This $50M/Yr Side Hustle Is On Track To Make $1 Billion By 2030

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
Yeah, actually, call them right now and put it on speakerphone.

**Shaan Puri** (0:06)
Yo, Preston, you're live on the podcast right now. What's going on?

**Sam Parr** (0:19)
Thanks for watching! All right, we're live. Shaan, I've got a weird thing for you.
Do you remember, like 12 months ago, I told you about Craig Fuller? You know who Craig Fuller is?

**Shaan Puri** (0:28)
Yeah, he's FreightWaves, right? Yeah.

**Sam Parr** (0:31)
So FreightWaves, it's a data product for people, I guess, who are freight brokers, something like that. They're pretty big. For some reason, if you Google, they run their company like they're publicly traded in that you can Google them and see all their revenue and profit. So I don't know the exact numbers, but you guys can just Google FreightWaves revenue and they put out quarterly statements, which is interesting. But it's like a large 60 or 80 million dollar a year software business or subscription data business. Anyway, Craig is an interesting entrepreneur. And I told you about how he bought this thing called FLYING Magazine.
And what he did was he was a big fan of flying and he's wealthy on paper, but I don't know how wealthy is liquid. And so I think this was like a big deal for him, but he bought FLYING Magazine and then he also bought a seven million dollar, like 300 acre plot of land in Tennessee and was turning that into basically a flying club where you, it's kind of like a country club where you like an own a home on a golf course, except now you own it around an airplane strip.
And an airplane hangar and they use the magazine to sell plots of land.

**Shaan Puri** (1:31)
It was like a neighborhood and basically they were like, you could buy a house.
It's going to be, you know, the middle of this neighborhood is basically the airstrip. So we're going to be able to take off if you like, you know, either flying your own plane or private, private flights. And so they were like, we're going to that's the vision. That's the field of dreams. We're going to start doing this. And I think it was working extremely well.

**Sam Parr** (1:51)
I have an update. I will tell you how it's going.
So Craig has now acquired 30 or sorry, 44 different magazines and they are going to do roughly 50 million dollars this year with 18 percent EBITDA. And it's his prediction by 2030, this side business that he started, he says, I think we can get to a billion dollars in revenue with 30 percent profit margins.
And so that's an update on this guy, what he's doing. And he tweeted out recently his quarterly revenue. I think last quarter, Q4 of 2024 was 15 million in revenue. And he's doing it profitably. And here's what he does.
So he finds an old title, like an old magazine, where it's around an expensive hobby. So I think he has a boating one. He's got, I think he is even looking at like RC planes and RC cars and things like that. So where there's an expensive hobby. And he uses this thing that he calls negative cack, meaning people pay for the magazine. And so that is how he acquires a customer. Of course, they are paying for the magazine, not him trying to advertise to get the user. And then he goes, I want to create commerce products to sell to the audience. And so the media businesses pay for the company, they pay for the audience creations. And then they help bootstrap other businesses that can sell to this audience. And at this point, he's buying companies for three to five times EBITDA, which is, I think that's pretty cheap, but it's a dying medium. So maybe that's not that cheap. It does require some sophistication in order to like turn them around.
But it's really fascinating that he's pulling this off. And this is his side, like his side hustle. This is his side business. His main business is FreightWaves.

**Shaan Puri** (3:36)
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Well, a couple questions. So he bought this personally, it's not a part of FreightWaves.