Sam, Shaan, Ben (host of How to Take Over the World), and Jonathan break down the real numbers behind My First Million — downloads, YouTube views, costs, and estimated ad revenue. They discuss podcast growth strategies, why MFM makes zero dollars directly (HubSpot owns it), and the intimacy of podcasting as a medium. They also explore a framework for what makes a hit podcast and why finding passionate niche audiences (the “Bruno Mars effect”) matters more than chasing broad popularity.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, founder of Milk Road), Ben (guest, host of How to Take Over the World podcast), Jonathan (guest, MFM numbers/growth)
MFM Numbers: Downloads, YouTube, and Social [00:00:00]
Sam: We’re going to talk about one thing that I think everyone will find interesting — it’s like inside baseball, behind the scenes of the pod. What our current numbers are, the revenue we’re making from it, how we grew it, and things like that. And also yours as well, Ben, because you’re earlier in your journey so that’d be interesting to people. We’ll start with Jonathan on here too — he’s our numbers guy, he knows all about growth and how we grew it.
I’ll kind of say what the high-level numbers are for My First Million, and you can do the same for your pod.
So I just looked in Megaphone — that’s the software we use — and every number I’m going to say is trailing 30-day numbers. For My First Million, when we say “downloads” we mean YouTube and also podcast downloads, which is basically Apple and Spotify, and then a much smaller percentage is like Stitcher and all the other platforms.
For the podcast downloads we did — round up — 1.3 million. It looks like 1.255 million downloads on the podcasting platforms. Then our YouTube page right now has 110, maybe 112,000 subscribers. The trailing 30 days we did 2.7 million views, of which a lot are YouTube Shorts — so maybe 1 to 1.5 million is actual episode views, meaning any video that’s more than like six or eight minutes long.
Previously, not this past trailing period but the one before, I think we were at 3.6 million. We’re down a little bit because we had a few shorts go viral. So 1.3 plus 2.7 — that’s 4 million total. That’s about how many people saw our stuff.
Then there’s all the social stuff. My personal socials — I just looked this up — over the trailing 30 days, on TikTok I have two or three million views, and on Instagram I have another two or three million views. So that’s the total reach right now.
Ben’s Numbers: How to Take Over the World [00:02:30]
Sam: What are you at for How to Take Over the World?
Ben: Right now monthlies are at about 80,000 downloads. And then per episode — for stuff that’s mature — a good example is Walt Disney, which has been out since January. That’s hovering around 39,000. Alexander the Great has 43,000. So around 40,000 per episode. My biggest episode is now almost 54,000. So kind of 50,000-ish per episode.
My totals are obviously way different and weird because my volume is so much lower.
Sam: What’s My First Million’s volume?
Shaan: As you mentioned, we’re going three times per week, and then we’ve got the shorts on YouTube and the clips on YouTube, which drives a lot of the volume as you were mentioning. My First Million’s downloads per episode — that’s the number that matters most — it ranges from like 50,000 to 150,000. That’s right, depending on if you include YouTube, because if you include YouTube we have some that pop up to like half a million. The Dharmesh episode did really well, the Peter Levels episode did really well, and those have hundreds of thousands of views just on YouTube alone.
Growing the Podcast: What Actually Works [00:05:00]
Sam: What are you doing to grow?
Ben: For me the big thing is just fixing my production process, which is totally broken. For How to Take Over the World, it’s really just a volume game at this point for me.
Sam: Are you making money from it?
Ben: I’m making a little bit of money. At least I am making money. I used to be negative for a long time, then I was neutral for a couple months, now I’m positive.
Sam: How much do you charge for an ad?
Ben: About a thousand bucks per placement.
How MFM Makes Zero Revenue [00:06:00]
Sam: Everyone asks about My First Million — I get messages all the time saying “hey, can we advertise on the pod?” My First Million makes zero revenue.
Here’s how it worked: HubSpot — when the Hustle owned My First Million — Shaan actually came up with the idea. He goes, “Hey, I want to create a podcast, you guys want to be my publisher?” And I said yes, but we’re going to own it. And he said that’s fine.
We did a revenue split — I don’t remember exactly, but I think we did 50/50. So let’s say the Hustle sold $10,000 worth of ads, the Hustle gave him $5,000 and we kept $5,000, and we also paid for production. I don’t know if that’s actually a good deal for either of us, but when we sold the company, HubSpot bought the Hustle and they bought the podcast with it. Now HubSpot is the only advertiser on the pod, but we don’t make any money from it directly — although you can calculate how much money they would make off it if they had to go buy those ads elsewhere.
What MFM Could Be Worth If Monetized [00:07:30]
Sam: I went and talked to a friend who has a podcast in the health and wellness space. They get seven million downloads a month and they’re currently doing three million in ads, five million selling like fitness programs, and another half million in merch and affiliate deals. So collectively they’re doing around $10 million in revenue with about 65% profit margin. Pretty good.
I think our pod just off ads would maybe be in the $6 million range — around $75 to $125 per thousand downloads. That breaks down into like a bunch of different $30-per-thousand ad placements. We could probably charge $25 to $40 per ad, you have two or three ads in each podcast, and that’s how you get to that $5 or $6 million range. Then another $3 or $4 million off some courses or paid community.
Shaan: And that’s not taking into account costs, because if we’re selling our own ads we’d probably have to get an ad sales person who’d take a cut.
Sam: Right, exactly.
MFM’s Production Costs [00:09:30]
Sam: So what are our costs now for MFM, Jonathan? Do you know the production side?
Jonathan: Between Ben our producer, Ezra who does the video and audio editing, the short-form clips folks, our YouTube producer — between that whole team it’s like $25K a month.
Sam: Yes, and then if you include other ways to grow the show — whether it’s buying ads on other podcasts or other platforms — it could be anywhere between $25K a month to upwards of $50 to $100K. So our costs right now, not including me and Shaan, are roughly $500,000 a year.
Shaan: And you can scale it up and down — we’re just being aggressive with our growth goals so we’re putting a lot of investment in.
Our growth strategy basically: you buy ads on other people’s podcasts, which works decent but is hard to track. And the other thing we tried is buying ads on YouTube channels.
Sam: Do any of them actually work, you think?
Shaan: We ran ads on YouTube and it definitely drives a lot of views and some subs, but it’s not necessarily sustainable and you always question the quality of those subs. We’ve kind of tested everything, and the thing we’re most bullish on is obviously the short-form clips. It’s also not easy to tell how well those are performing in terms of driving listeners to the RSS feed, but it’s just a long-term play. As you’re seeing, your growth on Instagram and TikTok is largely driven by these clips from the show. A viewer isn’t going to convert the first time they see it, or the second time, but hopefully by the 50th time they see your face they’re like, “I just need to check out what he’s up to.”
Ben: Are you doing anything to grow?
Shaan: Basically just working on more production. My organic growth has been huge, honestly. As long as I produce more episodes it keeps growing. I’ve done a little strategic work around who I choose to cover in order to grow — what I cover is probably the biggest driver of growth.
How MFM Found Ben [00:13:00]
Sam: The way we found Ben: I was taking a flight at like 5 AM, I was exhausted, I needed some inspiration, and I think I looked up Napoleon or something and saw your pod. At that point, roughly how many downloads did you have?
Ben: Monthly downloads would have been in the hundreds to maybe low four digits. I was getting like a couple thousand per episode.
Sam: And then we mentioned you on the pod — we did this pretty big thing about you. I was like, “Shaan, this is the greatest intro song and pod I’ve ever heard.” How much did that boost things?
Ben: I’ve gone from 2K to 40K, and I’d say it’s been half and half. Half was a big upswing — I immediately went up to like 10 to 20K — and then since then it’s been steady growth from 20 up to 40K.
Why Podcasts Are So Hard to Grow [00:14:30]
Sam: Dude, that’s the thing about pods — everyone talks to me like, “I want to do this.” And I go, “Just so you know, it’s very, very hard to grow.”
At the Hustle we had maybe 1 to 1.5 million subscribers when we launched this pod. Shaan was like, “Hey, I want to do this thing.” I said, “All right great.” He goes, “In fact, I already have a pilot episode.” He sent it to me, I was like, “Oh dude, this is great as-is.” I’ll give you three or four weeks to get ahead of the game, and then we’ll launch one a week.
That first week we launched, I think the first episode got 50 or 60,000 downloads. The next episode got like 30 or 40,000, and then it just ticked down until it was like 5 to 15,000 downloads per episode — because we blasted it to the Hustle audience, got traction, and then it ticked down.
This is how all pods — and maybe many products — work: your launch is epic, then you go down, and then you just slowly work your way up over a couple of years.
Then one day one of Shaan’s guests didn’t show up. Me and Shaan used to meet like every two weeks and brainstorm in front of people. He was like, “Can you show up in like an hour?” The person didn’t show up and I was like, “I guess.” The results were decent enough that we were like, “All right, I guess we’ll just make this the thing.”
From there it slowly went up, and when we got acquired — acquired in February, about 18 months ago — I think we were doing 600,000 downloads per month. And then it went up from there a lot, and I actually don’t know why. I don’t know what happened.
MFM Started as an Accident [00:17:30]
Ben: That’s interesting — so the idea for what My First Million became was basically an accident?
Sam: Yeah. First of all, I didn’t want to do a pod forever. I thought it was a total waste of time — I was like, we have to focus. And Shaan was like, “I have this thing.”
At the time, Shaan was not a content person. He is now, and he’s great. But at the time he just wasn’t. He was my buddy who had a company in the gaming space — an operator, startup guy. He wasn’t even on Twitter, I don’t think.
He was just my buddy who had this company, always charismatic, pretty good at storytelling — although I would say that’s improved significantly. He was like, “I just interviewed our buddy Sully, here’s the pilot.” And I heard it and was like, “Oh dude, this is baller, this is awesome.”
It was called My First Million because he was going to talk about how people got their first million — users, revenue, profit, whatever — and it was all about the early days. Frankly isn’t that unique, but he was pretty good at it.
Then three or six months in, someone didn’t show up, and he was like, “Hey, come do this.” Me and Shaan loved this podcast called The Fighter and the Kid — Brian Callan and Brendan Schaub, two guys sitting on chairs just goofing around. We’re like, “I think we could do that.” And so we just kept doing it.
Ben: That’s interesting to me because when I started my podcast it was kind of an accident too. I was sitting there, I’d been reading this Napoleon biography, and I thought, “I want to remember this, I want to retain more of this information. I should make like a blog post or a tweet storm or something.” And then I had all this audio equipment lying around and I thought, “I’ll just do a podcast about what I learned from reading this biography of Napoleon, and I bet people would like to hear it.”
I think a lot of really good podcasts start that way — not someone sitting down and gaming the system, like “where’s a niche I want to make a podcast about,” but people who are just kind of doing stuff, and then it turns into a podcast. Do you think that’s right?
What Makes a Hit Podcast: The Diamond Framework [00:21:00]
Sam: Maybe. I think you could do it the planned way — iHeart Media does this nicely, Parcast does this nicely, Gimlet, Wondery. Where they come up with ideas and launch them almost like a movie — planned and hopefully successful. And then sometimes it’s organic.
But here’s the problem with podcasting. The problem is the same I have with copywriting and hiring writers: everyone can talk, and a lot of people like talking with their friends. Therefore the noise-to-signal ratio of people who want to do it versus who are good at it is really hard to determine.
You have a ton of people launching podcasts who: A, are not committed to the long term — they’re not treating it like a job. Me and Shaan record every single Monday and Wednesday unless there’s an emergency. B, they’re not actually good at it — they don’t have the skill or the talent, and they think they do because they talk with their friends a lot. C, it’s not well thought out. You know, Shaan and I joke — you need some attributes. You either have to have this crazy interesting niche, or — and I’d say this is definitely Shaan’s case, slightly my case — you just have to be really charismatic and good at storytelling. Or you have to have some crazy experience. You’re just an expert in X, Y, and Z. Or you’re in the NBA for 20 years and you can talk about what it was like. You have to have something intriguing, a weird angle, or you have to be super talented like a Malcolm Gladwell. You know what I mean?
Ben: Yeah. So you’ve touched on something — there’s this guy Eric Newsom whose background is in public radio, and he was one of the OGs of podcasting. He’s got this framework that I love for creating a hit podcast. He calls it a diamond, but there are really four attributes on which you can be unique, and you need to be unique on at least two of them to be a successful hit podcast.
The four ways you can be unique are: what the podcast is about, who hosts it, who it’s for, or the way you tell the story. So it’s the concept, the person, the audience, or the format.
Sam: Okay, so it’s how it’s told, what it’s about, who it’s for, or who it’s by.
Ben: Exactly. And most people only do one, and that’s where they fail. They’re like, “I’m going to make a podcast about gorillas because there are no podcasts about gorillas.” And it’s like, well, are you Jane Goodall? Are you an expert? You need that second thing to make it successful. And maybe you don’t have to be the expert — but if you’re not the expert, then you have to differentiate in how you tell the story. Really high production value, or you literally have gorillas on the podcast. But most people think of one new idea and stop there.
My First Million is successful because: A, what it’s about is unique — it’s an entrepreneurship podcast that covers everything from little side hustles all the way to big tech ideas worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It covers everything. And then B, who — you and Shaan have the experience and are really funny and super engaging.
It’s like the All-In Pod. People talk about that, and you’re going to listen to anything they say because they are so successful. Their worldview is so much grander than mine — they’re hanging out with ex-presidents, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. They’ve built billion-dollar companies. They have access to things I don’t. Therefore, they don’t even need to be that charismatic to make it awesome.
Sam: Exactly. They have that second angle. The second angle doesn’t have to be that you’re a great entertainer — you could have very unique insights like those guys do. But you’ve got to have something for that second angle.
The Upsides of Podcasting: True Fandom [00:27:00]
Sam: Let’s talk about the upsides. I’ve never experienced what it’s like to have fandom on video or picture-based social media — I’m not that popular there. But for the pod, the benefit of having a podcast is that I truly become a fan of people because I get to know them so well. And I notice this with myself listening to other people.
People will come up to me and say, “Yeah, I eat this food because you mentioned it” or “I read this book.” And I don’t even remember saying it — I just talk so much that I don’t remember all of it. But people listen so much that they really get to know you. It creates true fandom.
I think you could get that on other platforms, but I think it happens more with podcasting because if they’re 30 to 60 minutes long, they really get to know you.
The hard part though — the best way to circumvent someone’s BS detector is just not BS-ing. And that’s the hard part about podcasting. When you talk for 45 minutes or an hour and a half, three to five days a week — you can’t lie. It’s going to catch up to you. You have to be authentic. Or if you’re going to play a character, you’ve got to play that all the time.
Shaan: The greatest thing and the worst thing about podcasting is that it’s such an intimate medium. You’re in someone’s ears when they’re doing the dishes, when they’re commuting. They feel like they’re friends with you — more so than YouTube, Instagram, TV, any other media format. People really feel like they have this relationship with you, which is a little weird.
And as you alluded to, I think the most difficult thing about podcasting is that it’s really hard, hand-to-hand combat, to build a big audience. But the best thing about podcasting is that you can build a really valuable following with very few followers.
If you have 35,000 followers on YouTube, you just can’t do much — you’re nothing. But I talked with someone the other day who has 35,000 downloads per episode on his podcast in the productivity category, and he’s making half a million dollars a year from it.
Sam: And he could be doing way more off courses or whatever else he wants to sell — three or four times as much.
Shaan: Right, and he’s talking about doing that stuff but hasn’t yet. So that’s not even the limit of what you could do with that many followers. That’s the beauty of podcasting — if you can grind it out to get a decent following of a few tens of thousands, you can make real money.
The Business Behind the Podcast [00:32:00]
Shaan: And the best way to do it, I think, is if you already have a business. For example — I didn’t know this, but you know that guy Patrick Bet-David? He’s got that YouTube channel called Valuetainment. I just thought he was a personality, and he recently sold his life insurance company for like $300 million. I didn’t even know about that. That’s way more valuable than his YouTube channel — not two or three hundred million dollars valuable. Same with Dave Ramsey. His company is worth something like $700 or $800 million — it’s a collection of real estate and personal finance products. The radio show is definitely awesome, but it alone isn’t worth that. It’s not the monetization engine.
So if you already have that monetization engine and you build a podcast on top of it, I think it’s lights out. You can crush it.
Sam: And what’s interesting is our pod isn’t even that big. Let’s just say we’re between one and three million downloads depending on whether you include YouTube or not. It’s not YouTube-first — our faces aren’t really out there. If I’m walking around a top-10 city — New York down to Denver — I’ll get recognized maybe once a day. And that is a very small audience. There are 350 million people in America and we only reach one to three million of them a month.
I get recognized probably five times a week. Yesterday I went to Lululemon and gave the person my email — it’s my name — and I told her my name and she looked up and goes, “Are you from My First Million?” And then she goes, “I thought I recognized your voice.” That happens all the time. And that’s one of my biggest surprises — that we get recognized on such a small audience, and people are pumped, they’re excited. Which I totally get — if I saw Brendan Schaub, someone I really admire who’s not A-list famous, I would be like, “Dude, can I get a picture?”
The Podcast Audience Demographics [00:37:00]
Ben: Do you get like Instagram models sliding into your DMs?
Sam: That’s funny. I surveyed my Twitter audience and asked what gender are you, and it was 93% dudes. If you go to our meetups — we had one in New York, 1,500 people RSVP’d, maybe 800 to 500 actually showed up — I’m pretty sure it was 90% men as well. My stuff is mostly all men.
Also, on all of my social media profiles there’s a picture of me and my wife — she’s either the main picture or the cover picture. I always talk about her, so everyone knows I’m married. So do I get women DMing me in a sexual sense? Not really. Maybe at most once a month. And you have to remember: A, this is a tech and business podcast, and B, I’m like a Midwestern seven. I’m a Missouri seven and a New York six.
Ben: Do you realize that 99% of our audience, if they had Instagram models sliding into their DMs once a month, would not be like, “It’s not that much”? They’d be like, “I got Instagram models sliding into my DMs once a month — maybe I’m rich, I’m famous.”
Sam: Well, how many fake high-follower profiles do you get sliding into your DMs? Like five times a day?
So I don’t know how many of these women are actually real, but maybe once a month there’s someone where I’ll be sitting next to Sarah, my wife, and I’ll show her and we’ll laugh about it. I’m like, “You know I ain’t touching that, but just so you know, this exists.”
I was talking to someone who’s more conventionally famous than either of us, and they were talking about how they get real, verified models sliding into their DMs all the time. This person has a girlfriend and is in a long-distance relationship — it’s very hard for them.
Ben: That’s crazy.
Sam: I get the hand models. I don’t get the face models or the body models.
What does happen a lot: when it’s warm outside I always work out outside and I’m always shirtless, and there seems to be an unlucky pattern where I get recognized shirtless a fair bit. Me and Sarah have been on walks where I’ve been shirtless and a guy will come up with his four-year-old daughter and say hi, and I’m like, “Oh dude, I’m totally making this little girl uncomfortable being this shirtless dude.” So our joke is that I try to wear glasses or something if I’m going to be shirtless so I’m not that guy. That happened yesterday.
Ben: You’re saying your body’s more famous than your face?
Sam: I’m saying it’s a coincidence that when I’m outside during the day I’m usually shirtless. And maybe it’s not a coincidence — maybe they don’t recognize my face but they’re like, “Those are Sam Parr’s pecs.”
Shaan: The other day we released an episode about fitness, and people loved it. But Sam DMed me and was like, “Hey, can we change my after-photo? I don’t think I look ripped enough,” and started sending me five to ten shirtless pics.
Sam: I’m going to be shirtless on the internet — I’d prefer my best look. That’s all I’m saying. Anyway, that’s the update on the pod.
What Makes Episodes Pop: Finding Unique People [00:43:00]
Sam: Do we want to talk any more about that? I have a couple of frameworks I think are interesting.
It’s always surprising which episodes actually pop off. We’ll get someone really famous and their episode will do okay, and then we’ll get Peter Levels or Dharmesh and the episode goes crazy.
Shaan: Because we need more unique, weird people. Sometimes we’re clout chasers. You need unique people — when you get someone with a super engaged audience who wants to hear from them but doesn’t often, it totally blows up.
Ben: I’ve been thinking about this recently for my pod. I could go the route of doing more episodes like Julius Caesar — I could do a Charlemagne, or Winston Churchill, or Muhammad Ali. But the bottom line is there’s actually a lot of Muhammad Ali content out there, and you can probably find stuff that’s as good as my podcast or nearly as good already.
So I’ve pivoted to doing stuff that’s a little more niche. I just did an episode on Brigham Young — most people don’t care about him, but some people care very, very passionately. And that episode is on track to be my most downloaded episode.
So I’m trying to adopt that Peter Levels / Dharmesh framework: unique episodes. I’m starting to think, “Okay, Brigham Young — huge in the Mormon community. People want to hear about that, and that’s going to drive downloads. Those people come into my audience. Who else can I do? Who is the greatest emperor of Cambodia? Cambodians probably don’t get a lot of podcasts made about their heroes. Can I do that and drive downloads for that audience?”
The Bruno Mars Effect: Niche Audiences and Representation [00:46:30]
Sam: Have you ever watched Bruno Mars’s YouTube videos?
Ben: No. Are they good?
Sam: No, that’s my point. Bruno Mars is one of those guys everyone knows about but not that many people actively seek him out — even though he’s pretty amazing and I love his music videos. And I was watching them and they have like one, two, three, even four billion views. I was wondering why, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and then looked at the YouTube comments.
Basically, Bruno Mars’s mother is Filipino. He’s part Filipino. And the Philippines — how many people live there? A ton. Hundreds of millions. But in terms of cultural representation on a global scale, they’re not exactly represented a ton. So when this American-Filipino guy gets famous, the Filipinos are like, “Yes, one of us,” and they just get behind that person.
Same with Bjork from Iceland. Iceland is not exactly incredibly relevant on a global entertainment scale. When Bjork gets a little love from America or Europe, they all pounce and they go, “Hell yeah, it’s one of us.”
It’s like Nelly in St. Louis, where I’m from. My 65-year-old white dad is like, “Nelly’s the man, sir.” Everyone in St. Louis is like, “Nelly’s our God, he’s our mayor, we will do anything for Nelly” — because he represented us, and we didn’t have a lot of representation in St. Louis.
I think it’s the same way with different podcast topics. If you find that one or two things — it’s okay if it’s not a huge audience, as long as they’re passionate about it and they can rally behind it and they’re like, “Finally, something for us” — that just makes it so much easier to get popular.
Shaan: It’s a little bit like the Amazon strategy. Amazon is the store for everything online, but it didn’t start that way. It was a bookstore, then a DVD store, then a dog toy store. It’s actually just a collection of niches that all got bundled. And I think that works for content too — you can go out and collect niches and it becomes a big broad audience, even though you don’t start that way.
Sam: Right. At this point we’re a little more broad — we’re still not that broad, but we make dumber jokes and talk about Kim Kardashian every once in a while. But before it was just, “This dude’s making five grand a month on the internet.” You know what I’m saying?
All right — that’s the pod.