Whether you’re a techie, side hustler, marketer, or investor there is no greater event to mix and mingle with the brightest individuals across industries than Hustle Con. Speakers and attendees alike shared an overwhelming wave of hard-work, dedication, and belonging.  

Hustle Con is the flagship event from The Hustle, which sends the daily email we most look forward to during the workweek, providing us the freshest content in tech, business, and deals, deals, deals. Much like the emails, Hustle Con delivered 10-fold this year, bringing in 32 renowned speakers from companies including Native, Pandora, and Strava (a cred speaking client) to share the steps they applied to their own hustle venture. 

How to Hustle: 

• Find a niche: Strava Co-Founder and Chairman Mark Gainey told his powerful story of building the largest community of global athletes by keeping the focus very narrow: pick one table in Starbucks. His? The table of middle-aged cyclists. Then go very deep to engage that narrow audience and build a platform they love. When to expand? Your users will start to ask for it.

• Give your team the power—it gets people going: Moiz Ali, Co-Founder & CEO of Native, gave an inspiring talk about hiring his small team of eight. He shared that giving them authority and autonomy within their work and the company made all the difference in building a successful company in a short time. 

• Value transparency inside & out—at all costs: Kat Schneider, Founder & CEO of Ritual, started a prenatal vitamin company while 4 months pregnant, and then gave a talk on that company’s success at Hustle Con while, again, 4 months pregnant. Ritual’s success is due to its transparency inside and outside of the company. Externally, they ensure the ingredients and direct source of each vitamin are visible to the public. They achieve transparency internally by openly talking with their employees about the financial status of the company, hires and fires, and quarterly OKRs.

• Start with difficult conversations and change opinions: It’s hard to change preconceived notions about cannabis. Adam Grossman, Founder & CEO of Papa and Barkley, spoke to the importance of having authenticity through and through, by creating a mission that inspires and motivates ALL who read it. Grossman is steadfast in sticking to giving back to its customers and its community.

• Prioritize idea validation, self-examination, and create foundation: Everything begins with an idea. Courtland Allen, Founder of Indie Hackers, broke down the importance of creating an iterative process, asking yourself questions about your personal work ethic and building the foundation of the four fits model: identifying your market, diving deep into your ideal channel, clarifying why is your product the best on the market, and setting realistic qualitative goals.

• Discover the honest truth of being successful: A young Tim Westergren sought to make the music genome database we know today as Pandora—while it’s a household name today, there were some failures along the way. He and Sam Parr, Co-Founder & CEO of The Hustle, walked through Tim’s experience learning to lead: being sued by five employees, going bankrupt, and eventually throwing in the towel and moving to Mexico. Then, in 2005 he hired a CEO and the company changed forever. The company grew to have 100M customers seemingly overnight. The constant within his story: “Entrepreneurs have to know that they need to listen. The most successful entrepreneurs are always listening, always trying to learn.”   

The two-day event wrapped up with the main lobby full of inspired industry leaders, beginners, and everyone in between. The speakers and attendees at Hustle Con aren’t just those trying to break the mold of innovation, they’re a community, a culture of its own design.

It’s too sensational to put into words, so my best advice to you is to come to Hustle Con 2021 and see what the hustle and bustle are all about.   

Interested in speaking at events like Hustle Con? Get in touch!