#171 - How to Generate Millions from Paid Events (Bootstrapped)

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have. Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's Podcast Network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales. You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.
When I first hosted my...
I hosted my first event in June and the event happened... All right, decided to do it around June 1st and the event went place seven weeks later in August.
And when I started, I had close to nothing. I had a 200-person email list. So there wasn't like this, Oh, it's easy for you. You had the hustle. No, no, no, it didn't exist. There was no website. There was just a domain name called HustleCon. And I hosted this event. In the first six weeks, it made about $60,000 in revenue and $50,000-ish in profit.
And a lot of people were surprised by that. But it wasn't that hard. The second event, you can see here- Oh, hold on, explain that.

**Shaan Patel** (1:42)
So how did you sell the $60,000 of tickets during that process?

**Sam Parr** (1:58)
Today, Sean, let's actually jump right you, I think, want to do this Billy of the Week right away.
And then I have a thing on events. Do you want to do events? Do you want to save that? What do you want to do today?

**Shaan Patel** (2:07)
I want to do that. So I want to do this Billy of the Week. I want to hear your stuff on paid events. And then I have two ideas. One is a cool idea I've seen, and then the other is a brainstorm of a potential idea.
So I want to do all those things. So let's start with the Billy of the Week.
This one is very interesting. Have you ever heard of this guy before? Don't Google. I want to tell you the story. So don't Google this guy. Let me tell you the story.

**Sam Parr** (2:32)
I'm just, I Googled them. I'm just thinking, oh, wow.
Okay. Yeah. Young guy?

**Shaan Patel** (2:37)
Young guy, 29 years old, I think.

**Sam Parr** (2:39)
I don't know who he is.

**Shaan Patel** (2:39)
So his name is Sam Bankman-Fried. I think it's the way you say his name.
And when you, if you heard him talk, like I actually want you to listen to a YouTube video for a second, because he sounds like, you know, an absolute dweeb. And I loved it. I was like, oh, this guy sounds like he would be a self-made billionaire by the age of 29, because he sounds like a genius. He sounds like a tech genius.

**Sam Parr** (2:58)
Have you brought this person up to me before?

**Shaan Patel** (3:01)
No, I just discovered him like two days ago. So what's this guy's story?
So this guy would, you know, I'll just come Sam for short, but so this guy, Sam, he's a young guy, he's very smart. He takes a job as kind of like a hedge fund trader or something like that. I was in a group called Jane Street, I guess. And I don't know, I forget these details. They don't really matter. Guy's got a job in finance. And he leaves and he starts something called Alameda Research. And it's called Alameda Research because he needed it to sound as legit as possible and not like what it actually was. So what was it? So what this guy did was he was into crypto.