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How the Hustle grew its first 100,000 followers with Reddit
Be where your users are.
Sheldon Bishop
November 01, 2024
In partnership with
What’s up! This is Sheldon from The Zero to One - helping you grow your product by breaking down the growth tactics, strategic playbooks, and GTM motions behind your favorite startups and giving you the actionable insights to replicate them. Check out all my previous deep dives here.
Welcome to episode 2 of The Hustle series: Your No-BS friend who tells you the news and sold for tens of millions of dollars doing so.
How The Hustle grew by fetching users from where they’re already at:
Within two months of launching The Hustle was growing at a similar pace as some of the world’s biggest media companies: TheSkimm, Business Insider, and Morning Brew. And this was with only 33 pieces of content.
They had 555,958 unique viewers on their blog within these first two months. That is crazy high.
Sam mentioned that the Hustle had a ~3% conversion rate to email subscribers at this stage, which meant the Hustle had grown ~16k subscribers (users for a newsletter) in just two months. And this was on top of the 10k+ subscribers they already had from their HustleCon days.
The thing is finding your first customers (readers for The Hustle) is hard.
So how did they scale so quickly?
First, they found a massive gap in the market. There wasn’t enough news for business-focused millennials (what we spoke about last week). But knowing there’s a gap isn’t the same as letting others know you filled it.
So The Hustle went to where their users already hung out and brought them back to the Hustle.
They didn’t wait for their target audience to stumble across them. Instead, they put themselves right in front of their target audience.
By doing this users didn’t have to change any behaviors to become aware of The Hustle. They removed friction and reduced the steps required for readers to become aware of them.
🔬 How this looks practically:
3 actionable insights from the tactic.
🎯 1. Finding their landing spot
The first step: Sam and John (the founders) had to find where their target audience was already hanging out.
And for the millennial entrepreneurial nerds of 2014-2016, that was Reddit and HackerNews.
Today that would most likely be X, or dare I say, LinkedIn.
“I proposed to my girlfriend. Here’s what it taught me about business…”
Now you might think that they went straight to the typical business-y subreddits. Which they did. But where they got their most success was from thinking about other interests or hobbies their target readers would have.
For example, one of the Hustle’s most successful articles was on r/soylent, a meal replacement. But a meal replacement that was targeted for tech bros coding the night away.
This was a repost. I think the original’s been lost to time.
Probably someone with a lot of drive and a desire to achieve more. Just the type of person The Hustle was looking for.
But this time without all the competition of similar thought on r/entrepreneur.
It’s an important lesson that when looking for where your ideal users are already hanging out, it doesn’t have to be completely in line with your product or service. But rather think about the behaviors of your target users and go there.
🫂 2. Winning with depth > quantity
Once The Hustle found their subscribers they needed to get them to their blog, where they ultimately tried to convert them into newsletter subscribers, the core business.
What The Hustle did differently to most was focusing on big bets, weekly posts that required a lot of effort, research, and time to write, instead of just trying to get as many posts as possible out and play the quantity game.
The Hustle posted unique content that engaged users outside of just “business” and because of this stood out. With between 30-50% of articles bringing in substantial readership.
To give you some perspective on just how awesome these early articles were, here are links to a few (that all did over 100k views in a week):
And it was this type of content the posted on super-targeted subreddits: r/microdosing, r/soylent, r/selfpublishing, like we mentioned above.
But something else that stands out with these articles is their likelihood of being shared. Every one of them leaves you with a “no way” or “wtf”. I.e. they envoke emotion. And this was something Sam and the rest of the team were awesome at.
This depth over quantity approach, together with their shareability helped The Hustle grow at a much faster rate per article than other publications.
🌍️ 3. Hustle the forgotten text
The thing with a tactic like this is it requires a ton of hustle (😉). You’re cranking out high quality pieces of content every week. And for most the time, they were a four person team. With no dedicated writer.
Unless you count Sam’s 3 pen names, each with their own LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.
What these 3 pen names were great for was giving legitimacy to The Hustle, but also to provide different perspectives - Sam would write content through the lens of people close to him. Giving readers more faces to feel a connection to.
But that side note aside, The Hustle were bringing in thousands of unique readers per week. They wanted to make sure they kept them.
Their approach? Putting personality into what Sam refers to as the “forgotten text” - popups, 404 pages, welcome emails.
Starting with an iconic popup:
“well while you’re here, we wrote these blogs to get people to our daily newsletter. If you don’t like it, I’ll Venmo you a dollar”
I couldn’t find the exact one, but this one’s also pretty good.
This pop-up, just like the Hustle, didn’t take itself too seriously. And people loved that (as we spoke a bit about in the last episode).
And after that, the personality continued with the Hustle’s quirky welcome email:
Possibly the most iconic welcome email in business nerd folklore.
One that engaged users and got them more likely to not only come back but also to share The Hustle.
Being different and sweating the small details helped the Hustle stand out and convert readers to subscribers, and then into loyal advocates.
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