OLD Media Moves

How tech/business newsletter The Hustle raised $300,000 from its readers

March 14, 2017

Posted by Chris Roush

The HustleLaura Hazard Owen of Nieman Lab interviewed Sam Parr, the founder of tech and business newsletter The Hustle, which has more than 300,000 subscribers and raised $300,000 from its readers in just more than two days.

Here is an excerpt:

Owen: How big is your team?

Parr: We’re a team of 12, about to grow to 15 or 16 in the next couple months. We have a three-person editorial team and everyone else is focused on building the technology and building the list. [The Hustle said on its SeedInvest page: “Because we’re email first and driven by subscribers, not page views, we’ve been able to thrive with a small team of writers. This allows us to put most of our resources into growth via tech and marketing, and not clickbait-like content designed only to capture attention without delivering substance.”] We do big events as well. We’re profitable just from the advertising in the email, but the events make us a lot more profitable. [Between January and October 2016, The Hustle made $473,675; 81 percent of that came from events and the remaining 19 percent came from advertising.]

Owen: You’re also raising money, including some money from readers.

Parr: We ended up raising a little over a million from institutions, so like normal VCs, but also guys like Tim Ferriss, [Behance founder and VC] Scott Belsky, [Bleacher Report founder] Dave Nemetz, people like that.Our community — we consider ourselves a community more than a media publication — is very big, they love us a lot, and they always ask to invest. As a little shtick to get them involved, we let them invest. And we ended up raising something like $300,000 in like 40 or 50 hours. It was crazy. I thought that we were gonna get $150,000 over 90 days, but we got that in the first handful of hours.

Owen: What do they get for investing?

Parr: They’re a small shareholder. The average price was like $1,000, and so they own a small piece of the business.

Read more here.

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