The Hustle

Email turns attention into predictable money in a way a blog cannot. Sam Parr launched The Hustle in 2016 after figuring that one million subscribers emailed daily at a 50% open rate meant about 15 million reads a month, which he estimated could earn around $2 million a month.

He started with a blog, but it failed to bring readers back, which pushed him to email. He wanted to sell at scale without working constantly, so he learned copywriting and combined it with journalism.

How I Write

The Hustle grew from 150,000 to 1.7 million subscribers in four years. It reached 150,000 subscribers in its first year and 1.7 million by the time it was sold to HubSpot in year four, with a staff of 30 to 40.

How I Write

Post stunts in the subreddits where your readers already are. The Hustle's first 150,000 subscribers came from a blog whose stunts were posted in the subreddits its target readers already used.

How I Write

Signup popups followed AIDA: attention, interest, desire, action. Sam built popups, article footers and pages for new traffic on AIDA, and says these popups helped grow The Hustle to 150,000 subscribers in year one.

Grab attention with a vivid image, build interest, create desire with facts about how it solves the reader's problem, then say what to do. He illustrates it with a water pitch: gym guys carrying gallon jugs, a made-up 30% muscle claim, then a buy link.

How I Write▶ 24:02

The popup copy sounded like someone talking in a bar. The popup said The Hustle was a daily newsletter with some crazy blog posts and offered to Venmo you a dollar if you didn't like it. Together with the blog posts, it drove first-year growth to 150,000 subscribers.

David Perell calls this colloquial copy, which Sam considers his strength and a different craft from long direct-response copy. "That's how people would chatter in a bar."

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The welcome email turned a forgotten moment into a memorable one. Sam rewrote the post-signup email so that a bell goes off in the office, one employee runs outside to hug a stranger and another does push-ups, matching the brand's brash tone.

He calls post-signup text "forgotten text" and says nine out of ten welcome emails at the time were generic "click here to confirm" messages.

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Headline work can lift click-through from 1% to 10%. Sam told Hustle writers that a great article with a weak headline is a tree falling in the woods with no one there, and that improving the headline beats polishing the body.

"You got to spend time on the headline because you can change 1% to 10% pretty easily." He finds a story's hook by asking what its YouTube title would be, then writes the opening line with the same care.

How I Write▶ 40:25

Write under 500 words or over 2,000, never in between. Sam found that short pieces and long definitive pieces each worked, while the middle was "no man's land." Zach Crockett's long Sunday stories regularly got 2 to 5 million views.

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Good copy comes from stealing, testing on people and copying by hand. Sam tried phrases on Zoom calls and watched faces like a comedian; "business group therapy" made eyebrows move, so it stayed. He copied the best sales letters by hand for an hour a day for months and still does it for ten minutes before writing.

He believes short, memorable phrases repeated over and over make people act. At Hampton, a long secrecy oath became "nothing, no one, nobody" because the longer version was forgettable.

How I Write

The brand mixed elite and cheeky, modeled on old print ads. Sam drew on 1970s and 80s full-page ads from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Porsche and Rolex to be professional yet informal, chose British racing green and aimed the voice at Felix Dennis, founder of Maxim.

He ranks copy above design but says the two go together: "copy is like food, how it looks is as important as how it tastes."

How I Write

Study a company's early copy, not its polished homepage. Sam suggests finding the news of a company's Series A or revenue milestone and using the Web Archive to see its wording three months earlier. Both The Hustle and Morning Brew began with a plain email-signup homepage that worked before committees added complexity.

He compares it to a 13-year-old studying the workouts LeBron did at 13, not LeBron today.

How I Write▶ 27:11

Cut the first five paragraphs of every draft. Sam says nine times out of ten the opening paragraphs are warm-up junk, and the real writing starts after you delete them.

He ties this to David Ogilvy calling himself a lousy writer but a world-class editor.

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Write down what the company stands against, not only what it stands for. Sam admits he was bad at defining what his companies were against. At The Hustle he hired people who called themselves artists and found them too slow.

At Hampton he made the brand bold and masculine on purpose, accepting it is not for everyone.

How I Write▶ 1:04:11