Groupon

Daily Candy, Thrillist, Groupon: billion-dollar companies that started as email lists

Sam relaunched The Hustle as an all-email business in 2016 after studying Groupon, Daily Candy, and Thrillist. The insight: build a huge email list as a distribution channel, then layer products on top.

“if you study the history of Groupon, of, um, Daily Candy, of Thrillist, people may not even know what the last two are, but anyway, I was like, man, some of these like billion-dollar companies all started with an email list. Like, let's do that. Let's build up this huge email list and then start creating more products and use that as a distribution channel. And I think we could build a billion-dollar company that way.”

Steal thisBuild an email list as your owned distribution channel first, then launch products into it.