MFM x Trends - The Fundamentals of a ~$60m Newsletter Exit With Ryan Begelman

**Sam** (0:01)
All right, you guys are going to love this. It's another special episode. So here's the deal. On this episode, we have this guy named Ryan Begelman. I met Ryan in our Trends group, and he's so fascinating that we had to have him on to do a special episode. And we, Sean and I had him on as a normal My First Million guest, but this one's a special issue for Trends. And let me tell you a little bit of the background about this guy. He's so fascinating. I think he's 36 years old and he's done so much. So Ryan had this company called BizNow Media, which was a newsletter business that it was like the hustle like my company but for real estate. And he grew it and eventually sold it for $60 million in cash. And at the time of the sale, it was doing like $20 million in revenue, $7 million in profit.
And he did it bootstrap without taking any funding. And during this process, he started this thing called Summit Series. And you guys got to Google Summit Series to kind of get the full picture. It's so weird to explain, but and this is going to sound derogatory, but it's not. But it's kind of like a Ted Talk, but for like techies and entrepreneurial folks and rich people.
And they originally started out by hosting these events, where it was kind of expensive, like two, three, four, $5,000. But they would get like Kendrick Lamar to come. They would get ASAP Rocky. They would get Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and Reid Hastings, the founder of Netflix and all these amazing people. They had like Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Russell Simmons, Richard Branson, like these worldly people, Johnny Legend.
It's crazy and it started as a festival and eventually, it was like an annual conference.
Then they even hosted it one time on a cruise ship and the founders of Uber and Dropbox and Facebook Go. Eventually, Ryan had the idea of thinking like, okay, this conference is cool, but how do we keep this party going? How do we create a community of folks like this year round? So he somehow convinced all these people to pre-buy land, and he collected $50 million and went out and bought a mountain in which he turned into this thing called Powder Mountain. It was a ski mountain. It's one of the largest ski mountains in the country, privately held ski mounts of the country, I believe. It's crazy fascinating. I went out and visited it, and it was so cool, so interesting.
He was 27, 26, I believe, when he did this. They built all the roads, all the plumbing, they did everything, and it's just crazy fascinating what they did. Ryan's whole deal is that he's very calm, he's very collective, but he's definitely alpha, ain't all retentive, and I love that about him, but he's so calm about it. And so in this episode, what we talked about was how Ryan operationalized his business, both Summit Series, Powder Mountain, and BizNow.
And he walks through the steps that he took. For example, when he would hire people, he would have them go through this crazy process of hiring to prove that they had the attributes that he was looking for, and it's incredibly fascinating. And he would document the whole process. And at the company, the employees had a handbook that documented everything at the business. And it's really hard to do that, but it's so important to be able to sub people in and find talented people and get them onboarded really quickly.
And so in this episode, we walk through Ryan's tips for operationalizing his business. And it's just really fascinating. So I hope you enjoy it. You get the first 15 minutes for free. If you want the whole thing, go to trends.co and you will be able to listen to the whole episode, along with all the other episodes that we've done like this. People are loving it. So we're going to keep doing these.
And if you sign up, it costs a dollar. So you can pay a dollar. And if you don't like it, you can just cancel within 14 days and you just lost a buck. But folks have been loving these. And if you sign up, what you'll get is the Trends Weekly email where we dive deep and we do analysis on all the cool businesses that we're discovering and talking about. But you also get access to the community. So this is actually where I met Ryan. This is where I met a lot of big name people. So check it out. Go to trends.co and sign up and you'll see this podcast and all the other stuff. And we hope to see you in the group.