notessamuele onelia

Learning Growth at The Hustle Before Building His Own

The Story

After quitting his agency, Alex Garcia joined The Hustle’s growth team. The Hustle was one of the top business newsletters with 1.5M readers. Garcia helped scale The Hustle’s Daily Newsletter, Trends (their paid premium product), and My First Million (their podcast) (Source 1).

He started Marketing Examined in November 2020 while still employed at The Hustle. In less than six months, it grew to 25,000+ subscribers (Source 1).

Around two months before he left The Hustle, he realized he needed to build his personal brand so he could grow a newsletter and implement some of what he learned while working there (Source 2).

The Hustle was acquired by HubSpot in 2021 (Source 1). Garcia left to grow his own media company and shortly after joined part-time at Gumroad as the Co-Head of Marketing to fund his life and business (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

Garcia used his time at The Hustle the way Sam Parr used his time hand-copying sales letters: as deliberate practice with access to the machinery. He learned how a top newsletter grew, monetized, and retained subscribers, then applied those lessons to his own project. Starting Marketing Examined while still employed gave him a safety net and a testing ground. By the time he left, the newsletter already had 25K subscribers. He didn’t leap into the void. He built the bridge first.

Backlinks

External sources