My First Million

My First Million is a business podcast hosted by Shaan Puri and Sam Parr, produced under HubSpot Media.¹ The show premiered on June 22, 2019, with its first episode featuring investor Suleman Ali discussing his path from a $76,000-per-year Microsoft salary to selling TinyCo for over $100 million.³ Puri created the podcast and recruited Parr -- then the CEO of The Hustle, a business newsletter with 1.5 million subscribers -- as its publisher and eventual co-host.⁴⁷ By the mid-2020s, the show exceeded 25 million annual downloads and had published more than 800 episodes across seven seasons, making it one of the most listened-to entrepreneurship podcasts in the United States.¹⁰²

Founding

The idea for My First Million came from Puri's decision to pivot away from pure financial optimization after selling Bebo to Amazon's Twitch in 2019.⁴ During a four-hour walk with a mentor shortly after the Twitch deal closed, Puri described his ambition: "What if I woke up and I was in a million people's ear balls?"⁴ He wanted to build an audience the way Tim Ferriss and Naval Ravikant had built theirs -- through a regular show that mixed entertainment with business insight.⁴

Puri approached Parr with a specific deal structure.⁴ At the time, The Hustle had no podcast, and Parr had told Puri that podcasting was "too expensive" and he lacked the talent.⁴ Puri proposed that he would create all the content and hand Parr finished audio files; Parr would distribute them to The Hustle's subscriber base; they would split revenue 50-50.⁴ Parr agreed.⁴ The arrangement gave Puri immediate access to a large, engaged audience and gave Parr podcast content with no upfront cost or team distraction.⁴

The earliest episodes were interview-format shows where Puri served as host and Parr appeared occasionally as a guest.³ Season 1 included ten episodes, with guests such as Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt, real estate investors Keith and Gelena Wasserman, and Michael Birch -- the co-founder of Bebo, whose story of selling the social network for $850 million and buying it back for $1 million Puri knew firsthand from years working at Monkey Inferno.³¹⁸ Approximately six months after launch, Parr transitioned from occasional guest to regular co-host.¹⁰⁴

Format

The show's core format centers on the two hosts brainstorming business ideas based on trends and opportunities they identify in the market.¹² A typical episode involves Puri and Parr each bringing ideas, dissecting them in real time, estimating market sizes, and debating execution risk.¹ The show also features long-form guest interviews with entrepreneurs, often structured around how the guest made their first significant sum of money.²

The conversational dynamic relies on the contrast between the two hosts' backgrounds.⁹ Puri came from Silicon Valley -- he had been CEO of Monkey Inferno, sold Bebo to Twitch, and worked as Senior Director of Product at Twitch.⁹ Parr's background was scrappier: he had started a hot dog stand, built Hustle Con as a live conference, and grown The Hustle into a newsletter generating eight figures in annual revenue before selling to HubSpot.⁸⁷ Puri has described Parr as the "street fighter" to his "trained martial artist."⁹

Production is handled by a small team.¹⁵ Darren Clarke and Kal Elsebai have served as producers, with Arie Desormeaux and Ezra Bakker credited on later episodes.¹⁵²

The Hustle and HubSpot

My First Million launched under The Hustle's media umbrella, with early episodes branded as part of The Hustle's content offering.¹³

In February 2021, HubSpot acquired The Hustle in a deal reported at approximately $27 million, though Parr declined to confirm the price.⁷ HubSpot's SEC filing showed $17.2 million in cash, plus equity; Parr later said the total deal exceeded $20 million.⁸ The acquisition included the My First Million podcast.⁷ HubSpot's CMO Kipp Bodnar described the strategy: "We wanted to bring together some of the best business creators to one podcast network to be the go-to source for business education and inspiration."⁶

Three months later, in May 2021, HubSpot launched the HubSpot Podcast Network with My First Million as one of six inaugural shows, alongside Entrepreneurs on Fire, Business Infrastructure, Being Boss, The MarTech Podcast, and The Salesman Podcast.⁶ The network provided cross-promotion between shows and integrated episode recommendations.⁶

The podcast moved from being labeled a "Hustle" show to a "HubSpot Original Podcast."² In episode 153, Parr and guest Kieran Flanagan went behind the scenes of the HubSpot deal, detailing the process from initial cold outreach to close.¹³ HubSpot's media operation has since grown: by 2025, the company had also acquired Starter Story, a YouTube-based media brand, making My First Million and The Hustle the first two acquisitions in what became HubSpot Media.¹⁶

Growth

The podcast's growth trajectory moved through distinct phases.⁹⁵

In the first year, distribution through The Hustle's newsletter provided an audience base that most new podcasts lack.⁴ By early 2021, the show was generating over 300,000 downloads per month, or roughly 4 million per year.⁹⁵ Puri confirmed the 4 million annual figure in a Sacra interview while still working at Twitch.⁵

The HubSpot acquisition and network launch in 2021 accelerated distribution further.⁶ The show expanded to YouTube, where it accumulated over 200 million views by 2024.⁴ The YouTube channel posts both full episodes and shorter clips.²

By the mid-2020s, My First Million exceeded 25 million annual downloads and ranked consistently among the top business podcasts on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.¹⁰ The Pitch ranked it among the best business podcasts of 2026, describing it as "best for brainstorming business ideas and side hustles."¹⁷

Notable episodes and crossovers

The show has produced several episodes that extend beyond its usual format.²

Episode 7, "The Hippie With A Billion Dollars," featured Michael Birch describing how he sold Bebo to AOL for $850 million and then bought it back for $1 million -- a story that connects directly to Puri's own career at Monkey Inferno and the broader Bebo diaspora.¹⁸

Episode 180 brought on Furqan Rydhan, Puri's former CTO at Bebo and the founding CTO of AppLovin, to discuss what it was like co-founding a company that reached a $20 billion public market valuation.¹²

Episode 440 was a crossover with the Acquired podcast, where hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal joined Puri and Parr to discuss how to grow and monetize a podcast business generating over $10 million in annual revenue.¹⁹ Acquired also published its own version of the crossover, which included brainstorming startup ideas in the My First Million format.¹⁴

The show runs annual "Milly Awards" episodes, modeled after year-end award shows, where the hosts and guests review the best ideas, predictions, and business stories from the prior year.²

Relationship to other ventures

My First Million has functioned as a launchpad for several of Puri's subsequent business ventures.¹¹⁵

In September 2020, Puri launched the All Access rolling fund on AngelList, raising $2.5 million from 73 limited partners in 21 days.¹¹ None of the 73 LPs had met Puri in person -- the entire fund was raised from his Twitter following and podcast audience.⁵¹¹ The fund reached approximately $4 million per year in deployable capital.⁵

In February 2022, Puri co-founded Milk Road, a daily cryptocurrency newsletter that grew to 250,000 subscribers in ten months and sold to Bitfo in December 2022.⁴ The newsletter's growth playbook -- using an existing audience to bootstrap distribution, then scaling with paid acquisition -- directly mirrored the strategy Puri had used to launch My First Million through The Hustle's subscriber base.⁴

Parr's career after The Hustle has similarly been shaped by the podcast.⁸ After selling The Hustle to HubSpot, he remained as co-host of My First Million while the show's audience continued to grow under HubSpot's network.¹⁶