it's the most important skill a human can learn. I think there's other important skills, but in terms of the most important practical skill, I think copywriting is probably the highest. The reason being is copywriting is basically... The name is kind of silly because it's beyond writing and it's beyond just text based words.

Sam Parr (21:03):

It's basically understanding what motivates someone, and figuring out how to communicate something to put in their brain that hopefully convinces them to take an action or feel something that I want them to feel. So knowing what motivates someone, and getting them to do what I want them to do. Whether I'm trying to give a speech on why racism's bad, or I'm trying to convince you to buy something, or I'm trying to convince you to go on a date with me.

Sam Parr (21:32):

I'm just trying to persuade you to do or feel something, and in most of my cases, that just happens to be via the written word. That's what copywriting's all about. And so I think it's the most important thing, because the copywriting techniques that I use to get popular on the internet, I use the same thing to meet my wife. So it's the same shit.

Chris Ronzio (21:57):

I remember once buying an amazing... It was a 50 year old, 60 year old thing on copywriting, and you could see how so many of the ways to be influential in your writing that existed decades ago are still relevant today. But I'm curious where you learned to be a good copywriter or to be a good influencer persuader, like you said.

Sam Parr (22:22):

I learned it from my father a little bit who owned a business. I understood like, "If you act charming, you get what you want more often than not acting charming." And then I learned it from this guy named Neville Medhora. Neville Medhora is now my best friend. He lives two doors down from me, he was the best man in my wedding.

Sam Parr (22:41):

But I started reading his blog and I bought his course called copywriting course. His name's Neville Medhora, Copywriting Course. I'm not paid for this, but I want to promote him because it changed my life. I took his course and that's when I was like, "Oh my God, I've been doing this naturally already, but there's actually frameworks and formulas that I can use. This is awesome." And once I took his course, then I began reading everything I could on copywriting.

Sam Parr (23:08):

I used to do this thing called copy work where I would get the best sales letters and the best writing that I could find, whether it's Catcher in the Rye because I like JD Salinger's voice, or if it was famous letters that sold encyclopedias. And I would literally copy them by hand for hours every single day, for months, half the year. And that is the same way that we learn how to play musical instruments.

Sam Parr (23:33):

You learn Jingle Bells, and then you learn a Green Day song or something like that, and then eventually you start writing your own song because you see the recipe and you see the patterns. That's the same thing with writing, and so that's how I learned. So I learned it originally from Neville, and he showed me what copy work was, and then I did that for a long time, and obviously I read every book I could get my hands on.

Chris Ronzio (23:53):

What I want people to hear though is they might just assume that you were a good writer and that you were always a good writer. I don't think people would know that you took a course and that you wrote things that already existed. I've never even thought about that.

Sam Parr (24:06):

Well, a lot of people haven't. So I actually created this thing, it's like $50. It's called trycopythat.com. CopyThat. I call it trycopythat. Where I just find my favorite sales letters that I learned, and I just dissect them. I put annotations on them, and your job is very simple. You just got to spend a half an hour copying it by hand. It works really well. It works really well.

Chris Ronzio (24:33):

Awesome. Trycopythat.com, you said?

Sam Parr (24:36):

Yeah. I don't care if you guys buy it or not. You could go do copy work on your own. Everyone was asking me, "How did you learn?" I was like, "Fuck it, I'm just going to put together so you could just do it."

Chris Ronzio (24:46):

That's so cool.

Sam Parr (24:48):

But I would also sign up for Neville's thing. That really was pivotal. It changed my life.

Chris Ronzio (24:54):

So I'm guessing trycopythat or CopyThat was just one of these ideas that are floating around your head. You seem to have a ton of these because you talk about them on the podcast.

Sam Parr (25:02):

I just made that recently because I needed to stay sharp. A, people kept asking me, "How do you learn?" And I didn't feel like sending people... I don't know. And then B, I was like, "I need to stay sharp. I need to work on my craft." And so that's why I did it.

Chris Ronzio (25:17):

So tell me about trends, this community that you've built, which is I think a really cool idea. How long has it been around, and what's the purpose of it?

Sam Parr (25:27):

So at The Hustle, the game plan was to build up an email list of a million people and make money through advertising, and then make that business. So knowing what I know now, I still would've sold the company. But this year, had we not sold, we could have made $40, $50 million in revenue this year. We would've crushed it this year. It's because advertising sales are going through the roof.

Sam Parr (25:53):

I did not predict that. I would've predicted the other way around. But because Facebook has made changes, B2B advertisers are spending crazy amounts of money on places like us and morning brew and other email because it was such a good ad product. But when we started, I hated advertising, and I was like, "We need to figure out a different business model."

Sam Parr (26:18):

Ideally media is a little bit different from software because with media you have people's attention, but then you monetize it via lots of different products. So you could have maybe three different revenue... It wouldn't be weird for a media company that makes $100 million to have a $50 million business line which is advertising, a $30 million business line and a $20 million business line.

Sam Parr (26:43):

If you look at Barstool Sports, their revenue, it's like 30% ads, 50% T-shirts, 20% gambling, 10% events. That's a normal mix. And we had like $10 million I think in ad sales at that point, and I was like, "All right, we need to diversify. Let me do some research." And I would just research like crazy. And I would set different business models, and I would send my friends the research I was doing and they're like, "Oh, just sell that. Your research is cool. You're breaking down businesses. That's pretty cool. Just sell that."

Sam Parr (27:14):

That's where trends came to be. So trends was a weekly email where I would just do research on interesting trends and I would break down different businesses, and then we had a community component where people could discuss it, and it did good. I think by the time we sold it, it was doing high seven figures, almost eight figures in revenue, and that was a good business.

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Sam Parr's Sense Of Curiosity

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Chris Ronzio (27:39):

So did you always have this sense of curiosity to want to look into business ideas and industries and spot trends?

Sam Parr (27:45):

Always. I was obnoxious. If you Google Sam Parr questions, you'll see multiple articles and multiple Twitter threads of people making fun of me because both as like... For example, my best friend, Neville, who I mentioned, he's 10 years older than me. So when I met him I was 25, and I was so annoying. I would just ask him questions. I'm like, "How much money do you make? How much money you got in your bank account? How do you do this?"

Sam Parr (28:09):

I would just ask these obnoxious questions, and people made fun of me all the time, and I've always been like that. It always amazed me where I would walk around Downtown San Francisco and I'm like, "These traffic lights are wild. I can't believe that an individual came up with this idea and convinced all these people to agree to this. That this system is the right system." That's so interesting to me.

Sam Parr (28:33):

Or that this building is here. How do they know that this building's not going to fall over? How did they just buy into one person's theory and plan? I just thought that was amazing. I was like, "How does this all work?" I always was like that.

Chris Ronzio (28:49):

Endlessly curious. And so do you think that's a necessity for people building businesses? Can they be more curious? How do you train that?

Sam Parr (28:59):

I don't know if you can train it. I don't know if you need to be curious, but I think it's smart to always want to seek out the answers and to assume, and even to have fear, and... What's the word? I'm blank on the word. What's the word that starts with a P? Paranoia. It's always good to have paranoia that you don't have the answer and to constantly seek out the answers.

Sam Parr (29:31):

So for example, Dharmesh, the founder of HubSpot, Dharmesh is my buddy. He's the guy who bought our company. He is a billionaire. He's probably a multi billionaire. Remember when Wordle came out like six weeks ago? He built this thing, I forget what it was called. But if you look at his Twitter thread, he loved Wordle so much, so he built a Wordle clone or a Wordle study guide or something like that.

Sam Parr (29:58):

A piece of software that helps you succeed at the Wordle game. He just built it for fun. And I was like, "Why are you doing this?" He's like, "I love programming, and I just want to keep learning." This is a billionaire. You don't have to do this. He's got people who just does this. And so I think it's important to have that attitude where you don't have the answer, and you should always be a student.

Sam Parr (30:19):

Another example is Rupert Murdoch. He's the guy who started Fox News? My co-host, Sean, did a pitch or went to some conference or something where it was all of Rupert Murdoch's exec team, and they would get like eight companies to come. It was just young companies, Silicon Valley startups, who would just tell him what their company does. And there's no agenda. He's like, "I just want to see what's out there."

Sam Parr (30:43):

Sean told me that he purposely didn't drink water because he didn't want to have to take a pee break, and he would just sit there and take notes the whole time. And this guy's like 90 at this point. I don't have the answers. Someone's going to come and eat my lunch. I just need to figure out what's going on. I think that attitude is actually healthy.

Chris Ronzio (31:05):

Amazing. I love that. That idea of constantly being a student, always learning, and never being done. If you have a billion dollars, if you phone it in and you're like, "Ah, I'm I'm good." That's I think when you start to die. So I think it's a good idea to stay engaged. So the show, your podcast, My First Million, great title even if you said it's kind of a misnomer.

Sam Parr (31:31):

All my stuff has horrible names. The Hustle, Hustle Con.

Chris Ronzio (31:35):

It's like great [inaudible 00:31:37]. My First Million. So if someone was coming to that to try to learn how to make their first million, what would you tell them? I know it's a broad answer, but what's your advice?

Sam Parr (31:50):

People ask me this and they hate my answer. I say, "Well, what are you good at, and what do you enjoy?" So that's the first thing. Have you heard of the Japanese concept of Ikigai? Have you heard of that? Ikigai. It's spelled I-K-I... If you just Google, I-K-I-G-A-I. It's this Japanese concept that refers to how to give someone a sense of purpose and wellbeing in their life.

Sam Parr (32:23):

It basically looks like a huge Venn diagram where there's passion, mission... Sorry. I'm actually going to read out exactly which ones. Sorry. It's what you're good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. I summarize it to what are you good at, and where can you make money?

Sam Parr (32:45):

So let's just figure out what that is. And then for a lot of people, my opinion, if I was young and just trying to make literally a million dollars, I 100% could do that by starting a blog. I could start a blog in just about any niche that I... If I only wanted to make money, I could just read five books and blog, and summarize all five of those books and make a blog about various chapters and learnings.

Sam Parr (33:17):

And then I could get traffic to that blog fairly easily, and I could sell either a course or some type of consulting service. I could do that in my sleep.

Chris Ronzio (33:28):

Well, there it is. There's the easy answer. So for anyone listening, Sam just gave you the shortcut to making your first million dollar business if all you care about is money. But I love the concept of Ikigai. Am I saying that right?

Sam Parr (33:40):

Yeah. There's some Japanese folks probably listening and they're like, "That's not exactly how you say it," but I believe Ikigai. It's just this very simple concept of basically where's your skills, where's your passion, and where's the market? And you got to figure that out.

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Trends To Focus On In 2022

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Chris Ronzio (33:59):

Okay. Ikigai. Perfect. I'll Google that and I'll share it out in the show notes. Last thing here I guess is related to the trends, you are on the pulse of so much right now. You mentioned TikTok being a great place to get subscribers. What other trends or areas would you encourage people to just get educated and to dive into right now in 2022?

Sam Parr (34:25):

Well, I'll tell you what interests me. There's a few things. The first is at home diagnostics. There's a conversation that happens in doctor's offices where they're like, "Had we gotten this scan eight months earlier, we could have caught this and this could have been preventable. But not anymore, and it's past the point of no return and you're doomed."

Sam Parr (34:52):

I think that in some period in the near future, that could be 100 years, it could be 10 years, that conversation is going to happen less and less where we're going to be able to... It's just crazy that you could have a cancer or you could have some type of illness or some type of bad thing in your body exists for months, but you don't know because you literally just didn't physically go to the particular room that you had to go to in order to get the scan.

Sam Parr (35:20):

I think that's crazy to me. So I'm really fascinated by all the companies that are addressing that. So that could be a company like WHOOP, which is the wristbands, Oura Ring is another one. I invested in this company called Levels which makes a patch that goes on your arm and it tells you all about your blood glucose monitor.

Sam Parr (35:41):

I'm really fascinated by a lot of different at home diagnostic tools. I think removing the friction from going to the doctor and just being able to do at home will ultimately make that conversation of 'we could have caught this' happen less and less. So I'm really interested in that. What's another thing that's interesting. A lot of times I look at what are the Silicon Valley dorks doing in the free time?

Sam Parr (36:09):

So in 2012, a lot of my friends in Silicon Valley between 2012 and 2014, I'm talking wealthy people who have free time and who are nerds. What are they doing? A lot of my friends who fit that bucket, they were doing LSD in Ayahuasca. Now, that's way more common right now. So I look at what are they doing now? A few things that are interesting is I think sauna and ice baths are...

Chris Ronzio (36:35):

We're seeing so many of these at home products now that you can just get an ice bath and regulate it.

Sam Parr (36:42):

I have one.

Chris Ronzio (36:43):

Do you?

Sam Parr (36:43):

I do it in the morning. It's awesome.

Chris Ronzio (36:46):

My pool's not heated. I just jump in my pool and it's freezing. That works in the winter.

Sam Parr (36:50):

Well, it could work in the winter. The goal is you need to shiver. You have to shiver for a certain amount of time. Usually, it has to be cold. So I like ice baths and sauna. I think that's interesting. I've been pitched by a bunch of different sauna companies. That's intriguing to me. What are some other trends? I'm not about Web3. I'm not about that.

Sam Parr (37:16):

Crypto, yeah I am, but that's boring. I could always say, "Just go focus on that," obviously, but we all know that that's happening. What else is interesting to me? Anything related to trucking. So the average trucker in America is stupid old. The average trucker is in their 60s, and that's really bad. Because pretty much anything you have in your home that you bought, a truck had to get it. At least in one part of its journey, it was on an 18 wheeler truck.

Sam Parr (37:56):

And people say, "We're going to have self-driving trucks." And my reply to that is, "Yeah, eventually, but we are so far from that." And B, once the self-driving truck comes, someone's probably still going to be sitting in that seat. So you still need people to do that shit. So I'm incredibly fascinated about people who can solve the problem of A, getting people to come be truckers, and B, just how are you going to get stuff from location to location? That's incredibly fascinating to me, and that's actually a huge problem.

Chris Ronzio (38:29):

And if we don't have trucks, how are we supposed to get our ice baths and our saunas delivered?

Sam Parr (38:34):

To be honest, you're going to starve. Bananas don't grow in New York in the winter time. But you go to the store and you got a banana. That ain't normal. So you want your bananas in the winter time, there's a reason that's there. You know what I'm saying? I get nervous about truckers.

Chris Ronzio (38:59):

Well, I appreciate you sharing those. It's obvious that you just have a gift for following these trends. Thank you for sharing some of them here. Hopefully between your story, the trends you pointed out, what you would do if you started all over again, everybody listening has got a lot to act on, to take action on, especially getting better at copywriting.

Chris Ronzio (39:17):

I think the course from your friend sounds super interesting, and we'll post a lot of these links in the show notes. So Sam, where can people go to just follow along with everything that you're working on?

Sam Parr (39:27):

I post on Twitter a lot. I've got a nice Twitter following. It's theSamParr. And then I do a lot of fitness related stuff and I post a lot of that content on Instagram, and it's also thesamparr. So only sign up if you want to see a bunch of bro, shirtless picks of working out.

Chris Ronzio (39:48):

All right. I'm sure someone listening is really into that.

Sam Parr (39:50):

Maybe I could trick one person into signing up. Maybe one person will like it.

Chris Ronzio (39:56):

Perfect. Well, thank you so much for sharing the story, the lessons here, and I appreciate it. For everyone else, we'll see you next time on Organized Chaos. Hey, thanks for listening to Organized Chaos. If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe or leave a review and share it with anyone in your network that you think could use the information.

Chris Ronzio (40:16):

If you want to connect with me, you can find me on social at Chris Ronzio on all platforms, and you can find Trainual at Trainual just like a training manual. We'll see you next time.