Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Welcome to the Newsletter Operator Podcast. I'm Matt McGarry. And I'm Ryan Carr. And in this podcast, we teach you exactly how to build, grow, and monetize your newsletter. 0:08 We'll talk to the best newsletter operators, creators, and media founders in the space, breaking down their strategies and growth tactics. Awesome. Let's get into it. 0:17 [upbeat music] All right, all right. Thanks for coming on, man. How's it going? Hey, thanks for having me. Doing well. How's it going for you guys? Going, going very well. Doing good, doing good. 0:35 We're really looking forward to diving into the newsletter, Stacked Marketer newsletter that both Matt and I have both been big fans of for a while. 0:42 Maybe you can give a little intro for, for those listening who you are and what you've built and what you're building now. Yeah. Uh, so my name is Manu. 0:50 I, uh, started Stacked Marketer just about five years ago now, so we recently turned five. We are a newsletter focused on digital marketing, so it's essentially talking things like paid social, SEO, content marketing. 1:06 We try to cover, uh, essentially everything that has to do with digital marketing. We're now at, uh, 55,000 readers, active subscribers, quite engaged overall, super happy with how things went. 1:19 And, um, yeah, it's been quite the progress over the past few years with, uh, with the newsletter. 1:25 If you would have asked me five years, like, "Hey, if it reaches the, this point, are you, uh, you know, are you happy with it?" I was like, "Yeah, would be really good." 1:32 Yeah, excited where we can also take that, uh, into the future. Think there's quite a bit more potential that we haven't tapped into yet. And then give us like a sense of, like scale, like how big is it? 1:41 How many subscribers? If you wanna share things like what the open rate is or click-through rate is. 1:46 And, um, you also had a, you released like a revenue or, like company report for last year, like what the overall revenue was for 2022, if you wanna share that just to give people an idea of more- a better idea of the business. 1:56 Our average open rate, um, in the past like 12 months or so, has been 53%, uh, unique opens. That's a little bit inflated from Apple Mail privacy protection users. 2:07 So, like, even if someone, you know, is active, they show up as opening 100%, or even if they don't open any. So that's kind of inflated by, I would say around 5% for us. 2:17 So I, I would guess the more realistic open rate is somewhere around 48%, you know, let's say pre-Apple Mail. And y- 55,000 subscribers, I think I mentioned that. 2:27 And then last year with 2022, in this case, we did 685,000 in, uh, revenue, uh, with our newsletter. So from, from what I could tell, like pretty good monetization when it comes to the, the size of the list. 2:43 And just to kind of for context, like the list was much smaller. 2:46 If there is, I guess, episode description or something, you can also, uh, the annual report, we have more info in there, like, you know, how we progress in terms of growth and, uh, you can kind of calculate the numbers a bit better, but it's something open for everyone so they can check it out if you can link it somewhere. 3:01 So not a problem there. Nothing private there. That, that was a really awesome report release. So, like also, where were you at at the beginning of last year? I have the report open here. How many subscribers? 3:10 20,000 roughly at the beginning of last year? Yeah. Uh, uh, I think a little bit more than 20,000 is where we started. Good reminder for me to like also open it up on the side. Like if you have... 3:20 Like, okay, yeah, so 21,000 it seems. Yeah, so we- we've uh, a little bit more than doubled last year, and we're hoping to do similar this year. 3:29 That, that's kind of, uh, been our trend for the past couple of years, doubling every year in almost everything. Uh, maybe not doubling, but like 75% to 80% at least the growth on subscribers, uh, and revenue. 3:42 Th- those were kind of the trends. So yeah, not 10X-ing, but still good. Pretty happy with it. [chuckles] That's really good. 3:48 Let's, let's talk, talk about growth in a second, but one thing I wanted to know is like, what is, what's the target market for Stacked Marketer and like w- how are you helping them? 3:55 So like, maybe describe the newsletter content a little bit more, who subscribes, what they get out of the, the content. Yeah. We, we try to make the n- to make the newsletter, maybe to kind of, uh, take a step back. 4:05 It, when we started out, it was more focused on affiliate marketers, which essentially means someone who, you know, uses their own money to buy traffic and then to generate sales on an affiliate commission. 4:16 And through this we noticed that more and more digi- general digital marketers are interested in the content that we put out there. 4:22 So essentially what we've done is tailored the newsletter for the marketer who I would like to say is like, is in the trenches, right? They're just like hands-on with campaigns, with the work that they do. 4:31 I might be wrong on the exact example, but you know, the CMO of Pepsi would probably not read it, I'm kinda saying. 4:37 Like the, the big corporate CMOs that are more focused on team management and just like, you know, managing 20 marketing departments across a bunch of channels and doing these, like Super Bowl commercials, they probably realistically won't get as much value from our newsletter directly 'cause they're not, you know, they don't care about the latest update about, uh, meta ads. 4:57 Like, "Oh, there's this policy change," or there's that polity, policy change. There's this Google algorithm change, uh, for SEO or things like that. 5:06 So we try to tailor it more for people who are, you know, hands-on with their campaigns and who care about the performance. 5:11 So like brand is nice and all, but if you care about getting an ROI or, um, uh, you know, return on your ad spend, that's the type of content that we try to feature, and of course, we also feature the news around that. 5:23 We try to feature some news, um, and also practical advice, insights, whatever we can find. So I would say we're still around 75% curation and then 25% own content in that sense. 5:38 So that, that's the mix that we have, and I think that's something that we will try to always improve on. One way we're trying to improve on is with, uh, buying other newsletters. 5:46 We recently bought Psychology of Marketing. 5:48 We haven't merged that, but we thought that the Psychology of Marketing newsletter has, uh, complementary content to what we've done in Stacked Marketer, which is a bit more news focused.Psychology of marketing is much more focused on, you know, uh, insight, uh, and like insights and like tips you can apply quickly to your, to your marketing. 6:07 I wanna get into that soon. 6:08 To circle back to content, I feel like you kind of hit a chord and hit content market fit really fast because there's not a lot of people who cover marketing news for direct response marketers. 6:18 There's lots of like brand marketing news or general news or, or news like focused maybe towards big agencies. Did you see an opportunity in the market for that, or was it just organic that it just happened? 6:27 Or like how did you find that niche and angle? Essentially, the way the newsletter idea came to be is, uh, I found Morning Brew. 6:33 I was like interested in business and finance to some extent, but I wasn't working in the industry. But I saw the Morning Brew newsletter, I was thinking, "Well, this is pretty useful. 6:40 I'd like to know these things when they happen. Is there anything like this for marketing where I'm, you know, hands-on and doing stuff?" No, there isn't. Okay, can I try to build one? 6:48 'Cause I wanted to start a new project, and then that's how it started. Like, Google Document first, see if, um, you know, if there's enough content to curate. How do we write it? Does it make sense? Like, is it... 7:00 Does it, essentially, does it make sense for myself? And then working on it, asking friends for feedback and stuff like that. Building it for myself in a way with some feedback from others. 7:09 Now of course, that evolved a lot over five years, but that was the starting point, and I think you can still see that it's made for someone who... It, it's still built around what I would like as a marketer. 7:19 So I didn't really... I wouldn't say that I found it for direct res- like, I looked at direct response and thought there's not enough content or there's not, not a good newsletter there. 7:28 It was more like, you know, I want something for myself, and let's, uh, let's try to build it. Yeah. That's probably how most good things come around. It's not like identifying everything and like being doing analytical. 7:37 [laughs] So you're building it for yourself. That's probably- Yeah, you figure things out. Yeah, you figure things out. 7:41 Uh, I, I can say that, you know, over the past five years we've had all sorts of different plans and expectations and of course like half of those didn't work out, but that's fine. 7:49 It's just kind of learn and then you continue to make progress in things that work, so. 7:54 You kinda list out so- some of the areas that you could improve on in that report that you released, which kinda brings me back to the report. 8:00 Because I think a lot of people are building in public, but I can't really think of too many that are doing it as transparently as you are. What kinda drives that, and what has the response been? 8:11 I mean, obviously you have folks like us that think it's like amazing because you're, you're providing all this transparency into your business and it's helpful to others, but what has the response been? 8:20 I guess, where does that come from? Like, why, why do you choose to do that? 8:23 It's generally been the most clicked link in our newsletter for the year, except this year it hasn't been, but we also haven't been promoting it as much. 8:32 But the previous two years it has been the most clicked link in our e- newsletter. So it, it's been received pretty well. We also use it as a, let's say as a reply incentive for our welcome email. 8:43 It helps a lot, and it helps to, for people who are new to our email to see like, okay, this is what these guys do. You know, they present... 8:51 Like, if you're giving a m- your email to someone for free, you might still be skeptical, and I found that that's like, you know, it's a... We get enough replies, and people kind of can dig into what we do. 8:59 They see like, okay, this is, you know, I feel like they are, you know, legit for, because they all, you know, they present their numbers out there, they explain their thought process. 9:10 Essentially, like what you said, like being more transparent probably earns us, uh, some more trust, so I think that's one benefit. I've not seen negative feedback directly or anything like that, so that's good. 9:21 Another thing that it, it can come with some, uh, cons to it. 9:26 One of them is like, you know, the more you show what you do, the more there is a likelihood that people can copy you, and especially the more we grow, the more tempting it is. 9:33 Like, you know, we've done better and better, so it's like, oh, now it's worth the effort. Like, no. 9:37 When we posted our first one, I think we had like a little bit over 100,000 in revenue, so people back then were like, "Yeah, I mean, it's, I thought you were doing more." Right? 9:46 Like, "You put in so much effort, daily newsletter, blah, blah, blah." Uh, like, "Are you... You're only making so much money. 9:50 Like, you're making so much revenue, and your profit is even lower of course, 'cause you have expenses." 9:55 So with all that in mind, the first ever report we published probably had a positive reaction in terms of like, you know, great to see, but like, uh, it's not really a good business or like it's not making much money. 10:05 [laughs] And in a way now it's probably going the other way around where it's like, oh, you're still growing and still going better and better, and then at some point it becomes the opposite problem where people see that it's going so well that it seems maybe too easy, and they will try to, uh, copy it that way. 10:20 You know, I think so far from what I've seen, it's outweighed by the positives 'cause we get pretty constructive feedback in general. 10:27 When it comes to growth, when it comes to monetization, we get some pretty constructive feedback overall. 10:32 Not that we have used it, but it does, like every once in a while someone checks out the annual report and they're like, "Hey, can we invest or can we buy the newsletter?" Stuff like that. 10:41 But it, it's not something that we are interested in right now, but, you know, good to know that there's always like that possibility there. So yeah, with all of this in mind, I think it's something we'll continue to do. 10:52 Um, but yeah, I don't know for how long exactly 'cause one thing that I didn't think of and that might become a risk is like, I don't want it to turn into something that looks like bragging 'cause, you know, we started from when we didn't, didn't do too much. 11:06 So the point is to make kind of a realistic real time case study. But if, you know, hopefully we have the problem that in two years we go double and double again, so then it's like, it, it sound- sounds like bragging. 11:17 I think people outside don't view it that way, but then internally as someone putting it out there, you always have those concerns, right? Yeah, yeah. 11:25 So I think we'll just always approach it based on the feedback that we get regularly. So whenever we get criticism, especially like const- in a constructive way, we, you know, try to understand why that comes. 11:36 That's kind of also the content evolved that way. Like, "Hey, this topic or this, the way you approached this is probably not the best way." 11:43 Sometimes they were a bit harsher and then we tried to dig instead of having a reaction of like, "Nah, you're wrong. Shut up." [laughs] Was more like, okay-Why do you feel that way? 11:53 You know, how, what, what's actually your reaction? Did we not hit the right point? And then with that, it helped kind of tailor some content rules as well, and I think it's gonna be the same with the annual report. 12:02 If we continue to do it that way, we get some feedback and, um, yeah, iterate on it, uh, over the years, so. Let's talk about, like, how you got to this revenue and then subscriber level. 12:11 So, like, you have this thread you did a while back on the road to 50,000 plus- Mm-hmm... active subscribers- Right... and, um, so it's 1,100 plus a year. 12:20 Can you break down, like, how you got to zero to 1,000, 1,000 to 10,000? Can you maybe explain that journey for the listeners and for us on, like, each stage of the growth? 12:28 You don't have to talk about every single, [chuckles] you know, journey, but, like, what helped you get to zero to 1K, and then we'll start 1K to 10K, et cetera. Yeah. 12:35 I, I think zero to 1K is probably the one, uh, that a lot of people care about 'cause when starting out they're like, "But I don't have a social following." Good news is I don't have one either. 12:43 Like, if you add up all our social followers on all accounts and everyone in the team, we still have more active subscribers on the list than, [chuckles] than followers on social media for, you know, 13 plus people on all platforms. 12:54 So that's a good thing. You can build a newsletter without having a social following. The way I've done it, first I started off by asking some industry friends, like, "Look, is this something..." 13:03 You know, showing them a sample, asking them, "Is this something interesting? Can you sign up, and you'll get it across the next week, and then I'll ask you for feedback every day or every couple of days." 13:14 Then, uh, yeah, I did that with around 10 people, got some feedback, implemented the feedback very quickly, and from that point onwards it was more like, "Okay, you know, in one week we've made this progress. 13:25 What do you think? Is it good? Is it something you would recommend to other people?" 13:29 If they would say yes, if they said yes on recommending it to other people, I would ask them, you know, "Could you please give a shout-out or a promotion? Like, we can pay." 13:37 So I thought about having some budget set aside from, for some promotions through, you know, people who had a social following. 13:44 So by, you know, posting it on my Facebook, posting it in some groups and communities that are interested in marketing, and some friends posting it, uh, on their, you know, Facebook groups or giving a shout-out in their blog or newsletter for free and some paid, we ended up having a few hundred and then close to 1,000 subscribers. 14:01 Um, it would be hard to break it down exactly right now. 14:04 Would have to look back at the numbers, but essentially that, that was the road to over 1,000 subscribers with some free and a little bit of paid promotion, probably a couple of thousand dollars, um, spent on that. 14:15 And then how do you get from, you know, 1K to 10K? That's... This is probably, you mentioned in the thread, one of the most challenging growth periods. 14:23 I, I think it's maybe less challenging now that you kind of, you know... Like, there's a lot more content about how to do that. 14:29 So the way we've done it, uh, Matt, you post regularly about how to grow the newsletter as well, s- like, how to grow that, and I think there's more tools available now. 14:36 But essentially what worked for us was cross promotions or swaps with other newsletters. That helps a lot. Then, um, doing more cross promotions or swaps with communities, groups, things like that. 14:49 We did start to do paid social. I think, you know, we... I know some things that we've done wrong back then that I would do better now. 14:57 I think now if you start the right way, paid social is still a very good way to go from 1,000 to 10,000. 15:04 Any sort of recommendation network, whether it's, uh, the partner network with SparkLoop or, you know, the, the ones integrated on Substack, Beehiiv, uh, ConvertKit, those are probably helpful. 15:15 Just one thing to keep in mind always is the quality of those subscribers. Whenever you go paid or some sort of incentives, um, the quality gets lower. 15:24 So, you know, what we've had going for us was that from 1,000 to 10,000, even though, you know, it was slower maybe than we would've wanted, it was always very engaged 'cause we always looked, like, new- newsletter swaps, communities, and high-intent traffic. 15:39 We didn't have so much paid social or recommendations that way, uh, like simple opt-in. So that, that's still... I think those things together now can make, um, a good mix. 15:50 But maybe, like, one thing, uh, to notice there, I think from 1,000 to 10,000 without having a following before, mm, it, it requires some budget behind it. But that, that's kind of... 16:01 You know, if you turn your newsletter into a business, it's probably worth it. Would you, if you were to do that differently, like today if you're, if you're going from 1K to 10K, would you post more on social? 16:09 Would you do something differently? Would you use another growth channel that you didn't use back then? Um, only the ones that didn't exist back then, I think. 16:16 So using these recommendation networks, I would probably start using them, uh, right away. But, uh, I would just be careful about the quality and the engagement, uh, requirements that you have for it. 16:27 I, I think if you have only 1,000 subscribers and then you bring in 3,000 that are low intent, you kind of ruin your deliverability, your stats, your... It, it just gets harder. 16:37 You have to kind of slowly ramp up the budget to make sure that if you get, you know, 300 subscribers that are not so great, you can still clean up the list without hurting your deliverability. 16:46 Easier to do that if you have 50,000, right? 16:48 So if someone, you know, 'cause it happens one day, 300 new subscribers, but the quality's pretty bad, but, you know, they get a few emails, handful of emails from us, and they're less than 1% of the list, it's all fine. 16:59 If you have 1,000 and then you get 300 that are bad, that's 30% of your list that are disengaged, spam reporting you, whatever, bouncing off your... Just negative signals. 17:08 So this paid avenue, you should kind of, like, take it a bit slower with it, I think. 17:14 Of course, if engagement is high for you, then ramp it up, but just make sure that engagement is there and that the, the quality of the subscriber is, uh, there before you ramp up growth there. 17:24 That's the only thing I would probably do differently now 'cause it, it exists, but also have to pay attention to that. It makes sense. I think it's a good, good warning heed. 17:33 I wanna talk a little bit about monetization. 17:35 So, um, at Trends obviously, and then with other brands that I've worked with, we've tested with Stacked Marketer and routinely, uh, among the best performing in terms of ad click-through rate, and you and your team are the ones writing the ads. 17:49 Um, I would love to know, you know, what, what have you learned writing ads for, for all of these different brands? 17:56 What have you found that performs that otherUh, media companies, other, uh, newsletters could take those lessons and apply them to their own, you know, links or calls to action? Oof. Yeah. 18:08 Well, the main thing is probably the mindset that you go into it with. We've tried as much as possible to just think of, "Okay, if we had this product, how would we present it in front of our readership?" 18:20 And like, you know, if it were our own product, how would we present it? We cannot 100% do that because some people say, "Well, this is our goal." 18:28 And then we would- I would think sometimes like, "Well, that's probably not the best goal, but I understand in the grand scheme of things, that's your goal right now." 18:35 That's one thing, trying to be more like a strategic consultant for the brand and explain to them how you think the product fits best for your audience, and that's also the reason why we insist on writing the copy and creating everything, and then just sending it over for review, final approval, and things like that. 18:52 That's the main thing. 18:53 Then there are some fundamentals, social proof, numbers, uh, name-dropping, success stories, things like that help a lot with engagement, with, not just with engagement in the ad, but then from click to conversion, like a demo or a lead or things like that. 19:11 If you're doing lead gen, biggest thing ever, which sounds so silly in 2023, but make sure that your form, your landing page is optimized for mobile. 19:21 Like, as much as possible, put your form above the fold or like, you know, first screen that you see on mobile. So many... Like, it's 30 to 40% relative, so not absolute. 19:31 So if s- if your form has, you know, 50% conversion rate, uh, if it's above the fold, it will have like 30, 35 if it's below the fold. So like you're losing 50%... 19:41 15% of the business that would convert, which is just silly. Are you giving those advertisers advice on conversion rate optimization and not just tech company too? Small advice like that, yeah. Yeah. 19:51 So, uh, even today I had a call and I mentioned like, "Look, headline I think is good, but then your subheading doesn't follow up with some proof of why your product does this. Like, it's still a little bit vague." 20:00 And following up on that, I think it would be good to change it to more concrete example of how you do the things that you promise in the headline rather than just following up on you do it. 20:10 So i- it's not, you know, it- it's not like we do a full audit or anything like that, but like this fundamental stuff, is your messaging clear? Does it fit? Is your form looking okay on mobile? 20:21 Those things we regularly mention to them and, you know, it, it, most of the time they take the advice 'cause i- we're not, you know, we're not giving advice where they have to re- they change their strategy or anything. 20:31 It's just like small enough adjustments that make sense. What are the elements that help the ad in your newsletter do well for the sponsors? Is it the image? Is it all copy-based? Any thoughts there? Mostly the copy. 20:42 I think the headline makes a big difference. So we've noticed that a headline that has, you know, good numbers, success story, a headline that's tempting, that already provides some sort of, uh, value to the reader. 20:54 Like, it, it already provides some problem, solution, or like a solution to a common problem, that already helps a lot with everything. 21:03 Of course, there are details within the copy, you know, making it easy to read, skimmable, you know, bolding some things that are really important. 21:10 Those all help, but the biggest difference is, you know, what's the actual offer, and that usually comes with the headline. 21:17 The images can make a difference, but unless you have a really bad image, usually the image is kind of like, if you have a really bad image, it doesn't work. If you have a good image, it helps. 21:28 And then if you have no image, we've noticed that actually it does probably a little bit worse nowadays. When starting out, we didn't have an image as a default. 21:36 It was more like, let's do without images first, then we offered images, but some people didn't want them. 21:42 But now I think it's pretty clear that having an image is better overall, even though 80% of the time our images s- are made by us, and it- it's a mix of our branding and the sponsor's branding. 21:54 Maybe Ryan remembers that, like, having our character, our mascot, like, you know, reading through a trends report or something like that we've had, I remember. 22:01 So i- it kind of makes it fit a little bit better within the newsletter design and stuff. Yeah, I always loved how native all of the sponsored placements look to the newsletter. 22:10 And, uh, st- sticking on the, the topic of monetization, you, you have Stacked Marketer Pro too, like the Pro membership. 22:16 Could you talk a little b- a bit about that, the numbers there, um, and then maybe we can dive into what the funnel looks like from, from free to Pro? Yeah. 22:25 Uh, that's been something that we've had for I think two years now, a little bit over two years, and it's, uh, 22:32 it's a similar experience to the newsletter, which means, you know, it, it's harder than it looks, and I think we haven't reached a tipping point where we say like, you know, "Okay, this is an amazing product. 22:41 This is, like, our main thing now." Not even close to that. So right now, Stacked Marketer Pro, so the membership and everything is around 10 to 15% of our revenue, roughly. 22:53 Uh, the thing is if the newsletter grows a lot, that even tha- though that one continues to grow at the same pace, it, it, it does, it still maintains that percentage. 23:00 So it's growing slower than we do- we would have hoped for, but it's still like, you know, if you, if you take it outside and you look at it as its own individual product, it's still like really nice. 23:10 But I'm always comparing it to the newsletter, so sometimes I feel like a little bit disappointed about it. But I think what we've done recently this year helped a lot, and it also shows, uh, more about what people like. 23:22 So that started as an idea of providing in-depth reports from different brands. 23:27 So like going into their marketing funnel, front and back end, going through all the funnel, buying their product, and just going as deeply as possible into how they do marketing right now, like in, you know-A month ago or two months ago. 23:39 And I think the concept still has merit, but in the end, it's too in-depth and people don't read as much into it. So what we've done this year... And also we didn't have any free access, free sample, anything like that. 23:51 It was directly... There was a pre-sale for a few lifetime memberships, but essentially one month into it, you had to sign up for a $99 per month membership, so it's also like, uh, some- on the higher cost level overall. 24:03 What ended up, uh, happening is, like, we got more feedback like, "Okay, the report has to be adjusted this way. We prefer things that way." 24:10 And bit by bit, we adjusted all the way to now this year we also have a seven-day trial. 24:15 Uh, we are posting the reports in different formats or even creating extracts from the reports to make it, uh, a little bit easier to consume. 24:23 We also started adding courses to it, so video courses, um, which people have received really well. 24:29 And it's like if we do a course that you take in a few hours, and then you have a one-week trial, you basically get a really good course for $7, which is the trial period. So that's been like... 24:40 The feedback has been like, "Yeah, for $7, this is, like, the best course ever." Like, of course, there are some more expensive in-depth. The first one was Copywriting Essentials we called it. 24:48 And, you know, if you start as a copywriter that has an idea of a few concepts but doesn't have the right structure in place to write copy quickly and effectively, that's like a super... Like, it's a steal. 24:59 Like, for $7, you'd probably make tens of thousands in the end if you just work as a freelance copywriter. We want to add more of those. 25:06 We want to improve the discoverability of the content, and especially discoverability of, uh, the actionable content in there. 25:14 So the feedback was reports are great overall, but the format in which they're served, like 100 pages, it's just harder to consume. We don't do just brand reports. 25:23 We have actually, uh, rolled, kind of backed up a little bit on that, so we do less brand reports. We haven't done that in a few months now. 25:30 And now we've gotten the feedback, "Look, you know, go into other topics as well." So we've done a two-part report, so that's like 150, 200 pages total now, on how to use different, uh, AI tools in marketing. 25:43 So whether that's, uh, from ChatGPT to Midjourney, stuff like that, what can they do? What can they not do? 25:49 That evolves really quickly, so maybe, like, by the time this comes out, there's a- also another update about that. 25:54 But things like that, we've went into topics, um, you know, mar- channel specific, you know, l- let's say, like sub-disciplines of marketing specific to that as well. That's been well received too. 26:06 What have been the most well received, most popular reports or courses within Stacked Marketer Pro? Like, what's the top three or four? I, I guess, actually, I would still have to say that the very first one did well. 26:16 If I think about it in terms of, like, presenting the first report along with the concept, the amount of, um, you know, essentially, like sales and feedback that have, uh, we got through it, I think that's still a very good one. 26:29 So that's something that's a deep dive on a brand called Snow Oral Care. So they have, they started off as teeth whitening. They added more, uh, oral care products now. So that was really where we, well received. 26:42 And do you, like, break down... What's the breakdown look like? Do you break down your, their landing pages, their marketing emails, their ads? Like, what's the- So we start with home. Yeah. 26:49 So for the brand ones we did homepage, product page, if they have any blog or content websites. 26:55 Then we bought their products, so we s- went from their product page through their upsells and stuff like that, upsells, cross sells, whatever they have. Then emails, right? 27:04 So emails, both transactional emails, how they notify us about, um, shipping, tracking, stuff like that. 27:10 There's a few brands that did some cool stuff there with, like, essentially i- including some possible upsells in their tracking and stuff like that. Really nice, uh, touch. 27:19 You know, there's a little bit of space available there in your emails, and those get opened more often than, uh, marketing emails. Yeah. And then going through their promotion emails as well. 27:29 So we caught some brands doing their Black Friday campaigns. SMS when available, though that's a little bit trickier 'cause it has to be, like, a US number. Most people don't send to, like, Austrian number. 27:40 So if I'm the one doing the... Especially back then, I was the one, uh, starting this out, so they didn't send to an Austrian number. But yeah. 27:47 And speaking of SMS, I think the guide for SMS marketing was the second one that was received. SMS and email marketing was well received. 27:54 And I think the best one maybe recently is something that we called The System 1 Manipulation Report. Essentially, it's a two-part report. And if you know, do you know Thinking, Fast and Slow, the book? 28:05 What they call System 1, which is the s- you know, the part of your brain that essentially acts quickly, thinking fast. There's a lot of marketing concepts that rely on that. 28:15 Some are more ethical, some are less ethical, but that one has done really well, like, explaining, you know, how different either dark patterns or just normal things that are conversion rate optimization, and then also going into how, uh, anyone who's traveled ran into some sort of, uh, cons and scams. 28:33 Like, that's where you're, like, put under pressure to think fast, and then you kind of just always make the wrong decision, like, you don't notice what's going on. 28:38 So two-part report going into a lot of those things and how, you know, general, you know, how behavioral psychology kind of affects, or, like, how marketing and behavioral psychology kind of goes together. 28:52 So that's probably something that, uh, ends up being quite evergreen as a report 'cause those things don't change. So, like, in-depth tactical reports for marketers essentially, uh, which sounds- Yeah... super valuable. 29:04 And you mentioned that you're testing a trial, or y- you've, you've started using a trial mechanism now. Yeah. I would be interested to know, I mean, I'm sure, 29:12 uh, we experienced this, this with trends as well, where the price tag scares people off, but when you get them in with the trial and show them all that value, um, that was, that was super useful for us. 29:21 Have you seen overall conversion, like, to the trial increase since you started testing? And then have you seen retention increase as well? 29:29 Since we didn't have any trial before, the whole concept of conversion from trial to full member is new to us, and that one started a bit better, then it slightly decreased, and I think that's because we also started growing the newsletter faster. 29:42 So it's like more people who are less familiar with us started opting in, so that's one thing I, I think happened.And then churn rate has been pretty stable there, and I think that's something where we have to work on when it comes to user experience. 29:55 'Cause I remem- remember, like I mentioned from the beginning, this year we're making changes there, and we've made some, but not all when it comes to how, what format the reports and the, just the general insights come in to make it easier to consume. 30:07 So the feedback was that, you know, in-depth reports, pretty great, but 100 pages is a bit too long. 30:13 Some people really like it, and we will keep providing it in that format, but we have to make it a little bit more snackable as well. That's the general consensus. 30:22 And then different formats, like video for the course has been really well-received. We don't plan to turn the reports into video or anything yet. 30:29 Maybe with AI we can do that in a couple of months, [laughs] but, uh, we'll see how that, uh, uh, road, where that road goes later on. But essentially it's, like, improving it and, yeah, as I said, like, if you... 30:39 It, it, it reminds me a lot of how the newsletter was in its second or third year. If you compare it to where it is now, very different. 30:47 Uh, you wouldn't really think it's, it goes, like, it gets to where we are now, and I think this is the same, uh, the same road where, um... A lot of lessons to learn and apply, essentially. 30:58 I- if there's stuff that you just don't have time to do right now for Stacked Marketer Pro, 'cause you have so much going on, like, what would those improvements that you would make to, like, the marketing or product for this, how would you make it better if you just had, like, a magic wand that you could just hit and it would be perfect? 31:12 Like, where would... How would it be different here? Yeah. 31:15 I think the main thing we will, uh, do, that I'm hoping it has the biggest impact, is essentially having a, a better onboarding experience, where we ask, we make a, like, we do a quiz, "What type of marketing do you care about? 31:26 Content marketing, paid social. Um, how much experience do you have?" Those sort of things, and then present, like, a table of content of, you know, 5 to 10 best pieces that we have. 31:37 Like, you know, "Go through these," like, "Take this course," or, "Go through these reports, go through these articles. This is how you... Like, start off here, and that's gonna really improve you." 31:45 Like, essentially ask a few questions and then provide the best content that will provide, like, that will, uh, just improve you as a marketer right away. 31:52 'Cause right now you would have to guess, "Should I read this report, that report? I don't know." Like, it, there's a lot of stuff there. Like, there's a lot of content there. How do I discover what's best for me? 32:01 So I just think including that, uh, that onboarding experience, I think, will make a big difference. I would hope, at least. That's... 32:07 We discussed this internally as well, like, in the team, and we're kind of all in agreement that, yeah, if you just provide the best content, but personalize it for the people, depending on a few parameters like that, you just, essentially the time to value from the subscription decreases so much. 32:22 It, it's probably the, the best way to do. And it's not super complicated, but yeah, as you said, some limited time, then, um, also tech resources. 32:30 We're not, like, tech specialists, so we have to work with others to implement that. But yeah, that, that's the bigger next step for Stacked Marketer Pro, I think. Yeah. 32:39 And then one other question I had about this is a lot of people that we talk to or that listen to this, like, they have a free newsletter, they have a following, maybe they're, like, a newsletter operator or creator that has a newsletter, and they wanna sell a, a course or a premium product or a paid newsletter- Mm-hmm... 32:52 but they, they tried it, it didn't work. Like, what advice would you give to that type of person who wants to have a paid subscription product or online course like this? How, how should they sell it? 33:01 How should they make it successful? Oof. That's tough to say, 'cause it really depends on what, what do they really have, right? So- Or maybe we'll narrow it down to, like, a newsletter who wants to do a paid newsletter. 33:13 And, like, maybe should they even do that, or, like, in what scenario should they or should they not do that? It doesn't have to be, um, a yes or a no. 33:19 Maybe it answers the question indirectly if I explain it, but I, I like the concept that the free newsletter is already a profitable product, and it can be the entry point to more products. 33:29 Therefore, you know, just grow the free newsletter and use that to do other things without thinking so much about how would the paid product do by itself. 33:38 Essentially do more things that, uh, those on the free newsletter like, and then, I don't know, a, a paid newsletter, I'm not... 33:45 I, I think I'm subscribed to maybe one paid newsletter, but even that has, uh, half of it is free. So, like, you're essentially paying for half of it to go more in depth, which is fine. 33:54 But maybe that's the, maybe that's also the answer, is just like, do people want more of what you've done before? Do they want something new? I think don't rush into paid. 34:03 From what I've seen, a paid product is not a magical solution if you can't monetize your newsletter. 34:08 To be, like, perfectly honest, I think sponsors are a great way to monetize a newsletter, not just because, um, you know, it's pr- advertising is a proven model, and you kind of h- can focus on the content of your newsletter, but at the same time, it l- it teaches you what your readers care about, right? 34:25 So if you see that they love educational content, in our case, right, then you can think, "Oh, can I create educational content?" 34:32 If you, if we know our sponsors love, you know, Salesforce, well, unfortunately, we cannot just replicate Salesforce. So that's unrealistic. [laughs] It's... 34:40 Like, you kind of see, like, based on a wide variety of sponsors, then you can see, okay, this is what they resonate more with. This is the type of sponsor that works really well. 34:48 And then taking it from there, like, you get hints based on your own content, your organic content. Then you c- get hints from your sponsored content, what you can do. 34:55 And then to have a free newsletter that's profitable gives you so much flexibility and opportunity. I think focus on that first. 35:01 If your newsletter cannot be profitable, you know, with some sponsors and maybe some, uh, you know, uh, paid recommendations on the recommendation network, again, coming back to SparkLoop, I, I think then you have to make it a little bit more efficient, or at least make it break even there, so then every user that you acquire for your newsletter, break even, anything extra is great. 35:21 So you have... You know, you can pay yourself something, and you have infinite time. 35:25 I mean, you know, you have a lifetime to figure out [laughs] what your course or your community or whatever paid newsletter should be like. But yeah, no magic answer there, unfortunately. 35:34 Just, I think, don't, don't jump into paid as a magical solution. I think a free newsletter is very valuable if you, if you optimize it a bit. I think that's, that's a good answer. 35:42 And l- I wanna talk about free newsletters and, like, get into details on this, 'cause we can talk all day about this. So can we maybe talk about, like, how to grow a free newsletter? 35:51 But we talked about kind of the 0 to w- 10,000. Let's talk about how you're growing now at scale, where you're going from 50,000 to 100,000.Like, what is, what does growth look like now? 36:03 Like, if you were to break down like a pie chart of different subscriber acquisition sources, what would that look like? Maybe we can start from there. Uh, yeah, I can roughly give you that. 36:12 I think it's around half of it, uh, SparkLoop, uh, partner network right now. Then like 25 to 30%, uh, Facebook ads, then like a 10-ish percent newsletter swaps. 36:27 So, uh, you know, free swaps, but essentially doing some newsletter swaps, and then another 10% organic. So like maybe a little bit more organic. I would have to check. I haven't... 36:37 It, it's still significant, but it's definitely paid acquisition essentially. So I think that's like a main point. It, it sounds great that you can always grow for free, but I don't think that's possible. 36:46 Like, e- especially today, like there's so much... Like, distribution is important, and then paid distribution is just more accessible. Like, going viral is not a strategy, I think. Yeah. Great if you're Mr. 36:57 B- Like, think about, you know, person who goes viral the most, MrBeast, like he's actually paying a lot to create those things. [laughs] So going viral for free is not, not a strategy. [laughs] That's a good point. 37:08 And a lot of people don't realize that you go from 50,000 to 100,000 subscribers, it's very hard to get that organically just through, you know, Twitter threads or a TikTok or a YouTube channel. Yeah. 37:17 And then, and then count that you also should clean your list quite a bit, so churn rate is also a part of it. 37:22 You just, you don't just add, you also will remove some subscribers 'cause they drop off, they're not engaged. So with all this, I think you just need to do paid as well if you really want to go through it. 37:33 There are probably some exceptions, there always will be, but I don't think they are, you know, the exceptions are not the most... You know, you don't increase your chances of reaching that goal essentially by going... 37:42 Like, no- unfortunately, we're not all exceptional, so we have to just play the odds and do, do the things that are most likely to make it work for us, so. Let's jump back into that pie chart. 37:52 So if we click on SparkLoop, like what is, what is SparkLoop for people who don't know, and like how does that work? How do you use that to grow? SparkLoop started off as a referral tool for newsletters. 38:01 Uh, we still have the referral program, but it's, um, not very significant. 38:06 It still brings us, I would call them, some free extra word-of-mouth referrals, and now their most powerful tool is their partner network, including a tool called UpScribe, which essentially means when someone subscribes to your newsletter, they can get a, a interstitial pop-up or whatever you wanna call it, where they get other newsletters recommended. 38:26 And then if, you know, you can recommend other newsletters for free or get paid for them, and you can also advertise your newsletter there, and that's, you know, 90% of the 50% of SparkLoop, maybe even more than 90% of it is the UpScribe widget. 38:39 So essentially other newsletters recommend us in that UpScribe tool, and then we pay per subscriber. So essentially it's a lower risk way to do it, to doing it. 38:50 It's high, higher volume, and then it's also higher churn, so you kind of have to put certain, uh, quality parameters, and SparkLoop lets you say, you know, "Approve this subscriber only if they're still on our list after X days." 39:04 And then, you know, if they don't open your emails, if they don't click whatever parameters you want and you unsubscribe them, they will not be considered a referral, so you don't have to pay for them. 39:14 So that, that's essentially... And they have a good amount of traffic. 39:17 You know, like a lot of other newsletters recommend you 'cause they get paid, so it's a good way to also monetize your own newsletter, uh, at the same point, at the same time. That's what I was gonna ask. 39:26 Are, are you using... So it sounds like you're using the, um, you're using it the, the other way as well, where you're hel- you're recommending, uh, other newsletters. 39:33 We're definitely using it both ways now, and it's also useful to get... Recommending other newsletters that you think are pretty good can also get you instant revenue, almost instant from your subscribers. 39:46 Uh, so I think it's pretty good. We haven't had anyone complain one way or the other. 39:52 Uh, so as long as the recommendations were done, you know, properly, like using the, uh, the right tools and no like scripts to make automatic subscribe- subscriptions and stuff like that, we didn't have people complain about us recommending someone else, and we didn't have complaints about someone recommending us. 40:09 Now, we only had like, yeah, if you made like the wrong integration a little bit, you might have people automatically subscribe to you by mistake, but, you know, in a day you can tell that, "Yo, this was wrong. Stop. 40:19 Revert." And then it goes, uh, well. And that's when you get some complaints, right? But now, that was like in the first week that we used it or something like that, that someone, uh, did that. 40:28 So it's, it's just start off mistakes, but now it's been pretty good. That's why it's still like our growth. From a, from a revenue perspective, is it pretty impactful? 40:38 Like, have you done any math on how it impacts the LTV of a, of a free sub? 40:42 We don't have enough data yet, so it's been only a couple of months that we could really go into it, but it does make, you know, like the people who subscribe on 40:52 web, so like from our website, 'cause that's the only place where you really have it, you do get a couple of dollars of revenue, like net revenue from them, uh, from the very beginning. So that's... 41:01 I think if you think about, especially as, you know, it's less impactful for a weekday newsletter, so we send five times a week, but if you're a weekly newsletter that makes, you know, less than a dollar a month on your, uh, from your sub and you get like $2 a month from your sub [laughs] by using UpScribe, that's very impactful, right? 41:19 So it's a little bit relative, but I think it, it's very useful to try out and then maybe additionally, like it's really useful for us now that we have two newsletters, we can always recommend each other. 41:29 So, uh, that, that's pretty useful as well, because you can add in a free recommendation. It helps if, if we promote one of them, the other one gets some benefit as well. Yeah. 41:38 Any recommendations for if I wanted to use SparkLoop to pay for subscribers like you do? What should I shut, set my CPA on? There's... 41:45 You can also set it so you don't pay for subscribers who don't open after X amount of days. Yeah. Like, what should that date range be? What location should I pick? 41:54 Like, how should I optimize the platform to, to grow from it? Well, still learning, but I think I can give a few, uh, initial tips for someone starting out. 42:02 So I would say if you don't have a-Good list cleaning process in place before starting SparkLoop, then you're in for some trouble 'cause you're gonna get a good amount of volume from the beginning, and that's the part where I mentioned a bit earlier, like from one thousand to ten thousand, if you start with SparkLoop and you don't have the right cleaning process in place, you can just get a few... 42:20 Like, you can get five hundred subscribers in one day, [laughs] and that's half your... Like, it's a fifty percent increase in your list. 42:27 Th- that- that's just, like, too big, uh, all of a sudden to not have proper list, uh, cleaning in place. But assuming you do have it, you have to judge based on your frequency a little bit. 42:37 I would say send at least five emails, so if it's a weekly newsletter, you have to put the period at thirty days or so. 42:44 Maybe, like, I think you have to put it there, and then, you know, if someone doesn't open your newsletter, send them a re-engagement, unsubscribe them, and therefore don't pay for them if they don't open any of your first five emails or so, four emails. 42:56 What people are doing more and more, and I think that's good, and it's, um, recommended I think, um, not just asking for a, uh, for opening, but asking for a click or a, you know, certain amount of clicks in a certain period. 43:10 Again, weekly versus daily versus monthly newsletter. 43:13 Like, with a monthly newsletter I think it gets tough, 'cause then you'll put a payback, like you'll put a period of, like, I don't know, ninety days to approve a subscriber. Like, who's gonna recommend you if you... 43:22 They have to wait ninety days to, uh, to look. So I think the sweet spot is fourteen, twenty days, you know, two, three weeks there, maybe up to a month. If you do more than a month, I'm... 43:33 Personally, I would not look at recommending a newsletter that pays out more than a month afterwards. And then, you know, there's different other things. 43:41 Aside from the engagement with your list cleanup, you can include a form of double opt-in, right? There's more and more where people say, like, yeah, they have to double opt-in, otherwise they won't count. 43:50 Uh, I think that's a good thing, and I think with SparkLoop you can even say in some way, depending on what the email platform you use, "If it comes from SparkLoop, send them this email and make sure that they click on this link to confirm that they're subscribed." 44:02 So, like, let's say a dou- a manual double opt-in, not automatically with your email platform across the list, but you just do it with an automation, and just say, "If they come from SparkLoop," or like, "If they come from UpScribe, make sure that they click this link before they are segmented into our nu- normal list." 44:18 And then, you know, it's a double opt-in right there. Then you can just say, "Must double opt in." So things like that for keeping the list clean. Then in terms of payout, that's really relative. 44:28 If you're a mainstream newsletter, which i- it's, like, it depends on how mu- how you monetize as well. I've seen payouts from $7 to $1, in between there. 44:37 The good thing here, though, is start with whatever payout makes sense. Look at the market of relatively similar newsletters. Set a payout in that range. 44:46 You're probably gonna start getting some recommendations, and then what you can do is you can, uh, set a custom payout per subscriber. So, uh, per... Sorry, per partner. 44:55 So if someone sends you very engaged subscribers and you want more from them, you can increase the payout, or if someone sends you, you know, mediocre, maybe you have to lower it a little bit. 45:04 You can just lower the payout for that one publisher. Um, but again- That's cool. I didn't know you could do that. Yeah. 45:09 So just something to mention here, it takes time, so you're not gonna be able to make these decisions within a week or two, right? You have to give them time to open newsletters, to interact with the newsletters. 45:19 So we have a daily newsletter, and we still take more than a month to make such a change, because we need to see, like, how do people engage across a month or so, like two, three weeks, then analyze that in the next few days and then make some decisions. 45:34 It takes time to learn to g- to gather the data of... when it comes to engagement. So make sure you plan with that in mind when it comes to budget and your CPA. 45:42 It sounds like the engagement's good, though, if it's, it's a big chunk of your growth. Like, it's... The, the subscribers are engaging and sticking around. Yeah, yeah. 45:50 'Cause y- you can set up your own growth parameters that way, right? So that- that's, uh, like your engagement parameters. So that's pretty good. I would still say that, you know, newsletter swaps are the most engaging. 46:01 Like, by far. That's not even close. So don't get hopes there, but I think when you compare it to Facebook en- it, it's comparable to Facebook engagement, but just way easier to manage in some way, I would say. 46:12 That, that's kind of like, you know, maybe you find better Facebook audiences sometimes. But it, it's comparable to Facebook at least, which I think- That's good enough... is still pretty good quality overall. 46:22 And because you can customize it more with targeting, or not with targeting, but with, with your engagement parameters, you can make it higher quality than Facebook, right? 46:30 You can just say, like, "No, the quality from Facebook, it's average." 'Cause just it's everything. Here you can really say at least this amount of... 46:38 this click-through rate or so, which is, you know, it can make you get lower volume, less recommendations if you're too strict, but at the same time, it's your option. You can do that. 46:48 Nobody's gonna stop you from doing it. On, um... I know we're getting close to time here. I guess you mentioned newsletter swaps as being the highest, uh, engagement. 46:56 For someone who's just starting out, what is a good process to, to identify a swap? How do you go about it? Are you using... 47:03 I mean, probably now you're getting inbound requests, but, uh, when you were first starting out, were you just reaching out? Were you using apply-... 47:09 I know there are platforms like Paved that you can probably do or organize stuff like this through, but yeah, curious, curious to know your, your kinda framework there. 47:17 Oh, well, when we started out, these platforms didn't exist. [laughs] So it, it's what, again, one of those things where now... I, I think now what you can really do is, um, join, uh, Paul's group. 47:29 I think it's called Letter Growth, uh, or like Discord, Letter Growth Lab. Just join that, and there's, like, cross... You can do cross-promotions with newsletters of all sizes essentially. 47:39 So that, that would be my recommendation right now. We haven't used it actively, uh, much. 47:43 I'm still around there, and I chat here and there, but I haven't used it to find cross-promotions, mostly because we already have a few partners that we work with regularly, um, that are, you know, similar enough in size. 47:53 It, it just, like they're a fit, and we have... That, that's all the swap placements that we really have. So I'm not looking for new ones for, for ourselves. But essentially that, that's how I would start it. 48:03 Look for people with similar size or sim- like, related audiences, and a big point there is don't expect all of them to go great. You will have some fails. 48:13 You will have some times where you send more and you don't get anything in return or, like, you don't get much in return. 48:17 Of course, they willYou know, they will feature you, but you might not get the type of traffic that you want. 48:22 I prefer swaps that are focused on unique clicks, so trying to send the, the same amount of unique clicks to each other, 'cause that ends up being very similar when it comes to how many subscribers you get. 48:33 But you take out... Because it's unique clicks, you take out the, you know, conversion rate part of it. 'Cause if someone has a bad landing page, um, that doesn't convert so well. 48:41 Like I told you, above the fold on mobile makes a huge difference. Some people just don't change that, then they... Okay, if they don't want to, they don't want to. They just want to present other things above the fold. 48:50 Then, uh, at least you can, you know, you can get parity quicker. You don't have to... Yeah, essentially you don't send more traffic than you have, so you don't have to provide more placements. 48:59 So you're aiming for unique click parity. So they send you the same amount of clicks. They send you 100, you send 100. And do you ask or do additional placements on either side if, if that doesn't match up? Yeah. 49:09 So if it doesn't match up, you just continue sending until it matches up. So we have, um... Well, we do with, uh, The Daily Upside, we've done regularly, and if they send one, we usually have to send... 49:21 Now they've grown a bit quicker, so we have to send, like, three or so for them. But it's, it reaches parity at least, so we're both okay with it. Like, they are more impactful for us maybe now than a year ago. 49:32 A year ago or two years ago maybe were a little bit more even. But yeah, it's, it's just kind of... It still works out pretty okay and reliably. 49:40 'Cause as I mentioned, the quality is also pretty important there, so, um- Do you... Like, where do you put the feature in your newsletter? So it's... Is it a dedicated ad? No, we just do a sponsored post. 49:50 Yeah, it just works out well. It, it... 49:53 Maybe that's one of the other things, it's a good way to think of ha- like, if you have any sort of remnant sponsored placements or someone backing out last minute, good place to do a swap with someone. 50:03 Still get quite a bit of value out of it if you think about it, so. That makes sense. 50:07 Have you ever worried about, like, losing sponsor revenue because of the swaps, or does it just work out where you have some unsold inventory or, like, inventory where you can put a swap in there instead? Hmm. 50:17 We, we've only done swaps when we've seen, like, okay, there's a few placements left that are unlikely to get booked. Holidays tend to be one. 4th of July gonna be an example in summer. 50:27 Some sponsors will book it, but it, it tends to be less, uh, requested as a date, right? So there it fits to do some sort of swap. 50:36 That, that's, you know, holidays, things that kind of you see, like, there's a week out and you don't look, you don't have anyone interested in that, uh, date in your placement, then it fits. 50:47 For us, we've not had that issue, 'cause again, daily newsletter, three sponsored spots per day. Different visibility with them, but still there's three of them. It, it's hard to get 100% fill rate no matter what you do. 51:00 So I, I, I think, like, literally, even if we had... 51:04 in theory, if we had the demand for it, I think it's just the workflow would not help, 'cause even when we, uh, like, we f- we get close to it, but there's always something, like, last minute, "Can we postpone this a week? 51:16 Can we change this a little bit?" It always, something always comes to mind, so you always have, like, two, three placements in a month that don't get filled up, no matter what you do, I feel like. 51:25 No, it's really fascinating. 'Cause you broke down this, this cross-promotion strategy for me months and months ago, and it was really helpful. But I think you're one of the best newsletters at, at using this. 51:34 Most people just don't use it or they don't know how or they don't do it like you do. So it's, it's cool to hear you break that down here. And it really is, like, people don't... 51:41 You didn't mention, like, the open rate numbers from these subscribers, but it's probably the highest quality subscriber you could get for a newsletter. Would, would you say that to be accurate? Yeah. 51:50 So i- it, it's usually similar open rate, especially nowadays open rate is less reliable, so that, that's, you know, the 50% mark, 45 to 55% range is what you would expect very often for most newsletter swaps. 52:05 But the click-through rate is really good, so people engage way more. 52:08 I can give you an example of we've promoted the new newsletter that we bought, the Psychology of Marketing newsletter, we promoted it in our daily newsletter. And for the first send, we... I have the engagement rate. 52:20 It's 73% open rate, and, like, 12% click-to-open rate, or, like, 14%, something like that on the first few... like, on the first newsletter that we sent after promoting it. So i- it's really, really good. 52:33 Of course, this is the exception, 'cause it's the highest intent right now, 'cause it's the first time we featured it this way. But, you know, you can see the difference. 52:42 Like, the average is, you know, if you have a th- a, you know, 45% open rate and 6% click-to-open rate or so, you're doing all right. Like, you're above average. 52:53 Depending on what, uh, format your newsletter has, you're really good. 52:57 But then you get subscribers that open 73% or so and then click twice as often or maybe even three times as often, you can see that the engagement is just way, way higher, uh, overall. 53:08 Not all swaps go that way, but it's always been, you know, 50 to 100% better compared to the average, um, to the other channels or the average. That's, that's pretty high. Yeah. 53:19 I know we're, like, at our time here, but I really wanted to ask you about the Psychology of Marketing acquisition. Do we have time to cover that? Sure. Yeah, we have time from my side- Yeah... so no problem. 53:28 Why, why do you wanna buy it? W- how do you think it will help? We'll start there, and then I wanna get into, like, how do you value a newsletter like this? 53:33 'Cause it- it's significant size, like, 25 or 20,000 subscribers, but it's not... It's a somewhat new and, like, small business too, so the valuation metrics may be different. 53:43 First part was, is this the type of content that we want to provide more of? Like, how, what, what, how do we see Stacked Marketer growing and what type of content? There's usually, like, two ways that newsletters grow. 53:54 Either they repeat the same model in other industries, or they expand within the same industry, right? Like, they provide a variety of content or services within the same industry. 54:05 For us, it seems pretty clear that we want to stay within marketing. 54:08 And then you look at, you know, what type of marketing content, what sort of marketing newsletters maybe that, uh, have, uh, the existing audience would like. 54:16 So people who w- read Stacked Marketer, would they like Psychology of Marketing? The assumption is yes. So there's a few other newsletters like that out there. 54:25 With Psychology of Marketing specifically, we did a swap back in November or December. 54:29 So we, uh, started talking, and then at some point I justAsked in early January or so, like, what's, you know, what's the plan for the, for 2023? 54:39 Would they be interested in some sort of, uh, you know, acquisition, partnership, something like that, and that's how the discussion started. But essentially for us it was, okay, this makes sense. 54:49 The size is big enough to make an impact, but not so big that we cannot afford it, or, like, maybe we cannot afford it, and we'll see what, uh, thing, how things, uh, that was the thing, how things go. 55:00 But it's not so small, 'cause, like, acquiring a newsletter with 1,000 subscribers is probably not worth it so much, 'cause we can build 1,000... Like, literally we're doing it right now. 55:08 In a week we have 1,000 sub- week, a little bit over a week we have 1,000 subscribers on our new newsletter as well. So i- it's kind of like 1,000 doesn't make sense to negotiate, you just provide. 55:18 Like, you have the content idea, just do it yourself and, in our case. But like you said, 23,000 is the, the number where, that it had back then, was, you know, significant. It was almost half of what we already had. 55:30 So that was the reason. No, yeah, that, that makes sense. How do you come to, like, a valuation number? 55:35 Like, do you EBITDA, total revenue, multiple of revenue, multiple of EBITDA, like a, a value per subscriber, like you pay 10, 20, 30 bucks per subscriber? How do you- It really-... think about that? 55:45 It, it really depends on what you're really buying, I think. And it's like, is it a running business that you don't have to work on? Or in most cases with smaller newsletters, you're buying a job, right? 55:59 So then what we've done is we just put, uh, multiple layers on it. 56:03 So we said this, like, if we acquire these subscribers by ourselves, or if, if we make these effort, how much would it cost us to get th- this kind of subscriber? So that was layer one, valuing the subscribers. 56:14 Then layer two, valuing the, uh, the type of work that's get, that gets done on it, and then a performance incentive. So, like, we have those three layers that we've, uh, put there. 56:23 Subscribers, how much it costs for, to get the subscribers, then how much would it cost to continue working on it, and then how much does it cost to, you know, like, some performance incentive to be like, "Okay, if you work well on it, you get more out of it," essentially. 56:35 And that performance incentive is for the, the previous owner, Javi, right? Yeah, exactly. Great. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Okay, that's a great breakdown. So those are the three, the three layers there. 56:44 Uh, and then as I mentioned, like, the valuing the subscribers really depends how you value them, 'cause any, any model can work, but I think the first question you have to ask yourself is what are you buying? 56:54 And then depending on that, 'cause if you're buying, you know, someone who bought Morning Brew, they're thinking of cash flow probably a lot. Then, uh, again, for another example, The Hustle was bought by Trends. 57:04 I don't think that HubSpot... Uh, sorry, uh, The Hustle was bought by HubSpot. I don't think HubSpot was thinking literally how much cash they make directly, 'cause they stopped, uh, featuring sponsors. 57:14 But there was probably other discussions there, like how much, what's the reach? 57:19 And then from The Hustle's side, yeah, okay, but if you don't pay us at least how much money we make, then [laughs] it's kind of like pointless. 57:25 So there was probably, like, two valuations happening at the same time in those, uh, in that scenario. But yeah, it, it just kind of, you have to think what makes sense. 57:34 And I think recently I've been, there's a few people who've sold, uh, you know, like, they got, uh, they essentially sold a small share of their newsletter for some money as well. 57:44 So they got silent invest- investors or silent partners they called it. I think that's also, like, an option to think of in some cases. 57:51 Um, but yeah, for acquisition, essentially, it really, really depends, but that's how we thought about it. 57:58 Do you think we'll see more people buy newsletters, like, in the, in the 10 to 50,000 subscriber range, or more newsletters buy newsletters? Like, is it a good move for most people, or is it not worth it? 58:09 I think it would happen. I mean, let's just say that if it goes well, if things go... 58:16 If our assumptions are correct with psychology of marketing, we'll probably look into either acquiring more newsletters or expanding in some way. 58:24 So that- that's one reason I say I think it sh- it might happen more, or it should happen more. 58:29 Even at a bigger scale, like Morning Brew bought a few newsletters not too long, like, like, over the past couple of years they bought a few newsletters. 58:35 And I think it will happen because some people are just very good at creating content. Some people are not so good at the monetizing the side of things. 58:45 And then that's where you can have a good, you know, you can, the creator can get more money than they would be able to get alone, and the business pays less than they would have to build it, 'cause, you know, they instantly have an asset that they can monetize better than it's worth right now. 59:00 Like, they instantly plug it in. So I think these sort of roll-ups can happen a little bit more, and they make some sense, especially 'cause newsletters can be profitable. 59:08 It's not like the, you know, the e-commerce roll-ups where it's, like, buying, losing businesses, like m- businesses that lose money. That, that's kind of what I'm thinking of. 59:16 Like, I know there, those were quite popular last few years, and then all of a sudden money's not free, and then it, it's not so easy to make those work. Let's let the newsletter roll-ups begin, begin for us. 59:29 [laughs] Uh, but I mean, also on the other hand, uh, like, a lot of newsletters, especially free ones, are monetized through advertising, and advertisers definitely had a lot of budget cuts, and I think that also makes it harder for some people to monetize. 59:43 If there's a lot of budget, excess budget, people will try out new newsletters. 59:48 I think, you know, if we start now, like if Stacked Marketer would be starting today, even though we reach, you know, 10,000 subscribers faster, I think it might be harder on, on the monetization front, 'cause who will try to take a risk? 59:59 Now we have, you know, a few hundred sponsors that we've worked with, and their rate of return with sponsors is really good for us, and I think that gives an, uh, gives us an advantage if we buy another newsletter. 1:00:09 All of a sudden, all that relationships, all those relationships come into play. While a new newsletter, even though it's good, they might just not be able to do that. Yeah. 1:00:19 The, the trust part of it is hard to, it takes time to build trust essentially. Yeah. You build these, like, over 200 advertisers you worked with, right? 1:00:25 So that you've built those relationships over years, and that gives you a huge advantage. 1:00:30 I want, I'm trying to make this list of, like, the top 100 newsletters, and, like, are there newsletters that you look to for inspiration and learning from? Like, then their content, their growth, operations. 1:00:40 Any, like, two to three you take inspiration from?That people should check out, or media companies, creators, doesn't have to be just a newsletter. So I think Morning Brew is still an example to, to look at. 1:00:50 Just put it in the right context, and what I mean here is, like, you know, they're not the same scrappy company that they were five years ago. 1:00:58 Now they're like hundreds of, uh, people working there, owned by a bigger entity. One of the founders is the CEO, the other founder is still involved, but it's not really founder-led in the same sense. 1:01:09 Like, there's still founder involvement and they still do a great job, but it- it's different. So, uh, just for the scale there, I think. So Morning Brew is still one that I look at. 1:01:18 There's not much else that I would say stands out too much, but I follow, like, I don't know, probably like 30, 40 newsletters or creators overall to try to learn and see, like, you know, what works, what doesn't work, what they do well, what maybe I think they don't do so well, or I try to assume why they do it and just essentially learn from that. 1:01:39 But yeah. So there's one newsletter that I think is interesting, we also advertised in it, that I think has more potential. 1:01:48 It's called Dense Discovery, so that one would be a newsletter that I would mention, like, pretty good example. What, what is Dense Discovery? What, what do they do? 1:01:58 Well, essentially it's, it's a very, it, it's kind of like a personal newsletter. So the author just writes it with recommendations of, you know, tools to just... It- it's a mix of tools, art, things like that. 1:02:11 It- it's just like, um, yeah, you have to see it to really see. Like, to discover cool things essentially, but it's done in a thoughtful way. It's not like a link dump, you know? 1:02:20 Like, it's not just a list of things to look through. Kind of like as the name suggests, right? Like, it's dense, but it's discovering, uh, things like that. 1:02:28 Then for marketing, I think, uh, Ari is a pretty interesting one and a very good concept. 1:02:35 They essentially go through academic research that was published and tr- as, they basically extract the actionable things for marketers there. I think that's really a good one that will have more potential in the future. 1:02:49 So yeah, those three. I think Morning Brew is still the example to follow overall with, you know, adjusting for context and everything, and expectations and scale. And then those other two I, uh, I like quite a bit. 1:03:01 I think they do... They can do better, but I think content-wise, they're really good. 1:03:06 I think both of them probably can think about monetizing better, but that's, I think that's a little bit of a bias 'cause I think we do monetization reasonably well compared to the average. So 1:03:17 that's where usually I see the opportunities to do better. [laughs] Content-wise, there's a lot of really good ones. I think monetization-wise, there's more that can improve. Awesome. 1:03:25 Well, those are great recommendations that I'm sure everyone should check out. Where can people find you? What's your Twitter handle? Stackmarketer.com is the newsletter website. Where else? Yeah. 1:03:35 So stackmarketer.com is the newsletter website. Oh, yeah, bought the.com. Was a whole debate if we should buy it or not, and now it's like such a no-brainer. 1:03:43 [laughs] Uh, I, I know that people like to debate those things. Don't, uh, fuss too much about it, but if you have, you can afford, it usually pays off, so. 1:03:51 Then Twitter handle, Stack Marketer is for, uh, the newsletter, and my personal one where I post pretty often now, at least a few times a week I post about newsletter growth, uh, newsletter content and monetization, is, uh, @emanuelcinca. 1:04:06 That's C-I-N-C-A. Also on LinkedIn, I also regularly post there. But yeah, though LinkedIn and Twitter is where I'm, uh, active. But if you, you know, if you read Stack Marketer and you reply, I also get those. 1:04:18 So you can reach me, uh, just by replying to a newsletter. That's probably pretty safe and simple as well. Sounds good. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for having me. [outro music] Thanks for listening. 1:04:32 If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to follow the Newsletter Operator Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating to help support the show. 1:04:42 If you wanna learn even more about how to grow and monetize a newsletter, go to newsletteroperator.com. 1:04:48 And if you'd like to work with Matt or Ryan directly, check the links in the description and apply to work with our agencies. 1:05:02 [outro music]
