Transcript 0:00 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. 0:16 [upbeat music] Hey, what's up? Welcome to the Newsletter Operator podcast. I'm with Ryan Carr and our guest, Kieran Drew. Thanks for joining us. 0:33 So tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do. You're kind of known for a lot of different things. Writing is a big one, but maybe just tell the audience, like, what you do, how you help people. 0:42 Give us kind of the, the overview. Yeah, sure. I'll give you the, the TLDR. So three years ago, I was a dentist, and, uh, I started writing online. 0:50 Fell in love with the skill and ended up kind of quitting my career to go all in, and over the past kind of two years, I have been building up my newsletter, which is now called Digital Freedom, and it's kind of evolved just as I've been exploring my curiosity. 1:06 But, but what I do now is I, I, I write about helping entrepreneurs, like, build a powerful presence by writing online. 1:13 And, you know, the thing that I'm really bullish on is that we're not so much talking about, like, building an audience as opposed to attracting one. 1:21 You know, there's kind of personality, story-based content so that entrepreneurs can basically convert followers into fans and, and create more customers. 1:30 So that's pretty much the run through of, uh, of where I'm at now. 1:33 And just diving into that journey a little bit more, because I know we have quite a few people listening that are maybe writing newsletters on the side while they're working another job. 1:42 Talk to us a little bit about that journey from like going from being a dentist to writing full-time and what that transition looked like. 1:49 Yeah, I mean, it was, it was the most exciting and exhausting period of my life because as a dentist, I was working six days a week, and it happened when, uh, COVID hit. 1:57 I suddenly had a couple months that I couldn't really draw teeth in my living room, and I, I stumbled across Naval, who said, "Just explore your curiosity." 2:05 I actually wanted to be a stand-up comedian at first, so I was messing around with that, and I found writing, and I was like, "Whoa, these mornings I'm writing just fly by." 2:12 And yeah, it was, it was really exciting, but it was also terrifying because it's like when you start online, it's like being dropped in a foreign country with no map and no clue how to speak the language or what the hell is going on, right? 2:23 So, and I thought copywriting was for lawyers, and making money online was for drug dealers, and [laughs] I just didn't get it at all. 2:30 And because we were doing it on the side, I mean, when I started going back to work, initially I was trying to write in the evenings, but I was always too tired. It was very hit or miss. 2:39 And so I ended up kind of shifting everything to early mornings and weekends, and that was where the slog began because, you know, at first it was just gonna be a little side hobby. 2:48 I was like, "You know, I'll write for five years. Hopefully we'll have a bit of an audience. Maybe I could quit my job slowly." But it's kind of like having a stone in your shoe. 2:55 You know, when you think it's not gonna bother you, but after a few, like, well, a bit of time you're like, "Geez, it's all I can think about." It was the same online, man. 3:03 Like, every time I was driving to work, I felt like I was making a massive mistake because I was thinking, "I'm working so hard as a dentist, but what if I was just working this hard all in online?" 3:13 And so I ended up quitting my job. I've got written on my whiteboard here as a reminder [laughs] second of September last year, so that's twenty twenty-two. 3:22 And, you know, the plan was to be a copywriter because, you know, everybody seemed to be making money online with writing. Turns out internet money is terrifying when you've never made it. So massive imposter syndrome. 3:33 During the actually six months, I didn't make a single dollar, so I, I basically burned through all my savings and done everything but the work I needed to do. 3:40 And it was funny because as a dentist, I would, I would happily charge three to five thousand dollars a case. 3:45 As a writer, I didn't believe anyone would pay me fifty bucks, and it's crazy because a lot of people feel the same. 3:51 And it's actually, uh, if you look at the level of skill of writing, you only need to write for six months to, to be in, like, the top fifteen, twenty percent i-in my opinion, and, and that's where you can start monetizing that. 4:00 But then it came up to March, and I was like, "Well, look, if I can't find a copywriting client, I'm gonna have to employ myself." 4:07 And so I made an announcement on Twitter March the first, and I was like, "I'm gonna release a product the thirty-first of March." No clue what I was doing. I hadn't built it. I had a very intense month. 4:16 Clicked send on that first sales email, and from there onwards it's been, uh, it's been a bit of a wild rollercoaster. Wow. 4:23 I didn't realize that you left so recently, and you're, you're doing this at a high level now, just like, oh, less than two years later. That's really impressive. 4:30 Well, I'm curious what got you into writing and copywriting because I've had the same experience. I think Ryan and I are both super passionate about copywriting. 4:37 The audience is all newsletter writers, so [laughs] I'm sure there's a ton that are in that too. So tell us about it. It's funny because I actually found copywriting very early, and I hated it. 4:45 I, I think I was reading like a Gary Halbert book, and I was like, "What the hell is this crap?" It's like it's manipulative, it's pushy, it's not real writing. 4:52 So I, I, I threw it away for like six months, and then what happened was, you know, I was blogging. I wasn't really getting results. I was writing on Medium, and then I stumbled across Twitter. 5:01 And at first, you know, it was crazy. I was like, "This is just people writing crap, commenting on crap to grow more crap." And I was like, "How does this lead to a business?" 5:10 And then slowly I got introduced to that world of like Dan Koe and stuff, and he actually sent me a message about it. 5:15 It was like, I told him the, the five-year blogging plan, and he was like, "Study the word copywriting." And when I actually then took another look at it, I was like, "Oh, you know what? 5:24 Like, yes, it's, it's, it's kind of sales based, but actually it's, it's just the art of getting people to take action, you know, to read, to think, to click, to change their mind." 5:36 And when I started looking at it like that, it really reframed it all for me because, you know, a lot of writers, they actually have very good ideas. 5:44 They're just not packaging them well, and that's what copywriting helps you do, right? It's like you, you, you earn someone's attention, and then you can hopefully help them with something. 5:52 So I'm a huge fan of following your curiosity. I read one book and then just got deeper and deeper, and I'm still just reading it pretty much every day. 5:59 I'm practicing it every day and-I don't think everyone needs to become a, a pro copywriter, but, but like a three to six-month fundamentals will do wonders for, for any entrepreneur. 6:08 What like books, practices helped you develop those fundamentals? Book-wise, I can give you, uh, some of my favorites. I actually don't read... 6:15 I don't think anybody should read the classic books early because a lot of it's outdated, and it's a little bit overwhelming as well. 6:21 So I always recommend people start off with, uh, Joseph Sugarman's Adweek Copywriting Handbook, Great Leads by Michael Masterson, and then one of my favorite books is called The Ten Commandments of A-List Copywriters. 6:35 I mean, those three, and that's John Mitch Kovak. Those three books are brilliant. And then I think if you progress to... And my f-favorite book of all time is, is, is Breakthrough Advertising. 6:43 Every time I read that book, I have my mind blown. I think it's just the Bible of all copy and, and marketing. So that's book-wise. The, the other thing really is, I'm a huge fan of copy work. 6:52 So what I used to do every single morning for thirty to sixty minutes was I'd hand copy better writers. And it would depend on the sort of stuff I'm doing. 7:01 So if I was writing Twitter content, I would usually hand copy someone like Naval because I quite like the blithe attitude approach. 7:07 If I'm writing emails, I would, you know, take someone like Ian Stanley or John Mitch Kovac, who are just email copywriters that I really enjoy, and sales pages similarly. 7:16 So I was doing that, and in terms of learning any skill, I'm, I'm a huge fan of just intensive immersion. I think it's Nathan Barry that said it's like online, it's you are the bottleneck. 7:25 Like everything's out there if you need it. 7:28 So I had like a good two to three-month period where I was just listening to as many podcast interviews with experts and all that stuff because it's like people talking a foreign language marketing. 7:36 I know like, Matt, you're, you're brilliant at it, and right, I've not met you so much, but I didn't get any of these terms, so I just dive, dive right in. 7:43 And then obviously did like nothing, nothing has made me a better writer than actually doing, like building a project, building something to sell. In copy work, how did you do it? Just so the audience knows. 7:54 Did you write it down by paper? Did you type it out? Yeah. So I write it out by hand, and we get into the weeds of it a little bit. But basically, you're not meant to have lined paper. It's meant to be blank paper. 8:03 Apparently, it's better for coming into your mind. I heard that somewhere, not confirmed. But that was from Ian Stanley actually. 8:10 And what I would do is put a timer on for forty-five minutes because, you know, a timer is much easier to work to. The thing I hated was that it felt very slow and boring, but that is kind of the point. 8:19 But I, I felt like I wanted to get more use from it. 8:21 And so what I would do is that when I'm doing copy work, if I hear a sentence that I really like, I would then rewrite it on my Notion selling something of my own, even if I didn't have it in sell. 8:32 And that would just be very like someone's talking about selling a car, and I'd be like, "Oh, I could do that for, for writing." 8:37 And what actually happened was when I came to, yeah, write my first sales page, I had like three hundred just little mini excerpts of copy work just there. 8:46 And that was also pretty cool for, for inspiration, and it just felt like there was a point behind what I was doing more. 8:52 And I used to at the start for like the first ten or fifteen or so read it again after with a list of questions. I think I have a checklist somewhere, but it was, you know, what's the big idea? What's the story? 9:03 How did they do the proposal? What's the unique mechanism? Just so you're actually like consciously noticing these things. But I stopped doing that because, you know, it just, it just got very long. [chuckles] Yeah. 9:13 I think after you know the structure, you kinda start to stop following that too. It's like I like that strategy of taking the copy work and then applying it to your own product. 9:22 Because it seems kind of on- abstract at first if you're talking about some like weight loss product, you know, some guy in the '80s was selling, you're writing that down, it doesn't feel very concrete and applicable now, but it makes more sense. 9:32 I-I'm-- I'd love to nerd out about Breakthrough Advertising for a second, as most people haven't even heard of that or read that, and it's hard to get a hold of that book, I think. 9:42 I have a copy behind me, but like, I think I s- I spent $500 on it. [chuckles] There's a funny story here in that book. [laughs] Yeah. 9:48 So tell us about like any like big takeaways from the book that, that come to mind for you. It's actually easier to get now because Brian Kurtz has re-released it. So, and it's still about two hundred bucks. 9:57 But as a book, like I, like I said, it's, it's a, it's a reason I had a six-figure launch. In terms of takeaways from it, so my key one is beginning with mass desire. So when I first started doing copy, I, I... 10:08 and you see this all the time. People have this like spray and pray approach to, you know, like, "Oh, this will do this and that and that," and they'll say it all at the start. "This is for you if X, Y, Z." 10:17 And actually, we respond better by this like rule of one, the specificity, right? And so you want to identify the core desire of your audience. 10:24 And by the way, when we're talking about copy, this is what I really love about it. He's doing it for selling stuff, but as an audience, like, like if you're attracting an audience, it's the same thing. 10:35 If you can identify the core desire of your audience, and, you know, when we say core desire, it's not just to make money. It's stuff like freedom, it's impact, it's influence. 10:43 If you can actually pick the thing that people will follow you for, it has a much stronger pull with it. The second part or what came after that is understanding that markets are at different fa- uh, phases and stages. 10:56 And so this is in Great Leads. It's probably explained a little bit simpler there, but just the way obviously in the core text you, you really get it. 11:02 But the more competitive your market is, the more unique your offer has to be. 11:10 So you have to build in a unique mechanism, and you have to make that mechanism more and more apparent if you're competing with everyone else. So like if we were to take you, Matt, you're the newsletter guy. 11:20 Thankfully, you're kind of like the top of the newsletter guy, but there's a lot of newsletter guys coming. 11:24 And so you would have like a unique newsletter system to do X, Y, Z, and that, that would help you set yourself apart. And you don't need to know that obviously, but it's just [chuckles] a random example. 11:34 No, it's good to give an example. That's... M-maybe break down one more example. I think one from the book was like fat loss. Back in like 1920, you could be like, "Here's how to lose fat," and that ad would work great. 11:44 Yeah. But now there's so many like fat loss, weight loss, fitness products out there, that ad would do awful today. So our, our copy has to be more sophisticated. We have to have a USP, those types of things. 11:54 And I, I think that's pretty... I mean, if, if you get those three things, right? Mass desire, sophistication, and awareness levels, that, that, that's extremely powerful for-Emails or anything. 12:05 And actually the, the tip I love the most that has actually improved my writing the most... Sorry, there's two, because this is a brilliant book. 12:10 A, what does my audience need to believe to buy this product or buy my ideas, right? So for example, I am a writer and I sell writing, right? 12:22 And so I could actually just list down the stuff like, for example, my audience needs to believe, and this is how I wrote my sales page, they need to believe that, A, they can write, 12:31 B, that an audience is powerful for their business, C, that I can teach writing, 12:37 D, that writing isn't hard if you have a system, and E, that if you, if you're writing well, you don't need to be an expert, you can build a successful business on the back of it. 12:47 And when you understand the beliefs that are motivating your audience, you know, if you don't address one of them, you don't get a sale. And also in all my content, I'm just addressing these points over and over. 12:57 And then the final point that kinda ties into that is that the whole point in copy or marketing is to meet your reader where they are and lead them to where you want them to go. 13:07 So the problem is when, with some people they, they forget where their reader is, like curse of knowledge or a lack of empathy. 13:15 They jump into their point and it never really hits home because the reader, you know, even in emails and stuff, the reader's like, "I don't care." 13:23 So you have to kinda meet them where they are, you know, with a pain point, a desire, or just like an interesting anecdote or story, and then lead them down the page. That's something a lot of people miss. 13:32 How do you understand how to meet the reader where they are? Like, do you do audience research? Do you have frameworks for that? How does that work? 13:39 Because it's very easy, especially as you get as sophisticated in your business and your content to write for advanced people or to write for yourself, but that doesn't apply to everyone you're writing to. Yeah. 13:50 I mean, as a start, I write to myself initially. That, that's been really powerful for just making an audience an extension of yourself. So the understanding is there. 13:58 But I think the problem that most entrepreneurs have is that they began- begin to make steps. You forget the pain of what it was like in the first place and how easy... You think it was easier than it was to learn. 14:10 The way that I've been combating that, mate, is feedback loops. 14:13 So, uh, when people buy my product in the post-purchase sequence, there are questionnaires inbuilt, so people can let me know what they're working on, what they're trying to build, or these sort of things. 14:22 I hold Q&A sessions, which are brilliant. I mean, they... my audience think it's really useful for them, but I'm sitting there getting two hours of questions thrown at me, and I'm like, "Holy shit." 14:32 You know, I don't know if I'm allowed to swear. Sorry. But like, uh, like to me, for example, niching, right? It's like, oh, you know, pick a niche, one, two, three step. 14:40 But I kinda forget that it took me nine months of stressing about my niche to work it out. And then you hop on a call and you're like, "Oh, yeah, that's what pain feels like." 14:48 So I think talking to your audience is brilliant. I always tell my-- on my page, you know, it has like a, "You buy the product, or you can buy the product and a call." 14:56 And those calls are, are brilliant because, A, again, you get to understand your audience more, but B, I ask them all to take the course before the product. 15:04 Take the course before the call, so that then they tell me what, what I'm either missing or what's coming next. You know, and as you can imagine, a lot of the conversation is around newsletters. 15:14 So speaking of, of the course and kind of your consulting, one of the things that I've seen you put out is the Freedom Meter, which I think is a really cool framework for thinking about how you're spending your time and how you're, you're monetizing your audience. 15:27 And first of all, for those who haven't seen the Freedom Meter, maybe you can kind of explain what that is and how it kind of works within your framework of building products. Sure. 15:36 So I'm a huge fan of building in public. I think it's really brilliant to do real-time storytelling and bring your audience along for the ride. 15:42 So I've always been kinda posting my revenue meter, like how much money I've been making and stuff and... But I, I actually, funnily, I don't like setting money goals. I think it can really... 15:51 It led me to a bad place with dentistry, right? Like selling all my time, not thinking smart. So this time around I thought, "Right. Well, we're here for freedom." 15:58 You know, my newsletter is called Digital Freedom, and a, and a Freedom Meter basically is a measure of where my income is coming from. Low leverage, which is ghostwriting, one-to-one calls, those sort of things. 16:09 Medium leverage, group coaching, one to few. And then high leverage, one to many. And, you know, there's that saying that what you measure, you improve, right? 16:18 So, uh, I started doing this in January when I launched Digital Freedom. And my Freedom Meter, I set a public goal to get to ninety percent high leverage, and it was at like ten, fifteen, twenty percent I think. 16:31 And it's a brilliant forcing function, you know, because like there's been so many times where someone would be like, "Hey, can I, can I pay you for coaching?" 16:38 And I'm like, "Actually, man, like I don't wanna, I don't want my audience to see me backtracking on the, the announcement I'm making." And i- it's cool because last month we hit eighty-nine percent high leverage. 16:48 So it's, it's been a good, uh, goal to work towards. Maybe talk about how do you think people should start? When they're first starting, they're not gonna be ninety percent high leverage, right? You weren't. 16:57 None of us were, right? So how should people think about that? Should they even have digital products from, from day one or early on? 17:03 Or like if someone wants to make a living as a writer, live this lifestyle, like how do we get into it? That's a, that's a big question, but- Yeah, yeah, yeah... let's just start with that. 17:11 As you say, there's, there's no kind of black or white answer here, but I'm a firm believer that if you wanna disconnect your time from money, the first thing you have to do is sell your time. 17:19 People dive into product building without understanding their audience, without testing their systems, and so what happens is, if someone does decide to invest in you and they take this half-cooked product that doesn't actually make sense, 17:31 they then never go on to become fans and buy all your other stuff. But quite often when you sell a product, there are people in your audience that would happily pay for your time. 17:39 And so, you know, it depends on the vibe you're going for as a writer, but I kind of deal more with like thought leader sort of stuff. 17:46 I know you could have just monetizing through ads like a media business, but if we go down that route, I always say to people, "Let's start with people, all right? 17:55 Let's build our business on people, and then you productize your knowledge when you're too busy and you've, you've proven your system." 18:01 And the way that I started, mate, and that's the only way I can kinda tell other people too, I was a complete beginner in my niche. So I actuallyW- terrible writer at the start. 18:10 What I ended up doing was I started coaching people for free. Just for small stuff, thread hooks, 'cause that's all I could do, right? Like I, I, I set a public challenge. 18:19 Again, I'm a huge fan of public accountability, and I wrote 30 threads in 90 days, and I told everyone. By like thread 20, I started getting okay. 18:27 And then people were like, "Hey, I'm writing threads too, but I really struggle with hooks." 18:30 So I started sending Loom videos just rewriting the hooks, and I, I'd always over-deliver, so I'd do the whole, the whole video, loads of rewriting, loads of explanations. They became my first clients. 18:42 My first high-ticket client was, uh, $500 for 10 hours of course. All right. He's actually a friend now. He's either very evil or very smart. 18:53 But yeah, 500 bucks, and you know, people say, "Wow, that's, that's too cheap." You know, it's money, Twitter's in, but the aim really isn't really money, right? It's momentum. 19:02 And so every time I would do something like that, I would get a strong, strong testimonial or case study, and then I would begin to use that to move upwards. 19:11 And then the way the lab sort of happened, which is my first digital product, I asked my audience, sent an email, "What are you guys struggling with?" I hopped on a call with like 10 people. 19:21 Writer's block kept coming up and I thought, "Okay, well, I need to go build a..." I didn't really know what I was doing, but I was like, "Let's go build a solution to writer's block," because I used to have it too. 19:30 And you've got a swipe file, right? You know, nothing sexy. If you've got a swipe file, it's cool, but if you try to sell a swipe file, it's, it's $9, right? It's... You can't really charge for that. 19:39 So created a unique mechanism, which was the looking glass technique, showing you how to imitate and innovate. Called it the Viral Inspiration Lab, not a content swipe file. 19:49 Started selling it for 40 bucks, and I used that product and simple one-on-one calls, 60-minute calls to make my first six figures. Let's circle back one second to audience build. 19:58 So you're talking about your Twitter audience, right? And then I, I know you're writing on LinkedIn too. I think Twitter's by far your, your biggest. When you were first starting there, what did you do? 20:05 How do you start from scratch there? I was at... The starting point was a lot earlier. So I was making the, the big mistake everyone makes, trying to be everywhere and going nowhere. 20:13 So I, I came onto Twitter and, you know, I, I was posting a tweet a day and I was doing a bit of engaging. I was also trying to do 10 other things, and I was like, "This is hell on earth." And so I quit like four times. 20:24 And then August 2021, I, I was like, "Look, it's been a year and I still didn't have 1,000 followers anywhere." That wasn't for lack of trying as well. I was writing a lot. 20:32 And so it was like, "Let's, let's go all in on one." By then I had met some cool people on Twitter. I had started to see some of the potential. 20:39 It seemed like a very smart entrepreneurial crowd, which, you know, obviously you want to be around those sort of people. So I, I quit every other platform. I stopped sending emails. I stopped writing on Medium. 20:50 I went all in on Twitter. Here's the thing. So when I first started writing, I made the silly mistake... Actually, the first page of my diary when I... I, I kept like a, a log as I was doing it. 21:01 I wrote, "Do not write about yourself. People don't care." And so for the first year, I never told a story about myself, and it's my biggest mistake because now every day is just talking about me. 21:13 Like, you have to be your own cheerleader. And the thing with storytelling or the mistake I made is that I thought the story was about me, but actually it's about my reader, right? 21:20 Like it's, you use your story to inspire other people. And so in August 2021, I posted my first story and, you know, like I said, 12 months of work to get to just below 1,000 followers. I woke up with 3,000. 21:33 And that's when I began to realize that actually personality story-based content is the... So I had like hundreds of DMs, and I was like, "Oh my God, there are suddenly so many people I can help. 21:42 I don't even know what to do." Uh, and since then, it's been a rule of mine to share a little bit about myself every day. 21:49 How I think, what I'm up to, and I believe that if you just keep putting in those reps, has this like magnetic pull where, you know, at first you catch attention, then you begin to build a bond, and followers hopefully become fans over time. 22:00 I love that because it's... I feel like it's counter to a lot of the kind of more meta Twitter advice that you'll get from folks where they'll, where they'll say, "Oh, just post about... 22:09 Find your niche and just post about your niche and only..." Like, basically like very hyper curating what you post and kind of removing yourself from the equation. 22:18 But your advice would be to be kind of much more authentic and put your true self out there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, authenticity is a bit of a buzzword, right? It's like, what are you learning? What are you doing? 22:27 And what are you thinking? And just those three things build a great brand and, and I get the whole hyper-specificity stuff, but people buy from people at the end of the day. 22:36 And generally, I mean, l-look at me, I'm a writer entrepreneur. 22:40 We're like the answer to the internet, and like I know I'm a better writer than a lot of people in my niche, but I have shown more of myself, and I think a lot of people can differentiate themselves that way, as opposed to, you know, just being that guy that does one thing repeatedly over and over. 22:55 Tell us about how to write a story about yourself or any content about yourself that people actually care about. Because I think if like, you know, it, it's tricky, right? It's easier said than done. 23:03 You have a story about your... how you broke your neck that worked really well for you. Maybe you can break that down and tell us like why that worked and how other people could apply learnings from that. Yeah. 23:15 Maybe we can go about this the other way, actually. So the mistake I made with that, that was the first story I wrote. The mistake I made with that is I went for the, like the mecca of stories, right? 23:23 Like a broken neck and a neurological tumor and like the 10 life lessons. I went in hard, right? I actually wrote it four months before, but I was too scared to post it. 23:31 So what I tell people is that like, you don't, you don't go into the gym and expect to deadlift 500 pounds on day one, and it's the same with storytelling. Like, it's like a muscle. 23:39 It's a skill, and you need to practice it. Brilliant part about Twitter is you got 280 characters to, to make that happen. And so what I suggest to people is let's just start minimum viable momentum. Story tweet a day. 23:50 And the way that you can do a story tweet, really, really simple. You go about your life and anything that happens to you, you think, "How can I turn that into something useful for my reader?" 23:58 Which is one way, and it makes you quite, uh, more aware of what's going on in your surroundings. So if I was to give you an example from, uh, today, what have I been up to? 24:07 Before this, I was meant to have a client call and they canceled two minutes before.And so I could write a tweet about that and say, you know, "A client just canceled a call two minutes before. 24:15 When I was a dentist, I'd be furious because, you know, that's five hundred quid down the drain. But as a writer, there's always so many, so many fun things to do. It's all good. Some jobs are better than others." 24:25 That's a story tweet. That's one way to do it. But the other way that I like to do it, man, is I always ask people to think about their favorite messages that they believe in. 24:34 So I call it ten for, ten against, where it's like, what are the things you believe strongly about and what are the things you disagree the most about? 24:40 And then you could ask how you can use your story to frame that a little bit. So, for example, I'm a huge fan of persistence. Persistence pays off. And so if I just wrote that down and thought, "Well, h- how... 24:52 What does that actually mean to me?" I could talk about the neck thing, you know, like I, I was-- I couldn't walk for months. I could talk about lo- losing fifty pounds, uh, 'cause I used to be a right chubby kid. 25:03 I could talk about the writing. 25:04 And, and so-- And the really cool bit with that is if you start sharing little bits about yourself around beliefs that you enjoy, you begin to attract people that also enjoy those sort of ideas, and that's where it starts getting really powerful. 25:16 So that's the first bit. Start small, and then you can begin to scale them up. It's just the same thing, right? It's like people wanna hear stories not, not about you, but about how it-- what they get from it. 25:27 So always have a takeaway with a story. Always begin in the action. So internet, everyone's very busy, right? You have to write like it. 25:35 So, you know, my story hook there is like, ten years ago, I, I broke my neck, and then my spine bent by fifty-six degrees, and then I was diagnosed with a tumor. And then this is the next part. 25:44 The cool thing with storytelling is that you need to have this, like, flow to it. And so then I say, "It was the best thing that ever happened to me." And it's a misdirection. You go down one way, then you go the other. 25:55 So my favorite storytelling tip of them all, very, very simple, is but and therefore from South Park. 26:02 So most people have in their story, they go, "This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened." 26:08 But if you in between each beat, which is like what happens, change that to but and therefore, and you'll see where it takes you. You're not making stuff up. 26:16 Like I could've said, "Oh, you know, I broke my neck, my back was bad, and then I had the operation, and then I had to recover, and then I went to uni, and then I became a writer." 26:23 But just by having but, I would be like, you know, "I wanted to go to uni, but then I broke my neck," so which like therefore, "I had a year to, to recover. 26:32 And I did recover, and I went to uni, and I became a dentist, but I hated it, so I started writing, but I sucked at writing." So it just goes on and on, but it has a really nice flow to it. That's a cool framework. 26:43 And I know we talked about copywriting resources. 26:46 Are there storytelling resources that you would recommend, like books that you've read on storytelling or- Or even like shows or movies or stuff, like the South Park clip is, is one we got a link to. Yeah. So that... 26:56 the South Park interview is pretty cool. There's a website called, and, uh, you guys might know, uh, tinylittlebusinesses.com. 27:02 Actually, they're called Modern Marketing System now, which is Andre Chaperon, and he invented the SOS sequence, uh, for emails, you know, like the, the soap opera sequence. 27:11 So they're, they're brilliant at teaching storytelling, and that's where I learned quite a lot of it. And I'm hesitant about books because... 27:18 I mean, to be fair, when I first read Story Brand, it blew my mind 'cause I'd never heard of storytelling before. It's a cool intro. 27:24 I think a lot of storytelling is actually about just doing interesting stuff and putting the reps in. And you know what? The best place to learn it, in my opinion, is, uh, email copywriters. 27:32 I'm signed up to about fifteen of them. Email copywriting is the most competitive sales environment o-on the, on the internet because they're selling to the people that are aware of what's going on. 27:42 So you see some brilliant storytelling there, and I just sheer volume of reading that, that's helped me a lot. Give us like two examples there. So Andre, Andre Chaperon, I guess last name, right? Andre Chaperon. 27:53 So it's Andre Chaperon and Sean Twigge of Modern Marketing System. They have a brilliant, brilliant ethos, very self-guided ask, which obviously is another person who's a brilliant storyteller. 28:04 Ian Stanley, great storyteller. John Bajkovic is a little bit more underground, but he-- I think his storytelling is top-notch. Ben Settle, Justin, Justin Goff, like you could just keep going, right? 28:15 In terms of females, there's like Kim Strauss, Laura Belgrade, and a few others, so. Okay. That, that... Those are some good ones I need to check out. 28:21 And I haven't read Andre's stuff in a long time, but it was fascinating when I first got into it. I gotta get back to that. We talked a lot about audience growth, but let's talk about your course, your course launch. 28:31 So tell us like what the course is, what the product is about, what it includes, like the price point, and then we'll get into like how you... how you've been marketing that. Yeah. 28:38 So the course is called High Impact Writing. It is, as you can imagine, a course on writing. 28:44 And I built it because I feel like a lot of writing concepts are poorly explained about actually attracting an audience for business. 28:51 And so I just shared everything I learned, you know, combined copywriting, storytelling, and content creation into a very condensed, actionable demonstration of how it works. 29:02 And the whole point is it takes you from not knowing what to write about all the way to becoming an authority in your niche by coining terms, building frameworks, that sort of stuff. Price point is two nine seven. 29:12 In terms of, uh, upsell, there's also my first product, the Viral Inspiration Lab, which we put on for a one-time offer of a hundred bucks. 29:21 And in terms of how it went, so I, I, I released it in May, and, yeah, dude, it was, it was, it was absolutely wild. [chuckles] You know, my first launch for the lab was five thousand dollars. 29:32 High Impact Writing, first round was one hundred and forty K. Uh, if we can get to the story about that a little bit more, but that, that was nuts. 29:39 And then I, uh, closed the doors, so people couldn't buy it for three months. And people always ask, "Why would you close the doors on a digital product that you could sell to anyone?" 29:47 But there was good rationale behind it, and then I opened it back up in September, expecting to maybe, you know, get the stragglers, fifty K would be brilliant, and it was a hundred and eighty K. 29:57 The course is now evergreen because I didn't enjoy the open-close model. And so, yeah, tell me where you wanna go, and we'll dive in. Maybe break down the first, first one. 30:05 Well, I was gonna say, you just mentioned that there was a rationale behind the, the closing the doors model. I'm curious what it was at the time.Yeah, sure. 30:11 So we'll go-- we'll talk about the first one after the closed model. So very hard to build real urgency and scarcity online, right? Like, like who are you trying to kid if you tell your product has limited availability? 30:22 Like, and I also strongly disagree with discount selling and flash discounts. I think it cheapens your brand. I think it cheapens the value of the product too. I learned that from mistakes, by the way. 30:32 My first product, I sold about seven hundred copies. Most of that was discounted selling. So that was my plan for this one, no discounted selling. 30:39 And so what I did was the, the product's available for four days, so now we have that launch mentality that cohorts benefit from. 30:45 And inside the copy, it was really nice to hold my hands up honestly and just say to people, "Look, this is available for four days for two reasons. Number one, I wanna reward early action takers." 30:56 It's people that identify for like, "Hell yeah, that's me," they wanna buy that, and good for them. And I'd say, "Look, these are full of all my writing systems. You're gonna get a head start." 31:03 And it was actually kind of annoying because I realized everyone started doing the same [chuckles] stuff as me, so now I have to constantly keep adapting. But... And the second reason was really powerful, mate. 31:11 I told them that I wanna work closely with my, with my audience because, you know, I think you... product building is, to me, well, it's learn to build, learn to write, right? 31:19 [chuckles] Building is the most important skill of them all. And during those three months, I worked constantly with five hundred customers to improve the product experience. 31:29 So loads of feedback, refilming, editing, Q&As, webinars, and by the end of those three months, I had seventy testimonials, loads of case studies, so that when I actually launched round two, I mean, we had forty affiliates, but not even that. 31:44 I sent one email to my buyers and just said, "Would you mind just saying if you enjoyed the product?" And I couldn't retweet it enough. 31:51 So word-of-mouth marketing, it, it was just really nice to do it that way, and I'll probably do that for every product now. The reason why is really important. I think a lot of beginner copywriters miss that. 32:00 If y-if you're gonna have something like this, you have to explain why and in-depth, and it's important that you did that. 32:05 Always sticks out to me the reason why, because of the story and influence where, you know, he says, "If you provide a justification, it doesn't even have to make sense. People do it." What is it like? 32:13 Someone's in the queue at the copywriter and is like, "Can I use that copywriter because, you know, I'm gonna have a coffee?" And it's like, "Yeah, sure." So reason why is, is always really powerful. 32:21 Tell us about like the, the tactical stuff around your first launch. You had it up for four days. How many emails did you send around the launch about the product? 32:30 Stuff like that, and like how did you think about setting up a launch for a product like this? Yeah, sure. So I'll, I'll be honest. I think the reason why this went well is because I began building it six months before. 32:40 Well, actually, technically, I say it's eighteen months before because I learned how to sell my second product by releasing the first. So I always tell people that, like, "You wanna have a big launch? 32:47 Go release anything first and you'll learn quite a lot." What happened this time, mate, was come January, 32:53 every single newsletter, I would introduce like an idea, you know, a system I'm testing out, whatever, and then every time I'd say, "If you like this, I'm releasing a new product. Just click here to join the wait list." 33:04 Didn't know the name of the product, didn't know what the product was really gonna be, but that worked quite well because what we started to do is build tension. 33:11 And tension has completely changed the way I write about everything. 33:14 And to hear it first from Seth Godin, where basically you have to pitch your marketing like an elastic band, and the longer you pull on that band, when you do eventually let go, the bigger the snap at the end. 33:26 And so I began building tension just early, right? People are aware of this course as we're moving along. And then, 33:33 so if we launched in May, what happened was, you know, I started getting hundreds of people on this waiting list, and I was like, "Oh." A-and people were asking me all the time, "Where's your writing systems?" 33:42 You know, I was doing writing coaching, but I was moving away from that. And so I decided to productize, and, and what I did was, following the same principles I built my brand, I began building the product in public. 33:52 With building the product in public, I was try-- I wanted to build the best product I've ever built, and I think that's one thing that if people want great sales is to really believe in what you're selling. 34:01 And so it was a lot of work. Really high-quality slides, really concise, like constant rewriting. It took months. And I'm just telling my audience all the time what I was up to. 34:10 Just little bits here and there, you know, like, "Hey, just finished recording module one." 34:14 Or like some of the stupid mistakes, like I recorded forty minutes without my microphone on and all these little things that just let people in behind the curtain. Then we get towards launch week, mate. 34:24 It's like a three-pronged approach. Email is the big one for me. You know, email is brilliant because you can control the narrative, and you also are not at the mercy of an algorithm. 34:33 To put that in perspective, I think between launch one and two, Twitter gave me fifty percent less impressions in September despite having twenty thousand more followers because of the algorithm. So email, really cool. 34:46 Well, here's what most people do and what I did for my first launch. You mention your product twice, and then suddenly it's available. 34:51 What the aim was here was, uh, I didn't want people to be surprised when I mentioned it, it was available. I wanted them to be bloody excited. And so started ramping up the emails. 35:01 You know, my newsletter was once a week anyway. I'm like, "This thing is coming out soon." 35:05 The week before, what I did was write a three-part email series following natural storytelling structure because stories are how people, you know, understand information. 35:15 And so three-part structure is you have the setup, which is the desire, what the hero wants; the conflict, what gets in the way; and then the resolution, the product. And so, you know, I sent an email. 35:27 I think the first email series was the setup, freedom. The conflict is noise, i.e., it's getting busier and busier, and the resolution was writing. And so I sent those three emails. 35:38 Buy high impact writing at the end, and that got like 1.5K clicks, which are-- which is quite nice. And then during the actual launch, I sent three to four emails per day. That was terrifying. 35:48 And it only happened because, you know George Tan, he was affiliating with me, and my first day went really bad for, for high impact writing, actually. I can tell you about that if you want. 35:58 And then I messaged him being like, "Ah, dude, man, I, I think I, I messed up the copy here." And he was, "How many emails did you send?" And I was like, "Two." 36:05 And he was like, "It's embarrassing that I'm sending more emails about your product than you are." [laughs] So I sent four emails a day, but I segmented my list. So cold subs didn't get any. The main list got one or two. 36:18 The people on the wait list got them all.And so it wasn't like complete spam. And that was basically the email marketing. You know, every single email followed the same format. So before I sell, I would teach. 36:28 Before I teach, I would tell a story. 'Cause that way even if they don't buy, everyone gets value. That was email. Social media was a thread. But basically, like a launch is simple economics. 36:39 The more impressions you can get on your sales page, the more sales you make. So you have to be everywhere. And so I said like, "We have to treat this like game day." 36:46 It-it's you have to be fresh, and you have to be on it, right? So I wrote a thread every single day, hopped on Spaces, you know, for a couple hours, I think maybe twice. 36:55 I posted every single bit of social proof that came through, and you know, you have to be your own cheerleader, like we said. 37:00 The best loop that I set up, mate, was when people buy my product, the first email, 'cause for every email I have a little picture of myself, right? It's a nice little branding touch. 37:09 And in that email, it just says, "Pumped to have you inside High Impact Writing. Would you do me a quick favor? If you enjoy the product and you think it's good, can you just post about it on Twitter with a screenshot? 37:20 But only if you like it. And the reason why is because I don't wanna have to keep talking about this product. So the reason why, yeah." 37:26 And so what happened was when I first clicked the first sales email, I told myself, "This time do not stare at your Gmail." I lay there on my sofa, and I stared for like forty-five minutes, and I made one sale. And I... 37:39 And you know, when you have a six-figure audience, you're like, "Oh, something's gone wrong." And you know, I had planned like a date with my girlfriend, and we're gonna go drink at the bar and watch the money roll in. 37:49 Nothing was coming in. Like, it was genuinely awful. By the end of day four, I mean, day four alone was eighty-five thousand dollars because of the social proof flywheel. Proof is everything, right? 37:59 So that was pretty much the strategy, and then there was affiliates, which, you know, we don't have to get into. 38:04 So day one, not a lot, but you're starting to see like the last twenty-four, the last forty-eight hours a ton more. Was that kinda how it worked for you? Yeah. Yeah. 38:10 And, and it was very disheartening because I had been studying launches, and everyone said day one, day four, you know, day-- first day, final day are the big ones, right? 38:20 And you know, I'm a build-in-public guy, so I do believe that like you either win or you've got a story, but I really didn't wanna write that thread about how my [chuckles] launch had flopped. 38:29 And so, but yeah, it just, it just really built up over time, and actually, the second launch was, was kinda similar, except it went pretty well from day one. 38:37 The three to four emails a day in that launch period, in that, in that four days is really important. Segmenting is really important. You broke down how you segment your list to send those. 38:45 And you also explained a little bit about what's the contents of those. But maybe break that down a little bit more like... 38:49 'cause p- I think people are so-- they're so scared to do that, but also they're scared because they don't know what to write in those launch emails. 38:55 But it's really important that you send to, especially the wait list that many times in those launch. Like, what do you include in those emails? Uh, it depend, it depends. There's, there's a lot of things. 39:06 I don't see which angle I could go with this. You know, with email, like it's, it's amazing the sort of things you could send to then pivot to your product. Because you know what, what... 39:14 I think the mistake that people make is that they just dive straight into the product then. That's okay for one email, maybe on, on the first email, you know, it's out, and the final email, time's nearly up. 39:23 But in between, like people do not buy unless they're feeling something, and so we're here to create a, a perfect and buying environment, and so you do that by entertaining and inspiring and educating as well. 39:34 You know what you're selling, and you can begin... The same way that we spoke about story, which you can begin to work backwards. So, you know, let's take High Impact Writing. One of the... 39:43 You know, the first module is how to find your niche, right? 39:46 So I tell the story about me taking nine months to plan my niche and wasting hundreds of hours plotting on paper, and it was all completely pointless because I'm building this business I didn't even know would exist in the past. 39:57 Tell a story that they can relate themselves to, and then you can kinda pitch your product. That's one thing. But then on the flip side, you don't always wanna tell stories about yourself. That's, that was my mistake. 40:07 It becomes off a bit like, you know, a bit 2D and a bit, you know, maybe a bit like cringe and salesy. And so what you also want to do is tell stories about other people. 40:18 Really, really powerful way to build authority by association. Actually, I think my most popular email was what Naval Ravikant and Jack Butcher told me about escaping my nine-to-five. 40:26 And so what I would do is I would take their best ideas and then frame it to pivot into my product. And it's a form of proof because, you know, these are authority figures, so that's a really cool way. 40:35 So you can take books, you can take podcasts, you can take just a quote, you can turn that into an email. 40:40 And then my favorite is, uh, uh, little everyday events, you know, because the whole point in emails or storytelling is that we're just trying to transport people into our world. 40:51 And so if you just say something like, "You know, last week I was pumping iron in, in the gym," and then they can picture you actually at the gym. 40:58 And I've actually just written an email like this, but it was to tell people that writing is a bit like going to the gym because, you know, you've got squat, bench, and deadlift. 41:06 If you do those three things well, everything else happens. Same with writing. Personality, storytelling, and advice. Do those three things well, ignore the rest of the bullshit. 41:14 And so you could just use little, little stories like that, just pivot into a lesson, pivot into the sale. 41:19 But best advice for it, mate, sorry, I'm going on about it, but I get very passionate about storytelling, is if you don't know what to send, that's because you're not doing all the work before. 41:28 I have a document where I just save anything I notice, right? Like recently, my pigeons attacked my balcony, like fifty pigeons, right? They moved in. And that's gonna be a hell of an email in a few months. 41:38 And, and it's just writing all these little things in the forge that pop in. 41:42 You might not know how it will turn into an email, but if you're writing from the blank page, that's already a hundred times harder than it needs to be. 41:48 So all, all these sales, like, well, it's not all of them, but most of them came from email, right? And that's very, very normal. And so, like, how do you get people on your email list? 41:57 How do you come up with the concept for the newsletter? And so... And we can also kinda cover advice for someone who just wants to start a newsletter for the first time or has a small newsletter and wants to grow it. 42:06 How do you think about it? You know, like we, we have concepts that we think about. 42:09 I think you do an e-email in a different way because you send a lot of emails, but you also send a weekly newsletter, and not a lot of people do that. Some people just kinda do one or the other, right? 42:16 So tell us about your process. Yeah. There's a, a lot of questions in there. I'll, I'll, I'll start from the top. Concept of the email. First of all... Actually, let's talk about starting an email. Let's... 42:25 People go, "How, how big does my audience need to be?" Which is the first kind of false dichotomy, right? It's not about audience size. Uh, like I said to my girlfriend, size is everything. 42:33 But I say there's like three criteria really. It's like if you know who you write to and what you write about-And potentially if you have an offer, brilliant time to start a newsletter. 42:41 If you don't know who you write to and you don't know what you're writing about, you need to stay limber, all right? Because you wanna post as many ideas as possible on Twitter, make noise, and listen for signal. 42:51 If you're doing a newsletter as well, every time you pivot, it's like you've gotta carry this ship around, it gets harder and harder to steer. 42:56 So once you've worked out who your target avatar is and you have a general idea about how you're providing value to them, you can start doing the newsletter. 43:04 And in terms of how I suggest you begin, if you don't have anything to sell once a week, because there's no point in sending more, then you need to be writing more on social media. 43:13 You know, the bigger your audience, the faster you grow, which we'll get into in a moment for your newsletter. And I would just take the data from my Twitter audience results and turn them into emails. 43:24 So for example, if I post a tweet, and you know, I think I posted one today saying that I asked ChatJ- ChatGPT to write an- rewrite an email for me. It got rid of the story. 43:32 It told me just be more professional and sucked out all the personality. I just turn that into an email on the basis that people enjoyed it. I'd say, "Oh, I just did this. It said that. 43:41 By the way, ignore all of that crap," right? Email's about being personal. 43:45 So that's a really cool way to begin to build because your audience votes with their attention, and then you know that email is pre-validated, it's gonna work. 43:52 You know, two years ago I used to latch onto any person with experience if their advice is black or white, right? 43:59 And it's very confusing for an early writer because, you know, someone will tell you not to monetize, someone will say monetize, someone will say audience first, someone will say email first. 44:07 What I'm trying to get at here is that Matt, going you, actually I was listening to you and I heard this like, uh, someone was like, "Don't use lead magnets. Use lead magnets." All right? 44:15 And, uh, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is blowing my mind." And the way that I built my list, I'll tell you what I did and why I think it was wrong. 44:24 I-- Before I monetized or during my first year of monetization, I built eight free video courses, and I gave them away for free in exchange for emails. That was brilliant for reputation and authority. 44:36 However, when I actually looked at the data [chuckles] 44:39 , churn rate very, very high, because A, a full course, people don't finish what they don't pay for, and B, you're beginning to build a list of people that like free shit, which becomes a bit of a problem. 44:51 What I should have done... So then what I did in the past maybe six months, I, uh, switched off my, my free courses, and I've just been growing it without lead magnets. Organic growth dropped by eighty percent. 45:02 So as to whether that's worth it, I don't think so. 45:05 I think a lead magnet, quick wins, something that introduces your philosophy, something that gets people excited is the best way to do it because, you know, people are lazy. 45:13 You need to bribe them to get on, and then you have follow-up emails to begin to nurture that relationship. But then people say, "Well, what about these..." 45:20 I call them authority assets, these free courses that prove you are worth investing in. 45:25 I should have just given them away without a paywall or a, a firewall, you know, like no email required because these are really good assets to give them to your entire audience. 45:33 Let them decide if they're worth coming on the email list. 45:35 So most of my growth, seventy percent is from Twitter, ten percent is from LinkedIn, which I have fifteen thousand followers on, but to-- I only really chill on Twitter. 45:45 I'd say to everyone else, uh, secondary channel, social media, absolutely not necessary. Big distraction disguised as an opportunity. LinkedIn, I haven't written a single piece of original content. 45:55 It's all Twitter copy-pasted. Don't tell all these LinkedIn people on my list. [laughs] Uh, I do love them too. And then ten percent has come from co-reg, so SparkLoop, which... 46:05 Well, actually maybe a little bit more now 'cause ConvertKit has their Creator Network, which is the free version, but basically co-reg is this thing where for your audience, I know you guys know, people sign up and they will get a, "Hey, you might like this newsletter too," and you would pay for a certain subscriber, and they... 46:22 People say, "Oh, when should I do that?" And you know, unfortunately, people would then just start buying subscribers thinking that this is the answer to everything. 46:29 You have-- Once you have something to sell, you can, you can check your numbers, right? And so what I did was I paid for... 46:36 Stupidly, I, I thought, I thought I spent two thousand dollars, but I spent five thousand dollars, and then I turned it off. I was just like, I looked, I was like, "Oh, crap. 46:44 I, [laughs] I think I knew I forgot something during that launch." And then I could actually go back and look at the numbers. Unfortunately, it was a failed experiment for me. So I only made... 46:53 I, I think I spent five thousand, but I only made one point four K. 46:57 Now, of course, there are some things that we haven't taken into account, LTV, so there's people might buy more, and, you know, some people take forty-five to ninety days to buy. 47:07 So it might break even, it might not, but it was still quite useful because I could then look at where those buyers came from. They were all marketing newsletters. So now I know that marketing has a good appeal. 47:17 I actually am reaching out to those newsletters specifically to run ads with my lead magnet. So, you know, there's, there's little experiments to start paying for growth. 47:25 That's where I'm at now because I don't know what it is with creators, man, but they hate spending money. You know, it's like, "Well, look at my margins and stuff." 47:33 But like the penny dropped for me when I was like, "Well, I could write another two hundred threads in a year and go crazy, or I could just start spending some of this money to actually pay for attention instead." 47:44 Yeah, I think that there's a lot of... It's a whole nother skill set, right? Doing paid acquisition to grow instead of free content. 47:49 And both, I think both most businesses should do over time, but it probably is best to start with free content, so. Yeah. I like that we can talk a ton about that. I tried to learn it from you. 47:58 I listened to a podcast and man, I, I, I was way too overwhelmed. I was like, "I need to just go pay you at one point." 48:03 [laughs] But I'm sort of starting small with newsletter ads and I, I think it's one of those skills that you should probably understand the basics, right? Stuff like CACs and stuff. 48:12 Like I figured out I have to learn it on the go. Yeah. 48:15 And newsletter ads are a good way to learn because you, you pay, you know, a flat fee, you get this many clicks, you see your conversion rate, and then the subscribers, you know, buy or they don't buy, and like it's very easy to measure ROI. 48:24 Yeah. Some platforms can be a little bit more tricky, but that's cool, man. We've covered so much stuff. I wish we could talk for another hour. 48:30 Tell us about where people can find you, your Twitter handle, newsletter, et cetera. Yep. So best place probably to find me is Twitter, @itskierandrew. Had to think about that one. 48:38 My newsletter is called Digital Freedom, which you'll find at kierandrew.com. If you want most value from me, the email is where it's at. That's where I put most of my effort in. 48:47 And you know the other thing, if you like the course, it's highimpactwriting.co. You know, no pressure on that one. Just drop me a DM if I can help. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. I really encourage everyone to subscribe. 48:56 I've been enjoying the, the newsletter and emails a ton, so thanks for coming on, man. Thanks a lot, guys. [outro music] Thanks for listening. 49:04 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. 49:14 If you wanna learn even more about how to grow and monetize a newsletter, go to newsletteroperator.com. 49:19 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. 49:25 [upbeat music]
