How NOT to Make $1,000,000 (I Tried 17 Ways)

Sam Parr

Alright, everyone. In this podcast we talk a lot about the successes, but I want to talk about the *failures*. So here's about **ten different companies** that I started before I made my first **$1 million**. Almost all of them sucked — they didn't work. But I'm going to explain how much I made for each idea and the lesson that I learned.

Shaan Puri

Alright, what's up, Sam?

Sam Parr

What's going on?

Shaan Puri

"Let's set this up. Name of this podcast: **My First Million**. When did you make your first million?"

Sam Parr

So, cash—like, cash million. I made it when my wife worked at Airbnb and it went public, and that's when we made our first. Then, about three months later—I think it was later in December—my company sold in February, and we made a lot leading up to that. We were doing pretty good too, but I don't think we had crossed $1,000,000.

Shaan Puri

"Okay, so you made your **first million** — let's call it *at 30 years old*. Here's all the businesses you tried before that, before making your first million, which I think is pretty fascinating. I want to go down this list. Does it start in high school?" "Yeah. Alright, go for it — give me number one."

Sam Parr

In high school, I made $2,500 one summer by buying graduating seniors' old sports equipment and selling it on eBay. What I used to do was buy people's track spikes or whatever and sell them on eBay. Most of the time I didn't buy them — people would just give them to me; they would hand them to me. On eBay I made $2,500. That was my *first business*, where I actually started making money online.

Shaan Puri

And this is *flipping*. Basically, it's flipping assets that other people not only undervalue—they might not value at all. They're just happy you took them off their hands.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and frankly, I did this in college too, which I didn't list here. At the end of the college year I would stay a few weeks after the school year ended. When people were moving out, I'd say, "I have a storage unit — you can come and put it here and just give it to me. You're going to throw it away; just give it to me," and then I would resell it.

Shaan Puri

I saw people doing this in college with textbooks. They would just say, "Oh — at the end of the year you don't want to take all these heavy textbooks home; you're done with that class." Well, guess what: the next semester there's a bunch of people who are going to need that exact textbook and who will be happy to buy it used. So they would just go buy up people's textbooks. Each book was, you know, a $40 or $50 future sale that they were able to pick up for free. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

At 20, I started a hot dog stand. Everyone makes fun of me for talking about it — "I have a hot dog stand, you have a sushi restaurant." They're sick of us talking about it. But I had one called **Southern Sam's**. A wiener as big as a baby's arm. 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 was able to pay him on the 30th as opposed to the first of the month, so he hooked me up. With $500, I went to Restaurant Depot and bought a bunch of Vienna sausages to get my supply. I was in business, *baby*. Within a week of having this idea, I was up and running. I used to live in a bad neighborhood. Rydell was my next-door neighbor and he became my best friend. He had served 20 years in prison for attempted murder, and somehow we became best friends. He had the spare key to my house — this was my guy. Rydell ended up working with me at **Southern Sam's**, and we spent all day outside. It was a pain in the butt. Some days I would make $50. Other days I would go to a concert or an outdoor spot that was popping and I would make $1,000. I did that when I was about 20 or 21.

Shaan Puri

"This is summer in college, or what were you doing?"

Sam Parr

I was in college. I was in class, so I would work until 3 p.m. I would go to classes from 3 p.m. until 8 p.m. Then I had a *night session* where I was out by all the bars — that would be from about 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Shaan Puri

"That's amazing. How did you get the idea to do the hot dog stand? Did you just see somebody else doing it?"

Sam Parr

I met a guy who had a *cart*, and I wanted to do something—yeah.

Shaan Puri

Did he tell you, like, "I'm making $300 a night," or something? What—what did he?

Sam Parr

I saw a video online of a guy saying how much money the Home Depot hot dog guys make. "They make $100,000 a year," the ad said.

Shaan Puri

And you were like, "in..."</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

I was a man. I was... I was broke. I had my PhD — *poor, hardworking, and driven.* I was...

Shaan Puri

"Would you do this again—this one?"

Sam Parr

No, man. It was *so hard*. It was *so hard*.

Shaan Puri

"No, not now. But... if you're 19 or 20 again, you needed to..."

Sam Parr

"I learned how to sell so well, man. This is what inspired me to get into **copywriting**. I realized you had to... wheel and deal a little bit—you had to schmooze, you had to flirt, you had to do this. Then I realized: what if I could do this on the internet, where I could write something one time and have an infinite number of people come and read it, and I didn't have to sell constantly?"

Shaan Puri

Didn't have to stand there in...

Sam Parr

The heat — I didn't have to stand in the heat. I'll post a photo here [photo]. I had these horrible... I mean, look at me: I'm like the **whitest guy ever**. I had these terrible sunburns that, when I took my tank top off, it still looked like I was wearing a shirt — just a white, like, beater.

Shaan Puri

> "Flirt with everyone: flirt with women, flirt with men, flirt with old people, flirt with kids—just flirt with everybody. It's nonsexual; literally just be the most playful, charming person you could be at all times. Practice this muscle." I actually think this is 100% true. I know a couple of people in my life who are like this. I'm not really like that, but I've been starting to do it just for fun, as a little mini-game. When you're living a pretty routine life—just going to the grocery store—it's either going to be a forgettable experience or you try something to make it a little more fun. I've been doing this, and it's kind of amazing.

Sam Parr

You know what I call it? You know how people say "nonchalant" — *"bichalant," "bechalant," "bechalant," "bechalant."*

Shaan Puri

Nonchalant *as hell*.

Sam Parr

Yeah—be *nonchalant*. Try hard.</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

I emailed my wealth manager at Morgan Stanley and I was like, "Hey—I made this trade," and there was a commission of a hundred-something bucks at the end of the trade. I asked, "Is there a *magic button* you got over there, man? Like, you got this magic button you could push that makes all those fees go away?" That was what I sent to the private wealth manager. He replied, "Magic button pushed. Trade's commissions reversed. Enjoy your trading." And I was like, *just flirt with everybody*. Yeah — I could have been an annoying Karen. I could have just taken it and done nothing. I could have been a Karen complaining. Just flirt a little bit — everybody likes to be flirted with.

Sam Parr

So my next business after that: I started this thing basically in Tennessee at the time—white whiskey, which people call *moonshine*. Moonshine technically means illegal whiskey, but there were companies making whiskey in a mason jar and calling it moonshine. I started selling that online and thought I was doing it the right way because I had kind of Googled it and talked to a lawyer. I was selling it as a "novelty"—kind of like a gift item. I did that for about two or three months, and then I went to my university's entrepreneurship program where they offered free legal advice. I said, "Hey, I've made $10 in the last thirty days selling this whiskey online. I think I'm following the right rules, but is there anything else I need to be doing?" They were like, "Yeah, brother, you better shut that down tonight." That was my second internet business and it inspired me to get into the game of the internet. My lesson learned on that one was: if you're going to do something like this, you better really do it right—and pick something that aligns with your values. Around this time I was still drinking and I didn't even like alcohol. I had a love–hate relationship and thought, "Why am I going to start selling this? I don't want to do it; this is stupid." Anyway, you're going to see there's a pattern: it was definitely a quick-money thing, which I think everyone who becomes a good entrepreneur goes through—the *gray hat* phase. This was my *gray hat* phase. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Okay, I like it. You started it online—did you learn about online marketing through this? Were you... how'd you get the 10K? Where'd you get your customers from?

Sam Parr

I posted on forums—like motorcycle forums—because this whiskey I was selling, people were already searching for it. The guy "drink and drive," of course—yeah, that should have been the name. People were already searching for this whiskey, but it was very early, so I was able to rank super easily on Google. I posted on message boards and forums for people who wanted it, and that's how I made money. Alright, so a lot of people watch and listen to this show because they want us to tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. A lot of listeners have a full-time job and want to start something on the side—a side hustle. Many people message Sean and me and say, "All right, I want to start something on the side—is this a good idea?" What they're really asking is, "Just give me the ideas." Well, my friends, you're in luck. My old company, *The Hustle*, put together 100 different side-hustle ideas. They've appropriately called it the **Side Hustle Idea Database**. It's a list of 100 pretty good ideas, frankly—I went through them; they're awesome. It gives you how to start them, how to grow them, and things like that. It gives you a little bit of inspiration, so check it out: it's called the **Side Hustle Idea Database** [link in the description]. Click it, check it out, and let me know in the comments what you think.

Shaan Puri

Okay, so now you moved to San Francisco. I think you—didn't you just do a cross-country motorcycle ride to get to San Francisco as well?

Sam Parr

I did it at a later date, but this time I flew out there because I had a job offer at **Airbnb**, which got rescinded when I arrived — because I'd lied on my resume about getting a **DUI**. I was out there thinking, "What the hell am I going to do? I have to meet people." So I started a thing called the **Anti-MBA Book Club**. I tried monetizing it at first, but I couldn't really. What I did was post ads on **Craigslist**, **Reddit**, and I think **Facebook**. I got about 2,000 people to sign up. The premise was simple: it was called the Anti-MBA because I was very envious of Stanford and Berkeley students — I envied that network. I said, "We're going to read one book per month. We'll break it up into a quarter: a week, a week, a week, a week. I'll find an expert on that book's topic, and we'll come and discuss it with that expert. I'll organize and get the expert; you come, it's free." I got 2,100 people to sign up to my emailing list, and I had about 20 people show up every single week. Some of those people include **Sievea**, who's now one of my best friends and one of your close buddies, and **Neville Medhora**, who was the best man at my wedding. My best friends came to the Anti-MBA Book Club. I also posted a photo. If you zoom in on the top left of the photo, you're going to see a **Skee-Ball** machine. I found an arcade that let me host the book clubs for free in that space, as long as we would play Skee-Ball.

Shaan Puri

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?

Sam Parr

I don't remember everything we read, but it was like Tim Ferriss's book *The 4‑Hour Workweek*. So, you know, if I were a techie I would have built something like *Clubhouse* or something actually cool. I didn't have anyone to discuss these books with, though. It was kind of a forcing function because I thought, "I need to get good at business; I better get educated." What I could do was get people to come to this book club. I'd read one week in advance, take really good notes, and sort of teach it. Because when you do a book club, by the way, no one reads the book—just the one guy who is organizing it. So I was just going to organize it and talk about it.

Shaan Puri

Okay, what came next?

Sam Parr

Okay. Around that same time, when I moved to **San Francisco**, I met a guy who had an idea for a roommate-matching app. I was like, "Hey, I don't have anything to do—may I please join you?" I previously had a pickup truck in **Nashville**, where I lived. I sold it and had roughly $5,000. He had a little bit of money. We put it together and started with this idea called **Bunk**. The idea with Bunk was a roommate-matching party website. We went to landlords who had two-, three-, four-, or five-bedroom units and said, "We're going to post an ad on **Craigslist** and advertise this three-bedroom as a one-bedroom apartment." Meaning, instead of a $3,000 three-bedroom, we'd advertise it as a $1,000 one-bedroom. We'd get 100 people who were interested, host parties to help them team up, and move into this apartment—or potentially other apartments. It sounded interesting and it was somewhat interesting, but we 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 **acqui-hired** roughly nine months later, which basically meant we got a job and some bonus money if we accomplished a couple things. What we did that was interesting—and I was definitely the marketing guy, but I was not able to do this technically—was turn that idea into *Tinder for roommates*. That was really dumb because when we launched we actually got tens of thousands of people to sign up via the infographics that we made and linked to. However, many people who were using it were just meeting to date. We should have just done "Tinder for Tinder" [meaning: Tinder for dating]; it would have been way smarter. So that didn't really work out.

Shaan Puri

Okay, so I think that to win in business you have to 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 going to be learning to sell, learning to make things, or learning to hunt down interesting deals. Right—you need a money-making skill. What was your money-making skill you were developing across all these different little projects?

Sam Parr

"Copywriting, and also tenacity — *getting after it*. But copywriting was the one, and marketing."

Shaan Puri

**Marketing**, right? Learning to sell. In your case, learning to sell through...

Sam Parr

Getting **website traffic**, and getting the **website visitor** to do what I wanted them to do.

Shaan Puri

Cool. The second thing is you have to learn to be sort of **tenacious and scrappy**, which doesn't come as something you want to do but as something you're forced to do because you really have no other choice. Once you find that gear, you now know you have it. That's how I would describe it — is that accurate? It sounds like it's what happened in your case too. Nobody wants to be scrappy, to be clear. If you had the option not to tough it out, you probably would have taken it. But when you're forced to do it, you learn, "Okay, I have this sort of animal inside; I can do this," and now you're going to use that in every single thing you do. Whereas somebody who doesn't know if they could do that is hesitant to go for it.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and what's funny about that — tenacity, or sorry, *being scrappy* — is there's this chart where basically you start that way and you don't like it. Then you kinda get a little bit fancy. But once you're already fancy or successful, you realize you should always be scrappy. You know what I mean? There's a reason that Amazon has the "pizza rule" [small teams only]: you'd only have a team of four people, because small, scrappy teams do significantly better in many cases than bigger teams. And so, yeah.

Shaan Puri

So, when we met, it's actually hilarious. If you had just taken a picture of both of our offices and asked, "Which of these two guys is a successful entrepreneur?" — *my office.*

Sam Parr

It was like a museum. You had a dude. If you walked up to **Sean's** office, I'm not exaggerating: in **San Francisco**, we lived by **Yosemite** and the redwood trees. They're huge—you could cut a hole in one and drive a car through it. Sean's office... it's as if they made, like, a coffee coaster for your cup out of a redwood tree, and it was the size of, like, 18 feet. It was an 18-foot-diameter circle that was probably a $500,000 table.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, 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 wall was made of one-way mirrors, so you could see out but they couldn't see in. We had a chef there every single day. We had a masseuse on Fridays. We had an open bar, so every Friday we had... all these things. It was a 30,000-square-foot office, decorated by **Ken Fulk**, one of the fanciest designers in the world. That was my office. I remember Sam came over one time. He picked up the ashtray — nobody smokes inside; I don't know why we had an ashtray, it's basically illegal to do that — he flipped it over and he goes, "This is a $700 ashtray," because the sticker was still on it. I was like, "I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what I'm doing here."

Sam Parr

"And I stole it."

Shaan Puri

It's like the *Titanic* got built, and then they just plucked a 23-year-old idiot and were like, "You drive." I was just driving that company into the ground. You had this half an office — it was literally like somebody's apartment.

Sam Parr

It was an apartment that cost **$700**. Siewa and I shared it.

Shaan Puri

Yeah. The bathroom didn't have a door — you just had to be like, "Hey, I'm taking a shit." It was the craziest scenario. Siewa was just sitting over there; he isn't even part of your company, just another guy who happened to be there. The wall… everything was so strange. Nothing made any sense. You didn't have Wi‑Fi and you were building this internet company. And yeah, you actually were the one building something successful at that point in our lives — you were actually onto something. I was sitting here making things that nobody wanted. Your scrappiness was well deserved at that time and it earned you some good things. I had to go through my scrappy period at a different time. So the third thing I would say: one was the tenacious side — developing that *scrappy* mentality and being willing to be at the bottom and survive there. Two is the **money‑making skill**. And three is **project selection**: starting to figure out, almost through a process of elimination, what all the bad businesses are that you should not be in.

Sam Parr

"I was in the *elimination phase*, for sure."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, you eliminated—hey, I probably don't want one where I'm standing outside in the heat selling hot dogs, because I'm going to be capped at 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 mentioned was an illegal business. Like, "Oh great, a lot of people want this moonshine, but... it's only going to..." The bigger it gets, the more likely I am to...

Sam Parr

"To go to prison."

Shaan Puri

Fail and go to prison — so that's probably not a good project to select. So you are going through a process of elimination on project selection. You go through this roommate-matching app. You're making apps now; that's already better. If I say, like, what's the *sample criteria* now, after doing all 10 of these things, what is a good project to be in for you?

Sam Parr

I believe in *ikigai*. It's like: "What does the world want? What does the world want to pay for? What am I good at? What am I passionate about?" I try to find that in the middle. But my goal—okay, so that's the "woo-woo" stuff that I totally believe in. On the other side is the practical question: can I bootstrap something to 100,000,000 in revenue in ten years?

Shaan Puri

Okay, but can I *bootstrap* it? There has to be something you're answering underneath that that's like saying, "You know what my strategy in chess is? *Checkmate.*" Right. Like, okay, yeah—I get it. But how do you get there exactly? So what do you look for that's going to be a thing you can bootstrap? 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"? It seemed like *The Hustle* was very much that way. Yeah, the newsletter, right? You looked at the [unclear: "scam"/"scan"/word unclear], you looked at a couple others, and you were like, "Oh, I get what they're doing and I could do that, just in my way."

Sam Parr

Yeah, so I like to — I call it a **"forgotten business."** There are a lot of these businesses I haven't even talked about on MFM. Basically, there are a bunch of businesses, like Hampton, that are doing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit. What I tend to do when I look for them — I mean, Hampton is my only company; that's what I'm going to be doing for a very long time — is research. I go and talk to the owners, I do diligence, and I thought of it this way. When AI started coming into play, it really solidified the idea: look for something that *can't be disrupted easily*. I also like looking at things that serious operators don't take seriously, because I think there's less competition. Like with The Hustle, people laughed at me when we started it, but I was like, if you do the math, it definitely can get to $100,000,000 in revenue. I sold before it got there, but Austin Rief, who founded Morning Brew, only sold part of the business and still kept running it, and they're in the $80–$90 million revenue range now. So the math was right. I look for things that can be real opportunities but that the ballers aren't taking seriously.

Shaan Puri

Yeah. What Charlie Munger says is, "The secret to success is *weak competition*." So, if I were to say—*from afar*—I've known you for... I don't know how long. Have I known you?

Sam Parr

12 years, maybe. Yeah.

Shaan Puri

Long time — "three obamas" [unclear]. What I would say is I've noticed that one thing you do really well is you're very good at **sniffing out interesting things** in spaces where other people are not even looking. You mostly just follow your curiosity and taste, but you go and do a lot of research. You come across nonchalant, but you're pretty *fucking* chalant about the research. I'm very chalant. You go really detailed: you go meet them, you talk to the bankers, you talk to a lot of people in a space to get a real idea of what those companies look like.

Sam Parr

And because I want to eliminate the uncertain... okay, so *entrepreneurship*—I've been thinking about this. The reason I think entrepreneurship is almost philosophical to me and to a lot of people is because entrepreneurship is sort of like: how much **uncertainty and fear** can you take and still continue moving forward? Entrepreneurship is basically working on the same thing for six, twelve, eighteen, sometimes twenty-four months and seeing barely any progress. You ask yourself, "Is this going to work?" The price you pay for a potentially big outcome—building a business or becoming free—could take five or ten years. The ones who win are the ones who can handle that uncertainty for a long period of time. That is what entrepreneurship is, ultimately, in my opinion: dealing with uncertainty and dealing with fear. You have fear over hiring someone when you only have $30,000 in your bank account. I remember when my first employee had a kid and I felt 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 promised them one thing; now I really have to work my butt off to make it work out for them." You have fear over getting hate and people making fun of you. So the name of the game in entrepreneurship is: can you handle the fear? And, what's worse—can you handle the uncertainty over potentially five or ten years?

Shaan Puri

Beautifully said. Manish Parvai had a good addition to this, which was: understand the difference between **risk** and **uncertainty**. He was talking about it with the stock market. "The stock market—stock market investors—hate uncertainty." If they don't know whether your earnings are going to be good or bad, they will just sort of assume bad. You get a huge discount for uncertainty. But that's not the same thing as actual **risk**. Risk is: what do you have to lose? Uncertainty is just not knowing what's going to happen. People think entrepreneurs take a lot of risk, but I actually think most entrepreneurs are *risk minimizers*. They're asking, "How do I win while taking the least amount of risk necessary to win?" I'm not trying to take unnecessary risks. I'm trying to vaporize risk everywhere I can. Whatever's left over, fine—I'm willing to live with it. He tells the story of Richard Branson to illustrate this. Branson is seen as a freewheeling, gunslinger, risk-type of guy—partly because of his look and brand. When he started his airline, which people think is a very risky business, he actually reduced risk. Most airlines fail; margins are razor thin. When he started Virgin, he called up, I think, British Airways and tried to get one plane. He asked, "Do you have a 747?" They said, "No, we don't just sell one to a random guy on the phone." He kept asking if they had extra 747s [Boeing 747] not currently in use in their fleet. They said yes. He asked if he could *lease* one. He started Virgin by leasing the plane, not buying it, which reduced risk. He was only on the hook for the payments—like for 60 or 90 days later—but he was already going to pre-sell the tickets. The airline business works where you sell the tickets before you end up paying for the plane, the fuel, and the actual operating costs. So he realized, "What's the worst case?" I just give them the plane back. That's all I'm on the hook to do if I can't follow through. If I can get it to work, I'll know ahead of time because I sell the tickets up front. It's actually a risk-reduction approach to what other people see as taking massive risk. I would say you're the same way. When I've seen you go into a business, you're looking to reduce risk everywhere possible. For example: - Does another business like this already exist and work? That shows demand and a working business model. - Can I apply that model into a space with little or weak competition? That reduces competitive risk. - Can I bootstrap it—avoid external investment—so I can start with almost no money? Then what I have to lose is mostly my time, not a financial hole. - Can I use my copywriting skills to attract demand before I have to fulfill the service? These are practical ways entrepreneurs reduce risk rather than recklessly embrace it.

Sam Parr

"I would sell sponsorships before. Yeah — sold sponsorships? I wouldn't sell, but yes, I would *pre-sell as much as possible*." </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Right. So you would do a bunch of research to reduce risk. You'd talk to the bankers to figure out what works in these businesses. You'd talk to the ex-CEOs and ex-employees to understand what works and what doesn't. I think you're a **master risk reducer**. When somebody sees the businesses you do, they all sound kind of random. But where you've come to, I think, is that you've figured out your **money-making skill**. You've learned how to be **tenacious and scrappy**, and lastly, you've gotten better at **project selection**. Ultimately, you'll use a sort of risk-reduction method to pick a project that you think is—I'm not saying a slam dunk—but you're not hoping for a one-in-a-hundred outcome. It's kind of like, "I have to fumble execution for this to fail."

Sam Parr

Yeah, and you should hold your breath still on saying, "I had good project selection," because in 2015 I started a business called *Itch Juice*, a poison-ivy treatment.

Shaan Puri

*"Scratch your own itch," as they say.*

Sam Parr

Stupid. So there was this type of lotion that mechanics used—called a "green scrub." I forget exactly what it's called, but it turns out it also had the same ingredients as poison ivy treatment. I bought in bulk—a barrel you'd have at a mechanic shop. It was about $0.20 an ounce, but as poison ivy treatment it sold for like $20 an ounce. I realized I could rank high on Google, so I got into the poison ivy treatment business. I learned the same thing there that I learned in the alcohol business, which was: this was starting to make money, and it's the kind of short, little *get-rich-quick* schemes that you jump into without doing the ikigai preparation—asking, "What am I actually passionate about?" They're stupid. So I learned that one.

Shaan Puri

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."

Sam Parr

I think I did well at selecting new things, so I got rid of that, and then I started...

Shaan Puri

Working years — I think I have the same story: it took **10 years** for me to even figure out what a good business is.

Sam Parr

"Dude, I don't know how. I read about these *prodigies* who are so mature when they're 26 or 27, and I just—I'm like, was I slow to develop? When I see some of these smart 26- or 27-year-olds, I think to myself, 'I still don't behave that way,' and I'm ten years older than that. When I was 26 and 27, I didn't know anything. I knew nothing. I actually felt this way about you. I was like, 'He writes stuff on a whiteboard and he's got these frameworks, this way of thinking.' I don't think in *frameworks*—I just do."

Shaan Puri

Yeah. While I was sitting there thinking, "Why am I just on a whiteboard? This guy's out there just doing it — I gotta do what this guy's doing." It took me **ten years** to even figure out at all what the hell was going on. **Ten years.** You could say that — look, I said that in ten seconds, but 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. If I knew, "By the way it'll take me ten years but I'll figure it out," it would have felt so much better at the time. It's like the tunnel is still dark and I don't even know if or when the tunnel ends, and I don't know how much time I've got left to get there. So it feels much worse in the moment. So for anybody out there who's in their kind of tenure, doing dumb stuff, or, you know, I feel you. It's normal. It still works — just keep going.

Sam Parr

**Lewis and Clark** is one of my favorite stories ever. Basically, they were sent out starting in Saint Louis. Thomas Jefferson said, "Hey Lewis, hey Clark — do me a favor: just walk in that direction and tell me, does it end, what's it look like, and what's on the end?" They just went. Back then, obviously phones didn't exist and mail didn't exist. They were just walking around and they didn't know exactly where they were going. It took them two years. Imagine that: sending someone off on a trip for two years and having no idea what's going on or if they're ever going to come back. That's what entrepreneurship kind of feels like. It could've taken two years; it could've taken five years — who knows. We're just going in that direction, and I pray and hope that we're going to find something. That's what the uncertainty feels like.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. And every year you're like, "Now I know." Then you say that again the next year, like, "Oh, well, last year we were so, so dumb, but this year we have it figured out." It takes a certain amount of *self-delusion* to not be like, "Hey man, listen — you said that three times already. Do I really believe you this time?" So you need — you need delusion. I think, actually, that's also why you gotta move to **San Francisco**: you'll be surrounded by success stories and you'll see them. You'll be like, "Okay, cool, that guy's not special. I could do it. If you could do it, I could do it." And also everybody around you is similarly deluded, which really helps, because you sort of brainwash yourselves into this mode where you're gonna keep going, keep taking shots. 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**.

Sam Parr

Can I write off just a few tiny ones? I did this thing called **"Frisco Disco Taxi."** We dressed up in disco outfits with afros and gave rides home to people on **New Year's Eve**.

Shaan Puri

"Was this, like, before Lyft?"

Sam Parr

"Yeah — before Lyft... or maybe you..."

Shaan Puri

I literally had Lyft figured out.

Sam Parr

Yeah. Yep — I did her too. I—her too. We made $800 that night. I did a copywriting class with Neville. We actually hosted it at your office. I think we each made $10,000, or maybe we made $10,000 total. Then there were a couple more failures. I bought some real estate, and I learned that basically the way you make money in real estate is through doing the most due diligence upfront and looking at tons and tons of property, because *"you make your money when you buy."* That is not my skill set. And then, of course, I had **The Hustle**. **The Hustle** started as a conference, then became a blog, then a newsletter, which worked. We launched this thing called "Trends," which was fairly successful. Then we expanded our events business. The events business was horrible the way that we did it — horrible. We had hundreds or thousands of people coming to each event. It would have been way better to go after smaller groups and charge a lot more. Back then I couldn't even imagine the idea of someone being willing to spend $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, or $5,000 per ticket to a trade show, and I wish I would have figured that out.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and then this podcast turned out to be a *business*. We didn't really realize it. You know, I started it alone. I definitely didn't think of it as a business. Did you join? I still don't think we thought of it as a business for, what, the first two or three years.

Sam Parr

"For the first nine months, I'm almost certain it made **$0**, right?"

Shaan Puri

No — I had a sponsor somewhere there. Wait, wait. I mean, *round down to zero*. Yes. Like, you know, like **$10–20 grand**.

Sam Parr

Sean came up with the podcast, I think, in July. I think I joined him in September, so he did a bunch alone. 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, so he came that day we were recording because he messaged me: "I need to use an office for a meeting. Can I use this?" I said yeah, and we pulled him into the podcast as we were recording. I posted this photo of me, Lance, and Sean sitting there — and we only had two microphones. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

"And two chairs."

Sam Parr

And two chairs—Sean's.</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

"Three minutes, just like two chairs, Mike."

Sam Parr

Sean's sitting on the arm of my chair. During the episode, when Sean wants us to talk, he has to lean in to reach my microphone. In another episode, we had a guest call — a digital guest. It was me and Sean in real life who had a guest. For some reason, one of us didn't have AirPods, so we just shared an AirPod; we each had one in our ear. I think we were recording on an iPhone. It was *so janky* even six months into it.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, which was funny too, because it's not even like these were the early days of podcasting. It's pretty late in the game of podcasting.

Sam Parr

We should go and look at those old chairs that we use. We picked these chairs because there was a podcast at the time called **"The Fighter and the Kid"**, and they used these bright red chairs — the brightest red chairs. We figured they'd use them so they would stick out on a thumbnail. I don't even know if we did **YouTube** at the time, but we wanted those chairs. It's just a hilarious-looking set.

Shaan Puri

Honestly, it got to be pretty cool once when we were *in person* together. It was pretty amazing. I wish we could be doing that. Oh... it my...

Sam Parr

It would be the best. It was so much fun. We ran to Best Buy and bought a video camera, and we had an intern record us. The shot is just you and me — it's dead on: you and me talking. The guys we were copying were **Theo Von** and **Brennan Schopp**. Obviously, "Theo Von is Theo Von now," but back then he was like a cameo — he came in as a cameo for this... other.

Shaan Puri

Good times.

Sam Parr

It feels *nostalgic* going through this stuff, doesn't it? You were with me for most of it—or a lot of it. But doesn't this—yeah, this is kinda fun to look back on. It's crazy, this stuff that we've done.

Shaan Puri

Yes. I mean, when you're in it, you just want to get out so bad, right? *God, I just want something to work.* Anything— is this gonna work? I really hope this thing works. I just wanted to get out of it so badly. And then, now you look back. I've really never had as much fun since as I did on the *come up*. The come up was a lot more, I don't know, high-variance—unpredictable. Crazy stuff happened, and it was fun. There were things I would never make the time to do now. You're never gonna go do Sam's Frisco Disco now. You're never gonna run the hot dog stand now. But actually those are pretty fun—kinda random projects: great stories, great photos, great memories of trying to pull it off. At the time you were too dumb to know it was dumb. And now, unfortunately, you have the **curse of knowledge**: the further you go, the less likely you are to try random, dumb things that might actually have high upside, high fun, or great memories at the end of it. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

We have a lot of young guys listening to this who are in their twenties—*enjoy it, man.* 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 **10 years** and keep taking risks, you'll see results. Sean and I have dozens of friends from that same era, and we've seen many of them succeed—many, many of them. Not always total home runs, but we have plenty of those too. A lot of base hits, a lot of doubles. Many life-changing businesses have been built. It's so exciting to look back and be like, "It works. **You just gotta do it.**"

Shaan Puri

It is... I mean, it sounds corny, but the truth is: at the time you think your success is about how hard you're working and maybe your idea, your team, or your execution of the individual thing. That's true at the project level, but at a personal level the only thing that's going to determine your success is basically your rate of learning. How quickly are you figuring things out? Are you adapting, learning, and getting better at your next shot than you were at your last shot? It's that *rule of a 100*: do something 100 times, and each time try to make one thing better. If you do that, your success is pretty much inevitable. At the time you don't think like that. You don't really realize it. But looking back, that's very much the case. I'm sure there are some people who have a way to get there a lot faster. For both you and I, it took ten years because we, through a process of elimination, got rid of most of the dumb things you did. Do one thing differently than I think most people did: you never made the mistake of building something nobody wanted, which was maybe the main mistake I made. I had a bunch of things that sounded great on paper—if it worked it was going to be huge—but nobody even wanted the thing to begin with. You die on the launch pad. Whereas you made the opposite: everything you made people wanted—whether it was hot dogs, whiskey, or a way to get rid of their itch. You always made something that people wanted. Sometimes the business model was broken or the scalability was broken, but I feel like you did one thing really well: you never made the *cardinal sin* that I would say most entrepreneurs make, which is doing something that sounds good on paper but that nobody actually wants. You then spend all your energy trying to convince them why they're wrong and why you're right, when actually no—they just don't want it; they don't need it.

Sam Parr

You know what's funny: looking back, I— for example, with *The Hustle* —I think we were at 100,000 subscribers in year one, then I think it was 500,000 in year two, and then a million in year three. That sounds lovely, but it didn't feel like it at the time. It still felt like I was pushing a rock up a hill. You're saying I made things that people wanted. Looking back, I agree. But when you're going through it... I remember Ryan Hoover launched Product Hunt and people were talking about his product way more than my product. I was like, "That's what product-market fit looks like — not mine. I've never experienced that. What the hell?" I looked back and realized I did have it. Some of these lessons are hard to see when you're in the thick of it. You have to really work to pull the lessons out at the time, and often you have to sit by yourself to figure them out. There have been so many moments where I think, *had I only done this, I would have had so much more, I would have worked so much better* — but I didn't learn those lessons in the process. For example, I used to think, "I want to become a big company, so I have to act corporate now." Now I know you want to *act small* as long as you can. If you have something growing at, like, 50% a year, don't mess with it — that's a great growth rate. I saw other people growing significantly faster and thought, "I want to grow that fast. What the hell?" Looking back, some of those were rockets: fantastic, bootstrapped, beautiful. I heard this line that basically says, "VC is like rocket fuel." [VC = venture capital] The point was: who deserves rocket fuel? Rockets — not fast cars, not cool cars, not cars that you love. Rockets. The thing about rockets is most of them blow up and don't go anywhere. A cool car — a great car you love — could be an amazing life and could actually get to the destination eventually, even if it goes a little slower. At the time I took that as an insult: "But I want a rocket and I want it to work!" Nonsense. I wanted a car. I wish I had had the confidence back then to learn that lesson sooner.

Shaan Puri

Alright, so that's **Sam's story** — he made his first million at 31. But instead of focusing on how he did it, which we've talked about before, it's the — you know — ten or fifteen things he tried before that: the stumbles and fumbles on the way to success. I'm gonna do mine. We'll do one next episode. I'll do my version of that, where I tell you all the terrible, terrible ideas I had leading up to finally making it.