Sam Introduces The Hustle

TL;DR

The speakers accidentally built a media company (The Hustle) from a conference called HustleCon after discovering attendees valued founder stories over tactical business advice. They have $500k from investors and prior profits to spend over a year producing monthly themed deep-dive story content (like a stretched This American Life episode).

Key insights

• Attendees of HustleCon revealed they came for founders’ personal stories, not for business tactics—despite the event being explicitly marketed around starting/growing a company without coding.
• The weekly content created to promote the conference (infographics and deep-dive articles) filled a gap between shallow clickbait (Buzzfeed/Upworthy) and lifeless, personality-free journalism (Wall St
• The $500k budget comes from both investors and profits from the previous conference, and will fund a year of content production.