How We Got Our First 100 Customers (No Bulls**t, Specific Details)

And then we were like All right, fine deals. Like that's you know, this business is so freaking hard. Like let's try this. And uh in the end, I don't think it ever ended up working. But you got the customers, and that's the point of the episode. Yeah, we can't. The subsequent failure is irrelevant, okay? Be what I want to I put my law in it like a day song on the road. All right, we're live. Sean, we're gonna do a QA session today. We got a bunch of questions. I have a feeling we're gonna spend most of the time on one question, but the question is, how did you get your first hundred customers in your businesses? And what are the best ways that you've heard of? So

Uh I'll ask you, Sean, it but Uh I've personally have grown I think Five things to A million to ten million in revenue. I've grown one thing to well north of ten million in revenue, multi million dollars per month. I've grown a bunch of stuff to thousands of users. I've grown a bunch of stuff to hundreds of thousands and I've

Brown. One thing to millions. And we'll go through examples. And uh you've done the same. You've how many did Bebo have or uh Blab? Lab had like four million users. Um

Yeah, basically we've done this a bunch of different times and a bunch of different ways. And so When we get this question Yeah, how did you get your first hundred customers? I actually really like this question. This is a very different question than like, you know, what's your advice It's like forget the advice. Let me tell you literally what I did. when it comes to how we grew our businesses at the very, very start.

Because If you're at the start, it doesn't matter what somebody did. to go to to get to ten million in revenue. What matters is what the how they got to ten dollars in revenue. How did they get the ball going? How did they get the initial momentum? Cause if you don't do that by definition, You don't really get to You know, you don't get to step two unless you've done step one. And so this is the uh

The step one episode and I thought it'd be fun if we take the Our own Like Just all the different projects that we've done.

And just try to label the method that we use to go and get those first hundred customers that are that got the ball rolling. Do you wanna go back and forth? Yeah, let's trade off. All right. So the first thing that I grew I'm actually not gonna talk about it a lot because I didn't realize it, but I was breaking the law. But it was I had an e commerce store and I originally got my first hundred customers by posting in uh

Forums. But I'm not gonna mention that. By the way, is that a real thing? The statute of limitations? Like is it is there a real thing? Uh maybe we need producer Ari to let us know. And by the way, show her in her sweater. Fantastic sweater. Okay, it's not a thing. All right. So So correct. Do not tell people what you were doing. I thought after 10 years everything's forgiven. No, I'm not gonna mention that. But all right, the first uh my first business was called Bunk. It was like my first like actual startup out of college. It was called Bunk. It was a roommate matching app. It was Tinder for roommates, which I always say was stupid. We should have done Tinder for Tinder,'cause this was right when Tinder came out. It was like swiping like clicking less yes or no. Um But before it became an app, we actually just had a website that was built on Weebly. We probably did fifty thousand in sales in a handful of months, something like that.

And what we used to do is in San Francisco, it's mostly transient people. So people like me and Sean who move there without knowing too many people and you want to rent a one bedroom apartment, but you can't afford a one bedroom apartment. And so instead There's a four bedroom apartment where there's one room left and P you apply to move in there. What a lot of people don't know is back then, and I don't know if it's this way now, but back then, literally a hundred people would apply for that one bedroom. So the way that we got users is we went and

found people who had like landlords who had four bedroom apartments. And three bedroom apartments. And we said hey We're gonna host an event. It's not gonna be a party. It was a party. It's gonna be an event. at your three and four bedroom apartment.

And we're gonna have a bunch of prospective tenants there and they're gonna team up and get their own place. And so let's say that it was a four bedroom place or four thousand. We would create individual ads for a one bedroom at one thousand dollars. And we and back then on Craigslist, you could use HTML and and create these beautiful like images of what the apartments look like. And it said, This is bunk SF. We help people match people. This is a one bedroom and a four bedroom, but we're gonna help you team up and we went we we would get like Ten thousand users uh

a week coming to our bunk SF dot com website. And that's how I got our first bit of users was through Craigslist. And the point being, the takeaway, by the way, is We already knew the seekers were there.

And so it was just a piggyback where people already were. So the the smart part there is using Craigslist because Craigslist already had a lot of search volume, basically. You instead of SEO, you use basically CEO. So it's like go go to Craigslist and get Uh use that traffic. But then hosting the event. What did you do in these events, by the way? Was there anything special you did? Or like how did you get people to Did you have to make it marketable or did you just make it normal? Because I know for the hustle you had these great

Little events that you use called Pizza in forties. Where you would invite a speaker But the You would tape.

Two two forty ounce beers to their hands. And The rule this is a genius, by the way. This was so good. I remember when you did this, I was like, That guy Sam is cool. I want to be friends with him. Literally I had that thought. And then I wasn't. I didn't even drink, by the way. At this point, I didn't even drink, but the name of the game was pizza in forties because we didn't have a lot of money, so we'll supply Costco pizza and we'll have beer, and the speaker has to have a 40 ounce beer and the The interview is done when the forty ounce beer is done. Right, right. It's like a TED talk, but instead of eighteen minutes, it was however long it takes him to finish the beer. If he wants to get off the stage

Chug, baby, chug. And and you'd get a little bit more loosey goosey with the questions towards the tail ending. That was genius. So that one was marketable. Was your did you have to do that for the apartment thing or was it as simple as saying Hey, come check out the show. We would get like hundreds of applicants for a one bed uh for like a four bedroom. And we just emailed them and and we are very transparent in the ad. It said this is not a one bedroom, it's a one bedroom and a four bedroom. But what we're doing is we're gonna host a party with fifty people. Here's the types of people who are coming, show up at this time. And then they would team up and get a place. And once they got a place, the landlord would tell us it came from us and we would take money from both the user and the landlord. And um

Uh yeah, we were just really transparent about it. And I would literally like ride my bike at the time to the house and be like Knock knock. I'm give me your hundred dollars, please. uh or three hundred dollars or however much it was and that's how we made money. But no, it was that it was very easy. But now you can't do this. Uh Craigslist has changed how they operate. But this by the way, is exactly how Airbnb got popular. Um all right, what's yours?

All right, I'm gonna give you my first business as well. So this is uh I'm twenty one years old. We are starting a sushi restaurant chain and I'm living in Denver. And the way our thing worked, it was like a cloud kitchen. So it was um Because we didn't want to sign a ten year lease and build out a physical location and have to go raise five hundred thousand dollars. We had a mentor who was like, What if you did a delivery only

A delivery only method. And you um renting a commissary kitchen by the hour. I remember we were paying nineteen dollars an hour. Instead of having to so like the contrast was we were about to sign a ten year lease with a personal guarantee and drop about three hundred to five hundred thousand dollars to build it out.

Or for nineteen dollars an hour we could start Monday. You're fifteen years you're fifteen years in the future. I mean you you nailed it. Yeah, we were too early, but still it w it and so how do we get customers? Back then DoorDash Uber Eats didn't exist. So where are we gonna get customers for our delivery only restaurant? I didn't know any better.

Knowing what I know now, I probably would have just run ads. Local ads, maybe Facebook ads, Google ads, something like that for people looking for sushi. But I didn't know that at the time. And Ignorance is a bit of a superpower. So the ignorance led us to

Our planning meeting was like Twelve minutes long. It's like we need customers. So like hey, we got the kitchen now. Like we need customers. Hey, um I don't know, walk around and ask people. So what I did was I went downtown and I did a version of door to door, but instead of door to door,

I did. floor to floor. So I went into a skyscraper because I wanted density. So I was like, oh let me just go to this big office building. There's thousands of people working in this one building. So I don't have to walk around all day. I can just go in the elevator, click one, Get out and talk to whoever I see. Click two, get out. Talk to everybody I see it. I'll go up.

you know, thirty or forty flights in this building. And what I realized when I was doing this was Um it's kind of amazing. I actually recommend this to pretty much anyone. Which is when you have a new thing You You have all these ideas about why it's so great.

But you haven't actually like pitch it to somebody in a concise way. Where You have, I don't know, thirty seconds to a minute to like get your foot in the door and then maybe another minute to explain what your thing is. And then you gotta make a call to action and try to get them to buy. And my pitch really sucked.

But Because I was floor to floor, it was like how twenty By four, though. Which was solid. I knew. And so what I realized was, okay, you go in, you can't just bother people in an office. You have to find the front desk lady. Her job is to greet A visitor. So I said, Okay. That's the accessible person. She also had a lot of clout. And so I learned about

Basically a local influencer. So when people think about influencers they think Gotta be a celebrity. But actually In any in any pocket of people, there is somebody who is more influential than the rest, any tribe of people. And in an office, that's always the person at the front desk. It's the office manager, the secretary, whatever you want to call it. And so I would go to this kind of office manager and I would say

Um Oh, say, hey, do you guys ever do k so instead of saying Hey Would you like to eat some sushi? It's like No, I don't just Eat sushi from strangers. I realized pretty quickly that was my first pitch by floor two. I was like, all right, I'm not saying that again. So floor three and four, I realized, okay.

I should actually ask them like do they ever um do you guys ever do office catering for lunches or whatever for the for the for the group? And They would say yes. So I asked a question that had a very simple answer, a yes or no answer. If it was no, then I knew don't waste my time on this prospect. They're not gonna order.

But if it was yes, now I had one person who might order Fifty lunches. Um, in one order, right? Like they would order bulk. And so I would ask them, Hey, do you ever order uh

You know, do you guys ever do catering for office lunches, maybe a birthday or a big meeting or or just every Wednesday? And they were like, Yeah, we do it every Wednesday. And I'd be like awesome. I said, When you order Um Where do you typically order from? Oh we always do the sandwich place, blah blah blah. I said

Awesome. Um If you ever wanted to try something new, we actually just opened up a restaurant. I would love to do a deal with you guys where we actually do it for free one time, right? So I created an offer. I was like, I'd love to bring you a sample tray just for you and you can invite a couple of people in the office to try it out. If you guys like it. We'll leave a menu with you guys. If you don't like it, no problem. We'll come back and clean it up.

And I created an offer, I created an opening question and I ended up getting my pitch right. And this one thing We were profitable month one. I remember we made like thirteen grand in the first month. And like At the time, everybody said restaurants, you don't make any money and we were like

We're doing it. We're making money. This is fantastic. And so this floor to floor sales and understanding who is the gatekeeper, who is the person I need to get on board and what is the the sort of uh risk free offer that I can offer them. Was

For customers. How much revenue were you doing in year six? Or not year six, month six. Year six? Zero, dude. We quit in month three. Cause what we realized was we were like, all right, we were making I don't know, tens of thousands a month. So I think we were doing like maybe thirty thousand the first month and then a little bit more the second month. And then by then it was like Dude, we were so worn out of the just the process of running a restaurant. And we we kinda had a realization like, Great, we can keep scaling this, but that means we're gonna have to keep

Doing this and it was Yeah, we were waking up at four in the morning, going to the fish market. Staying there'til eleven at night'cause we would do private caterings at night. And uh doing dishes and then I we didn't know anything. I was so stupid. I didn't realize you should hire people We just did everything like

You're like looking at your partners one day after work and you're like Bale? And they're like Fail. Like we're out. We had a realization. We we realized we were in the wrong business. We realized Actually the the the genius of this was the d delivery part. People actually liked food delivery.

But they only ate sushi every couple of weeks, max. And so we were like, Oh, you know what we should do? We've been telling everyone for a year we're gonna create the next, you know, this Chipotle of sushi. Actually what we should do is just deliver Whatever the hell they actually want. They want sandwiches, dude. They want burritos. So we should just deliver that. That's the business, not the sushi part.

And then we're like All right. I think that's true. Do we wanna do that? And yeah, we had the smart thing which was Hey guys, maybe the first business idea we ever had in our lives might not be the best one. And uh we're still young and we haven't committed anything to anybody. What if we just switch to a better to a different business altogether?

And I'm so glad we had that conversation because Most of the time if something's working, you're making a little bit of money and you've been telling everyone for a year You just feel like you need to stay consistent with it. And that would have been a terrible decision for us. Um, that's hilarious. Um, all right, I'll tell you uh another one. So

I'll skip the book club one, but I'll mention it briefly. I had a book club, the anti MBA.com, and I that's how I met Cieva. I met Ryan Hoover this way, uh some of my best friends. Dude, I just put another ad on Craigslist that I said, I'm gonna organizing a business book club and it was just from Craigslist and I ended up getting ten thousand people signing up to my email list. By the way, again. Can we name these methods? I will call the first one you did either like Uh

Piggybacking'cause you piggybacked off Greg's list, or like a host an event, maybe. That was the method you did. Yeah. For mine, it was literally door to door. And it's like don't underestimate the fact that you can just By brute force, hand to hand combat go get. A hundred customers that way. It'll only take you a few days to do that.

Um And this third one, you're talking about the book club. Recall it like the magnet. There's something different to it because it wasn't just an event. 'Cause what you did was you found a bunch of like minded people'cause there was a filter. The only people who wanna do a book club for on for like biographies and business books

Are gonna be the type of business nerds that you wanted to be around in your life. Create a product for. And so like The selective filter where For ninety ninety five percent of the people they're gonna be like hell no.

But five percent there, it's a hell yes. 'Cause it's like so niche to their obsessions. And I think that there's something smart there that's different than just hosting a general event. The learnings, by the way, for a book club, no one reads the book except me. I was the only one who read the book. I was just like teaching the book. Um All right, I'll do the second one though. All right. So Bunk was acquired for a very small sum.

And we ended up turning it into an app called Broomates. We'll call this methodology. Made to stick, I guess, because I learned this. I uh one of the books that we read at my book club was called Made to Stick. It was by Dan and Ch Heath, I think they're experts on like morality. And there was something in the book where it talked about I forget exactly the phrase, but it but my takeaway was that phrase that I always say, niches make riches.

And the idea being, if you ever see one of these BuzzFeed articles And it'll be like fifty ways you fifty reasons why are uh Fifty. Fifty things only only Long Islanders will laugh at. Right.

Or fifty things you know you're an Italian American, or fifty ways you know you're from St. Louis. And the thing about those is they don't Yeah. A huge amount of traffic.

But the people in Long Island or Saint Louis or who are Italian They will always click it. They w and so the click year rate is Through the roof. And so we didn't have a budget when we launched the app roommates. And so what we did was I stole that that

That Learning. And I created we launched in LA, Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco. Five or six cities.

And so what we did was we made an infographic where we called it the typical roommates of San Francisco, the typical roommates of LA. And I had never even been to LA or New York or Boston. I'd never even been there. And what we did was each image of the infographic. It was eighteen people, I think, or fifteen people. And it said, Here's the people from the marina, which is a neighborhood in San Francisco. Here's a typical roommate from the mission, which is the

hipster area of San Francisco. And in each thing we said Where do they shop? And we named Mm. Or four different places that they would shop.

Where do they eat? What what's a f funny quote they would say. And I would read Yelp. And I would find out in in let's say New York Like

what is a the most reviewed restaurant on Yelp in that area. And are people making jokes and saying that it's overhyped or whatever and which stores are the most popular? And then what we did, we made those infographics and we Uh we shared them out on Facebook and Twitter and I think Instagram, I don't even remember where

And we tag those restaurants and those stores. And most people are like oh this is so funny, they totally know us, which We just stole it from Yup, all the jokes. And they ended up sharing it and we got Something like a hundred thousand users.

Just from that infographic. Just from those five infographics. And if you Google You guys can Google um Typical roommates of LA. And you'll see Hoving to Post or all the local newspapers of those regions shared it. And that's how we got all of our initial customers. From uh From those four. I remember seeing that. I remember seeing the San Francisco one. It was really funny. It would be like you're making it sound almost like it was

Like uh Like utilitarian, but it was actually humorous, I thought. Like it was funny. Yeah. The marina. It's like and then it'd be like whatever I I don't remember exactly how you phrase it, but it would be like

Um Uh here you're gonna find uh Kelsey is blah blah blah, and you would kind of like make fun of them, but also backhanded compliment them. And then you would say like, you know, the upside You'll you know, you'll always have um, you know, Lululemon around the house. The downside, blah blah blah. And you're like kind of poke fun at them and because of that

Everybody shared it. For their own neighborhood. That's so true. That's so true. That's so uh oh my God, this is you. And then for others that they didn't like the other neighborhoods Same thing. It was like kind of like our team versus their team. And so you a lot of people shared this thing. I was living in San Francisco at the time. I remember seeing that right when I actually moved there and I was like, This is actually quite it was useful.

'Cause it's l it's not info you really found anywhere else either. Like uh supposed to be like the real the real take. So here's an example. This is Wrigleyville in Chicago. I've never even been there, but it's an image of a broy looking guy who I I guess went to Indiana University and he's wearing a Cub shirt. It said average one bedroom rent, average two bedroom rent. Um Here's how much you would save if you had a roommate. And it says three hundred and ten dollars per month or twenty Merkle's fish bowls, which I guess is like a restaurant in that area. Or it would say

Um Avoids Pilson and Andersonville. So it creates like the tribe thing. Those are other neighborhoods. Occupation, a PE teacher or a weekend bartender at Deuces. Uh, you'll probably find them at wriggle wriggly feel rooftops, crushing old styles or doing seventeen shots of fireball. Secret spot, the back bar uh of the stretch, trying to get the waitress to play find the water or calling everyone boss.

Shit they say. Hey bro, wanna shot ski? So like things like that where we would make fun of people. But you'll notice we name as many brands as possible. The name of the game was throwing as many brands as possible and those are people. And those are the people who share. And that is how we got

I forget exactly how many users we had, but I remember I got paid on how many swipes people did. And they were swiping millions and millions and millions of times. Right. That's how we got uh That's how we got traffic and users to the app roommates.

All right, I'm gonna tell you uh I'm going in order here. So my next business was a biotech business in Australia that um Go to Australia. Now biotech is a very like Like we're talking about like scrappy startup stories, like how do you get somebody to download an app, how do you get somebody to like order food. Biotech is like Science. You just go to an alley and you're like

Hey man, here's a needle. Do you uh You wanna try? Well it wasn't like b human body biotech, it was basically energy, clear. So the idea was our our technology was There's coal that's underground. And people think coal is real dirty'cause if you mine it, you bring it up to the surface and you burn it Yes, it is very like bad for the environment.

However Our technology was this thing where you don't have to mine it, so you don't have to bring it out of the ground and you don't have to burn it. Instead, what you do is You pump little microbes into the ground little Naturally occurring microbes. And their natural feeding is basically they eat the coal, they they basically decompose the coal.

Essentially it's like they eat coal and they fart out natural gas. So their natural metabolism of it. will release natural gas, which then bubbles back up to the to your pipe in the surface. And uh Boom, you have a flare of the Was this like a company?

Like a big company. Yeah, it was a company, it was a start up company. So basically this the backstory was This guy in the United States, this scientist in the United States had been had gotten forty million dollars of government funding. Two Develop microbes that would uh

Decompose ammunition. 'Cause the government had uh w there's wars all around the world and part of the like the environmental cleanup they had to do as part of the wars was they needed something that would decompose a lot of the ammunition and the the The waste product of the wars. And so what happened was

somebody realized you know the guy who the CEO of our company realized Hey, ammunition actually has a very similar composition to coal. I wonder if these bugs could Decompose coal. And so but it was speculative and we didn't know if it would work. It worked in the lab, will it work in the field? Now

What are you gonna do here to get your first customers, right? To get a customer, you need somebody that has owns like land that has coal. You have to have permits They have to let you like go do shit on their land. How is this gonna happen? It's like so much friction. So what we did was what I'll call the method of the no risk offer. So what we did was we would go to we we said, Who needs this the most? And we said, Well

It can't be somebody that actually values their cult. 'Cause we're gonna go and we don't have the money to go buy this coal. Like we can't buy the land from them. Like if you own land with a bunch of you know, coal that's basically like fuel, like that's very valuable property. So we said we need to go to people that have Stranded coal. Meaning they have coal that mining it would be uneconomic. It'd be too deep. It'd be too gnarly the way the the ground structure is. So there is coal, but like it's not good for mining.

And so we got really tight on basically finding some for somebody for whom this was excess capacity. And I think they are like Airbnb That's what they did, right? They sold excess rooms, excess space in your house. So we had took that same method. We said How do we make a no risk offer? So we went to them and we said, look.

You're sitting on a bunch of coal. What's that? Like who's a an example. Like the landowner. We would find we would do a geographic we looked at the geographic survey, we would find where the stranded coal was, meaning coal that's not economic to be mined. Then we would go figure out from the property like records who owns that. We would go knock on their door, we say Did you know you're sitting on a bunch of coal and they'd be like, Yeah, but like you can't really mine it. We did a feasibility study, didn't work.

And we would say great. What if I told you there was a way That you could make this many dollars per square foot. Without mining the coal. Yeah, I'm interested. Okay, tell me more.

And we said, Well, look, we have this technology, but you know, obviously we need to to prove it. It'll only take us this much space. And here's the deal. We will do this all at our cost. To do this whole method. Costs you nothing. And

But if it works, we want to share of the upside. And they were like Okay, so You might make my land way more valuable. And I only pay you

If you do it. And if I don't if it doesn't work I'm out I'm out nothing. Deal. And I'll throw in a tray of sushi. Exactly. And so that we were able to do this. Now this is something that

This is also how Alex Ramosi did his gym launch thing. If you listen to his story, what he would do is he'd go to the gym owners, he'd Uh, you know, I have a marketing program. They're like, Ah, I don't wanna buy it. We tried a bunch of marketing things. I don't know. I don't have enough money money anyways. To go do this. I'm not gonna buy your marketing program for ten thousand dollars. So he reworked his offer and he was like

How about this? If I don't increase I will oh I will Increase your sales by a hundred thousand dollars using my marketing method. And all I say is that anything we any of the incremental revenue we bring in, we get to keep whatever, fifteen percent. It's like okay, so you keep fifteen percent, but like you don't get anything if if you don't raise my my revenue. It's like Yeah, we if we don't raise your revenue by X, we get nothing.

Yeah, no brainer. Her mosey did her no no brainer offer. Main Street did the same thing, grew really fast in the Text startu community by saying Hey, there's R D tax credits available. We will do it for you. We keep twenty percent or twenty five percent of all this all the extra tax credits you get. You're not gonna do this anyways. So it's just free money for you. Um, and so a lot of people use this this no risk offer method. And I think that's a very, very

fast way to bypass one of the hardest parts is if you're a new company, which is You have no relationships, nobody trusts you, nobody you have no track record. So you need to offer them something that has like zero downside and only upside. How many customers did you get doing that? Well, ironically what ended up happening was we had like five interested customers and then one of them was like hey, hey, hey If you're gonna do this, I want

I wanna own this technology. Like if it sound like basically don't go to my competitors with this offer, like they're gonna Then they're gonna have, you know, all this benefit. I want this. And so then they they came back later. And they renegotiated the deal and they said, How about this? We'll give you five million dollars. and the land and we'll do the permitting for you.

Um But and then we're like, Okay, what's the catch? And they're like, the catch is if this works, we want to be able to buy fifty percent of the technology for fifty million. And then we were like Alright, fine deals. Like that's you know, this business is so freaking hard. Like let's try this. And uh in the end, I don't think it ever ended up working or I'm not sure what actually happened because I left after that deal was signed. I was like, Turns out microbiomes yeah, microbiomes don't even like charcoal. So it turns out that's in the lab, but it's like it's I think it would turn out to be kind of expensive. Or what actually happened is this

field trial was gonna take five years to do. I wasn't gonna sit around and wait till the to the conclusion of this. And so I think what happened was like the guy who said yes got fired or took another job. The next guy who came in was like, Ah, I don't know, I don't want to fund this. And I have no idea what happened. It's kinda died on the vine. But you got the customers, and that's the point of the episode.

Yeah, we can the subsequent failure is irrelevant, okay? Yeah that doesn't matter. Um all right, my next one. So uh I started a conference series called Hustle Code. I ended up hosting this event maybe four or five times. The first time I hosted it, I decided to host it. In May.

And I think it went l uh it the event happened in July. uh July one or July fifteenth, but I had roughly six weeks between deciding to do it and it happening. And I think I made sixty grand in revenue, and I think fifty thousand in profit. The next year, I think it was something like a hundred and eighty grand in revenue.

And my costs were only twenty grand. So whatever that is, that's what I made. And then I did it again. And I think I made Like a quarter of a million in revenue and like two hundred thousand in profit. Um And then we hosted a bunch more events. Peak did like six hundred K, right?

Yeah, it it made uh each event was doing cl like a couple of times we got close to a million. And I made a ton of mistakes. The biggest mistake I made is I made it like a Tet event, not like a trade show. Had I made it like a trade show, I probably could have made tens of millions per event, but I just didn't know what I was doing. And I also charged like three hundred dollars to attend this event. So I screwed up the business, but I did get a lot of uh hype right away. And the way that I got hype was I actually found one of my old posts. Um

I would uh this one is on price anomics. So this guy Rohan uh Rohan. He had a blog called Priceonomics and at the time They were like the best bloggers out there. He was such a good blogger and he would go viral all the time. So he was gonna give talk on content marketing.

And what I would do is I think I had eight speakers. I wrote a blog post. Every Tuesday and Thursday on each speaker. And I would go to Hacker News and I would go to Reddit. And I would figure out which subreddits would this article fit best in. And then later on, and my second thing I'm gonna talk about after uh after you go is

I ended up eventually running blog posts specifically that would g get popular In Reddit. Or on Reddit. And different like subreddits. But

At this point, I hadn't figured that out. And so right away, I think on the first day of business, I think I got a thousand people to come. uh to the website and then after that it would go to like one thousand to five thousand on any given day. And you would go to the website. And it would say a a funny pop up. that I would get your attention and I would say, give me your email.

And the hustlecon dot com, you couldn't even purchase a ticket unless you gave me your email. You couldn't even see all the details. And so I would get people's email And I would subsequently like The way I had it set up was I would write blog post number one. Put it on Reddit. Blog post number two, put it on Reddit.

The traffic comes, I collect their email. when I get their email, they go into a cycle where they get sent blog post number one, then they get blog post number two. And then I would keep writing blog post number three, number four, number five, and I would keep emailing it to the past people. So it was like cycle and those people would share. Just a little bit. And that's how I eventually got two, three, four, five thousand people coming to the website. And I did another thing where I made the speaker Look like a hero.

So it was like a glowing article about them and they would share it within their company and the each employee would share To be proud. And that's how I got two, three, four, five thousand people. And I think

I think the email list I if you Google um HustleCon Nev Blog. So my friend Neville Midora, Nev. N E V B L O G He wrote a blog post about how I made sixty grand and like six weeks and I list all the blog post and emails that I sent.

And that's originally uh how we got our first I think ten thousand email subscribers. Um is just doing that blogging. And and and when I say we I mean me in my kitchen.

uh just like doing this in my crappy San Francisco apartment. That's yeah, that's great. I remember reading those blog posts. They're really good. I s highly suggest you go Read those, uh They're detailed and specific and you literally have screenshots of what you wrote in certain emails, and I think that's really Cool to go see. I like when people share

the specifics, um Oh, do you hear that? You hear that? That's no. Dude, that's the

That's the thrill of the show. I thought we had a pause. Like, wait, what? Uh you've got ninety seconds to to to thrill me. For those who don't remember the thrill of the show is where we show a thing, but The way we do it is with value. We do with we by we by entertaining with a little bit of story. So I was gonna talk to you about Shepard, but the way I did it was I asked Marshall, I go, Yo, when you launch this thing,'cause this is now a business that is

Coming up on Like. I I guess I really should say, but millions of dollars of profit a year. So very, very, very healthy business. How old are they? Four years? Uh yeah, like less than four years old. So uh in less than four years getting to, you know, basically eight figures in profit. Profit. Not revenue profit. So anyways, I was like

Hey, dude, I'm doing this episode about how you got your first hundred customers. What did you do for for Shepherd? And he goes Um he goes, Well, I did a couple of things, but he's like, What I did was I He s linked me to the tweet. So he did three like three or four steps in a row. So t tweet one, I'll show this on the screen. He just goes

I'm launching a new business tomorrow and then do the sign emoji and they said hint it's an agency. And he had a small Twitter following about Ten thousand followers at the time. Um not like a huge mega influencer, but enough and that

That post itself has 350 likes. So that post itself probably got a bunch of people being curious going in about and then what he did next, he's like, I'm gonna explain it on my newsletter. So he goes to the newsletter and he writes this post and he goes, They am launching this new business. But let me tell you a story. And he goes A few years ago my business is struggling. Here's why. So it does what I call the personal story tactic, which is Instead of pitching

The solution that you've made, you pitch the problem that you had. And you tell a personal story where you reveal some information, you do some vulnerability, and hopefully other people resonate with the problem that you had. So he goes. Uh my business was was doing good and he's like, but I uh or so he's about he's like, I had this business, it was kind of struggling. I was working all the time, but we never really had any profits. I realized I I always thought I could solve the problem with growth. And then finally one day I was like, maybe I should try to lower my cost. I didn't really know what to do. So I looked for where could I lower my cost.

He goes, I heard about a guy who had hired somebody in the Philippines for less than a thousand dollars a month. Meanwhile, I was paying somebody five thousand for the same service. So I did it. I did another one. Here's a picture of me in the Philippines. We went out and met them because I was so amazed at how this worked. He goes. And so then that became my secret weapon. I was hiring overseas. And so now all of a sudden I went from profit margin of zero. to profit margin of whatever, fifteen percent. And that made the difference between the business sucking to the business being good.

So I started doing this for a few friends just for fun. Finally decided I'm gonna make a business called supportchep.com to help you find equipment uh amazing employees. That are eighty percent less than the US equivalent. He goes, blah, blah, blah. And then he sent me the screenshot. We could show this on the screen. So This newsletter went to twelve thousand people.

It had an eleven percent click rate. Which is the power of a story versus an ad. And so normally a a an ad would get like a one to three percent click. Exactly. So this is ten times better. Why is it ten times better? Because again, he kinda opened up the kimono and told a story. So the to support shepherd.com it says uh thirteen hundred people clicked that link. And then that's where he got, you know, just you can even assume even like a three percent conversion on thirteen hundred people is gonna get you, you know, your whatever, your f I don't know the math, but like let's say your first twenty, thirty customers to get the ball rolling. And for a business like this, where each customer is worth thousands of dollars.

That was enough to to sort of really actually move the needle. And then what he did was he just kept doing the same thing. And so If you want to hire people, go use Shepard. That's really the the show. But I actually like this method a lot. I remember that Ryan Hoover did this amazingly with Product Hunt also. I remember him doing this. So he did the hand to hand combat where

Every morning. He would go to Phil's coffee in San Francisco at like five or six in the morning. And for the first three hours of the day, all he would do would be reply to people's tweets. So anytime somebody said about something about product, he would reply personally. Anytime somebody mentioned a cool product, he would be like That's awesome. Do you want to post that on Product Hunt?

I gave you access. And he would he would manually brute force do this in the mornings, but then he would go and he would go to Fast Company and say, Hey, do you want to cover Product Hunt? And they're like I never heard of it. No. So he's like, Damn, I really want to get pressed, but I can't uh

They're not they don't want to talk about product and it's not sexy enough. So then instead what he did was he would go to Uh fast company would say Hey, I signed up a thousand customers for my side project in a weekend. Can I tell you how we did it? And I wrote this blog post. It's already written in this Google Doc.

Will you guys run this? And as a guest post. And then if you go look Product and has a bunch of posts that he wrote. And so it was like He would get to a hundred customers, then he would write the post on how he got to a hundred customers.

Get that posted somewhere on Indy Hackers or whatever. That would get him to a thousand. Then he'll go write the post of how I got to a thousand, because he's like the generically interesting story. People aren't that interested in product time. But they are interested in how A guy can bootstrap his side hustle. to a thousand customers in a week. And he did the work for them.

And he did the work for them. And so again, it was a no-brainer offer to to basically say, Hey, it's written, do you want to run this or should I go, you know? I I like fasting update, you guys should run this. If not, I'll I guess I'll go ask somebody else. And that that method I saw was something somebody else did that worked really well. All right, solid thrill the show.

Good job. You forgot the call to action. Join Shepherd.com. Support Shepherd.com. Support Shepherd.com. Um all right, what's your uh what's your next one? Okay, so my next one I call Pissin' in the pond. And visit in the pond.

is as good of a method as it sounds like. So what you want to do, like you said, like a horrible method. There's riches and niches. Similarly, what you want to do is not try to boil the ocean. Bad phrase. You want to piss in the pond. Okay, so bowling the ocean is when you go try to get the mass market to care about what you're doing. Doesn't really work.

What you want to do is say, All right. I'm small anyways. To me, when I have no customers Ten customers is a big win. Hundred customers is a a phenomenal win. And so where can I go? That is small. But hyper obsessed. And so

What we did when we launched our e commerce brand. Was we know we knew that there were Facebook groups dedicated Comparing products in our niche.

These weren't big, right? There may be five thousand people total. And this is like and Facebook, yeah, it's like that's a that's Kind of a small overall Facebook group. And what we would do is we'd go there and we would do the Martial thing. Just like he did with Shepherd, we would go tell our story, which was why we started this brand. So instead of saying buy our product, we would say

Um Hey, y'all, wanted to share my story, the ups and downs that's gone over the last six months trying to launch a brand that does this. And then we would share like Here were some of the ups we had. Here were some of the downs we had when we got screwed or we got scammed or we were so naive. And people really started rooting for us and you could get people to root for you.

Um, and so that's how we for my ecom biz. We did I think th uh thirty thousand in month one in and revenue about I think twenty eight thousand specifically. And our ad spend was only maybe five hundred or a thousand. So we did two try ads, but most of the the revenue that first month.

came from this group. And this was really good because Who those hundred customers are actually matters. And if you can get a hundred hundred of the hyper obsessed people of a niche to actually k give a shit about you and know about you, they're the ones who spread the word. They're the ones that other people look to for recommendations. And so it's actually quite valuable to go get to go piss in that pond. And so you go to that group and the way you do it, that's

acceptable where you're making the water warmer, not uncomfortable, is You tell a story of the ups and the downs you've had trying to build something cool in this space. Why you started What worked for you, what didn't work for you. Some of the big mistakes you made and people will then root for you because you're the underdog.

Now let me tell you another example of this. So I can't believe we even did this business. I'm embarrassed to even say this is a business I was doing, but In our idea lab. We had a hackathon, and in the hackathon our our DevOps guy was like Hey, I built this app. It's like uh four square foursquare was hot at the time. This is way back in the day.

He's like four it's four square for beers. He's like basically every time you drink a beer, watch this, you scan the label. And it checks in that beer and it keeps track of all the different beers you've drink. And then everybody's like Starts laughing and we're like

That's awesome, man. That's cool. You know look beer. Who love who doesn't love beer? And so We were kinda like Maybe there's a thing here. And actually to this day, actually there is a business called Untap that does this, and there's a there's a version of this for wine. We were just the wrong people to start this business. Similar to the sushi business, I made the same mistake again, which was I d well I drink beer, but I'm not like a craft beer

aficionado, guy who loves like try new craft beers, all like drinking it, you're like, ah yes. Yeah, Miller Light. This is beautiful. And I was like, nah, thanks. I don't smell it. Yeah, do you guys have french fries? Exactly. I was like, Can I just drink it? I don't care about all this. So anyways. Um We had this app called Beer Hunt. Okay. So how do you do it? Well there was a craft beer. So it was like where do you get again, if you go to the b the mass market. Mass market is like me. They don't care about beer enough to care about this product. But instead there was a craft

beer tasting festival or something like that in San Francisco. We went there and we tried to make a splash. This is also the uh What I'll call the booth babes method. It's how do you actually make a splash at an event. And so we weren't hosting this one, we were attending.

And so we dressed up like it was Oktoberfest. We dressed up like in our like whatever Liederhausen and whatever. We wore outfits like we were straight from Germany. And we came and we created we were like people probably won't just download our app if we say download our app. So how do we get it? Twenty three, twenty four. Um And so we but you know, we our whole company was is older, but we're all there.

And they were they were down for it, which I liked. Uh, you know, my our engineers are doing this. And so the um what we did was we created a scavenger hunt for the conference. We were like, hey. Here's a little card. Um If you can mark off all these things at this conference

Uh, we're gonna give one person like, you know, the like whatever, some beer dream. It was like, you know, you're gonna get a year's supply of Of craft beer. And it was like It didn't even matter what the prize was. The idea was like people were gonna wander around this place anyways. They were happy to play the game of like marking things off as they went. So we had our branded little scavenger hunt.

They would do it and at the end we would s had a guy standing at the door, he would collect them. He would give them out and he would collect them. And on it they had their email address. And so now we had Basically I think we had like fourteen hundred leads or something from the states. Fourteen hundred leads of people who Are so into craft beer.

that they will go to this like craft beer like paid money to go to this craft beer tasting festival type thing. And so then that those became the first, you know, whatever, seven hundred customers, uh, seven hundred people to download our app. And they really gave a share. And so that that really cranked the engine to get something started. Seeing you at a twenty three year old you at a like fancy brewery. It reminded me of a time

One time I had told Neville, I go, Neville, I've never been to a strip club or somehow it came up And he was like I'm gonna take you right now. And I was like, I I don't really wanna go to a ship club. He's like, Well you have your flight at Five PM. There's a strip club near the airport in Texas.

It's two o'clock. Let's go. And I don't drink, so like it's even worse. And we go out to the strip club. And I'm so uncomfortable on rubbing my hands. I don't know what to do with my hands.

And uh I've like and like these strippers come up and like touch my shoulders and they're like, Hey, can I get you anything? And I was like Yeah, can I get some ketchup for these fries? Like the waitresses. Yeah. Like and the food was only six dollars. It was one dollar for fries, five dollars for sandwich. I remember texting my wife and I'm like Do I How much do I tip? Cause I kinda took up a seat, but I didn't do anything. It's just like it was the most uncomfortable that I've ever been. It's like the first and only time I've ever been to a strip club was two o'clock at the airport in Austin strip club.

Uh just can I tell you the one time I went to a strip club, it's it's a incredible story. So I've been one time in my life, uh yeah, maybe twenty two years old, something like that. And we go and it's me. People know me, so I don't need to describe me, but it's my buddy who's like The ladies man. This guy, like, was the big man on campus. He you know Like

Your dorm has like an RA. He like hooked up with the Ray's girlfriend. And it's like that guy's a senior freshman is like wow, this guy's just amazing. And so with we go with this guy, he's the man. And then we go with our other buddy. Um It was like Mr. Long Term relationship. So he's been in a relationship forever and never met, never known this guy, not in a relationship, but he had just broken up. And so We go to a strip club.

Because you know, like in Vegas, they're like, Hey boys, you want some free drink? Get in this limo. We're like, Oh wow, what's the drive like thirty minutes away to a strip club in there and now you're here. And uh you have two free drink coupons that you can go name at the bar. So me and the ladies man, we don't know what to do. None of us have ever been to strip club. So We go to the bar again, what do I uh I'm uncomfortable. Let me just like find a safety net. Like let's go get a drink. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Drink, drink, drink. That's a good idea. How we go. And then we turn to look for our friend, Mr. Long Mr Always Wifed Up.

And he's not only not with us. He is holding hands with a stripper going into the back room. And I'm like, it's been less than like two minutes. Yeah, we're like, We're like, What's he doing? And so we had several questions. One Um I can't but like why is he doing this so fast? Number two, why is he going to the back room? Isn't that like for like the the high tier stuff? Like why isn't he just sitting here and watching the the stripper? And three.

Most importantly was Why did he pick her? 'Cause just objectively, completely scientifically, the least attractive stripper in the place. And so Fifteen minutes go by.

He comes back out and we're I'm like I have a thousand questions. What happens in the back room? How much does it cost? Do you have to tip on top of the cost? I have so many logistical questions. But most importantly. Why'd you pick her, man? You could have picked anyone here. And he goes. Oh you can pick?

He goes, Oh He goes, I he goes, I thought it's like Harry Potter. The one chooses the wizard. To this day, the line, the one chooses the wizard is like catched in my soul. It it just applies to any situation. And neither of us have been to a strip club since. Since never been again. Um all right, I'll do one last one. Uh trench. Trench.co. Tr we're gonna go from shipper to what the Sass. Yeah. Sassy to Sass. Yeah. Um I hope people have made it this far.

Um uh Trends Trends at Co was a uh pay research newsletter that I launched. When we sold it eighteen months after launching it, I think it was doing four or five hundred thousand a month in sales. I think we had twenty thousand users or so. Um And it was great, whatever. I I screwed up a bunch of stuff with that, but we got some results.

And the way that we got results is We started and I I did this like I as a little skunk project. And if you actually see the link, I list to my original Gumroad project. I made a gumroad page. And I think it was like four hundred words of me just writing like a story explaining. So basically the story was

Like in nineteen ninety six, Jeff Bezos saw this amazing stat, which was that the internet was growing at twenty three hundred percent. Nothing grows that fast, Bezos said. Unless it's in a petri disc. And immediately then. He knew that he had to start an internet company that sold something.

Um, and so that was how it started and then I said Hey, everyone, I'm Sam. Um, I invest in a lot of companies or I in or I have this company called the Hustle and I'm able to see a lot of interesting things. Next quarter I'm launching this product called Trends, where I'm going to Um break down interesting companies and explain how they work and hopefully identify a handful of trends as shocking as this Bezos one that he found.

So you're gonna be able to catch the tidal wave instead of miss it. I'm gonna charge three hundred dollars a year for this, but right now you just spend a hundred bucks and you get a lifetime. Um of access. And so I got Originally I got

Um a thousand or two thousand people to sign up for this and I'll explain how. But before we even launched this whole project, I ran Facebook ads against a this Gumroad page and it made sixty thousand dollars in pre-sales. And the way that I got the initial hundred users is the hustle at the time probably had a million emails. And I just found the three hundred engaged users and I sent them an email that basically explained the story and linked to the Gumroad page.

Um, and then what I did was I actually got on the phone with all one hundred of them and I asked them, Why'd you do this? What are you looking for? What what are your expectations? And then I went and made the first report. based off of like some of their insights and what they wanted And then what we did was People would sign up to the hustle.

And afterwards they would see a page that says thank you. By the way, we have something coming soon. And it would link to this gum road page. Now that's a little bit you're listening to this and you don't have an audience, you're like, Wow, what the fuck? That's not really actionable. But I had to share this is how we built like

I think it was four hundred. Or five hundred thousand by month eighteen. And so it worked. And we built the product around just calling those people. Yeah, that's like a you had a launch pad. you had an audience that you had built for years and then you were able to do this. And I wouldn't recommend doing that just to launch a product. But if you don't really know what product you want to launch.

It's not a bad idea to uh to build a launch pad along the way. So just to recap. I did the same thing with Hampton. And I would DM people on Twitter. And you could say, I have an audience, so it helps. I didn't use my audience, but I did use my reputation. So some people had known me. Um, so I I but I called emailed people on LinkedIn and I called people on Twitter. So if you want to do this methodology, you could still do it that way. Yeah, and we didn't mention a couple of the obvious ones. So

And we kind of loosely mentioned it, cold outreach. There's a bunch of traditional methods to to try to do this. We Told you what we did, which was partly because we were young and dumb and we didn't know any better. We didn't know that you could just I didn't know you could just run ads or just do cold emails. I

would go door to door instead. Um But also You know, it it some of it's in the specifics. So for example From Milk Road.

I had an audience, so I had a newsletter, I had this podcast. And I could have just mentioned it, but I layered on another tactic, which is what I call the David Blaine method. And you know, David Blaine will do this shit where he's like I'm gonna freeze myself for a week. Yeah, watch me, you know, slightly torture myself and try to do something incredible. And it's like all right. I'm gonna freeze myself on a block of ice, I'm gonna bury myself underground. I'm gonna hold my breath until I pass out. Yeah, I'm gonna he literally did one where he's like, I'm gonna hold on to these balloons and fly away. Like, okay, dope. And he did it. He like flew away like the movie up. And so he um

David Blaine does this stuff. So when we started the Milk Road, I was like, okay, if I think if I told people that Hey, I'm starting a daily newsletter about crypto for people that want to read um, you know, the latest kind of News and info on crypto, I think people would sign up. But I wanted to like juice it a little bit. So how did I go a little bit further? I was like

Let me do a stunt. And so I said, I am funding. And of course, you know, you have to have some money to do this version of it, but you could really David Blaine puts his body through torture. I put some money on the line. So what I did was I said, I'm gonna put a million dollars in this wallet. You can go look at the address right now. Here's a million dollars in a wallet. And then I'm gonna try to turn this into ten million through Trading crypto. And this is like um Dave from Barstool does this with his uh Davy Day trader.

Uh, you know, Jason Calcan has tried to copy that and do J Trader. Like people try to do a version of this where it's like, watch me try to run this bankroll up. Uh I s I learned this from back in the poker days. I used to love when any anyone would do this in the gambling or poker space and they'd be like, I'm starting with this bankroll. I'm either going broke, I'm going to this level. I'm getting I'm getting to this milestone. And here I'm gonna post all of my history. And it never works out, but it's really fun to watch. And that's what I figured.

And that's exactly what happened. I Managed to turn a million dollars'cause we bought it like a you know, peak crypto. into what became like three hundred fifty thousand dollars at the bottom and then now it's a little bit higher. But um Basically it's like watch me lose money, but either way, watch me lose money is also entertaining. People will subscribe to watch me get my ass kicked to watch they'll subscribe to watch me kick ass.

And even better, they'll subscribe to find out whether I get my ass kicked or whether I kick ass. And the other version of this is People call it now build in public. People do that. Before that, buffer and convert kit did this stuff where they would share like all their team's salaries. They would share all their team's revenue. uh or the company's revenue. And

It it tends to work. I remember this guy named Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income. He was one of the first guys to do this. He would share his monthly revenue and where it all came from. And I would go there every month to see like what he was doing and it totally worked. The a the extreme access works, but I think the other one is calling your shot or Uh basically creating a a storyline. So it's basically like What is the story? There's the hero.

They have a goal. And they have an obstacle. And then there's some stakes. There's there's something on the line. And I think that's the way to like juice that up. So it's not just I'm gonna build in public, so I'll I'll provide a monthly update. It's I'm gonna try to do X and if I don't do X

You know like there's a there's a Like I'm putting something on the line trying to get there and I'm gonna try to do this incredible thing, not just You know, if I said, Hey, I'm um You know, I'll show you, you know, my pro you know, some of the things I'm investing in. That'd be okay.

But to say I'm gonna try to turn a million dollars into ten million or go bust? That people want to watch more. And so, you know I think the David Blaine spectacle method is another one. I wanna see you do that with your second trip to the strip club. I'm gonna order as much food and free water as I can until they kick me out of the strip club. Can I make it over or under six hours before they realize this guy's just here for the fries.

Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to I put my law in it like my day song On a roadless travel never looking back

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