Ethan Brooks
@damn_ethan
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Building a media company in Austin, TX | Prev. stories + community @HamptonFounders and @TheHustle.
Austin, TX
Joined March 2019
"How 7-Figure Newsletters Make Money" For the last few weeks, I've been doing this talk, based on 6+ months of dedicated research. Time to see if it translates well to Twitter. For your viewing pleasure...đź§µ
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One of the best retrospectives you'll read all year. Even better coming from someone who's built multiple big companies
2025 Broke Me and Hampton Wide Open I don’t usually write posts like this. Ever. Most founders don’t. It feels safer to share the highlight reel, the wins, the cool logos, the big revenue numbers. But 2025 wasn’t a highlight reel for me. It was a year of collisions: between
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With yesterday's product drop, a lot of people are hyping beehiiv. But here's a reason to use them that has nothing to do with the tools... I'm teaching a class on newsletters, and one of my students was having a weird issue with her beehiiv site. This person isn't a paying user
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Austin is the most important podcasting town in the country. And in a city full of legends (Rogan, Williamson, Lex, etc.) I think Tony Hinchcliffe is truly the most-skilled interviewer of the bunch. Interviewing is always hard, but to be funny and on the ball, while interviewing
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I've worked with Sam for years. First at The Hustle, and later, as one of the first hires at Hampton. I've seen him lead through incredibly tough situations. You will not find a higher-integrity person, period.
Sharing this here. This was my reply to this Jesse guy. 1. The price paid cash up front (something like 21 or 22m). 2. Then I personally was given a bunch of stock as talent (I was hosting MFM and The Hustle was, in part, my personality). 3. Also, some key employees got
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Guy who got famous for carrying his corgi in a dog backpack is now helping rescue dogs get adopted by carrying them in a dog backpack. [📹 kittytime] https://t.co/8pidwdHYrZ
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This is cool, the archive has one of the oldest issues of Barstool too. Back when it was a paper magazine https://t.co/oTWjML8ENQ
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Sometimes I like to use https://t.co/Um7p3Fc2TJ to look up old versions of famous websites. This is Barstool back in '04... Honestly, I think this would work today too, but for different reasons. Back then, this was pretty flashy. Now, this just feels very personal and almost
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This one channel sounds like it’s worth the entire membership dues
Hampton has a Slack channel called sh*t i'm f*cked where people tell stories when they nearly failed. The channel is our most popular channel. Its honestly pretty awesome seeing super successful people talk about near-business-death experiences. Also fun to celebrate these
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Yet another reason to be building an audience of your own
Google just made a subtle but massive change Last month, Google quietly removed the num=100 search parameter. This means you can no longer view 100 results at once. The default max is now 10. Why does this matter? - Most LLMs (OpenAI, Perplexity, etc.) rely (directly or
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Yesterday about twenty founders from around Austin went to shoot shotguns together. This was one of the wildest shots of the day
Honestly, @damn_ethan hosted a great meetup. Watch me nail two discs in one shot! Looking forward to taking 1st place next time
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Brett just sold his third 9-figure business, and this is his new project. Definitely gonna be following along.
"Love Conquers Fear", my podcast, launches on Sept. 24 with a solo episode that sets it up and distills a lot of my learnings. This is followed by the episode with my dear friend @MarkGoberAuthor, which drops on Sept. 25. To be clear, I'm operating from a deep place of love for
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Agree. The thing that stuck out to me most when I visited was the mindset that comes from running tight deadlines and hundred-hour weeks for months on end. https://t.co/p4tTnh0qxt
Some people think Gauntlet Ai is simply an arbitrage - find the best engineers who are underpaid and match them to companies. But that’s not really right. Our most fundamental role is creating a type of AI talent that is super, super rare. Can’t reliably find anywhere else.
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Do I know anyone on @tferriss team? Would love to interview him about the creation of Coyote for The Austin Business Review Guarantee not-lame questions
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The other day, a Hampton member asked in slack if anyone could help a friend’s son with terminal cancer see Imagine Dragons in Aspen. Members immediately hit their networks. Several got in touch with the tour manager. Within a few hours they helped secure tickets, backstage
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One of my favorite pieces I've written all year.
“AI’s toughest bootcamp” — That’s how The Austin Business Review described Gauntlet AI in its newest deep dive. 10 weeks. 100-hour weeks. $200k+ job offers. Full story here: https://t.co/p6EuTlIAQ5 Thanks for the story @damn_ethan!
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What's interesting about this is that Rob (who runs a portfolio of supermarkets) talks about ways to increase profit, without ever mentioning raising prices. Hope Mamdani et al take note – just because a business grows profits, that doesn't mean they're gouging consumers.
You can buy your local supermarket doing $10 million in sales for 3.5x earnings plus inventory. Let's assume that's an all in price of $2 million ($400k EBITDA * 3.5 = $1.4m + $600k inventory). 10 year loan = roughly $200k per year of debt service 5% EBITDA margin gives you a
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Damn, I think Ryan Carr writes the best, most useful AI newsletter for business owners. Super deep dives into vibe marketing. Zero fluff. https://t.co/5UMlc1zuPk
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The popularity of these AI Yeti videos has me wondering about the future of humanoid robots. The natural assumption for AI video was that it'd be used to make clips of other humans (for better or worse). But Yeti shows that people are more whimsical than that. What if the
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Some great stuff going on in ATX this week. If you're a founder, looking to meet people, check these out 👇 PS. I send a longer version of this to hundreds of founders in ATX every week. You can get it straight to your inbox here: https://t.co/h4hiNaQ3yN 🗓️ June 16: Conscious
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