From $0 to $10M ARR in Six Months: The Growth Playbook of Hunter Hammonds, Co-Founder & CEO of Assembly Ventures

Hunter Hammonds [00:00:00]

I was basically just a fucking degenerate for six months. I was like, okay, you know, what if I was in my early twenties again? Let's, let's pretend to do that real quick. And I played video games and like read books and played poker and like, just kind of dicked around for six months and it was glorious. It was amazing.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:19]

This is Hunter Hammonds describing himself during the six-month sabbatical he took after wrapping up his creative agency, Everest.

Everest, by the way, was a pretty successful agency.

Hunter Hammonds [00:00:34]

I ran Everest for about five, yeah, four and a half years and grew it to like low 8-figures, like 10 to 13 million a year roughly but I owned 100% of it. Very, very profitable business but in reality, I ended up just hating. Like I just wasn't that guy.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:54]

Yeah, he hated it despite the fact that it was making him more than $10 million a year!

So, there was only one thing he could do: EXIT.

Hunter Hammonds [00:01:03]

but because of our size, you know, big enough to be attractive for an exit, but not big enough to where I'm not involved in the day to day. There was just too much key man risks. So everything came with like a two, three year lockup. Um, you know, the multiples in that space aren't the craziest, right?

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:18]

So, instead, he decided he would just, quote-unquote, "wrap it up"...

Hunter Hammonds [00:01:22]

So we ended up, uh, kind of wrapping Everest up about a year and a half ago now. And then I went and took a six months sabbatical, um, did no work. I don't even think I like opened an email for six months.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:32]

The very same sabbatical during which he was...

Hunter Hammonds [00:01:35]

...was basically just a fucking degenerate for six months.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:38]

But then, towards the end of the sabbatical, he got a text from an old friend..

Hunter HammondsYong-Soo Chung [00:01:45]

Sahil was texting me, was like, dude, like, um, you know, how's it going? I've got an idea I want to talk to you about.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:49]

That’s Sahil Bloom, the incredibly successful creator with a large audience across multiple social platforms...

Hunter Hammonds [00:01:55]

And we get on a call to catch up and he's like, dude, here's my idea. And I was like, wait, hold on. I was like, let me tell you mine first. And I was like, let's, let's do X, Y, and Z with creators. And funny enough, he was like, oh, that's exactly what I was going to tell you. Uh, so we, we just had this beautiful like moment of coming together at the same time with the exact same idea.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:13]

This 'exact same idea' idea was what became Assembly Ventures...

Hunter Hammonds [00:02:19]

Hi, I'm Hunter Hammonds and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Assembly Ventures, where we build creator-led B2B brands.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:27]

So, what is Assembly Ventures? How do they partner up with creators with large audiences before they even launch their products? How do they come up with new product ideas to launch?

We’ll cover all these questions - and more - on today’s flight with my co-pilot, Hunter Hammonds, the CEO and Co-Founder of Assembly Ventures.

Hunter Hammonds [00:02:49]

Yeah, thanks. Happy to be here.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:50]

Over the next thirty minutes or so, Hunter and I will take you on a journey of how Assembly Ventures grew from 0 to $10 million annual recurring revenue in less than six months. We'll discuss what they did, how they did it, why they did it, and what they plan to do next!

So, jetsetters, buckle up your seatbelts, put your phones on airplane-mode and get ready for take-off!

Hunter Hammonds [00:03:17]

Hi, I'm Hunter Hammonds. Let's get down to business.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:03:29]

The next generation of successful founders in this digital age of entrepreneurship will leverage their audience to launch, build, and scale their brands. First Class Founders explores this golden intersection of audience-building & company-building with proven strategies to grow both your audience, which is your distribution, and your brand, which is your product.

Because those who can master both will create a category of one.

Hi, my name is Yong-Soo Chung and I'm a serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped 3 successful businesses from $0 to $20 million over 8 years.

On this podcast, you'll learn timeless lessons from world-class content creators, startup founders, and CEOs. You'll also hear tactical tips & strategies from ME, Yong-Soo Chung!

Are you ready? Then, let’s begin!

Jetsetters, a quick reminder here that First Class Founders is not just an audio experience. We teamed up with HyperPods to bring to you a 3-min hyper-visual summary of this episode featuring Hunter Hammonds talking about how he grew Assembly Ventures from 0 to 10m ARR in under 6 months.

This hyper-visual summary is absolutely free so please, do yourself a favor and grab it at firstclassfounders.com/hypervisuals.

That text from Sahil Bloom, the one that set things into motion for the birth of Assembly Ventures, wasn't just a random text. It was something Hunter and Sahil had previously discussed.

Hunter Hammonds [00:05:04]

Sahil Bloom is a really close friend of mine. And we had been kicking around the idea of building a business together really organically

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:13]

But running Everest meant that Hunter didn't have enough bandwidth to give the idea the breathing room it needed to make it a reality.

Hunter Hammonds [00:05:20]

so much of your time gets spent just doing account management. Just fielding, you know, like irate phone calls from like a VP that has a problem with something that's not your fault. It's actually their internal initiative, but your team members are on the project. And so they want you to fix it, but you can't. And really quickly, I just grew to hate the business that I was running.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:40]

Taking a six-month sabbatical not only helped him clear the cobwebs in his head but also helped him crystallize his thoughts. It was what gave him the seed of the idea that eventually became Assembly Ventures.

Hunter Hammonds [00:05:52]

.. which is a holding company slash Venture Studio. I don't really know how to describe it. We build companies very quickly, typically operate them for some measure of time. These are creator-led businesses that we don't have to worry about distribution too much and can have really strong customer acquisition. Scale them quite quickly. And then we bring operators in to help run the day-to-day. And then we just go off and build another business.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:06:19]

Remember how I always say that the two fundamental pillars of any business are finding the right product and the right distribution channels?

Well, that's what Hunter, and by extension Assembly Ventures, are essentially all about. What they do is find creators with sizable audiences for distribution and create relevant products that those audiences might be interested in.

But, how do they choose which creators to approach?

Hunter Hammonds [00:06:42]

So there's a handful of ideas that we wanna build. Some of them are probably super lucrative opportunities, but maybe we don't have the right creator for it, or the creators that we're talking to right now don't have the right audience to support a particular idea. And so we have to kind of postpone.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:06:58]

In other words, they DON'T build every idea they have. In fact, it has been that way since the very beginning (pause) because of Sahil's involvement in the business...

Hunter Hammonds [00:07:09]

For us, I think it's a unique situation because Sahil is my co-founder, right? That opens up our network and even the inherent trust that comes in that network to a fairly unparalleled degree, right?

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:23]

Sahil's HUGE network and the inherent trust that came with it meant that Hunter and Assembly Ventures could play it one of two ways - either they could be judicious in their choice of creator-partners or go all-out and throw the gates wide open.

And they decided to go with option number 1.

Hunter Hammonds [00:07:40]

And so there's not really this big process of us going out and trying to solicit or pitch creators. It's more, at first it was more of us looking at some of our closest friends and saying, you know, we think we could build a business together that looks like this. Are you interested? And everyone said yes. Like, how could this work? And then it was a matter of us just figuring out what the right steps were to build a service that tapped into the existing audience that Creator had. And most importantly, make sure that we were able to do it in a way that felt organic, didn't feel like they were trying to sell you something.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:08:18]

Finding the right service and building something that felt organic was important, Hunter explained. He pointed to the situation with Mr. Beast and Night Media as an example.

Hunter Hammonds [00:08:26]

Mr. Beast has 200 million YouTube subscribers now, if he puts his name on anything, there are kids that will go and buy it. Well, cool. That's, that's fine. You can do that. You know, Feastables is going to do, I don't know, $200 million in revenue this year. But look at what happened with Beastburger, right? There wasn't the proper controls for quality in place to make sure that it was an experience that upheld, you know, what Jimmy thinks of the Mr. Beast brand and the quality that stands for.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:08:54]

This sentiment about protecting the creator's brand by ensuring strict quality control featured prominently and regularly in Hunter's description of all Assembly Ventures' businesses. In fact, it was one of the main reasons why they chose the smaller-bets route.

Hunter Hammonds [00:09:08]

we wanted to take the antithetical approach, which was to say, look, let's not go and try and bite off anything that's too big. Let's not do anything that's too big of a swing that takes the quality control out of our hands. Let's focus first on a series of smaller bets that allows us to manage every little detail of the customer interaction to figure out first how we protect that reputation and build a kind of parent company brand that creators, whether they're in our network or not, look at and say, that's really interesting to me. I kind of want to get involved with that because it seems like they're having a lot of success and the brand quality is super high.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:09:49]

And the way they achieve this is actually pretty simple yet genius, in my opinion.

They look at TWO things primarily.

Hunter Hammonds [00:09:57]

things that A, accelerate our flywheel, and B, have a really clear product audience fit with a creator that excites us.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:10:06]

Or, in simple terms, things that will grow Assembly Ventures, while ALSO growing the creator they associate with!

Hunter Hammonds [00:10:13]

And I guess the best way to look at that is, you know, if you think about Ali Abdaal, like what comes to mind? Like Ali Abdaal having a YouTube agency, yeah, it makes a ton of sense, right? His audience is gonna look at that and be like, yeah, this checks a box, like I could see this. If you look at Sahil Bloom having a design agency, it's like, yeah, it doesn't make any sense to me. Like Sahil is not known for design. Like he's not a design influencer, right? It doesn't make a ton of sense.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:10:38]

Having the right product for the right creator ensures that the audience is automatically there when the product rolls out.

Hunter Hammonds [00:10:45]

If not, we'll shop around for a new creator or tweak the company, tweak the offering, whatever it is.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:10:56]

But, finding the right creator and the right product is just the first step.

Hunter Hammonds [00:11:01]

Yeah, it's kind of the first spark.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:03]

The product still needs distribution and it still needs to find paying customers.

This, one would assume, is where the creator's audience would come into the picture. This is where the creators might be required to promote the product to their audience to bring in the customers, right?

Well, not quite.

Hunter Hammonds [00:11:20]

When was the last time that you saw Sam Parr, for example, talk about viral cuts?

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:24]

Not really. Right?

Hunter Hammonds [00:11:25]

Probably when he announced it.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:26]

Yeah. Exactly. Right?

Hunter Hammonds [00:11:27]

Yeah. Just the one time.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:28]

So, what is the distribution strategy they use? And how does it tie-into the larger flywheel?

Hunter Hammonds [00:11:35]

If that's all we had, the business would fail.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:37]

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Okay, now let's get back to our episode with Hunter Hammonds of Assembly Ventures.

Before the break, we discussed how Assembly Ventures chooses the creators they want to build businesses with. And I was about to tell you the distribution strategy they employ for the businesses they launch.

Spoiler Alert: They DON'T rely entirely on the creator's distribution.

According to Hunter, marketing in the B2B space is somewhat unique and very different from marketing in the B2C space. You don't need the creator to plug the business frequently. In fact, as he pointed out moments earlier, Codie Sanchez and Sam Parr, with whom they started ViralCuts don't frequently plug it to their audiences - they only did it during the launch.

Hunter Hammonds [00:13:48]

And from that initial launch, there's this thunderclap. There's this huge surge of interest and attention. If that's all we had, the business would fail. Right. If that's all we had, the business would fail. The creator and, and having that distribution component does not equal success.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:14:06]

Creator and distribution doesn't equal success? But wasn't that the whole idea for starting Assembly Ventures? To find a creator with a sizable distribution. To then design a product that matches their persona and platform. Then, simply sit back and watch as customers break down the door trying to get in!

Hunter Hammonds [00:14:23]

this is something Sahil and I joke about, cause there's a friend of ours that I won't name, but thinks that distribution is all that matters. And because of that, he's going to have the majority equity in a company and the operator is going to have very little and whatever it is. And it's like, look, you can't eat leads. Ultimately you have to service those customers.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:14:41]

Yes, indeed! HAPPY CUSTOMERS is what it all boils down to, at the end!

Hunter Hammonds [00:14:46]

And what we've relied on is that when we launched, when we get that first, uh, you know, thunderclap of interest, we get all these people signing up, wanting to work with us, let's take really great fucking care of them. Let's do really great work. Let's turn them into advocates. Let's make sure that we have a ton of really warm customer referrals that really allows us to accelerate the amount of organic customer driven acquisition that can last us over time. So really what we're using the creators for, other than just actually being good partners in the business and really being instrumental and thinking through how we approach go-to-market, how we think about the service, because they're either experts or they use it themselves, we use it as the initial spark for us to cut years off of the agency growth cycle of how you think about customer growth.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:15:41]

In plain and simple words - build a great product, use existing distribution channels to kickstart the process, and then build a SECONDARY audience and reputation on your own merit!

And this playbook has consistently yielded positive results for Hunter and Assembly Ventures in these first five months.

Hunter Hammonds [00:15:58]

So I think there's a lot of trust in what we're doing right now because of the approach we've taken and The people that we chose to partner with first Versus doing something that's more of the celebrity-driven kind of vast-market creator approach.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:16:11]

Come to think of it, even with this measured approach, Hunter and Assembly Ventures seem to be spinning up businesses quite regularly.

In the five months since inception, they have started five businesses - HeyFriends, ViralCuts, OffMenu, Bite-Sized, and KeyFrame - with perhaps more on the horizon.

So, the obvious question on my mind here was: How did they manage to maintain their high standard of quality service for all of them?

Hunter Hammonds [00:16:39]

they're all the part of the same flywheel. That's how.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:16:42]

The flywheel in this case being the one that belongs to Assembly Ventures, that is.

Hunter Hammonds [00:16:46]

So they might today look like they are disparate brands. And they are all, you know, their own unique companies, their own unique services, but they're all pieces to very important flywheel that we've been building

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:01]

This flywheel, according to Hunter, was like the Power Rangers.

Hunter Hammonds [00:17:05]

Like, they come together to form this like big, this big monster that if you point it at any one creator or brand gives you a ton of firepower to really build that brand quite quickly, whether it's short form video, long form video, whether it's written content, which is coming soon, or it's overall like social strategy, amplifying the growth on social, building the actual brand presence on the web, site, product, et cetera. It's all part of one flywheel and it all kind of runs the same playbook.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:37]

And there are three components that make up this flywheel:

Hunter Hammonds [00:17:40]

strategy, execution and amplification

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:43]

Strategy, Execution, and Amplification.

Hunter Hammonds [00:17:47]

So instead of us launching a new brand and that detracting from the quality every time we launch a new brand. We're pulling that playbook into that new space that new service, using the learnings from this new service or how we you know perform this particularly new niche creative thing, and using that to inform the rest of the operations. So it is it's really. At the end of the day, it's just pretty vertically integrated.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:12]

So, who handles the day-to-day for all these companies? Has he hired operators to manage the day-to-day, or...

Hunter Hammonds [00:18:18]

No. It's it's, it's gonna blow your mind. It's me. I do it all.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:25]

That's insane.

Hunter Hammonds [00:18:26]

Yeah. I know.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:27]

Managing the affairs for not one, not two, but five different companies is insane, no matter which way you look at it. I asked him how he manages to retain his sanity.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:39]

You know the fun thing is like I feel like a kid in a candy store all the time, right? It's just really fun problems to solve. And instead of having to get into the weeds with a bunch of different businesses, myself and my COO have a pretty easy way to manage what is happening. So I only need to get plugged in case something's going wrong or we feel like there's a big inefficiency in the process..

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:55]

And that, quote-unquote, 'pretty easy way' that Hunter mentioned has two parts.

The first part is having a general operations playbook…

Hunter Hammonds [00:19:03]

If HeyFriends, for example, is struggling with this one, you know, particular piece of delivery, us going through and fixing that, um, is likely going to, uh, shed light on how we can improve process for other companies as well, right? So it all is kind of running one, um, general operation playbook, um, that allows us to do it quite easily.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:19:23]

...and the second is to stay away from anything involving customer-service!

Hunter Hammonds [00:19:29]

If I was involved with customers, I'd probably lose my mind because it'd be too fractured and varied across the different needs and ways that we service them. But the way it exists today, it's feasible for now, but we're beginning to go through the process of either hiring operators or training operators up as we kind of approach the 10 million mark.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:19:50]

...but, instead, an incredibly valuable resource to implement in their existing pipeline.Yeah, I was gonna tell him exactly that - if he hadn't hired operators already he should definitely look into hiring them!

But thankfully, he has… because he explained to me, in detail, HOW he structures his teams!

Hunter Hammonds [00:20:10]

the general thesis for our video companies is that they're broken into pods.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:14]

...and also shared how his company operates on a day-to-day basis.

Hunter Hammonds [00:20:18]

There are two ways that we think about process. And it's honestly quite contradictory.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:24]

And we'll look at all the details of his team-structure and also hear from him about how the day-to-day is typically managed in a little while but, first, while I have your undivided attention, I would like to welcome the most adorable sponsor we have had on this show Humphrey!

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Alright, let's get back to our episode with Hunter Hammonds and how he grew Assembly Ventures from 0 to $10 million ARR in less than 6 months.

I was just telling you about how Hunter structures each of the teams working at various businesses under Assembly Ventures.

The teams working in the trenches, dealing with the actual products and services are broken up into… what Hunter describes as… pods. 

Hunter Hammonds [00:22:18]

So a pod is typically gonna be somewhere around four to five team members for viral cuts. For Hey Friends, a pod might be a little bit more complex where it's comprised of everythingfrom a producer, strategist, a writer, a handful of different editors, animators, and that pod might service, let's say five to six customers at a time. Off menu is a little more straightforward where every designer is typically gonna be working on three to four projects at a time. Byte size is a similar function. Keyframe is a similar function.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:22:50]

The size and complexity of pods might vary across different products but the overall philosophy remains the same - to make them self-sufficient.

Hunter Hammonds [00:22:59]

So they should manage their own really tight loop around creative direction for the videos that they're working on, feedback and review cycles, and generally making sure that they're leveling each other up.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:23:11]

Each pod is given tons of incentives to make sure they are not only performing at their best, but also leveling up in the process.

Hunter Hammonds [00:23:18]

And then there's fun incentives that we give to pods to kind of face off with each other, see who's performing the best, who's like making the coolest videos this month, whatever it is. It's a fun little internal game that we like to play.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:23:04]

Guiding these pods on a day-to-day basis is the management.

Hunter Hammonds [00:23:34]

Each company has a really, really strong, really senior director of production or project management, if you will, that we rely on pretty heavily to lead the overall customer experience and the overall service

Yong-Soo Chung [00:23:46]

The management reports weekly to the COO…

Hunter Hammonds [00:23:49]

And then of course, they have an ability with our COO to report on a handful of metrics every week. So every week we're getting a scorecard that has all the metrics contrasted against our goals

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:03]

...who reports to Hunter.

Hunter Hammonds [00:24:05]

And that really allows me to look at something at a high level and see if I need to kind of jump in to help turn a screw or, you know, fix something.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:12]

Pretty straightforward, really.

As for the shared services team - that is, the team that provides services to all the different teams belonging to all the different businesses.

Hunter Hammonds [00:24:20]

...you're probably going to laugh at me, but our shared services team is, uh, is more or less like it's me, my COO, and then we have a recruiter and that's it, um, that's, that's the shared services.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:34]

But, considering that they have started five companies in five months, the shared services team is also being expanded.

Hunter Hammonds [00:24:42]

There's a lot of functions that are going to be critical for that. Largely, it's going to be focused on recruiting, making sure that we are working closely with our teams to help develop our talent, help train up younger talent, and generally just make sure that people fucking love their jobs.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:59]

This recruitment, interestingly, is mostly driven by internal referrals.

Hunter Hammonds [00:25:03]

I would say that 90% of our growth has come from team referrals. I think today we're somewhere around like 60 odd people, um, spread across the globe.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:25:11]

And a sizable chunk of the team is from the Philippines BUT don't make the mistake of assuming that they AREN'T paid well! Far from it, actually…

Hunter Hammonds [00:25:19]

So one of the things that we did first from starting, we basically looked at what everybody was paying talent in the Philippines. I'm sure you've seen the tweets of like, oh, they make $5 an hour. And we said, look, fuck that. Like, let's just pay them double. Let's pay them triple. Let's find the best of the best talent that we can there. Let's pay them really well, but at a level that still keeps our margins super healthy. And that has allowed us to attract a ton of really high level talent there quite quickly.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:25:26]

What fascinated me more though, is Hunter's description of HOW all these teams actually operate on a day-to-day basis…

Hunter Hammonds [00:25:53]

There are two ways that we think about process. And it's honestly quite contradictory. So the first is that at the assembly level, everything is intentionally slow. It's what we call calm aggression. So it's very asynchronous. We rely on a lot of long form written memos and loom videos to handle the majority of our communication, our strategy. So we make sure that all the information is available. Context is there. Everybody's bought in and we really clearly understand the strategy, the initiatives that we're using to execute on that strategy and the projects that are required to drive this forward. When we have all those things, we've found that we're able to execute relentlessly because everybody's waking up, they're getting right on task. It's the definition of deep work. You're not having to send Slack messages and ask for missing information or context or hop on a meeting o transform some information. It's all happened in long form.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:26:55]

So, the first style relies on 'calm aggression' and 'relentless execution'. That is 'aggressively' collecting all the necessary information in a calm and methodical manner. Then, once you have everything go into deep work mode and 'execute relentlessly'.

Hunter Hammonds [00:27:11]

The other is when we perceive that it's kind of wartime, um, which right now, because we're so young, it feels like everything is wartime. Um, and it is. Day to day. Let's get on a call, um, and let's talk through process. So we have a call every morning where each of our project leads for each of our companies reports on customer health and any inefficiencies they're seeing in the process right now that need to be addressed. So we're constantly iterating that process on a day to day basis, documenting that again in writing, um, and using that to rapidly transform the way that we work and continuously improve the way that we deliver results for our customers.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:27:56]

The 'wartime' analogy could again be related to the 'aggressive' collection of information, in a way. Except that this collection is exploratory and iterative - that is, it involves evaluating constantly and documenting the processes as they happen and evolve.

Hunter Hammonds [00:28:10]

Eventually, once the companies are a little bit more mature, they're a little bit more stable, that will slow down and that will go back into calm aggression and happen just via the scorecards, via written updates and things like that. But those are the kind of two realities that we live in to make sure that we're moving the companies forward.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:28:28]

And there you have it - 'calm aggression,' 'relentless execution', and 'constant evaluation' - those are the 3 pillars of how the Assembly Ventures teams operate across various businesses!

But, my favorite part of my conversation with Hunter was when I asked him for tips on how to structure deals with creators. I figured, with five businesses under Assembly Ventures, he would definitely have some interesting strategies and observations that could come in handy for my own personal holding company.

And Hunter did not disappoint!

Hunter Hammonds [00:29:00]

From my personal experience, I could say that creators are interested in one of two things.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:29:05]

Wanna know what those two things are? Well, you'll have to sign up for the First Class Founders membership for that.

The First Class Founders membership comes with a ton of perks. You get access to a private feed, the episodes are all ad-free AND released a week early. Plus, each episode in this private feed contains an additional, specially-crafted segment that provides specific and highly-tactical knowledge that you can apply in your own business!

So, yeah, join the First-Class Founders membership today - go to firstclassfounders.com/join. Look for a link in the show notes

Yong-Soo Chung [00:29:39]

Before wrapping up our conversation, I asked Hunter to share his advice to entrepreneurs looking to build their own version of Everest or Assembly Ventures.

With incredible humility...

Hunter Hammonds [00:29:50]

First, I am not qualified to give any advice.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:29:55]

...he pointed out that first-time entrepreneurs need to find their "why" before they do *anything* else.

Hunter Hammonds [00:30:01]

What's the motivation? Why are you trying to do it? If you're just trying to do it because you think it's an easy means of acquiring customers, again, it goes back to whether or not that's the right reason.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:30:09]

And, for those who were already running a business and doing well with it, looking to partner up with creators and leverage their distribution, he had these words of wisdom:

Hunter Hammonds [00:30:17]

I don't have any experience reaching out to creators cold. Everything that we do is in-network. So I think that's the first thing is like, how can you build your network to the point to where that is just very organic and you're operating from the basis of just giving value, just being helpful, not asking for something in return. And if you can do that pretty well, I think you'd put yourself in a position to where the opportunity emerges to partner with somebody in the network.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:30:46

So, figure out your "why" and build your network to the point where a partnership with the right creator emerges naturally!

You can reach Hunter Hammonds online through a variety of touch-points.]

Hunter Hammonds [00:30:55]

Uh, you can find us at off menu dot design, Hey friends, dot studio viral cuts dot co keyframe dot design, bite size dot design and, uh, X.com forward slash underscore Hunter Hammonds. I did it, I did it, I knew those.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:31:10]

And if you enjoyed this episode with Hunter Hammonds, I'm 100% sure you will LOVE listening to:
- episode 48 featuring Mr. Sweaty Startup, Nick Huber, who gave an absolute masterclass in turning "unsexy" ideas into gold mines.

Alright, that wraps up today's show!

I'll see you on the next episode of First Class Founders.

Hunter Hammonds [00:31:38]

That that was it. That was the winner. No. No. No. We gotta go with that one. That's the one.