We hit record on our private strategy session

What It Covers

Sam Parr and Sean Puri record their internal My First Million strategy session live, covering six years and 822 episodes of podcast growth. They identify three priority initiatives for the next 90 days: building a clipper army, refining guest strategy, and adding ritualistic episode formats to deepen audience connection.

Key Questions Answered

• •Pre-meeting prework framework: Send 8-10 specific written questions to all participants before any strategy meeting — questions like "what's not working" and "what are we stupid for not doing." Collect responses, identify patterns, then use gathered answers to drive discussion. This method, borrowed from Amazon, surfaces honest input from the 90% of people who don't think well on the spot.
• •Clipper army growth tactic: Pay external creators on a CPM basis — approximately $1 per 1,000 views — to clip and distribute podcast content across Instagram, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn. Run the program aggressively for 90 days with loose controls to generate scale and a clear result. MFM previously generated 20 million impressions in one month using a $5-per-clip bounty model.
• •Audience sampling via clips: Podcast growth operates on a loyal-listener plus sampler model. Samplers discover shows through short clips placed where audiences already exist. Consistent, tightly edited clips that deliver a single repeatable emotional payoff — humor, insight, or story — build show identity faster than full-episode promotion, as demonstrated by Chris Williamson's team generating weeks of content from one episode.
• •Curated 100-person retreat over live tour: Rather than a large-scale live show, host a curated retreat of 100-150 listeners selected for being the most interesting 1% of the audience. Invite past guests as attendees. The goal is not revenue or ego — it is meeting high-quality listeners and enabling them to connect with each other, functioning as a relationship-density event for the host and audience simultaneously.
• •Guest preparation artifacts: Before recording, request screenshots of guests' phone home screen, desktop, calendar, and Chrome extensions. These artifacts reveal idiosyncratic personal systems — Warren Buffett's "too hard pile" box or a motivational desk sign — that unlock angles no other interviewer accesses and generate specific, personal conversation that standard pre-interview research cannot replicate.