3 Successful Paid Newsletters to Mimic - Sam Parr

If you want to have a paid newsletter, go out and find the scammiest stuff you can find.
They’ll probably be doing a whole lot better than the people on Substack. Don’t be scammy.
Be ethical, provide value, but try to understand why these scammy people are winning. So
for example, there’s a company called Agora. Not everything they do is scammy but some of
the stuff is. They’ve been sued for selling a diabetes cure, which is like a book. You should
go to prison for doing that. They’ve been sued for it, but they make about a billion dollars a
year selling newsletters. Even if you don’t agree with the ethics, which I don’t, let’s figure out
what they’re doing that’s really good, and apply that to a good product with a high-integrity
team. That’s what I think you should do. I don’t think you should copy people on Substack
because only a few of them are doing well. I think you should copy companies like Motley
Fool, or Agora, or James Altucher. No one talks about Motley Fool right now. I bet you they
make half a billion dollars in sales a year. James is my buddy. Everyone makes fun of James
because he had these scammy-looking ads. I bet that makes 60 million bucks a year. I’m not
saying go against your ethics or anything like that, but ask yourself: Why do some of these
people succeed significantly better than these other people who we talk about all the time?
Try to combine interesting tactics. If you want to have a paid newsletter, go out and find the
scammiest stuff you can find. They’ll probably be doing a whole lot better than the people on
Substack. Don’t be scammy. Be ethical, provide value, but try to understand why these
scammy people are winning. So for example, there’s a company called Agora. Not
everything they do is scammy but some of the stuff is. They’ve been sued for selling a
diabetes cure, which is like a book. You should go to prison for doing that. They’ve been
sued for it, but they make about a billion dollars a year selling newsletters. Even if you don’t
agree with the ethics, which I don’t, let’s figure out what they’re doing that’s really good, and
apply that to a good product with a high-integrity team. That’s what I think you should do. I
don’t think you should copy people on Substack because only a few of them are doing well. I
think you should copy companies like Motley Fool, or Agora, or James Altucher. No one talks
about Motley Fool right now. I bet you they make half a billion dollars in sales a year. James
is my buddy. Everyone makes fun of James because he had these scammy-looking ads. I
bet that makes 60 million bucks a year. I’m not saying go against your ethics or anything like
that, but ask yourself: Why do some of these people succeed significantly better than these
other people who we talk about all the time? Try to combine interesting tactics.

How Sam Parr Built The Hustle

[Music] so how did it bridge into the hustle where'd the idea for the hustle come from so i had
a business that was a roommate matching thing and we sold it and i didn't sell it for a ton of
money but i was in my early 20s 22 23 24 and i had a little bit of money many tens of
thousands maybe a hundred thousands maybe 100k or something to my name and i was
like well that's obviously not enough to live off of but that's a cool start um let's start a
business and so i had this conference called hustle con which was like uh it was like um an
entrepreneurial conference but all the speakers were people who had founded huge
companies but they weren't technical so like the woman who started stitch fix which is a
multi-billion dollar company the folks at casper um all types of like companies like that and in
order to make that con i just did the conference to meet people and maybe i could like
partner with someone after i was like i'll just meet someone i don't know maybe this might
lead to something i'm not sure what it's going to lead to but i'm just going to do it and in order
to make it popular i created a newsletter and that newsletter i would write all the time and
that newsletter got really popular and the conference made a lot of money too i didn't expect
it to but it did and i was like that's kind of funny let's do it again so i did it again and it made
even more money it made like a quarter of a million dollars in profit in like four weeks or six
weeks or eight weeks and i was like okay i don't want to do conferences forever because it's
really hard but this newsletter thing that i made like maybe that has legs like what what can
we do with that and that's kind of how the hustle came to be so originally the newsletter is
just supporting the conference it was to help you sell conference tickets what was the
content of the newsletter originally similar to today or was it different no it was it was it was
different it was entrepreneurial so i would just write articles about the speakers but i would
do it a in kind of a funny interesting voice that was like wrapped in copywriting i was a
self-taught copywriter so i knew how to write to get people's attention and uh b i did
something interesting early on which was i was like man if i send an email let's say i get a 50
open rate and then a 5 click through if i send an email to a thousand people that means only
like 50 people are clicking my thing whereas i have 500 of them just viewing the article or
viewing the email i should just put all the content in the email and that's what i did back in
2014 2015 and that was considered kind of unique and original and at the time and that is
where i was like okay this could be kind of cool and then i was like all right let's start a blog
where i just write these stories a bunch of times a week and that's what i started doing and
then i said this is hard to come up with this type of stuff all the time let's do something even
more let's do let's do news there's news every single day i could do that all the time that's
easy and so in 2016 we only did news so you started this newsletter and do you remember
when you did the first conference like how many people attended the conference how many
people are on the newsletter just so everybody can get some you know context of the size
when i started the newsletter it was so the newsletter the hustle cons newsletter was one
thing that started with zero and after six weeks i think i had three or four thousand
subscribers and um 350 people came to the event and i think it made 60 000 in revenue and
that event was it took six weeks from like deciding to do it and then doing it so in like six
weeks it got maybe it was two thousand subscribers but it was somewhere in the range of
two to four thousand people signed up for the email because right away and i actually posted
my if you google like sampler hustle con and you could see like my first email drip i actually
show all the stats the websites like right away we were getting a thousand people to come to
the website because i got really good at posting it on reddit and hacker news and then i took
six months off where i traveled the country rode my motorcycle and then i did it again and
this time i think uh we sold 600 tickets but probably 450 to 500 people showed up and at that
point the list had 10 000 people so i basically i would work for six weeks hosting this event
take time off and then do it again so like depending on how you look at it uh it could either
have been it took 12 weeks to get to 10 000 people or it took nine months depending on how
you want to measure it but i wasn't working in between conferences and um so when i
launched the daily newsletter we had about 10 000 subscribers and then at the end of the
first year of doing the daily sends which is what the hustle is we had a hundred thousand
wow and so was it just you at this time at the the beginning yeah and so it's it's so here you
are you're writing newsletters you're putting on these these events and then you're just
taking extended periods of time off did you have these big ambitions to build this into
something huge or did you just think let me rinse and repeat and do this for a while and and
take some money off the table it depends what your definition of huge is but i wanted to go
bigger than just an event that's for sure i wanted to originally i was like i want to employ
thousands of people and then i got to the and then i started thinking about it more and i was
like i read a couple books um and i learned about a few different people like mark cuban and
a few other folks and i noticed that there was this like trend of the people i admired where
they were able to secure like some type of financial stability and financial freedom by their
like early 30s and in doing that that allowed them while they were still young and had energy
to restart but on even bigger problems because they didn't have to worry about like
day-to-day finances and i really admired that way and i was like if i could crack that code
which i think i can i'm good like that's the life i want and so i knew i wanted to hit a certain
number by the age of 30 and i was so because of that i was perfectly fine selling the
company for let's say many tens of millions as opposed to trying to build a multi-billion dollar
company yeah that's that's great that you set out you knew what your goal was when you set
out so you built this list of three or four thousand people in a handful of weeks which i think
for most of our listeners would be the most difficult part to imagine because once you've got
some momentum once you've got 10 000 then you can see it going to a hundred or a million
but getting those first three to four thousand people is no easy task and so how did you do
that like how did you stir up the momentum to get the first people and i know that that's
people think that's the hardest part and it's kind of hard but doing it for four years or five
years sending an email almost every single day for many many years and growing from a
hundred thousand to many millions is way harder because that consistency is really really
tough it's really hard to do something because you get you lose focus you want to give up
that was really the hard part the exciting part was going zero to three thousand the way that i
did it was i basically thought early on where are the people who i want to subscribe to my
newsletter where do they live and in my case i thought they live in a couple subreddits and
they live in a couple uh and they live on hacker news which is hacker news is kind of like
reddit but for like geeky silicon valley people like me and i thought okay so they live there so
then what would get their attention well like a headline that mentions these 20 topics would
probably get their attention great i'm going to write those articles and i'm gonna get if i can
get a million to come to my website i'm making these numbers up if i get a million to come to
my website and i can get three percent of them to convert that's 30 000 emails great how
many i just have i know that 18 different titles there's a chance some of those can work so
how many of those do i gotta write and then i just work backwards and i just like banged it
out like constantly so what were the metrics that you were watching you know you
mentioned conversion rate and how many people get to your website like what were you
laser focused on in terms of metrics for your business at the beginning for the first one to
three years every week at first it was just me and then we had a proper meeting where it was
like all right monday morning at 10 a.m how did we grow our subscriber base by at least
three percent if yes great what do we do now if no why didn't we do that and what what do
we got to do to get there i wanted to grow three percent every single week until at least 200
200 and something thousand people um and then i looked at the open rate the open rate
had to be at least 50 percent and so those are the basically the two metrics but then of
course you have to go upwards which is in order to grow by three percent you need this
many website visits you need this many uh conversion you need this conversion rate you
need this many people to click on an article this many people to click on an ad like things like
that and i cared about the rest of the funnel and i like we were like we had like it's called f1 f2
f3 f4 where funnel one funnel two funnel three or four on a four and i would like meticulously
look at like all right i need i need this many people to see this site there's so many people to
see this page to this page but it was all rooted in growing my total subscriber amount by
three percent every week and and so at what point uh did you hire someone else i saw i saw
some video where you were talking about a new york times writer that you tried to hire so
maybe you could share that story but but when did you finally hire someone yeah so the first
year of business we made like 500 000 and it was mostly from all those conferences and
then i hired a couple people so i made money through conferences and then i launched the
hustle and then like maybe a few months after i was able to hire someone um and the first
hires were some writers to help me write and so that was just taking up the most your time i
guess and that was the the thing you needed to offload first yeah and the thing i hated the
most writing is writing's hard i like the result i don't always like doing it and then like the
seventh eighth ninth employees were sales people to sell ads in the newsletters i i don't think
anyone would expect you to say that writing was the thing you hated the most in starting a
company with a daily newsletter with as much writing as you've done so did you were you
aware of that from the beginning or did you just burn out over time [Music] you

4 Newsletters Making Over $1 Million a Year

at appsumo.com we do over 15 million dollars a year just from our newsletter i think starting
your own newsletter is one of the greatest business models i've ever seen in today's video
i'm gonna show you four different types of businesses based on email newsletters that you
can copy for yourself today i'm gonna show you how they grew how they make money and
key takeaways for yourself and stick to the end of this video where i'm going to show you live
how you can start your own newsletter and get your business growing today so the first
business that we're going to be looking at is called the hustle dot co so they are a daily
business newsletter targeted for startups founders entrepreneurs just like me and you they
have really really amazing articles that they've built email list of over one million people they
do is they have one major article up top and a few little snippets at the bottom how did they
actually get the audience so that we can copy that number one they organized offline events
so they started with hustle con which right now they're not doing a lot of offline events but all
these people sign up for that event and they move them into the newsletter which became
the hustle.co number two their ambassador program so when you join the newsletter if you
want stickers or hats or t-shirts or socks or free access to their upcoming events all you have
to do is refer other people now we've built this into sendfox.com and i've tried this on my
personal okdor.com mailing list it didn't work for me but it worked for them it's something that
you may want to try out yourself next up that they did is they used a lot of facebook apps so
if you go to facebook.com ads slash library hopefully we'll have a link in the description
below you can see every company's facebook ads and i think these guys are spending
somewhere between five and six figures a month on their ads so we can actually come here
and browse all the ads they're doing looks like one of the things they're doing that's
interesting is that they're actually running a giveaway the other thing that's really interesting
about how they grew their email list is that their home page is just give me your email
address if you look at them if you look at okdor.com my own site and they focus on getting
the email so think about that for your own site or landing page is it very clear give me your
email address so how do these guys make millions and millions of dollars a year in their
newsletters kind of at the top you can see it it's a little bit kind of hidden almost but it says
together with miso robotics so these miso robotics companies are paying somewhere
between five to twenty five thousand dollars per insertion i actually don't like this why
because you're really dependent on how are the ad rates how's the economy and a lot of
times with these types of promotions it's not performance based the other way that they're
making money is their premium products and this is the part i'm really excited about
especially for them the ad rates and sales can definitely fluctuate depending on the economy
and how their team is but what they did is they created their own products so they can
control their own revenue one other thing that they have here that i think is super valuable is
they have a private community so if you are creating a newsletter and you want to expand
the value offered to your audience create a facebook group or you can use circle.so uh
there's a few other tools out there to create a community so that people can actually stay
connected so what i love about the hustle at a high level is i love how they've evolved their
business from offline events to a newsletter with some ads to creating their own products
and creating their own private community and i think they've evolved that really really well so
the next site up is mr spoils and they are a curation newsletter the hustle.com is writing their
own news every single day these guys just curate it in a specific template so let me actually
show you right here on the side what the newsletter looks like so they generally put up some
images they put up places to go they put up music what i actually specifically like about their
newsletters at the bottom of every single one of their newsletters is just one interesting
article and that's why i love it i think their email list size is over 500 000 people so how did
they actually grow their list so big the number one thing that they've done is cross
collaborations or cross promotions what you could do and what they did is they found
another person noah actually i've done this with them i email it to my audience like hey i like
i'm doing the mr spoils email today then they email out to their audience hey we're doing a
thing with noah today and we both grow our audiences by promoting each other the next
thing that they've done that's really interesting is cross-collaboration giveaways so what they
do with that is they partner with somewhere between three and five other really cool
companies so here's one with solei bikes i love soleil bikes and they get solely bikes plus mr
spoils plus one or two other companies and all of those companies promote and then the
last thing that they do is that they have a referral program very similar uh to the hustle.co so
hey if you refer people to this newsletter we'll give you a sticker or a hat so it looks like they
make money either through sponsorships or an affiliate program so they're promoting the
shoe company right here snug a pair of slippers i don't really know what that is but in these
shoe companies they're either getting paid 15 to 20 000 just to send the email or they get 20
for every shoe they sell you can try out both of those in your own newsletter business so the
thing that i love about mr spoils is that i love that they have a templated curation style so you
don't need one person to always be reliable you can hire a large team of them to actually
make sure the emails happen every single day so i love that they have the image they have
a story they have music and a product and it's just really nice that it's the same pattern over
and over and over by the way if you've liked this video so far hit that little thumbs up button
below with your finger let me know that you've liked it all right the third side up yes i'm a little
biased but it is a deal newsletter aka appsumo.com aka the company i helped start 11 years
ago every single day you get an amazing deal for cool new products specifically targeted
entrepreneurs and started people just like yourself so our email list audience is around over
1 million people the number one way that we've actually grown the newsletter for
appsumo.com is through the best deals possible and i know you're looking for some secret
which i'll give you a few other things that we've done but we've tried a lot of gimmicks but at
the end of the day when we found an amazing deal that we negotiated the team did and we
sent it out that's actually grown our email newsletter the fastest so the second thing that
we've done to really grow our newsletter the fastest is an appsumo giveaway so we'll either
be doing like here's a home office setup giveaway here's a travel giveaway this looks like
we've done on screen a video giveaway and that's actually done really well because people
join the giveaway then they tell their friends and they join the giveaway and that's how we
get a larger audience of people finding out about our newsletter we spend somewhere
around six figures a month on facebook ads so let's actually see if we have some of our ads
here and there's a large variety of ads so we have ads to specific products we have general
ads that say hey we're an amazing deal site for entrepreneurs come check us out so point
here is that ads have been a really big one but i wouldn't actually start spending money on
ads until your newsletter and your business are making money one last thing that we've
used to grow our newsletter is sumo.com it's a free email pop-up so if you have a website it
goes boop it says hey why don't you give us your email address and that's been a super
effective way of growing our newsletter so how do we make money great question let me
just show you live so if you go to appstore.com check out any one of these products this is
freshstock.com awesome software to create visual magic on your site and so we go to these
guys and negotiate an exclusive deal normally they sell their product let's just say a hundred
dollars a year subscription we negotiate a lifetime deal or ltd deal for 69 and then once we
go and sell that to our sumo links or that's what we call our email list subscribers and our
audience we split the revenue with fresh stock so let's say we sell it for 69 we give them 50
and we keep 50 and that's how we do our business model so what do i think we're actually
doing right at sumo.com i love how simple our model is it's not super complicated we've tried
a lot of other things over the years but the end of the day it's go find amazing tools
entrepreneurs promote it out rinse and repeat the last category newsletters that i want to talk
about today is the freemium newsletter this is one of the fastest growing categories of
newsletters i've seen and we're going to talk about lenny rachinski what a lot of people are
doing is that they're maybe experts in different categories from product management to
strategy to maybe it's about apple maybe it's about politics whatever it is so lenny's is about
product growth and marketing and so he gives weekly advice on this type of information and
he has free emails as well as a subscription version of his email he is doing around 360 000
a year from writing his own newsletter which is amazing for a single person lenny actually
grow his newsletter he grew it in three ways number one he wrote a post that went viral on
medium.com so a great way to grow your newsletter and this has worked really well for
appsumo.com is go write blog posts people share them and then when they come to your
blog post put a link at the top that says click here to join my newsletter so he wrote an article
called what seven years at airbnb talked me out building a business which was a significant
driver of traffic and sign ups for his newsletter the next thing that he did is he writes guest
posts but on andrew chen co he wrote a guest post so go find other people on youtube
channels or their blogs or their instagrams to write their guest posts and lastly he promotes
his newsletter on social media what i think is really interesting about how he promotes on his
social media is he talks about like the revenue and behind the scenes of this newsletter and i
think that gets people really excited and interested and so they share and talk about it and
then they join the newsletter just to see what's happening let me know in the comments for
myself and everyone else out there any of your favorite newsletters so that we can all get
inspired so right now i'm going to show you how you can start your own profitable newsletter
in under three minutes so i'm going to go to sendfox.com i'm going to type in my email
address see if i can get this going so there's gonna basically be three steps in setting up
your own profitable newsletter one you have to have a way to send emails so you can use
your gmail or yahoo account but i recommend using sendfox.com or substack.com what
you're gonna do once you sign up no matter what newsletter you're using is create your
landing page this is really critical of getting people to subscribe to your newsletter so within
sendfox.com they automatically create your own landing page so i clicked it here it's sent
fox.com noah kagan plus 100. but the second thing that you want to do no matter what
provider using is create a few automations so an automation is that when someone joins
your newsletter probably through your landing page it's the first email that they're going to
get once they've joined so let's actually start with a template see if it actually has it what's the
name of your website okay dork it's pretty cool with senfox.com actually automatically pulls
in a lot of your information so you don't have to do anything so they have two things here i'm
just going to automatically click my welcome series and add a bam uh it's automatically
created so my recommendation no matter what size your email is but especially the first 100
subscribers is to personally email and build a relationship with them i still try to do it no
matter what size my email list is i recommend you do the same so this is the first email that
we send second email we send is have you seen these i think these are some of my recent
articles and so it automatically pulls that in and then lastly it's four places to find my tips
which is the social media follow like go check me out in these places you can customize your
automation or whatever you want once you set up your landing page and your automation
commit to the law of 100. so my recommendation for you is send 100 emails so that's
basically one a week for the next two years and after that you can decide if something you
want to continue or you want to completely stop but do not stop until you finish the law of
100 i've seen so many people give up including myself right before success happened so
commit to the law of 100 so now that you have a landing page there's three things you can
do to almost instantly grow your subscribers number one update all of your social media bios
so go to your twitter your tick tock your instagram your whatever and update your social
media bio number two on your social media places so on facebook or anywhere online go
and tweet hey i'm starting a newsletter here is the link to it and that's where you post your
landing page and the last thing i recommend is in your email signature you should just post
hey join my newsletter now anytime you're sending an email to anyone it's automatically
encouraging them to join your newsletter let me show you that right now so in gmail you click
on the little gear icon you see all settings scroll down right here this is vacation responder
right here signature and so you post your your landing page link in here mine says
newsletter every time i send a newsletter it automatically has it in there i don't even have to
think about it and around the clock now when i'm emailing i'm getting people to join my
newsletter plus with my social media stuff people are joining the newsletter so by the way if
you are ready to start your newsletter today check out this video by going into more detail
about how to get your first hundred email newsletter subscribers and if you haven't already
make sure to hit that subscribe button and notification bell we do exclusive office hours just
for subscribers and we post two juicy business videos like this to help you on your journey
every single week i love you and i'll see you out there

From 0 to 100k Email Subscribers - with Sam Parr

how are you building your list what what was your most successful tactic to getting new
subscribers the first 100 000 subscribers it was through me blogging a lot and so I would go
to Reddit and Hacker News and other forums and I would see what topics people were
interested in and I would write blog posts about them and then I would post it in those
communities and they would go viral and not all of them went viral but I would write like one
to four articles a day and some of them would go viral and so we would do sometimes like
really crazy things for example I had a friend that was really depressed and he started micro
dosing LSD in order to kind of self-medicate and he like researched it but of course it's illegal
so but he like researched it out of as a very like medicinal way like you know studies show
that like still Asylum which I think is in mushrooms and then like LSD like it might actually
help with alleviate some of my problems and so I wrote about like you know I said I'm testing
I wrote I actually wrote it but I did it from his perspective when I interviewed him of like you
know I'm testing LSD to cure my depression day one here's how it is and I would like write
things like that or we would have someone live on Soylent for 30 days and that would go
viral or like I knew a guy who used to plagiarize authors on Amazon on these book topics
like how to sleep with women and he would post it and make 60 Grand a month and I
thought that was horribly unethical and Sleazy and everything and so I wrote a story about it
and so I would write about these like crazy sometimes things and we would get like 500 000
to a million people a month coming to our website right off the bat and then I had really good
pop-ups that said oh no not another pop-up okay look while you're here this article you're
reading it's about someone doing something crazy that's not exactly what we do all the time
you see we're we are the hustle we're a daily newsletter sign up but if you don't like it I'll
send you a dollar or like we would just like have silly like attention grabbing things like that
and you know that's how we got our first 100 to 200 000 people in the first year or so and
then after that we created an affiliate program or like a referral program where we would
send you stickers and uh hoodies and things like that if you referred more people and then
we also realized our our business model if we're making a dollar a month per subscriber with
our advertising business model week and they stay with us for like you know a couple years
we could definitely spend a dollar fifty or two dollars to acquire new customers and so we
started buying advertising on Facebook uh on in another in other newsletters and places like
that thanks for watching today's video to grab your free copy of John warlow's best-selling
book built to sell head over to builttocell.com John's book built to sell has been endorsed by
well-known entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss Patrick Beck David Dan Lok amongst many others
but don't just hear it from me hear it from them the most well-known book is built to sell that
would be that would be that the mega mega best selling book built this out gave me the
steps like exactly what to do right one of them being a book I read in 2012 titled build to sell
that I've recommended to any entrepreneur out there's a good book actually that people can
read which gives them pretty much the gist in the title and that is built to sell this book talks
about how to get your life back once your business takes over how to focus on doing what
you're supposed to be doing well and how to build a scalable business that can be sold
building a business that can be sold is much different than building a profitable business that
relies on you and you are the bottleneck inside your entire company

How to Start an Email Newsletter

last week i spoke to alex lieberman who started writing an email newsletter in his dorm room
and then a few years later sold it for 17 million dollars for me starting an email newsletter
was one of the best decisions i've made in my life as a creator and now every time i send an
email i make around five thousand dollars which is more than i was making in a whole month
of working full-time as a doctor so in this video we're going to be breaking down why you
should potentially consider starting an email newsletter what you might want to write about
and then the step-by-step process of how to go about this completely for free and this is
episode one of creativepreneur club which is a new series where we're gonna explore
principles strategies and tools that we can use to kickstart or level up our creative
entrepreneurial projects let's get into it part one why you should maybe start an email
newsletter right so starting an email newsletter is the perfect starting point if you are new to
the whole being a creator thing so firstly because it's completely free there are a bunch of
platforms out there that we're going to talk about later in the video that are completely free
you do not have to pay a penny at all to start an email newsletter and this is kind of different
to starting a youtube channel where yes you can film with your phone but then there's there
is an element of like cost that it takes to get started with something like a youtube channel an
email newsletter is completely free secondly an email newsletter is very very low friction it's
pretty easy to just get started writing if you know how to type something you can probably
send an email newsletter again something like starting a youtube channel or starting a tick
tock or an instagram it's like it it does take a certain level of friction and a certain level of faff
whereas when it comes to an email newsletter all you have to do is type a few things and hit
send and so it's one of the easiest kind of platforms that you can get started with as a creator
thirdly an email newsletter is private in a nice kind of way in that you're writing stuff for public
consumption but realistically no one is going to be finding your thing there is no algorithm
that encourages people to sign up to your email newsletter so really if you want you can
send your first several issues completely in private and hopefully that'll help you get over the
hurdle the kind of the emotional barriers that get in everyone's ways whenever we're thinking
of starting a new creative endeavor putting yourself out there on camera on a youtube
channel is admittedly a pretty big step a lot of people really struggle with that step but if you
can put yourself out there in a small way and take those baby steps by for example sending
a weekly email update to like a handful of friends or even no one or even just your mum or
grandma that really helps you kind of wet your appetite for what it's actually like to be a
creator and share stuff publicly on the internet and the final reason why starting an email
newsletter is a great starting point is because ultimately it's all about writing now any other
kind of creative platform that you create on like youtube channels and youtube videos are
really about the writing even like tick tocks and stuff if you're gonna do them well it's about
scripting it and writing it and like structuring it in a way that makes a lot of sense but the
problem with all these public platforms is that you ultimately don't own the audience on the
audience that sounds kind of weird but you ultimately don't own the audience youtube owns
the audience and i right now i'm just you know building a house on borrowed land like this
youtube channel is only successful because of youtube platform whereas if i can take some
of my audience and put them onto an email list now i have a direct relationship with that
audience now i can show up in their inbox because they've given me permission and i can
show up in their inbox every single week and share stuff of value which also means that
when i have something to sell i could potentially sell it to my email list and to be honest we've
made over two million dollars from selling our part-time youtuber academy not through
selling it on the youtube channel because i tend not to mention it on that but actually through
selling it on our email list because generally when people are on an email list they've given
you permission to contact them they can unsubscribe anytime and it does help you build that
relationship people can reply to the emails you can reply back i've also made a bunch of
friends through the internet because people have signed up to my newsletter and then have
replied and then i replied and we've fought and formed an exchange and maybe met up in
real life or had zoom calls so that's one of the downstream benefits of having an email list
that you can build up this audience which you then kind of own in a way that you don't really
own your audience on other platforms and the second main reason is that to be honest an
email newsletter itself could become an asset that you can then monetize further down the
line if you want to i spent like three and a half years writing my weekly email newsletter
before i monetized anything in it although i did have some affiliate links so i was always
making a few dollars from amazon book recommendations here and there but recently we
started to get sponsors on the newsletter who pay several thousand dollars for like a slot in
the newsletter that's kind of insane that anytime i just send a weekly update which i treat as
a bit of a public journal that hey here are some thoughts on my mind here are some articles
that i like all that kind of stuff by the way that's in sunday snippets my newsletter if you want
to sign up to it anytime i do that a sponsor is willing to pay five six seven thousand dollars at
the moment uh to basically kind of get their message out to the audience which is pretty sick
and of course as i mentioned at the start there are people like alex lieberman who started an
email newsletter called morning brew who are instantly sponsoring this video but more on
those later alex lieberman started morning brew in his university dorm room and it was just a
daily email newsletter that helped people keep up with what's going on in the world of
business and then he sells it five years later for 70 million and this newsletter generates
ridiculous amounts of revenue which is why they're able to sponsor videos like this one so
obviously i'm not saying that like my newsletter or your newsletter or anything is going to end
up selling for 70 million but i am saying that there is the potential that this itself just an email
something as simple as an email that you send once a day or once a week or once every
other week does have the potential to even make you money further down the line and yeah
i just find it pretty insane that like something as simple as an email has the potential to do
that part two what should you actually write about okay so at this point let's say we're sold on
the idea of having an email newsletter and you're thinking okay cool it might be a thing like
generally at this point most people have this incredible like barrier that stops them from
doing anything which is that i don't know what i would even write about and what i would say
to that is that there's a few different ways of approaching it number one broad brushstroke
you can write about whatever you want really being a creator if you're new to this thing is
about finding a way to create content that you enjoy creating kind of intrinsically for its own
sake and then you're kind of hoping that that content is able to add value to other people as
well what i wouldn't recommend necessarily is for example starting a newsletter starting a
youtube channel starting at tick tock whatever with the intention that like i i want to make
money from day one or i want this to be successful because in the early days when no one
is watching your stuff no one is subscribing to your channel no one is like reading your email
newsletter it's really hard to have extrinsic motivation be the reason that you do the thing
whereas if it's an intrinsically motivated reason of i genuinely enjoy writing harry potter fan
fiction and therefore i'm going to make an email newsletter where every week i write a few
paragraphs of harry potter fan fiction and i'm doing it for the sheer joy of the craft that level of
intrinsic motivation makes it way easier to stay consistent with the habit and generally in the
creator economy being consistent is the ultimate secret to getting results so you can just
write about whatever you want when it comes to my email newsletter sunday snippets i do
just write about whatever i want every week i think huh what have i been thinking about this
week last week i wrote about the odyssey plan which is how i'm figuring out what to do with
my life the week before i wrote about a conversation i had with a friend that made me think
about like how how like i'm considering my career and over time i've just built up an
audience of people who just care about what's on my mind which is kind of nice and i sort of
treat my newsletter as a public journal of sorts where i'll just share whatever i want and then
share a few links to articles or books or podcasts that i'd listened to or read that week that i
enjoyed and it's generally pretty chill and i don't think too hard about the email newsletter
which is why i like it so much to be honest on my youtube channel i don't just make videos
that i want to make because it is like a business asset in a way and you know anytime i feel
weird about the youtube channel it's because i'm over optimizing for the numbers but on the
email newsletter front it's just so easy to not really care about those it's just a public journal
i'm sending to people who i consider are my friends i eat people like you guys who subscribe
to the newsletter and people reply to and say oh this was really helpful or this made me think
about this or have you read this blog post instead and then i read it and then i reply to them
and it's just it's just a kind of nice relationship builder in a way that's fairly chill if you're
looking for other ideas for things you could do the other option for an email newsletter is to
just curate things so if you're watching this video and you've gotten to this point chances are
you're the sort of person who is quite smart sophisticated intelligent very handsome very
good looking of course but you also probably spend your time reading stuff listening to
podcasts watching videos and every week you've probably got something or another that
you've read that you found is interesting and you can just share those in a weekly email
newsletter that's how tim ferriss who runs one of the most successful newsletters in the
world started five bullet friday every friday he just sends out a list of five things he's enjoyed
that week it might be a blog post it might be a book it might be a documentary it might be a
gadget and he just started off sending it to friends and then started selling it to his audience
and now he's got over two million subscribers to this email list and he probably has
generates millions and millions of dollars a year just off the back of a single email list so
curation is an option the other thing that you can do is you can write about something that
interests you and just do that every week for example that's how morning brew got started
morning brew by the way thank you for sponsoring this video is a completely free daily email
newsletter which basically gives you updates in the world of business and tech and finance
and so if like me you're interested in those things you can sign up completely for free in the
link in the video description and every morning they'll just send you a nice summary of
what's going on in those worlds straight to your inbox they do it in a genuinely entertaining
way that helps you understand what's going on like what's what the hell is going on with elon
trying to buy twitter and then pulling out of it what's the deal with that what is happening to
the price of bitcoin these days and what are the macroeconomic factors around like inflation
and stuff that's making that happen what are some businesses that are succeeding despite
the recession and like how are they doing it there's interesting things like that that's written in
a genuinely engaging and informative and kind of fun way and it's completely free you might
as well sign up it's completely free you can unsubscribe anytime i read it every morning
because it helps me get updates in the world of business and tech and finance which is
three things i care about so yeah check out the link in the video description to sign up to
morning brew and thank you so much morning brew for sponsoring this video and morning
brew was started by alex lieberman who i mentioned at the start of the video and i
interviewed on my podcast last week and he talked about how he was just interested in the
world of business he was getting into the world of business and he just realized that there
was no good resource out there that helped you stay updated on business advice which is
why every day he just decided to write this thing and then it grew into this ridiculous like
enormous media company that he then sold for 70 million so you can check out that podcast
interview i've done with alex uh we've had a bunch of comments saying that that's like an
incredible podcast episode and we talk about a bunch of things like life and happiness and
the death of his father and how he dealt with that and like a bunch of stuff that's just
generally interesting and outside of the world of newsletters but it might be quite an inspiring
podcast to listen to if you're looking for ideas for what sort of email newsletter you might want
to write about but really the overall message here is you can write about whatever you want
and the great thing about an email newsletter is that it's a fantastic practice ground for being
able to dabble with what it's like being a creator after that point you might decide you don't
like it you might decide you know what i cba can't be bothered to write anything every week i
don't really like the idea of sending stuff publicly i'm very happy in my day job and just like
whatever that's fine but at least you've tried it out or you might do what happened to me and
a bunch of my other creative friends and think oh it's actually kind of fun sending out an
email every week that just tries to add a morsel of goodness to people's lives and help them
out in an interesting way or just document something i've learned and you might decide to
stick with it and i've been sticking with it for the last four years and it's now a you know stable
part of the business and it's really fun and it's the sort of thing that i probably am going to
continue doing for for the long term part three how to get started with an email newsletter all
right so the first step to get started with an email newsletter is to pick a platform now there
are a few different options you've got here the option that i use personally for my newsletter
and have been using for the last like two plus years is called convertkit but the problem with
convertkit is that you have to pay for it it is a paid platform it is ridiculously powerful
incredible if you want to take this newsletter thing seriously they have a free plan i think your
first 1 000 subscribers are free but you do then have to pay and it does get quite expensive
right now we pay several thousand dollars a month for the privilege of using convertkit it's
totally worth it but it is a paid product i'll put an affiliate link in the video description if you
want to check it out but it's generally not what i would recommend getting started completely
from scratch if you want to get started completely from scratch and you want to do it without
spending a penny there are two main options that you've got that i would recommend the
first one is sub stack and the second one is review i was using review for the first two years
of my email newsletter and it was absolutely fantastic and it's completely free and it was
recently acquired by twitter so the nice thing about review is that if you are serious about
growing on twitter people can subscribe to your email list directly from your twitter profile
because it's nicely integrated and it's completely free so you can try out review alternatively
we've got substack now subtac has been around for a few years now as well and honestly if i
were getting started completely from scratch today sub stack is probably the route i would go
down basically you go on substance.com not sponsoring this video or anything but people at
substance if you're watching this let me know would love to work with you and we just hit
start writing you can make an account or you can sign in with twitter exactly like i've done
and you just write a quick description musings from my day-to-day life as a doctor turned
creativepreneur lol kinda cringe but oh well if you have an existing email list you could bring
a csv in and populate it but you don't have to you could add subscribers from day one so you
can get your parents or your grandparents or your friends to sign up if you really want to
again i'm gonna skip this step and here we are i've just now got my own newsletter which
also doubles at its as its own website alibaba.substit.com it's live you can check it out if you
want and now if i want to send my first issue all i have to do is click new post and i can just
write whatever i want and i've just written my very first issue of my email newsletter now i'm
going to hit publish and then i can send that to everyone do you want to add subscribe
buttons to your post yeah why not now i have my first email newsletter i hit publish and we
are good if i want to i can share it on facebook and share it on twitter or i don't have to i can
just do this like this and treat this like my own personal practice ground for publishing
something on the internet and now if we open up an incognito window and go to
aliad.substack.com here is what it looks like ali's newsletter musings from my day-to-day life
as a doctor term creatorpreneur launched a few seconds ago and then people can subscribe
directly from this which is kind of nice it's quite simple or they can read it first and they can
read my kind of first issue which should be here somewhere my first email newsletter there
we go this is cute this is kind of nice and then there's the option for people to subscribe and
it's all completely free and i know people personally who have made hundreds of thousands
of dollars a year by just starting a completely free email newsletter on substance and later
switching on monetization or getting sponsorships or selling their own products all that kind
of stuff which is all part of the business of being a creative printer if you've gotten to this point
in the video and you start an email newsletter send me an email alia aliable.com and i
promise i will subscribe to your email newsletter so you will at least have one subscriber if
you would like if you don't want your friends and family to be your first subscribers if you are
potentially interested in learning more about the ins and outs of what it's like being a creative
printer i have any course on this it's called the part-time creatorpreneur you can check it out
link in the video description and if you're looking for more theory more of a framework on
how to get started with being a creator you might like to check out this video over here which
is my my three level system for growing a youtube channel but the same thing applies to
growing an email newsletter or any other sort of creative business so check out that video
over there thank you so much for watching do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already
and i'll see you hopefully in the next video bye

How Morning Brew Reached 2.5 Million Subscribers (Grow Your Email List!)
what's up everyone this is alex lieberman co-founder and executive chairman of morning
brew my goal today is to tell you all about my journey and our team's journey in building
morning brew from an idea that started at the university of michigan back in 2015 when i was
a senior in college to now what is one of the largest digital media brands in the us spanning
not only millions of newsletter subscribers but also audio video social franchises and a team
of 140 incredibly talented people in the media industry i want to keep this casual i also want
to keep this compact so over the next 20 minutes i'm gonna break down morning brew into
what i think of as a four chapter story and we're in chapter four right now but basically here's
how the story goes chapter one in morning brew was the evolution of the business the
ideation pounding the pavement to put a product out in the world it's the chapter that i call
newsletter as a hobby we had no idea it was actually a business until way later chapter two
was basically when we went full time on the business and and we said this is not just a
hobby this is a business and that chapter was newsletter as a business chapter three was
transitioning from a single newsletter as a business to a newsletter business and chapter
four is what morning brew is in now which is the transition from newsletter business to media
brand or consumer brand as i break down some of the stories in each of these chapters i'm
also going to share some of the lessons that i've learned along the way everything from how
to grow a single newsletter audience from zero to three million subscribers all the way to
how to start a business from the ground floor when you've never done it before so without
further ado i'm going to hop into it but what i'll also say is in these 20 minutes i'm going to
cover a lot if you have any questions for me you can always email me it's alex
morningbrood.com i also have a podcast it's called founder's journal and i break down all of
my learnings and experiences as an entrepreneur for other people trying to build businesses
or to accelerate their career so i would encourage you check it out so chapter one basically
to give you context on how i truly accidentally fell into entrepreneurship if you were to tell my
family six years ago that i was going to run a media brand they would have laughed at your
face and the reason for that is because i'm from new jersey i grew up in a finance or wall
street family my mom worked in sales and trading for 20 years my dad worked in sales and
trading for 20 years my grandpa worked in sales and trading for 20 years and so for the
longest time all that i wanted to do was to have a job in finance specifically in sales and
trading because that's what my role models did and so i went to the university of michigan i
studied business i did the classic things that everyone who was kind of like on the path from
college to financial services did to go on that journey and end up working on wall street had
internships in my summers after college and i get in my senior year and i was lucky enough
that i had accepted a job to work at morgan stanley out of after school i had had an
internship my junior year i accepted that job and i felt like i was on top of the world like that
was the dream for me was to be a trader out of school it's what my parents did i get into my
senior year i have all this free time because i don't have to recruit for a job and so i'm like i
got to do something beyond just playing fifa and other xbox games all day long and so i
started helping students prepare for job interviews and in these kind of mock interviews i was
doing i would always ask one question to just get the conversation started and that question
was how do you keep up with the business world i thought it was a layup my goal was like
let's just start this easy so there's no awkward exchange between us but the answer i got
from every single student was as if they had all rehearsed it before talking to me it was
always i read the wall street journal and i would say why do you read the wall street journal
and they would say i read it because there's no other option it's what my parents told me to
do it is what is expected of me it's dense it's dry i can't get through the whole thing but it's the
only option and after after some point where i just had heard dozens of students in these
conversations say i read the wall street journal because i have to but not because i choose
to i was like this is crazy these kids are working their asses off to have careers in business
yet they don't have content that excites them and gets them energized to basically spend the
next 40 years of their life the majority of their waking hours working in business and so i just
started writing a newsletter i was like one this is gonna help the students that just told me
they don't love what they're reading and two it's gonna force me to stay up to date with the
business world for when i graduate and go work in finance the original newsletter was called
market corner i literally took a microsoft word template i would condense and and summarize
the top five wall street journal stories i would put a stock pitch of the day a business leader of
the day an inspirational quote of the day a lot of like the dna of what morning brew is now but
just think like everything was a little bit worse the writing was worse the presentation was
worse we didn't even have a website if you wanted to read market corner back when i was
writing in college you had to message me and say hey alex i heard about your daily business
read can you sign me up for your listserv and i would literally have to go put input your email
address into my listserv what ended up happening was this newsletter this pdf that i was
sending out picked up steam and i was like i want to take this a little bit more seriously
because somehow people are signing up for this and loving it even though it's impossible to
sign up for there was infinite friction to sign up for the product so i ended up sending out an
email to my readers at the time and i was like hey i'm going to take this more seriously i think
i'm going to make it into a newsletter and not just a pdf that's attached to an email i'm looking
for people to help me out and i get an email from this guy austin reef austin was a
sophomore at the university of michigan when i was a senior uh we were actually in the
same fraternity but i i didn't realize that at the time and he said hey alex i have ideas for how
to make this better can we talk it's the best conversation i ever decided to you know accept
to have because austin and i met we met in the the main area of michigan's business school
and austin basically spent 45 minutes ripping apart market corner when i say ripping apart all
i mean is he gave direct feedback he told me exactly what could be better he told me how it
could be better and that was one of the first lessons that i learned about entrepreneurship
and honestly about career in general is how bad most human beings are at giving feedback
we are allergic to it we're allergic to it because we are programmed as human beings to
belong and to belong we feel like we need to always be on someone's good side to feel like
they accept us but what i realized as like a first-time entrepreneur and i wasn't even thinking
about this as a business yet was there was nothing more unhelpful than all of the people
subscribing to my newsletter saying how great of a job i was doing and to just keep doing
what i was doing it was it was so unhelpful i had no idea how to make the product better and
so what i said to myself was wow this this guy who i'm working with he's giving me more
substantive feedback than people twice his age i need to surround myself with this person so
i brought austin on as a co-founder we launched morning brew in march of 2015 as a
newsletter and we're off to the races one other thing i'll say before i move on to chapter two
is that i didn't appreciate in the early days of the business just how valuable it was austin and
i being naive and what i mean by that is austin and i didn't know anything about media we
grew up in finance we were consumers of content but we knew nothing about journalism or
the way the industry had ever worked and the reason that was so powerful is because we
didn't have these preconceived notions about how we should build a media business if we
did have those preconceived notions we would have never launched with a newsletter
because people media would have been very jaded about it they would have said you know
newsletters old and antiquated oh hey there was that one business that launched as a
newsletter called daily candy and they got acquired and then basically went to zero don't do
what they did but we picked a newsletter because we were just practical about it it didn't cost
a lot our readers were college students who use their email a lot and that was it and
fortuitously what happened was email has become one of the best platforms to build an
audience because it is one of the only remaining ways in the age of big tech platforms to
truly own the audience that you're building so being naive was an incredible kind of forcing
function to be independent thinkers and entrepreneurs and not be jaded by how things had
always been done chapter two was newsletter as a business so basically what happened
was austin and i in september of 2016 decide to go full time on morning brew i quit my job in
finance so i graduated from michigan took this job in sales and trading i quit my job austin
decided that when he was going to graduate from michigan he was going to go work with me
on morning brew rather than go to a prestigious job in investment banking and once we went
from okay this is like a fun thing we do on the side too oh we actually need to make money
to provide for ourselves everything became about focus we truly in this chapter of the
business appreciated how important focus was to actually build a business and so they're
basically two big parts of this chapter one was raising money because austin and i knew we
weren't going to be able to write our content we weren't good enough we needed to hire a
writer but it was a chicken in the egg problem because we didn't have a large enough
audience yet to make money to then go hire a writer so austin and i raised 750 000 from a
bunch of individual investors we decided not to raise venture capital money which for us was
ended up being a really great decision um and then all of our focus other than raising money
was on a simple three-step process and actually i think this is the same three-step process
for any media company in the world irrespective of its size or the the specific product you're
working on step one create great content for a specific audience that you want to add value
to step two get that great content for that specific audience into the hands of as many of
those audience members as possible so growth and step three once you have great content
once you have a lot of the right audience who is engaged monetize that audience either
through selling that audience's value to advertisers or selling a product directly to that
audience whether it be subscription whether it be merchandise whether it be you know a a
line of cookware like the media brand food 52 does and so that for basically from 2017 to
2019 that was it we did one thing we had one newsletter we focused on hiring the best
writers create to create the best in class content for the daily business reader the modern
business leader we did everything from a growth perspective organic and paid to scale the
audience as quickly as possible and we became exceptional at storytelling this audience to
brands before i move on to chapter three i just want to talk quickly about how we grew the
audience and how we story told the audience to monetize through advertising at the end of
the day growing any audience but especially a newsletter audience where you don't have the
virality of social media with the retweet the like the comment button is it's way harder the
nice thing about emails you own your audience the hard thing about email is it's not
inherently viral so it is a constant grind to grow your audience even to this day with 3 million
subscribers on our daily newsletter what i can speak to is we did everything we fought for
every subscriber we were smart about focusing on the right metrics so it wasn't just about
growing our overall subscriber base it was about growing our subscriber base with the right
subscribers and for us right subscribers meant getting as many people who open at least
five of their first 10 newsletters get as many of those people into our audience but just to give
you context like the things that work best for us organic growth strategies were cross
promotions with other email newsletters anytime you can do partnerships with like mediums
so email to email podcast a podcast social channel to social channel you don't have to
retrain an existing audience on a new channel they have to use so email cross promotions
were one of the best strategies for us morningbrew's referral program has always been a
massive engine for us so when people get to 1 3 5 10 25 50 100 and 1 000 referrals we give
them rewards that we think are going to incentivize them to share the brew and so we
always were really tactical about picking rewards that were either more premium content to
give our best readers more of what they enjoy or swag that didn't cost a lot so from a
acquisition cost of a subscriber perspective it wasn't expensive but would go a long way in
allowing our best subscribers to socially signal that they were vips within morning brews
audience so things like a mug that they could put on their desk in the office and show off
their status or stickers that they could put on their computers the referral program to this day
has gotten over 300 000 of our 3 million readers to uh refer at least one person so it has
been wildly successful and it's why we've been able to spend so much on paid acquisition
because we know so many of our readers are going to end up sharing the brew with at least
one person and that final piece which i just mentioned is paid acquisition we have built a
great machine of doing paid marketing across all channels facebook instagram uh reddit uh
we've done subway ads uh we've done youtube ads we've done everything and what i'll say
is paid acquisition is so much a game of being agile and it's so much a game of uh having a
good sense of your data and being great at creative uh these platforms are sophisticated
enough where they'll do a lot of the work for you to to optimize your paid acquisition what
ends up making your paid campaigns go well is picking great creative that makes someone
stop when they're scrolling through the feed and also being opportunistic about new
advertising opportunities as they come about so for example in the early days we did an
instagram ad where it was like a fake text message conversation between two friends talking
about business news and then one friend saying how did you find out about that and the
other friend saying obviously i read morning brew that creative crushed it and so we rode
that wave with that creative until the efficacy started going down and we moved on to the
next thing most recently youtube advertising through youtube creators direct advertising with
them has been an incredible unlock for morning brew to grow so that was chapter two of the
business which is us focusing on how we grow the audience sustainably and then how we
sell that audience to advertisers and very simply how we sold it to advertisers was selling a
lifestyle not a product we didn't sell a newsletter we sold the fact that you could get in front of
an entire generation of people who are high earners going to accumulate so much wealth
over the next 20 years be in positions of leadership but they're young enough where they
haven't built a lot of their habits yet like who do they go to for furniture when they shop for
their home who do they go to when they think about vacation when they're thinking about
their first car to get as a family who do they go to and so our pitch was you're getting in front
of an audience who hasn't built habit yet but they have a lot of money that they're
accumulating you should be the brand that is able to build habit with them before anyone
else and that's how we started getting the ball rolling in terms of advertising chapter three of
the business was going from newsletter as a business to newsletter business basically we
went from a one product company to a portfolio of newsletters the way we did that was we
moved horizontally into b2b so morningbrew started as a daily newsletter for any business
professionals we moved into industry and job function specific newsletters so that we could
help people make better decisions in their jobs the reason we thought we were qualified to
do that is we knew how to create newsletters already and we had this large built-in audience
that we could learn from understand what industries they're in so when we launched these
b2b newsletters we knew we could launch with tens of thousands of readers on day one and
so we have retail brew we have emerging tech brew we have marketing brew and we're
launching hr brew later this year and we basically have the same consideration any time we
choose a b2b franchise one is their depth of advertising dollars two do we have a lot of
existing morning brew readers who work in that industry or job function and three is there
enough news flow such that we can write a at least twice a week newsletter and so our b2b
franchises have allowed us to work our way deeper into someone's job and also give
someone another opportunity to engage with the morning brew ecosystem other than five
minutes in their morning and finally i want to talk about chapter four because that's where we
are now which is morning brew is a media brand basically you know my co-founder austin
and i have a few key principles about media and about building an audience one in a world
where technology is commoditizing most things the thing that is not becoming commoditized
yet is building a trusting and loyal audience we have seen the power when you build and
own an audience that trusts you just how much you can do in further expanding your
audience but also monetizing that audience and the way we learned that is morning brew
recently came out with its first paid product its first opportunity to monetize its audience
beyond just advertising morning brew launched an eight-week accelerator program called
morning brew accelerator or mba and the whole idea was helping business professionals
accelerate their careers with a real world curriculum and case studies with a best-in-class
network and the ability to hear from experts and do so without having to go back to business
school and we were able to fill two cohorts of people paying a thousand and fifteen hundred
dollars for this eight-week program cohorts of 150 students each without any paid marketing
the only reason we are able to do that is because we've spent the last six years cultivating
an audience of newsletter subscribers of podcast listeners of social followers that truly trust
what morning brew has to say and it's been interesting to see how we can extend that trust
outside of just pure business news content and so the other thing i'll say here is that where
media is going is consumers expect more custom experiences than ever before they expect
you to meet them where they are which is why morningbrew has grown from just a
newsletter brand to doing newsletter multimedia web events we want to exist everywhere if
you are a business professional we want you to think of morning brew multiple times a day
when you're thinking about consuming content when you're thinking about meeting people or
when you're thinking about making purchase decisions so those are the four chapters of
morning brews history it's been such an incredibly uh incredible journey i feel incredibly
privileged to have seen this company go from zero to 140 employees to become a true
media brand so i hope you've enjoyed this chat again if you have any questions email me at
alex at morningbrew.com or check out my podcast founders journal where i talk all about the
lessons in entrepreneurship thank you so much for your time [Music] you

How to know what your audience wants to consume w/ Alex Lieberman

i oftentimes think about like the best content that i consume i can never find on google today
if i wanted to all right our guest today is the co-founder of morningbrew a successful founder
ceo content creator investor uh you name it you probably probably done a million other
things that i'm not listing there um you've built a massive audience online for morning brew
but also for yourself to the tune of 200 000 plus followers on twitter over 100k on linkedin
other places as well just a big audience and then you've got this big media audience as well
for your company and you have a wildly successful podcast called founders journal which i
love super easy to digest so today i'm excited to welcome in alex lieberman to the show and
to start out with i really just want to go back to your very start with content going back to your
origin story do you remember the first time where you kind of remember thinking i should
start creating content what was that moment like for you uh well first of all thanks for having
me uh on pump2 uh to be here um you know i would say i've always kind of known i'm i'm a
creative person i i think back to um in kindergarten when i would be like trying to invent new
forms of pens and highlighters and literally like cutting them and pasting them together like i
always had just like a very creative and visual brain i would actually say that i didn't from a
content creation perspective it was kind of the the bane of my existence for a long time in the
sense that like i didn't the content creation growing up was you know it wasn't twitter it wasn't
social it was writing essays in school and uh i neither enjoyed that nor did i think i was very
good at it um and so i would say my kind of introduction to content creation happened pretty
organically right where i was a student at the university of michigan it was my senior year i
had a bunch of free time and i was like i need to do something to pass the time and i and so i
started spending time with students in the business school of michigan where i would do
mock interviews with them and i would always ask them in these mock interviews how do
you keep up with the business world and every student would say you know i read the wall
street journal and i read it because i feel like i have to because that's what my parents told
me to do and at some point i was like this is crazy these kids are working their asses off to
have careers in business yet they don't have content that story tells the business world in a
fun and engaging way so i just started writing a newsletter um at the time it was called
market corner it was a microsoft word template that i would put together every single day
after pouring the internet for you know four or five hours grabbed a bull and a bear fighting
from google google images uh it had the watermark on it definitely wasn't allowed to use that
image but i did um and yeah you know i never said to myself hey i want to be a content
creator now it was more just like i did it part selfishly to force myself self to stay up to date
with the business world so that when i graduated from michigan i would kind of be on top of
my game to go ultimately work in um sales and trading and then i would say part selflessly
where it's like the students i was helping they kind of just kept telling me they weren't
enjoying business news and i wanted to make it better and more engaging and so that's that
was my introduction there's a principle in there that i think is super valuable to anybody that
hasn't started building their audience set or creating content where you took something
complex and made it simple and there there is kind of this idea out there that or or at least
there used to be maybe not so much anymore that you kind of have to be an expert on
something to be really interesting online and now i think that narrative has shifted to you can
learn in real time and just share what you're learning in real time and either create or curate
and that's a viable way as well so your journey has been i would say you've probably even
touched more lives especially in content creators lives than you'd even think through
everything morning brews done just because you look at the model and it's like how many
people were really thinking of that morning brew and email could become this big business
and now it's you know it's it's not the biggest business in the world but it's like really
substantial everybody knows it it's crazy does it does that ever dawn on you how crazy it is
that an email turned into this yeah i mean the last seven years have been um [Music] you
know kind of like the most fulfilling difficult enjoyable you know like all of the adjectives um
it's been the the most intense and privileged experience uh of my life and i would say
historically i've been um really bad at sitting back and truly appreciating uh the impact that
the brew has had but i also think that's in a lot of ways what kept us motivated for so long
was just seeing over time the number of emails in the inbox every single day just scale with
the size of the audience and see how it was really helping people uh in their everyday life um
and yeah i mean it was super fulfilling and the one other thing i'll say you know uh about
principles from kind of like the early days of creating the product is you mentioned one thing
um about uh making things digestible and kind of like the leverage that's created by just
taking complex topics and breaking them down simply and i'd say that that's absolutely um
something that we did with the brew and that was one of the ways we differentiated the
product but the other thing i would say is you brought up the word curation and i think again
ever even today most people feel a certain way about having to always have original ideas
and i think at the end of the day a very simple truth and i'm sorry if i break your heart saying
this like very few of us ever have original ideas even the idea of morning brew is not original
we we came up with a business newsletter there have been other business newsletters
before um we packaged and remixed in a way that was different so it was uh unoriginally
original and so the reason i say that is curation is an amazing tool for drafting off of honestly
the work that's been done by other people um and doing so obviously in a way that you give
credit to them but also it's such a service right in the in the age of the internet where content
abundance continues to accelerate because it's never been easier to create content it is
harder than ever to kind of find signal as a consumer to know what you should care about
what to look for um you know i oftentimes think about like the best content that i consume i
can never find on google today if i wanted to right like if i looked up 100 the stuff that i
wanted to find i would never find it on google and so that means there's a ton of opportunity
to kind of be the the the strainer of sorts that that sifts through all of the that's on the internet
and gives a specific audience the stuff that they should actually care about and to me that's
an invaluable service and it's only going to get more valuable because i don't think the
internet's going anywhere a little bit further beyond the point when you just had the idea but
when you actually said oh i think maybe we could do this as a business or at least try in that
moment what were kind of the things that you were looking to do or well i guess who are the
people you were trying to reach if you had to define that group with a one-liner who is the
person that you were trying to reach at that point or who your audience was and how is that
different than what it is now at morning brew yeah i mean so if i had to say in one line the
original audience was the college business student the evolved audience over time was the
modern business leader um kind of like the emerging business leader uh the the the career
competitive upwardly mobile professional who's working in a large coastal city in their you
know mid to late 20s who's just constantly trying to find ways to level themselves up and
grow as a professional but it was a pretty kind of what i would say gradual graduation of who
our audience turned into right when we started writing the newsletter i think out of necessity
and out of just ease our reader was the college student who was just our peer in the
business school at michigan right that's the people we had access to and then once we had
felt like we saturated the michigan market right then we were basically like okay what do we
do now we want to keep growing but we there's only so many classes and clubs that we can
go pitch this thing in and tell people to sign up on a piece of paper for and so then austin and
i were like okay let's find other alex's and austin's at other colleges and have them do the
same thing of going into classes and clubs right so the original audience went from the
michigan business school student to the just college business student um to the college
student who should care about business and then at some point after you know we had
been doing our college ambassador program for a while which was a really huge unlock for
us in the early days then we were like while we're getting emails from people who are
definitely not college students they're getting a ton of value out of this product so how do we
think about that and to be honest with you in the early days it was actually kind of a very
hard thing to reconcile when we saw hypothetically like a you know a 45 year old um person
who was well into their career reading the brew not that uh we look at the brew in any sort of
way like of discriminate discriminating by age group but we had created it with a certain kind
of audience in mind which was the college business student and so a concern we had was
like is that a bad thing if someone who's like 45 and deep into their careers reading it is that
bad because does that mean we're actually not writing in a simple or clear enough way for
the college student who has way fewer years of experience under their belt and you know
what we came to understand is no actually we were kind of writing for the established
professional the whole time and the college student if they only understood like 65 to 70
percent of the brew that was okay because their goal was to become the professional and so
they were just constantly reading to try to get more and more out of it and so ultimately after
kind of college students that's when we launched morning brews referral program which to
this day has been the biggest organic growth driver of subscribers for our business and that
that was the unlock that took us from just serving the college business student to basically
started serving the modern business leader the person who has a vested interest in knowing
what's going on in the business world talked with other people about this same thing too how
your audience evolves over time and it's not a rigid thing because if if your audience stays
rigid that probably means that you're staying the same you're not learning you're not evolving
so it's it's absolutely crucial to understand the data points that are telling you when to move
in a certain direction so when you were doing the college ambassador program especially
upfront in michigan what were what were the signals that maybe were indicating to you that
people were or that you should like keep expanding your audience that you should add new
topics things like that or how did you even know that what you were making was good did
you did people give you direct feedback like how are you collecting all that info i mean the
short answer is like this is the really hard part about the content game um because
something that i think about a lot right is you can be very scientific about let's just say a
software product and finding product market fit like you can be incredibly data driven with it
because you have access to a lot of data to glean insights from with content you have the
same goal in the early days of a media company or being a creator which is to find content
market fit right so this is something i think about all the time with founders journal have we
reached content market fit yet with my other podcast imposters have we've uh reached
content market fit yet and in the early days of the brew to be honest with you it's like even
harder to tell if we had reached content market fit relative to like if you were a tech company
saying have we reached product market fit which there still isn't like a kind of prescriptive
number that you hit that you've reached product market fit and the reason is is you have a
newsletter you only get so much data with that newsletter you get opens you get clicks and
you get replies to your email and so it's really hard right to be able to tell on a day-to-day
basis what's resonating with people what's not other than kind of directionally anecdotal
evidence from people responding to you saying what they like and don't like i think i i would
say the biggest thing for us was again because once we had realized that the whole time we
actually weren't creating while while our intended target audience on call it day one was the
college business student once we realized that we had never actually been writing for the
college business student we were writing for the person who was say five years out of
college because our view was like if we kind of right up to the the already existing
professional the emerging professional is going to hop along for the ride because they are
aspirational they want to be that 28 year old professional i think it made us realize that oh
wow we have the opportunity to serve kind of any business professional who very simply
wants two things they want to save time because they don't have a lot of time in their day
and that is true of a college student who's taking classes that's true of a 28 year old
professional is trying to manage a social life while having a work life and it's true of a young
parent who has two kids all of them have scarcity of time i'd say the second thing is it's for
people who want something that feels like they're like the content is as if they're having a
conversation with a peer uh who is quick-witted who is passionate about the topic but
doesn't take themselves too seriously and to be honest with you our view kind of turned into
like we think most people are that way we think most people actually just want content that
doesn't feel like you're talking to a teleprompter um and so that was that was kind of the big
unlock for us i think if we had started the brew from the place of writing it in a very
elementary way for people who were just getting their feet wet in business it would actually
would have been a very a way harder transition to make to scale the audience because i
think as we would have tried to get kind of more tenured professionals they would have
resisted the product kind of feeling as if the product was simply too simple for them and it
wasn't serving them in that way and so i'd say that was kind of part intentional intentional
part luck in the early days of the business to write up to the audience rather than to write
down to the audience and kind of piggybacking off off of this concept as well you'd since
have built out like marketing brew and other wings of like different topics using similar
structure but going deeper on not just money like going going marketing things like that so
um with with that did you have any indicators that people wanted that was were there
enough replies from to those emails that like hey we want a marketing brew or was it just
that was the direction that you wanted to take with the company it was a gut feeling and it
worked out so there are a few data points the first was basically we were like we have this
one newsletter all of our eggs are in one basket we not only have not diversified our revenue
outside of advertising but we haven't even diversified our our revenue within advertising
meaning all of our advertising dollars sit within one product and so if there ends up not being
as much appetite for that product we're screwed that was one the second was like we
basically said to ourselves okay we have all these subscribers now how do we build a
deeper relationship with let's call it a million subscribers at the time and we said well what if
we just find a way to work ourselves more and more into their day-to-day jobs into the
industries they're they're in into the professions they're in so that was the second thought
and the third thought was we were aware of b2b publications i would say generally from
honestly austin and i consuming a ton of b2b media content in the early days because you
know again for context austin and i had zero media experience and so i remember in the
early days of the brew we were just consuming everything possible about digital media just
to learn about the industry and i think from doing that process we quickly realized that if we
thought like b2c or consumer business news was dry and antiquated b2b business news put
it to shame i was just gonna say that must have been like the worst time of your life doing all
that b2b research totally and so i think all those data points basically said to us oh wow there
could be a really interesting opportunity here because we made business news fun and
engaging for the for a kind of call a consumer audience if we can make it even 10 percent
more engaging for a b2b audience one we think it's easier to do that because b2b news is so
shitty and boring right now and two our view was that um there's actually more money on a
subscriber basis to be made because on the b2b side our viewers advertisers would be
willing to pay more per subscriber to get in front of a specific job function to get in front of a
marketer to get in front of someone who works in retail versus just getting in front of a
general uh professional audience right like it played into a thesis that niche media was
generally more valuable and that we would never try to get more general than the daily
newsletter and the only other thing i'll say is like we have the same kind of mental model
today of what uh b2b verticals we launched at the brew as when we started it's a
combination of is is there enough news flow in a given job function or industry to uh to be
able to support at least a three day a week b2b newsletter second um is there a sizeable
enough audience in this vertical that we think it could end up being an eight-figure business
like with all of our b2b verticals our hope is that all of them could be eight figure businesses
in their own right and on that second one about audience we also always thought to
ourselves not only is the audience big enough but do we have a lot of them in our existing
daily newsletter audience so we can kind of have a very large built-in audience on day one
and the third was is there a depth of advertiser is there a large depth of advertisers who want
to get in front of this specific audience so it doesn't feel like we're always trying to just kind of
grab dollars from the same three or four companies and so you know fast forward today we
have marketing brew uh we have retail brew we have emerging tech brew we have hr brew
we have it brew cfo brew um and our view is that there are going to be more verticals to
launch but actually we think as much as it's important to kind of move horizontally and
extend our surface area in b2b going vertically is actually as much of a focus right so these
these verticals now take marketing brew for example aren't just newsletters it's newsletters
it's events so we have like a robust events business now for industry professionals we
launched our first job board and we're actually launching sub-industry verticals so i'm sure
that you saw like jack appleby is working at the brew now and we've kind of taken this
creator model that we're using on the b2c side and we think it is as applicable to the b2b side
where actually within our given industries or job functions individuals can be kind of
effectively content creators and influencers where we build businesses around them in given
uh given verticals i wish that this would have existed a long time ago like it's cool that it does
now but it took a long time to get this place where creators really like rule a lot of the internet
and it's totally it's i love it i love where we're at now and i i'm grateful for companies like like
morning brewery keeping it going but even with so with you there's the morning brew side
but then you also like you're trying to build your own thing and i'm sure that one of the main
drivers is that you want to help grow morning brew still but there's still this side of it that's like
it's good to have your own thing you want to have your own personal brand so the
differences between building a personal brand versus building a brand for a media company
must be pretty drastic and i'd i'd love to just pick your brain on what what those key
differences are how you approach it differently like if you were just a one-man show but still
building morning brew right now how would that still look different than creating your own
content yeah i mean to be honest like i think creating content and to talk about that
specifically you know what does that look like for me i would say that's creating content uh
and threads on twitter it's creating some content on instagram and tick tock like especially
short form video content which i've gotten into um it's creating founders journal um which i'm
actually in the process of evolving right now and kind of like pivoting it um to i think better
hone in on content market fit and then it's imposters which is my show that basically focuses
on world-class professionals and performers and deep struggles or traumas that they've had
in their lives and how they've navigated them while still being successful and why do i do that
and how is it different from the brew well i would say the the reason i do it is there's a few
reasons one is because i genuinely enjoy it um i i really love creating content um and it's
such an ironic thing to say because like i said early in my life i hated it but i really love it and i
don't think it actually took me a while to realize i love it because a lot of times when you do
something you love you're not actually actively saying yourself i love it it's like you just do it
and you do it mindlessly and you do it without complaining it's it's more of like creating
content is something that i kind of do in autopilot because i just enjoy it um so i enjoy
creating content i would say the second reason is you know at this point feel incredibly lucky
to be in a spot where morning brew has grown a lot right we have 260 employees we have
um you know more than 15 products and so in some ways it doesn't feel like a startup
anymore at least from what i get to touch and i love the ground floor of things and so to me
creating content building my personal brand launching shows like founders journal and
imposters it's uh it's it kind of puts me back at the ground floor it makes me almost feel like
i'm working on a micro startup again um because to you know just to use the example of um
of imposters right we're like 15 episodes into this thing we're getting single digit thousand
downloads uh an episode like this this is not a huge show yet and to me part of the
adrenaline rush is thinking about how do we achieve content market fit as fast as humanly
possible by being partly data-driven partly driven by gut and having both a a content mindset
but also a growth mindset of okay how do we make our episodes as good as possible but
also how do we think about all the possible distribution channels that we can get this show in
front of and so that's part of the reason and then the third piece is i actually think creating
content myself helps me be a better partner to my co-founder austin and to the rest of the
business in kind of being an idea generator for where we go from here because as morning
brew doubles and triples down on bringing creators onto our platform i've i generally just
believe that it would be very hard to kind of understand creators to work with creators and to
kind of in a way build offerings for creators if we didn't if kind of one of us wasn't a creator
ourselves and i just think it um it helps me empathize with the journey of creators who we
ultimately bring to the brew yeah i love that because that's that's not really the path that most
companies are going to take anyway most companies are not going to have too many
executives posting content out there there's they're too busy to do that stuff and yeah you
know it's it's a lot of playing it's safe not taking risks type of thing so with what you're doing i
think there's a big example in there for people listening and i am also a little bit curious like if
you were just starting out here again like starting completely from scratch i guess i'll let you
take the knowledge you have now but you've got nothing to your name anymore other than
your knowledge if you're just starting out do you think you would focus more on the content
that you just personally want to create or more on the content that's based on like audience
research and what other people have said there's demand for it's kind of one of those things
of like what you spend your time working on right and i think it's this intersection of like um
what do you enjoy what are you good at and what do people want and i think it's actually a
similar exercise for content right so it's like what what are areas of content that you think you
enjoy uh what are areas of content that people want and what are areas of content uh that
you think you would uh you have something some unique knowledge or insight that makes
you good at creating that content and i think the intersection there is where things become
interesting right so i think the example is let's just let's just say i was starting from scratch
and i'll i'll give an example like um i'm into golf like i really enjoy golf and so if i'm thinking to
myself i could see myself just anytime i go to the range anytime i'm on the course creating
golf content because i assume there's a lot of other people who are trying to learn like
become better golfers like i am um one i need to kind of figure out a way to validate if that's
true but to be honest i think it's hard in the beginning to validate okay how am i gonna find
out if human beings are interested in kind of like following the journey golf content i think it's
more the belief that if i'm interested in this and this is like a national sport they're going to be
other people interested in this and i think it's about understanding how much content is
already out there about by golfers around the process of improving in golf and if you don't
think there's a lot of content out there to me that's the example of like okay i play golf i've
played for a while i'm looking to improve uh i think i i don't think there's a lot of content out
there about it and i think people want it because they don't feel like there's a lot of places
they can turn other than a professional to look for golf instruction and so to me that feels like
an interesting and ripe area to me and so then the kind of the second piece becomes okay
what is going to be my unique point of view and where is that going to occur right so how do
i create content around my journey of becoming a better golfer that is unique in nature and
feels like only alex lieberman could have created content around it maybe it's um you know
maybe it is because of my network it's the combination of uh some content is me on the
course but some content is actually getting professional golfers and straw or instructors to
provide commentary on my swing uh at in the form of video like it's what whatever my unique
point of view is i think that's important to think about and the second thing to think about is
like where does this content live so what is the best way to express kind of like content that
relates to the journey of getting better at golf and also where does my intended audience live
and to be honest it's gonna be hard to know that in the early days so it's more of me asking
myself if i'm currently looking for call it instructional golf content where am i going my
answer's probably i'm going to start a golf vlog on youtube because that's where people are
probably going and yeah my follow-up question for you there would be then so i i agree with
you that um when you're when you're just creating create what you think is interesting and
then you have to go out and validate that after the fact because it's really hard to just make
assumptions based on a couple different tools online yeah once you get to that point there's
there's a lot that goes into the validation maybe we can come back to that as well because
i'm interested in your thoughts on idea validation but if um if you were to start the morning
brew experiment like back in michigan but you started it as a youtube channel instead do
you think that you would have succeeded or do you think that the medium had to be that at
that moment i think the reason we didn't even think about video at the time is because it felt
like the hurdle to create great video content was so much more daunting and so much higher
and we already felt limited in the fact that we weren't like professional writers for us to be like
okay now we not only have to write scripts we need to video those scripts we need to learn
adobe premiere we need to edit those we need to learn how to think about youtube as a
platform it just it honestly the thought didn't even cross our mind so i think the answer would
have been no because i don't think that like i think what made us this work was definitely a
lot of luck and definitely kind of an eye for what in text conversational content looked like and
i i don't know that we had kind of that eye in video i think it takes a longer period of time to
train that eye and again like the reason we chose email was it was cheap and we knew uh
our peers were consuming content or or they use their email on a daily basis and so like
that's why youtube wasn't even a thought at the time because like no you know today it feels
like everyone consumes content on youtube at the time i didn't watch youtube content austin
watch austin didn't watch youtube content and it wasn't kind of in our consideration set that
like our peers were watching youtube content so um no i don't think it would have been
successful both because i don't think we had the we were equipped with any of the tools to
possibly have an advantage and because i don't think a lot of the students in our school went
to youtube for the type of content we were creating for people and interestingly you wouldn't
have collected email addresses either so you wouldn't have owned any of that uh exactly
you would have to push them from youtube other and so the business side of it would have
not been nearly as rapid until you figured out the rest of it but all that to say i was just
interested in that because i think format matters i think the medium does matter and if you're
whoever's listening to this right now if you're like questioning should i do a youtube channel
or a podcast or should i do twitter or whatever i think the correct answer typically is whatever
you feel like you can get off the ground today and then stick with for a while and then you
can always expand there's nothing stopping you from expanding but like i tr i've tried doing
all the channels at once and that totally failed became super overwhelming and then you
focus on one thing and you stick at it long enough you can figure it out and move on to the
next i i think at the end of the day so much of it is just giving yourself a fighting chance to and
enjoy creating content for a long period of time because you can bet it's going to take a long
time uh you know it's the cliche example but like mr beast has been creating content on
youtube for i want to say like 13 years at this point um something like that yeah and you
know he didn't really see success like he he's provided kind of like a breakdown timeline
wise of when he got his first million views um and it took many years and we go back to his
original videos like i don't know if you've ever gone to his old videos but his first videos ever
were like him playing minecraft and like the videos were dog but like he enjoyed doing it he
became obsessed with the platform and he just got incrementally better on a day-to-day
basis and the nice thing by the way about youtube versus say emails you actually get a fa
like far more data about your audience that can help inform the content i think in a better way
than email but yeah to me it's like it is such a long game that you need to give yourself a
fighting chance that you're going to enjoy it um and so on one hand i think you should pick a
medium that where you think you're the audience for the content you're creating is likely
going to be but i think you should also pick a type of content that you think you'll enjoy
creating because i know plenty of people who write newsletters who absolutely hate creating
shorter long form video and vice versa um and so to me it's like yeah at the end of the day
you just you really gotta enjoy it and by the way if you don't enjoy creating content that's
okay too there are other ways to create value and build network in life like while i think
there's a ton of um advantage created by being a creator being a creator is not for everyone
because again it takes a lot of time it can be emotionally exhausting and not everyone likes
creating content and that's okay yeah i mean again some people like actively creating some
people like curating which is also a form of creation that takes a lot it still takes something it
requires effort and it is valuable so you can be just as helpful there maybe you don't there
are a lot of people on twitter for example that just build things but they don't really create a
ton of content and they're awesome they create really cool stuff that's not content they're like
apps and things like that so you can provide value in a lot of different ways and by the way
one other thing i'll say is like also if you get far enough in your career um especially like if
you're working on a business and you realize the importance of content creation but you
don't personally enjoy doing it right like this is where i think there's quality systems to create
in the sense that like you know gary vee has a i i don't know how many people are on his
brand team now but it's a crazy amount of people to a million dollars in payroll a year or
something insane and you know this guy is like he he he does enjoy creating content but a
lot of times he's not the one creating the content he's not the one capturing the content he's
going to absolutely have input but a lot of times you'll see his videos where it's either him
after a conference talk giving advice to someone and someone on his team who's like his
producer editor is capturing that is turning that captured thing into four clips it's either that or
it's literally from 10 years ago of him creating content youtube content for one library and
they built such a good machine of somehow having that content logged and sharing it 10
years later and so what i'll say is like you also don't necessarily need to be kind of always the
the button pusher of content you can also build a system around yourself like someone who i
think does this very well is uh ryan sirhan uh the uh real estate agent um he he has a team a
media and content team around him that's creating awesome content around kind of his
journey of of building a very large real estate agency but again i don't think he's the button
pusher i think he has set up the right system yeah and that that's important for a lot of the uh
the founders listed in here too if you don't feel like you have time systems are the way to go
um going back to this idea of idea validation just a little bit one thing that that i found on my
journey i want to kind of pick your brain on if you post something that's really great it can be
pretty easy to make assumptions on why because people you'll get good engagement
people tell you stuff on the flip side if you make something really bad uh people will also tell
you a lot of the time that it's really bad or you'll just get nothing on it i find that one of the the
hardest things is when you get when you create something that's okay and you often don't
know really what to make of that so if you if let's say i've created a piece of content that's
kind of just okay how am i supposed to know uh how how am i supposed to glean insights
from that for my audience and like what's the process to take that from okay to great after
that like have you seen that with morning brew have you ever posted something that turned
out to just be that's fine and how did you how did you actually know that it wasn't good
enough oh yeah all the time i mean my view is there's kind of there's two ends of the
spectrum on kind of how content creators go about putting out content uh i would say it's
kind of people who are point and shoot and people who are kind of spray and pray on kind of
like opposite sides of the spectrum so you know an example i'll use is like sahil right i saw hill
bloom um he is very much point and shoot like sahil is putting out i mean i don't follow his
like feed religiously but my guess he's putting out two tweets a day maybe um but he's
incredibly intentional about every tweet he puts out and driving engagement with that tweet
um for me i would actually say i'm a little bit more spray and pray and i would say i'm that
way because that's how my brain works and i think uh rather than resisting kind of the crazy
brain that i have i just embrace it and when i have a thought you know i spend a little bit of
time refining the idea but i put it out into the world and my view is directionally over time by
getting signals from people of what's working and not working i'm going to kind of mentally
make these adjustments that get me more and more engagement over time uh so i would
say to your question of like when something's just okay uh how do like what do you do with
that the reason i bring that up is it depends on what your goals are right like for some people
just okay is not how they want to kind of carry their online brand for someone who's more
point-and-shoot where just okay for someone who really is like actually just trying to have a
waterfall of content it's more acceptable to them the other reason i'll say it's based on your
goals is there are things that i create that i know are gonna get just okay engagement like i
actually like i know if you were to ask me for alex like how many likes is this gonna get i'll i'll
be able to i would say within kind of like a 20 margin of error say what it is and the reason is
is because my goal for that piece of content isn't to drive engagement it's actually to do
something else so i'll give you an example like yesterday i tweeted something specific to the
the media industry or the crater economy where i said um that it's only a matter of time but
before a there's a creator-led software brand um what i mean by that is like you have a lot of
physical creator-led brands right so you have you know the rock and terramona tequila you
have um you know uh mr beast and you have feastables but i haven't seen any like creators
launching software brands and i think it's going to happen at some point because either a
software company is going to go to a creator and literally give them enough equity to
become the marketing channel for it or a creator is going to bring on a technical co-founder
and launch something themselves all this to say you know with 2 15 000 followers i know
that less than probably 20 of my audience right so we're talking about 40 000 people actually
actually gives a about say digital media or like deep creator economy insights but my view is
that tweet while it may not get a lot of engagement it's gonna get the right engagement it's
gonna get the right eyeballs and i actually what i thought like far more value is someone
dming me after that tweet to have a conversation about my perspective on that and so i say
all that to say like actually before like what we think of as like a met engagement actually
may not be met if we have an understanding of what our goals are if we have if we actually
want something to kind of outperform and it doesn't perform great honestly the thing that i
always do is like i have a group of people that i'm in a text group with like other people who
have large audiences on twitter and i will very often go to them and say hey guys this did not
perform nearly well enough or not as well as i thought it would what do you think isn't landing
right here what is it about the hook that's off what is it about the formatting that's wrong like
what what am i not what am i missing here because i also know i'll think about it emotionally
um and so for example uh you know i'll reach out to david perrell who has a writing course i'll
reach out to dickie bush who has shipped 30 for 30 and to me those people give the best
feedback because they spend all of their waking hours thinking about how do you create the
most uh engaging content on twitter um and they can think about it as a third party i love the
concept and and i've for morningbrew specifically i would say that you're at a point now
where vast majority is probably pretty high quality content within the specific newsletters uh
maybe maybe you feel it wasn't always that way but you know that definitely wasn't always
that way bringing it back to systems you've built systems you've you've got ways of knowing
things ways to enable other people to create great content and things like that so there's
probably not tons of meh content going for there but i i think that it is more specific content
so one one thing that i would be interested to know from you is if you felt like if you told your
team you wanted to try to make every single email more like viral content going forward
instead of specific what what type of impact do you think that that would have on the
business yeah i mean it's tough because i don't think news is inherently viral right so i think
in order to create if we truly wanted to create viral content we'd have to steer away from
news into things that uh kind of are more like jaw-dropping and so i think actually in trying to
go viral we'd actually like lose the core reason that we serve our audience which is for them
to know the most important stories that have happened in the business world over the last
24 hours but what i will say with news is like while it's not viral per se there's inherent virality
to it in the sense that new because new is this timely because it has a shelf life that let's call
it is 24 hours there is natural urgency for people to consume your content because they
know if they don't consume it soon it won't be valuable to them after a number of hours and
so i would say that's the answer for email say for morning versus twitter i think the risk you
run is um becoming one-dimensional in your content as in to me kind of in our world the
most viral content i see is generally by like the finn twit accounts right by like um uh dr parikh
patel and by uh john b or john w rich like the you know the pseudonym yeah the
pseudonymous fintwitt accounts like i would say they are the most viral accounts i think the
issue is is if we were to kind of tell our team hey let's just like rip it like them and let's be
exceptional at posting and uh doing memes i do think and by the way by the way i don't think
it's inherently bad but i do think we would we would end up isolating a part of our audience
that's kind of not on the inside joke of what's called like financial markets and fin meme
culture for sure yeah that's that's kind of what i anticipated too that i i do believe negative
impact across the board there but um well you had mentioned something too that it's timely a
lot of the stuff that you do most of the stuff you do at morning brew is that something you're
conscious consciously trying to mitigate like are you trying to add any evergreen content in
there how what's the split right now between what's just timely versus evergreen eighty
percent of what's in morning brew right now is timely 20 is evergreen 20 is kind of like um the
news uh adjacent stuff the the games uh the um the quizzes the uh we show a picture of a
house describe the house and you have to guess the the value of the house at the bottom of
the newsletter and in terms of mitigating it you know we're not trying to mitigate in the
newsletter because again at the end of the day with any content you create i think it has to
uh serve a specific passion or solve a specific problem i think the problem we're solving is
the the business professional being caught off guard in a conversation with their boss or
their peers and we are solving the problem of that not happening we are your insurance
policy for not looking like a schmuck um but outside of the newsletter yeah i think there's
absolutely opportunity to create evergreen content i i would say actually that's very attractive
to us especially on say youtube as morning brew goes into creating more multimedia content
with creators um i think having a good balance of evergreen content is really important
because at the end of the day you're playing with let's call it the second largest search
engine on the internet um in youtube and so the ability to create content that continues to
accrue views over time as people search for keywords related to what you're doing i think is
a huge asset and to be honest this is one of the difficulties i found with podcasts because my
podcast founders journal all of the basically all of the topics i talk about are evergreen in
nature right so like if i even just look at the episodes that we put out from last week most
recent episodes were six six steps for successful meetings because most people don't know
how to how to have meetings uh why following your passion is it bad advice um how to build
meaningful relationships and network in kind of the age of postcovid how to get unstuck in
your job if you don't enjoy your job how to get promoted faster right like none of those have a
short shelf life but the issue is you don't get the benefit of that with podcasting because
discoverability finding those topics is impossible on podcast players and so i think in a lot of
ways this is actually why the kind of strategy is changing where i think some of these topics
would actually do far better either as web content or far better in kind of video form on
youtube and so this is kind of one of i would say the the struggles of scaling a podcast
podcasts are hard yeah you don't have to tell me twice i've tried building a bunch of them
and it's it's hard to grow the discoverability is bad the social aspect's really bad so if anybody
can grow a podcast kudos to them because it's it's not for the faint of heart and totally it's
hard to go viral um my last little question for you here just kind of wrapping everything up
that we've talked about we've talked about some of your personal stuff we've talked a lot
about morning brew as well two different sides of the same coin really but everybody is
slowly coming around on the idea that every business kind of needs to be a media business
now content's not just a fad it's something you really need to build a structure around and
everybody has to be doing this looking at what you know now especially from morning brew
what are some of the favorite principles that you've learned from building a business brand
that you have been applying to yourself or you would recommend applying to somebody
else's personal brand yep i would say there are infinite niches on the internet and niches
tend to be far larger than you think niche does not mean small niche means specific um
humans resonate with humans and so the more that you can put faces and individuals at the
forefront of the brands you're building even if you're a company brand um i think the the
better off you'll be uh the the least or the least the less can can speak the uh less
promotional you can be about your content um the better especially as a brand you know
someone who i think has been doing a good job with their content is uh mad happy the
apparel brand uh on tick tock um most of their tick tock is clips from matt happy's podcast
that talks about mental health um with kind of well-known creators and influencers and there
really isn't anything promoting mad happy beyond uh the co-founders who host the podcast
just wearing mad happy swag so i'd say like just create good content and kind of your prize
for creating good content is people look into who you are and want to support you um and i
would say the final piece is at the end of the day it's like good content talks and walks and it
is just like uh with any company if your product is mediocre good marketing can cover it up
for a period of time but then you will start to hemorrhage customers because they will realize
they don't like your product and the same thing goes for content if you have exceptional
content the nice thing is content is marketing and so you'll be able to grow your audience if
you have mediocre content even with the best marketing you will not be able to grow nearly
as fast as you want to and you'll not be able to retain your audience nearly as well as you
want to so if there's one thing you focus on it is being ruthlessly honest with yourself of do
we have best-in-class content and do we think only we uniquely could have created that
content or someone else was capable of doing it man i i've taken like so many nuggets from
this interview so appreciate you coming on i know that this is going to be a big hit with with
the listeners so uh floor is now yours i want to give you a chance at the end here to just talk
about what you're working on right now what's top of mind for you in your life and also where
people can find you yeah um well uh first of all again i appreciate you you uh for having me
um you can find me on uh twitter on tiktok on instagram uh my handle on twitter and tiktok is
business barista my uh handle on instagram is alex lieb i gotta change it to business barista
at some point um and i would love for you to check out um my podcast uh founders journal
it's made for um entrepreneurs uh and it's all about giving you tools and strategies to help
you build your business better and imposters is for people who are interested in
self-development self-work and mental health that is the focus of those conversations and i
hope you enjoy it can't recommend the follow enough follow him alex lieberman again thanks
so much for coming on thanks so much for having me

How I Grew My Newsletter to 91,892 Subscribers (Without Paid Ads)

in this video I'm going to show you how I grew my email newsletter to over 90 000
subscribers without using paid ads but more important than the list size alone our email
newsletter gets a 50 open rate to 90 000 people every single week which is definitely above
the industry average and not to brag but this isn't the first time that I grew a newsletter to
tens of thousands of people my last company backlinko we grew that newsletter to over 200
000 subscribers also without running any paid ads you probably already know how valuable
having a newsletter can be I mean look at companies like morning brew and the hustle they
sold for tens of millions of dollars because those companies that bought them knew how
valuable that email-based audience can be and in the case of exploring topics our newsletter
is one of the biggest growth channels for us basically for two reasons first people that open
our newsletter on a weekly basis it's basically like free retargeting we're reminding them
every week that we exist and we're providing a little bit of value now we don't really sell too
much in the newsletter we just basically have a little pitch for our Pro product but the real
benefit is that every week people are opening it and getting value and remembering that we
exist so when someone wants some sort of trend spotting tool or Trend spotting solution
we're top of Mind in fact most Enterprise customers that reach out to us that end up closing
say that they found us via the newsletter or they signed up for the newsletter and really
enjoyed reading it every week and then when they want some sort of trend spotting tool for
their team they don't have to Google Trend spotting tool they just come right to us because
they're familiar with us and also just because you have a newsletter doesn't mean you just
have to send the newsletter you can also send promotions I mean we do product launches
two or three times a year to the exploding topics email list and those are some of our biggest
growth months and because we're providing value between those launches via the
newsletter our open rates are still like 40 or 50 during the launch and we close a lot of
people and convert a lot of people during those launches because we built up so much
Goodwill over the weeks and months of delivering value with the newsletter all right enough
fluff let's get right into the steps on how you can actually grow your newsletter and get the
most out of it so your first step is when someone signs up for your newsletter is to send them
what's known as a CD welcome message so the C stands for confirmation and the d stands
for deliverability and basically the idea behind this welcome message is two things first you
want to confirm that they made the right decision by signing up so imagine someone lands
on your website and they go to your newsletter page and it sounds interesting and they sign
up if you don't send a message for a few days which is possible if you only send a Weekly
Newsletter they're kind of gonna forget you exist so it's important to confirm that they made a
good decision and remind them already upon sign up about why they signed up so in our
case we just kind of remind them you know we're going to send Trends every week and such
and such a number of people have signed up so if you don't have a big email list that's totally
fine you don't need to use social proof you can just say every week you're going to get X to
really confirm that they made the right decision the next step is to use your welcome
message to increase deliverability in the future two things that have really made a huge
difference for us is one when someone signs up for our newsletter in the welcome email we
literally tell them to move the message from the the promotions tab in Gmail to primary now
at this point with a 50 open rate we'll obviously get into primary most of the time in Gmail but
it still doesn't hurt to put that in there because if you ever get into promotions again the act of
someone moving the message from promotions to primary sends a strong signal not just for
that subscriber but just in general that your messages should be in primary because most
people when they see something in the promotions tab they leave it there because usually
it's a promotion and they don't want to do anything about it if a lot of subscribers are literally
moving your message and dragging it from promotions to primary that sends a really strong
message to Gmail that your stuff should be in primary the other thing we do to improve
deliverability for Gmail or any other email platform that people might be using is ask them to
reply to the message you know reply and say why did you sign up for this newsletter this is
huge because most emails that get sent out are basically transactional emails that people
open they click they interact with some way and all that stuff is good for deliverability people
interacting with your message but a reply is especially important because it actually shows
that people are engaging with your email and it's not just a one-way message it's sort of a
conversation if enough people do that it tells Google that these messages are things that are
going to be replied to by subscribers so they should end up in your primary tab so the goal is
really at the end of the day is to get engagement early on from new people that signed up to
show Google and Gmail I should say that your message should go into the primary Tab and
we found that the primary to the promotions tab is huge like basically the promotions tab is
the new spam folder you do get some opens there but to give you some context when we
send a message and it goes to Promotions our open rate is usually like 30 something
percent when it goes to primary it's 50 plus it's almost double just based on going from
promotions to primary now if you go to spam that's a totally different story but I'm just talking
about how to get deliverability in terms of going from promotions to primary it makes a huge
difference in this welcome email sort of a passive way to increase the odds that your
messages land in primary in the future the next step is what do you actually send these
people and in my experience the best way to to get people to open your newsletter to share
your newsletter to subscribe to your newsletter is to have what's known as a branded
newsletter so you know a lot of newsletters that people create and send out are sort of
people's musings on this and that or a list of links think of substack for example every time
you get an email from a sub stack you kind of don't know what you're gonna get most of
them are kind of essays or long rambling stories that someone might have and that's fine
there's nothing wrong with that but if you want to really build a huge newsletter following that
you might even be able to sell or just something like in our case designed to grow your
business you want to have a branded newsletter so a branded newsletter is just like it
sounds it's a newsletter that has its own brand unless your company is the newsletter like
morning Brew Your newsletter should have its own separate unique brand from your actual
brand so for example Tim Ferriss has five bullet Friday right that's his branded newsletter
that has its own brand separate from him and the reason for that it's just easier to share the
newsletter as a separate branded thing so if I told you oh sign up for Tim ferriss's newsletter
it's easy to forget but if I told you sign up for five bullet Friday it's much easier to remember it
also kind of encompasses what the newsletter is as opposed to Tim ferriss's newsletter
which could be anything you kind of know okay it's five bullets and it comes on Friday just
from the name alone so the brand is really important now not just the name but you also
want to have a unique template inside of every message every message should be more or
less the same with the fields change so in the case of exploding topics or as we call it
exploding topics Tuesday that's our brand newsletter we send out four Trends every week
and the four Trends are all over the place some are about e-commerce some are about
technology some are Concepts but either way the the format is exactly the same someone
knows what they're going to get they're going to get four new trends every single week they
don't know what the trends are they don't know what spaces they're going to be in but they
at least have some idea of what they're going to get and this is the benefit for you and your
subscriber it helps your subscriber because they're gonna open because they know hey I
know what I'm gonna get pretty much I'm just curious about what the details are this
combination of familiarity and the unknown is a really powerful motivator when it comes to
someone opening your message in fact we don't even have to use any fancy subject lines
like our subject line is the most boring thing ever it's just E.T colon the date as opposed to
having to think of one every week we just use ET and the date and we still get a 50 open
rate because people want to know what's inside the message the subject line doesn't really
matter that much in our case because people know what they're going to get but they don't
know exactly what they're going to get having a template also helps you because you don't
need to reinvent the wheel every week or every day when you send out your newsletter like
you just fill in the blanks and send it out our newsletter because we used content from our
Pro platform basically it only takes us about five minutes to put together it's really easy
because you just fill in the blanks send it out and you're pretty much done as opposed to
having like an editorial process where you're like what subject line should we use what
should we cover you could just basically fill in the blanks and you're done it's super easy and
it's a win-win for you and your subscribers so while you're sort of developing this template
and it's okay to test out different templates to see what works I'd really focus on providing
bite size value make it so someone can skim your newsletter and get something out of it this
is the Brilliance of news letters like morning brew and the hustle is that they were able to
take the day's news basically and encapsulate it into easy digestible little nuggets now in
your case you might not have a news newsletter you might have something about
technology or about Fitness and that's totally fine but the idea is that you want to have bite
size value that someone can just skim it and get something out of it so in the case of five
bullet Friday Tim has some links to things interested in and then usually a quote of some
kind within 30 seconds you can get some value out of it and if you want to click on the links
and learn more you can get even more value so it's bite size value across the board there
with literally five bullets every week in our case in exploding topics Tuesday we provide four
Trends so you can just skim the trends if you want and just see what they are or we provide
some insight and Analysis if you want to read about them and learn more either way it's all
about providing bite-sized value in your newsletter so as you develop your template try to
think of a way that you could just help people just quickly get some value out of your
newsletter without needing to click on any links or read a bunch of content the next step is to
never miss an issue of your newsletter whether it's Christmas or your birthday or your mom's
birthday you gotta send that newsletter every week or every day depending on the time
frame that you choose in the case of exploring topics we've sent out 150 newsletters at this
point and we've never missed one it's really important for people to build up that habit of
opening so that's one of the reasons besides what I already mentioned of why people open
up our newsletters at such a high rate yes it's because we provide bite-size value we're
providing value overall but we're sending at a consistent day and time so people know
Tuesday at 9am Eastern they're going to get their exploding topics Tuesday to open and
learn about new trends like that habit forming part of it is huge and in fact those newsletters
that I mentioned like morning brew and the hustle they have literally a million plus
subscribers and I know from talking to people like who are involved in that company that
they have a 40 open rate on a million subscribers and they send every day how is that
possible well it's because that becomes the daily routine of their subscribers just opening
that newsletter like they get up in the morning they check their phone and they open morning
Brew to learn about what happened yesterday like that's the habit forming potential so if you
miss even one issue you can break that habit it's important to send at the same time at the
same day of the week every single week every single day depending on your schedule in
fact this is a mistake that I made with the backlinko newsletter I will just send out messages
sort of when I felt like it when I had a blog post to share when I had a video to share when I
had something to rant about when I learned about something new that I wanted to share I
wasn't consistent like every week or even every month you get a newsletter sometimes you
would get three in a month sometimes you would get one per month sometimes you would
get none for a while like six weeks so there was no consistency there and that's one of the
reasons that the open rate on the backlinko newsletter was like 30 something percent I'm
exploring topics it's about 50. in fact many of our subscribers tell us that they actually look
forward to reading our email on Tuesday like they know when it's coming and they look
forward to it and that's only possible if you stand really consistently last up if you're serious
about growing a newsletter you need a dedicated page on your website for people to sign up
to your newsletter if you rely 100 on pop-ups it's gonna be hard to build your list yes pop-ups
can bring in some subscribers but nothing beats a dedicated newsletter page so in the case
of exploring topics in our main navigation we actually have a link to our newsletter page and
most people that sign up for a newsletter sign up through that page as you can see this page
is really simple so it's not about the page itself it's more about funneling traffic to that page as
opposed to having people have to hunt around sign up for a newsletter or happen to see
some sort of pop-up you have a dedicated section of your site just to get email subscribers
so to quickly recap the most important takeaways that you can use to grow your newsletter
first of all you definitely want a branded newsletter of some kind make sure your newsletter
is a brand that is separate from your actual brand unless of course you're building a
newsletter focused business which if that's the case you're probably not watching this video
to learn newsletter tips for me hopefully you're learning from morning Brew or those guys
that just do that the other thing to remember is your welcome message try a CD welcome
message your welcome message is really important for getting people who just signed up
your newsletter off on the right foot you want to send a really strong first impression that tells
people look you signed up for an awesome newsletter you're gonna get all this stuff and also
nudges them to do do some things that can help with your deliverability and also make sure
that your newsletter is a template that can provide bite size value that combination is really
powerful when someone knows that I can open this skim it and get some value from it
they're more likely to open it in the future because they know it's not a huge time suck and
also you definitely want a dedicated newsletter page on your website and ideally you'd link
from that from your site's navigation so I know that real estate in your site navigation is really
you know important and that's actually why I put the newsletter link there because for us
building our email list and growing newsletter is really important so it's worthwhile so now I'd
like to hear from you have you built a newsletter are you building a newsletter now what's
working for you or maybe you have some questions about something you saw in this video
either way let me know in the comment section below thank you

$100,000,000 Newsletter Strategy

in 2020 the morning Brew was acquired for 75 million dollars a precipitous climb for the
company that just five years earlier was started out of a University of Michigan dorm room
two years later they are on Pace for 75 million dollars in annual revenue and in this
conversation with CEO Austin Reef we talk about the metrics that matter to a company like
the morning Brew what he's learned about hiring scaling a company and how they've
implemented the EOS model to get outstanding results stay with us foreign you had a very
interesting tweet recently there is no industry in the world that is easier to get to an
eight-figure exit than digital media but there's also no industry harder to get to a 10-figure
valuation than digital media can you explain uh what that means in more detail and maybe
what you're experiencing that made that pain so or that realization so clear yeah so when
everyone starts whenever anyone starts off a question with you tweeted recently my heart
drops I'm like oh no like what what are you gonna bring up but no this is a a good one I have
a lot of conviction this so first off let's define digital media I'm not really referring to Netflix or
anything like that right I'm talking about digital publishing right the the BuzzFeed Vox
morning Brews all all these these companies that grew up over the course of 10 or 15 years
and I think the challenge with most of these companies is you well the pro right why is it easy
to get to eight figures of Revenue or maybe even eight figures of profit it's really inexpensive
to create content right uh you know creating a tweet costs nothing creating video content
we're creating video content and audio content now it's costing us uh whatever Riverside
costs so you know very very inexpensive so creating content inexpensive Distributing
content very inexpensive right you have these platforms and you can find fit on a platform
before they change an algorithm you can build a great audience on Instagram or Facebook
or Tick Tock or YouTube and so it's really inexpensive and allows you to test and iterate and
get your voice out there create a brand we did it over newsletters other people done it on
YouTube on podcasting and so that's why it's actually not that hard to build an audience and
then sell uh sell that audience or sell to that audience the reason why it's so hard to create
let's call it a billion dollar company is because the shelf life of content is like three seconds
right I create a tweet that content is good for a very short period of time we create a
newsletter that newsletter is good for what a day maybe and so you with a digital publisher
you're amortizing this content over the course of minutes or hours versus Netflix uh which is
another Media company right they create uh squid games and people watch that for years
and years and and maybe decades right and so you can spend so much more money on
content you can invest in it right and therefore you can amortize that content over a longer
period of time but when you're a digital publisher creating news or or even Evergreen
content like it's really the the value is not there uh and so it is very difficult over time to build
uh a multi-billion dollar brand in media not say it can't be done there are people doing it but
it's incredibly difficult versus software again has very different economic softwares
economics similar to Netflix you create software it's good forever or or close to forever and
you can advertise that over you know many customers in a long period of time and you know
akin to you know a recent tweet there's a lot of noise in Twitter but there is also signal if
you're paying attention to and listening to the right people and so the reason that that you
know put an antenna up for me is this is high signal because you are the CEO of one of the
flagship Vanguard digital media upstarts that's pointed to as being you know Blue Chip front
line as it pertains to growth and what's accomplished so it's it's particularly uh uh you know
interesting when you're the one kind of waving that flag and not you know some VC that got
wrecked because they got into BuzzFeed advice or something yeah I I mean look right I am
talking my book a little bit we didn't raise capital and and and so uh and I don't believe any
company should raise capital or not a lot of capital especially not Venture Capital uh so yeah
I think it's incredibly difficult to jump it's hard to make a billion dollar company or or create
one anyways uh but particularly in media and so uh yeah it is hard and and you know if I
build a 999 million dollar company I'll be happy so I'll be okay with that I think understanding
the potential of what you're building is incredibly important always here the last couple years
so many people right have raised at their company can be worth 10 20 50 billion and it just
they turn themselves to a bit of a zombie so talk to me about where morning Bruce stands
now uh you know people that are they're paying attention they know that there was a
majority acquisition of the firm by Business Insider um but but talk to us about I looked at like
didn't look like there's over 300 people working at your company now yeah so morning Brew
was majority acquired you know technically by Axel Springer Axel Springer owns uh Insider
and a bunch of other they spot Politico it's a very large German media and holding company
and that deal happened end of 2020 since then we've really taken off from really every
metric so we've gone from about 50 employees to about 300 Revenue went from 20 million
to 70 million or so profitabilities increased and so we've really just grown a ton since then
across not just newsletters so after we launch morning Brew we launched you know the
morning Brew for X for X industry or X job function marketing Brew retail Brew HR
Healthcare Brew launch today if anyone listening or watching this works in any of these
industries definitely go sign up they really are great Publications and so that's where we we
went next and now we're starting to expand beyond that into multimedia content audio video
content as well as other revenue streams so we've built an education team which is our first
foray into direct to Consumer Revenue and so one of the you know elements here when it
pertains to multimedia I have so many questions you gave me like three different Pathways
to go down so I'm actually going to reel it back in and go to specifically one associated with
the acquisition that rate of growth and the increase of uh employees and all these other
things can you break down part of what was unlocked or enabled as a part of the acquisition
was it you know was it cross promotion between these other brands was it access to existing
you know sales infrastructure like how do you conceptualize you know the before and after
of morning Brews operations after that majority acquisition occurred yeah so it was actually
none of that right it wasn't Synergy with any other company but it was access to Capital so
we've been bootstrapped for so long and what Axel Springer gave us the ability to do
number one it gave us a little bit of secure job security for people we hired so people were
more willing to come to morning Brew if we had the backing of Axel Springer and number
two it allows us to be a little bit riskier because the axle Springer wasn't going to let Maureen
Brew out business and so we were able to ramp up investment a little bit faster than if we
would have otherwise if we didn't have an owner and so we were able to invest more than
historically we would have because you know we didn't want to your cash was a concern
when you're owned by a 10 billion dollar company cash becomes less of a concern uh
because of the infrastructure around you got it that makes a ton of sense I want to build back
up to the multimedia and like morning Brew is a really interesting thing that you know the
morning Brew could potentially now be a brand that someone interfaces with and they don't
think of you guys as a newsletter company which literally like I remember getting the
newsletter I I'm gonna guess like 2018 or 2019 for the first time and it's like wow this is so
cool but so distinct it's crazy that like it's even possible now that someone might see it as like
Dan on Tick Tock or you know some educational YouTube video yeah that's exactly it right
so I think there's pros and cons to that right a lot of companies out there a lot of media
companies have decided to build a branded house everything a morning Brew this morning
brew that a lot have and I think the challenge is it's really hard to be all things to all people
and we have subsets of our audience that like to get personal finance content in a really
funny tone from Katie right or like to get comedy tick tocks from Dan or want to hear about
entrepreneurship from my co-founder Alex and Sophia and Jesse puji over at The Crazy
Ones which the new show they launched but we want to be careful about preserving
morning Brew's voice and morning Brews uh Essence right and so while everything within all
these other brands they do ladder up they have the same ethos they have the so the same
uh voice they they are portrayed in different ways right and so uh yeah you totally could
stumble upon money with Katie or The Crazy Ones and and at first not even know it's a part
of morning brew and that's a great thing for us we view that as opportunity it allows us to be
more flexible more Nimble allows us to test things uh with less uh risk and so yeah we're
we're excited about that the house of Brands approach and it's interesting that you still talk
about voice because from the earliest days when it was really understood as kind of a
singular newsletter company I remember you know you and Alex both talking about that as
like the style guide and the what uh what reading a morning Brew newsletter should what
that experience should be um I want to talk about some of the new multimedia properties but
first going back to those early days there's a Simplicity to the early days of a business where
there's only a couple metrics that matter obviously cash in the bank and revenue but specific
to a newsletter business was it really you know new subscribers sign ups and open rate like
what were the metrics that mattered to you operationally at that point in time yeah at the
beginning of the company we had three goals right the best possible newsletter on the
planet grow that newsletter with high quality subscribers and then sell ads into that
newsletter to support the growth of the writing team to hire more writers so we could get
even better and support the growth of the newsletters we could grow with more high quality
subscribers that was the flywheel for two or three years straight we didn't think about
anything else right grossel right gross sell and what we did was we I think a lot of newsletter
companies just focused on newsletters but we focused on opens we were really really hyper
focused on opens it's a little bit more tricky to do that now because of uh Apple's new
updates but five years ago that's all we cared about so every single day at 11 A.M we'd stop
we were doing and we checked the open rate of the newsletter and we'd write it on a
whiteboard and we had just months and months and months of open rates every single day
and that was our North Star and that's what we were most focused as a company and
everything that went into that with something that mattered a b testing subject lines acquiring
high quality subscribers writing a great newsletter and you know the the five six seven ten
people work at the coming time our entire lives revolved around that number at 11AM every
single day and and so now as uh a firm that is you know an order of magnitude larger how
do you instigate that same degree of focus on a team by team basis because just the
quantity of metrics that have to matter when you're at this scale has to it it also Grows by an
order of magnitude how do you instigate that but also stay kind of abreast of all these
different teams as the CEO yeah so what's interesting is now Maury Brews multi-product
right multi-mediums multi-revenue Stream So to your point many different metrics matter and
so what we do at morning Brewers we use this this approach called traction I don't know if
you've read it it's a I think the author's name is Geno Wickham or something Gino Wickman
yeah yeah it's a great book and so we have company rocks right those the the companies
three to seven top goals for for the next 90 days each one on each person on leadership has
their goals there are three to seven goals and we start to layer them down at the company
and so now we don't uh and I think it's a little unfortunate but just the way our business is
right we can't have a metric like the New York Times which is like 15 million subscribers and
that's North Star for us there's a variety of metrics because we are multi-revenue stream
multiple multiple uh businesses uh and so those metrics might change every year every
quarter this quarter we're really focused on growing this property this year we're really
focused on monetizing this property and what's really important is the company understands
what are the three or seven most important things for the whole company and then each
leader to understand what is their priority are their priorities uh helping us get to this quarter's
goals or are they setting ourselves up for next quarter's goal or next year's goal and it's a
little bit more complex it's like a little bit of a web that takes way more preparation than
simply saying right gross sell one newsletter and it's definitely one where you know that book
coaches you towards starting at the top so really starting in the clouds 10 years out three
years out what do you want what are you trying to attain and to some degree it doesn't
perfectly then lay out what the micro goals are but it allows you to actually at least trim the
fat of the things that maybe were potentially stealing some of your focus that are no longer
relevant how have you constructed or are you comfortable sharing what those really big you
know vision and goals are for morning Brew over those time Horizons yes so what's
interesting is that that number has changed every every time right my original goal was I
mean day one and avoiding group or even what traction was my goal was like how do I
make enough money so I can do this for a living so I don't have to go get my job in finance
and then once we accomplish that I was like how do we get to uh 10 million dollars of
Revenue like that would be crazy and then it was like wow can we get to 25 million of
Revenue and even a year ago we were at 46 million we're like you know we get to we get to
100 million dollars of Revenue that would be amazing in three years right and we're sitting
here today at 70 million dollars of Revenue uh this year or so and for us it's it's now how do
we get the 250 of Revenue right and now it's like how do you do 100 million dollars of profit
right for me if as a media company a digital media company we get you a hundred million
dollars of profit that's more of a 10-year Vision I believe right I think that would be that would
be incredible and so I I mean in the vein of morning Brew we've always cared about
profitability and so Revenue goals are nice right they're easier to look at they're easier to to
Think Through uh right but ultimately I think you know the 10-year goal could be 100 is 100
million dollars of profit uh in my mind at least that would be you know 100 million dollars of
profit and 20 was that 2032 or whatever it would be would be pretty crazy yeah hopefully just
inflation hasn't gone crazy by then exactly um so so all of this really builds up to one of the
core questions that I wanted to ask you which is you if you look at the statistics around
entrepreneurship and on the success of entrepreneurial Ventures how counter-intuitively if
you watch you know like the social network or someone something it's not actually 20 year
olds that have the highest probability of success and the best outcomes when it comes to a
venture it's usually a second time founder it's usually someone in their 40s maybe their 50s
and so you and Alex are really substantial outliers not just in the realm of digital media but as
entrepreneurs who founded companies in their 20s generally so my question for you is really
the attainment of knowledge Beyond so your imagine yourself starting hey can we you know
make enough money so that I don't have to go you know work in finance that's a huge gap
between executing you know the operations of a firm that is on its way to 100 million dollars
in Revenue the actual collection of the knowledge that you needed were you you know hiring
coaches hiring Consultants obviously you're reading books but like what did you do to Fast
Track the knowledge attainment there's a little bit of survivorship by here right which is to say
that I agree you know it to some extent that we we learned a lot we worked really hard but
also let's you know just be transparent we got lucky right we luckily stumbled upon
newsletters now we took advantage of that right and I think that's your question how do we
do that I think it's a few things I think one now of course I have a business coach and I have
a great network of people but in the early days it was just we were so fully immersed in what
we did every single minute of my life that I wasn't sleeping I was reading a book on growth
marketing because how are we gonna grow the newsletter it was spending time talking to
people who sell ads it was going to Industry events although not too many to be honest um I
don't think there's that much value but going to there when we saw value and just working
and you know I really believed uh it was outworked everyone and it wasn't okay we outwork
everyone it'll be a 100 million dollar company was it we outworked everyone we can just do
two percent better or five percent better and I think in some ways us having a beginner
mindset and learning as we go as we went was really valuable however we did and we still
do make a lot of mistakes and so again you're right we are the outliers I also invest on the
side and I don't usually invest in Founders my age or when I started morning Brew because
there is such a steep learning curve and the last thing to add on to that is also you have to
remember it was a bootstrap business there was no investor expectation we would have
raised two five ten million dollars and the investor expectation was to grow at a certain rate
every year uh I think we would have failed miserably I think we set our own goals our own
expectations because we didn't have outside capital and that was really really important for
us to keep expectations at the right level got it but you have the coach now so can you talk
about like when the realization was that maybe it's just enough money's coming in the door
that I can afford it but there's also a degree to which it's like hey I now at least have a
conception of what I might not know and need to access this this thing that will increase you
know speaking from my own experience I just hired uh my first coach for my agency and it's
like already three sessions in wow I'm just seeing the board a little bit more clearly than I
previously had and I was super skeptical before I had actually hired a coach yeah I mean
look they say uh everyone has a plan to get punched in the mouth right and I got punch in
the mouth a bunch of times I thought I made the right decision it was a horrible decision yo
you make enough decisions where you have so much conviction and you're you couldn't be
more wrong you're so wrong and it's like holy I have no idea what I'm doing like I'm getting
punched in the mouth every single day at work and I need an outsider's perspective and that
happened you know 2019 once we went from single newsletter to multi-newsletter and we
were scaling the company and you know the company got to be 20 30 40 people I was like
wow I am just getting crushed like big decisions I am just you know I'm consistently you
know a CEO or executives they get paid and they have their jobs to make very few decisions
a day or a week and have a very high percent uh hit rate on those decisions be right 80 of
the time 85 percent I was right like 50 60 right it wasn't good enough and so seeing a coach
and being more introspective and and rethinking things was I had to do or we were going to
fail miserably and so I saw that I started seeing a coach and I've seen multiple coaches now
and I just grew some humility uh because again you should get punched in the face a bunch
of times and you realize that you know just because you got here doesn't mean you're gonna
be able to get to the next level are there any of those decisions that you have enough
distance from now that you can share I most of them honestly were hiring right most of them
were like oh we need this role I want to hire that person you hire that person like oh my God
like that person is like not right for this role like what was I thinking why do I think we need
someone that's senior why did I think I needed someone with uh you know with that
background and you just get punched in the the face with these higher incisions and the
problem with these decisions are they're so they're so costly right when you miss on a senior
higher it's so painful because you spend three to five you spend two months really or a
month to really understand do I need this person then you spend two three four months
hiring them then you have to wait a month for them to leave their job to come then it takes
three to six months to realize not the right person and then a month to three months get rid
of them so you're 12 15 18 months in and you're like wow we just wasted 15 to 18 months in
this part of the business like what a disaster uh that's the big one the other one was
expectation setting right I it it it might be a little unfair but to myself but in the early days I
started this this business with Alex and there was a bunch of other you know uh people
around and we didn't have the expectation right a bunch of other great employees some
some people our age and we didn't have the expectation that this company was going to be
as big as it was and I think if we would have a bit more ambitious mentally or I thought I
thought it was me bigger maybe would have set more expectations with the team like hey
this team may have all may have to hire more senior people and I think I've learned you
know from the early days like you really have to set expectations all your co-workers to make
sure they understand that like yes uh this is the way things are now but things can always
change we might always need we might need more uh management we might need to move
people around and take new roles and I think uh I wasn't being thoughtful enough when I
hired someone or I made a decision and so I wasn't setting the right expectations with that
person and say hey this is where it is now but maybe it'll be somewhere different later and so
those two of setting expectations right from day one with new people and then also uh hiring
the right people in the vein of hiring going from bad to good hires can you talk about some of
the uh you know maybe 10x isn't the right term but super high leverage hires that you've
made because it is digital media there is an ability to you know scale infinitely as it pertains
to distribution create at a very low cost you hear this sometimes in Tech the 10x engineer
that just like fixes or covers for everyone's problems but in the content business in the media
business you can uncover those same type of talents who have been some of the you know
highest leverage team members on the morning Brew either shout out by name or
specifically by role that just allow you to take the next step as a company the highest
leveraged people recently right in the early days everyone was high leverage right and of
course we're managing editor Neil Freeman is incredibly High leverage you know so much of
what we do today is based off his tone and his voice so someone like that of course you
can't even make a comparison or or or go beyond that but let's talk more recently it's really
the executive you hire as coo we now have a publisher a head of product people like that
who the team was like kind of shaky and you bring them in and they're so good at their job
that I never need to think about that team it's a really big Focus for the whole company how
is that team navigating what is that team doing right so it's taking it I'll use a specific example
we had a B2B business uh uh it was retail Brew it was emerging Tech Brew we were
launching marketing crew and that was like the focus the entire company was getting those
out the door fixing those and then we hired someone in Jacob uh who took over the B2B
business he was GM of B2B and all of a sudden the focus of the entire company one person
was owning that and he was taking over the whole thing and that allowed everyone else to
be like okay that guy has that thing we can now focus on something else and optimize other
things and so people who can turn your your weaknesses or growth opportunities into like oh
never need to think about those again because that person is doing such a great job that's a
huge unlock for the rest of the organization it's a huge weight lifted off everyone else's
shoulders and when you're thinking about your company as a system and how it interacts
with one another that now becomes this lens where you're identifying the constraint you're
identifying the choke point and then hopefully being able to recruit effectively enough to find
someone who can fill the Gap really I'm of course I'm the CEO of the company but each
executive oversees a team of between let's call it 15 and 50 or 75 people and so they're
really the CEOs of their own business so when those businesses can hum and work in a
really great way and then interact with other systems right other teams that's really when you
have uh a a really efficient operation got it so going back we talked about the early days
when you know it's just a half dozen people or so and we're just worried about you know
open rates and and new subscribers and that three-piece flywheel that you mentioned um
there is to to some degree uh maybe a lower threshold you don't want to mess up
necessarily like you know an advertising you know spot or something but if an error is made
or we need to you know experiment with this one newsletter there's tomorrow's newsletter
and we'll kind of be okay maybe that wasn't the mindset that you had but I would I
guesstimate when you're small there is a little bit you know Freedom or freewheelingness to
how that media gets produced is that fair yeah totally so now that you're at this scale how do
you think about the experiments like there's like you know the market research tested bets
opportunities I'm sure like you know it's it's very straightforward hey Healthcare is this like
huge business vertical we don't have something there like we need to figure out a way to
attack it but then there's also like the comedic Tick Tock sketch that is very you know like
EXP mental maybe to land maybe it won't and has a different type of investment so how do
you think about the different experiments that the morning Brew runs and how to effectively
size those bets yeah it's understanding what is the opportunity we succeed always start with
if we succeed how big is the opportunity is it Quantified in the thousands the millions the tens
of millions right what investment do we need to get there over what time period and what is
the minimum viable test right what's the how can we build an MVP and test as fast as
possible Right with someone like Dan and his tick tocks we had to hire Dan and it wasn't that
big of a bet from a monetary perspective it turned out to be an amazing bet I'm glad we did it
but it didn't have to be a big bet but if you told me hey we're going to build a software
company that's going to do X Y and Z when you hire 50 people and that's five million dollars
of annual payroll the opportunity needs to be Quantified in the you know tens and tens of
millions of dollars if not hundreds of millions to make that worthwhile so how big is the
opportunity how big is the investment and how much work and distraction is it going to take
to get us there amen how have the packages that you've sold to your different sponsor
Partners it started with the banner at the top of the newsletter how have those evolved as
you've learned more about ad sales and actually built out that team within morning we really
think we have it we have a really compelling ad unit which is a native ad unit written in our
tone so the basic ethos that the add you does not change but the way we where we put it
we've done a ton of testing we test everything in our ad units and so the number of AD units
has changed right so we do small modifications but one of the reasons why we were
successful was because we found the perfect fit of content medium and AD unit and that is
what makes newsletter so successful is when you write that ad unit in that tone so we
haven't done too much evolution of the unit itself now our package has gotten much bigger
we do events that we do yes you can sponsor our events we do virtual events we do content
on our site we do podcasts so when we work with a big brand we want to we're not selling
products we're selling our audience right it's it's here's like in front of our audience here's like
in front of it then on Instagram on tick tock on on YouTube newsletters events everything
right and that's our goal is to work deeply with a partner to engage them with our audience in
our tone our voice our style across as many mediums as frequently as possible and if you
had to evolve the archetype of who you're speaking to with that morning Brew voice because
I also remember in the early days it was like I have this experience as you know someone in
school or recently out of school who's just trying to access these business stories in in a way
that makes sense to me and isn't kind of written like the Wall Street Journal uh so to speak
but you know as the audience grows like is that still how you define The Voice or how has
that had to evolve yeah I I think naturally as we've aged in our writers of age the the
audience had well and the audience's age we've started to make references that are
meaningful to us we're not going to reference things that are being full of college students
anymore it's not saying we don't Target college kids college kids still do read morning Brew
but we're targeting a little bit older of an audience and the audience has aged up in the early
days of morning Brew we thought the newsletters were college kids and so it's a very
different uh very different audience different way we speak to that audience now yeah I know
that you guys don't always necessarily like lean into this uh comp but I noticed that Barstool
has started on Instagram to post like parenting videos and you know I have a 14 month old
so like I'm actually like yeah like look at this you know crazy kid doing something it's like you
can't even fathom them doing that seven years ago when it pertained like it was like a frat
party or something exclusively so there that makes sense that when it is so a media
business is so driven by its kind of core creatives that as those creatives all age as time
passes there's going to be a similar kind of um shift but there's probably also more you know
uh desirable Target demo that your your advertisers like to reach exactly Austin this has
been fantastic I want to aim towards wrapping up you've been uh excellent answer of all my
questions um before I do that um what's your take on why the Ravens have the ugliest
uniforms in the NFL those black on black uniforms as Monday night football uniforms with
little purple uh accent I don't know what you're talking about we don't have that that mustard
yellow garbage in that horrible Stadium up in Pittsburgh I uh we're gonna have to do like uh
some sort of better something on the next time the the steals are actually good because this
is definitely not the uh the the Steelers year by any stretch of the imagination I don't know
what's his name looks pretty solid though what's it what's your quarterback's name the new
guy we like pick it because he went to Pitt but he's there there's a ceiling we're not we're not
over the the moon about him I think that this is going to be a good you really just have to
worry about burrow now for the next couple years although they don't look very good either
right yeah yesterday but I don't know man yeah we'll we'll see um this has been awesome I
want to make sure that people can connect with you in the digital world uh what coordinates
would you like us to point to people uh Point people towards if they'd like to learn more about
you morning Brew all that good stuff yeah I spend most of my time on Twitter so it's Austin
underscore Reef r-i-e-f you will find me beautiful and we're gonna also Point people towards
the new uh Healthcare newsletter that you guys have stood up amongst all the other
amazing morning boot content linked at going deep with aaron.com podcast or in the app
where people are probably listening to this right now before I let you go Austin I would like to
give you the mic one final time to issue a actionable personal challenge to the audience so
when I left college and started morning Brew our goal was to just like make money on the
internet and it's become very a little cliche now there are some people who talk about this
but if you haven't done it just make a single Dollar on the internet I think it's a really
empowering feeling to realize that you know we're in a time where a lot of people vilify
technology and big tech companies but if you can harness the power of the internet learn on
the internet and then sell things whether it's you know ads whether it's product to people I
think it's such an empowering feeling to be able to leverage technology and leverage the
internet to make money if it's a dollar a week you know whether it's a side hustle or a
full-time thing I think it's really powerful I think it's really empowering to understand that you
can turn all of this stuff built for you all this technology into a way to make money I think it's
really really cool so I'd encourage everyone to try to in the next month make a single Dollar
on the internet and grow from there I could not agree more I I can remember exactly that the
first time uh created a transaction on the internet and uh your life's never the same so uh
love that challenge hope everyone will take it and uh Austin thank you so much for sharing
your time with us yeah absolutely thanks for having me we just went deep with Austin Reef
hovering out there has a fantastic day thanks for listening to the end of my interview with
Austin if you enjoyed it you'll also enjoy my past conversation with the founder of the hustle
Sam Parr all about selling and Landing seven figure deals go check it out [Music]

Repurposing your content to create passive streams of revenue with Matt

Briel
how many people here have written books already oh this is going to be easy how many
here have been a creator for more than a year in terms of actively generating content and
putting it out there for consumption yeah all right good well thanks for coming to our session
uh even those of you that just thought this was probably a cool place to come and check
your social media check your email that's fine i'm good with it you don't have to look up here
it's probably better that you don't but anyways and then quick shout out to convertkit the the
fact that they had a momentary lapse of reason and allowed me to come up here and talk to
you guys is probably either really cool or really bad but we'll find out all right so we're going
to talk about repurposing your content creating streams of revenue from that passive or
active some people start that process and uh it trickles in others start that process and the
floodgates just open so we'll talk about all of that so what the hell is lulu yeah spoiler alert we
don't make yoga pants but we spend an awful lot of money on google competing against
lululemon for those keywords of lulu so that's been a lot of fun we were founded in 2002 by a
gentleman named bob young for those of you that don't know who bob young is he was one
of the original co-founders of red hat which is a massive software company based in raleigh
he started lulu after he had a really bad publishing experience though and we'll get to that uh
we're a free to use publishing platform we utilize print on demand technology so everything
is printed as it's ordered better for the environment better for your customers no overhead
you guys know the drill um we've had about 2.2 million creators that have used lulu in the
past 20 years to publish and or print their books so we've had a pretty good run so far i think
we're getting a little bit closer to 2.3 at this point so and the best part we have paid out
almost 120 million dollars on creator revenues uh as of last month so that's you guys making
all that money we're happy to pay it out it's fun for us and we'll keep paying it out we've got a
couple new really cool integrations uh shopify woocommerce these work really well with your
existing websites if you don't have a website shopify woocommerce they're great tools to use
to get one up and running very quickly to have something really nice as a home base to
send all of your users to get your content everybody has a mission everybody wants to talk
about how great they are what they're doing ours has been the same though since bob
started the company we're dedicated to making the world a better place one book at a time
it's pretty much that simple there's a few things in there as well that we try to utilize to make
that happen but we're all about books so bob young this is our founder as you can see he's
still very much active he's a big book nerd he's a serial entrepreneur if it weren't for bob none
of us would be here we wouldn't have such a desire to empower creators like you guys to go
out there and create books and make money off of them bob young took red hat public in
1999. at the time that he did that it was the eighth biggest first day gain in the history of wall
street so when that happened you can imagine made a lot of money everybody wanted to be
his friend but a lot of people were asking about his story they wanted they wanted to hear
how he got there how he was able to take red hat to such a large ipo in 1999 it was huge for
a software company especially for those of you that don't know red hat is open source
software which is essentially a nice tech nerdy way of saying free so it was one of the first
companies ever to go ipo and their software was free you just paid for the service to support
it um he had people asking him you know how did you do this what's your story he said well
i'll write a book people were asking for a book something like that his experience with writing
that book was terrible he was turned down left and right the publishers that did want to work
with him it was a very long drawn out process that they wanted to send them through they
wanted to control the content they wanted final say-so over the cover design the royalty
splits were obviously all over the place he decided he was going to self-publish that was
even worse what was out there at the time was just terrible most of them were scams to take
money from would-be authors and leave them with basically nothing at this point bob's got a
lot of money like a ton of money right because his ipo just took off we're talking nearing a
billion dollars in his bank account he's got nothing to do now because he just sold his
company doesn't all just start a company how about that granddaughter nickname lulu he
says oh we'll call it lulu doesn't help me and my team out trying to market a publishing
company called lulu was not was not the best idea in hindsight but nonetheless you know
lulu here we go so he's got this money starts lulu he's got all this time on his hands he says i
don't want anybody to go through this this is ridiculous you know what about people that
don't have the amount of money that i have or the resources i have how do they get books
published how does their content get into the hands of of the people that they want to that
want to read it he pushed forward that's what happened to bob's books that's also what
happened when i went on vacation one year these guys thought it'd be fun to to wall off my
cubicle i think bob sold maybe about 50 of his books the rest are part of my desk so yeah
don't be like bob all right a little bit more about us be core certified does anybody know vcorp
is one you're cool two you're cool too don't worry about it be corpse because we believe in
the environment we believe in people we believe in leaving this place a better place than
when we found it uh b corp is a certification that a business can go through it's pretty
rigorous actually but nonetheless uh b corpse all live by certain levels of accountability um
transparency uh we have to publish our transparency reports every year and as a publishing
company that's really important for us because books take trees and you know inherently
publishing companies aren't always the most environmentally friendly but we do everything
we can to make sure that that is not the case and so we're very proud that we're a b corp all
right you got a little bit of an introduction i think introductions suck but we're going to do
something different everybody have played two truths and a lie everybody know how to play
that somebody wasn't on their head no you got to pick which one of these you think is a lie
the other two truths right anybody thinks i've never eaten a burrito raise your hand thank you
anybody who thinks i've worked for disney world raise your hand anybody that thinks i hate
ebooks raise your hand you guys are good i can't stand ebooks i did work at disney world
that's the ugly truth and clearly i've eaten a burrito i had one last night by the way it was
really good so that's me 1996 working the desk at disney world and i definitely hate ebooks
all right everybody knows the term creator economy we've all heard it a thousand times
maybe even today that's the big buzzword right now everybody wants to talk about the
creator economy how do we be a part of it if you're a brand as a creator how do i get into
that creator economy how am i making some money how am i monetizing my content i don't
want to work this nine to five anymore you know i want to have that freedom that you've
heard a lot of these other speakers talking about that is the creator economy so we've all
heard it a thousand times but for now i think we should focus on that what does it mean how
do you become a more substantial part of that my kids are gonna be proud of that does
anybody not know what that means okay i won't say it um signalfire put out a really cool
study recently they did a lot of research into the creator economy and all the creators that
are that are in that at least that they can get their hands on top three trends they found some
really cool stuff creators are moving their top fans off of social networks and onto their own
websites and apps and monetization tools this is really important this is going to be a tone
throughout this presentation and workshop and it should be a tone throughout whatever you
guys take away from here and put into your daily practice creators becoming founders
building out teams and assembling tools to help them start businesses while focusing on
their art also very important if you want to make this thing full time if you haven't already and
you want to sustain that life that you want where you're not clocking in for a nine to five and
you're creating for a living third creators gaining power in the media ecosystem as fans to
seek content with individual personalities rather than faceless brands i thought this was
really cool and they're one of the first ones to really kind of nail this down and put it out there
in a way that makes a lot of sense for us signalfire if you hadn't seen that you can go to their
their blog that research published there i did use um several other pieces of research in this
presentation which i can make available to you if you want them afterwards but there's a lot
of good stuff in there that will not only help you understand kind of where this creator
economy is at right now but again how you can get yourself inserted into it if you're not
already and even how to find that little niche pocket that maybe you've been looking for that
you haven't been able to identify yet so a lot of good stuff from the tilt influencer marketing
hub even forbes believe it or not a lot of good stuff out there all right first things first forbes
while the creator economy benefited hugely from the post lockdown headwinds in 2021
some of you felt this some of you hadn't some of you were probably just getting started at
that time some of you probably just getting started now but a lot of creators in the beginning
of 2021 got that wind in their sails so when 2020 was winding down people were ready to get
back out there they wanted to spend money they wanted to to see what their favorite you
know creators or influencers were doing a lot of people got that one in their sales including
us people flocked to lulu to create content they wanted to create passive streams of revenue
or active ones because maybe they'd been laid off or maybe they quit a lot of people were
like if this i'm out you start looking for ways to make money so we even experienced a really
abnormal first half of 2021 with that though obviously this coming year will be all about
differentiating from the crowded competitive creator landscape you got to differentiate
yourself right right now everybody's jumping in and doing podcasts everybody's jumping in
and doing self-help books or self-help podcasts or self-help videos or you know whatever
your chosen medium is somebody's probably working in that space with some variation of
the content that you want to do you have to think about how you're going to differentiate
yourself and you do that through value adding value don't just go out there and throw a
bunch of content up on the screen hoping to acquire new followers only then rinse and
repeat we don't need any more white noise or garbage on the market we need value right
this is paul by the way so if you ever read any copywriting on our site in the notebooks that
you guys got this is our senior copywriter paul i'm pretty sure that was in college by the way
diversify create deeper connections right so these are coming out of those signal fire trends
that i that i told you about um and and what we get from those trends are these actionable
takeaways these things that you should be doing to help build your community to start
building these passive streams of revenue creators have to balance the distribution potential
of certain platforms with the risk of becoming dependent on them right that's a big big thing
and it's going to continue to be a big big thing monetize by either earning a little off of each
fan for mainstream content for a big audience or earning a lot off of deeper connections to a
smaller set of fans through niche content that's your sweet spot by the way i should have
highlighted it but i didn't and in case you haven't guessed it i'm terrible at designing these
things also that's taylor swift if anybody didn't know that creating a deep connection with
whoever this guy is lauren who is that guy this is for lauren lauren and he's who her well they
look like they're making a deep connection so i liked it i used it but also very important this
phrase creators are becoming more diversified in their revenue streams being funded
directly by their fans that sounds way better than being reliant on youtube throwing those
pennies at you for those ad views or some of that other sponsored content that you guys are
working with being funded directly by fans that sounds way better to me and then community
right the big piece creators have discovered the importance of building communities and if
you haven't already you will this is my community some of them are down here obviously i'm
a little grayer in there as well that's mainly from these three this is a very powerful phrase i
think a couple of sentences influencer marketing hub is a great site but nonetheless i think
we all are piecing together here what this pattern what these trends are telling us right we
want to diversify our streams of revenue we want to not be so beholden to these platforms
that we're currently working on right now at the whims of their algorithms or you know what if
elon musk wants to buy instagram next week how many of you are screwed i mean i'm not
but some of you might be maybe not i think everybody should read this and understand it
and let it soak in it's 2022. the opportunities that you guys have as creators to have
ownership over every aspect of your business as a creator stem to stern have never been
more abundant never go look at any period of time in history it's insane the amount of
opportunities we have right now and they're only getting better right some of you are already
involved in or know about are talking about web3 technology nfts creator tokens things like
that this stuff is only getting better right and providing more and more ways for you to own
your content on where it lives on the transactional piece of it that's the goal all right so what
is all this signal for creators it's time to start diversifying streams of revenue obviously you
want to experiment with new platforms as best as you can again we don't want to be
beholden to one or two platforms and stuck at the mercy of their whims and their algorithms
we got to begin balancing quantity and quality of audiences looking past the numbers let's
get past this concept of how do i just get more followers i just need more followers i don't i
don't really care if i got to pay you know 20 bucks per thousand or if i can throw out some
click bait contrarian type of content and get people over to my platform or my my tick tock
channel or my twitter account you know then i'll worry about converting them later we got to
get past that we got to create deeper connections we need to look for ways to build more
value into our offerings create repeat engagement right so again we talked about don't just
create content that you think is just going to draw people there just to get them there create
content that has value stop creating white noise if you're doing it stop now it's not it's not
good those fans are not going to be lasting fans and in fact you know they're just going to go
somewhere else when they realize that was what you were doing create value and then you
know a lot of us have problems issues with this some of us don't but a really big trend right
now is collaborating with other creators there's so many people in your space that do so
many wonderful things and you're focused on one thing and they're focused on another thing
collaborations bring in so many more fans and followers to what you're doing and it opens up
so many more opportunities for you to diversify those streams of revenue and build your
community right so again this is the theme right build your community has anybody not got
that hit no okay i know it's after lunch i'm tired too i had really good pizza by the way so but
matt i already have a community don't i i've got 2 000 subscribers on youtube and i've got 15
000 followers on instagram and i've got 3 000 followers on snapchat and my tick tock's
blowing up dude it's it's i already have a community don't i i don't know do you are you
building on rented land do you own that platform some of those platforms do you even own
that content once you upload it do you own that follower data do you get any identifying
information from that platform about who they are you know how to reach out to them above
and beyond when they just show up and like a post if you're lucky we're building on rented
land right now and you know right now a lot of us don't have a choice to a degree but this is
your call anybody remember these i don't either i know they're still around but let's be real
who here uses clubhouse yeah who here used vine when i was around am i dating myself
thank you i'm not the only old one in here yeah if you put all your eggs in that vine basket i
felt bad for you a lot of people didn't recover from that and learn how to switch over to other
video format sites or even instagram or some of those areas and they just kind of faded off
back into corporate sort of obscurity but there's a lot of good content online i don't think any
of those creators got the ticket with them followers will like you on their platform of choice but
fans will follow you to any platform you choose again commit this to memory this is one of
the fundamental differences between followers and fans one of the first things people say
when they see a statement of followers versus fans what's the difference don't get me
started but here's a good one right as you work towards ownership of your content of your
space this is going to become even more important for you knowing who's going to follow
you if you show up if you show up to your platform of choice one day hey guys i'm doing my
thing over here now this is all one hundred percent me right i own it stem to stern it's better
for me as a creator i'm gonna be able to provide more value to you i wanna be able to show
up more authentically every single day how many of those followers will follow you over to
that platform probably none of them especially if it's a new platform or something they've
never heard of your fans will though they'll show up fast all right how do i grow my
community with a book everybody in this room operates in the digital landscape i think
maybe six seven of you raised your hands when i asked who had written a book or working
on a book talking about physical printed products in a room of people who work in a digital
landscape is sometimes a bit intimidating right most people don't know the power of a book
when it comes to how you can use that book as a tool to build a community to create
connections with people books change lives books are powerful everybody in this room has
read a book i'm certain of it somebody's smiling like nah you don't know me fair enough uh
i'm gonna assume everybody in this room has read a book books build credibility and
establish expertise right it's almost subconscious if you meet somebody and they hand you a
book hey check out my book when you get a chance subconsciously you're like man she
knows what the hell she's talking about she has a book right we just assume half those
books that that some of us read in high school or college you don't actually know who wrote
those things they could have been high on meth when they wrote that textbook and in fact at
my college it seemed like a lot of them were but nonetheless books are great at building
credibility and establishing expertise right handing somebody a book says i know what the
hell i'm talking about uh trust legitimacy these are things that are needed when you talk
about building a community nobody's going to join your discord or whatever other channel
you're using to to to build your community if they don't trust that when they get in there that
they can communicate freely that they can talk to others that they can talk to you and not
feel like an outsider right communities are about belonging so building trust and legitimacy is
really easy to do when you have a book increase social capital right books are great ways to
get yourself invited onto podcasts for interviews or you know some of those other uh youtube
channels that that they interview people when you have a book you'd be amazed how many
people come knocking once you put it out there like hey don't you come talk on my podcast
can we talk to you here can we talk to you there so it's great social capital it also gives you a
lot of new content to post right hey i just published my book come check it out uh we could
go on and on about that but along with social capital collaborations start knocking right you
know all of a sudden you've got a couple different uh people maybe you met here or there
but now they're sliding into your dms man i saw your book that's great maybe we can work
should i not set sliding into the dms my team's my team's like okay sorry nonetheless they're
reaching out to you right they want to work with you now let's collaborate i saw your book
that's that's sick okay uh increase real capital money you guys want to be able to live the life
of a creator 100 and not have to clock in every day unfortunately it takes money right so
books create real capital not just social capital uh and again obviously anybody looked at the
market lately we could all use some real capital uh create a participation hub and by the way
these things kind of follow in that notebook you got in your swag bag from us this content is
in there about you know how books will help you grow your community uh create a
participation hub so i've seen a lot lately of of discord groups and other places where a
creator is using their book as the hub for that sort of conversation right so they'll start a
discord channel or something along those lines around the book they just put out and they'll
invite fans followers friends come in let's talk about the book i'd love to hear what you guys
thought what do you think about this concept that concept and before you know it you've got
tons of people chiming in and talking about the book and different concepts in the book
whatever that book might be about so they're great at creating participation hubs they're
great conversation starters for the digital landscape not just irl in real life because there was
one person that i think noted they hadn't read a book yet but communities thrive on trust and
participation these are some of the things you need you've got to be able to build that trust
that people will participate a good community needs trust and participation you don't want to
show up to your community and nobody else is you need these things books are great for
opening up new doors we've talked a little bit about that you probably heard this over the last
couple years some of you maybe not um books are great business cards i don't care what
anybody tells you books are awesome business cards um i don't know about most of you but
i get a lot of business cards handed to me sometimes i keep them a lot of times they go in
the garbage or the recycling bin sorry um no animal's gonna throw a book away like and
even if they turned the corner when you weren't looking and went to throw it away
somebody's gonna give them a dirty look like nobody's throwing a book away they might
take it home and throw it on the counter and not think about it for a week or two or they
might give it to somebody but nobody throws a book away so it's a great way to kind of break
the ice instead of pulling out that crappy little business card that your cousin designed and it
looks terrible hand them your book instantly create credibility instantly show some expertise
and out of the gate they're already going wow she didn't hand me a business card that's
pretty cool i can't throw this away so maybe i'll read it or i'll pass it to somebody else but
either way again great for opening up more opportunities right books are a gateway drug that
gets you into all kinds of things webinars online courses podcast series youtube series uh
again there's no better way to to get yourself into a situation where you can get in front of
more people than you were in front of yesterday and do the same the next day and the same
the next day so for all the data nerds out there not me but some of you i see a couple of you
on your heads the rest of you guys you can skip over this uh but you're gonna be missing a
few really cool things here so i mentioned convertkit some of the other places i'm getting
some of my data how many of you guys actually saw and read convertkit's state of the
creator economy good for those of you that didn't you should get your hands on it it's very
insightful and it'll probably make you feel really good about yourself uh nonetheless full-time
creators have an average of 2.7 revenue streams i should have just said three everybody
knows you round up after five three revenue streams how many of you have more than one
revenue stream good how many have been more than two or two or more sorry how many
have three or more revenue streams you should be talking to this lady right here and this
gentleman over here right 2.73 revenue streams 41 percent of creators surveyed say they
plan to create a book project in 2022. obviously this is self-serving i'm talking about books
but 41 that's way up from 2021 where only 21 of creators said they were going to do a book
so something happened in that 12 months or 8 to 12 months right i think people were
realizing books aren't that bad good way to get in there and build some more revenue and
build my community up print book sales in the us have continued to grow over the last 10
years 825 million books sold in 2021. that is a lot of books and for that one person out there
said they never read a book you see a number like this and it's kind of hard to believe but
nonetheless 825 million books sold this is print by the way it's not those shitty ebooks we
talked about this is print books that people physically bought they pulled out their wallet
contactless payment bought a book and read it 825 million that's really just there for those of
you that saw prince dead prince dead it's not it's been growing for us again a little
self-serving lulu direct users have sold over 220 000 units or books this year so far in six
months 220 000 units and that's a 25.7 percent i know i should round it up we just had this
conversation increase over the same time period last year super secret data by the way
that's a big number what kind of book should i make how many of you are thinking that while
we're talking right now what kind of book would i make now nobody wants to be honest
damn all right well this is the easy part you can start with what's in front of you i'm assuming
everybody in here has created some sort of content right whether it's a macaroni picture of a
rainbow or you know what she's probably got a ton of it since she's got three streams of
revenue or more but so again talk to her if you don't have anything sorry i'm not gonna pick
on you anymore but this is all stuff that makes great content for a book we see it time and
time again come through lulu all the time this is great stuff if you've got top performing blog
posts and articles that's a no-brainer it's already written we have templates you can
download and so do other sites you don't have to use us i'd prefer you did but it's so easy it's
there so just go into your blogger user interface find out which were your best top five
performing ones boom there's five sections for a book right there it's that simple top
performing social content another great way to generate content for a book repurpose
content uh most viewed youtube videos another one we see all the time or we talk to people
at events i don't know how to make a book i just make youtube videos what do you make
youtube videos on gaming all right let's talk about gaming you could fill a hundred pages
about gaming that's all you need to make a decent book it's not that hard honestly
photography and artwork this is an easy one we love to see artists photographers people i
mean you have your problem is going to be narrowing down what you're going to put in a
book right online course materials is probably one of the hottest things right now a lot of
people out here maybe already do online courses and create online courses or you've met or
known other creators that do that's where your revenue is coming from and then she's
shaking her head wildly yep see this is you take that material turn it into a supplemental
workbook right or a spin-off from your course a double click into what they just learned in
your course is now some of that material or an expansion of that material in the form of a
book you just created another passive stream of revenue newsletters the other really hot
thing right now right if you're providing a newsletter service to people and you are doing your
best to fill it to the brim with valuable content there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't
turn that into a book or multiple books and i promise you if you have any fans at all and if
you're doing newsletters that's easy your fans are the ones that are actually opening the
newsletter and potentially clicking they will buy a book from you absolutely they're finding the
value in your content so any more content you put out they're going to scramble to get it it's
all about the value you're providing podcasts again same thing take the transcripts from your
podcasts whether they're interviews or just you ranting on on on on the microphone for 45
minutes about you know how shitty the crypto market is it doesn't matter take the transcript
turn it into a book it's that simple if you've got fans they'll buy it 100 and it's that tangible thing
that's now in their hands they feel more connected to you right so now we got an idea of how
we can sort of repurpose what we're doing and we could talk about this me and my team all
day every day so if you want to talk about that further after this we're more than happy to
because i know somebody's out there going no not my content you're wrong we can figure it
out trust me all right what type of book you want to think about the format that will suit your
content right so again if you are a photographer maybe you're out here taking pictures of all
these beautiful mountains in idaho or there's a lot of tractors around here maybe you're
taking pictures of tractors or um well you're not going to want to do a standard 6x9 trade
paperback size book it makes no sense you're going to want to do something where you can
fill it full of really beautiful premium color quality photos on a nice thick paper right so you
need to think about your content first but then think about your audience so again we'll stick
with that you know i've got a photo book or you know i'm assembling a book of let's say as
the photographer these are my top 50 favorite photos i took from you know my quarantine in
2020. i guarantee you if i have at least a hundred to a thousand fans and i start leaking that
i'm going to be putting this book together they're all dying to get it i mean unless you're just
the worst photographer in the world and even then there's probably value in that too as a
coffee table book for people to go god look at this [Music] and as a self-publishing company
you should see the stuff we stock our library with because we get all the returns and the
rejections or somebody ordered it and they get it they're like nope it comes back to us so
yeah i mean either way if you're great or terrible you can still do a really good book that
people will find value in all right so standard paperbacks hardcovers magazines magazines
are really popular again all of a sudden right because again ebooks suck people don't want
to read a magazine on their tablet they want a magazine in their hands you know magazines
are really quick easy cool ways to just put a little bit of content in there make it look really
good get it out there and then you can do it monthly people love that boom and all of a
sudden you've got a subscription service in the form of magazines cookbooks are super
popular workbooks again we talked about manuals calendars is a great one so no matter
what your content of choice is if you've got some fans every year you can do a new calendar
they'll buy it i promise we see some of the worst calendar projects come through and people
buy them like crazy like crazy journals notebooks planners this is what we call low or no
content books meaning you know you buy a journal or a notebook oftentimes it's just blank
it's for you to um so not that the content is garbage it's just low or no and in fact this has
become so big right now that some of our top selling creators that use our shopify or
wordpress plugins things like that they're just selling notebooks journals planners like crazy
it's insane people really like to write believe it or not so comics and graphic novels yep you
can make those too we've seen some really cool ones and again some really really bad ones
inappropriately bad like we should probably think about where we're going to start drawing
the line on those so some people are probably still like i don't know about this book stuff
maybe i should go check one of these other rooms out that's fine here's an experiment you
can do so on our site we will actually give you blank interiors for low to no content books for
free you could actually take this and go to one of our competitors too don't tell my boss i said
that but oh is this being recorded um nonetheless we're going to give you the interior file if
you want to try this out all you got to do is create a cover and covers for spiral bound books
are super easy super easy i bet anybody in this room could make a really cool cover for one
of these styles of notebooks and test it out if you've got a pretty decent amount of fans on
your platform try it out see what happens if nothing else you'll be able to say well i tried it
maybe i'll come back to this another time when i can add more value or create better content
people love these right now though some of your fans might love one that's branded from
you or that has your content you can take these files by the way and then interlace your
content in there if you want make it your own it's that simple and you can get these right off
of our site so this is a cool experiment it's an easy way for you to sort of dip your toes in the
water and it's a great entry point to try this with your fans and followers because they're so
inexpensive for you to get through us at wholesale you can sell them very inexpensively to
your fans and followers so what does all this look like we talked about community the
importance of building community getting to a place where you can start owning everything
about your content business we talked about the importance of increasing the amount of
revenue that you have coming in right so adding more streams of passive or active revenue
we talked about how books can help you do that what does that look like i'm going to show
you some examples of users on lulu that have been doing a really good job of taking all of
that and using it to build their communities most of the ones that i have up here while i can't
share the numbers with you are doing a lot of revenue so it's not passive streams of revenue
for them it's very active some of them started as passive and they just caught that windfall or
did some really good uh marketing and communications work some out of the gate they just
had already built their audience they had turned a lot of followers into fans they'd added a lot
of value so the minute they said hey i've got this book dropping they didn't have to ask twice
i mean out of the gate clever girl finance thousands of orders coming through in the first day
this is a really cool brand woman owned it's all about personal finance for women they have
a great message they add value on a lot of the content they put out on all their channels um i
kind of stay on instagram so all these are gonna be instagram i don't i mean i i wanted to add
facebook by the way to that other slide with vine but my team wouldn't let me so but i mean
come on clever girl finance so it's financial content personal finance content right that one's a
little easier right you're like oh yeah you can make books out of that stuff no big deal so i get
it all right but still nonetheless uh great stuff they do some journals and notebooks as well to
go with their courses so they do courses personal finance courses for women and they have
a great mission our mission is to empower women to achieve financial success a really cool
brand doing really cool things adding value out there not just a bunch of white noise and
creating passive streams of revenue along the way this one does anybody know who this is
anybody seen his tick tocks or anything i should have put his tick tock up here this is insane
his tick tock is even crazier yeah 4.7 million he literally just talks about plants and gardening
like how to grow coconut trees better or you know if your plants died how to bring it back to
life did you know that you can take aspirin dissolve it in some hot water mix that into a gallon
of water and spray it on your plants and it'll kill like bugs and fungus and like that's what that
book is that's his passion so if you go watch his tick tock videos they're amazing he has a
ton of energy but it is all gardening and plants 100 percent his story is really cool too he
basically had a bunch of fans telling him it's really hard to get a good idea of what i should be
doing just from your tick tocks right because we're talking 30 60 second clips they're really
entertaining but the actionable takeaways are really hard to extract his fans wanted him to
write a book they figured he'd try it out he spent three months writing and designing this book
by the way which you know again if you're good or if you've got the time or you're dedicated
you can bang out a really nice book in a couple of months maybe even less actually on
average though to do a really good book you're talking six to 12 months in december he puts
it out there in two weeks 500 people had purchased it within another two weeks he was
already up to three thousand units within the first three months he had sold ten thousand
copies that was solely because he had a community of fans that's it he didn't have a massive
marketing budget he didn't buy thousands of dollars of instagram ads facebook at well
facebook's dead but twitter ads none of that stuff he wasn't buying paid search ads displayed
none of that not even any organic seo really i mean his site was okay but 10 000 copies now
without putting his business out there it's about a 20 book you do the math he's a full-time
creator now but they jumped at the chance to support him that's the message he spent the
time he added the value he built a community he turned followers into fans and created
revenue from that revenue that felt good by the way right so he didn't just go and like design
some janky ass t-shirt plug into a print-on-demand t-shirt provider and say hey go buy my
t-shirt and pick up a water bottle and a beach towel and a this is a product that creates value
for people they were asking him for it crafting content right this is my first time at boise it's
beautiful but i actually have an uncle that live here i've never visited them don't look at me
like that i like them they're great so thankfully they come our way a lot and i also got my love
of disney from them by the way my aunt creates quilts and has done so like ever since i can
remember really cool quilts too like you know she'll put family photographs and stuff in there
and like i had a bunch of t-shirts that i outgrew because i like burritos and so she would take
the t-shirts and cut out the cool parts and make me a quilt from them all this cool stuff if we'd
had these things back in the 80s late 70s i don't want to date her too much but early 90s she
could have retired early and just talk to people about how to create these amazing quilts
sweet red poppy it's a lot of crafting quilting whatever these qriket machines are what is it a
sticker what do you do laser printer yeah she does that she sells a lot of books by the way
her youtube following and some other channels are actually even more impressive but that's
not the point the point is she has convinced her followers that what she's giving with them
what she's sharing with them is of value and they see that they're fans now so when she
comes out with her first books full of patterns or again cricket joy whatever that might be
boom within months thousands of copies being sold and again you can do the math the tools
that we have now like we talked about what you have at your disposal in 2022 is absolutely
amazing there's no reason why there should be creators struggling right now or years from
now because of lack of tools or platforms or ways that you can do these types of things tikka
the iggy i threw this one in here because the one thing we haven't really spent any time
talking about i touched on it briefly again is calendars like it's a foreign concept to me
because i don't look at a paper calendar i mean i won't actually look at my work calendar
until i get in that morning like i don't want to see it the night before i don't want to feel anxious
i don't want to see it three days before birthdays pop up in my phone to me it's odd that
people use paper calendars but they do like crazy tikka the iggy is a fashion model and a
gay icon from montreal 1.1 million followers at this point on instagram and lizzo everybody
knows who lizzo is yeah okay you're the one that didn't read a book right okay all right well
you just made up for it because you know who lizzle is lizzo said that tikka the iggy is an
actual bad so that's her claim to fame i'm pretty sure she gained like 50 000 followers just off
that um right they do a calendar every year it's insane it's ridiculous it's cool though and they
sell a ton of them like a metric ton of them yeah i don't know i guess she's cute we getting
the picture here any kind of content even fashion models from canada can be turned into
tangible printable physical books and calendars create more connection build passive
streams of revenue that will help you focus on creating more content of value when you have
these passive streams of revenue coming in that's your key to independence and you have
to be able to spend more time creating more valuable content without stressing so much
about that next utility bill that has to be paid or you know i've got to pay for this or how am i
going to do this the next one i'm going to show you is a really cool story you guys actually all
in your swag bags besides our notebook got a copy of his book darren smith we first met
darren a month and a half ago something like that in arizona at another creator expo well it's
called creator economy expo as a matter of fact um it's the first year for us put on by joe
palitzi of the tilt it was an amazing event nonetheless we just happen to run into darren there
doing the same thing sharing his book with people for free um darren has a pretty cool story
the way that he the way that he wrote that book i say cool it's terrifying to me but and i'll let
him talk to you about that nonetheless darren's content is more entrepreneurial nature he
loves to talk to creators about how to increase their streams of revenue how to make money
from your content how to adopt that business mindset and really get into that position where
you can make this a full-time venture his website craftsman creative a lot of online courses a
great blog again diversifying streams of content which then turn into a newsletter um
podcasts and then the book right so it's kind of a natural sort of progression and darren's
story of why he created that book is a really interesting one too and i think we're seeing more
of that and i think for you guys that's a really really important piece of darren's journey that i
think a lot of you it'll resonate with you and i think it's something that a lot of you could
probably sort of plug into your journey as you're moving along this path of being a full-time
creator so again you guys got a copy of this book so thanks taryn darren do i have a typo
here no thank goodness i don't want to like wipe out a screen okay you did catch in your
book though right darren's book is a great book and you know we can talk about these things
offline i know people have more questions about creating books than what they should do
but there's a lot of key things you need to do on a book for people to even pick it up and look
at it right books get judged by their covers that old cliche is you can judge a book by its cover
and you should if the cover is garbage nine times out of ten the content is garbage darren
designed a beautiful book the contents of this book are amazing um i'm gonna stop talking
about it though i'm gonna let darren come up and talk about his book we're really excited
that darren's here to kind of give you guys sort of a live case study about how darren came
to decide he wanted to create a book what he's been doing with that book and what he's
been able to achieve so far with his creative journey with that book so i'm going to turn it
over to darren for a few minutes so everybody give a round of applause for darren smith holy
cow you all just experienced something magical that just happened you may not know what
it is yet but in like five minutes you're gonna understand what just happened just now so if
you saw that slidey put up with my very impressive follower numbers you saw that i have
1850 followers right now that was like two days ago so how many of you have more
followers than i do in this room on any platform your email list put them up put them up put
them up look at this 90 of the room has more followers than me so i'm really excited to share
my story because i don't have 1.1 million followers i'm not a gay fashion icon i don't come
from montreal i come from provo utah so how many of you in the last year or five or 10 years
have done something to try to grow your audience how about have you done something to
try to grow your revenue everyone in this room that's why we're here right so my story starts
in 2013. i read this ebook by a certain gentleman named nathan berry called authority which
is about how to write books for fun and profit basically i read that book got inspired three
months later i published my very first ebook called the indie film sound guide because my
background is in sound and film and uh what was really cool about that is i wrote the book
and then nathan was like hey anyone who read my book i'm putting out a hardcover and i'd
love to include some case studies i think i made like twelve hundred dollars selling that book
but i told nathan that i made 1200 and he put me as a case study in the back of the hard
print of authority i have a signed copy at my house that was 2013. so nearly 10 years ago
and look how many followers i have now so i've been at this for a long time and was not very
successful in that part of the creator economy or that part of my business i spent most of my
career working in film and television and i produced movies and it wasn't until last year
where i realized man i need some diversified revenue streams i need more than one way to
make money here and i had been living in and part of the creator economy for nearly a
decade and had never really tried my hand at it so you know over those years i had done a
lot of things i tried a podcast i started a blog i started a newsletter i tried my hand in a paid
newsletter and like four people signed up and i was super excited any this resonate with
anybody you've tried multiple revenue streams all at the same time thinking that's the way to
do it well it didn't really work for me i tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and i never
grew an audience i never grew any like meaningful revenue from any of those projects so
what happened last year that changed everything i wrote a book and i did it uniquely as matt
said i wrote the book in public so what i did was i went on twitter and i said hey everybody
i'm writing a book and i'm going to publish the chapters as i write them and i'm going to give
you daily updates of the progress of how i'm writing a book so on some days i would write a
chapter which was essentially a blog post so going back to what matt said anyone can do
this if you're writing a thousand or 1500 words as a blog post or a newsletter just put it in a
different context and call it a chapter of a book and 30 or 40 blog posts later you have a book
right so that's all i did for three months i every day showed up i either wrote a tweet about
here's what i did today i called an editor or i talked with somebody or i joined this community
or i read this book or hey here's a new chapter and three months later i had a book but i also
had a ton of new opportunities within the first three months of writing the book before i
announced that it was on sale before i tried pre-selling before any of that happened i had
nearly doubled my email list because i created a new little segment and i put a little form on
the website and i said if you want to follow along go ahead and put in your email and
hundreds of people signed up all of a sudden people with very large followings 18 20 50 100
000 followers or email subscribers were grabbing my content and putting it into their
newsletters or retweeting it and sharing it with their audiences so all of a sudden i had much
more awareness and distribution for my content when i did open up like here's how you can
buy this thing i opened up an early access opportunity for people to get a signed copy of the
book to get early access to the manuscript and be like a beta reader and they could join my
community i didn't think i was going to start a community but i had people resonating with the
content so much that i wanted to keep having those conversations so i said hey i'll try my
hand at a community i pre-sold 25 of those which equated to like 2 000 in revenue before the
book was even released before it wasn't even a pre-order i just said early early access two
thousand dollars well i hadn't made that in years of time the old way right so i announced
that the book's coming out and i tell people it's going to happen and i print like i pay to print
copies and i bring them to creator economy expo and this is the magical thing that you just
experienced at the beginning here what happened when i created a book was like created
opportunities and now i'm standing on stage at craft and commerce in boise idaho which is a
stage you can't like submit to get on i tried i messaged nathan and said hey remember me i
was in your book in 2013. he said yeah we don't really take submissions to be on stage at
craft and commerce showed him so here's what happened i met them and then they found
out i was going to be here not only did he invite me to come on stage and share my story but
they actually printed the copies that are in your bags when you showed up here i didn't have
to do it out of pocket and the amount of the people that i've been able to talk to the
opportunities that have come from putting a book out into the world yes i've made hundreds
or maybe even thousands of dollars at this point by selling the book but like you saw my
audience is 1850 people i haven't sold 10 000 copies i've sold about a hundred but the
opportunities that are created when you take the step to write a book to put your content out
in the world in that way it's a business card on steroids just like matt said the opportunities
that are created are the reason to do it whatever stage in your business you're at that's why
to do it and i highly highly recommend and actually plead and beg with you to write your
book not just for the opportunities that you're going to create for yourself but because you
can actually dramatically help people and change their lives through the stuff that you put out
into the world as a creator so that's my story thanks for the few minutes to share it i'm
excited to chat with all of you thanks so much thanks dan thank you my plan worked we're
almost out of time just kidding darren that wasn't my plan i'll go through the rest of this pretty
quick because i don't know about you but i'd rather end on darren's story to be honest with
you darren's story like i said is unique though because he uses his book to create more
opportunities for his other content for his other channels for his online courses for his
website for all the other things that he does that are that are you know i think probably even
more valuable in the end so it's a great tool to be used all right how will i sell my books we'll
go through this pretty quick because this is also kind of the yucky sales pitch side of things
right obviously we want you to sell them direct through your own website that's how you
again own everything from start to finish right you create your content you upload it you keep
all the revenue it's a pretty simple process again we can talk more about it afterwards at our
booth but selling direct using e-commerce tools platforms owning that that whole relationship
keeping that customer data not giving it to to amazon or whoever else you might use to
distribute your content that's the name of the game to put it more directly pun intended
hahaha funny let's move on past that piece uh lulu direct uh enables authors creators direct
to consumer sales print on demand we make fulfillment easier for you at the end of the day it
doesn't do you any good as a creator if you're wasting hours shipping books out to people
dealing with the issues of the print you know maybe something's not quite right working back
and forth with your distributor we take all of that off your shoulders right the minute you
upload your book to lulu and plug it into whatever platforms you want to use you just sell
that's it we print ship it's all white labeled it doesn't say lulu on it comes from whatever your
brand is so we try to take all that off your shoulders you can also sell it on our bookstore
where we will take a cut obviously it's a small one it's not like amazon but nonetheless you'll
get 80 of the revenue we'll take 20. still not a bad deal if you don't have a website or you
haven't built one yet or you're working towards it you need a temporary place to sell your
book plus the discovery discoverability aspect of it so we get quite a few visitors and page
views on our online bookstore it's been around for almost 20 years so you can imagine and
then global distribution if you do want to do all these things if you do want to make those
crappy ebooks we talked about like darren did in his very beginning of his journey and we
can get those into all the major uh distributors right apple books ingram kobo so you can
basically get your book to anywhere on the planet using lulu in any way you want to do it
that's the sales pitch made it quick you're welcome somebody's really excited oh i see you
we talked to you earlier okay she's a publisher by the way so she knows the pains and
struggles of of creating books multiple books how can i get started i'm gonna make this really
easy too we did have a bunch of slides about how to do this and that we'd rather talk to you
about that today or some other time but it's very simple go to our website start clicking
around there are so many good resources on the website we offer tons of free downloads for
templates tons of free resources on how to to do everything from creating that book to what
types of formats you should pick everything you need to know to get that thing started and
completed and out there in the world into people's hands providing value so again if you
want to do a double click or talk deeper about it we'll be out there at our booth we're happy
to talk to anybody we're all book nerds by the way not just me i told james to say whatever
she wanted about me this is the cool part books are a great opportunity for collaboration
again we've talked about that some of you may not be designers or artists you you may stick
to creating entrepreneurial types of content or finance content we saw an example personal
finance reach out to a creator that maybe you met here that is a designer you know three
weeks from now say hey i'm working on a book project i'd love to work with you maybe you
do the cover and a few illustrations and maybe there's an opportunity for me to do something
for you later on you'd be amazed at how many people will be like yeah absolutely let's do it
you know when and where what do you want let's talk about this this is a great way
depending on the size of your project especially for those of you who are like me extremely
introverted you don't like talking to people this is easy hey i have this project let's work
together right lastly again a ton of free resources check out our blog little university on
youtube we spend way too much time nerding out over our video content on youtube if you
actually look at it you'll see you will become very familiar with our youtube personality her
name is chelsea she has a very unhealthy affinity for her cat named batman which is i guess
respectable that's it thanks [Applause]

How Sam Parr Wrote His Way To Millions of Dollars and Subscribers
you don't have to think clearly necessarily to be a good speaker but you have to think clearly
in order to be a great writer how did you figure out how to write viral articles I was like well
hold on a minute let me do this math if I get a million people to subscribe to my newsletter
and I email them every day I bet you I could make like $2 million a month doing that that
changed my life make it concrete make it Visual and like make a promise at the top and then
there's like subcategories so like women who want to sleep with werewolves yeah that's like
a thing uh yeah it's a thing tell me about the writing so the vision the copy talking to
customers taking notes how did you write the vision so usually what I do is I steal from a lot
of stuff and I mash it together yeah um and so I like branding and I like words words are very
important to me every word has to serve a purpose and so I'm a big fan of like um uh 1980s
and 1970s Wall Street Journal in New York Times as ads like the internet existed when they
would buy a full magazine or like their own newspaper or newspaper they would buy out
these full ads and I love like old Porsche ads Rolex so like Rolex had this beautiful campaign
years ago where it says like the men who what was it the men who create the world wear
Rolex and they would do like an ad with like Dwight Eisenhower wearing a Rolex or some
ship captain in the in the Navy and I was fascinated by that type of like sophistication and I
was also fascinated by cheekiness so like the ability I'm obsessed with this idea of how to be
professional yet informal and so Rolex is a good example of that it's a fancy watch but it's
meant for diving and sports you know what I mean and so I'm really fascinated how can I be
like cheeky and fun but also professional and Elite and so I took uh British racing green
that's one of my favorite colors it's the color of a lot of old Jaguars and old Triumph
Motorcycles and then I like was trying to craft the phrasing and the copy on the website to be
uh like Felix Dennis who wrote This Book how to get rich um it's almost like Richard Branson
and Mick Jagger had a baby like he founded Maxim yeah Maxim magazine and so I wanted
like a professional and Elite but a um like fun and so I would just what I would do is I would
get on the phone and usually what I do where I do Zoom I like will say phrases phrases that I
like and I'll look at the reaction just like a comedian of the audience and i' like that one didn't
hit okay I got to change my phrasing a little bit and I would like use a different phrasing and
like for example I would say like the word business group therapy and like someone I like
their eyebrows moved I'm like oh gotcha okay that's the phrase that I got to keep with and
then I would try all these other phrases and it wouldn't hit so I would just like constantly talk
to people to see the reaction and then that helped me make the copy in the website but um
I'm really good at collo copal copy you know like um um there's like a bunch of different
types of copy but like a lot of people call me a copywriter but that's like when I think copyright
I think of like direct marketing so if you go to like a website like mle fool yeah you'll see 3,000
words of copy and they're trying to sell you on something and what they do is almost like ux
and or like building an app they're actually building an app but they're doing it with copy but
instead of building an app they're convincing you to like fall down the sliber slope and buy
something and there's like Frameworks to do that I do colloquial copy which is almost like
designing a website on Photoshop and making it look good yeah and uh that's what I'm good
at and so I know how to like write words to make people feel a certain way you know Harry
yeah so he texted me this week he said copy is like food how it looks is as important as how
it tastes and I thought that was just money that when you're talking about Photoshop the
copy's got to look good and I think a good copywriter is almost like vertically integrated with
design well you yeah exactly the whole thing has I call it texture your your landing pages
need texture they need to feel and read a certain way and so if you give me a blank piece of
paper and I could just I could write something and probably get someone to buy but it's a lot
better if I can do both yeah uh and so uh I think copy is more important than design I can if I
can have I can have really bad design and not achieve My outcome I could have really good
design and Achieve My outcome but if I had both it's ideal I like that point about talking to
people one of the things that I've really noticed is that good CEOs are slogan years and I see
this in I'll sit down with really high level CEOs and I kind of get to know them and so I have
dinner with them once twice three times four times the average person if you become friends
with them they tell you different stories all the time good CEOs tell you the same story over
and over and over again time and time and again and what I'm noticing is they're doing
exactly what you're saying they're telling the same story and they're just tweaking a word
here tweaking a word there and they're so in love with their project that they see every social
interaction as a chance to test out their pitch well it's propaganda is what it is totally so like I I
like read a new history book every week yeah and like when you read about great cult
leaders even great normal leaders US presidents or Hitler they like it's repetitive and you like
it's propaganda is what it is it's manipulation yes hopefully you're manipulating people to do
good things but in some regard it's it's bad things but I love like reading about how people
manipulate one another with words and one of the common threads is you have to repeat
constantly you say the same stuff over and over and over again and you have to use
memorable phrasing yeah so like at Hampton we a confidentiality oath so you have to like
you can't talk about what is happening in Hampton because that ruins the the uh people
wanting to share and so we were thinking about words and um we were thinking about like
what we could what we could say and we had this like sentence that said it and it not
memorable and we're like nothing no one knowwhere H uh let's just say nothing no or
nothing no one nobody you know like just that that we just use those three words instead
and like just don't talk anything to anyone yep you know what I mean um and so like I like
phrasing like that that makes things memorable because the words actually matter because
if it's not memorable no one will do it totally the line that I have been thinking about for years
is that in the human mind the way that we process spoken information is that repetition is
indistinguishable from truth and that there's something about the human brain that when it
hears something over and over again it just bu into it yeah and there's like phrases that
people say that they don't Mak sense but because there's such good phrases you just do it
and it changes your behavior for example my biggest pet peeve there's this phrase called
when people say I might as well so someone will be in line for something and they don't
even want the thing that they're in line for and they say I've been in line for an hour it's going
to be another 3 hours I might as well just keep waiting like you might as well not like you like
you shouldn't wait like if you don't want it bail but because that phrase is so good like you
use that you use that phrase to like keep waiting in line you know what I mean yeah like it's
that's always fascinating me where there's like phrases that makes that that that are good
sounding but it's like no you might as well not you might as well bail you're using that phrase
wrong you know what I mean yeah like and that's always been fascinating to me so as
you're doing you read a book a week and you're really interested in these Thrillers and these
big history books and how has that influenced your writing so uh I read a lot of that stuff
because I feel like I'm a soft person and it's fun to like you're not well it's fun to like read
about like a shipwreck it's funny it's the second time you said that today really well the first
time you said that was I was soft the second time is I need to prove to myself that I was a
good onene which is actually pulling from the same threat I'm all it's always motivated by
some high school girlfriend who DP me you or who made fun of me like it's all a big rudge to
like get back of people who made fun of me or to prove to my father that I'm good enough
but uh like I like reading about like um books of like where people suffer extreme hardship
and it makes me feel better about what I'm going through so that's one of the reasons why I
like that like Lewis and Clark like baller Z of joa just having this baby and strap it it on her
and walk it across unknown country for two years like yeah she could do that I could do this
stupid blog post you know what I mean so that's why I like reading that stuff I mean these
are great storytellers so there has to be something there right take a book like American
Kingpin I know you love that I love americ Kingpin so um what I what really fascinated me is
how they can describe indepth scenery and feelings with simple language so for example
Ernest Hemingway well or or like some of these great authors that I love are like JD Salinger
like these like people like if you read catcher and the Ry like it's like a pretty interesting book
in that it's like impacted America but like there'll be a sentence like he was sad it just says he
was sad yeah and like it's I'm always fascinated about how you can use Simple language
and simple sentences and short sentences but it be in depth so like I do you do you ever use
that website Hemingway app yeah of course so if you go and put in Hemingway or um some
of like these Great American Authors they write like a fifth grade reading level yeah and like
I'm always it's really cool how you can like create something that uh is a bit in depth or has a
lot of meaning to it with simple language and so that's one of my big takeaways I also uh just
the research they do so um what's the guy who wrote uh Hamilton uh L Miranda oh no he
wrote the the play yeah he wrote Titan he wrote Titan or what's this guy Carl Robert Carl
Robert Carol car like every sentence has a purpose and it required him to go and research it
and I think that that intentionality and that like rigor is very very inspiring I remember in the
Titan biography he describes the way that Rockefeller wore a tie when he was like 12 years
old and I just I remember just being at my house in Brooklyn at the time and I was just like
that is such insan insane research it was amazing right it's just like a crazy flex but I think
about this a lot when I'm talking to R passage students talking to new writers whatever it is
what people will try to do is they'll try to like on their personal website or in their writing they'll
try to flex they'll be like I'm the chief marketing officer at this place or I've been doing this for
like seven years it's like don't write any of that yeah just write in a way where you can have a
series of words a sentence an observation that shows me your experience I don't want to
see it explicitly I want it all to be implicit and when I see the Tha description and Titan I'm like
okay now I can trust this guy it's cool right way more than the bibliography at the end of the
book and you know I'll tell you fun this is could to be a good clip for you I'll tell you a funny
story so I like American King pinned and here's what so Ross brick orbite he was the guy
who created Silk Road they sold like2 billion dollar worth of drugs in two or three years it was
like the eBay of drugs and murder you could like hire someone to do crazy I knew him before
he got busted in San Francisco in San Francisco I went to a party and I was flirting with this
girl and he bust in the door and he's tall and he's good-looking and he was like pretty
charming and he stole this girl I was with but I was like not even mad because I was like it's
a good-looking guy I don't blame you and this was like 10 years ago or 14 years ago and um
I just like said a handful of words to him and and friended him on Facebook and turns out he
lived down the street from me in Glen Park in San Francisco on I get home one day on like a
Tuesday and there was uh on the news and there was something like going on down in our
little village in our little neighborhood I was like what the hell's going on and I see the
headline the founder of Silk Road Ross o was arrested at this Library Five Doors Down from
my house and I'm like oh my God I knew that guy I knew him and I went and took all the
pictures I had them in Facebook and took them down and saved them and then I read the
book American Kingpin and Nick Bilton yeah uh he uh did such a good job of explaining
Glenn Park and when rth got arrested he did he's like this Bakery was here I was like yeah I
know that that's the Brazilian Bakery I know that one and he explained all this perfectly he
goes the wind was blowing this way and his shadow was to his left and I like researched like
Nick how' the hell do you know this stuff and he like wrote an interview where he's like I
looked at the weather uh I looked at like where the like wind was blowing I saw Facebook
photos of Ross and I saw that like he was facing this way and he and also Ross was like
writing in his diary daily about what was happening I read all of that and I baked it into the
story and I was like that was so beautiful I felt like I was there he did such a good job and in
fact I I was in that neighborhood and he did such an effective job of doing it and so it's just
amazing how much like rigor goes into that totally so Caro has a few things so when Robert
Caro was first writing his biographies of Lyndon B Johnson what he wanted to do was
Interview the people in the Hill Country actually right out by your Airbnb his lbj's place just
short of Fredericksburg and he would go out and wouldn't get good information so he was
living in New York at the time and he said to his wife we're moving to the Hill Country so they
lived there for two or three years and the thing that Carol would always say is make me see
the scene make me see the scene make me see the scene so what I did was I went to
Caro's Ranch and I brought the first Carol you and I was in his childhood home and I was
reading the book in my right hand and looking at the rep rendition of the house actually on
his Ranch and just looking at how car described things but I think that's the work you actually
move there you do these interviews they take forever and the other thing that I think is really
interesting from an interview perspective that I learned from Jimmy Sony who just wrote the
founders guest on this podcast is so many of the best interview anecdotes come from people
who are outside of the main stage when you think of the founders you think of David tax you
think of Peter teal you think of Keith R boy you think of Elon Musk in terms of the history of
PayPal he said no a lot of the best insights come came from the guy who interned there the
guy who worked there for two and a half months had one interaction with Elon and because
they're not media trained or something there's an honesty and a purity to their observations I
also think that a lot of these biographers or people writing non-fiction books I have no proof
of this I think some of them I wouldn't say they've lie but I think think what like they don't let
the truth sometimes get in the way of a good story like for example I'm reading this book
about the Korean War okay and this guy is like writing about this Soldier and he's like uh and
as he CL closed the door he thought about X Y and Z and it's like well that that was 70 years
ago you don't remember what you were thinking as you close that door more more likely
than not but it's not a lie to say he thought because he probably thought about that another
time or he probably like told this guy you know what I mean but you don't let like you're like
well but I could weave that into the story it's so what I kind of learn what I kind of learned was
like reading a lot of these books is um you can kind of like like for example if I'm telling you a
story where I'm like yeah I was driving to the driving to my car and the guy next to me was
telling me the story and we were just laughing well he didn't tell you there was three other
people in the back of the car was also chiming in it's like just leave those people out you
know what I mean you you don't bring that into the story yeah and so like when you're writing
like an interesting story or like uh you can pick kind of certain parts and every once in while
you could fudge a little bit of it it's like look it doesn't matter like that that's not a mean thing
but I can make that to make a more cohesive story I think that's what a lot of them do yeah
um but I don't know if that's a fact tell me about the these early days of the hustle so I want
to hear the Genesis of your interest in copywriting I want to talk about the pen names and I
want to hear how did you figure out how to write viral articles you told this one story about a
news article that you saw you realized it wasn't very good there was something in the news
article that he had made a bunch of money or something he said wait hold on let's bring that
that yeah they missing yeah so tell me about this yeah so I started the hustle because I um
was always interested in sales like I always wanted to like convince a girl to like me like in
high school or like convince someone to like me or or or learn how to get voted class
president whatever were you class person no but it didn't work uh I was still learning um but I
I had a I opened up a hot dog stand in college and I was like all right I'm going to use this to
like sell hot dogs whatever and then I was like this is exhausting How can I like sell to like
more people and not have to work all the time and that's when I learned about copyrighting I
took Neville madora was now my best friend I took his course did you know him at the time
no no wait you took his course then he became like your best friend now he lives I took his
course and then I cold emailed him and I said I'm going to hosted an event in San Francisco
I'm going to take care of your accommodation fly up here I'll pay for it and it was really just
like 10 of my friends and we each paid like $10 to pay for his $300 flight or something like
that and he stayed at my couch in my house in San Francisco and we became best friends
and so that's how it worked uh so yeah so he then he was the best man in my wedding um
so thank you and so I um I like learned about copywriting and then I read the biography of
Ted Turner that's the guy who started CNNN yeah he's he was a wild guy and he was like
from the south I'm from Missouri I was living in Tennessee but he created this like New York
Media company and I was like I'm an outsider I love news I like content what can I do and so
I was like let's just what if we Blended this copywriting with like some type of Journalism and
we created a a a way that I can make money with content because I love content I love news
and so I started I started a Blog and the problem with the blog is that it was like impossible to
get people to continually come back to your website like it was really hard like BuzzFeed let's
say they have 100 million uniques a month they have to get you know whatever 100 million
divided by 30 to come every single day yeah but then I started learning about email and at
the time no one took it seriously it was mostly like people who did newsletters was like the
mly fool but then like other like not other but different scam scammy Shady like affiliate sites
what year was this I got interested in it in 2014 okay um I started the company 2016 but I
was playing with email in 2014 yeah and I was like well but hold on a minute let me do this
math if I get a million people to subscribe to my newsletter and I email them every day
although they're not different people if I get a 50% open rate so a million time 30 if I email
them every day that's uh 30 million people 50% open rate that's 15 million people 15 million
people a month I bet you I could make like $2 million a month doing that as opposed to
getting them to come to my website constantly and so I pitched a bunch of people this idea
and they were like no that's nonsense that won't work and like the founder of a big company
um he is the CEO of I'll tell you after the CEO of a large like digital media company he was
like that's man that's never going to make any money and I'm like man do the math if you're
on your phone who cares if you're on Chrome Safari or in your email app if I have your
attention you're going to come like I'm the ad will work and I can you can read my content it's
going to work and so I just launched this thing and the hustle and I created a Blog in order to
get email subscribers to the the newsletter and so so that was your One Core metric email
Subs yeah it it was opens so how many people opened up my newsletter every single day
cool and so the hustle now we're at close to 4 million subscribers so 4 time 30 the math
doesn't exactly add up like that but let's say that's 120 million uh people a month uh not
unique people but like reads a month and I'm like that's like the same I mean that's a lot of
people that's a lot of reads um the math is just there and you only need like three people to
run that um and so I just did that math and I was like I think this could work and so in order to
make it popular I think in the first year we got 150,000 subscribers year 2 500 year 3 1
million year four when we sold it 1.7 and the first 150,000 just came through blogging cuz I
knew how to blog and I knew how to get people would come to a website and I would go to
like different subreddits that I thought so my whole strategy was go to where the people who
you want already are and siphon them off and so now there's Twitter but back then I didn't
use Twitter but they're on Reddit and so they' be like on this subreddit called self-publishing
for some reason a lot of self-publishing publishing people my content was the hustle it was
business news and it was for mostly uh Young Folks which is mostly young men who would
read it 70 60% young men and I this P the self-publishing subreddit I thought that might be
where some of our people are so I'm like what content would get popular in that subreddit
and so I knew a guy who was kind of a SLE ball at the time where he was making 60 Grand
a month and basically what he would do is find books on how to sleep with women and like
take all like the interesting topics from it and like merge it into his own book and then put like
a sexy title on it and then like get fake reviews for it and then that would like go to the the top
of the Kindle rankings that he would make money huh and I was like that I think that's crazy
that you're doing that I'm going to write a story about it so I wrote a story about it and then
the next week I said to top it off I'm going to become a bestseller I'm going to prove that this
is nonsense that this is that you can do this and you shouldn't trust everything you read on
the internet and so we found out that uh romance novels had the RO most liquidity meaning
the most amount of new books and the most amount of buyers yep and then there's like
subcategories so like women who want to sleep with werewolves yeah that's like a thing uh
yeah it's a thing well look at the movie uh that movie that came out 50 Shades of Gray well
no there's some other movie with a guy named Taylor what's it called where he's I don't
know there's like vampires they're like vampires this is all news to me it's like hot vampires
who turn into werewolves that type of thing uh is to me uh anyway there was another like
category of like hot military guys you know like if you're like a hot marine or in steel and then
me and my old life yeah and so we made it like a a werewolf who become like a Navy SEAL
and slept with women or something like that and we put like some crazy title on it or some
crazy uh this was a book that you published yeah so what we did was we plagiarized
another book so I just found another book that was popular and I just took the I took the
content I barely changed it and it got approved through Kindle and we put a sexy title on and
then we went and got a bunch of fake reviews and we were number one in our category
what yeah I had no idea yeah and then the um publisher Harley Quinn was like threatening
to sue us the second week we launched the company uh because they go you plagiarize
and we're like look guys we're actually trying to help you we're not making fun of romance
novels we're just trying to prove that Amazon is kind of like NE being negligent here and
letting like people do crazy stuff and that you shouldn't trust everyone just cuz hey they're a
best seller like it's and we're actually helping you and they're like we get it just take it down
and so anyway I published those two blog posts and we got like a million people to our
website because I posted them on that subreddit and we viral there which went viral in this
other place which viral in this other place and I would do that every month and so another
one was like soilent soilent like Slim Fast for nerds okay my publication I'm a nerd it's like
nerd that's a good colloquialism Slim Fast for nerds that is a great example what you're
talking about yeah exactly and so um I lived on we had a guy live on soent for 30 days and
we like posted it in the subreddit of soilent and so just doing those crazy things over and
over and over again we got 150,000 subscribers in one year and our popup would say oh
wait no no no the popup well while you're here the hustle is actually uh like a daily newsletter
and we write these crazy blog posts every once in a while if you want our newsletter sign up
and if you don't like it we'll vill you a dollar that was like the the that's what the copy said
that's so good yeah yeah because that's how people would chatter in a bar yeah it's like yo
not another pop up oh come on if you don't like it throw your throw your dollar well it's a
attention interest desire action so that's like what's that so so uh that's just a framework I
follow it's a it's it's I didn't make it up it's an old thing so attention grab someone's attention
interest get them interested make them desire it by uh telling them facts and how it's going to
solve their problem get them to act so for example if I'm going to tell you to drink more water
because it's good for you you maybe will do it or maybe you won't do it but let's say you're
trying to gain muscle I say look have you ever seen those big beef cakes at the gym who
walk around with gallons of jugs of water that's an attention getting like story you see the
reason they're doing that is because water builds muscles 30% faster than not drinking water
this is fake obviously I'm making this up and then the desire is like so if you drink like eight
gallons of water a day uh you're going to get bigger muscles at a 30% faster rate you're
going to feel better in this way and your skin is going to look great so all you have to do is
drink bar water and specifically eight junks a day like that's how I would convince you to
drink water yep you know what I mean yep and so I would and then at the bottom buy water
buy our water for the action exactly cool and so that's like Ada is like a way to like grab
people's attention who are new so transactional traffic and to get them to act and so I would
do that with the popups and I would do that with like the footer uh you know at the bottom of
an article you got to imagine someone's flow they're there you got to get their attention yeah
so you just I would do that constantly and that's how we get subscribers I heard that you're
onboarding email for the hustle was sick yeah so that's another thing with a lot of websites
there's this part that I call the Forgotten text so when you sign up to a newsletter the thank
you page after you sign up is typically like your very generic yeah cuz you're just and you
installed some software and just thanks check your email totally and so I'm like we got to
make that special but that was like the welcome email 9 out of 10 times before at least
before we started it was just like some generic like thanks for subscribing click here to
confirm instead I was like no that's forgotten text we got to use that and so I wrote this like
really good in-depth email where I was like uh what just just happened was magic you see
as you entered your email a little bell went off in our office and when we heard that Bell we
went crazy I just saw my head of operations Cara she just ran outside and hugged a guy and
another and another employee John is now doing 15 push-ups because he's so excited he
had to work off some energy and then this other person is going to do this other thing wait I
got to go stop them they're going to get in trouble but hey before I leave I just want to say I
really appreciate you for signing up you're going to get your first email tomorrow and it
means a lot to me that you're here like I would do things like that and at the time our brand
was like a little broy so like we could get away with being a little obnoxious but that was like
the whole trick was like the Forgotten text it always has to be good you just said at the time
one of the best piece of advice I've ever gotten from you is when you want to research how
another company does copy don't look at what they're doing now go to the internet archive
and see what they did in the early days that's so good you got to go to web archive because
because it's kind of like if you're a 13-year-old kid and you want to be a pro basketball player
don't exactly look at LeBron today go and look at what workouts he did when he was 13
yeah go and look at what stats he was doing so you can track your way up there you know
it's not exactly fair to compare yourself to the final version right and so what I like to do is
whenever I'm researching a company or trying to get ideas for how they phrased or
positioned their product you go to web archive and you what I tend to do is I find news
articles in the was Journal Tech crunch wherever where I'm like all right they're at they just in
this article they announc series a or they announc uh that they're at this much revenue or
they announc that they're expanding this product offering to this other thing I'm like all right
cool let's see what the phrasing was three months before that because if they raised that
funding round they're not that means things are working let's look at what things were when
they were nothing and they had to make it work yeah not where they have all these other
offerings and they're going broad let's see figure out exactly how it started or for example uh
you could figure out like what type of culture the company had like were they zany were they
like what what because often times when you're starting a new company you're like well
Shopify does this and it's all professional and polish and it's like okay yeah but everyone
knows Shopify let's see what they did when they had to stick out do you know what I mean
yep so yeah web archiv is like the best thing ever I think a really good example this is
morning Brew morning Brew had that amazing homepage click your enter email it was so
simple and now if you were to say hey morning Brew they've done really well they sold on
you're to go on their home homepage it no longer has that we did that too or I'm not part of it
anymore the hustle did that too and it's so stupid here's what happens adding complexity
because you have I think the I don't know how many employees the hustle has a lot morning
probably has two or 300 it's because people who didn't start it and didn't look at the numbers
early on say well gq.com has an open homepage where we can click around the Articles or
this website has an open page no one has just a plain email inbo like an email inbox and
they're like yeah but that thing worked really well well but all these like committees are like
well but they do this they do that they do this you like yeah but this worked and so anyway
it's like a committee making the decision not necessarily like looking at the numbers and
figuring out what's right and you just copy other people I like this meta strategy for starting
media companies to look at a space and then counter position against New York media so
Ben Thompson does this against something like in gadget New York media had a very
standard way of talking about tech Ben Thompson comes in and says we're going to analyze
the business bus model of tech there are all these sorts of standard ways and there are
many media companies especially over the last decade that really were saying hey New
York media does this we're going to do that and we're be able to reach people because it
won't be so sterile and sort of in the homogeneous Circle joke yeah I mean bar is a good
example ESPN you're wearing suits you're behind a desk you make some jokes but it's
everything's like pretty uh above the line and they're like H yeah we're going to appeal to like
a little bit of the lower common denominator a bunch of like you know Pizza Bros just sit
around you know what I'm saying and it works and so yeah I think you can look at what
whatever's working and go the opposite telling about this book that you brought elements of
eloquence why' you bring this you brought one book tell me about it I just started reading this
or I I I I read a lot of it and I'm going through so you you were talking about copyrighting and
so I'm obsessed with phrasing yeah you ever listen to Scott Galloway yeah he's beautiful at
phrasing I like people like that or Felix Dennis this author of how to get rich tell me about
Galloway what does he do so well so he I don't think of him as a great Frasier I think of him
is really good at other things so what am I missing he's lyrical he's like a rapper when he
when he talks you know like the rhythm is wonderful yes and I really like good Rhythm
because that's another way that you Captivate people's attention so like when to leave
space is when to talk really low but then when to get loud you know like like people who like
have that Rhythm he's also funny and he's funny yeah watch his L2 videos he would come
out with these one this one video every Mercy No Malice it was great and he would but he
would use these phrases like he would call Amazon Microsoft I forget the other he' call him
the four horsemen yes and like he would like talk like really slow like this but then he would
like make us like but who anyway who cares about those losers but anyway like he would
like make these like he like had this beautiful phrasing so I love phrasing same with um Felix
Dennis yeah so like he would he like he would write his phrasing will be beautiful like he'll
say things like so why am I here sitting writing this book you may ask because it's fun like
you know what I mean like he'll just like he'll talk to the reader in a really nice way and ask
himself questions and I really enjoy that so I was with dares sha do you know who dares is
CTO of HubSpot yeah darash darash is kind of my hero so darash is this guy really good
writer you know very good writer you know he signed up for write a passage and I was super
excited I was like yes did he attend could be in the course I don't remember but I bet you he
did so here's here's why happened was I called him and I was like or or no I emailed him I
said hey you want to hop on a call and he basically responds not really with an emot but with
an article about why he doesn't do any meetings and I just I was like that's badass man like
you had this in an article and it was funny because if he had sent me that I would have been
like maybe got offended or something like that but the fact that it's in an art an article for
posterity it doesn't feel personal I was like I respect it dmes is awesome so dmes had a
previous company that he started and he got a little bit of money and then for some reason
he wanted to go get his PhD or what did he get his his MBA at MIT and while there he met a
guy named Brian and they had this idea for a company and and dares goes all right I'll put
up the first 500k for the business but and I'll be the CTO but no one can report to me and
that was the rule and that company ended up being HubSpot and now it's worth like $30
billion he's very likely a multi-billionaire oh I didn't know that yeah yeah it's publicly traded so
any given day it's worth wor between 20 and $30 billion he's also very prolific and successful
angel investor so he's worth billions of dollars um and he told me uh I get dinner with him
every once in a while because he bought my company and so I become friendly with him he
told me he goes um copyrighting is the most underused or undervalued uh asset in business
and so I wanted to get really good at it and so we studies it and he reads a lot about it and
he told me to do read this book and the reason he told me to read this book among for a
bunch of different reasons was he gives a know every year at inbound his conference and
he was like I read in a book that like to be to be funny being funny helps people remember
like what point you have to make and so this guy dares he's an engineer and so he goes so
what I did was I took HubSpot I took a 100 employees at HubSpot I broke them down into
like sets of 10 and I delivered this speech that I have to 10 different groups and before I did
this I built this plugin on Zoom that would count how many times they laughed and when
they laughed when I spoke and in this book that I read you want to get a laugh every 90
seconds or something like that and he goes so I honed it in and I looked at my software I'm
like all right I didn't get a laugh for 2 minutes here this time it was three minutes all right I got
to put a joke here got to put a joke here and he honed this in and that's how he did it and that
was his goal two years ago was to get laughs every like 90 seconds something like that this
year he said he goes my goal was to um save more memorable phrases but I didn't know
how to do that and he goes I bought this book and it helped me come up with memorable
phrases because this book it's called what is it called the elements of eloquence it's basically
different tools to make things more memorable to make phrasing more memorable and this
is what he used to make his phrases more memorable and so I wanted to learn about it and
so I've got a few interesting ones so uh I know that you're like into the Bible now you said
you're recently converted and so uh there's a few phrases in here that I thought were cool
have you ever heard of a you said you knew this but you don't remember the words and
these words are hard to pronounce so excuse me if I screwed up but a a polyon I don't know
what the things are and how they relate to what they are but when you say them I'll be like
oh I probably know that so all right so this one is when um you say the same word or close
to the same word in the same sentence but this but that word means two different things
okay so here's a Biblical one so this is from the Our Father forgive us our trespasses as we
forgive them that trespass against us so trespass twice and so that's like an interesting way
to PHA uh to phrase that that I love another one is um in the Bible there's tons of these but
it's called an antithesis so it's like you say one thing and then you say something that is like
the complete opposite of it so here let me find a good example those who can do do those
who can't teach so you're you're trying to like explain like something and so you say this
thing and then that thing would ask not what you can do for your country but what your
country can do for you would that be antithesis yeah or uh and some of them like blend but
like another one would be like um we choose to go to the Moon not because it's easy but
because it's hard exactly that's one not because it's easy but because it's hard yeah so
instead of just saying like uh we're doing this because it's hard you say not because it's easy
but because it's hard right and that's like really good phrase there there's a ton in the Bible
where it's like to everything is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven a time
to be born a time to die a time to plant a time to pluck A Time to Kill a time to heal so like
these like these phrasings are really fascinating wonder if Eminem read that book oh maybe
and here here's one more there's another one where it's called a I have to fight it it's called
Uh I think it's called a mer merism merism and it's like um this one's when you use words for
Words sake so for example if I wanted to get the attention of a room you just say everyone
instead you say ladies and gentlemen or uh when you're getting married uh uh in uh in
health or in sickness you could just say all the time right in health or in sickness or like uh
instead of saying he ate everything you say like uh or you say Hook Line and Sinker he ate
he ate the fish and the hook line Sinker it means he ate a lot well what I like about this is it
flies in the face of remove everything unnecessary exactly and that's something I believed in
for a long time and then I realized your writing needs to have some soul and you and the
phrases like that give soul to it you know like one small one small step for man a giant lead
for mankind yep like though like that's very that's a very memorable phrase that was planned
no he didn't mean to say that he he meant to say uh so there was a a there was static in the
in the when he was speaking so they couldn't entirely understand what he said but I think he
said one small step for a man a giant leap for mankind yeah and so they that a got removed
but it so much better one all set for man that's everyone versus him and so uh but then but
that's that's an example of another thing I said man and Mankind yeah and so uh anyway I
like those types of phrasings I I I think that they're really fascinating how cool is it that for
such a definitive moment in human history the technology glitched to dial up the Poetry so
much yeah it it worked out beautifully and and I think that's happened a lot of times there's
been like a lot of phrases that like people uh didn't say one thing but over the years it's like
become a thing there's a story I bring this up whenever students will ask me about imposter
syndrome and they'll say oh you know I have imposter syndrome and how can I get rid of it
and I go you'll never get rid of it and it's something that you're just G to have to deal with and
there's a story where Neil Gaiman the fiction writer he goes to a party and there's all these
bigname people there and Neil Armstrong basically says I have such bad impostor
syndrome there's people here who build businesses they want Olympic goals they've written
great books all I did was go where I was told and if Neil Armstrong has impostor syndrome
then you will have impostor syndrome by way that's a great line I just went where I was told I
like that uh but yeah that's interesting love that story because it just like it's just really the
knife in the stomach of impostor syndrome to me yeah it it definitely doesn't go away and I've
been fortunate to have those like meetings with daresh and these people at hustle con and
like literally billionaires people worth1 billion dollar definitely doesn't go away tell me about
the combination of headline first two sentences that you really focused on at the hustle so in
the world of social media but even not social media you don't if it's just a magazine n you
know let's say you have um a 1% click through rate that means that if a uh 100 people see
your headline only one actually click it there's a world where you can change 1% to 10% so
um a lot of writers at the hustle originally they would write these amazing articles but their
headlines sucked and I'm like dude what's that what's that phrase the tree falls in the woods
and no one's there there to hear like I'm like dude no one no one's going to read this that you
just worked all this work on you got to spend time on the headline because you can change
1% to 10% pretty easily uh once you kind of Master an art of like headlines and then in the
world of your phone say similar I mean Tic Tac didn't exist when we started but this is pretty
obvious that you have to grab someone's attention right away and so I need the headline so
like on Facebook for example the way your eyes go are headlined description picture like
that's usually the story that you're telling yourself or like the that's like the order that you're
going like that first of all I try to think in headlines Ju Just like uh so like if I have a good idea
of her story I think like what would the YouTube title be yeah or not necessarily because I
care about the clicks but because that just helps me like frame it you know like what's my
hook but then the the opening line is just is just as important because I got to grab their
attention because I usually the way it works is a lot of people say something's too long and I
and my opinion of that is like no that it's not that that article was too long it's that your slope
wasn't slippery enough you know what I mean like you got to get someone to fall down that
and you have to craft it early on because once someone starts reading they're more likely to
read through the whole thing do you know what I mean and so you you got to make that
slope really slippery to get them to fall down otherwise it's worthless that you spent all this
time working on this thing Lord of the Rings is who knows how long when you watch all the
movies people do Mar marathons in a day you have comedians who do these great stand-up
sets that are an hour and a half you have Rogan the most popular podcast in the world the
super hours yeah the idea that we're moving to short attention spans I don't think is quite
right I think that adjacent it's like we're moving to Shorter patient spans or something like that
that people want payoffs faster and faster almost with what you were saying about daresh
like in a comedy sketch that's really good it's an hour and half but you're getting a payoff
every 60 to 90 seconds just like what was going on in that speech yeah and I mostly don't
believe in like changing of trends like I've read Robert Green has this book called human
nature and he tells a story about how like some of the earliest writing on walls was a
generation complaining about the generation after them that they were lazy it's like that will
always exist you know what I mean and people will always be impatient like it's always been
the same so like uh if you read a lot of history you're like oh hey people nowadays are
complaining about World War III and they thought the Korean war was going to be World
War I like Churchill said World War I is about to happen wow yeah like people always think
that like one thing is going to happen I mean so anyway my point being is like I don't really
believe too much in like Trends uh like that human nature is almost always the same one of
the pieces of advice that I really like though that I think I'm going to implement is either write
a piece that's less than 500 words or write a piece that's more than 2,000 words and that in
the middle it just doesn't work like it's funny when I think of the most popular things I've
written they are things like the never- ending now certain tweets that are just these short
pieces super distilled literally like a screenshot or I wrote Peter Teal's religion I wrote a piece
called what the hell is going on in 2017 or 2018 that just went absolutely viral and I think of
those is like these definitive takes someone's going to sit down maybe make a cup of Joe
and actually read it very intentionally or just hey click it open it read it hey that was pretty
good ship it off to someone is sort of in the flow of the day today and there's something weird
about that middle that generally isn't as good yeah and we found that with the hustle so
that's kind of where that idea came from was like we would write these Sunday stories that
would go viral all the time we had this guy worked for us named Zach Crockett most people
have never heard of him but you definitely have seen his work because he would go every
Sunday we'd write something it would get 5 million views or 2 million views like constantly
and he was a he he made hits we always just say no deep Cuts hits only he just he wrote
hits you know he was like the Lady Gaga of Internet writing he just like pumped the out he
went an indie band and um what what we found was like either things that are long defined
as 2,000 or more or things that were short that is kind of like people want one of the other
um and they serve to different purposes and anything in between was a little bit uh no man's
land how did you craft a team you had staff you had Zach you had Trung all of these writers
who individually have a sense of distinctiveness a Vibe a personality but then get them to
write for the hustle in a way that was consistent with the brand but also not in a way that was
procrasti where you were yeah I mean basically morphing them and shaping them to where
they lost their Essence we I think I don't know how many people we had hired over the years
50 or 100 what we sold we had 30 or 40 people and of those like 30 or 40 or 50 people I feel
like 30 of them are like popular in the newsletter space now or own like a agency or own like
a newsletter company or own or are like prominent writers and so one of I take a lot of Pride
that we found what I always say is I'm going to buy her stock early before the market finds
out yeah and so we got really good at that so trong was like not a writer Trung was he
worked at an analytics company I don't even know what he was doing uh Steph was a
product manager I don't even know at top tail like she wasn't like um and so and Zach one of
our best writers he worked at a uh he was just a blogger um and so I would just like find
people who had good headlines or who could uh like trunk didn't have a Twitter when he
started working for us but I would do a few things one I would search for people who are
writing for fun so that's what Steph was doing she had a personal blog and she had one
headline that convinced me that she was great it was to be great just be good consistently
yes so I saw that and I dm' her I go that's an amazing headline you want to interview for a
job as a uh doing whatever I forget what her role was but uh that's why I found her with trun
and Zach I knew they would be good because I could usually what I look for is I call it the
bottom fourth of a resume so what you studied if you played Sports things that you put at the
very bottom and I asked you about that and and if you could tell me a story about it and
entertain me that gives me proof that you are an interesting person and you have an
interesting opinion and you might be a good writer and then what we did was we would take
our email our daily email and we would ask them just to rewrite it by hand for a few weeks
just to understand our voice and then we just said all right get after it so that you hinged a lot
on that bottom fourth what they did making sure that hey they have some interesting
opinions and yeah like if you spent like $200,000 on College and you can't entertain me on
like your favorite class you're a loser and I don't want to be around you like that's my
philosophy which and the other thing was are you still pretty big on these real work tasks
yeah like I believe in copy work that's how I learned how to write tell me about that so copy
work is uh I think I originally read about it in the Ben Franklin biography so Ben Franklin used
to use it and then Hunter Hunter Thompson wrote every sentence of the Great Gatsby so we
could feel what it was like to write a great novel yeah that's badass it's badass like Jud
appow did that with comedy and SNL scripts and so I wrot out this thing called copy work
about basically up until like the 1920s or 1930s this is typically how we taught children how
to write and when you think about an instrument uh we're really good at learning instruments
so like if I want to teach you how to play the piano I'll teach you a little bit about how to read
music but I could even teach you not to read music and I could just be like look copy me do
exactly this and then you play Jingle Bells and then you play Happy Birthday and then you
play a more complicated song but you're copying other people's work and then you're like all
right I want to like learn like rock and roll so I'm going to learn how to play like Nirvana and
then Green Day then I'm gonna like combine all this boom I've got my own thing now yeah
that's the best way to learn how to play an instrument my opinion it's also the best way to
learn how to write but we don't do that and so what I did was I spent months just locked in a
room doing this thing called copy hour where for an hour to a day I would just take the best
sales letters of all time and I would copy it by hand and you have to do it with a pen and
paper not typing it I do it with pen and paper and then I would like learn the texture of the
writing and I would see the uh the patterns of like great writing even writing that I didn't want
to emulate but I'm going to steal that from you steal that from you and I'm going to create my
own voice um and I do that with writing and I think that's the best way to learn in my opinion
what was a habit that you did for doing that what you do an hour day for six months or
something yeah and I still do it like right before I got to write something if uh if I have to write
I'll take like a book that I like and I'll just spend like just 10 minutes just really yeah like
Anthony Bourdain for example he's a really great essayist and um he had some like good
just like passages in his books and I always thought that um I thought that he approached
the keyboard with boldness and I appreciated that and so I would just be like all right I'm
feeling a little weak today I need let's get bold and I would I'll copy his stuff boldness that's a
big theme in the kind of writing that you got big tattoo right here and it says uh the the hustle
I go we're a pirate ship and every subscriber we get is a little bit of win in our sales and I
have bold Fast Fun BFF tattooed here because I believe that's my kind of my motto for
business is bold Fast Fun bold Fast Fun okay you're coaching me David writing is sterile it
lacks boldness what do I do like you have to give me a topic let's talk about R of Passage
like okay so the homepage for r a passage I want to have like right now we have you were
made for more and Harry dry was looking at he's like it can be better one of the things that
he always says make it falsifiable make it concrete make it Visual and like make a promise
at the top was one of the big things that he was saying and I just I even feel like what what I
would do if I was you is I would go through your testimonials or your reviews and find a line
of inspiration so like it could be as simple as like a a crazy claim like give us 90 days and will
I I would have to think but like we'll like turn you into like the greatest writer you'll ever be or
something like that this is exactly what what Harry recommended when he sent me these
loom video feedbacks and he said you have this thing towards the bottom of your page that's
super bold and it's out there what's the line 38 people from our last cohort called it
lifechanging that's a great one and we had that all the way at the bottom he's like what are
you doing yeah that's a good one life changing is a good one so like like some type of
promise with a number typically does well uh and then like a sub headline that it further
explains it yeah so like what what would you say your headline was or your H1 or your title is
You Were Made for More yeah I would make that like an age3 yeah like that would be to get
you to continue scrolling well one of the things I found with boldness is I find that sometimes
when I open a computer it's like I'm in work mode or something I'm a little scared or timid but
then if I'm just texting friends or or if I'm in conversation with somebody and I'm sort of
feeling a little hype then I'll say bold things and then what really helps me is to have friends
say hey that's good like last night I had a friend say write that down and I was like yes and so
I feel like boldness is something that I can't consciously cultivate but when I'm feeling
relaxed and calm or little energetic and sort of in the flow that's for me when boldness comes
out well then that's why I do copy work because that gets me in the the mode and typically
what I find the the good comes out into editing nine out of 10 times you write something and
like the first five paragraphs just delete it yeah and then that's where it starts you know after
you're like five in you got to get that crap out of the way and it's pretty normal I think you
have that David Ogie book on there what did he say I'm a I'm a lousy writer but I'm a
worldclass editor or something like that exactly uh typically that's how it works you got to get
the crap out the way you know it's like you're warm up and then your real workout is in the
editing yeah fast fun talk to me about those uh I just believe in speed I believe in momentum
I think when you start business or when you start any project if you don't start right away and
you if you don't put some Stakes on it you're screwed meaning if you say if you're fat and
you're like I feel fat and disgusting and horrible all right well post a shirtless picture online
and say in 60 days I'm going to look better and I'm going to post another picture in 60 days
and do it right now you have that idea do it right now I like I firmly believe in like putting your
back against the wall and there has to be Stakes on so what I like to do is like if I think of
something I'm going to like immediately put it out in the world so I feel pressured and I force
myself to do it or I'm going to put some money on the line to where I have to do it so that's
where fast comes in I'm a big believer in that what I do with my writing is if I'm at a dinner I
won't walk into my house until I've written out something that was an epiphany while I was
sitting down but the best thing I do is I have the GPT for voice transcription and it's so good I
mean it so much better than Siri and I just open up my phone every day for something and I
just say it while I'm out on a walk I say it right when I have the idea and I never let the
momentum the fire the Roar of an epiphany and never let that flame die I do it right now and
I think what you could even do is have like a personal blog that you don't even share with
anyone and you just put it out there so you're like that's on the internet like it's it exists
maybe I'm not sharing it but I know it exists and so I feel pressured into like doing that now
yep um which I have I have like a Blog that no one knows about but like it gets like 100
people a day who somehow find it through search and I just like I put that out there and it's
like I'm on the hook I so that kind of makes me feel on the hook so that's where being fastest
and then I just like Adventure and fun I don't know I just I love being a and getting into
Adventures so what Riders Inspire fun for you embody that I like Felix Dennis because he
talks about like some serious topics in a fun way uh I mean how to get rich was like the best
I don't read business books but I used to and that's the best one I've ever read hands down
well who are some other fun writers um my friend Neville madora like whenever I read his
work I'm just happier because I feel like I'm having a good time reading his stuff um who else
is a fun writer I don't think there's that many that like I don't know who do you think I think
Mike salana is hilarious I don't he's just a Twitter guy right yeah I mean he's so funny like he
just has such a voice about him that's my favorite thing about his writing I just feel like he just
injects you with just this shot of energy and it's funny like I just love the mix of fun and funny
like even now when I'm reviewing our team's copy or writing something for sales or for
something that a student will read I'm just like did this make me smile did it make you smile
as a writer I read something this morning it was like that was written under some kind of fear
I don't know what it was but like that was written with your back against the wall or
something that was not written from a place of love and the Flames of passion do you read
history at all not as much now do you know about MLK's assassination no I love
assassinations I read a lot about them so like there's only been four presidents who have
been assassinated you know who do you know they are hold on Lincoln yeah JFK easy hold
on Lincoln JFK who are the other two Garfield he was assass a something like 90 days in
would have never got that and then uh McKinley when so I've read all about the about their
ass I just love assassinations it's like a fun Thriller I love it because there's a beginning and
the middle and end yeah um and so I recently I read this great book called Hellbound it's or
hellbent Hellbound it's about the assassination of MLK and so basically this guy James oay
he was racist and he was crazy and he assassinated MLK and then he got away and a lot of
people don't know this you know where they arrested him they arrested him in England so
this like 90 days after he did it so he basically um shot MLK got in his car drove off and they
they didn't even see him and he drove all the way up to Canada where he got a fake
passport made and then he flew to Portugal and then to England and then on his way to the
uh to back to Spain or to Spain he was in the British English airport and he gave his passport
to the guy he put it into his pocket and now as he's walking off the security guard was like
dude you have is that a second passport that's coming out of your pocket and he was like oh
it's uh they spelled my name wrong so I had to get and they're like hold on man come here
what is this come here here and they they're like you have two passports dude this is Shady
come in here we got to talk to you and that's how they caught him that's crazy it was crazy
so he almost got away he was on his way to he was on his way to Africa because there was
like this racist government and they're like they're going to welcome me Wide Open Arms he
almost totally got away and that book it's like 300 pages I like read the whole thing and they
did such a good job of like capturing my attention have you ever read Shan ton uh
endurance Shan ton oh what shant Trum okay so shant Trump fiction book and I read no
fiction so recommending a fiction book this is like I'm recommending a fiction book and I was
with a friend and I was at his cabin One Summer and he was like hey I know you don't read
fiction I have a 90 a 900 page fiction book you have to read it I'm like there's no way that I'm
going to read this book he reads me the first page and I was hooked and I read the whole
thing and it's this guy Gregory David Roberts and it's like half fiction half non-fiction and he
basically is a convict from Australia he escapes from prison and he goes on these wild
adventures In India with women and drugs and crime and all of that but it is so well written
and we're talking about fun like what the kind of writing I love is writing that's so descriptive
that it almost makes me laugh David Foster Wallace does this and Gregory David Roberts
do it and you read it and it almost is more real than real like usually if you're reading about
something it's less real because there's less information content but if someone's really
descriptive they're like it's like reality on enhanced mode and this book has it and what's so
interesting is I love the book and apple made a TV show about it and I hate the TV show it's
just it has none of thec magic Gregory David Roberts has none of the of the lyrical Magic
and it was funny like me not liking the TV show made me realize just how much I like the
writing in the book some of the sentences will just they'll just knock that do you use good
reads no you you don't know what that is do you no I mean I know what it is is on by Amazon
you know what's funny about good reads the reviews for a book on Goodreads are
consistently more negative than they are on Amazon and they're so much more interesting
they're and they're really negative it's because I'm a big good raids power user it's because
the it's almost like early Yelp where you somehow think they're like a food critic when it's like
dude you're in and out like uh like so people Rel leave these long reviews and they're way
more pesimistic and so everything that has above a 4.2 on good reads is considered like
world class yeah so I get most of my stuff on good reads and I track it all on there um and so
I like it because everyone's really negative so tell me more about how you use it well I've got
like a list of like so I'm going to go and add David uh GRE David Roberts yeah I'm going to
go add that to my good re Sean teron and um that will be on my like my list and then at the
end of the week when I finish whatever I'm on now I'll just like what am I in the mood for and
I'll just like click it and get and buy it and that's usually how I I track everything but I
Goodreads is my favorite place to get book reviews they also have wonderful lists so anyone
can make a list of like and then others will vote up something in the list so it's like my favorite
era to read about is um like uh 1880 to like 1920 in America oh so much happened then
yeah there's a lot happened it was post Civil War so we were rebuilding things regulation
didn't exist and so you get bar yeah you these like crazy stories of like monopolies of like uh
the SEC wasn't real so um we were still getting out of slavery so like racism's a huge issue
and so you get these fantastic like riveting stories of like bad men and so that's my favorite
era to read about and uh they'll be like the best books about the Gilded Age and so there's
like a whole section just for that you know who yeah and so like I I love that era that's my
favorite era so tell me about your reading like how does that work you do a book a week and
you run a company you have a giant podcast you got super social you got a bunch going on
in your life how do you do that I'm not that social okay I'm not that social uh I don't drink I
don't go to bars so I'm like I'm a loser uh I exercise a lot and that's about it uh so I read my
book in the evening time is like it's there is no benefit in there other than it entertains me and
so um a 300 to page books book is between six and eight hours of reading and so you read
way faster than I do that's not that fast I read very slowly I don't read fast I'm not a fast
reader I'm very average I read very few pages and then I just think and think and think on it
like I have totally stopped trying to read a lot like I just read very little and then read dive into
it like I don't remember the last time like if you were to say six to 400 page book like at this
point it would just take me so long I just can't actually read for that long in the first place well
so I from like 10:30 to 11:30 or 10:30 to midnight I'm just reading like a history book and you
don't actually need to read every word of it like sometimes you'll like mistakenly like skip a
name and you're like I can figure it out as I go so that's why you could do that fast and so I
do that at night on my Kindle and I'll highlight stuff that I think is cool and then I'll just like and
then I'll write a blog post or write like a Google doc just kind of outlining some of the cool
stuff that happened just so I remember it and then during the daytime I'll try to take half an
hour to an hour and I'll read something that I think can enrich me so like I'm really fascinated
with um Burkshire so basically Hampton's going well and we have some money and I'm like
how do we reinvest this and so I'm reading um a book that's like a complete history of all the
Acquisitions of Burkshire hathway which is Warren Buffett's company and it goes and so I'll
just sit down for like half an hour during the day and I actually sit at a desk and I'll try to like
uh like take notes and like how does that apply to me and that one I'll go real slow and so
that's typically what I do is like um during the day it's like an enrichment thing at night I uh I
only do what's entertaining how did you write the company vision for Hampton how did you
think through that one thing that I screwed up at my other companies was I was pretty good
at writing about what we stood for and I was really bad at writing what we're against huh and
so I did a good job of like so for example that's back to boldness there's a real bold
component in that yeah and I'll give you an example so like Hampton has a masculine brand
and it's not because we prefer men over women we don't we I don't care if it's all women but
I want to I want to attract people who are aggressive about growth business growth
emotional growth things like that and today they'll be like well that's too masculine and I'm
like no it's it's it's good masculine I I like that and so like I'm not going to like try to I don't care
about pleasing that type of person mhm or um well this seems really exclusive and not
inclusive people will say I'm like yeah yeah it is uh it's not for everyone uh and you have to
be of a certain caliber to come um so like I I I think like knowing like what you are and what
what you aren't is actually as important and so I didn't really do that as good so like at the
hustle I would hire people who would call themselves artists cuz I like art and I think that
those types of people are cool but then I was like dude but you're just too slow so like you
take too long so like you know what I mean like I didn't do a good enough job of
understanding what I stood against I think it's either at the British library or the British
museum you can see the Magna Carta and it's from you know the 10th 11th Century 12
12:15 there we go and is that right I think it's 12:15 I don't know junah 12:15 that's
impressive if you got that right I for some reason that's the one fact that I ever remembered
nice so I think that it's it's very cool when you see institutions countries that where they're
founding document becomes this orbiting right I loveo and I was looking at a Greek
translation of the word aragos recently and as one does as one does and the variety of
meanings is so good the first is author source and origin that's one way to interpret it the
second is Pioneer founder and the third is ruler Prince and and which those are very
different very different but I think that that author source and origin Pioneer founder ruler
Prince would all be in the same thing and the way that it relates to writing is I see a lot of
writing as bringing those things together you are this founder You Are An Origin point for a
lot of ideas a seed and then if it goes well you become a ruler and a prince and I think that
there is something very deep with starting a company yeah there's something very deep in
that Ed ology from 2,000 years ago that reveals something about what writing can be that
only the written word can do the spoken word can't do that but the written word one
paragraph like you said and the way that it's locked in stone as the Magna Carta is it has this
gravitas this weight that gives it a propulsion to actually go make change in the world there's
this uh you're watch South Park yeah of course there's this episode where Cartman starts a
crackbaby NBA basketball league which is ridiculous and some person's try to negotiate with
him and he invents the league and he and he's like look ma'am that's against the rules I'm
sorry I can't do that and she goes what can't you change the rules she's like look ma I don't
make the rules I just think them up and write them down and I was like that's the greatest
thing ever so like so like that's kind of like a company where it's like look the rules are This
and like an employeer or a customer is like can't you change the rules like look I don't make
up the rules look I just think them up and write them down okay I don't I can't do that that the
rules are the rules totally so I think that that's like interesting where um I think it's super
fascinating I always think I think about the Constitution a lot because like James Madison
and Thomas Jefferson were in their like early 20s when they wrote this thing and I'm like
that's wild that almost 300 years later we like fight over what's the interpretation yeah it's like
it's pretty amazing and they very purposely chose words and it's really fascinating that
someone could be that young and like be wise enough to like pick those certain rul you know
life liberty and the pursuit of happiness it's like look we didn't say you have to be happy you
can pursue it you know what I mean and like it's always fascinating uh like the words they
chose and how we're still like fighting in between but we're still fighting in between the lines
to figure out what it means and I think that that's like really effective well this is why if
someone were to say hey what is one piece of Creer advice do you have like one thing I
would say is whenever you can be the person who writes if you want to have influence do it
because it isn't that what you write exactly that will happen but the person who sets the
frame has an invisible power over how a society functions how a community functions and
just like you're saying the founders of the Constitution set the frame they set the Overton
window that now we're battling against but that is like this invisible grain that has such
influence over how people live and it forces you to think so like I hate presentations I prefer
narrative written things so like have do you have any friends that work at Amazon no so you
know what they do right the six page well now it's way longer so I've got friends and they like
it's like 40 page memo we got to write but I think that's beautiful CU because um I think
Stephen King said this in writing on his book on on writing what did he say he said um you
don't have to think clearly necessarily to be a good speaker but you have to think clearly in
order to be a great writer and like in that writing you will become a clear thinker like you can't
when you write you actually have to think things through and so I love like having people
write SI down because it forces you you're forced to be logistical and like think about what
are you actually saying and how is this going to be implemented versus a presentation you
can yeah it's funny Paul Graham did this interview with Tyler Cowen and the most I'm
coming at this from a place of insane respect for Paul Graham the most revealing thing is
Paul Graham's ideas aren't super well formed out in the interview and he's almost a shell of
himself and what's so revealing is what Paul Graham does is he will spend a month or two in
an idea and that's how long it takes for him to find the bottomless pit and if you talk to people
who've gone through IC they'll say he's so helpful because he's in the sandbox of things that
he's written about but the Tyler to interview he's asking about like British housing policy yeah
he's one of my favorite writers too so good his essays are very good and he's pretty funny
when he writes uh he has like some type of like simple fifth grade like Hemingway yeah and
he he he like he has cute phrases like schlep work schle schle Rock talks about that a lot
yeah he has a very memorable phrasing goofy he's somebody who's smiling he's having a
good time when he writes that was fun it was good I think we went over a lot of stuff
hopefully the people liked it that was good thanks for coming on man I appreciate it I think
this is going to be a big thing I'm excited to see how all this is paid off me too what your work

How to Make Millions with Newsletters from the "Newsletter Growth Guy" |
Matt McGarry
[Music] you cannot invent and Pioneer if you cannot accept failure we wanted people that
were insanely great at what they did nobody was making any money at all uh most people
thought the internet was going to be a fad all right today on the podcast um I like to find
guests in an interesting Way by just stalking them on Twitter because they're making
amazing content and then I reach out and I'm like you need to come on to the podcast and
today I have someone that really inspires me of what he's putting out there and he's the
newsletter Guy this is uh Matt McGarry he's done some very impressive things grown
newsletters from like 10 000 subscriptions to quarter million that have been sold for seven
figures and he's going to come on and give us all of our secret all of his Secrets but Matt
what's up man glad to have you on hey what's up thanks for having me on it's good to
connect we've talked a few times you've helped me out with my agency a lot and um so it's
good to do this I think I discovered you through like the Trends Facebook group a year or
two ago yeah first got connected yeah that I haven't been as active there but you know I I
would do like some I try and really test some content there just to be very honest to to see if
it would make noise or get business and it was really active and I was very impressed with
the people that came from it um but I haven't been as active there but that that's been a fun
one um and yeah you worked there but before we even you know dive in like could you just
give a little background on yourself like kind of becoming the newsletter guy yeah my
background is I worked in marketing direct response marketing it's my whole adult life almost
and then back in around 2020 I got a job at the hustle which is a newsletter that now has I
think over 2 million subscribers and so I worked there for about two years that's how I got I
was in marketing before digital marketing but that's how I got my start in media and
newsletters and how to actually grow a newsletter and media business and so that was
awesome experience and that kind of parlayed that into starting a marketing agency for
newsletters yeah and I I feel like I know like I used to work at Urban daddy which kind of was
inspired by daily candy that sold for I think 150 million and they were just an email newsletter
I worked there and so I I really understood the power of newsletters and how to monetize it I
thought I knew some stuff but um I did a call with you a paid call which by the way very
impressive on your form you make people pay to speak with you so you get the Riff Raff out
so well done I've I don't that's something we might try and do but I was very like impressed
with our 30-minute call but one thing you and I were talking about beforehand is I don't think
people understand what it means to start a newsletter like oh cool people get a sub stack
and they're just sending out content and then maybe something good will come from it they
don't understand that the business behind it can you talk about first like why someone should
start a newsletter and two how can you make money from having a newsletter yeah it can
actually be a really awesome business model That's What attracted me to working at the
hustle I was just fascinated by this business model where you send an email every day you
get one or two sponsors and each um in each newsletter and it's a really profitable business
it's basically you have a writing team you have a growth team you have an advertising sales
team and it's a really simple and profitable business model and there's been some really
interesting outcomes so like the hustle the company that I worked at sold for earned 25 to 30
million dollars in about five years um and that's just one of the outcomes that are kind of on
the smaller end if you look at the biggest newsletters out there I think the biggest one people
wouldn't even know of it's called industry dive they sold for over 500 million dollars and they
were founded about 10 years ago and I think they sold one year ago and so it's a massive
outcome that's one of the biggest media Acquisitions or biggest media company sales ever
is a newsletter business called industry Dives that's really cool morning Brew which most
people know that's kind of the most common and well-known one sold for 75 million um and
then the milk road which is one of my first clients for this agency they sold for seven figures
like the estimate is is I don't know the exact number but you know seven four to seven
million and they started that company and sold it in 10 months and so there there's some like
outcomes on the big end of the spectrum too like big um big businesses multiple employees
um scaling quickly but there's also lots of kind of Indie businesses solopreneurs who are
using newsletters to grow businesses that are at you know 10K to 100 000 per month um
and you don't really hear about those either no and so I'd like to break that actually quick
question on industry dive was is there a Content B2B focused or b2c focused it's B2B and
that's why a lot of people haven't heard of them because they don't have um their brand as
an industry dive that's kind of the holding company they have all these separate brands for
different industry verticals so they have banking dive HR dive um CFO dive Etc construction
dive and so they'd have all these B2B Publications for these different verticals and they have
probably 20 or 25 that are super successful yeah I mean B2B is definitely where the money
is from like an advertising standpoint if all of a sudden you can be like hey you can get in
front of all these CMOS or director of operations or whatever that is um there's people that'll
pay a lot of money for those eyeballs not to say like morning Brew or daily candy that's more
consumer facing isn't great but like the cost per Impressions the cpms might not be as
valuable as B2B is that is that what you see as well yeah absolutely it's a it's a same
business model but different mechanics to it and so b2c newsletters that focus on Business
News sports news lifestyle Etc they're selling ads more based on a CPM on opens so they
pay they charge based on 1000 opens and usually that CPM is between like 25 to 50 per
1000 opens um however B2B the number is just much much higher it can be 100 per 1000
open so it could be a thousand dollars for one thousand opens the ranges are really broad
for B2B because it can depend on a lot of different factors and the reason B2B can charge
so much more for a sponsorship in their newsletter is because the people they have on the
list they basically have a lot of business decision makers CEOs CFOs um marketing officers
marketing people on these email lists and the advertisers are usually companies that have
Enterprise level products products that have an LTV of over a hundred thousand dollars per
year like high Enterprise software Services stuff like that so if they're able to pay tens of
thousand dollars tens of a thousand dollars for one sponsorship in one of the industry Dives
newsletter and they get one customer from that they get an Roi on that investment and so
there's a really interesting advantage to going B2B versus b2c oh yeah and I see it too with
um a lot of people kind of in our space where they've got even a list of 50k to 100K and
they're making you know three to seven K per email send um and that's that's a really nice
business um if you're sending like three per week or even more and so obviously there's like
ways to monetize it where you're selling the ad units and obviously people are buying these
companies there's an exit at the end of this rainbow so it's like all right sold let's do this as far
as launching a newsletter I want to like start from scratch if I'm someone that wants to launch
a newsletter how do I get started where do I go with like how I pick a niche or how I name it
or should I do paid versus free like what's some of the Frameworks you use if you're trying to
start something from scratch and guarantee success yeah the first thing I think about is
something that I would call a Content Market fit so a lot of people have heard of product
Market fit and so for news newsletters of content business of course you're going to have
this a little bit different version of product Market fed and so content Market fit is kind of the
intersection of what the market is interested in what people want to learn about what people
want to read about um what you can actually write about so your skill set your experience
your writing skills and like how they come together right so if you have experience and skill
sets that a lot of people are interested in um you can kind of just start there so what I find
that works best is people who have deep experience in one area maybe they've worked in
the industry for multiple years maybe they had a unique life experience or maybe they're just
a really skilled writer whether they're a journalist or they're just entertaining funny writer and
they can parlay that into the right topic so number one is developing that so how do you
develop that I think it comes down to picking a niche and starting variationally expanding
later so I like to say pick one Niche and then dial that in one the two niches deeper um and
so for example Tech with niche of like Tech or the niche of business or Finance or Sports it's
just too broad there's so many Publications around that you want to find something you want
to find your tribe kind of within that and so if you like football there's something within football
maybe it's even deeper than football maybe it's fantasy football or daily fantasy if it's
business maybe it's media businesses and then below media businesses what's even more
niches newsletters what I talk about so there's no perfect answer to finding your Niche it
really depends on what you're interested in what your experiences are and what you see
what opportunities you see in the market to cover and then you really just need to start
writing and getting responses to that writing it doesn't even need to be a newsletter at first
necessarily you can just start writing on whatever platform or publishing on whatever
platform you prefer so it could be Twitter LinkedIn or a really popular basis for newsletters I
would probably recommend those but also you know publishing on Instagram or Tick Tock
can be great too and you want to just publish consistently so you need to figure out what that
is for you that could be for me it's one thread a week one tweet a day for someone else it
might be one video a week or three videos a week and see what type of content what type of
topics are hidden and getting a great response and that's going to help you identify what
your newsletter is about um and so that's how it starts so Step One is like pick that Niche um
and then there's lots of steps after that I can dive into it too yeah so it's it's like picking that
Niche where you can really own it and have a voice and I also like even you do a great job
with your your Twitter Bots like newsletter guy I know that if I see content from Matt it's like
let's like turning on the TV if I go to ESPN MSC sport so I go to mtvl I'll see music and if I see
you I'm gonna see newsletter content so you can own that category one thing that I've
struggled with with our newsletter is how much of it is original thought leadership content
versus how much of it is curated right and then I see some other communities like Trends did
a great job of a curation of the community are there content formats people should think
through to make content that really resonates yeah that's a really good point about the
position of your of your topic to adjust the circle back to that like that's really key and that's
something you want to think about as you're writing content how can you pick a category that
you're the best in the world in right and how can you be the go-to person in that category and
it's a lot easier for people to pay attention to you if they know exactly what they're going to
get when they come to your newsletter or your social profile but to get into what that content
looks like I I've seen this framework by I think Dan oshinsky if I'm saying his name right he
has this this framework about the different types of newsletter voices and I think it's a good
way to think about that content format and so he there's five and I think these kind of
categorize all types of newslettes so there's the analyst and this is someone like a Ben
Thompson who analyzes industry there's a curator like we just talked about someone who
summarizes things who links to things who finds interesting things they bring value by finding
the most insightful and interesting things to the readers um number three is the expert so
someone who's just an awesome at a particular topic that could be like sports swimming
newsletters whatever I my content probably falls into the export category then there's the
reporter which is journalism essentially and then there's the writer which is kind of a catch-all
category where there's like this is creative work this is someone who's sharing um I would
say like personal advice personal development a lot of times art stuff like that and so I like to
kind of maybe pick one category or a combination of two and um ideally I think every
newsletter should have some curation however it's really hard to start with only curation uh
maybe if you have an existing audience starting to only create a newsletter is helpful so
people like um James clear and Tim Ferriss they have these newsletters James clear's one
two three newsletter Tim Ferriss is the five bullet Friday they're both all curated newsletters
and but before they started his newsletters over the years through their writing and podcast
Etc they built up a massive audience and so they can kind of have a easy to produce
newsletter that people subscribe to because they're just interested in what they have to say
because they have already read their original work right and so I do think it's hard to start
just curated however the great thing about curation is even if your original work you have in
the newsletter let's say you write like a how-to piece in your newsletter about something
maybe people aren't interested in learning about that topic that day however if you have you
know five to ten pieces of curation below that or above that piece there's probably at least
one or two things in that curated news or curated content that people are going to be into
and they're going to keep coming back to your newsletter because of that curated content so
I like to pick one of these and then add curation onto it that's such great advice and even
that's how we did our newsletter we'll start with curation and we'd sprinkle and thought
leadership pieces but it was so hard because you just get busy and like we do it even just
weekly and um the curation allows you to one hopefully give something for everybody but
also on those weeks where you just don't have the stuff it's like okay you can still add value
without writing a 2000 word article or doing something and like what we've done for original
content like this podcast is kind of one form of that we build in public that way the byproduct
of us growing our startups is content so I'm always interested in how you can repurpose
things but um sometimes nothing's as good as just making content that's specific for the
newsletter yeah and I think there's a way to do it so it doesn't require a ton of effort because
you have to think about this time if you're going to be publishing this newsletter weekly for
years or daily over time eventually it just makes sense to start weekly then add more sense
as you grow right so you have to have content and you can consistently do right and so like
2 000 words every week or every day just isn't doable and that may not even be what the
audience wants but maybe there's other content formats that you can make consistently and
that are still insightful and original in some ways yeah at the end I want to get into your your
content machine and operations but we'll say on this pads like all right we're sold let's do this
let's do a newsletter sell for seven figures or more like the milk road we've picked our Niche
we've picked our content format um how do I get my first thousand sign ups like what are the
things you do because so many people are launching newsletters now it's very crowded it's
like newsletters are cool again how do you kind of Rise Up from the noise yeah I think the
first 1000 is really all about publishing and getting yourself out there and most that's going to
come through social media I like to pick one platform because it's hard to be especially when
you're first starting out you can't do all the platforms maybe you can do too that kind of pair
well together like Twitter LinkedIn seem to pair well together but I would just pick one to start
with and start publishing about your topic I mean it could be if you're publishing a Weekly
Newsletter you're just repurposing that content every week into a thread or into a LinkedIn
post or you're purposing that content the long form content you write into five different tweets
throughout the week and just you know it's gonna when you start off and you have zero
followers it's gonna take time to grow that those people like the content they'll share it Twitter
has you know built-in sharing so does LinkedIn and so if that content resonates it's going to
grow and that's how you're going to get your first 1000. there's some other basic tactics that
make sense to do too so like you know having that of course you need to make your social
bios for all your platforms very clear and have a clear call to action for your newsletter so
Twitter bio has to have a clear call to action linked to your newsletter same thing with
LinkedIn um Instagram Etc adding that to your email footer is really helpful um sharing with
like your closest friends and colleagues is really helpful to get traction and like get you to
commit to something you know if you have 10 friends or 10 colleagues subscribed and
expecting a newsletter every week and expecting content every week that's gonna keep you
motivated to actually keep writing it so you kind of have to put those little um commitment
remember things up they're out there to yourself um and that's really 1K is maybe the
hardest part but also maybe the most simple when you get past that Mark and you see you
have some type of content Market fit then you can start to get into the more sophisticated
growth strategies that we've talked about that we could talk about yeah I'd love to get into
that so it's like it's kind of Scrappy good content distribution yourself to get to the first
thousand you did a really cool post on these different milestones and the different tactics you
have to do based on your newsletter size I'd love for you to kind of expand on that okay so
so first like zero to one K I would say is publishing publishing on Twitter LinkedIn wherever
your people are that's where you're gonna start so once you have 1K subscribers you can
start partnering with other newsletters to cross promote each other and so these are called
cross promotions or another form would be recommendations if you're familiar with substack
substack made this feature really popular call recommendations where you have to
subscribe to one newsletter they recommend other newsletters and so you can start to
cross-pollinate with other newsletters that are similar to you but non-competitive and start to
grow with each other and so the two ways are recommendations are really the easiest to set
up because they're kind of set and forget you just get a newsletter to agree to recommend
with you and then everybody who signs up make sign up for someone else's and everybody
who signs up to that newsletter may also sign up for yours so that's really simple hands off
the second one is cross promotions or some people call this ad swaps and you're basically
you're just going to have an ad for another newsletter in your newsletter and they're going to
do that as well and so you want to find people who of course are a similar topic but also
have a similar list size similar open rate similar click-through rate and you want to have
basically a small shout out in your newsletter for them and they do the same and the best
way to do this is probably with a tool called lettergrowth.com this popped up recently I also
have some resources on my Twitter the device but basically this is a directory of a ton of
different newsletters and you know if you're publishing the space you're probably going to
know what newsletters are similar to you anyways and you can just reach out to them but if
you need to find more people lettergrowth.com is a good resource for that and this can take
you I mean it's a really simple strategy but people have added tens of thousands of followers
or subscribers rather just by doing recommendations in cross-promotion sometimes many
more just from these two different strategies that are same in some ways and so once you
get to 1K where you actually have an audience to do that I would recommend doing that as
your next growth strategy after social content yeah it's so interesting because um we've
been very like just Bottoms Up making good I hope we think is good content and just
recently we did that path of trying to partner with different platforms that connects you with
other people's lists and we were getting like 200 email signups per day I have not seen letter
growth I will definitely be checking that out um and so you start to grow you're getting to like
five maybe ten thousand email signups what what's some of the next tactics you do after that
yeah I like the next one is now we have a bigger audience and maybe now that audience will
be open to sharing the newsletter With Their audience right it's the next tactic I would look
into as a referral program and I think this is really popularized by morning Brew in the hustle
it's what's called a milestone based referral program there's different ways to do it but this is
probably the simplest ways to start and this basically is every time you refer someone or one
of your readers refers someone else to the newsletter they get a sign up for you um they get
a reward after a certain Milestone so that could be for my newsletter I basically have like a
PDF guide I give it one referral I have another like piece of content I give five referrals and
then I have online course that I give away for free when someone sends me 10 referrals
there's tons of examples for this morning Brew the hustle have done a lot of like physical
swag so like 10 referrals you get a t-shirt 25 you get a sweatshirt 50 you get a hat that may
not be the best way to do it for most people however if you have a brand that's like has really
cool branding cool visuals I think physical swag could work well it really depends on what
you need so my newsletter more based on business advice so I give away digital content for
people however a physical stuff works too and so the way I would do this is look at a bunch
of other referral programs and see what they're doing and see how you can emulate that so
morning burn the hustle are good the milk Road had a lot of success with the referral
program um I have one too people can check out a newsletter operator there's probably a
ton more you can look at and then the way you set this up is with tools that there's custom
built tools for this so the most popular one is called spark Loop spark Loop also has a ton of
content about how to set this up and then also beehive which is the email service buyer that
I use has this as a filter has a feature built into their product so you don't even have to use a
third party tool to set this up like James Clear I think he does like a you know refer and get a
secret chapter that wasn't in atomic habits that I think performed really well for him that I like
that I think low referrals and giving away a digital product or something digital it doesn't cost
anything to you makes a ton of sense and so at the milk road we gave away like a report that
was called like what crypto whales are buying and selling right now it was basically they
interviewed 10 to 15 people who were like huge crypto investors and they asked them about
their investment strategy um at the current state of the market and that generated I think
over 20 or 30 000 signups just from referrals and we gave that away for people who referred
one reader to the newsletter um so I like that like one to three referrals you get a digital
product you know later on you can give away more if you have a product that you're open to
giving away for free like you have an online course you have the physical product whatever
that you can give away at 10 20 25 referrals that one works really well too that's uh that's a
really good example from the milk Road um okay so now now we're approaching like 10 or
25k when do we start monetizing the newsletter and when can you start doing paid tactics
for the newsletter I think depending on your newsletter topic you can start monetizing as
soon it can depend a lot because like At first your ad prices are going to be really low
especially if you have 1 000 subscribers so maybe it makes more sense to sell a service sell
Consulting sell a digital product but when you get to 5K 10K 25k you can definitely start
monetizing with sponsorships and so at that point your newsletter definitely should be
monetized in some way after you get past one or two thousand subscribers whether that's
with ads Affiliates something else um in the way to maybe we'll Circle back to monetization
but the way once you get to maybe between 10K and 50k subscribers a great way to grow is
with paid ads with paid marketing and that's what I've done a lot for newsletters like the
hustle and the milk Road and the types of ads that work best are basically social ads so
Facebook ads Instagram ads Tick Tock ads now Twitter ads are becoming more popular too
for newsletters um just the ad platform there is changing but this is a of course there's more
fun not the other tactics are mostly invest in your time now we're talking about investing
money too so it's a little bit of a higher risk higher reward strategy but it's a very scalable
strategy too at the hustle over I think the lifetime of our like Facebook ad campaigns over
four or five years we generated over 800 000 subscribers just from Facebook ads for the
milk Road I drove probably over 150 000 subscribers just from Facebook ads not including
other AD platforms and so it's a great Channel um however you got to do it right because
you don't want to be throwing away money you don't want to be acquiring subscribers at a
crazy high cost so I can dive into how to how to do that exactly yeah because I mean I think
a lot of people like without seeing our agency we do quite a bit of paid ads we're selling
products we're selling software right as opposed to just going for the the cost per email sign
up um you know what what are some like quick tips or advice you could give to people on on
how to Think Through Those ads yeah so number one is pick your ad platform I really
recommend the Facebook ad platform it's the easiest to use it's usually has the best cost
most effective best targeting options your audience for most newsletters your audience is
going to be there I think like 40 of people on the internet use Facebook or Instagram every
single day so you're gonna find people there right A lot of people say Their audience isn't
there but they really are maybe they're more active on Twitter or something else but they're
on Facebook and Instagram too to hang out with their family and friends um so that's the
platform I would pick and I would start with making a great landing page I have some content
about this um on my Twitter website it's hard to explain how to make a landing page visually
like we could talk for 20 minutes about any Pages we won't get into but it's really important
and I like a simple short landing page that basically just asks someone to enter their email
address to sign up um so you want to have that in place you also want to have a thank you
page in place because we find that um tracking based on a URL redirect what Facebook
calls a custom conversion is a lot more effective than tracking based on a button click or
something else and so you want to have a great landing page able to sign up to once they
sign up they're redirected to a thank you page for your newsletter um of course you want to
install your pixel we won't get into every single detail about a set of Facebook ads but that's
where you want to start and um after you have your landing page set up you have your pixel
set up you have your custom conversion you've picked your ad platform the next step is
targeting or I guess the next step would be your campaign type actually so there's the
campaign type there's who you Target and then there's your ad creative and so the
campaign type is simple but some people mess this up you want to use a conversion
campaign I think what Facebook calls now a lead campaign you a lot of people would pick a
traffic campaign because they think I want to give as much traffic to my website as possible
however Facebook basically any AD platform will send you very low cost traffic that just
doesn't sign up for your newsletter they almost over optimize for the objective you pick so
you want to pick the right objective and that's going to be conversions or leads and then you
want to do your targeting so the targeting depends on your newsletter topic but the easiest
way to set up targeting is just to Target other Publications that are similar to yours so if you're
about sports you're going to Target ESPN if you're about business you're going to Target
Wall Street Journal stuff like that you can also use look like audiences which I think a lot of
people know about where you upload your email list and Facebook goes creates audience
that is similar to that and they find people that are similar to people that are on your email list
right look like audiences and so the final step here is AD creative and this is one again it's
kind of hard to explain without a visual but we have um one of the best ways to learn about it
is just to look at what other great newsletters are doing so a lot of people know about the
Facebook ad Library you can look up a Facebook page of other popular newsletters like the
hustle morning Brew milk Road we'll talk about other newsletters later and just see what ads
they're running and get some inspiration from the copy the types of images the types of
videos what's really working best now for newsletters on on Facebook and Instagram ads is
what we call ugc videos these are like short usually 15 to 25 second videos of someone
shooting selfie style if you can do this to yourself as like the newsletter writer or founder
that's even better but you can also pay people to do this for you on Fiverr or if you just
Google ugc videos there's tons of marketplaces to find people who create videos like this for
you and so basically have someone make a video that's kind of somewhat similar to a
testimonial about why your newsletter is awesome and why people should read it and so
that's kind of what the Facebook ad process looks like and you don't need to do every single
ad platform you don't need to have 12 different ad platforms there's I think maybe a billion
people on Facebook I have no idea but there's got to be hundreds of millions of people on
Facebook and Instagram that you can reach so there's enough people on that platform to
grow your newsletter to millions of subscribers right um and then over time you'll test more
as you get good at Facebook yeah no yeah I I think so many times just with our agency we
see people try and diversify too soon on channels when they haven't squeezed the most out
of one channel and maximize their spin there so I I totally agree there so I'd love to hear so
you join the hustle um talk to me about like coming up with a strategy for acquisition and how
you kind of took the reins to do that was that something they were already figuring out or
was that something you were able to innovate on or were you just putting gasoline on the fire
because I'm what I'm getting to is how you really like perfected your craft at the hustle and
then how that kind of led to this like move to go out on your own thing yeah I came on an
interesting time where the hustle was really focused on the trends.co product which you
know about you were in the Facebook group there and so that was a subscription paid
newsletter and they were so focused on that that was a great product awesome product
Community that's providing recurring Revenue where the hustle and newsletter was kind of
left behind because the entire team was focused on that and they had no one assigned to
actually grow the hustle so at the point I came on the list was actually declining we were at
like 1.5 million before I came on and by the time I got there it was like churning down to 1.3
million somewhere in that range and so my job was basically be totally responsible for the
hustle newsletter and growing that to over 2 million subscribers and so I kind of had to
because the list was declining there wasn't a lot of marketing there going on I kind of had to
figure out the marketing strategy from scratch however there was obviously years of work
before me to get to over 1 million but I had to kind of start and reset the marketing strategy
so number one was figuring out what we called self-serve advertising so that was figuring
out Facebook ads Facebook ads have been a great channel for the hustle historically it had
generated like over a hundred thousand subscribers or maybe 700 000 before I started but it
had kind of fallen behind Costa got higher um the ad formats had changed and they hadn't
really innovated on the Facebook side so step almost figuring out Facebook ads and then
second of that was like figuring out new channels that new new paid growth channels that
we wanted to explore so at the time back in 2020 Tick Tock was a somewhat new ad
channel so that was the one we dove into next and so Facebook pretty soon after that
Facebook and Tick Tock ads became one of the biggest growth channels for the hustle we
figured out how to do ugc videos ugc video ad group like I just talked about for the hustle
and we were really good at that before I came on they're basically using all images and the
kind of the ad like the the way ads work to change you know it'd move from images working
the best to videos working the best so we we got really good at finding dozens of different
actors to make videos for the hustle and use those videos as ads on Facebook and Tech talk
and Instagram so that was number one and then the second thing we did a good job of was
figuring out affiliate marketing and this is something they had dabbled in a little bit but I went
a lot of steps further to optimize it so it's kind of oh affiliate marketing is a lot a lot more
opaque than like Facebook and Tick Tock ads anybody can get started there it's it's a little bit
more challenging to start affiliate marketing for a newsletter um because if you you're not a
certain size or you don't have a certain budget you can't even Explore this channel like if you
don't have five or ten thousand dollars to spend with one of these affiliate Partners they're
not going to consider working with you but I can talk a little bit about that it is a really
interesting Channel because most people just don't know about it like they know about
Facebook ads they know about all these app platforms influencer marketing but they don't
know affiliate marketing is somewhat on the underbelly of like the internet if you know what I
mean oh yeah a little bit about it yeah there can be like some not a lot of some things people
like oh we don't do affiliate marketing or other businesses that they just like explode on the
back of it yeah I'd love to know like what what worked with affiliate marketing yeah so I mean
Facebook Tech talk and referrals were always core and also organic traffic we've got a lot of
SEO traffic we converted the website visitors into subscribers that was like our core um high
quality subscribers but we were able to get a lot of extremely low cost lower quality
subscribers from affiliate marketing so I'll dive into that and so there's basically um the main
type of Affiliates we use were called co-registration and so it's again this is our dictionary for
the visual but let's say you sign up for a newsletter on like um readersdigest.com after you
sign up you might see three to five different ads for other Publications or other products and
you can check a box to select subscribing to this publication too so we did lots of
co-registration marketing across literally hundreds of different websites so I'm like Readers
Digest some like you know giveaway sites like they're giving away a Macbook or something
people would sign up for that and then they would also select a sign up for the hustle too and
we would pay 20 cents to 35 cents for subscribers from all these different websites and we
would optimize which ones are bringing in the highest quality subscribers who has the
highest serpent rate high school thread which ones don't it's a lot like Facebook ads where
you're pausing what is not working positing what is low quality and doubling down on what is
high quality and so there's a ton of optimizations we did and we worked with probably at
least six different affiliate um Brokers I would call them to find these hundreds of different
websites to advertise on and so that's called co-registration there's not a lot of information
about it online um but it worked extremely well because the subscriber cost is so low 20
cents to 35 cents um most subscribers were coming from these co-registration Affiliates it's
just it's hard to it's hard to outgrow that with Facebook when your your cost per subscriber is
two dollars on Facebook and 20 cents on another platform so you're always going to have
more subscribers there but we had to think about it in like a fashion where we're not
allocating too much much of that so we normally kept that type of source around 20 to 25 of
our marketing budget and um sources like newsletter ads Facebook Tick Tock um referral
program that was more like 75 of we would actually spend gotcha oh that that's super
interesting so it it's clearly going well at the household well what's interesting is like if people
listen to this man listen to my first million you worked with two companies owned by people
from my first million like what was it like working with Sam par it was good I didn't get to work
a ton of Sam we more like just chit-chatted because I came on about I think four to six
months before the hustle was sold and so once it was sold to HubSpot Sam wasn't like
directly managing wasn't doing stuff like that so I worked a lot more of the rest of the team
Scott Nixon many other folks there so Sam was awesome he's like what I've learned from
Sam and also Sean Perry um is like the tenacity that they get after things and like the
expectations they have um it reminded me a lot of like my high school football coaches like
the type of management they were doing they're like let's get this done yesterday um yeah
and have it kind of been reality a little bit and have the expectations that are a lot higher than
your average person I think a lot of people would be happy with like a three dollar subscriber
from a Facebook ad but Sam was like we need to make this 50 cents and like figure out how
to do it um so yeah it's a lot of fun yeah and I think the right team members could respond
really well to that or maybe they won't but that's really cool feedback and then so so it's
clearly working at the hustle when do you make the move to go all in on your own thing and
then how do you land the milk Road as a client I mean it's probably from your track record
but that's pretty impressive yeah I kind of just somewhat dabbled into it and then fell into it
because I wanted to I was working at HubSpot um or I was working on the Hostile ad
HubSpot and the company changed a lot I didn't want to keep working in the big tech
company um and I I applied for shipping jobs but really I was very picky and I couldn't find
the job that I wanted so I was like I'll try some freelancing so I reached out to Sean Perry
who started the milk grow in January I think I reached out to him like late January where I
was still working at the hustle and he said yes and I started doing that on the side of my
main gig and then eventually that went well I was really enjoying the work I had some more I
guess referrals or like some more people I closed through code email and then at like I think
only two to three clients on that kind of freelancing for other newsletters I kind of took the
dive to do that full time and it wasn't until a few months later where I really decided to turn
that into an agency and not just you know consulting or Contracting by myself yeah um and
what who else I mean you've got a pretty impressive list of companies you worked with
anybody else to like call out or like lessons learned it's cool to hear what you learned from
Sam and from Sean but anybody else the milk grow is really interesting we can dive into that
um 1440 is one that I worked for a lot it's one is like really under the radar kind of like
industry dive is extremely successful but most people wouldn't know about them they have a
newsletter of over 2.3 million people um and I've worked with over like 20 newsletters now
bins bites is one I worked over recently it's like a really fast growing AI newsletter and so
maybe we can talk about some of the the more recent strategies that like they're using
currently yeah I'd love to hear that yeah Cody Sanchez but yeah but that's so maybe we'll
dive into Ben's bites so we can Circle back to any other ones that are interesting again Ben I
just started working with them really recently so I've only kind of seen what he's done and we
just started in the past two or three months um and basically one thing that's helped him a lot
is just like being early on the trend and so everybody when Chad GDP launched I guess it's
got to be two or three or five months ago now Ben had already had AI newsletter that had
launched three or four months before that and was publicly talking about it on Twitter daily
and so one interesting strategy that he used to grow the newsletter was kind of being the
reply guy and so every time there was a big piece of AI news they dropped Ben would reply
to it and be like hey this is awesome I'm adding this to my AI newsletter tomorrow and then
you would link to the newsletter and so he would reply to people like the CEO of Google and
the CEO Google's tweet had millions of Impressions and then Ben will be the first reply and
he would get you know 50 000 Impressions and then he would get hundreds of subscribers
from that so um just owning that AI category on on Twitter and being the first and best in that
category helped a ton and then now we're kind of accelerating that growth of paid acquisition
with marketing on Twitter ads Facebook ads Tick Tock ads Etc the reply guy is a great tactic
um I I've heard people talk about that and I've seen it work even when I've tried to do it it's
like oh wow like the engagement that can get is insane so that's a really cool one he has a
great referral program too that's generated a ton of signups for him and so if you look at his
newsletter binsbytes.com I think it's very creative content so there's probably 20 30 different
links A Day to all the different AI news different AI tools that are out there and then he has
created kind of like a really organized spreadsheet for a database of all these different links
that have been in the newsletter and there's thousands of them now because he's been
sending every day for months and so if you refer one person the newsletter you get access
to that database and so if you're already interested in the content you're going to want to
have access to find more content like it or have it in a more organized fashion so that is has
got to have done at least 10 000 subscribers for him man that's awesome and yeah it's really
nice to ride the AI wave that's only going to get bigger and bigger and bigger as people want
to learn about it so you're now this agency owner like what what has it been like being as this
kind of accidental agency owner like what's your your kind of takeaway after kind of getting it
going and getting it working but now you're kind of building this team yeah I've been lucky to
kind of fall into the right Niche I mean I kind of I wanted to work in with the hustle for years
like I DM sampar one or two years before I got hired there because I was interested in the
business I was trying to share insights with him and so I guess it's been a long time coming
even though I've only just started the agency about 11 months ago right um and so I guess
what first of all I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do because before I started with the hustle
I did a lot of freelancing I was like I don't ever want to do client work again um but then I kind
of heard if you're familiar with um what's the same the guy from tiny.com Andrew Wilkinson
yeah or um talk about his Agency on my personality and talk about that being the building
block to build is other businesses it being a cash flow asset the advantages of building
agency business really resonated with me um it's one where one of the few businesses
where you can get started and have a media cash flow immediate profitability do the service
yourself nothing really out there exists I mean media is kind of comparable to that where you
can start a newsletter and have very low cost or start a YouTube channel or something like
that but it's almost a lot harder to get traction on those types of businesses and a lot easier
to get started on the agency and so I I like it in that way of course there's still struggles every
day but like one one strategy has worked well for me is hiring people from other good
agencies and so I have and also hiring people from other great newsletters so I've hired
people from morning Brew I've hired people from other very successful e-commerce
agencies and I basically just use the tactics strategies that they've learned at their other jobs
and apply them to my agency so that's worked well I'm up to like five part-time people now
and um I think I plan to keep using that strategy over and over again just just grabbing more
people from those companies and having them work part-time for me totally getting the bin
there done that person can take a lot of weight off of your shoulders and a lot of stress there
I mean there are good up-and-comers that you can train but when someone just hits the
ground running on day one you're like oh my goodness thank you so much so um well very
cool well one question um I always like to ask is what is the nicest thing anyone's done for
you in your professional career yeah I don't have a great emphasis I would say my manager
of the hustle Scott Nixon he was kind of the the CEO of law school essentially he was kind of
like leading the team there and I reported to him and it's talk about like the best manager I've
ever had helping me grow personally and like figuring out what my goals are and what I
wanted to do he pushed me there and the piece of advice he gave me I think when I left was
like if you're good at something or if you have experience with something just double down
on that and that's what kind of encouraged me to actually go out and do this because I didn't
think um I I didn't think the category was big enough to have a marketing agency or even a
media company about newsletters I thought it's such a small Niche like people don't really
care about this it's so tiny when I listed out like potential clients for this agency I could only
list like 20 or 30 different companies um but now there's there's literally thousands that could
be clients for this and I guess it's growing a lot too but Scott giving me that advice to like like
you have experience for this you're already in newsletters just keep doing it and see what
happens um helps so much because people you know they look for people who have
experience and Authority with other big names in the industry and if you're able to build on
top of that instead of starting from scratch in another area um that helped me a time is I was
going to go work in SAS or work in startups or something completely different and I would
have to start and kind of build my career all over again versus just going on what I did yeah
it's nice because I love this idea of escape velocity where you build up this experience at
other companies but then when you burst out to do your own thing you have all this
momentum and you're really able to to harness that very well and I I mean I think it's smart
like my favorite agencies are the ones that do that where you do something well like you said
it's like growth marketing but then you take it one step further and it's like just for newsletters
because whenever people like oh I need to like grow my newsletter it's not even like oh look
at all these other options like oh no go talk to Matt like he's literally like the guy and so no
man I think it's it's really well done and it's it's cool to have someone that had your back and
kind of gave that recommendation um but um but but very cool man um but yeah look yeah
but um but what else man what what like I want to like be able to tell people where to to send
you but anything else you want to hit on I feel like you just put on a master class for for
newsletter growth but what didn't we cover yeah I mean there's so much I don't know how
much time you have we can talk about the milk Road a little bit um that might be the most
interesting case study because they sold for seven figures in ten months they grew from 10K
subscribers to 250k subscribers in 10 months and that's one I was the first person hired
there part-time yeah so I've I've got like five more minutes I'd love for you to just Riff on that
because I think that's such a cool story and the fact that you came in at such an early point
yeah it shows that like it's it's news I think we're going to see more newsletters in the future
have a lot of success stories like this I think we're just getting started in the newsletter space
I mean there's the daily candy the skin the morning morning Brew of like built industry but
we're going to see a lot more Niche newsletters pop up and have these quick success
stories um and then milk Road was like a matter of basically two things being having great
content Market fit I would say three things actually great content Market fit popping on a
trend that was exploding and being really good at paid acquisition and so I was really hoping
that third area and so Sean and Ben Levy who created the milk Road they were amazing at
explaining crypto in an easy to understand funny way um in publishing that daily obviously
the trend was happening at the time back in January of last year it was actually kind of on
the downturn of the trend in crypto so that was a bit of a struggle but we still rode that Trend
and then being great at paid acquisition was basically taking everything that I did for the
hustle and copy and pasting that strategy of the milk Road and doing the exact same thing
just applying that to a different newsletter and then putting money behind that growing from
you know 10K to 250k in 10 months 85 percent of that subscriber growth came from Paid
acquisition so Facebook ads Tick Tock ads affiliate marketing in a little bit of referrals and so
that's what made it successful I can even break down like week to kind of dive into that
because I think people find the numbers interesting I think over 150k from Facebook ads
north of 30k from Tick Tock ads north of 20K from referrals and the rest is kind of
miscellaneous Twitter and resources stuff like that what's like the average cost per email that
you're going for on that at the lower ends when the market was really booming like April of
last year Marshall last year we were getting subscribers for a dollar ten to a dollar twenty and
then when the market started to slow down our costs went up to you know dollar fifty dollar
seventy um we started to spend less too um but that's really good I usually shoot for under
two dollars and we were just crushing that that Target yeah now the other thing that I think
they did really well was create a brand where they could really create kind of this following
because you could just be like oh crypto weekly or whatever but instead it's like no let's
create a brand around this which can be a little bit harder when you're getting started
because like wait what is this but once people resonate with it it really clicks and I think that
aligned with the type of content I made yeah and the funny thing is they're all about moving
faster on things that are important so they got a great domain they had a great writing voice
but they actually didn't create the the character and the logo in their brand colors until
they've reached 100 000 subscribers they were like we're not gonna even make a logo until
we're at 100K yeah so I think there's value to that too but when they did do the brand they
did it amazing and it's super memorable and awesome yeah they really kind of knocked it
out of the park with that because even like ours it's like startup growth by growth hit and I
think it needs a little bit more soul to it but I was just like let's just go and prove this but that's
uh that's really good feedback I also speaks to the speed of like let's validate this is there it
gets 100 000 and then we'll invest in this or is there anything Founders or first-time Founders
could be like oh let me spend a lot of time on these things that maybe not might not move
the needle needle like your brand or your colors or things like that yeah you can get
paralyzed by the tiny things that aren't really important oh yeah until later at least yeah well
so um one last thing actually what's kind of the end goal because I think you and I are
drinking the the same Kool-Aid as far as the Playbook that Andrew Wilkinson has with meta
than to Tiny I mean that's kind of our goal is we're like doing the startup studio is is that kind
of the end goal that you have with your agency or um what what's kind of the next thing after
you get this thing really working the way you want yeah I'm trying to grow vertically right now
so I'm gonna go in the agency but I'm going to basically my audience's newsletter Founders
and operators and media companies and also content creators have a newsletter and so I
basically want to build products um up and down the value letter for those people so right
now I have an agency that's probably higher on the value letter but I want to create you know
I have a free newsletter it's lower in the value letter I want to kind of fill that in so I want to
create an online course that's probably going to be between 100 to 2 000 that's a broad
range but it's going to be filling that in so like yeah people who can't afford my agency they
can get more information from the course and maybe there's something above the agency or
maybe there's parallel products in different ways I can help people so right now it's really
focused on still helping newsletters but just helping them in different ways and then hopefully
over time I'd love to explore different stuff but I really feel like I got to maximize this first
before I go to a different type of product for different Niche rather it makes total sense that
way you're helping people at every phase of their like newsletter Journey from hiring the
premium agency or give them free content or course to get them started but um and what's
cool is as you're building your own audience and following a newsletter you know they're
going to be interested because there are different phases in the different things that you offer
so no man that's that's awesome thank you yeah that's the idea yeah well cool well Matt man
um where can we send people if they want to learn more about you and what you're doing
thank you the place where I publish most is the news newsletter operator.com so that's my
newsletter and then I'm most active on Twitter my handle is at J Matthew McGary yeah I
definitely recommend uh the follow um he's just dropping knowledge like even like some of
your newsletters I'm like oh my gosh I would have spaced that content out over three weeks
you just put so much good stuff in there but no man really appreciate it it's so cool to see
what you're building and the rate that you're building it at but uh look forward to talking more
yeah thanks for having me on this is awesome I love your questions yeah thanks Pat [Music]
foreign

How To Grow A $75M Newsletter Business | Morning Brew Co-Founder

(#398)
all right so we have Austin here Austin Reef founder of uh morning Brew uh I I I I know how
big you guys are I don't know what the public numbers are so I'll let you kind of say like how
big is the company now yeah 70 75 million of Revenue this year uh double digit profit uh
margin 250 people or so [Music] and it's kind of crazy kind of a crazy story you guys started
this you guys were at college right you're you're at uh is it Michigan where you guys went to
school yeah so so we're at the University of Michigan uh I applied to Duke didn't get in
though unfortunately sorry and so I went to Michigan yeah I went to a small private
condolences uh so I no Michigan worked out well it was a little cold a little bit colder than
Duke but I I mean my goal was to go to the biggest school I could get into other than you
know Ivy or Duke so I got to Michigan had no idea what I wanted to do uh and everyone
went to finance of Michigan so I was like oh I gotta I gotta follow the herd I was a sheep
following the herd straight into the world of corporate finance or Investment Banking uh and
then stumbled upon this guy Alex Lieberman who was like I wouldn't even call a newsletter it
was a PDF attached to an email he actually took a he made a Word document he would
PDF it and put it to an email and that was the first newsletter so he was all he was already
doing it was it called morning Brew no it was called market corner it was way more Market
space way more Finance oriented was he in college as well or was he had he graduated
yeah so he was two years older than I was and that's a big part of our success to be honest
uh if I was his age we probably would have went out and raised Venture Capital so you know
20 2015 you have BuzzFeed raising money Vice raising money and the only reason we
didn't follow that path was because I was in college and no one's going to fund a sophomore
in college and so Alex went to work at Morgan Stanley for 14 months I spent the summer in
Investment Banking and was like holy [ __ ] this is miserable get me out of here and so I was
like all right well I got this morning Brew thing I might as well do it for a couple years and
what's the worst thing that happens I come back here and that was the that was the start of
going full time what did your nice Jewish parents think about you not becoming a banker and
instead working on a newsletter so my parents were actually okay with it except I told them
after my junior year I said I have one more year of college what if I I just don't go back what if
I don't finish and the idea of them spending a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on three
years of college and not finishing my senior year drove them nuts so the deal we made is if I
graduate and they were cool with me doing morning Brew for a year or two after and then
fast forward you guys so it was funny uh right when we were in the process of selling you
announced that you had sold like months or two months uh and it before us and so you guys
sold a portion of the business I think the majority of the business for at something like a 70
million dollar valuation in that ballpark right yeah right around there I think we were actually
we were doing M A at the same time we were even talking to some similar Partners I I think
we were and the reason why like Sean and I wanted to have you on because we want to talk
about newsletters which every all three of us have a newsletter business but you and I have
an interesting background we're like on paper we kind of hated each other like the whole
time I hated you dude I hated you so I didn't entirely hate you I just it was it was like I uh it
was like Just Sports a posting sports teams where I was like I have a lot of respect for this
person I don't know anything about their character but I'm gonna make up the story in my
head to like motivate me and the reason why I wanted to do that was because we so I
launched we technically launched the hustle in April April 2016 were you before us or after
us we were 25th teen when we launched the first newsletter but it wasn't it was a very small
thing though so we were going like back and forth it was like the skin was like the thing and
then it was you and I morning Bruno and the hustle and you guys were this like a New York
kind of buttoned up crew I was like a little bit of a crazier person it was Tech San Francisco
but it was like everyone kept comparing us and I remember like wanting to like Crush you
guys and then after we built sold Alex called me and uh you and I became buddies and I was
like oh no I actually love these guys and now at this point you and I are great friends and I
have a ton of respect but uh yeah like I wanted to crush you I didn't I didn't really hate you
what did you feel yeah look I think it's always good for a business to have an enemy I think in
the early days our enemy was the skim very quickly though we were like you know what
they're not our enemy we realized I think we both realized pretty quickly that you can't raise
25 million dollars for a newsletter and have a good exit and so I think it was you and us and
so I turned you into that enemy and I was so immature at the time right this was my first
thing out of college I knew nothing so I was like here's this guy he's so abrasive he's so
aggressive like what the [ __ ] like I was so I I wasn't principled I didn't have real values at
the time and so I just saw you who are super valued right you have strong principles very
strong principles which some people love tons of people I'm sure don't like uh and I was like
this guy is just so abrasive and I've learned to love that about you but the time it just it
rubbed me the wrong way and I was like we're gonna make this guy our enemy and we're
gonna crush this guy dude I used to get mad because everything that I was bad at you were
good at and everything that I was good at I thought you guys were bad at and I'm like [ __ ]
they're just stealing all my ideas from my ads and them Runner they're stealing all my
content ideas and then I would see how you guys operate and I'd be like no we gotta have
all these sales people just like the like I remember I was at your office and uh I and you were
talking about morning brew and you were like I thought you would just hate them and be like
they suck because uh I feel like that's how we used to just talk about most people at most
startups was just like oh my God they suck and especially one that's doing what you're doing
then it's like oh I already want you to suck so I'm gonna say that and instead you were like
God why is this email look better than ours and you would just like show it to the whole team
and you're like look at this why does this look so much better than our email look at what
they do at the top like God they're so like they're just like they're so much better at that you
know like the the formatting or the cleanliness or like the brand that they're doing at the I
remember at the top of the email and I was like wow he just respects the actual like craft so
much that he can't even hate him fully he's like ah they're doing good at these three things
Sam I'll give you a story I think I've ever told you which is you know there was a time where I
thought our copy was much better than yours our editorial and then there was a time where I
thought you guys passed us right and Alex in particular was maniacal about this he would
print out morning Brew in the hustle every single morning by line we'd sit down line by line
and we'd be like that Line's better no our Line's better no that and we go line by line some of
the early morning Brew employees they really hated you because when you wrote a story
that we wrote and when yours was better and Alex thought yours was better people I mean
people were pissed they're like a Revolt in the morning room office one morning because
people were like no ours is better and I think ultimately it wasn't better or worse right it was
just catered towards different people but I mean yeah we printed out your newsletter every
day and read through it through it for I don't know six months nine months like we were just
so focused like I've never been as hyper focused as I was in 2018 on us writing the best
newsletter growing the best newsletter and selling it like I woke up every day right Gross cell
right gross out like we wrote it in the wall and at 11 A.M every single day we had the Great
Wall of opens and we track our open rate and right down the wall and we had that for
probably two years running every day what was our open rate and your strategy was to our
our strategies were they diverged and they were different so we were going to launch we're
gonna stay in this space and verticalize and launch subscription services and all this other
stuff you guys launched multiple different newsletters which met from my eyes you grew your
Revenue quicker I personally hate that business because I don't like advertising that much
but you grew your Revenue way faster than us um well I think you did like we if we were one
year behind you I think we were tracking one year behind so the year we sold I think we
could have done 18 or 20 million in Revenue which is around you were I think the same year
so we're like tracking perfectly which is really interesting but you went this horizontal route
where you launched multiple multiple newsletters which route do you like looking back look I
mean it's tough to say we took the round the wrong route uh but I also think it's what we had
to do right we didn't have the choice you had because our content was more General
business right you wrote with an edge with a tone you were targeting uh entrepreneurs or
maybe like account Executives who want to become entrepreneurs and so you had way
more opportunity to launch a Trends or to launch a hustle con uh for us we thought you know
a general morning Brew subscription wasn't going to work a general morning Brew event
wasn't going to work the the tone wasn't specific enough the the Target customer wasn't
specific enough but we fell in love with this B2B business which I know both of you gotten a
little bit of a Twitter [ __ ] when you when you spoke about the B2B world and you know
industry dive but we I fell in love with that business and I'm like wow if you can get in front of
retail professionals and HR professionals and we have them in our newsletter and it was the
craziest business where we'd launch a newsletter and it'd be break even before we even
hired the writers because we pre-sell uh you know Advertiser like let's call it like a B2B SAS
company into one of these newsletters and so I don't think there's better or worse I think
your our opportunity was easier to get to 100 million of Revenue yours was easier to get to
let's call it like a a billion dollar uh company right because you could have subscription
multi-revenue stream much easier it just was going to take another you know eight to ten
years that's great I'm happy I'm learning that now after I sold it I'm happy I got to see it
because I just got to copy both your playbooks and do that do it for the milk Road like all
three of us were able to win with the same Playbook mine was the easiest path of all
because I could just text you guys and be like hey uh thinking about doing uh your thing but
for crypto uh what do you think it was like yeah I think it's gonna work let's do it they did the
Playbook work perfectly Sean you think it has so far right we basically less than a year we
built the number one like the biggest daily crypto email it's profitable it's you know seven
Figures it's I don't know like it worked as well as one could expect bootstrapped it you know
in our spare time like that's like as good as I could have expected that to go dude that's why
these businesses are awesome is people don't realize that's why I always hate when people
say if you're going to start it over again what would you do I'm like do the same thing like it
works it consistently works I know uh Austin you're way more like pessimistic you got you're
like I'm pretty paranoid you're way more paranoid and I know you say like oh it can't work
again and I'm like no man I think I forget awesome you have like a framework around you
have like a lot of opinions around email newsletters give us that and put it in the context of
milk Road like when I told you I was gonna do that or you saw I was gonna do that what'd
you think and did that fit your framework for what you thought might work or was that a
maybe an outlier what what was it yeah so it perfectly fits the framework so I'm pessimistic
on relaunching the next morning brew a general business four million person email uh but
basically I split up newsletters into three categories one are the editorial newsletters right
you have your sub stackers your your packing McCormick's full newsletter maybe 2000
words maybe 10 000 if you're some of these writers uh that's like category one right category
two is what we did aggregation right and Sam and I kind of went more General General
business went for scale and then uh after that you kind of have like the let's call it morning
Brew for X right where you you still have that aggregation of summaries but you're more
Niche right and maybe the tab is smaller but you think because of your tone and because
the way you cover it you can have a larger percent of that Tam reading your product which
Sean I think is what you're doing and the third is more of like your classic hey I'm gonna give
you five links your five bullet Friday or things like that I think the biggest opportunity is Sean
what you did which is morning Brew for X you find a growing industry and you just ride that
tail wave and you just own that and build a brand something really distinct in one of these
you know if x is finance or X's something that's more B2B or like you know a professional
you know something that's a job title uh then X works better than if x is you know fly fishing
or or or you know basketball or something like that yeah so I think if you're gonna go
consumer route right target consumers it's got to be high dollar it's got to be you know the
newsletter for Ferrari owners or the newsletter for Rolex owners right something where
people spend you know hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on this B2B is great as well
that's the other place I would go and so you were kind of like I call it maybe Pro summary
right that was the best of both worlds you could hit them both worlds you got the consumer
oriented uh readers and then also the people who work in the crypto industry did you agree
with our I know that I and we actually did or I'll say it myself I did sound like a douchebag
when I was talking about Industry Drive I didn't mean to like phrase it that the way that I did
but when we were talking about Industry Drive you know they're a 600 million dollar a
company that mostly is a newsletter business and our criticism towards the B2B industry
was like the content's pretty whack do you agree with that uh that assessment like do you
still think there's a lot of opportunity to build really big B2B media companies yeah I just think
you have to do it the way Sean did it right which is go the complete opposite route right so
they're they're pretty dry they have a standardized process they go in every single vertical
look I think their business model is simple but it's not easy I don't think what they did was
easy at all but I think it's very simple The Playbook is very well defined there's no crazy Tech
they're not you know building some AI machine learning thing it's they create great content
they resonate they sell ads into it uh but the way to compete I think is to treat B2B like
consumer right to treat them like people like you know the milk row does why is it not you're
saying it's simple but not easy why is it not what do you mean it's not easy I mean I I think to
scale across all those verticals right to your point added businesses are pretty tough right
and so you take on a lot of costs and you can't you can't mess up right because if you you
go wrong in verticals you have a bunch of writers and sales people and and the thing about
media business is even when they're profitable the difference between 20 uh profit margins
and losing 20 is way is way like it's easier to flip that uh because of all your fixed costs it's
not SAS you don't have locked in you know you're a B2B SAS company you've locked in a
hundred or a hundred ten percent of your Revenue the next year because of renewals every
day with ads it's another grind you got to go sell more ads and so it's not easy you know ad
business is an absolute grind we found this guy um I'm gonna give a shout out here his
name's I don't know I think you pronounce it Walter and he's from the Netherlands and he uh
I think he's at school right now I don't know what happened but I I did a video I thought okay
maybe maybe we'll start doing YouTube content I did this video when Luna collapsed and I
did this video like oh I lost a bunch of money on Luna and I did this video I thought it was
gonna be like I remember buddy I was like a viral whatever we came out late we came out
like three weeks after the news so that was kind of stupid so it didn't go super viral but one
good thing came of it which was this this kid on Twitter was like hey your thumbnail sucks for
for your YouTube thing like it should be like this or like this or like this he did this thread and I
was like yo you're great um I don't know if I'm gonna do any more YouTube videos but like
you want to just come in our slack because I just want I like what you just did that was like
helpful and it was quick and like you know he's like sure yeah let me be amazing I love the
milk Road and so he joins our slack first we're like What do we do with this guy like what the
[ __ ] is this guy like imagine like a two-person meeting and I just invite this third guy from the
Netherlands to a meeting you'd be like uh like it's gonna talk what's why is he here and for
two months no one knew why he was there but then something amazing happened we were
like ah we need to sell ads like for the next month or whatever and it was like nobody wanted
to do it it was just like uh do we have to like it's gonna be a pain in the ass it sucks it just
sucks to sell ads like oh we should hire a sales guy it's like uh even hiring a sales guy is kind
of a shitty task okay let's procrastinate a little bit and uh along the way this guy had been
wanting all right this guy had been always just messaging us ideas like because he's like I
don't know he's like in the slack so he's like trying to be productive so he would just non-stop
message ideas of things we could do and uh it got to the point where Ben was just sort of
like dude this guy is like you know incessant like he won't stop messaging it's like you know
at first it's a good but like nobody can handle this volume of ideas like this is crazy and then
he's like he's like you got to do something about this and I was like okay I'll I don't know I'll
talk to him or I'll kick him out of slack and I was like Hey what if we just point the machine
gun like outwards instead of like right now the machine gun's shooting us with ideas what if
we just made him like sell the ads and he just bothered the hell out of everybody else and so
that's what we did and this guy is the single-handedly crushing milk Road ad sales through
the crypto bear market like we are fully sold out for months on end just one guy just one kid
who's not even 20 years old just absolutely pillaging the market and the advertisers will
privately DM me and be like yo I shared this guy's name with our sales team because I was
like this is how you sell like this guy is Relentless and I was like wow that was just like an
incredible I don't know like incredible thing he is so impressive dude let's talk about that real
quick ad sales ad sales suck Austin they suck and what I learned getting into the hustle I I
did you sell I sold our first ads I think I got us I sold like the first maybe hundred thousand
dollars worth of ads and then in order to scale we had to hire a sales team and they would
show me like the conversations that they are gonna have I'm like there's this conversation
will never work like you're using all this jargon and you're wearing like these like buttoned up
plaid shirts and like these brown leather shoes like you guys look like dweebs like this is
never gonna work and it worked perfectly nobody wants to go skateboarding with you right
now yeah you're not ready you look like your name's Todd or Kyle like this is not gonna work
and uh it's like my name is it [ __ ] works yeah yeah it works perfectly you're you're not cut
out your personal is not cut out for the the media buying world did you do it you're uh well no
so yeah in the early days we bought right but we we sold all direct response ads right it was
Casper mattress it was a way luggage it was saying no hey buy your placement here you're
gonna get 300 clicks and three percent of them convert and you're gonna make a thousand
dollars and we'll charge you 800. as we've grown though I think there's another difference
between us we were in New York City and it opened up this whole world that I had no idea
about which was the world of of media buying and these big ad agencies and they have
huge budgets right we're not talking about a hundred grand for Casper we're talking about
five million dollars from the biggest brands in the entire world and it really is a black box of
people who aren't in it and I think it's one of those things where it's a black box intentionally
so people can't get in right Finance is the same thing every year there's a new term within
the ad industry or Finance just to keep people on the Internet it's crazy it's crazy and it's like
not based in logic or fact it's based on relationships and like it's so weird it's like oh wait I
have to realize that this person this lady I'm trying to get to buy ads she just has to spend
this 20 million dollars this quarter and she just wants to find somewhere to place it where she
won't get fired that was such a weird feeling yeah I mean the idea of like media budgets right
hey they if they if they don't use it they lose it and so you're incentivized to spend money it's
it's interesting and it's uh something that we learned Again by hiring people in New York
which I think was a big difference between us and you you had a lower cost more like inside
sales team a really efficient one right you took that route we didn't take that route we went for
these Big Brand dollars and and I think both routes work it depends what you're what you're
looking to sell um we just took the route and say hey we're gonna we're gonna Dive Right In
this black box and we're gonna learn all about it we're gonna get a million I mean one of our
first advertisers discover gave us a million bucks I was in college I'm a senior in college living
in my frat house right like beer cans everywhere and I get an email from the CMO discover
like here's an RFP I'm like what in the [ __ ] is an RFP like what are you talking about no clue
I open it up and it's like hey give us media plans for like half a million a million bucks right for
a million dollars she could own the company seven times over the company was not worth
100 grand and and here's this woman asking for a million dollar RFP and we just we learned
it but it really is a relationship driven game how did you how did you justify that like how do
you like if if if AMX says we're going to spend five million dollars this year be real do you
actually think that's going to help them like sell more [ __ ] yeah so I I do right we do a lot of
brand lift studies and things like that right it's different right it's not we're not no one's trying to
uh you know like Lexus for example or car company studies did you do we used to do that
but I'd be like what the [ __ ] is a brand live study like I'm like are you kidding me Todd what
the hell is a brand live study I don't know what the hell this is or we would do all this other
stuff like an RFP like we had been doing it for like six months and I was like Hey guys like at
this point I'm a little bit too afraid to ask but what the hell is it RFP I don't know what this stuff
means I didn't know what any of this stuff it's so challenging if you don't work in the industry
and then they like they talk about agencies and I'm like wait what the hell it is an agency why
don't we just go straight to the brand like this stuff from it from a small business owner's
perspective all of this stuff is crazy inefficient and stupid now that I've been at a big company
HubSpot I understand I'm like okay I get like these guys are having to like give out a billion
dollars of marketing like now I I understand a lot more but when you're just a 10 person
company you're like do you guys realize this Market study [ __ ] doesn't work like this brand
study that's [ __ ] right or like you're gonna give me twenty thousand dollars to write this
article it took me like 20 minutes to do it uh like so it doesn't make sense when you're small
yeah but you know people are people are buying the audience they're buying the the
relationship with with you they're not buying you know purchase or things like that and so
you know I think at scale when you get to four million subscribers if you can change the
perception of half a million or a million people and have make them because of a marketing
campaign have a you know 10 of people have a higher perception of of credit card X's
programs like that is really valuable when your Visa or your master or your American
Express and you spend a billion dollars like that's so much money how do you deploy a
billion dollars of marketing spend you go through agencies and that's how it all happens
Sean and I are really good I think at starting stuff we've got pretty good Vision where we can
spin things up and get them to like a million in Revenue pretty quickly the thing that I was
always envious of you because it's my it's a it's a fairly big shortcoming I think I have is you
are just so good at I don't know exactly how to explain it you've got this like almost private
Equity like ability to like look at numbers and be like oh the margin here is shitty and I'm like
I've never used that word margin in my life but you'll like talk about like the margin here and
like well if you just change that by like 10 probably by doing this your outcome is going to be
like this this and this like you just have this really good operational ability you're also really
good at saying like well if you just improve this this and this and only focus on that then in six
months I think your outcome will be this you're really good at that and you're really good at
that at a very young age how did you figure out how to do that how did you learn how to do
that and and have that insight and have that ability and also have that faith in like well if you
just do this this and this the outcome might be this this and this in eight months yeah I mean
so I got an undergraduate business degree and I always used to [ __ ] on undergraduate
business degrees I'm like what a complete waste of time like those four years were so dumb
but as I look back it really did give me a pretty good overview of what it takes to to run a
business not actually the day-to-day of running a business but like what is accounting I took
like seven accounting classes or I don't know maybe five those were actually really valuable
to be able to really dive deep into a p l to real and my summer expensive Investment
Banking to understand what's a financial model what drives the model those things that
within the context of Finance like yeah you know they're okay when the context of running a
business was super helpful to understand what levers you need to pull but the other the flip
side is I looked at you three years ago and I before we knew each other maybe even two
years ago and I was like both of you I was like I hate these guys because they're so good at
going zero to one they're so good at coming up with ideas like I'm the opposite right I'm not
an ideas guy I can't come up with ideas but I do think it is there cooler and sexier to do what
we do do you know listen there's no doubt about that it's definitely yeah like dude what would
you I mean you know we don't we need to like partner because zero to one is cool but then
like one to 100 million years is pretty [ __ ] cool too yeah how about you guys take things you
get them off the ground you take them to three employees and a million dollars of Revenue
and I'll take it from one to a hundred and we can just pair up in just everything about his
margin and he thought I said margarine he brought me some butter dude like like I didn't
understand what we know for all we know the the hustle was either a billion dollar company
or worthless um Sam says no idea yeah well I like I remember um when we were negotiating
to sell and like there was just all these things that people were giving me advice on and I'm
like man I just didn't even think about that like it's just and I actually know a lot of people that
are really successful like we're talking billion dollars successful and they know so little about
operations and there's a lot of people like that like who are just they're good at hiring Like
Richard Branson I think he famously said he's like dude I didn't know what a p l was until we
hit like hundreds of millions of Revenue like I didn't know how to read it um which is super
cool uh so awesome you what I like uh that you said on the operation side like Sam's saying
is um like you when you were talking earlier you were like you know right gross sell we wrote
that on the wall we woke up every day and said right gross sell we had the greatest so good
at that those are the things that like uh we I used to do this such like similar like literally we
had the wall but not with milk Road actually but this is like kind of my earlier startups and at
Monkey Alfredo I remember Sam you probably remember this when people used to come in
like we would always have like all this [ __ ] on the walls and like these sayings and these
posters indoctrination things the indoctrination and and I always felt like whenever I would
meet Founders one of the highest predictors of success was do they even know what the
main thing is and it sounds like a stupid question but for a lot of Founders they didn't really
understand what the main thing was for their business they didn't know their business's
version of right grossell okay and even if they understood like that that's gonna generic okay
what are you gonna do with that they didn't understand to translate that into the Great Wall
of opens is the number we're gonna write down every day we're going to look at it and if it's
bad we're gonna do something about it and if it's good we're gonna like double down on that
and that's what daily work is is around this one number and so it was like I remember we had
these Founders in in the office and they would be like I'd be like all right what's the you know
how many new customers you guys get today like what's the revenue and they have to like
oh yeah let me check and they would like at first they didn't have a dashboard they're like
going into the database like bro you haven't built an easy way to know this number and then
then finally they built that and they always had to check and I was like how do you not know
why am I asking this question like it's 3 P.M one of y'all two should have asked this question
by 3 P.M like every day this is crazy and they just didn't do it and I was like these guys are
gonna fail because they don't have to keep the main thing the main thing is that something
that you see or like did consciously like where'd you get that because that wasn't uh obvious
to be right out of college but it sounds like you got it right right away I can't find this client info
have you heard of HubSpot HubSpot is a CRM platform so it shares its data across every
application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases
HubSpot grow better yeah that I mean for us I I mean it's almost an insult right we were we
people like why didn't you do this why don't you do that why don't you go into video we were
too dumb to do that like we had no we're like video how the hell do you make a video we can
barely get our newsletter out I mean there were days where we'd we'd finish the newsletter
like 2 A.M we'd be coding the thing ourselves and so I think it was partially you know a little
bit of foresight but also partially a forcing function uh you know we just looked at we're like if
we do these things we will get here and we looked at the math and we're like everyone's
telling us we're crazy but if we grow Subs fifty thousand dollars every or 50 000 subscribers
every single month and our costs don't change we're gonna go from 50 000 monthly
Revenue to 75 to 100 to 125 and by end of this year we're gonna be at a million Subs doing
a million dollars of Revenue a month and I tell that to investors and people they'd be like that
doesn't make any sense I'm like I don't know what to tell you like I'm just looking at the Excel
and people could I mean we spoke to investors and they were like what do you mean your
business only has a hundred thousand dollars of costs I'm like it's people it's growth
marketing and it's an ESP that's it that's all we spend money on what was that last line I
don't even know what that last line is email it's like provider email service provider will you
sail through oh ESP yeah okay I think I said yeah I was like SP I was like what the hell is sp
okay yeah but it's it's one of those things where like it was just when you boil it down to
numbers and run it in an Excel model it's like it's so simple and people these investors were
like well like you're not accounting for this and that I'm like it's all [ __ ] like none of that
means anything I'm just trying to make money like I'm just trying to also did some Scrappy
stuff I remember like uh didn't you get your first I don't know a few thousand emails just by
like standing in a classroom I I think we may have we may have broken a couple laws to get
our first couple thousand people want to walk out you'd have a piece of paper and be like
hey just write your email now we we wouldn't let him walk out so we go in the beginning of a
lecture these econ 101 lectures like a thousand people and I hated Publix I still do but I
hated public speaking and I was like look if I'm going to this lecture hall and I've been talking
from a thousand people I better get every damn email and so what I would do is I'd speak in
front of these people and I'd walk around like the teacher would let you speak or you would
just stand up yeah no no the teacher would let us speak because there's a thing called
Michigan times you actually had 10 minutes in between each class so if the class started at
10 it actually started at 10 10. and so at 1005 I get up there I pitch on Pitch them one
morning brew and then I basically print out an Excel document and I'd walk around I would
just stand in front of people and just stare them in the eyes until they gave me their email
and I sit in the back of the class and type every email in and I'd be like [ __ ] Alex that an A
or a c or an e he'd be like who cares put them all in and we've had like every like six
permutations of every single email and that's how we got to like 10 or 15 000 at Michigan
and then we're like do you have a friend of Penn State I have a friend at Penn State let's do
this at Penn State let's do it at Miami let's do it at NYU and next thing you know we like 50
000 people across the the country college students reading morning Brew are your parents
wealthy did you grow up wealthy uh I'd say middle class upper middle class but what's
interesting so I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore and like I didn't know I thought I knew
wealth and then I moved to I went to Michigan and I met people from LA and New York and I
moved to New York and I saw people from New York and I never saw that kind of wealth and
to me that was inspiring that was exciting uh because I came from again there's like a very
well-off I had everything I needed but you know I know people I met people at school who
were flying private planes I know what a private plane was you got rich pretty young right like
when did you guys sell you're you're pretty young right now I think you guys sold it what 26
or something yeah I need 25. well the reason but hold on real quick the reason I asked was
because like you've got this like this immigrant hustle and before I knew you I stereotyped
you as this like uh everything's been given to this rich kid like and and hearing this story I'm
like oh no these guys were like just as gritty as I was for sure sometimes more um yeah I
mean Alex has his own story about you know his family and and his dad passed away and
so he was I mean I learned so much from Alex about Hunger like Alex again he broke things
down the same way I did Alex would be like hey you know I'd be like Alex we need a
hundred advertisers this year I'd be like I don't know how we're gonna do it we have zero he
goes I know exactly how we'll do it I'm gonna go on LinkedIn and I'm not gonna sleep until I
message a thousand companies and we'll get a 10 reply rate I'll be like you're gonna
message a thousand companies he's like well isn't that what you need to do to get to 100
100 advertisers I'd be like yeah but that sounds crazy he goes well let's start working and we
just like you know sit there drink beer and we work and just you know crank out cold DMS
the head of I mean I must know the head of growth at every New York City direct to
Consumer company because Alex incessantly emailed them and we would like we would
laugh at the response like we would get excited when someone respond to be like hey Alex
this is your ninth email like you gotta stop following up like number eight was good but nine
you you passed it so yeah I think we both had that hustle what did it feel like the back to
what Sean was saying you're 25 and you I don't know how much one you made but let's just
say eight figures what's that feel like when you're 25 um [ __ ] dope it was very cool it's great
so so it's so it's interesting right um I I got the wire this is what the the sum of money I was it
was during covid so I get this like listen to this juxtaposition on one hand I just made a
boatload of money more money than you know I thought I'd ever make right on the other
hand I'm living in my childhood bedroom sitting next to my parents as the wire hits my
account and everyone's like what are you gonna do now I was like I don't know my mom's
cooking like meatloaf yeah mom make me breakfast yeah it was the most anti-climactic thing
ever it was unbelievably anticlimactic you should have just moved into the master bedroom I
think uh getting a quick win early or a win early in life is so important right just having that
Swagger that confidence that brand allows me to do so much that I wouldn't have been able
to do otherwise but get into any room I can get in touch with anyone right what other
opportunities do you think you get I mean again like get into any room right so meetings uh
investing what are some what are some cool rooms you got into I mean again like it's the
same things that I think you guys are you guys also have wins right I don't think anything is is
that well I don't like to leave my house and then Sam's only interested in like people that are
like this guy's the best ax thrower in you know the country and he's like super pumped about
it I'm like I don't think you needed to like you know pull your your you know rich guy card to
get in touch with him but I feel like you I don't know like like have you met Leo DiCaprio I feel
like he might have just bumped into Leo DiCaprio somewhere that I feel like that's more
Europe in New York well so so I I bumped into Justin Bieber in the Bahamas um which was
pretty cool um but no I mean like the weekend we had with with uh uh what's his name Mr
Beast and and uh hosted was cool I spent the weekend with Kid Rock on his Ranch yeah tell
me about it was pretty sick what was that like I mean he is a a unique unique character
again this is all according to him so I haven't even fact checked this but I'll assume he's
telling the truth he told me he's the only person to play at both President Obama and
president Trump's inaugurations he played it both and he knows both super well he's close
to both and he has this this he lives in this huge Ranch outside of Nashville right I went there
it was uh my friend his name's Shane uh he works in Tech he's good friends with Kid Rock
Kid Rock obviously music guy and Shane put together 10 people in Tech Kid Rock 10 people
in music we go to his Ranch and I mean you get there and it's like out of a movie right you
walk in and Kid Rock's bats is to me he's got a cigar sticking out of his mouth he's got a
shotgun and he's just shooting clay pigeons and the whole weekend was out of a movie right
his Studio unbelievable we pull no lighter together just telling stories about Eminem uh I
mean he's uh it is really really cool he's a lot of people don't realize this but Kid Rock got
famous right before CDs went down and he's one of the best-selling artists of all time and I I
it wouldn't surprise me if he's probably worth two or three hundred million dollars because he
was famous when CDs were 18 and 21 and so like it's wild yeah so now though I think he's a
new source of wealth so he owns uh again this is what I've been told he owns the most
popular bar in all of Nashville and whereas most of the other ones like Luke Bryant has one
and a bunch of other country singers they just license their name to the bar right and they
make a couple percent I think Kid Rock's like a 50 50 owner probably makes two million
bucks a month no I've heard more really like it's a project I've heard again I've heard it's big
big money you know high high uh tens of millions you know it's just crazy dude the one of
the best things uh about our companies and um like the culture that us three have kind of
built with our friends because we kind of like got into this media game a little bit early and I
don't know about you Austin but when the hustle was starting there wasn't that many people
who we could look at and be like well let's just do what they do but different they're like I
remember I told this one media guy who I'll tell you afterwards he's the founder of a
multi-billion dollar Media company now I was like here's what I'm doing he goes bro this will
never make more than two million dollars a year in revenue and this other person who I'm
now good friends with was like dude what are you talking about this I'm like it doesn't matter
it's just a small screen who cares like if you're an email or on a website it doesn't matter the
math shows X Y and Z and so we had to hire like 24 year olds who like were promising but
like and then we had to learn about it as we grew and be but because of that both morning
Brew the hustle and the and the crew that now I mean Sean's great at this as well we've
we've done a really cool job of like finding smart inexperienced people who now have gone
on to do a lot of really cool stuff and that makes me really really proud to like see like this
crew that we've all built and so there's like the hustle crew the morning Brew Crew and then
uh Sean was like the hustle thing now he's got his own thing have you noticed that like we all
have this little like Army of people who have like been through like this like self-created like
training camp it's kind of neat right yeah 100 I mean it's it's we in the early days we could not
get people to work with us who didn't want to be entrepreneurs and the pitch was simply like
Hey we're starting a business you'll be in on the ground floor right you'll see what it's like and
that's that's all you get like you know we didn't have for the first year and a half I was so
cheap for the first year and a half of morning Brew you didn't get a company computer you
had to bring your own computer to work dude I was famous because on Facebook I would
put hey I'm buying I'm buying laptops does anyone have a Mac for sale for 500 no dude we
were not dropping any money on company we didn't have health care in the early days you
got nothing you got I mean and we we couldn't afford it because I was so against taking
venture capital I was like we're gonna make every penny count One More Story Fridays at
three o'clock we'd all go pencils down work would stop because we had a referral program
we'd send out stickers and t-shirts and that whole thing that you know I'm sure we've all seen
but yeah we had no we know packing and so we'd sit down we'd like wheel in that we were
keg into our office and we'd conveyor you know we do like assembly line the first person
would would like open the envelope the next person would stick the sticker in there the next
person would lick them the next person would put the the label on and for like three or four
hours from like 3 P.M till 7 pm on Fridays that's all we did was just pack envelopes of [ __ ]
well you're one of your early Guys Tyler dank has gone on to start beehive which is a really
cool company he seemed like a really good entrepreneur he's pivoting or um iterating really
quickly and then I've got a couple people have done that and then um like it's just cool to see
like these people who were young and not dumb but like just young and like inexperienced
go on to like build cool [ __ ] and then like your ex people are now at other newsletter
companies and then Sean has hired a couple of my ex people or and probably it seems like
a couple of your ex people and it's like this incestuous thing which at first I would be jealous
I'm like whoa what the hell why are they working with this person but now I'm like oh this is
awesome man like we've created this like tiny little industry of of newsletter nerds and it's
actually quite cool yeah I love it yeah I think it's really cool and I think there's gonna be so
much more value create I think what Tyler's doing at beehive is amazing I think what I've
been so impressed with him is like the the maturation from the morning Brew days of you
know it's like six of us and he's doing a little bit of everything so the way he's been able to
scale himself and scale that team is amazing and so it's really and I mean Trung is the same
way like what Trung's done is incredible and there's I mean there's a ton of examples it's
really cool to see do you regret selling no that's that's you answered that quickly even though
like not even so you sold part of the business what do you think the the entire business is
going to sell for in the future hundreds of millions I think many multiples of what we sold the
first uh half four but we structured the deal in a way that I thought was great right I mean the
ability to have life-changing money if anyone has the option like I always think it's good to
take half your chips off the table right and maybe I'm biased because I did that and and it's
worked I thought that was really important but I still have enough upside where I'm excited
right it's not like a tiny earn out that people sign where it's like 10 of the deal it can you know
it can be really really meaningful and that drives me that keeps me excited it keeps me on
the hunt I love the company I love the people we work with I love the executive team but I
would I I mean during covet or during I wouldn't have slept at night and I just I sleep very well
at night knowing that like I have my my nest egg and so what'd you do with money do you
think cool with it or do you uh did you touch it right away what that money hits the bank
you're at your parents house what it what happened to that money over the next I don't know
how long it's been like a year or two yeah so I haven't ideally in terms of everyone's like oh
yeah like make a Splurge purchase there was nothing out there that I was that excited about
buying so I ended up buying a car on which expensive I didn't buy like a Mercedes I bought
an Acura right nothing crazy yeah a pre-owned Acura it wasn't Frio and brand new 2022.
sports mode sports edition Air Conditioning that's air conditioning what why dude you really
do have that immigrant mentality but I think we need to get you like a 23andMe test I I feel
like uh there's something going on here you got too much immigrant energy I love it no but I
mean I I I increased my rent four to five times right I live in a great apartment um I went on
an amazing vacation last summer um you know I I actually love I know you guys know
ramit's uh States here sethia I'm not sure I pronounced last name but like that idea of like
your rich life and your spending on because I mean uh lifestyle creep is real totally that is
real and so like look I spend money on the things that I find interesting and that I like and I
love traveling and staying at really nice hotels and spending a ton of money on business
class flights and things like that I like living a nice apartment but like I live in New York City
what am I going to do drop another 50k on a car that sits in a parking lot 361 days a year it's
a complete waste of money it's just stupid and you know I Morgan Howells will actually
tweeted this um and I read this too it Will Smith's book he has a great quote he was talking
about Fame and becoming famous and the quote was something like becoming famous is
awesome being famous is cool and losing any Fame is horrible and I feel the same exact
way about money right I feel the same way and so I have no desire to like spend money on
things I don't actually care about I don't wanna I don't want to lose my money because I can
you know change the a to a you know an M or whatever on a Mercedes so I spend money
that I on things I actually care about so I can make sure I maintain my wealth or what do you
invested or do you just are you conservative are you aggressive like what's the pie chart of
like of the hundred percent where did it where did the money go yeah so I probably took like
85 90 of it and put it into very very boring stuff right S P 500 or Vanguard like Target date
funds like uh 20 65 or something like that you did this yourself or you hired like a well
personally no I hired a team it's a good thing I did because if not I would have went off the
rails right um and then I put you know five maybe seven percent in crypto right and I put
another five percent in Venture investing right uh but the vast vast majority is in really boring
real estate S P 500 uh and uh like bonds right but like really boring [ __ ] nice and let's talk
about some non-newsletter stuff so you got a bunch of ideas uh when we were hanging out
at Camp MFM uh you were telling me about like this thing you're doing and this thing you're
doing I was like oh this guy's like way more Dynamic uh and interested in a whole bunch of
different things what are some ideas that you think would be cool to share yeah um so I'll
throw out a bunch of ideas I have but one General framework I think people should think
about is when you're in shitty Economic Times like we're going into now I think the the
framework you should use is you should look to save companies money or earn individuals
side income right before companies money didn't matter right Capital was abundant so
companies they were all about just grow grow right how can you help me grow it's a 180 now
you know people were trading their money for others people other people's time right now
they're trading time for money and so all you know if you can help companies preserve
money you can I think build really really great side hustles so a few ideas right I think it's like
what's old is new and then there's a bunch of agencies I think it'd be really interesting to start
right now one is outsourced Talent I knew nothing about the outsourced Talent game I
recently became a co-owner in a business uh it's a really interesting business called oceans
they found talent in Sri Lanka right really cool talent in Sri Lanka where they've U.S
graduates uh come to Tech startups work there uh really interesting and I think there are
ways right they have a unique Advantage going to Sri Lanka which we don't really have to
talk about but I think there are companies who were hiring a full-time copywriter let's call it or
a full-time uh you know marketer and they probably only need them for 25 30 hours a week
2021 screw it right we'll need them at some point I think now companies are really
questioning ftes right do you need a full-time hire and so you can create these Niche
marketplaces and I'm getting investment opportunities for them all the time and they're just
not Venture scaled but you bootstrap a Marketplace let's call it like a Content marketing uh
agency or content marketing Marketplace for B2B companies right these stocks are down 90
95 they're trying to drop ftes but they still want content right we all know how valuable only
audience and content is and building that Marketplace helping them find people I think
simple services like that are going to come back and to Vogue and be very very profitable
what's that company um where the founder got in trouble for not converting the the stock uh
converting the convertible notes but it was a Marketplace for uh developers and it like
bootstrapped its way uptown practically it was a top towel so top towel um they got in trouble
because they only raised like 800 000 or a million dollars but they didn't convert the the the
the the note or whatever so it was controversial but they basically have bootstrapped it to
this point to like north of a 100 million in net revenue um and so these marketplaces are like
can be they can be pretty freaking powerful it seem they seemed hard to get off the ground
but they don't seem that hard if you already working in in the industry and it's a super Niche
a niche topic because people ask me all the time they go hey I want to hire writers who
should I hire and I'm like I don't know man it's hard I don't know who you should hire yeah
yeah I mean the one I the one I'm now a co-owner and has gone from zero to seven figures
of ARR in like eight months right you pick a very specific Target customer that's a gross
unique talent gross or is that just yeah margins are no no well now both right both are seven
figures of ARR that's crazy yeah and then uh what's his name Marshall from uh Marshall
Haas he did Shepard what's the URL that's the same thing right it's the same same business
and I I it seems like he's scaled that to high seven figures in like less than a year it seems
from the outside yeah yeah I think they're a bit different right ours is I think they're just more
like strictly EAS the one we have is more you you know you have people in finance people in
operations what's interesting about Sri Lanka is they have big four accounting firms right so
you can poach people not just from local businesses but from people who've been trained by
Ernst young and and Deloitte and so it's an interesting an interesting demographic to go into
yeah I love that one I think that's a great one what are uh what are some other like you know
help businesses save money help you the other one you said is help individuals earn side
money what's a what's an example of that yeah so here's one I think is interesting right so
you built morning Brew for crypto right I know a lot of people spoken about this but I don't
think anyone's really built the brand yet I think morning Brew or the hustle for AI is gonna be
huge but how's that feel by the way a thing you're just like calling Sean the morning Brew of
blank it's okay it's okay we did kick your ass to crypto I mean it's okay it's okay that that
happened no you we can test Let It Go though we could tell we could take a collective deep
breath and just let it go if you if that would help no no again you guys did a really great job I
thought that was awesome um and I think someone's gonna do the same thing in AI right
and so the bootstrap version of this is to do what you did right the AI newsletter right down
the Fairway have a unique tone integrate yourself into the audience the way I think is take it
to the next level is the last three months thousands of entrepreneurs have all started
tinkering on little AI side projects right and they all have 50 100K of ARR and I've been
reaching out to all these Founders like you know um different little tools right these aren't real
big businesses they're all side hustles right I went home for Thanksgiving I asked all my
friends from home my family Haley have you guys been playing around with the chat GPT
have you been playing around and they're like what in the hell are you talking about right and
so clearly it's the same customer for all of these different things right and so I think there's
this opportunity for the AI for morning Brew to start a little tiny capital or a little holding
company where you can start to invest and buy these businesses right give a an off ramp
these Founders who built these 50 or 100 or 150k Arrow businesses and start
cross-promoting them bundling marketing them you write reviews for your little AI tool and
then you promote it and instead of having advertising which Again Sam has spoken about
how it's difficult you're just promoting all your products you have this portfolio of 10 20 30
little AI tools and maybe each one is half a million or a million of ARR but all together you
can get you get pretty big pretty quickly that one seems harder to me um I I feel like like I like
the idea but with Mike okay realistically if I did that I feel like I would uh I like ideas where the
idea is so good my execution can be like a seven out of ten and I still win um because yeah
but this is his thing man this is his thing he he executes some of these things really well yeah
yeah I don't think it'd be that hard I'm telling you I I've been talking to a bunch of these like
these Founders these little AI SCI projects and I've been I'm like what are you doing with it
and they're like well at least I think it's hard is not because you can't roll them up you can't
buy them I think it's hard because uh all it's like the Lindy effect right so when something's
been around for three months is that 50k mrr and it seems great like you don't know if that
thing's gonna be around three months from now because the next model will come out or the
next chat like for example uh you know your stable diffusion comes out then and then uh you
know chat GPT comes out well people were you know I've invested in a couple of these that
you know the AI writing tools they're getting better and they're pouring Millions into marketing
to get to get customers for their you know AI writing tool but everybody's building on the
same foundations the same models and they're trying to say how they're going to be
differentiated and the reality is they could differentiate it on I don't know customer acquisition
and so I think that like it is you know I think about when I buy something like you know the
tiny Capital model works because he buys stuff that's like kind of been like around and
forgotten and ignored for like a long period of time but he buys like you know dribble um you
know it's like oh it's been around for years and I could buy it and I can it's gonna be around
for years and I can improve it over that time uh versus buying the things that are really new
and quick I think you have a challenge with the durability um of those businesses because
what happens as you know the AI just keeps improving but you know either these things
become obsolete or it starts to consolidate into like one app that can do four of these things
and so you don't need one for posting on social media and one for writing emails it's like ah
it's the same Chrome extension that's just gonna do both and so I think there's a good
chance you can kind of get like you know um you know just sort of Blown Away by by the
rate of change that's going on in the industry so that's the thing I would be worried about with
that similar to I remember telling Andrew Wilkinson about frazio I was like oh this is super
smart like these FBA stores are super cheap and there's you know like each one of them is
small but you could go and just like scoop up all these and look at this they're buying them
on this like crazy little multiple agos yeah it's like picking pennies up in front of a steamroller
and um is his first reaction and I was like yeah I can see what you mean what like if the
platform changes he goes if anything happens he's like you know these aren't real durable
Brands I haven't been around for a while maybe it's that Amazon changes the algorithm
maybe it's that there's you know more competition maybe it's not the multiples go up there's
there's four or five different ways where you just get steamrolled and that's actually what how
it played out pretty much in the in the Amazon aggregator space was for a while the getting
was good and then those companies went all in on it and then they kind of got steamrolled
that you know they're getting steamrolled as we speak yeah I think you bring up a great point
about AI right and that's why well I think the technology is great I've been very skeptical of
investing in these companies that just really build on top of uh you know open AI because it's
like you have a nice wrapper right it's nice marketing it's great but what do you have long
term what do you actually can all do that what are you gonna do who doesn't do that
nobody's doing their own AI everybody's everybody's building off open AI or stable diffusion
and that's why I'm skeptical investing in that right I I think there's so many popping up right
it's the next crypto wave right there's gonna be a huge huge bubble and you know and
they're raising not at crypto prices but I'm seeing hey two guys left some you know Andrew
recent back company we're raising 5 on 25 like what do you have they're like oh well we
have a deck but since we created the deck we've already changed our mind it was this and
now it's this it's like guys you can't he can't be serious we've seen this playoffs while you say
that they're like we just got another offer for 35 the price is gone you uh you know like I
always I I always felt this way about you and as I've got to know you I feel this way even
more the way that you know someone's an interesting founder is when you talk to them and
you're like a little fearful of them where you're like I don't want to have to go against this
person because they're going to be very very challenging to kill and you totally have that
Vibe you've got this like weird mixture of neuroticism where you're like no I have to go like I
have to win we're gonna lose like this everything's over if I don't win this thing but then you
also have this like really good work ethic I remember I asked you the other day I'm like hey
at what point at morning Brew did you quit grinding and you're like what never I'm still
grinding and uh I think that's just a really that's really fascinating um are you weirdly good at
like some random thing did you like channel that Obsession towards some other thing yeah
like growing up we like we tennis or some [ __ ] yeah I mean I was obsessed with video
games right Sports video games uh but nothing nothing specific right I wasn't like Travis
kalanick like number two we tennis in the world um no it was that and now I'm like into that
for cooking right I'm I've thought about like when I go to culinary school and take night
classes because now I'm obsessed with cooking I love to go out did not see that coming do
you gotta come over for a meal you gotta come to me I know you don't leave San Francisco
but when you do yeah so what what do you uh what's you said something about where me in
like your rich life what do you think your rich life how old are you now 28 what's your rich life
gonna be at 35 and 40. like what are you working towards yeah I I think for me uh it's all
about time right like to me wealth is all about having time and spending that time how you
want to right now I want to spend that time building this company because I constantly see
more growth and more opportunity and not just like 2x but 10x But ultimately what I wouldn't
be able to do at 35 is spend my time how I want to spend it on any given day right and and
that means a lot of travel I love traveling like I I want to go at some point uh in the not too
distant future hopefully don't want a six-month trip three months to Europe three months of
Southeast Asia I never got to do that a lot of my friends in college when they graduated they
went to Thailand and wherever else I drove from Michigan to New York and started working
the next day and so for me it's a lot of traveling you know nothing crazy spend time with
family doing fun stuff right like being able just to say hey like today I'm gonna you know drop
500 bucks and go you know do something you know the thousand dollars and go do some
fun activity right adventurous activities but it'll all comes back just waking up and say hey
here's how I want to spend my day and then doing that thing are you able to do that now I
can right but I choose to spend that time on Maureen Brew like I am maniacally focused on
growing morning Brew I think there's a ton of opportunity but as soon as I don't think that like
I'll change I'll say Hey you know today I want to do something else do you like having 200
plus employees it sounds like [ __ ] hell particularly New York Manhattan like woke
employees that like in the New York media scene like everyone's talking about unionizing
like when I think about that I'm like this sounds miserable blink if Blake if it's miserable
because I know you can't say anything what are you gonna say um no no I I mean look and
there's a couple things one uh we have a lot of remote employees so we do have a really
good distribution of employees across the country which I think does help right I think having
employees everywhere gives different perspectives right our engineering team lives uh you
know in the midwest then and we have people all across the country which I think is cool uh
but to be honest as a CEO of a 250 person company I'm not interacting with that many
people on a daily basis but what I love is like the one of the reasons I Stay is because we
built this team of people who are reporting to me who are just a plus All-Stars like absolute
rock stars and that's what makes me so happy is when I can just come to work and say Hey
you know Chief content officer hey you know person X like what are you doing like tell me
more about it how can I help you but also I'm like a vacuum right I'll hire someone new a
chief content officer a COO I'll be like I'm gonna learn as much as humanly possible and my
goal is to catch up to you and knowledge as fast as possible so if you're 38 you're 40 you
know you're you're 10 years older than me I want to just vacuum up those 10 years of
knowledge you've gained working in these four or five places in the next like two months and
I'm just gonna pester you and sit with you and just learn as much as humanly possible so I
can you know be better than you and know more than you and it's like this competitive
nature that's exactly what I'm saying about being like someone that you're you're you'd be
really hard to compete with you were hard to compete with uh that's a really fascinating
mindset it's very intriguing I saw Sean smirk that's always a good sign you're like yeah I
wouldn't want to compete with you it's like oh you did for like five years I did yeah and like uh
I mean it was fun I I think that I think maybe I'm the same way where someone's like I don't
know if I want to compete to consume but but like you know I think it's um it's it's it's you're
you're intriguing you're interesting I think you have got a really good mindset I think you got
that good inner game yeah I I think I think I I can't refresh this before but I think the thing that
really I I've changed my thinking about you so much is I used to think you were like rude and
now yeah we've been working together on like a few side projects and what I've learned is
that your style is not for everyone but you are what I would call like admirably abrasive right
and we wrote a call I don't know if I'm supposed to tell a story I won't say names we're on a
call and this guy gives us like a three minute pitch and I just see the look on Sam's face I go
oh no this guy's Spiel is not good and the guy goes Sam what do you think and Sam no
smile straight face goes I don't know why I'm even on this call what are you talking about
well I just start dying but but I'm not trying to be rude I'm not trying to be rude exactly exactly
and it's not for everyone right that style is not for everyone but I can see how you so quickly
grow things with the right people because that type of radical Candor that like hey I'm just
gonna tell you what I think and we're not gonna have an ego and we're gonna work together
to solve problems is so much better than sitting in the corporate media being like Oh yeah no
that was that was great and then sending an email later you should look this guy straight in
the eyes and you're like I don't know why I'm here yeah I mean and the person who we're
speaking with I think they're great and I was just like you're you're great this is stupid though
you you know be different and uh be better than you are right now and achieve your
potential I think you're I think you're great that's typically the way that I work with people and
I don't like hearing when people say that I'm rude that kind of hurts my feelings because I'm
like oh [ __ ] I don't want to be like I don't want to be known as a jerk I I'm a pretty kind guy I
thought so I hate hearing that but it is the truth [Laughter] yeah I think Sam's intimidating to
work with uh you know I think that I've seen a bunch of people around the podcast that are
intimidating but it's a good thing it's a standard like the people who have really high
standards for how they want things to go they're intimidating to work with like for me we
come on here something's messed up the camera the audio whatever I'm hey don't worry it's
gonna be a great show I'm trying to put that person at ease and I'm like they probably feel
like [ __ ] I know they didn't want this to happen uh you know like and a lot of these things
are I know like that's not you intentionally messing something up that's like something is
going wrong somebody's late so something out of your control is happening or as Sam gets
frustrated I could see that person start to sweat and I don't think that's rude I just think that's
like I think you're focused and I think you uh you know you're just like you're like a blunt
object it's like what are you gonna say say like this Hammer is not very soft no it's a [ __ ]
Hammer we that we that's why we like it that's why it has that's why it gets the best spot on
the tool side because it's this like really like heavy blunt object and that's what you need and
like for the podcast the podcast would not be successful without Sam like that's just he
brings that to the Pod and so I love that now with that comes well I you know sometimes it's
not gonna be you know not everyone's gonna get treated with soft gloves and that's okay
like you know if you know the guy's intent is good then you you don't really worry about it so I
don't know that's that's my uh I don't know my feedback that's good yeah no that that's on
brand and then Sean let me I I know I'm here for you guys to ask me questions but I want to
ask you a question uh which is you know like you obviously are a great Storyteller you're
very good on camera how much of that do you think is is natural like you're just born with it
let me ask it keep going keep going keep going let me let me answer it first part about the
camera enter I was gonna say how much do you think you're born with and how much are
you have you studied like are you and what are you doing to get better at it because I've
listened to the podcast for three years and you just increasingly upped your game and gotten
better and I mean it's pretty it's pretty incredible so let me give my perspective and then he
should answer but so from the time I knew Sean he was always pretty good he would we
would we would do these like the the podcast stemmed because me him and sieve and a
few other guys would meet weekly or monthly and like do kind of what we're doing now and
Sean was always good at at like I I would explain something and be like well so what you're
really saying is this so here's how you should look at it and he would like storytell in such a
way where I'm like oh wow you've got this like inspirational like thing about you that's really
good and then so he always had that I think that was like a I think he was born with that and
then we started the Pod and he was a little rough where I actually think early on I was better
than him at like capturing attention and then he started learning about copywriting I think I
was like you should learn about this copy or anything and then he got really good at
copywriting and then he got really good at storytelling like on a more refined basis and
basically what happened was because he was born with this I think this innate ability as well
as he wanted to learn about it and then he actually studied it his trajectory and his growth
was quicker than mine and I think he actually surpassed it in terms of like storytelling and
ability to capture attention and if you won't listen to like the first couple of episodes you could
clearly see like because of his tone of voice and everything like all right this person's
intriguing but then it was like he studied it over a year and you could see that there was a
huge change and I think it was in part of him studying copywriting and I do think he like
actually went and studied like Hassan uh Hassan and like all these other comedians he like
figured out we both like comedians but I think he studies it and we'll like tweet it or message
each other like hey let's look at how they like told this joke it was really interesting and so he
actually studied that and truly learned it and so I think it was a combination of being born and
studying over like two years is that is that accurate uh I think some things you said they were
accurate sure um my and nobody knows right like it's a possible question to answer but like
I'll give it my best shot here's my honest opinion my honest opinion is I I don't actually think
I'm that good at it in at Absolute terms I just think it's relative to Tech business and like
podcasts when I've seen you with like professionals and they like Comedians and I saw that
they were like coming to you for advice I've seen it yeah okay that happens but I think the I
don't know I grew up in Houston and Houston's just got like a very high swag factor and like
they're like I play basketball in the locker room there were dudes that like should have been
on stage at the Apollo or something like that like just the natural Charisma of people who
were just uh and you know that I grew up with were was just really really high so I think that
actually has a lot to do with it would you hang out with people who naturally have a lot of
Swag and Charisma and tell funny jokes or stories are able to to just quickly jump in and
have quick wit that just becomes your normal so I think part of it was that some environment
stuff my sister for example is way funnier way better Storyteller than me and growing up it
was always Sean's the smart nice one but he's quiet he's shy she's the funny one
charismatic if something happened to me they'd be like Nisha tell the story about like Sean
like let Nisha tell the story everyone will love it so at every family party it was her doing and
you know so imagine that like the person you admire your your older sibling is really great at
this thing and you just constantly see your family and friends are like everybody loves that
about them so to me it became like an important thing in my life I was like not in a negative
way not like a jealousy but I was like it was a thing I valued I was like oh that's a really cool
skill I value that I had no idea how to do it and when I was younger I was just super super
quiet so I didn't talk that much in my friends group I was just the I was the laugh track I
wasn't the guy making the jokes I was the crowd noise and um but I started to I got a couple
lucky breaks my cousin was in town and was like Hey you know there's a movie audition
going on like you want to come with me and I just like I guess so I don't know and so I went
with him and I ended up getting cast in the movie um and that like showed me that exposed
me to a different thing and the the guy in the movie who was my brother was uh Cal Penn
who was the guy from Harold and Kumar and stuff like that so I got to hang out with him for
like weeks at a time so now I'm around somebody else who's very charismatic very good
Storyteller but he's like a professional actor right so he was somebody I admired that I was
hanging out with for weeks he's the only guy I talked to on set because I was intimidated by
everybody else and he was super nice to me and so we just hung out every day for like you
know six weeks so that's like kind of a boot camp in like just being around somebody who's
got that Charisma okay then fast forward uh I moved to San Francisco and I'm like okay um I
want to be like you know I don't know in my mind I was like a CEO should be the leader the
leader should be inspiring charismatic clear I'm none of those things so how am I gonna do
all that and so I like tried to do things I took you know I went to the SF improv I took classes
there all the time right because I was like I don't know it's fun I might meet some people but
also I think this I think improv is just like a crazy skill set to have like to be able to on your
feet be able to think of something and you know make a crowd laugh that that to me is a
actual superpower and it's a superpower I wanted to have same thing with comedians like I
like that content but I don't just watch it and let's just let drool come out of my mouth that oh
wow these people are funny I'm like I want to be funny I love how funny they are and like
what do they do when they tell stories um to you know that makes it work and I'll go re-watch
it and I'll sort of break it down sometimes I'll I'll try it myself uh like for example when I did
that Luna video I did it in the style of like there's John Oliver or hustle Minaj like skits and
mine is like you know 10 times worse and I texted it to husband he was like cool change
these 95 things and I was like ah dude that's a lot to change I'm just gonna ship it like you
know I I don't have time to do all that but like now that you've told me this I now know what I
should have done but it's just those reps like it's Talent helps but then there's reps and
people don't really see the Reps and I would say like that combination of the three things I
mentioned like being around people who are who are better at it than you and you admire
them that plants a little seed inside you right like also you were talking about that with money
like when you've met people with more money it was inspiring and you're like oh wow my
World opened up I now have like people I can sort of like you know I could try to embody a
blueprint that that maybe they have uh to something I want that's how it was with storytelling
and sort of like I don't know Charisma or something like that for me and so that you know
being around people who admire uh putting yourself in unusual situations that are like kind of
intensives like improv or acting in movies stuff like that most people in business don't have
that experience so they shouldn't be as good at it right like if you've never gone through
these intense experiences and then you know how would you have developed those skills
why are you asking that Austin are you trying to like get better at talking or what yeah I want
to get better at public speaking so 2023 goal I guess I'm going to uh New York Improv dude I
I you're gonna probably I think some people are born better but I think everyone can get at
least good but I do think Sean has this like something that will make him great and uh it is it's
very uh well let me just put it this way Austin have you ever watched back a video of you
speaking publicly in order to take notes on yourself of how you did yeah super uncomfortable
feeling but an obvious thing to do if you wanted to get better yeah right like I just had that
moment where I was like oh I'm saying I want to get better at this I've never done any of the
obvious things you would do right I've never like went and watched myself and said what the
hell am I doing with my hands and why am I fidgeting so much am I oh man I keep saying
um at the start of these sentences I should just say the sentence but like I had to go review
the game film okay then the second thing was like I had to take it seriously like did I just walk
up there unprepared and not warm or do I warm up or do I prepare okay that that added to
the game and then the third one is like who's the best at this and I went to a Tony Robbins
event I was like this guy's like the best public speaker I've ever seen and even if I don't listen
to any of his content if I just literally listen to the rhythm of his words and the gestures and
then the the hooks and how he's getting everyone's attention that's a master class right there
like okay I'll take that and so that's how I started stacking up some of these things and I don't
consider myself a good public speaker because I don't do a lot of speeches or anything like
that anymore but um it's definitely something at a time I try to build up and it accommodated
in an epic wedding speech I gotta say the best speech I ever gave was at my wedding
unrehearsed off the Dome and just like it was I don't know the perfect the perfect speech I
just retired from the game right there at your own wedding at my own way yeah is there a is
there anything else you want to talk about Austin it's pretty cool you should come on More by
the way we should talk about newsletter [ __ ] because you're like the only person or us
three or some of the very few people that like I actually want to ask newsletter advice from
um and like yeah I'm trying to get out of the the newsletter guy branding but just keep on
bringing me on to be the newsletter guy dude but it's not it is so fun it's a love-hate
relationship it's really they're really fun to do but also they're painful and whatever yeah no I
think that's it I think we we cover most of it what do you think you're gonna be doing like 10
years from now you're gonna you think you'd be running businesses you're gonna be just
investing or a big business or something what he wants or what so to me it's it's barbell right
I either wanna you know have some passive income and you know work 20 25 hours a week
more casual or I want to go all in but if I go all in it's got to be huge right the potential has to
be multiple billions I don't think I'm going to want to run a business where it's like it's nice and
it's like a double right if I win it's a double I don't want doubles right I either want a home run
or I want to you know sit in the Dugout and just you know be be part of the the peanut gallery
I don't want to play in that middle game I'm going to look in the future and I'm gonna tell you
it's probably not going to be you sitting in the Dugout that is not going to be this is I think
maybe you will for a couple years but if I have to make a bet and I would put my money
where my mouth is it's not going to be that one that's not what you're gonna do we'll see well
thanks for coming on dude this is awesome yeah thanks for having me let's do it again soon
[Music]

13 Businesses Making +$1,000,000/Year With 0 Employees

I was like have you done any deals like that I would have heard of and he's like you know
Disneyland I was like yeah he's like a lot of Windows in Disneyland we do all the windows in
Disneyland oh my God they bought a window company got him a Disney contract we do all
the windows at Disney [Music] all right what's up we are talking about something pretty
special this episode this is gonna be different than our normal episodes which are you know
freewheeling freestyling today we got a plan and the plan is we're going to talk about
companies that crush it with only one or two employees so the reason we thought about this
was there was some news I don't know a couple weeks ago that a company that I had never
heard of called War graphs sold for 54 million dollars and the yeah that's I mean that's
obviously impressive but the most impressive part was that Warcraft was just one dude so
one guy sold his company for 54 million dollars and uh I don't know do you know what
wargrass did are you familiar with it is it a gaming thing it's a gaming thing yeah so he built
basically a companion app I think for a League of Legends so if you play League of Legends
this was like a thing that would keep track of your stats and stuff like that help you get better
at the game so he built this little companion app and uh it had gotten really popular I think he
got into like a million uh players that used it and was generating serious revenue and so he
sold it for 51 54 million in cash and he was upfront he was like I got half of the uh sorry I got
half of the 54 million in cash up front and I have the other half as like my earn out that I have
to look at like you know if it hits you know our Milestones along the way which is just super
impressive for a one-person company and how old is the person uh I think he started when
he was young but now it's been like you know seven or eight years so that's amazing I'm
gonna guess some something like 30 but the the it got me thinking it was like everybody
talks about big businesses for good reason big businesses are awesome uh there they are
but what about Mighty businesses what about the the guys who are punching above their
weight so somebody who has just themselves or just one or two people that does millions in
Revenue profitably flies under the radar and like how many other War graphs are there out
there so we did some research and we found some and so that's what this episode is going
to be about and we've kind of touched on this before we've done some of our most popular
episodes if you go on YouTube you'll see the episode with Peter levels I think has a couple
hundred thousand um listens the lesson uh sorry the uh episode about Amit Agarwal the guy
who builds uh G Suite you know maybe basically Google Sheets plugins um he does
millions of dollars in Revenue as just kind of one guy who was a blogger turned app builder
and so those were some of our most popular episodes so I think this is going to be a good
one too Sam anything else before we jump in yeah I want to give an honorable mention to
this one person Have you listened to juvenile growing up remember rapper the rapper
juvenile of course you're giving him a shout out like he's listening yeah I like last year NPR
they do this thing called the tiny desk concert series you know what that is it's like they're in
the office like playing acoustic songs yeah those are cool they said who should we have and
this one guy goes you should have Juvenile and juvenile replies and he goes what the what
that he goes WTF what what the f is a tiny desk and hell no and you know what they got him
to do it anyway it happened this weekend and so in preparation for this one-man band show
I've been listening to that juvenile concert at the tiny desk NPR series it was awesome it was
awesome he he remember back that ass up it was so good it was so good I had to be
inspired him and Manny fresh in it and it was awesome it was awesome awesome awesome
so honorable these are the tiny Desk Awards then let's call it that these are the tiny Desk
Awards which are the the businesses that can be run off of one tiny desk because it's just
one or two people all right and uh we're gonna do this like an awards show so we have a
long list but that'd be kind of boring so we're we're broken up into categories and we each
have our answer for the category so for example first category is going to be biggest
one-person business but we also have to set some rules here yes some of these things one
person it's a bit uh vague yeah one person oftentimes can mean like the founder and like a
team of contractors or in many cases it's going to be um uh agencies that they work with of
course or it started as one person and it was that way for a long time and then they hired a
team uh exactly so it's more of the spirit of the law than the letter of the law here so you
know they don't have t-shirts for the company because you know there's they don't have like
you know a bunch of employees and and uh you know morale they they probably won't have
a uh an office where a bunch of people go into it's either one or two people who are kind of
the core drivers and maybe they use some contractors or vendors or agencies for for other
things but uh that's that's generally the the way we're looking at this yeah and so uh let's get
into it so what's the first one the uh is it the the biggest so you go first so I'm gonna do one
another gaming one that I doubt you know of do you know what stardew valley is no what is
that so stardew Valley is this game and if you look at the game the game art looks like it's
like 8-bit art almost it looks like a very very simplistic game and it was made by one guy this
guy Eric Barone and he's basically is like you know I'm he gets out of school he doesn't want
to get a job so he's like well you know I'm gonna teach myself how to code uh instead of
going to get a good job so he's like why don't I learn how to build a game in order to teach
myself how to code like I don't want to just code for coding's sake I'll try to do something with
it and he always liked these games back if you have a harvest moon it's like this kind of like
Farming Simulator game um there's like very simple kind of like uh you know it had like a cult
following and so he's like I'm gonna make my version of Harvest Moon which was like kind of
was popular when I was a kid like you know 15 years ago 20 years ago and um so he
spends basically uh four years in solitude just building this game by himself before he
releases it and for four years his job did he have a job he just lived off his girlfriend his
girlfriend had a like a grad degree stipend and uh and then he had a part-time job as an
usher is amazing I mean and Usher is a terrible unless you're literally trying to be like a cover
artist covering the artist Usher like you know you never want to be a notcher that's not the
that's not your crew's not going the right direction when you're doing that um so anyways the
he launches this thing stardew Valley has sold 20 million copies um it sells for 13 a pop and
so uh you know he sold this thing I think over time it has done 150 million in sales or
Revenue um and he's the only guy who built it just by himself it's just honestly not that
uncommon Minecraft was largely built the same way there's this guy Notch who's the
developer behind Minecraft and if you've ever seen it he'll get on Twitch and he'll just code
Minecraft like he'll just stream himself for like 12 hours just building the game and like I think
Minecraft have more people overall but like one guy was really the driving force and the
driving energy around it for many many years uh but stardew Valley is my pick for for biggest
100 50 million off of one one Game Dev the guy Notch when he's sold I think he sold for like
multiple billions right three billion two billion something like that and he uh I think he bought
like an like he outbid Beyonce for like an 80 million dollar mansion in uh LA and he was
tweeting out or sharing how everyone hates him now he was like I'm so lonely this sucks but
he's still in this like fancy 80 million dollar mansion do you remember that whole like ordeal
where he was talking about how he like didn't give Equity to people and so some of the
people who he hired uh hated him and he was lonely but he was having all these huge
parties and he was lost and all that stuff do you remember all that no I I missed all that dude
he like went through this whole Spiel on on Twitter about how like he hates his life but oh
wow you know everything what else is uh I'm looking at this house this house is insane with
the 80 million 70 million it was like a it was a fat I remember like I would love to just see
Beyonce getting the news it's like oh who who did it who outbid me was it was it Spielberg
who was it oh no it must have been uh but Lenny Kravitz on this like not ch [Laughter] um all
right mine is a stream yard so stream yard I'll have to uh remember when they launched but I
think they launched in 2019 right before the pandemic hit and it was basically a it was a way
to stream events online and stream interviews and things like that online these two guys
scaled it to 30 million dollars in Revenue in one year or 18 months or so and this mostly
happened because the pandemic they ended up selling it to happen for 250 million dollars it
was a mix of cash in stock and hop in ended up laying up off a bunch of people uh like last
year but I've heard rumors that it's killing it have you heard these rumors pop it yeah no no I
have not heard I've heard the opposite of those rumors but I don't know what have you
heard well just like when the layoffs happened and it was like basically post covered events
came back online like in person so that's naturally going to hurt the business then they had
massive layoffs and I heard that the the founders had taken a ton of secondary or something
like that so I heard like a hundred million plus in secondary yeah but maybe the business
went well I have no idea I just heard kind of like that generally though when you hear those
three things it's like massive layoffs you know Market uh you know the the crazy event that
was driving your growth has stopped and the founders people start talking about how much
secondary the founders took it's usually because the business is going in the wrong direction
you usually people don't [ __ ] about secondaries when the thing is exploding I don't know I I
heard the other way I I also thought that and I heard the other way around we talked about
stream yard like right when they were getting going and then we talked about them again
when they were acquired did you say you knew these guys I think I met because back when
I was doing video streaming I met like kind of everyone in this space I I don't know I gotta
look up who these guys are but I do know that they got to 14 million in RR when it was just
the two of them and then it got to 30 million when they had by that time they had hired up a
team so this is kind of like a hybrid they got they got really far with just a couple people and
then they hired up um you know from from as they scaled it before they sold and I remember
going to their website when it was just them and I there was like the founder and he was he
was on the he was on the home page and he was giving like a tutorial video on how to use
the product it was just him like with this camera on his lap practically and he looked
exhausted he looked so worn out I remember this during the pandemic when we were
thinking about using them for something and he looked like super Haggard but it was very
impressive that these two guys have built this to sell for 250 million dollars and although it
was cash and stock so I don't know if the stock is worth anything I heard it might be so that
might be one of the biggest ones that I've heard of at least recent big ones another big one
that uh it happened a long time ago so I have no connection it was Plenty of Fish how much
did plenty of fish get acquired for like 550 million dollars yes hundreds yeah and uh that was
started by one guy named Marcus who now I see online and he seems like he like lives the
most lavish life and just does crazy [ __ ] and so plenty of fish was basically one of the early
dating websites it was a Marketplace it was like okay Cupid but I think it was predominantly
Canadian and that had to be probably the biggest exit that I've ever heard of for a really
small small team yeah plenty of fish was unbelievable that guy isn't he like a nut that Plenty
of Fish founder I feel like that's a whole another story we should do one day I think it's a
whole another I think I don't know I haven't researched it enough to actually like verify the
claims but I've heard like a little like grumblings like a little little stories that something weird
is going on but I don't know the truth also I love the fact that you've met the stream yard guys
and they looked Haggard and you're like it's like in Silicon Valley when you see somebody
like that you put your arm around them and you're like hey you all right is it is it because of
too much traction or not enough I just need to know how I'm gonna be super much yeah oh
it's too much traction okay okay come here come here you sleep on my couch let me feed
you just take this check put me on your cap table uh you know like there's really you know
one out of ten of the Haggard people they're getting beat down by too much demand and
nine out of 10. like that who have you met like that who else have you met where are you I
remember you're talking to a guy who um this guy Abner met a guy abder and he was doing
something pretty I met him after the fact but he told me the story and I it was it was stuck
with me and I always remember here after hearing the story I was like I should look for that
so what happened was Twitter started taking off in popularity uh right when it kind of got
going in Silicon Valley like it became like a thing and Abner was him and his team or they're
like kind of like data science type people and so they were like all right what can we build uh
that makes Twitter work better because Twitter was such a simplistic product and at the time
it was like almost like a protocol like anyone could kind of build apps on top of it or use the
data for something so he's trying to build something he doesn't know what he's doing he's
like he's sitting on a train and he starts coding this thing he's like oh I've done this research
on sentiment analysis and he's like I was like okay so yeah well the story sounds a little bit
boring who cares about sentiment analysis he's like yeah you could he's like you could figure
out like how people are feeling about a certain topic because they're talking about it in a
certain way so he said so tell him his story was boring right when he got oh my you know my
channel started to drift yeah I was like is there anyone else in this a car I could talk to I was
in a car with him in Ethiopia you know for four hours straight there's nowhere to run so I'm
I'm hearing I'm like all right let me hear about the story sentimentality yeah go ahead tell me
more about your PhD and sentiment analysis what did this do and he's like so I was on a
train and I'm building this thing I'm trying to analyze what people are saying on Twitter to see
if I could get the sentiment the current mood or whatever he's like but then I realized actually
what I'll do is instead of figuring out their mood I'll just figure out what are they talking about
a lot of like a lot more than usual that's kind of interesting and he basically created trending
for Twitter off of Twitter oh cool so he's like he's like oh I could figure out that the word
Olympics normally is only said this much but it's being said 10 standard standard deviations
more so that means Olympics is trending the the it's it's above its par and he's like this is
super cool like I basically have the 10 things that people are talking about on Twitter I can
kind of get that I get that signal in a way that you couldn't really get at the time on Twitter and
so he creates this and they create a separate website off of Twitter called Twitter trending I
forgot what it was called Zone website and they start getting millions of hits on this thing and
they're just trying to and as and he's trying to keep it keep it up because he's basically
drinking from the Twitter fire hose and he's got all this traffic and so he's trying to keep both
of them working eventually Twitter buys them so they become like employees 10 through 20
or something of Twitter oh sick and at the time Twitter had the fail well it was just like
constantly Twitter the service was going down it was had so much usage and it was like in
this Web 2.0 like it wasn't like scalable yet they hadn't figured out how to scale it and he told
me he's like he's like for six months he's like I just woke up every day with like an imprint of
my keyboard on my forehead like I had just passed out I was working trying to keep this
damn Side Up pass out wake up uh where was I and I just kept going he's like that was six
months straight of my life he's like I've never experienced anything like it and at the time I
remember thinking oh there's levels to this thing like that's what it feels like when you really
have one of the winners like and if you talk to people early at Facebook and they talk about
like what the what what it was like working early at Facebook Facebook it's like when people
talk about living in New York they're like just the energy was it's the energy you can't explain
it and it's like that's how that's what you get when you're inside one of these generational
companies at the early stage when they're they're scaling too fast dude that's exciting I love
that one um I like hearing those old stories like that I always read those old books like the
hatching Twitter and all that [ __ ] I love that [ __ ] yeah me too um all right next let's go to
let's wait let's go to a highest degree of difficulty we'll skip a category and come back to it
okay so this is the hardest one the hardest example the one that we're like how the hell did
you even do that and there's no way anyone else would have done this you go first all right I
have one it's called tiny wow so I think the URL is just tinywow.com so do you have that
pulled up tiny while yeah got it all right so I met this guy he's a member of Hampton that's
why I met him his name is Evan Gower he had a uh another website called Tech junkie
maybe you heard of tech junkie but they like just talked about like Tech topics whatever it's
pretty normal website but he ended up selling it for eight figures and on the side he started
this thing called tiny wow which is a bunch of tools that include like how to convert a PDF but
then image editing tools that use Ai and it's one of those websites where you Google like
convert this file to PDF it is able to he's able to come up first right now it has 6.6 million visits
a month and the reason it's yeah it's insane the reason it's interesting is right now it only
does 20 000 a month in Revenue because he says I haven't I just haven't turned on any of
the um monetization it just has like uh little ads he goes I'm going to turn it on eventually but
right now I'm just enjoying the summer and time at my family so I haven't really like dug deep
and like built it and so basically this guy Evan he wasn't you talking about the weather put on
AdSense what are you doing Evan this is insane dude that's the cool part about uh these
one-person businesses and this is another guy who I'm gonna tell a story about has said the
same thing he goes I felt like taking the summer off so I just let it ride for a little while uh so
this guy Evan he basically had a history as a a developer he says he doesn't do any
development now but he has a team of three people who are helping him or one contractor
who helps him with uh overseas who's helped him actually like build and Implement he
basically just draws it and Designs it but the reason why this thing is taken off is if you
Google or do you remember like do you ever see those videos on Tick Tock that say like
here's five websites that should be illegal but aren't so good that they should be illegal yeah
so that is basically how it the the website got popular is it's gotten popular from those videos
and so the reason why this is really hard to create because a getting traffic to a a like a
Content site or any type of website like this it's very challenging oftentimes building the
product is not the hard part it's getting users and getting 60 point six million visits a month
mostly from social quite challenging we'll see if he's able to turn this but I asked him I was
like how big can this get he's like well like I think of like canva so I'm like can we I think it can
make tens of millions of dollars a year in Revenue because we're gonna ultimately we have
this traffic we can have like a feature that says hey you can edit this uh picture using our
platform and we'll charge a small fee I think this actually could be a big business but right
now it's really tiny he told me it cost ten thousand dollars a month to run and it's making
twenty thousand dollars a month in Revenue wow yeah do you know how much uh how
much remove that BG makes who do you ever use remove.bg no what is that oh that's I
mean that's that was the old way it's like if you need to remove a background from an image
like you need to just cut out the object and remove the background remove.bg was this
website that was uh like just because of traffic yeah it was just a go-to and uh oh my God 50
to 60 million in monthly monthly visits so it's just like insane and remove.bg it just had a
Stranglehold for me at least on on doing this it was like super quick you just drag your image
in it just removes the background boom there you go and uh and then they charge for like yo
you want it like 1080P or whatever they started charging for like little things like remove this
Watermark and um I'm sure this thing crushes you know I I don't know I don't know how how
much uh Revenue they do now but I'm sure this is one of these like Mighty businesses
where it's a very small team uh canva acquired them it says that they had at least 100 million
people coming to their website last year yeah um that's a CR that's crazy so it's acquired by
canva so you can probably I don't know if canva has gone public yet maybe they have I think
actually they just did a last month you might be able to dig through their numbers and see if
they got Acquired and for how much but that's crazy that's so much traffic this site tiny while
definitely could be something like that they started this in 2019. um it's this company collidio
um and then they so they started in 2019 they sold it this was 2021 so two years later for
roughly 100 million dollars wow and uh wow do they have funding I think the parent
company it looks like it's a side project of the parent company the reason why I said these
are the hardest to make is getting that scale of traffic that fast is so challenging you know like
there's a lot of like software products that we're gonna name as one person companies and
that's challenging in the sense of like you have to put it in a ton of hours uh and you actually
have to like invent stuff and that's very challenging but getting traffic to me is more of an
intellectual challenge where it's like I have no idea like where to start like whereas with
starting with software like I I'm gonna make this one feature then I'll do this other feature I'll
talk to my users it's a little bit involves a little bit of luck a little bit of skill but getting a lot of
traffic to your website early on I think there's less people that know how to do that and so
that's why I think that this is one of the harder things to start so here's my my answer for
highest degree of difficulty photo p so photo p is very very similar basically it's one guy who
recreated the entirety of Photoshop in a web browser for free so oh my God Photoshop is
one of the most complicated products in the world he recreated it by himself gives it away for
free and made it work in the browser which Photoshop doesn't Photoshop is a you know how
you have to download the app in order to make it work it's just remarkable the guy barely
monetizes it uh doesn't want to sell it and uh if you go just search his like just search photo P
Reddit um or like you know founder Reddit he goes and he talks about like you know why he
built it how he built it um and what you know what how he thinks about it or whatever it's
pretty insane and I think how much traffic does it get uh traffic wise like 13 million according
to similar web uh per month and um he does at the time this was a couple years ago he said
that he was doing a hundred thousand a month um off this thing and it was like literally from
the most basic absolute most basic of uh of like ads like this is one guy Ivan who made it
and it's he's just like puts like the very simple Banner ad on the site and makes like 100 000
a month he uh did a post at Hacker News on April 11 2021 he goes hey guys I'm Ivan I'm the
creator of photopee I made almost a million dollars in the last 12 months 90 from ads the
rest is from premium uh which is useless you pay to hide ad so it's not even much of a
premium when you start your own project you never know if it'll make 250 000 but if you get
hired you can be quite sure that you will never make more than 250 000 and so that's why I
started it and so this company photo P I don't know how big it is but depending on how many
users it has I could see this getting sold for nine figures over a hundred million dollars so um
he did an AMA on Reddit and they said uh hey have you hired your first employee yet this
was a year ago and uh he says oh after I did my first AMA on Reddit uh lots of great people
got in touch I did end up hiring one guy from Prague who uh who went to my university but
it'll take some time for him to get familiar with the code he hasn't done it it is like it hasn't
done yet it's pretty crazy how this guy uh operates so why do you think this is the most
challenging uh just like technically recreating Photoshop feature for feature is absolutely
insane like I think that's just an insane Endeavor um and then making it work in the browser
like making it performance in a browser is not easy either so like for one person to do this I
think it's crazy that's insane yeah I uh the the cool thing about these like one I think the the
downside of these one-person companies is that everything relies on you and that you don't
have like anyone else to ask for help and you can't hire anyone you can't have anyone better
than you doing something because you're the only person and so in order to do this I think a
lot of these people they have a they have a handful of traits that we'll talk about in the end
but I don't understand how he could grind that hard for that long with all this pressure on him
by the way this guy says he put seven thousand hours into it before he made any money
from it that's insane so I think that that just takes so much will do you remember Viral Nova it
was a guy named Scott de long so Viral Nova was basically an Upworthy clone it was a it
says like they're like here's a list of 10 reasons why you don't want to go swimming after
eating you're not going to believe number seven and so this guy would talk about like how it
was just him writing 10 articles a day and he was like I'm the pressure of all this traffic and all
the success it's killing me I feel so worn out all the time and I don't understand how some
people can sustain that for a really long time like this photo P guy yeah this is like you know
when you go to someone's house and they're like oh do you want to see my model train set
I'm building you're like what uh yeah sure why not I'm here and they take you down to the
basement and then it's just like they've recreated like the city of Vienna and through their like
and they're just tinkering on this like one thing they're like uh how many hours how long have
you been doing this and they're like oh I just come here every night I love it and this is what I
do it makes me feel so good and you're like holy [ __ ] this is like the most intense hobby
that's how that's how I'm not that guy I'm not that type of person are you you're definitely not
I think right come on if not uh yeah I envy those people that's an amazing uh willpower all
right let's do another one let's do on the other end easiest to recreate so which of these one
person one or two person businesses do you think are easiest to recreate that um is the
opposite of the highest degree of difficulty go ahead um so mine would be anything that sells
information or service so I put just any course creator but you and I know a bunch of these
people of which you and I are both of those people uh you know we make hundreds of
thousands or Millions dollars a year from like a course or two and I think they're fairly easy to
recreate another one is uh there's a company called design Joy you know what they do I
believe it's a design subscription basically that's him yeah but the way that he positions it it
seems really hard to imagine that that's the truth but basically it's just this designer that you
pay thousands of dollars a month for and you ask them to make small changes to different
design related stuff and he claims that it's just him but I I believe he claims that yeah but he
says it sounds like he does a hundred thousand dollars a month so he does 1.2 million a
year or so around that range and it's basically you buy a subscription plan so you pay and
you buy like the five it's like four or five thousand a month um and then you you basically get
one request at a time um and that's it you get to just say I'd like this design thing done and
he turns around in some I don't know what his SLA is of how long he takes to uh to do this
but it's like it's cheaper than hiring a full-time designer probably unless like in the US um but
yeah that's the I think that's the easiest to recreate but also the worst to run which we'll talk
about later but that's probably the easiest one it's like a bunch do you know any other course
people that do like like I know Sam Evans does 10 million in Revenue 5 million profit and for
a while it was just him I met these guys I met a guy recently who does like a product
management course and I was like oh my God who's taking a product management course
he goes no no it's how to base your job interview as a product manager like how to get a job
as a PM at one of these tech companies and I think he was doing what was he doing but like
2 million a year or something like that I think they were doing like two what two 2.5 they had
2.5 million a year uh roughly in in Revenue I think it was like 80 percentish margins and what
they would do is they would basically say they would give away free content that was like
how to you know how to get a job as a PM how to interview as a PM how to uh prep for this
interview what it was like talking to a Facebook PM blah blah they give away free content to
get you kind of on the email list and get you to the website and then they're like hey do you
want to like get a job as a PM which will pay you let's call it 120 000 a year if you want that
job um buy this course and join this cohort of course or whatever and they basically sell this
course for a couple thousand dollars that's going to help you get this job that's going to pay
you over a hundred thousand dollars and that's like a very simple value proposition for
somebody who wants to uh wants to do that with their career and it was just him it was him
in three it was it was three of them three three PMS that kind of like got together and made
this thing another example of an easy one to start I think I told you about this it's called cyber
lead so you go to get cyberleads.com so it's c-y-b-e-r leads so get cyberleads.com it's this
guy named Alex West and basically it's a newsletter where I I think it costs four to a
thousand dollars a month so four hundred to a thousand dollars a month depending on what
you get what you do but basically he goes and he hand picks different companies that have
recently raised money and based off a bunch of attributes he thinks are about to hire an
agency and then he gets all these agency owners to sign up to his service and he emails this
list out once a month along with like the contact information the hiring decision or the hiring
uh uh like whoever's managing ad spend whatever and you can just contact him on he's got
your face and quota as a testimonial do you use this no I don't use this but I talked I talked
about it on the Pod uh I talked about it on the Pod like two years ago I've never used it uh
I've never you've never used it but he sure used you he is he was a big I don't know is there
anything can I can you say anything about these people who do this I talked about it on the
Pod I said it's so freaking simple the value's so clear I guess I said that on the podcast and
he uses that as a quote is there anything I could do decide to take them down you can
always say that um oh sorry let me wrap up my thing selling information so anything that you
sell information that's the easiest thing to start yeah I think uh so I went the same route but
I'm gonna give more detail because I think when you tell somebody selling information is the
easiest way they're like cool what so what do I do so [ __ ] I gave three examples yeah but I
think you have to break it down a little further so um you know this guy Lenny Lenny Russian
last name I don't know I like Letty Rogowski or vegetative uh something something along
those lines I like Lenny so Lenny I think used to work at Airbnb or something he was like a
growth slash like product guy and so he's got Lenny's newsletter he's got Lenny's
communities he's got Lenny's job board and basically he was like I'm gonna become he's
like I'm gonna put out tons of free thought leader content on a specific super Niche topic that
only certain people are gonna care about but they're gonna care a lot and that's that's kind of
the key with this stuff is how do you put out free content to establish yourself as an authority
in a niche so that you can then monetize that through either Consulting Services job board
paid Community or um or paid content paid newsletter right that's that's the formula and you
can look at the um the design Joy guy he does exactly this he puts out free content
examples of design work and then says you can hire me for design work um Lenny does the
same thing he puts out free content he's got really good stuff like you know how did these 10
huge marketplaces how did they get their first thousand users and he goes deep and he's
like I'm gonna interview them I'm gonna talk to them I'm going to get the real answer on the
specific zero to one question that's going to be highly relevant to other people going through
that same challenge I think he has a podcast too he's got a podcast like at one point his job
board was doing a couple hundred thousand I'm sure the newsletter does a couple hundred
thousand in sponsorships I think about monthly or annually annually um at least these are
minimum [ __ ] way more like I know at the beginning his job boards crushing I don't know
what they're doing now but like I would bet his entire roll-up of job board um content
sponsorship so podcast plus newsletter and then uh he's got a paid thing right Ben he's got
like a paid paid Community what's it what do you think bloody's total thing is 2 million three
million yeah for sure about two to three million uh a year and he did that I would say in a
period of like two and a half three years it seems like like I think he think he has a fun too he
kind of put his foot down on the content side I like he kind of appeared on the scene I would
say like two two-ish years ago um obviously you had to know your stuff right so he's like you
know spent time learning you know a decade being awesome inside these companies in
order to do so I don't mean to make it sound overly simplistic but there are people who did it
without that too so another example is uh Harry dry one of my favorite content creators in the
whole world a guy I tried to recruit like a hundred times to do something with me because I
feel like made to do something great um he keeps he keeps bullshitting and not saying yes
but he's gonna say yes eventually so he's got marketing examples he does a great job with
this blog called marketing examples now I don't know how much marketing examples makes
I would guess quarter million to half a million as just him making content I think he's young
he's very young he didn't do the put in 10 to 15 years become an industry like like do the job
cut your teeth then go make content he's like no I'm pretty sure I could just look at what's out
there and like give my opinion on it and it'll work I'll study this [ __ ] and that's how I feel like
you know a lot of people also can do it you can be the Curious novice approaching these uh
topics and become an expert just by studying them intensely and so uh I think Harry dry
would also be one of the easiest to recreate not because he's not talented he's super
talented but I think that's kind of something anyone can do anybody could just say yo I'm
gonna study what makes tick tocks go viral and I'm gonna put up content about viral tick
tocks I'm gonna become the expert of breaking down Tick Tock going viral and then brands
are going to know me as the guy that they should talk to you about Tick Tock Consulting right
like or like advertising on Tick Tock and like you could just build your Niche audience and
your Niche Authority in that space A lot of people are trying to do this AI right now and the
thing about Lenny and Harry was people were doing so first of all like a newsletters
Community podcast that's existed since forever uh so it's not a unique business model and
also people have been talking about that type of stuff for a long time but what's interesting is
that they were both early-ish where there was only maybe I don't know how many but they
felt like they were early-ish talking about it to this customer to this community on this platform
so both of those guys I think got popular on Twitter right before the pandemic started I think I
remember seeing Harry in 2018 2019 which I wasn't even really using Twitter as a power
user back then but they all seem a little bit early so I think timing matters for a lot of these
things uh speaking of which that Facebook threads thing no idea if that's going to be a thing
or not but that's an example of like hey there's this new thing right now if you want nothing to
lose you better be there yeah just go get go be around there see what's going on yeah that's
one of those things people did with Clubhouse I don't know if that worked out or not but uh
the way I say it is like you uh most most entrepreneurs were actually surfing waves you don't
get to create the wave but you do have to paddle out you got to be on your board out there
in the water you got to paddle out and you know which is a takes effort and then you gotta
wait and sometimes it's a dud sometimes it's just a small wave you're gonna have to paddle
back out again well when you catch a good one you know that's when you get and we'll see
how good you are at surfing you might Wipe Out the first couple times you try it but like that's
your job as an entrepreneur is to paddle out be out there and start trying to Surf these waves
and get a sense for where are the big waves and um and how do I not wipe out when I do
when I do find one so this episode you're giving a really in-depth surf analogy last episode
you gave us a fat uh a pitching of baseball what do you say a fat ass fat pitches it was fat
pitches if you ever played bass addiction never played baseball or serp in your life bro I was
starting right fielder for my high school team which anybody who knows baseball knows that
means you're the biggest scrub on the team because that's who that's what they put in right
field is the guy who's you know the ball never comes to right field and yeah but did you play
baseball in China like they were just learning I might have been in China you went to high
school and you went to high school in China yeah I mean or or Australia like it was hey
scrubs it was like we played the ball as it lies there I got a golf analogy for you too uh I was
in China but that's where I'm gonna be our software is the worst have you heard of HubSpot
see most crms are a cobble together mess but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks
gorgeous I think I love our new CRM our software is the best HubSpot grow better let's go to
the next one most fun one-person business so the one that seems like the most fun to to
work on I'll go first Joe Rogan so I'm pretty sure Joe Rogan's media Enterprise is bigger than
all the late night talk shows combined so forget the Tonight Show Letterman and any of
these whoever the new coming in whoever these guys are do the lettermen's been retired for
10 years Man Jimmy Fallon I don't know uh bro who's what who's watching this stuff his
audience is bigger he makes uh hundreds of millions and uh he's made hundreds of millions
doing it and I'm pretty sure it's just him and young Jamie I've heard from a few of my friends
who have been on it how it works so basically they told me that it's Jamie who produces it
and it's Joe and then they have one other guy named Matt I think and I forget his name
exactly I think it was Matt and basically Matt sends Joe a list of like 30 people they're like hey
I can get these 30 people these 30 let me know who you want and sometimes he just
ignores it every once in a while say that person and that person and that's all he says and
I've heard that it's just those three people that's amazing so I think most people just think oh
Joe Rogan he's just a podcaster yeah he is a podcaster but that thing is a juggernaut it is a
media Juggernaut so the you know Spotify obviously paid him you know hundreds of millions
to to be there uh for a couple years but even before that you know just off the sponsorships
off of uh off of the Alpha Brain you know um product that they build off of it Joe Rogan I think
has the most fun probably of anyone on the planet it's my sense he took all of his Hobbies
he's like oh I like UFC he gets to be the UFC commentator uh doing exactly what he would
want he gets to go sit ringside commentate for these fights and analyze the fights but he only
does it for the ones in Vegas that are an hour flight away from him he doesn't do any of the
the ones that require a bunch of travel um and so all the bit he does all the best ones he
does none of the worst ones uh you know he was like I want to do stand-up comedy so he
does Stand Comedy sells out you know uh theaters all around the country and um you know
gets to make people laugh for a living does this podcast where he's like I'm gonna have
conversations with the people I want and people are like oh Joe three hours is too long he's
like that's the type of conversation I want to have so I'm gonna do it my way and it worked
and so like I just think he just dictated how he wants to live life on his terms I think he has the
most fun I think his business is absolutely a mighty business in that it's just let's say one two
to three people that uh is building a thing that does you know over 100 million dollars in
Revenue which is like if you just valued something like that you know um traditionally which
is not it's not Apples to Apples but like if you have a thing that can do 100 million a year in
Revenue for multiple years for multiple years typically that's a billion dollar property and um
you know obviously it's weird you can't really sell legit you know Joe Rogan Experience
because you need him it's tightly branded with him but let's say at least he's built something
worth 100 million dollars I think we can agree on that because it's generated 100 million of
profit for him and so he's built you know with a very small team a multi-hundred million dollar
business at the minimum and he has this new thing called The Comedy Mothership it's like a
mile from my house in Austin and there's always a line out the door to get into that place
yeah Comedy Club why not why not if you drive by it at six o'clock there's every single night
there's been a line out the door to go there and it looks awesome right who you got most fun
all right so scroll up to the very top of this dock I put a link in there it sounds like I'm trying to
like promote Hampton I'm not it's just that when I had to prepare for this episode I just went
through our database and like picked out people and we had just written a blog post about
this guy his name's Joseph mambra and he started this company called gym streak and This
Guy's super fascinating because he has all the attributes of like what a lot of these like
Tinkers have but basically he's from Zimbabwe moved to England when he was like 12 or
13. that was the first time that he experienced the internet he taught himself how to code he
taught himself design and then he launched this thing called gym streak at first it was just an
app for tracking your workouts and then he what he did was he went and got his buddy to
wear one of these like suits and that way he could do 3D visualizations of all the exercises
and what they need to look like so he has hundreds of them and so his app it's free to use
and they have some like premium thing and basically you track your workouts he uses AI to
suggest which weights you should do for the next workout and if you don't know what the
exercise does and they'll suggest workouts and exercises to do he has hundreds of these 3D
models of like what a proper bicep curl or what this other type of exercise looks like in year
one he did three hundred thousand dollars that was in the year 2021 in year two he did 2.5
million and his goal he says by in the next two years I want to get the 15 to 20 million dollars
a year in revenue and he's the only employee I don't believe he has any contractors I think
he he told me that he uh got most of his uh users from Facebook and Tick Tock ads and he
hired a consultant in an agency to help him learn how to do that and right now he said I'm
taking the summer off so our growth this year might still only be 2.5 or 3 million a year in
Revenue but I because I don't feel like buying ads or staying on top of that so I'm taking the
summer off because we just had a kid but it's super fascinating to see a guy who basically
came from Zimbabwe didn't use the internet until he was 12 13 and taught himself how to do
all this he's like one of those really cool Tinkers and on that blog post you can see pictures of
him like arriving from Africa and like learning how to work the computer it's super fascinating
you'll see pictures of him with his like iPhone and a laptop at the gym filming people doing
like the curls so he can use his AI or whatever to like get the 3D imaging really fascinating
company I think Jim streak is awesome if this could get to 15 or 20 million a year in Revenue
like he thinks that would be a monster business for one person yeah that's an amazing story
wow love that uh good for him that's that's really really cool um next category business we
most want to own so this is um I think this is specifically a good question because for us a
business we'd want to own would be the lowest maintenance business because neither of us
want to really run an extra business right now so it's like which business would you want to
own because it is very much uh you know autopilot so it's not design Joy it's not people are
paying you and you're providing a subscription it's not one of those content or course
businesses where you constantly have to create new content in order to stay relevant and
get more customers um I think we both have the same one let's just do the same one that
we we both are really interested you you explain it go for it no you go first all right milled.com
so most people don't know mill.com it's m-i-l-led.com and it's a really really simple website
it's just a compilation of email marketing that different companies do so if you want to see
like what are my competitors sending for their fourth of July sale you just go to mill.com you
search the brand and you'll see okay here's what Ridge wallet sent uh for their fourth of July
uh email it's the top one on the on the Cyber site right now so it says you know you just click
and it shows you the exact email that they sent so you can see the design you can see the
offer you can see the copy and you could use that to get inspiration for what you should be
doing for your email marketing and this guy built the site uh I don't know how long ago now
but um he's post on Hacker News a little bit about it and it's one person it's a side project he
does a million dollars a year on it he said I was I was doing email marketing for a brand I
noticed two things one it took us several days to create each email blast um and two I had to
subscribe to like dozens of other competitor emails just to do research for for them so my
hypothesis was I could create a site that would just sign up for all the brands uh you know
email newsletters and um and then make it easier for anybody who's trying to do email
marketing right that's the uh that's that's the core core pitch for it and he's just been running
it as a side project doesn't take much maintenance doesn't you know he could just do
nothing on it for a little while and it makes money through ads yeah so so they use ads on
the left side here you can see like I have it open and he's basically got like in a like a link to
the brand itself and then he's got like a cyber security uh like ad here popped up below it
he's got like a skincare ad yeah it's just display ads so but here's another way how he makes
money so basically you're a marketer you go to milled and you want to see like uh it looks
like some shoe brand they run they ran this campaign and you want to check out the email
and you read it and get inspired whatever you click that ad and it takes you to the shoe
company and it's using an affiliate link if you buy some of the shoes right this is a horrible
way to monetize this is a a really amazing product under model under monetized website for
sure but good for him for getting the traffic in the first place but that's a horrible way to
monetize yeah yeah I agree uh but I think the guy doesn't care he's just like this is easy
that's cool uh low maintenance which is why I put it in my one I'd want to own because it's
low maintenance and I think it still has a lot of upside uh left I'll do one for one I want to own
so I said anything that is like marketplacey uh sort of like a Marketplace because sometimes
if you do it right those don't they don't run themselves entirely but the the community kind of
handles the business uh built with so built what was started in 2015 or 16 probably built with
is like the most Niche [ __ ] ever but there's it's a really big Niche so you go to built with in
order to see which plugins a website is using if they are using Wordpress and the reason
why that's important is you go to a website that you like and you go oh I love this feature they
have let's go inside without WordPress Shopify also that's new it started with just WordPress
I think um and so you're like just tell me like the plugins and tell me the the everything that
they're using Shopify and built with uh Shopify and WordPress it has something like tens of
millions of people going there a month and does at the time when I first found them I think in
2020 I think they were doing 14 15 million in Revenue with just one person so I think that
would be a really cool company to own because I think it's super valuable once you get all
that traffic and those people coming back to you all the time I think it's a really valuable site
do you know anything about built with yeah uh just what you told what you said there I've
been using it for a long time basically if you see a website you want to know what they use
for whatever they use just go to build with it's pretty great uh it's kind of like a data it's almost
like a data Index right it's like more like a database than it is a Marketplace in a way uh but I
agree it's kind of amazing um all right let's keep going we got a couple categories left we
have a rookie of the year so a new one a new a new one that we found I think you might
have already covered yours uh in here but dude it's boring I didn't want to say the same
thing twice but this guy Joe mombre this Joseph mombre like I love his story I think that this
guy's gonna be a big deal and I and I take a lot of Pride to try to find people before they're
like really popular I think he's read the blog post that I that I have linked up there from the
Hampton site it's really good I think this guy's Gonna Be A Winner so that's my Rookie of the
Year what's only finders only finders is mine so this is one that I don't know how old it is
maybe a couple years old now um so only finders is a search engine for only fans so if you
want to find a type of model on only fan so you you know you're into you know blonde agents
or like you know whatever good looking midgets whatever whatever you're into you can
search on only finders and it'll give you a list of top ranked profiles for that thing so as you
know I've been down the only fans Rabbit Hole where I'm like I think there's a lot of potential
in the only fans uh world of like businesses and this was one of them that I found and um
only finders run by one guy he's awesome he listens to the pod he um and he crushes it so
he crushes the SEO game for for only fans if you search for a bunch of different popular
searches um and in fact actually what what he did was smart which is he didn't want to just
rank for like the general uh searches like best only fans or something like that like he wants
the high intent ones so he wants the person who's searching for like whatever I don't know
what people search for but like redhead yeah redhead if you go to his site if you go to his site
you could you click the button on the right hand and it says like what the top searches are so
it's like Indian uh he ranks really high for the categories that people are that's like clearly
people's thing and it's like I don't know what your thing is but I got if you got a thing I got it for
you and because of that those are really really high intense searches and then what he does
on the other side is he goes to only fans models and agencies and he says hey if you want
more traffic I have tons of people searching for your exact thing pay me per click for every
person I send to you so he's basically recreated Google it's a search engine where you get
paid per click to send a somebody with intent to your to your to your site and um he could do
it he does a really really good job and only fans does not have a discover section on purpose
they decided they don't want to be in the discovery business they want to only be in the uh
like the kind of the underlying tools underneath these Creator profiles and this is insane and
it's just been surfing the growth of only fans which has grown like exponentially like only fans
a few years ago was very small uh you know five years whatever four five years ago it's very
small and then it got bigger bigger it's like sort of like I mean the curve looks looks unreal like
only fans is bigger than twitch it's bigger than like some of these massive websites uh now
and it generates a lot of money like they pay out billions to creators uh on the platform and
so if you can be part of that ecosystem it's valuable that's interesting I have now met multiple
people and only fans that you've never heard of girls that are doing between one and two
million a month on their profile because their body is the cogs so there's it's all profit
basically they have like you know usually they have like a they'll they'll have like some of
them as you get bigger you have like a agency that manages it so what are they doing with
this money they're just they have huge income and how long do you think can they do it for
five years three years yeah and it's funny that someone kind of exit they burn out and they'll
just sell their light name likeness and photo library and be like you run it and just give me a
web show give me 50. it's like Bruce Springsteen that's what he did the same thing the boss
uh this is insane I I don't know much I I don't know much about this [ __ ] uh this is absolutely
insane the engagement on these things are wild if you have a holy fans business reach out
to me shot at seanpuri.com I want to invest in only fans businesses that are just cash flow
are they cool like when you met these they're cool the problem is they're very hard to sell
and they're very easy to be killed and so they need kind of like strategy on like no I mean the
girls oh I don't know I don't know you said you hung out with a couple of them and I hang out
with them I just talked to them yeah they're nice people I don't know that's insane how did
you get in touch with them it's the internet bro what do you mean you know I've how many
times on here have I talked about only fans and then people basically like oh you're into that
so that they email you and then they they probably have a million Indian guys like dming
them uh I mean that's insane this is inside um I don't go through you know when you see a
big line at the front door you don't you know you don't go wait in that line you have to go find
a side door and the side door is generally you know some some dude who listens to our
podcast that runs their business or as their manager and that's kind of like the way in all right
let's that if we do or the last category is the worst of the best I have a different one but I
would have to say only fans would be up there but I have another one the worst one is this is
these are all cool businesses but which which one's our least favorite so uh yours is gonna
be only fans no uh I mean it would be but I already had something else Kevin Van Trump so
Kevin Van Trump I met this guy Sean likes him a lot now uh I met him in 2000 and 2018. I
was at a conference and Kevin Van Trump is like six feet tall and he's like really big he's like
a very very large overweight guy and he walks up to me and he's got this super thick accent
he goes hey what's up man how you doing like he just starts talking to me and I'm like this
guy's so confident and it starts talking about all my newsletters and the hustle and all this
stuff and he's got this thick accent he's wearing a Ramones t-shirt and he's got like Converse
on he just looks like a like a like a like a Walmart guy and then like he dropped he drops like
one or two lines where for some reason we talked about art but he was like oh yeah that
Picasso I got one of them some [ __ ] like he said something like that I was like what so I let
it slide and then I go how many subscribers are on your your newsletter and he goes like Oh
60 000 and he goes hey how much you guys charge for yours and I go oh it's free we make
money on ads you charge it goes yeah we charge like 300 a month I forget exactly what it
was and I like do the math in my head and I'm like wait that's 20 million dollars a year he
goes yeah it's something like that I don't even know and I started hanging out with him and
he basically this guy's name is Kevin vandtrump he's got this newsletter where he talks
about agriculture and like how it impacts commodity prices and it he's brilliant and I get to
know him a little bit more and you're like oh no you just have a Southern accent he like was
a Wall Street like Trader the guy's brilliant he's amazing and he lives in Kansas City and I've
done a zoom call with him and you see like he's got like these custom built motorcycles in
the back of his like house and he's got like all these picassos and [ __ ] the guy's killing it but
that same day when I hung out with them I was like hey you know go get dinner he's like
yeah I can go get dinner we we hang out at 8 30 he goes hey man I gotta run I gotta write
tomorrow's newsletter and I was like what he goes I do it every day I've done it every day for
10 years I go what do you mean every day he goes six days a week I send a newsletter and
it's 2 000 plus words it's really long he does it every day and he was making all this money I
don't think I would trade lights with him though just to have all that money I had the same
answer I think he's amazing you put me on to him I met him and his son such awesome
people so like they're awesome super fun so awesome just fun to be around smart uh really
nice just kind people don't like you know no no pretense about them um and same thing he
was hosting Farm con I went because you had told me about him and introduced me to him
and when when I go there he's we're at the conference called Farm con he's got Farm con
which is like the biggest farming conference get together so I go to Kansas and I and was it
awesome yeah it was amazing and I'm there and we're talking it's like 11 at night it's like the
whole event's done everyone's at the bar every single person is drinking a beer every single
person is drinking a beer and uh he's like I gotta get up gotta get up to the bedroom gotta I
gotta go back to my room real quick right there right tomorrow's Edition and I was like wait
you write it yourself still and he's like yeah I write it I've written it myself by hand every night
and he started this thing more than 10 years ago like I think he said like it's almost like 20
years basically he's been writing this thing 18 years or something insane every day almost
yeah and it's long too it's not like just some cookie cutter like here's Three Links that are
interesting it's like no drone Powell came down said this but and he said this said that you
know here's how this is going to affect corn Futures and here's what I'm I'm betting over here
and then there's a bunch of memes it's amazing basically his market analysis for like crap
you know crop and commodities and then it's a bunch of memes underneath it and he's like
nope never do ads um Isaac I just wanted to build as much trust as I can in this community
and uh so I never advertise I I charge for it and uh that's why we have Farm con so
everybody shows up is because you know they I built a lot of trust over the over the years
and I learned more about business from that guy in like one hour than I did in my entire like
four-year education at Duke like he said to me he said a bunch of things that I loved I put this
in my my newsletter I did a feature on him that I wrote a bunch of the lessons but one of
them that he said was he goes yeah the content's cool but he's like being he goes being an
investor is the best job in the world you kidding me uh he's like and he just said it so matter
of fact that he's like there is no better job in the world than being an investor it is it is the best
and you sort of think about that you're like all right well that sounds you know whatever I
guess kind of obvious and it's like okay if that's true then how do you get into that job like if if
that is true for you um how do you architect your life to get there because he's basically just
like look this newsletter is great yeah question makes a lot of money but I wish I was just an
investor uh it would have been a better better better choice blah blah they talked about
investing because he I think he was on Wall Street before he started doing what he was
doing yeah and he goes um he goes you know one thing I only he goes I was early into
Bitcoin I was early into Facebook I was like really and he's like yeah he's like I wasn't as
early as I could have been he's like but there's always uh he's like I got into Bitcoin like in 20
he's like we started hearing about it at Farm con like in 2013 2014 I didn't buy it till 2015
2016. I should have been in it right when I first heard it he's like same thing with Facebook
he goes one one lesson I learned in investing he goes um he goes two two lessons for you
in investing number one the best trades are gonna be ones where bones where you buy
them you put them in the drawer you never think about them again he's like he's like that
was the best thing I did about Bitcoin I bought Bitcoin I put it in the drawer never thought
about it again heard all the news didn't care it's in the drawer and I was like damn in the
drawer that's a cool concept of like what investments can you just have the conviction and
you put in the drawer you say I'm not gonna react to the Daily News cycle about this
investment I'm gonna let the 10 years play out on this investment because it was a let's see
what happens on the long-term type of BET um second thing he said was he goes uh you
always get a second chance to get on the train with the best investments there's always a
second chance on the train he's like with Bitcoin you know you think you missed it and then
the price will come down that's your chance to get back on the train and most people by that
time you know they spend the whole way up wishing they had got on the train train comes
back around and they get scared they don't get back on yeah same thing happened with
Facebook Facebook you know we had our chances uh when it was Private then it goes
public it goes up up crashed back down to 19 I got back on the track that train came around I
got right back on and he's like yo that will happen for the best investments and I sort of look
for this now of like uh how do you override the psychology that most people have which is
when it's going up you wish you had gotten in earlier then when it crashes down you're too
afraid to buy in because you feel like oh [ __ ] is it over did it pop is it did I miss it um was I
wrong and it's like well then you lose lose you know you want to buy on the way up and you
don't want to buy on the way down that's that's a recipe for being poor right like you know
buy High don't buy low right that's not gonna work and so uh those two little lessons were
ones that stuck out for me but this guy's business is amazing he's an amazing guy and the
reason he's amazing among other things is he breaks all the stereotypes he you you'll think
that he's just this like hickey guy just like people used to think about me uh and like I grew up
around people just like him turns out he's like brilliant he'll he'll like you're like you're gonna
talk to me about Facebook and he knows way more about it than you do he'll probably
knows all about Bitcoin I mean the guy's brilliant and uh I love hanging out with him and his
friends because you it teaches you like I'm a [ __ ] idiot for judging people a certain way
these guys are all badass dude and they're fun as [ __ ] I did a call the other day with
another guy so uh another guy from Farm con same same sort of guy he's this uh white guy
maybe I don't know it is 50s ish something like that was he Super Rich because so many of
those guys are super rich and I think this guy I don't know how racist guy private jet rich I
don't know how rich this guy is but the guy who introduced me to him was just like yeah this
guy's worth you know 300 500 million dollars personally and I was like Wow uh okay that's
crazy because I was like I was like do his deals like he's always talking about these deals
like does he actually make money on these like is he had it track record of success he's like
yeah he has um so this guy this guy's got phrases for days so I I have this doc that I keep on
my phone I call phrases except somebody says something that's just like funny or worded
well it just sticks out to me it's a Punchy phrase I write it down at Farm con I filled out my
phrases thing like because there were so many so this one guy um I don't want to say his
name put him on blast but he uh he was at a dinner with uh says Kevin vantrum and this guy
was at the dinner it was like a private dinner at the at Farm con and uh he stands up and he
goes everyone on the table is doing introductions and sit there I'm like you know how I am
Sean and yeah I work in Tech and uh just [ __ ] kill me I guess I'm boring like you know like
that's basically like how I felt during the introduction this guy stands up he goes yeah my
name's so and so he goes um you know uh he goes exactly where he said he goes he goes
uh I don't know who won the World Series I don't know who won the World Series I can't tell
you how to get a six-pack abs hell I don't even know where the remote is in my house but I
know one thing I know how to structure deals and today I'm gonna tell you guys about a deal
that I'm doing and you're like gave this intro and I was like what did he Crush I was like what
an incredible way to introduce yourself I don't know where the remote is but I know one thing
I know deals and I was like that is incredible then he's uh he's talking about how old he is he
goes he cut me in half there's gonna be a lot of rings that's the best nice and then he goes
and then I did a call with him the other day and uh I get on the zoom call and I had just
finished my workout and my trainer was like insisting because I was like dude I gotta run I
gotta be on this call he's like all right just take your call but let's do your like kind of like we try
to do like this like myofascial like kind of like you're rolling like a like a foam roller type of
thing like you're you're kind of like foam rolling out at the end so we were doing it and he's
like just do it while you're on the call foam rolled with this guy so I get on the call I turn on the
video and I'm like yeah I'm gonna show them what's going on so I'm like sorry if uh sorry this
looks weird I'm doing like some stretching yes the big dude he goes okay cool if uh if it looks
like I'm stretching call 9-1-1 because I'm having a stroke dude why would you take a call like
that incredible win like to have that line immediately ready when I say you know that I'm
stretching if sorry if it looks weird I'm trying to I was like wow that was literally so [ __ ] funny
to me I was blown away I was like I don't care what else happens on this call that that was
so impressive so good what state did he live in uh he's in Tennessee I think what the hell is a
deal struck I don't even know what that means like he like he does he's like private Equity so
he buys companies um but he's like I just know how to find a great deal how to put the
financing together and how to structure it so that like I get the maximum value out of these
deals it's kind of like what he does um and like you know I'm like so I was like I was like you
know what um uh I was like have you done any deals like that I would have heard of and
he's like you know Disneyland I was like yeah he's like a lot of Windows in Disneyland we do
all the windows in Disneyland so oh my God they bought a window company got him a
Disney contract we do all the windows at Disney do what with the windows like clean them
this guy's incredible what's yours for uh world uh worst of the best um I had both design joy
and the Kevin Trump just because of the time thing so I love that Kevin vantrope has built
like this this amazing power niche in the farming industry but I uh I would not want to be the
guy who has to write the newsletter every night because the pressure is it's got to go out
tomorrow morning I felt that during milk Road for a month and I was like nope not doing it
this way yeah although I think if I was him I would just find a way to hire somebody to do that
like I can't believe he hasn't done that yet um does Ben Thompson still do I haven't read this
oh yeah so Ben Thompson is my version of that so he does strategory and every day he
writes a newsletter about basically the same four things and I don't even know how he does
that like he talks about Facebook Google Amazon Apple Netflix and like what's going like the
kind of the business and strategy of what they're doing they're so long these are so long he
does this daily long form his audience is like has the highest bar his audience is like the
smartest people in the tech industry uh like you know VCS and all that that's who reads him
every morning so he's got to come with like original content that's super smart about the
same topics he's been doing this for like a decade and he makes three million dollars a year
roughly doing this office paid and he only charges 120 a year yeah I think he upped his price
I don't know what it is now but he like did raise his prices at some point 120 um it's 12 I think
it was 100 and now it's 120. a month uh for this thing you know but but he's you know I think
Ben's awesome uh so I don't beat it as a knock for him I'm saying I would hate the pressure
of the daily super insightful thing that I have to write every every morning original content
about like the same kind of like 10 companies is uh I don't I literally don't even know how he
does it if somebody told me they're gonna do that I'd be like what are you saying this makes
no sense and uh he does it every day sitting in Taiwan this is the worst this is the worst it is it
is amazing um but um yeah I would never want to do this um so what do we think that I
wonder what I want to know the listener if they think that these one all in depth on one topic
if they dig this if they dig the award category style or the award style what do you think yeah
this is an experiment for us of like doing a few focused episodes themed episodes so today's
theme was these one or two person businesses that crush it um do you like this or do you
like the freestyle freestyle's a lot easier this one takes a lot of work but if people love this you
got to go in the YouTube comments and show us if we should do more of these or no uh
we're cool either way but this is an experiment so let us know in the YouTube comments
dude I stressed out for so long doing this these These are these are emotional for me can I
give some takeaways because I don't think we did that uh I think we should do some
takeaways all right so here's my my quick takeaways the most common Industries you see
these one to two person businesses that Crush are uh just like thought leader on it on social
media so just putting out free content on social media e-commerce we didn't do any Ecom
ones in this but like there's a bunch of e-commerce that could do like you know a million
dollars a year in profit that are run with one or two people and then you can do agencies for
everything else um games so we talked about stardew Valley Minecraft there's a bunch of
games that are built like this um apps and plugins so plug-ins on top of things like a figma
plug-in a Google Sheets plugin a Gmail plug-in that sort of thing and then data aggregators
like built with which are basically compiling data like mill.com compiling bunch of things that
are of the same thing so it's you go search and you find what you want uh because they've
aggregated everything only finder same thing it's a data aggregator um strategy so here's a
couple strategy points you need to be either amazing 100 awesome at distribution meaning
you're the influencer you're the content creator or you need to be 100 awesome on product
you're the guy coding the game and and you'll you'll hire a publisher to do the publishing and
so I think that if I was going to do this if I was gonna try to make this happen I would say
where can I be either an incredible at distribution or incredible that product and I want to just
like put all of my emphasis on that um in order to make this happen the next one you need
attributes so a lot of these we made sound simple but you gotta have some attributes some
skill copywriting design uh you know the ability like investment judgment market analysis like
you got to be expert on one of these things if you're gonna make this happen and so you
know you got to get to that expert master master of your craft level if you're gonna do this uh
the last one it's all about leverage so the way you can get a one or two person company to
get to Millions tens of millions or even some of the examples we gave were hundreds of
millions of dollars um was leveraged so you need to be using code uh build it once and then
it runs as software you need to use uh media like podcasts or newsletters or whatever or you
need to use Capital because you're not going to use labor right like most companies use
labor that's why they have hundreds of people working for them but if you're going to not
have hundreds of people working you got to use these other forms of Leverage code Capital
some money or media are your tools of choice you got to figure out which of those three can
I use and that's how I'm going to do it and the beauty of it is because of the internet if you're
the best at X you now get to sell to the whole world so like we didn't give an example Miss
Excel so miss Excel is this girl who goes on Tick Tock and she in a high energy way dances
and tells it teaches you how to use Excel like Microsoft Excel better and she's the best in the
world at teaching Excel it turns out the best of the world of teaching Excel is you know how
to do the pop you know the useful stuff and you can dance turns out that's what the best
teacher of excel look like and she now gets to teach the entire world Excel like the best of
anything gets to is to provide that product service or education to everybody that's the
beauty of of the internet and so you need to figure out how to become the best of X because
and then just make it available to everybody and the last thing I I was going to say was it's [
__ ] lonely like the best times that I have in work is when I'm whether it's in the trenches and
like it's a shitty day or it's a great day is celebrating with co-workers these jobs are lonely I'm
actually surprised when I hear about this about like how they are able to push like I push
myself because oh I have Milds to feed or I want to be held accountable by these other
people and make them proud it's really hard to push yourself this hard and to think big when
you're by yourself and it's just hard to do this every day alone so hopefully you have like a
good spouse or a significant other or something because it's just challenging I I mean when I
started this I was like oh I want to be a solo solopreneur I wanted to be a solopreneur or they
call it a solo capitalist I raised a fund and it's like I want to be a solar capitalist and I was like
oh this isn't fun at all to do this by yourself yeah and not only is it not that good to do things
by yourself because you know a little bit of help can go a long way a complimentary person
who's good at the things you're not good at is really really useful but on top of that it ain't no
fun and like most of life is the journey not the destination and you don't want to have the
shitty Journey for this awesome destination and so very quickly I was like yeah this is a
duopreneur this is being bad doing this or in the fun it's me and rameen doing this and I
basically immediately was like I'm gonna do this even my econ business I gave a chunk of it
to a guy who was smarter than me and had done this before and would give me some
money and I was like why just because like I don't want to be reporting into myself and only
like have myself as a thought partner to be sparring with on ideas about this I want to have
somebody awesome just to do some you know idea jousting on this and so uh I think doing it
by yourself is honestly a terrible idea you should definitely try to get one other person to do
this I think two people is the is the sweet spot where you get sort of the the most autonomy
and the least like management headaches and you have uh you still get the most [ __ ] done
and have a lot of fun along the way all right that's the Pod whether you're listening on iTunes
or Spotify or whatever go to uh search my first million on YouTube and go to the comments
on this video and actually let us know we'll read them and see if we should keep doing these
that's it [Music] [Music]