Hampton is a highly-vetted, peer-membership community for founders. Created by Sam Parr, known for The Hustle newsletter and host of the My First Million podcast, he started working on it with partner Joe Speiser in June 2022 [2]. It launched publicly on March 28, 2023 [4] and has since grown to over 1,000 members, generating ~$8M ARR. And they're just getting started - Sam says, “This is going to be a greater than 100 million dollar a year revenue business” [10].
In this deep dive, we uncover how Sam Parr and team built a million-dollar community in a matter of months, even before it had officially launched.
Hampton is named after Hampton Avenue, a street in Missouri where Sam grew up [1]. It got off to a quick start - acquiring their first paying members 1-month in, before they even had a website (that came in December) [3].
Sam’s insight was that there are a bunch of 20 to 40 year-old founders of digital businesses not just in hubs like LA, San Francisco, or New York, but in places like Idaho or New Haven, and they feel lonely [5].
They’re business leaders, so they can’t be too vulnerable in front of staff and yet every day they’re tackling problems that you can’t Google or ask about on social media. Stuff like how do I negotiate without looking desperate, what’s the best way to lay off someone, or am I paying myself fairly? Plus, they’re scared - they’re constantly asking themselves is this thing going to work? or will I make payroll this month? [1].
Who can you share these fears and issues with who will understand? Fellow founders.
So Sam started Hampton to be “kind of like group therapy for CEOs” [3] - a community for people who grow and build companies to collaborate with and connect [2].
At just 35, Sam has been busy. He’s run a chain of Hot Dog stands (Southern Sam’s) as well as an online liquor store. His first foray into tech was with a roommate-matching startup called Bunk, which was acquired.
He then went on to run an event series, Hustle Con, which got popular because of a newsletter he wrote to promote it. That newsletter would become The Hustle, one of the fastest-growing media companies in the US [11] with more than 3.5M readers a day. He bootstrapped that and sold it to HubSpot for tens of millions of dollars [12].
While creating The Hustle, he also hosted the popular My First Million podcast, alongside its creator Shaan Puri, which is now owned by HubSpot with Sam getting paid to host it [12].
As you dig into his past, creating Hampton seems like a perfect fit. While running Hustle Con for around 5 years, he used to get guests to come along a few hours early “to mic check.” Except there was no mic check. It was just a way for him to hang out and learn from successful business leaders behind multi-billion dollar companies like Grammarly, WeWork, and Casper [13].
So when Sam says “I've been working on it since July [2022] but I've had the idea for a long time”, you can see why [10]. Through those experiences and successes, he’s built up a network of wealthy founders. Plus, he has run a bunch of communities, too, including Trends that was part of The Hustle and that alone was doing millions in recurring revenue when he sold it [3].
As The Hustle scaled and Sam needed to solve all kinds of new problems, he leaned on a group of peers, including Shaan, and would meet up once a month to share the problems and stresses of growing their businesses [14]. Sam describes that group as being “life-changing” [3] and reflecting on just how important it was gave him the idea for Hampton [15]:
“Well, what will people always want? They're always going to want to connect with like-minded people who are of high caliber, and they're always going to want it to be easy. They're always going to want accountability. They're always going to want to feel less alone.”
But the idea wasn’t some bolt from the blue. There are already some successful community businesses and non-profits servicing this group.
Communities like the Young Presidents' Organization (YPO) and Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) focus on Chief Executives. There’s Chief, which is specifically for women C-Suite and VP executives, and there’s Vistage too, who serve CEOs, business owners, and key executives of all genders.
These businesses do hundreds of millions in revenue, but many have been around for 60+ years, and it shows. They have a particularly old-school vibe, catering to Enterprise business execs and wealthy real estate owners. If you inherited an apartment block in New York, you might tick the membership requirement boxes for Hampton, but you probably have little in common with Sam’s audience of newly minted tech CEOs.
Initially, founders weren’t the target audience, though. Originally they started with Marketing Executives and then just Executives in general. “I did 50 to 70 meetings with people trying to convince them to join and none of them wanted it,” says Sam [26]. Eventually, they got enough to kickstart a group, but “they were willing to pay $500… and I was like dude this sucks” [26].
They set their sights wider, considering folks like doctors and Fortune 500 CEOs, but soon realized they didn’t know much about them or where to find them, so ended up focusing on an audience they did know well: founders [26].
The business got started in a lofi way [14]: “I created a Google doc that outlined what it was and at the bottom of the Google doc was a Typeform that says if you're interested, fill this out. I sent it to 50 people on Twitter in their DMs.”
Anyone who expressed interest Sam would Zoom or phone to interview them and figure out whether they’re a match. If they were accepted, he’d follow up with a Stripe link. At least initially, it was Sam or Joe who watched all of the member interviews and made the call - “we are the only people who click approve or deny,” says Sam [26].
So that’s how they got to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue: no website, no software, just a few docs and DMs [14].
And it continued to be very manual for its first few hundred members [14]. As each new member came on, they’d say it would take 30 days or so before they could onboard them. In the meantime, they went out and found the executive coaches they needed as facilitators, who they would train before kicking off their first meeting [10].
By the time Hampton launched publicly in March 2023, they’d already signed up 300 paying members. These early members included the likes of Morning Brew’s Austin Rief, CB Insights’ Anand Sanwal, Fresh Clean Tees’ Melissa Parvis, and Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes [7]. Sam’s network clearly gave him an edge, but what were folks signing up for? The main offer is known as the Hampton Five [16]:
Core Groups
Once you join, you’re put into a hand-curated group of 5-8 people [3]. That size isn’t based on anything in particular - “I just made it up,” admits Sam. “I just thought that that seems like a nice number” [1].
New groups are launched quarterly in January, April, July, and October [8]. They’re formed by considering each member’s locale, industry, business stage, business model, and member preferences [3, 17]. Each group gets an executive facilitator and meets once a month [18]. In reality, they meet around 10 times per year, with flexibility around summer months and winter holidays [8].
Core group meetings are two hours long (though they’ve experimented with 3 hours in the past). Topics vary but include things like doing a SWOT analysis of your business and going through all the financials, or doing a portfolio breakdown of their net worth, and asking the group for their feedback [3].
Sam says, “We have a person on the team who just talks to the facilitators constantly, and so after every meeting, they'll do a catch-up with them and figure out what's going on. How's the group? What do you need to make this more cohesive? And then we also get survey results from the attendees after each meeting” [3]. These group meets are the core of the Hampton experience, so they take them seriously [3]:
“If someone has a bad experience, anything below like an eight, we message them and be like, hey, what happened? Why was this not good? And then we like act really quickly in order to make it awesome.”
Digital Community Platform
In addition to your core group, you also get access to their digital community platform. There are two parts to this. A Slack community that is used by around 85% of members [7]. This is for daily chatting and knowledge sharing of tactical, high-level insights [18]. For example, someone asked about best practices for hiring and onboarding executive assistants. The thread got 20 or so responses, so they decided to set up a Zoom call to go deeper, sharing the exact systems they use to source and manage them [18].
It’s not all about business, though. The most popular channel beyond the general and introduction channels is one on parenting, discussing raising genuine good kids and sharing fun moments [18].
They also custom-built a portal (made with Bubble) that includes a vetted vendor list and an events calendar [7]. There’s a member directory, you can see where members are based on a map and request an introduction via the concierge [3]. The concierge is someone on staff who members can message and ask for intros to those with specific expertise or knowledge to facilitate connections with them [3]. Across the platforms, engagement is around 90% [18].
In-person Community
There is also an in-person aspect of the community, largely based around events that aims to foster connection and build relationships [18]. This focuses on three areas: monthly member dinners, annual retreats, and local adventures.
Depending on your location, they aim to host 2-4 dinners per year [16]. In December 2023, they got together 250 Hampton members in one evening, across 25 dinners in 19 different cities [30]. Over the year as a whole, they organized 150 dinners [1], and take a lot of work. Jessica Lowenstein, Head of Community and Events at Hampton, says “I put a lot of thought into where people sit.” So when guests strike up a conversation and realize they have a ton in common, that isn’t by accident, “there was a lot of thought behind it” [18].
Annual retreats are two-day get-togethers for 24-30 people. They began running group retreats in October 2023 [31]. Now all members have the opportunity to attend a retreat with their core group and fellow Hamptonites within their first 6 months of membership [19]. These include events like a mindful leadership retreat, as well as culinary experiences, concerts, etc [18].
While adventure days consist of activities like rally car racing, mountain biking, lobster diving - anything “where your blood gets flowing a little bit,” says Sam [1].
Speaker Series & Education
Layered across its digital and in-person communities is its speaker series. They host unique workshops and bring in guest speakers to discuss a range of topics. Past guests include Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell, Kat Cole of Athletic Greens, and Jasmine Star of Social Curator [16]. These cover mostly tactical topics, such as the ‘beyond the book’ series where they interview authors of favorite business books, like Andy Dunn, writer of Burn Rate [18].
Exclusive Perks
Lastly, the vendor list in the portal includes exclusive discounts, which members can use to save money on popular software tools and apps [16].
Currently, Hampton is mostly focused on the US, but members can be in Mexico, the UK, and Canada, too [8]. Members are ‘highly-vetted,’ but what does that actually mean?
Well, when Hampton launched you needed to have either built a company with $1M+ in revenue, raised $3M+ in funding, or sold a business for at least $5M [7]. But as of September 2024, you need $3M in revenue or $10M from a past exit [6]. The average revenue per member is ~$23 million [9].
Raising member requirements is something they have wanted to do for a while. Sam says that in December 2022, so before they even publicly launched, they “changed our requirements from $1-2M. But we got scared and quickly went back after a couple of weeks” [22].
Regardless, if you meet the requirements, they’ll confirm you’re running a “digital-first business.” Then there’s a culture fit interview and your application goes through “a series of additional steps” [8]. They claim to accept less than 8% of applicants [7] and everyone in Hampton also signs a confidentiality pledge, too [18]. The member base is mostly men, with women representing around 15% [7]. Although Joe says that “indexes 3x higher than industry average” [35].
During its beta phase, it seems like they experimented with various price points, including $3,000 per year [20]. However, by launch, pricing was set at $8,500 [2] but it’s now $9,500 per year [21] and they don’t do discounts [3].
The pricing strategy was informed by Sam’s prior experience with running the Trends community. Trends was a weekly email but they “created a Facebook group as an afterthought,” says Sam, but became the best part of the product [3]. But “we screwed up,” admits Sam. “I charged $300, which was really stupid because I couldn't afford to provide certain services” [1]. It also meant that they needed tens of thousands of members and a small staff to build a substantial-sized business. Sam’s advice [1]:
“If you want community to be the business… you should probably charge more money than you think because then you can provide a better service.”
Initially, they acquired members through the founding teams’ network. This was a point of pride for Sam: “I thought I was a loser, and I was like, I could only build a business if I tell my audience about it. Fuck that. I got to prove that I could do it”. So they set out to grow organically by DMing peers and through word of mouth [1], which got them to 270 members at launch [2].
Then in March 2023, they launched publicly and announced it on Twitter [4], on the My First Million podcast [14], got some press coverage [2, 7], and mentioned it during multiple podcast appearances [12, 14, 15]. That worked - they got over 3,000 new applications on the first day [7]. Two weeks later, that was up to 5,000 [12], and by August 2023, they’d had around 6,000 applications [15].
I assume a big chunk of those applications were from folks who didn’t qualify, though, as from June 2023 they first mention a waitlist of 2,000 applicants [17]. Either way, by August 2023 paid membership had grown to “almost 500 members” [18].
Skipping forward to July 2024, they claim 1,000+ members [23]. However, in August 2024 they stated they had 95+ core groups of 5-8 members, adding 10-20 new groups per quarter, which suggests it might be a bit lower [17].
Since Hampton membership is something of a status symbol, many members list membership on their LinkedIn profiles. Mapping public mentions of membership size to LinkedIn growth matches surprisingly consistently to around 1 in 3 members adding it to their profile. This enables us to estimate this growth chart:
For now, at least, it seems that demand outstrips supply. Seemingly confirmed by the price increases and higher earnings requirements.
Sam thinks this is a business that can last for decades [5] and he’s building it with that in mind. They haven’t taken any outside investment, so don't have external pressure to grow at a pace that doesn’t work for them [18].
We see pretty steady, controlled growth of around 7-8% each month or around 20-50 members. Factoring in member fee changes, current revenue is estimated to be around $8M per year.
Acquisition Channels
Sam suggests that “my name will get us the first 1 to 3000 customers, but then it's very easily going to outgrow me” [34]. They have made their first moves towards planning for that by hiring a Growth Marketing Lead, Content Lead, and part-time Content Writer to build out a marketing team [17].
Their marketing activity focuses on content marketing. This is primarily reports that leverage unique insights from its member base [26]:
“We've created these cool surveys and so we have a lot of Founders who have high net worths and we'll ask them all types of questions that people typically are embarrassed to ask but provide a lot of value… So things like how much the founders pay themselves each month how much money they're spending each month.”
The resulting reports include State of SaaS, as well as Salary & Compensation, and more niche reports digging into trends like AI or specific categories like eCommerce, Agencies, and Wealth Allocation. They also publish a regular series of member profiles, exploring their past experiences and business lessons [24].
Focusing on this type of content is a smart move since it’s unique (nobody else has access to that network of people) and directly highlights the value of having access to a group of people like that.
Many of its reports are gated. Providing an email address puts you into a lead nurture flow. They share other reports and encourage you to attend an ‘open house’ event to learn more and ask anything about Hampton membership. They’re lowkey, personable emails that leverage Sam’s popularity and share testimonials from members on the value they get from the community.
They also send a couple of DMs on LinkedIn, too - with messages aimed at playing into the egos of potential members, offering to ‘fast track’ you because you’d be such a good fit.
Other marketing includes an email newsletter and they’ve done some paid marketing across social, SEM, and other newsletters, too [17]. Their paid ads on LinkedIn, for example, mostly focus on the value prop of connecting with like-minded people:
Back in January 2024, they launched a podcast, MoneyWise with Morning Brew. They’re 21 episodes in and “get 20,000 to 40,000 downloads per episode” [17]. This again leverages their member base, with high net-worth guests discussing the realities and challenges of being wealthy - like raising kids, dating, liquidity, and other issues [25]. Topics that Sam says, “If done incorrectly, can really make us sound like an ass,” but are rarely discussed in a public setting [25].
Member referrals are an important channel and they have a dedicated signup page to fast-track such applications. This is something they have hired someone to build out and grow to “increase qualified prospects and also reward current members” [17]. Many of their members also have large online followings, so they intend to create an influencer program, too, encouraging members to advocate on their behalf [17].
Hampton is a “very operational heavy thing,” says Sam [10]. There’s its member base, which is comprised of founders who are used to the finer things and have a staff of people making sure their daily lives run as smoothly as possible. There’s also its network of facilitators which needs wrangling [10], and as Jessica notes, managing all of its events and retreats is “logistically really complicated,” too [18]. As of April 2024, they were on track to run around 200 events per year [26].
Managing all of this is a staff of around 16 people currently, working for Hampton across both full-time and part-time roles (up from 8 in March 2023 [3]), as well as 55+ contractors [37]. These include:
Community:
Ops:
Marketing:
Sales:
Early on, Sam hired a CEO to oversee the day-to-day management of the company. This was around March 2023, so under a year since the company began. “I'm really good at getting things to 1-5 million a year in revenue,” says Sam. “Then I'm really good at hiring executives to make it much larger.” To do that, Sam turned to Jordan DiPietro, who had previously led The Hustle through its acquisition and transition period at HubSpot [5].
Facilitators are its biggest cost. They’re mostly executive coaches and “We pay a lot of money for” them, remarks Sam [3]. They run the core group meetings, both guiding and participating in those conversations. “A lot of them are ex-entrepreneurs” and act as “glorified therapists” [3].
They’re trained and are there to handle the logistics of ensuring all members are there, but also use their expertise to know the topics to focus on, get people to open up, and encourage others to share their opinions. As of August 2024, they have 45+ facilitators [17]. The founding facilitator was Lauren Meagher, who started in August 2022, while others include: Jillian Richardson, Katy Trost, Heather (Bernstein) Yurovsky, Kelsey Hushek, Seung Chan Lim, Lindsay (Rubin) Levin, and Ashley Fina.
They outsource some areas of the business. For event logistics, they work with an agency called Marco. They handle the nitty-gritty of retreat planning and execution [9], such as the hour-by-hour logistics like managing transportation for guests, liaising with vendors, etc. Jessica notes that being able to outsource this gives the Hampton team “more bandwidth for community building before, during, and after the retreats,” and makes its events program sustainable with a lean team [9].
They also outsource aspects like editing and scripting for its podcast, an agency to manage its paid marketing spend [17], and Sam says that they “hired branding agencies early on, which is something I never thought I would do” [5].
He paid $15,000 for the branding agency, tasking them to create a visual identity that was “Elite, but cheeky” [26]. Sam says, “It definitely felt so indulgent,” but thinks investing in a solid brand early was the right move. Especially given his conviction in the business and its early traction, noting that he didn’t want to launch with something he’d only need to come back and fix up later [26].
Seemingly in acknowledgment of the logistical challenges of running a business like this, its first hire was an Automation Specialist. They work alongside another automation specialist and an agency partner. A lot of the work focuses on Zapier, HubSpot Workflows, and custom API integrations to automate aspects of sales, member experience, and community [17].
For instance, they’ve automated the sending of swag and made it so that staff can trigger swag boxes to be sent out with a button click inside of tools they use every day, like Airtable [32].
Other automations are used to nudge members in Slack reminding them if a client is awaiting a reply or a task is overdue [20] or for things like suggesting a new member joins the parenting channel if they mentioned being a parent in their intro message [33].
While the community itself runs on Slack for discussions, Zoom for video calls, and their own Bubble-powered portal, they leverage many tools to run the business side of things, too.
The Hampton website runs on Webflow with Typeform for its application forms. Behind the scenes, they’re using HubSpot as their CRM, which Sam notes they got for free from the acquisition [14]. They also use HubSpot landing pages for some of its member surveys, and to understand the sources of signups [26].
Stripe is used for payment and they have a ton of automations built with Zapier. Threado is also used for automating aspects of community and support, too, and they leverage SwagUp for member swag fulfillment.
Sales use Salesflow to power their LinkedIn and email outreach, while a lot of the member management and processes use Airtable [17]. Finally, the company wiki is on Notion [20].
Despite these investments, structuring Hampton to be able to handle these operational challenges, scale remains a concern. Here though, the main concern is about how you scale the member base without losing the magic that has made it successful so far. Sam says [1]:
“A community… if it gets too big and too fast, it sucks. There's no culture and there's no soul to it.”
To hit Sam’s goal of creating a 100M ARR business, Hampton will have to grow to tens of thousands of members while keeping things feeling intimate [3]. This is a challenge that Jessica says, “keeps me up at night.” “We're only going to get bigger. And so how do you really create that magic feel like while it's growing?” [18].
At launch, they said they were capping membership to 1,000 people. “Maybe we'll expand that to 2,000,” said Sam at the time. “We don't have a plan. All we've said is let's get to 1000 and then we'll reassess” [3].
Well, they’ve passed 1,000 [23] and it seems they now have a plan to grow further: decentralization.
“We’ve decided to create a chapter-based system that allows the community to grow in the best ways and yet also stay intimate in the best way possible” notes the Hampton website [8].
Hampton has had a decentralized model from early on with its city hubs. There are what they call Tier 1 cities (like San Francisco, NYC, Austin, and LA and Tier 2 cities (Denver, Phili, Charlotte, San Diego, Nashville, Boston, and Phoenix) [16]. They prioritize applicants in certain cities at different times to build regional densities [3].
However, what they’ve also found is that they don’t need to be the ones running all the things, facilitators and even members can too. As Jessica notes, members began to self-organize and arrange their own events. So they’re now doubling down on this: “We've found members in our major cities, and we assign them as a social chair and we give them a budget,” explains Jessica [18].
They support them in hosting dinners, providing them with a playbook including discussion topic suggestions that Hampton provides [1]. So they’re putting together kits that they can send to these hosts to help them, for example [18]:
“For the Miami one, I made the table seatings on a spreadsheet. I sent her place cards on Amazon and then she filled them out.”
They’re also trying this with adventures, too. For instance, “a member is hosting a golf tournament at Pinehurst Golf Retreat… If it goes well, we'll try to empower more members to do stuff like this and hopefully will increase our event output and quality.”
The other thing they’re doing to keep the intimate feel is prioritizing in-person events. They started testing these in June 2024 [29]. Seemingly encouraged by their results, they’ve now begun to switch core group meetings from digital to in-person, starting with NYC, Austin, Miami, Chicago, and San Francisco first [28].
Though Sam notes that this is hard “because you gotta trust your members… its scary! Fingers f-ing crossed” [27].
So there you have it - that’s how Hampton built a million dollar community. “Community is one of those businesses that people don't actually take seriously,” says Sam. “But they will in about five years when we finally release some of our numbers” [1]. A little over two years in, they’ve made great progress. I'm excited to watch their progress to Sam’s $100M a year goal.
Build a consistent audience across experiments
Like Daniel at Small Bets, you can see the through line in Sam’s career that helped him build the right audience for Hampton to achieve quick success. From Hustle Con and The Hustle to the My First Million podcast, building up a network of tech-enabled founders meant Sam could quickly validate whether the community model was going to work for his business. His ideas and experiments may have spanned multiple business types, but by building a consistent audience it meant he had people on tap when the right thing came along.
Tackle operational challenges from the outset
Community businesses are always operationally heavy. A lack of dedicated tooling and a desire to fulfil often unique member needs means you’ll always be needing to cobble together a mix of tools and manual processes. That means building the ability to scale your community business in the right way, like Hampton’s decentralized model. As well as being proactive in creating opportunities to free up your time. Whether that’s through software automation or leveraging outsourced resources (like agencies, facilitators, or even members), make sure you can concentrate on building the community, not running it.
Don’t underprice your membership
Many businesses start out with low prices and raise them over time. But as Sam learned from Trends, you can price yourself into a poor member experience. Make sure your pricing doesn’t just work for your members’ wallets but enables you to create the member experience you want to deliver.
Gareth has spent 15 years in founding marketing roles at community-led startups. He shares his learnings through deep dives.
