Highlights 

• Jan 2014 - Hustle Con is founded by Sam Parr who just exited on his previous startup and John Havel–an Airbnb host-turned-co-founder. It’s a conference for startup community in which the founders could share their insights and successes. It was „like a TED but less douchey”
  
  
• Apr 2014 - First Hustle Con is launched. It already made $50k in profit and sold over 600 tickets for $300. Quite something for no advertising budget and only doing content
  
  
• Jun 2015 - Sam Parr and John Havel raise $250k from 10 Sillicon Valley investors. Combined with profits from Hustle Cons, that’s $500k to reinvest and build a new startup-oriented content venture for millennials – The Hustle
  
  
• Jul 2016 - Thanks to email marketing, Hustle Con already gathers 2k attendees. The Hustle newsletter reaches 100k users, although the conference is still the core business
  
  
  
• Feb 3, 2021 - The Hustle is acquired by HubSpot, a popular marketing SaaS company that coined the term ‘inbound marketing’. According to Axios, the deal price could’ve been around $27M. There’s no official amount disclosed, though.

Social outreach
To reach the first 1k subscribers, Sam Parr downloaded his 5k-member LinkedIn contact list and send them all an email - “This is spam and I apologize but we’ve just launched something and I want to tell the world about it.

That kind of spam is much well-received as it’s more human. 

Content marketing at its best
The Hustle Con has risen to become extremely popular thanks to content marketing. Initially, they’ve been creating one infographic and one blog post per week. They were distributed on Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, social media, and email. The content’s goal was to get shared.

The content also led to email newsletter signup. With a conversion rate of 7%, that quickly went from a couple to around 80 emails collected per day.

5% of the subscribers shared the newsletter content, bringing new users to the machine. Sam Parr has a great sense of finding topics that’ll go viral which is why so many people shared the stories and brought the newsletter to the first 10k subscribers.

The evolution of email marketing
When it was only about the Hustle Con, the email list already grew to over 6k users. That was mostly thanks to the content itself - if 5% of users shared the content, that would be about 300 shares that contribute to raising the campaign and brand reach.

The idea behind the email campaign was simple - use the same automation sequence for every new user to build long-term relationship. So, if the sequence was email No. 1, 2, 3, 4, etc, subscribing to the list as a new user would put you at the No. 1 while other users were getting latter numbers. New users didn’t miss out on any content while staying informed and entertained by Hustle Con.

The campaign had unique open rates of between 35 to 40% which meant the audience liked it a lot. That would explain so much social shares and between 500k to 1,5M views  a month. 

Incentivizing referrals
Like many other newsletters, The Hustle uses referrals to expand its audience with a kind of evangelists. If you like the newsletter but aren’t into sharing it, there’s a little incentive to keep evangelizing.

There’s definitely business in the referrals. Sharing The Hustle with 100 people gets you $299-worth trends.co subscription. It gets only one out of those 100 to subscribe Trends for The Hustle to break even.

When they started, The Hustle had about 1000 ambassadors who referred on average 30 friends.

Using trial to break the barrier
Trends is the paid, even higher quality part of the business. 

It’s $299 per year, which is quite some entry barrier, but it’s lowered to $1 for the first 7 days to let you try it for yourself.

You still need to enter the credit card details but it requires much less thinking for $1. Then, you just need to decide whether to cancel or not, but since the quality is solid and your details are already there… 

Even if the subscriber number grews a few percent because of that tactic, that’s still worth it.

Conversion optimization
The checkout process is designed to lower any barrier you might have and subscribe to try the paid version.

First, you get the first 7 days for $1. There’s the guarantee of „No Commitment. Cancel anytime”. There’s also a countdown to put a time pressure on you. The checkout reminds that it’s secure.  

These are not the most ethical tactics but they work wonders for conversions. Just look at booking.com.

Tools
Email
Linkedin
Reddit
Hacker News
Product Hunt

Psychology

Zero price effect
The reason why Trends has over 10k active subscribers (that’s almost $3M annually!) is that the user flow is designed to reel interested users in. A free trial with some guarantees is enough to exchange your credit card details for it.

FOMO
Playing the Fear of Missing Out card with timer in trial checkout is not the most elegant way to convince users to buy, but it relates to such parts of the brain that it’s hard to pass by.

Be careful from the brand affection standpoint. Nontheless, it seems thousands of people love The Hustle and Trends.

Curiosity gap
The Hustle landing page is as enigmatic as it can be. You get the service idea but to learn more about it, you have to enter your email. Your curiosity, combined with almost zero effort needed, makes it hard to resist subscribing. Genius. 

Sunk Cost Effect/ Loss Aversion / Exclusivity
People resist to withdraw from something if they invested time and money.
People prefer to avoid losses more than earning the same profits
 
The $1 trial works like that:

1. You you're intrigued about the content, so you sign-up for the $1 trial - this way they already got your credit card
   
   
2. You discover amazing content + unique Facebook group for the Trends members only (exclusivity)
    
3. The Trial is ending, but you've already experienced the "Trends" the first hand. You don't want to give up that, and you've already spent the money on it...
   Let's just keep that!