How The Hustle grew by serving a starving crowd.

Feeding a starving crowd

There’s something to be said for building a great product. It’s hard. And we tend to glorify it above all else. Product building is the sword many founders live and die on.

But I’m not sure it’s the right metric to focus on. There’s something much more important: the market you’re entering.

And more specifically: the problem you’re solving in that market.

And even more specific than that: the pain level people feel about not having that problem, in that market, solved.

You can have an awesome product. But if you’re not solving a true pain point, it will likely never succeed.

It’s why it’s better to fall in love with the problem you’re solving. Not the product you’re building. Your job as a founder is not to build a solution. It’s to solve a problem.

The solution is just a vehicle in which you solve it.

It might sound crazy now, but in 2016, there was nothing like The Hustle (well except for Morning Brew - which led to a battle, much like Messi and Ronaldo’s, where everybody got better and won).

Even the idea of a newsletter business didn’t make sense to so-called thought leaders in media.

But they missed that the foundation for a great product was there.

The fact that there was nothing like it was a great thing. It reminds me of this beautiful Paul Graham quote: “Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious. That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen.”

The obvious problem Sam and John were solving? There was no news for millennials who cared about business. A gap that with hindsight seems so obvious to solve. The perfect outcome for a great startup.

They had found an audience who were starving. And he served them up the chef’s best dish. A daily newsletter with no bs reporting.

🔬 How this looks practically:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

🚧 1. Find an underserved market

Sam started the Hustle when your choices for business news were the NYT and the WSJ, or Forbes.

Two written for your dad’s dad and the other plagued by your favorite scammer’s favorite (let me just stop here. You get the picture)

There was this chasm for millennials who cared about business and professional growth.

Sam and John had found an audience who were starving. They wanted news. But news written for them. And they wanted it with:

• Only the most important stories and resources

• No BS and fluff

• No complicated language

The trick here is to find a group of people (ideally some with money). Speak to them. Find out what they’re missing. And get something out there to test it with them.

The Hustle grew out of Hustle Con, an events business Sam was running which brought cool founders to talk about their stories and how they grew their businesses.

He started collecting emails to get people to buy tickets. It was never intended to be the main business. But Sam realized people were loving it and the unit economics checked out. And so they started putting more priority into it, until they realized it should the main business.

🫂 2. Be like them

The thing with finding an underserved market and building for them is that for best results you need to be like them. Or at least have someone on your founding team who is.

Firstly, it’s hard to spot this gap and know if it’s a deep pain if you’re not feeling it yourself. You don’t want to be solving a meh problem.

Secondly, it helps when building your solution. You have a more intuitive understanding of your customers and what the actual root cause is (we went deeper into this in the final Arc episode). You can then use this intuition to guide your product roadmap and serve customers better.

What can also be underappreciated is that if you’re like your users, they tend to like you more. They have an intrinsic belief in you and a desire for you to win.

So if you’re like your users. Show them.

The Hustle was excellent at making readers feel like they were one of them. They crafted this awesome voice which became your no-BS friend who told you about the news.

Their tone was relaxed. Swearing was allowed. Slang was used. And it felt like The Hustle was just another one of your friends. The smart one. But also the funny one. So the one you love to hate to introduce to your parents.

But also who you love to brag about to others…

🌍️ 3. Build a community (make them fat)

Communities are hard.

There’s a bunch of work that goes in behind the scenes that you and me, as members, will never see.

It’s a job that never ends.

Until you get it right.

There’s this tipping point with communities. When you no longer have to reply to your own posts with 5 pseudo accounts. And when you no longer have to reply to other members.

Why? Because the rest of the community is doing it for you.

This is the beauty of a community. The members feed each other.

And then they attribute most of this value to you. Even though you’re no longer they driving force. They are.

The excruciating part is getting here.

The Hustle started to bring on Ambassadors (more on this in episode 3). What’s important to know, is that there was a FB group for them (for you younger folk, that’s the dark blue app with an “f” you see on your mom’s phone).

Sam spent hours everyday posting, replying to others, stimulating conversation. Getting the people going.

And he did this for over 18 months. Over a year and a half.

But then self-sustaining bliss and a group who The Hustle can:

• Test product ideas with

• Get the inside scope

• Understand how users feel

• Get real feedback

The Hustle Ambassadors became a key part of its growth. With Sam using the insights from them to keep that cult-like feeling around The Hustle. The good kind of cult of course.

And on that bombshell. I’m looking forward to speaking next week to riff about the biggest growth channel The Hustle used to get off the ground.

I’ve been testing some new times to send this recently, but from next week it will most likely return to the regularly scheduled Thursdays (unless the result of this last test change that).

For the Zero to One, it’s been your host,

Sheldon

My picks to take your business to the moon 📽️

• Fastest way to $100k MRR (link)

• How this startup got 100 warm VC intros for pre-seed round (link)

• Launch playbook for local newsletters (link)

• How to grow your business on Reddit (link)

Tools of the week 🔨

• Founders Go Viral: Turn your expertise into pipeline.

• guidde: Magically create video documentation with AI.

• Riverside: Have a podcast? Don’t overthink it. Just use Riverside.