Milk Road
Shaan Puri described Milk Road’s origin with remarkable directness: “Milk Road is the Hustle but in the crypto lane — I just took your blueprint for the Hustle and copy-pasted it over.”
He even copied Sam’s Twitter bio. “Your smart, good-looking friend who tells you everything you need to know” became “your smart, good-looking friend who tells you everything you need to know about crypto.” He deleted “business” and inserted “crypto” and called it research.
Sam’s response: “I saw that! You literally copy-pasted the Twitter handle description.”
Shaan’s defense: “I remembered seven or eight years ago when you first said that to me. It clicked with me then. So when it came time to do this, I was like, that’s the exact description.”
The Blueprint Applied to Crypto
The Milk Road playbook was The Hustle’s playbook, adapted for a different market at a different moment:
- A daily newsletter covering one vertical — in this case, cryptocurrency
- Friendly, intelligent tone aimed at readers who wanted signal, not noise
- Advertising as the core revenue model
- Distribution via paid and organic subscriber growth
- A tight team kept as lean as possible
The newsletter launched in January 2022, at the peak of crypto market mania. Shaan was explicit that the timing was partly intentional and partly luck — crypto had become impossible to ignore, the audience existed and was hungry for something readable, and the advertiser base (crypto companies with marketing budgets to spend) was well-defined.
He ran it with Ben Levy, his business partner, not as day-to-day operator but as the guiding presence. The full-time team was small. Diego was the lead writer. Billy, hired from a TikTok audition in which he drank a jug of milk shirtless to prove he wanted the job, helped write the newsletter and tried to build a TikTok presence that didn’t fully work out.
The Hiring Philosophy: Build Small, Stay Lean
Shaan described his approach to building Milk Road explicitly as a reaction against the CEO role he’d played before.
“My whole ethos building Milk Road was I’m not trying to be a CEO anymore. I don’t want to stand up in front of the company in a branded t-shirt and tell everybody how great everything is.”
When Milk Road was acquired, the new owners held an all-hands offsite — something the original team had never done. They invited the original employees. Billy showed up in a wife-beater. Not as a joke. It was just what he wore.
A few weeks later, the new owners offered Billy a raise. He quit instead. Ben texted him: “Billy, you got a raise — what’s the plan?” Billy’s reply: “Do I look like a guy with a plan?”
Shaan: “That became the most badass thing I heard all week.”
The Almost-Famous Hire
The most expensive non-hire in Milk Road’s history happened in the first four weeks.
Shaan spotted a young guy, 20 or 21, on Twitter. He was posting random websites on weekends — simple, likely to either go viral or flop completely, no middle ground. Shaan told Ben: “We should hire this guy.” Ben: “What’s he going to do?” Shaan: “Just have him do the stupid stuff he does on weekends but without the full-time job.”
Shaan reached out. The guy was interested. Shaan said he was traveling — let’s talk Wednesday, four or five days away.
Fatal mistake.
In those four days, the guy launched an NFT project that went super viral. He made enough money to go anonymous. He became “Frank DeGods” and built the D-Gods project, one of the most prominent NFT collections of the era.
“In those four days, this guy launches an NFT project that goes super viral,” Shaan recounted. “He makes so much money that he becomes an anonymous account. I was like, ‘Dude, you ghosting me? We had such a good idea.’ Classic 34-year-old mistake thinking the world’s not going to change in four days.”
The Sale: Visceral Gut Reaction
Shaan sold Milk Road within roughly a year of launch. The buyers were two private individuals, independently wealthy from their own exits.
The decision-making process was characteristic of how Shaan approaches hard choices. He and Ben were spinning in circles — pros and cons lists, “is this enough, is that enough.” They called a trusted advisor named Sulie.
“He just listens to us for five minutes and he goes, ‘All right, how about we put away the pros and cons list? Listen, you’re selling your company. Do you want to sell your company or not? You should have a visceral gut reaction when I say you’re selling your company. Either that gut reaction is yes or it’s no. And if you don’t know, don’t do anything.’”
Shaan’s gut reaction was yes. He wanted to sell.
The reason was the same one Sam had articulated for selling The Hustle: number four on the checklist — “I want to do this more than anything else” — was no longer true. Milk Road was working. The newsletter was growing. The revenue was real. But Shaan was loving the podcast. His attention was elsewhere.
“The business was actually working. But my brain was wandering to new ideas, and I was loving the podcast so much that I realized: is this the one thing I want to wake up and do every day? No. So we sold.”
What the Sale Felt Like
The result was financially successful — a seven-figure exit in less than a year. And it was, Shaan reported, somewhat anticlimactic.
“The same thing happened when we sold the Milk Road. I talked to Ben and was like, ‘Ben, how does it feel? First kind of big exit for you.’ And he’s like, ‘Honestly? I’m kind of disappointed. It doesn’t feel like very much.’”
This is a recurring theme in the MFM archive: the moments that entrepreneurs spend years chasing don’t feel the way they imagined. The money lands in the account and something about it feels smaller than the version that existed as an aspiration.
The podcast went on. Shaan went back to investing and building. Milk Road became someone else’s daily responsibility.
See also: shaan-puri | newsletter-business | the-hustle-story | morning-brew | sam-parr | my-first-million