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. 0:16 [upbeat music] Hey, hey. How's it going? What's up? Hey. Thanks for coming on. We've known about you for a while because of your, your Twitter. 0:33 Just for those listening so they have an idea of who you are, what you do, can you tell us your name, what you're known for, and a little bit about your newsletter maybe? Yeah. I am Ryan Sneddon. 0:43 I don't know if I'm known for anything, but I am working on Twitter to be known for, uh, you know, there's all these guys on Twitter right now, like the car dealership guy and the, uh... 0:52 Well, I don't know if you guys follow Rob Lebon, but he had a little period as the grocery store guy, and then he's like, "I don't wanna be the guy anymore." Um, I'm trying to be the local newsletter guy. 0:59 I started mine about two years and nine months ago, and plan is to take him all over the country, do a lot more, but right now I just have the one in Annapolis, Maryland, where I'm sitting right now. 1:09 About me, this is like the first business I've started that's done well. I started a ton of things in college and high school that were all just mess around things. 1:18 And I always say, like, nothing, nothing I did ever made more than, I think the limit was, like, 2,500 bucks. So all really small projects that weren't very good, and I think there were, like, 11 of them. 1:29 And now I finally have something that's working, so it's always good to have something that's working. Absolutely. I feel the same way. And also, I, I like that you're branding yourself as that. 1:37 I'm really fascinated by local newsletters, so I wanna talk to you a ton about that. Yeah. I tweet a lot. I let myself tweet about writing or copywriting or stuff like that, but I, I don't let my tweet... 1:45 myself tweet about anything else. Uh, or, like, well, sometimes some marketing stuff, but, but nothing else. Uh, like, I was... 1:51 I wanted to tweet about the new Apple Vision Pro, and I was like, "No, that's not what you're made for. You don't do that yet." 1:56 You can do that when you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of followers, you can get away with that, right? 2:00 You can tweet about anything you want at that point and not lose audience, but in the beginning, you gotta stay super focused. I think that works. Yeah, I think that's a good strategy for a lot of people. 2:07 Tell us about the local newsletter, like what it is, how it helps people. Just give us, like, a 60, 30, 60-second summary of what that, what that's about. Yeah. 2:14 My pitch always when people meet at, uh, meet me around town and ask what it is, it's basically a newspaper that gets sent to your phone, except it's a lot more fun. I call it the bar stool sports of local news. 2:24 It's got jokes in it. It's got sometimes memes in it, got our live music schedules, what the city council's up to, what the new businesses are opening, like new restaurants and stuff like that. 2:33 Basically, anything that you would wanna know as someone who lives in the city. Um, like, I don't do a lot of crime. I did crime this morning, but that's, uh, pretty rare. 2:41 I did it only because we've had six shootings in the last five days. Only two people were involved in them, uh, so nobody... Sadly, somebody did die, but only, um, one other person got hurt. 2:50 The other ones, uh, nobody got hurt. But we don't do that normally, but I feel like if there's six in five days, that's something that people would wanna know about. 2:57 Um, but if somebody gets robbed or a house burns down, like, that's not the thing that we do in our newsletter. It's, it's really tailored to, does this affect somebody's daily life? 3:08 Uh, and the fact that there's a bunch of shootings in one area, that, that might affect your daily life. I, I focus on that because we don't usually do that, but that's the pitch. 3:16 Basically, a, a newspaper that gets sent to your email inbox, and it's a lot of fun. I like that. 3:21 And I like the concept of, like, local, local newsletters too, and we'll dive into that, but I also think it's just from a user's perspective, a reader, like I read a few of these in my town, it's so much more useful than local news because I turn on... 3:31 I don't even watch a lot of cable, but I turn on, like, local news YouTube, and it's just all whatever, like, violence happened that week, and, like, I actually wanna know about new restaurants, events, like fun stuff that I can use to improve my life and, like, better utilize the city I live in, and it seems like that's what you're covering a lot more than what a typical local news TV station is or a local newspaper might be. 3:53 Yeah. Like, the newspaper's not putting the live music calendar in there, but that's one of our most popular things. 3:58 Um, they're not necessarily talking about the fundraiser party that's gonna be super fun before it happens. They might write about it afterwards, but people wanna know how they can be there. 4:07 They don't wanna know how it was afterwards. So that's kind of what we do. It, it really connects people to the town. If you've just moved here and you don't know what goes on, like where's the... 4:18 where do the cool bands play? Where, what are the fun annual parties that I need to be at? Like, what are the big important things to this town? Where are the parades? Uh, that's what we tell people. That's awesome. 4:30 And how many, how many subscribers does the, the newsletter have currently? Uh, this morning I think we sent to 15,245. Been growing pretty consistently for the last two years and nine months. 4:41 I'm pretty sure I could say this accurately, and there, there might be one day that we didn't, um, but I'm pretty sure we're over 400 newsletters sent now, and I think there's, I think there's only one. 4:51 I think every time, aside from this one specific instance, uh, we have sent the next one to more people than we sent the last one. That's so cool. 4:59 And, you know, like Matt, also super interested in the concept of these local newsletters. 5:04 I would imagine that growth channels that you're either utilizing, your, your growth stack maybe looks a little different from somebody who's re- trying to reach a, a broader, less targeted audience. 5:15 How are you growing the newsletter currently? Like, is, is a lot of it organic, or is there paid marketing involved? 5:21 Right now we're not paying for any marketing, unless you count paying a social media manager, which I wouldn't. It's... N-nothing is paid spending marketing. 5:30 Uh, the only exception to that would be we have a cool thing about Annapolis around the water. Uh, we have a water taxi system, which is pretty fun. 5:37 Uh, it's like three bucks, they'll take you across the harbor and save you a 10-minute walk, and you get to go on the water. That's super fun. 5:44 So we do trade with the company that runs those to have signs on their boats, and then they get ads in our newsletter. We did that because it's a good, good company to be associated with. Yeah, we'll leave it at that. 5:56 Normally that's the only trade I do. I don't allow anyone else to trade. Um, uh, trades don't pay the bills, but that one does pretty good for usAnd that's, that's the only paid marketing we do. 6:05 Um, well, in the beginning, you can't ignore this, we did a ton of Facebook advertising. Probably almost half the list has come from Facebook advertising, and we can talk more about that later if you guys want. 6:14 But right now we have a, a strong referral program. I just got our monthly report from Beehive. Shout out to Beehive. 6:20 We had four hundred net new subscribers last month, and a hundred of them came from our referral program, at least directly trackable. The other three hundred were direct to the website. 6:29 So I only imagine that people are going direct to the website if someone tells them about it, or I tell them about it, or they see a sign for it somewhere, uh, or they see it on Instagram and they Google it instead of clicking on the Instagram link. 6:41 So people are coming from the social media too, but it's, uh, a lot of search right now and a lot of word-of-mouth referrals. Uh, we're, we're gonna get back into the paid marketing I think. 6:52 Uh, but I also think that we're a small town and we probably cap out the audience around twenty thousand, so we're almost there, and it's gonna be hard and expensive to get those last five thousand. 7:01 Tell us about the referral program. That's, that's a huge percentage of the growth. And normally it's totally different for lots of other newsletters. 7:07 They have, they have a referral program, takes up a lot of space in the newsletter, but generates, you know, one or two percent of overall subscribers. 7:15 What are you doing differently that's getting people to refer more subscribers? 7:19 A lot of people talk about referral programs as like the magic sauce, and it's free marketing and it's great, but, uh, a lot of people don't set them up right or they set them up too early. 7:27 You gotta have a, a good size of audience to, to get this thing working. 7:31 I forget the exact numbers, but it is, it's a very small percentage of our audience that has actually participated in the referral program, but the ones that do really love it, and it's an even smaller percentage that have any more than one or two referrals. 7:43 I think our referral program probably accounts for about twenty to twenty-five percent of the overall audience. I know it was twenty-five percent last month, but I think it's really about twenty percent overall. 7:51 That twenty percent, which is, what's, what is that? Uh, three thousand, thirty-five hundred people. Almost one third or one fifth of that I know for a fact comes from one referrer. Um, and then the other... 8:04 I, I bet eighty percent of it probably comes from ten people, uh, who just really, really, really love it and refer it super hard. 8:11 But then you need a lot of those individual referrers who are gonna get one or two referrers, and that also helps. 8:17 The most important thing refer-referral program for me is the first reward has to be free, um, because it should be very easy to attain. We give out a birthday shout-out for the first time. 8:28 If you get three people to join the newsletter, then we'll wish you happy birthday at the top of the newsletter. 8:32 And I think we have fifty-nine of those currently in the calendar, and we have, um, at least one a week, usually two or three we'll, we'll be wishing happy birthday. 8:41 So we've, we've done a couple hundred of those, so that means a couple hundred people have three referrals. 8:46 And then on top of that, once you get to fifteen, you start getting actual physical things like a coffee mug at fifteen, a tote bag at twenty-five. Um, but we've given out like five coffee mugs and two tote bags. 8:56 Like barely anybody gets there. So the first thing, c- 'cause most people are only gonna get to the first level, I think the first level's gotta be free. 9:03 And then the other most important thing is it's gotta be super aligned to your audience. 9:07 You know, if you're a local newsletter and you're giving away, let's go with like a super hardcore Twitter marketing example, uh, a lead generation guide for like how to grow your Twitter audience, that doesn't... 9:18 that's not aligned at all. Nobody in Annapolis cares about getting a, a free PDF of how to grow your Twitter account. 9:24 Um, but they do care about getting their birthday wished to them at the top of the Naptown Scoop newsletter with fifteen thousand people who are gonna see it. That is really cool for them. 9:33 And, uh, so that's just really well aligned. Uh, those... 9:36 I think those are the two most important things to think about with a referral program, is make sure that your referrals are super well aligned to your audience, make sure it's something they actually want, and then make the first reward free, 'cause that's the one you're gonna have to give away the most of. 9:47 Yes. I love that idea. And then so you have the birthday one, and then you have different tiers for different physical swag that people can get by referring. 9:56 So that's your newsletter brand, Naptown Scoop branded swag, right? Is that, is that right? Lightly branded. It uses our coloring, but it does not actually have our name on it. 10:06 Uh, so the, the mug has a silhouette of our state house, which is the most prominent building in town. Um, and that's in our Naptown Scoop blue color. But then it has on the other side, um, Latin... 10:17 or no, it's not Latin, it's English. Um, the city motto is in Latin. It's, "I have lived free and will die so." And so the mug says that on the other side. It's pretty cool. 10:25 Uh, but it doesn't actually say Naptown Scoop anywhere on it. It doesn't really n- I, I figured I'd... I wasn't gonna give that many of them away. It's not like a huge missed opportunity. 10:33 Um, I'd rather have it be a unique thing that you can't get anywhere else. Yeah. I think that is really cool, and some people would prefer that over a Naptown's Scoop. 10:39 And like not everyone needs to have super branded swag that they're selling and giving out, especially when you have something like that. But I also wanna ask you about the intangible things about a local newsletter. 10:48 Like not just growth, subscribers, revenue, but like what type of benefits do you get in the city? 10:55 And so like, yeah, what's the benefits that we don't know about of having a local media company that has, you know, fifteen thousand subscribers in your, in your small city? Like what do you... 11:04 do you get access to stuff? Do people know you? Autographs? [laughs] Yeah. Access is definitely the biggest thing. Uh, that would be the first word that would come to mind, is you wanna go to anything? 11:16 Okay, you get to go to anything. It's, um, maybe it's a, an exclusive event that is, um, it's not a ticketed thing, but you can't get in any other way. 11:25 Like, get a, get a press credential, or you probably know the person who's running it or know someone who knows someone who can get you in. So you can get into basically anything you want. 11:33 You wanna go to any fundraiser party? Cool, you just like donate a couple ads on the newsletter or throw up something on Instagram and you get to go. Sometimes you don't even have to do that. 11:41 You get to just go to almost whatever you want. It, it's to the point now where if I see something that I didn't know about or didn't get invited to, I'm like, "The heck? How did I not get invited to that?" 11:50 I, I feel like I know about everything. So that's definitely the first thing. 11:53 There's a whole lot of free food involved and a lot of free drinks involved, to the point where I actually stopped drinking about 10 weeks ago 'cause it was just becoming too much. 12:01 I mean, I could drink every night of the week for free if I wanted, almost, and that was crazyBut yeah, ac-a-access is probably the top thing, and, and who you get to know as well. 12:10 Like, you know, every town has heavy hitters who are the big business people or the politicians or, or like anything like that, and, uh, you get to know those people on a first name basis. 12:21 You get to know them well enough that you can text them and they'll answer you within a couple minutes. 12:26 I, I have a thread going on that I, I have yet to perfect on Twitter, but I think once I perfect the copy, I think it'll be like my, you know, how Nick Huber tweets all like every six months or every three months about how he's gonna survive the recession with his companies 'cause he pays people five dollars an hour and then they live in the Philippines, and that's the whole point of the... 12:44 not joke, but the point of the tweet. It's super controversial and it gets him a ton of attention. 12:49 I think that this, uh, most popular person in town thread that I'm working on, I think it's gonna be my, my Nick Huber Philippines working tweet. It's... Once I get that copy written, I think it'll, it'll go viral. 13:01 People will be really interested in this local newsletter concept. I think that's the one of the main benefits and like what would draw people to it. 13:08 So I-I'm excited to see that, and that's honestly one of the biggest things I wanted to talk about or was curious about is I think the market cap on some of these is difficult, and that's why you have to expand kind of horizontally to different cities, and we're gonna talk about how you're planning to do that soon. 13:21 But this... That's just such a massive benefit. It's not just about money and subscribers, just all the s- all the cool stuff you can do in your city, which I think a lot of... 13:29 I think that's also doable for a lot of people. You know, you don't have to be Mark Zuckerberg to do something like this. Yeah. It's super doable, and 13:37 you don't h- like I said, you don't have to, or like you said, you don't have to expand if you don't want to. Um, if you just want to have this one thing and 13:46 be a, a solopreneur, if you will, and have just a couple people helping you out on a part-time basis, this could be an awesome job that you just create for yourself. And it's a lot of work. 13:56 You gotta write this thing every day or, or do the Instagram every day, and it's definitely not, not a lot of work. But if you're not building with this growth mindset of going to 100 different cities like I am, 14:09 you could kind of get to the point where I am now and say, "Okay. We have 15,000 subscribers. We have a good advertising book. How do I now..." 14:18 Like, you know, we don't have to spend any money on marketing anymore or don't have to spend as much 'cause we're where we need to be numbers-wise. 14:25 Now I just have this thing where I just have to focus on selling as many ads as possible, and I could make myself six figures net very, very easily or, uh, even more. 14:36 Like, um, it, it could be an awesome individual solopreneur thing. I love that. 14:42 It seems like if you're like someone who loves your city, you like people, this is like the perfect side hustle to start, perfect business to start, and you're like, "Right." And it's also very durable. 14:51 It's like if I start a AI newsletter, will that still be relevant 10 years from now? But your local media company's still gonna be around 50 years from now, 100 years from now, and email's not going away. 15:01 You're not gonna lose the business for some type of tech reason, right? So I like that about it too. Yeah. Everyone's always gonna need to know what's going on in their town. 15:08 How long into this was it before you started getting those perks, the, the access, or, or you started meeting people that, uh, around town that, that were reading the Naptown Scoop? 15:20 Uh, before I started meeting people that were reading it was just under, uh, about 10 months in. I remember the first time somebody recognized me on the street and stopped me and said they wanted to talk. 15:33 That was 10 months in. I, I wasn't really going to things. Uh, I was not... People often describe me as a man about town now. I was not that for the first 10 months of doing this. 15:44 I didn't see the value in that, and part of that was I was living at my parents' house 45 minutes outside of Annapolis actually. 15:51 I live here now, but I wasn't in the beginning, um, so I just didn't see the value of driving over. Uh, I drove over sometimes, but I wouldn't drive over every day. And then I went to this one thing and that happened. 16:01 I had a dozen people, and I think autographs are dead, but I think selfies are the new autograph. 16:06 And I had a dozen people at a party with probably only 150 people there, uh, literally come up and ask for selfies, and that was really eye-opening. 16:16 And from then on, I went to every single thing that I could find, uh, every fundraiser, every networking event, every single thing, and, uh, it's, that's definitely part of why we are where we are today. That's so crazy. 16:28 How many subscribers roughly did you have when that event happened, if you have any idea? Uh, I could scroll back in Mailchimp and tell you the exact number 'cause we still used Mailchimp at that point. 16:38 But on August 17th, we had 6,650. Uh, so in June, we probably had somewhere around 5,600 or something like that if I had to guess, and then about a 50, 55, 60% open rate. 16:56 Awesome. And it's like it's not like you need 100,000 subscribers to be the most popular person in your city. It's, it's achievable. No. 17:02 That, that was with a couple thousand subscribers on the, on the newsletter and then a couple thousand subscri- or followers on Instagram. It really was... It, it was way less than half of what it is now. 17:12 How big is the city of Annapolis, uh, population-wise? The city limits it- themselves are 38,000, uh, but we write about a 10-mile radius around Annapolis, and that is about 180,000 of people that we can reach 17:30 or at least that our content would be valuable to. Not, not valuable, but relevant. That's smaller than I thought. You've, you've got pretty good market penetration. I was thinking it was bigger. Yeah. 17:39 Great market penetration. Uh, don't want to do this again in a city that small. Our, our new limit when I expand is gonna be cities between 80 and 150,000 people. 17:49 That's gonna be the minimum, and that's within the city limits. So the metropolitan areas that we serve will be a little bit bigger, but the city limits, I, I... It's, 17:58 it's tough to build an advertising business in a city this size. Uh, it w- I think it would be almost impossible in a, in a city any smaller. Uh, a, a meaningful advertising business. 18:07 You can obviously do it, butTo fund expansion, uh, this isn't gonna cut it. Makes sense. 18:12 And then one question is, I wanna talk about horizontal expansion, scaling this thing, but like give us some advice, like if I wanna start a local newsletter in my town, this could be for the listener, but we'll just use me as an example because I'm kind of curious about maybe doing this myself. 18:26 How would I do it? So for example, I live in Greensboro, North Carolina. We have three hundred thousand people roughly. I don't know if that's the city limit or not, but we'll just say that's the size. 18:35 Just starting from scratch, how would you think about it? How would you do it in my city? What recommendations would you give to me or someone who wants to try this? I would do it as easily as possible. 18:44 Um, I, I jumped in and did it. 18:47 I, I call them full-featured newsletters with the, the general news section, the business section, the featured Instagram post, the live music, the city council stuff, the weather, everything is in there. 18:55 I call that a featured, a fully featured newsletter. Uh, I would tell you to do it the exact way that I'm gonna expand to other cities where I'm just gonna start with the live music. Only the live music. 19:04 That is our most popular section, and when I go to a second city, I will find a list of the... I will, I will go to every social media page. 19:11 I will call restaurants, or more likely I'll have somebody call restaurants for me. Find out who does live music. Find out where they publish the list, if they publish the list. 19:20 Can you get the manager's email and will they email you every month who they've booked? And I would just send an email every single day, Monday, Wednesday... or Monday through Friday if it's a big enough city. 19:28 Uh, I do Monday, Wednesday, Friday because Annapolis this size. But I would email every single day, Monday, Wednesday... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, where is the live music. 19:36 Um, and people will love to read that. 19:39 I would start running Facebook ads for that, and I would get, uh, probably a couple thousand subscribers in the first couple months for a very low acquisition cost on Facebook, like less than three dollars a person, hopefully way less in the beginning. 19:52 That's awesome. How, how did you gather the data that the, that live music is what people are looking at? Is it what people are clicking on? Is it feedback that you're getting? Uh, that's all based on feedback. 20:03 We don't have... The only links that we have in our live music section are, uh, ticket links if the show requires a ticket, and most of them don't. Like ninety-nine percent of them don't. 20:11 So that's not based on click data at all. It's based on the feedback that we get, uh, when we ask people, when we run surveys, "What's your favorite part?" They always say that. That's the majority. 20:20 Um, that's the thing that people come up to me on the street and talk to me about. They email me constantly and ask me to move it higher in the newsletter if it's pretty close to the bottom. 20:28 Uh, w- but it's not, it's never gonna move because it's right next to the, uh, lowest ad placement we have, and I wanna keep that there because that's a... [laughs] I need people looking at those ads too. 20:39 Um, so that's, that's how I know it's the most popular section is, uh, it's more of an educated guess really, but, um, I'm a hundred percent certain that I'm right. Makes sense. And then so we got our plan forming here. 20:50 So we got the newsletter content. We got our sending schedule. We got our first growth channel, Facebook ads. Any other growth channels you would think about early on? 20:59 Or like when would you add a referral program later on? Just Facebook? Yep. Facebook until you get a thousand, and then maybe you can add a referral program, but it might... 21:09 Unless it's super easy to do and whatever, uh, and integrated into whatever system that you're sending the emails on, I would just keep running Facebook. Everybody talks about Facebook ads being dead. 21:18 I just don't think that's true. There's no way that that's true. I listen to the, the Hustle podcast a lot, My First Million. You've got the Hustle hat on. You probably do as well. 21:27 Um, Sean's always talking about he's got this mentor who I don't know who it is, but if I had to guess, I, I think it might be, um, what's his name? Uh, Moiz Ali, who's, who's done amazing on Facebook ads. 21:38 He, he tells Sean this mentor, which might be Moiz, tells him, "Don't even worry about any other growth channel for your e-com business until you hit five million dollars a year. Just do Facebook ads." 21:48 I think the equivalent of that on, uh, on newsletter is it, it, there's no hard and fast number because it, that depends on the size of your TAM, but for a local newsletter, I would say, you know, get your first five thousand on Facebook ads and then worry about going elsewhere. 22:05 Uh, and then at five thousand start a referral program or see who you can partner with in town like I have with those water taxis. 22:13 But to be honest, there's not a lot of other paid marketing opportunities that you're going to be able to take advantage of. 22:19 Uh, you're, you're gonna have a hard time taking advantage of search, paid search because the, the click, uh, the, the click cost is high because you're selling a free thing and other people are selling subscription news, so they're willing to bid more than you. 22:34 And also I don't know how to do that, so you have to have... I would have to have an agency do that, so that gets even more expensive. So Facebook to me is the m- the majority of where our subscribers came from. 22:47 If we didn't have that, then our referral program would be a whole lot smaller because a lot of people that participate in the referral program came from Facebook. 22:53 I, I've given Facebook a, not a lot of money, uh, in the grand scheme of things, but a lot of money for me, and, uh, I don't consider any of it wasted. They've... It has made me so much more back. 23:04 One question about that. Do you use Facebook lead ads where you collect the email address in the app on Facebook or Instagram, or do you use a landing page? 23:12 And would you use something like SparkLoop, Upscribe for this if you're gonna use a landing page for your local newsletter, or would you not use that? How, how do... What's the mechanism of, of a sign-up on Facebook ads? 23:22 I used to use, uh, Facebook web conversion ads, just drive them to a landing page and then get them to sign up. 23:27 Then I switched to lead ads and used Zapier to make that talk to MailChimp, and just that happened automatically. 23:35 Uh, the, the acquisition cost went a lot down when we used lead ads and the audience quality, the open rate did not go down accordingly. So that was obviously a huge win. 23:45 I would not use SparkLoop, Upscribe, because I don't know what that is. [laughs] I've never... I know what SparkLoop is, but I've never used it. I say that a lot and it kind of horrifies people. I was in a, um... 23:54 They, they think I don't know anything about what I'm doing, which to some point I don't. But, uh, I was in a PR meeting. 24:00 They had like a dozen people from the media space in Annapolis give a panel and, um, I had the microphone and somebody asked like, "Should we ever use Help a Reporter Out? Like does that help you guys?" 24:11 And I was like, "Honestly, I have no idea what that is. So, uh, no it, it won't help." 24:15 And everyone's like, "Oh my God, this guy doesn't know anything and he's got this big newspaper."Um, I [chuckles] find myself that way a lot. I didn't come from newspaper or journalism. 24:25 Uh, I've got more of a business mind, and I just knew that this could work. And so I don't have any of those inherited problems that I think the news and journalism industry has, but I also don't know a lot of stuff. 24:37 [chuckles] Well, you gotta s- keep it simple. And one, like, one final question on, um, on our setup process for this, um, local newsletter we're gonna set up. Actually, remind us what target CPA we should be going for. 24:48 You said less than three dollars. Is that what you shoot for? Like, what should we pay for a subscriber with Facebook ads, Facebook lead ads? So there's no hard and fast answer to that. 24:57 In the beginning, the answer is whatever you can afford. Um, the answer is also always as low as possible, obviously. But it's all gonna depend on what you charge for advertising. I know that I can... 25:07 My subscribers are worth way more than three dollars, but I don't wanna pay any more than that. I just kind of arbi- arbitrarily picked that. 25:14 I could pay over double that and, and still be technically profitable, but I just don't want to. Cool. And that leads me into the f- the last question about this is, like, so we got subscribers, we got content. 25:22 How do we make money from it? Is it sponsorships? Let us know how that works, and, like, if I were starting from scratch, how would I d- start monetizing this? Yeah. 25:30 I would start moneti- unlike a referral program, I'd start monetizing as soon as possible. 25:33 There are people who will pay you when you have two hundred subscribers even though [chuckles] you're only gonna reach fifty people. 25:39 I did that, and I, I remember getting, like, fifty-dollar checks, and that was no money at all, but it was validating for the business. So I... Yeah, that's my advice. Like, don't... You don't need to... 25:50 You need to do the referral program later than you think, and you need to monetize earlier than you think. And you just kind of... You, you set the price. 25:57 In the beginning, I loosely based mine on seventy dollars per thousand impressions from... That's what I had heard Morning Brew was using. I just... I don't know if that was true, but I said, "You know what? 26:07 That sounds like a good number." And then I also developed different types of ads, so there were, there were low options, there were high options, and then now there's middle options. 26:14 Now it's not at all based on that seventy. I actually don't know what the CPM is. I just know that we raise the prices every year twenty-five percent, and 26:24 sometimes people get pushback, but it's still they're happy to pay, so I know it's still competitive and, and actually probably not even high enough. 26:32 Um, we don't often hear that it's too expensive and people don't want to advertise. And I f- I feel like [chuckles] it's pretty expensive. So, uh, yeah, pricing is hard. You don't know how to... 26:41 I don't know how to price well. You gotta figure that out for yourself, what... You need to figure out what your market is willing to pay. And how did you find those first sponsors? 26:48 So you, so you mentioned, like, fifty-dollar checks. Were those just folks that were reading the newsletter or, or had heard about you? I think so. I wish I could remember specifically. 26:57 I kind of blocked the first sponsor ever out of my memory 'cause he ended up being a little bit of a turd later down the line, um, which is unfortunate. 27:04 I wish it was a, a good fair, a Cinderella story where it's like, "Oh, yeah, the first sponsor and I are still friends." But, like, no, he ended up being a real turd. I think that he just clicked. 27:13 I-- From the very beginning, even the first day we sent where we sent seventy subscribers, uh, which we, we got Face... We can talk about that, too. 27:19 I got Facebook ads going before I sent, so I just kind of pretended we'd always been doing it and, uh, sent the first email like we'd just been sending for years even though only seventy people had it. 27:29 Uh, but from that very first day, I had the button that you could click and says, "Advertise with Naptown Scoop," and then it would just open up an email to send me an em- an email that you wanted to advertise, and, which is still how the inbound works. 27:40 I think that I had that from day one, and I think he just did it, and I was like, "Yeah, we have this many subscribers, and [chuckles] this is what it costs." And, and he said, "Okay." 27:47 And back then it was literally like, "I wanna sponsor one day of the email." And now I don't let anybody sign a contract for less than six months, and I, I push for a year or more. It's amazing how different things are. 27:57 I remember the first day that we ever got a, uh, what at the time I called a big contract, uh, which was, like, [chuckles] a month or two for five hundred bucks, and I was so stoked. 28:08 I remember I, I got off the phone, I threw it down on my bed, and I ran downstairs, 'cause I was still living at my parents' house, and I was like, "Mom, you're not gonna believe what we just did." 28:17 And now it costs more than five hundred bucks to sponsor a single day. Um, and back then that was, like, two months. Awesome. 28:24 And it sounds like you're selling these, like, packages or, like, monthly, where a lot of newsletters just in the online media space, they might sell, like, a one-off ad slot, or they might sell, like, a pack of three, but you're getting more long-term contracts. 28:38 Like, how would you recommend someone who has a local newsletter do that? Like, structure those... Like, how, how do we sell a package or, like, how would I think about selling that? Yeah. 28:46 I'd, I'd say go the newspaper model, like the, the newspaper magazine model. They're, they're signing, uh, our magazines here, they don't let you sign on for any less than a year. 28:54 Some of them, you know, they're signing three and five-year contracts with people. And it's hard to do that in the beginning. 29:00 You're not gonna be able to get away with that when you have three thousand subscribers, four thousand subscribers. But eventually, I think five is a pretty magic number. 29:09 Once you hit five thousand subscribers, it's pretty validating. When you hit ten, it's even more. Uh, after that, I, I don't think fifteen matters. 29:15 I think it'll probably more, like, the numbers, like, twenty-five and fifty and a hundred really are difference makers. But when you get to five thousand, you can start selling packages. 29:23 W- And you, you, you won't start where we are now with one and two and sometimes even three-year deals. 29:29 You'll start with three months and six months and even one month, um, which for us is, at the time it was every week. Now we do every other week. So if you're on for a year with us, that's twenty-six ads. 29:40 But at the, at the beginning, you'll probably do every week, and you'll do one-month deals when you can get them, and, and the first one will be awesome. Uh, it just... The, the people wanna see track record. 29:53 It's hard to ask someone to sign a one-year advertising deal when you've only been around for six months. And I don't... I think... 30:01 Well, I know for a fact that we've now signed a deal that is longer than we've been around. 30:05 Uh, like about six months ago we signed a three-year deal, and at the time we'd only been around for two years, so that was interesting. But, uh, people definitely wanna see a little bit of a track record. 30:15 They wanna make sure that their money is gonna be... You know, they're gonna, they're gonna get what they pay for. And I... 30:19 And that's another thing is, um, in the beginning, and I recommend this because you'll need it, uh, charge people upfrontAnd, and charge people up front for as long as you can. 30:29 If you want to advertise with me for three months and it costs five hundred bucks a month, you gotta give me all fifteen hundred before we start. And that, that just really helps with cash flow in the beginning. 30:38 Now we do, uh, monthly charge for people, but in the beginning and, and until you start to get some pushback that the, the checks are getting too big, just take it all up front. It just makes everything a lot easier. 30:50 And you'll probably start to get that pushback by the time your deals start to get to like four and five thousand dollars. 30:56 And with a local advertiser, they'll be like, "Ah, that's kind of a lot," and that's when you start to introduce the, the pricing plan. But I also recommend still getting some up front. 31:05 Uh, for a first time advertiser, we charge a twenty percent deposit, and we do that, uh, because we've gotten screwed a bit in the past where somebody would signed on and then like a week before, or even in this case, I think like two days before their ad was supposed to run, they backed out of a twelve thousand dollar contract. 31:22 And I reali- or a realtor, uh, which is relevant because realtors deal with contracts all day long, right? And I was like, "They can't do that. I wrote a contract." 31:30 And then I reread the contract and I realized that they followed the contract to the absolute letter of the law, which is so typical of a realtor, uh, 'cause that's all they do all day. 31:37 So I then rewrote the contract to be a little bit more favored to us 'cause it was way skewed to favor the advertiser, and I required a twenty percent, uh, non-refundable deposit. 31:46 So if they had canceled, then we still would've had... What would that have been? Uh, 31:51 twenty-four hundred bucks, which would've offset the cost of then now we have these ads that we have to sell 'cause they're now vacant and we're gonna lose revenue because I can't fill these like that. 32:03 Um, we didn't have that at the time, and we've never had anybody do that since, now that we have that twenty percent policy. 32:09 Ryan, one thing I'm interested in, you mentioned that you, you're comparing the way that you charge to magazines and newspapers, and what's interesting to me about that is a lot of newsletters see themselves competing with other newsletters, whereas your competitive landscape is more newspapers and the kind of l- more local publications. 32:29 I'm curious, like, do you know what other newspapers in your, uh, in, in Annapolis, like, what their subscriber base looks like? And do you see that... I picture, like, these guys, 32:43 like, being very worried about seeing, uh, seeing your newsletter and kind of the, the fast growth and how it, it could potentially replace, like a, a newspaper, uh, a more traditional newspaper. 32:54 Like, what is your relationship like with these other publications in Annapolis, and, and do you know if you're approaching the, the, the kind of market share that they have? Yeah. 33:02 So market share-wise, it's tough to tell. Uh, our newspaper is very... I, I can't find that information. I have not even... I have... 33:11 I could send a Trojan horse in to, to find out advertising, and I, I might maybe should do that. But I found out all the other publications or most of the other publications, what their circulation is. 33:23 And, uh, yeah, it is... I actually made a graph in our media kit, which is hilarious. 33:27 It goes out, I think it goes out to, like, fifty years, and then this is the subscribers, and it's like, I think it goes up to, I think it goes up to twenty-five. 33:34 'Cause there's one that has more than us, but they've been around for 10 years, and they also have, like, a twenty-five percent override. 33:40 So technically they have more subscribers than us, but also technically our audience is twice as big. Silly how that works, but it's... I had to draw a fake... I, I'll, I'll show you the graph after the call. It's funny. 33:50 Or maybe you could flash it up if you do a video. I don't know. But it's all these, like... 33:54 The l- the, the graph is length of time to get to 15,000 subscribers, and all these ones are, like, really long, low slope lines, and then ours is basically, like, on the Y-axis of the, of the graph because it happened so fast. 34:09 And so I really enjoy having that graph in there, showing people the fast growth. I, I would say I think they're worried because they don't, uh, they're not very nice to me, a lot of the other publishers in town. 34:21 I think that is a manifestation of them not liking me and not, and being a little bit worried. And I'd be in the exact same situation if I was in their shoes. I actually... 34:29 It's funny, the first day I ever started, I emailed everybody. I emailed all the publishers that I could find. 34:35 I emailed, like, the editor of the newspaper, editor of another thing that's pretty similar to what we do, a couple other people. I never intended to be the newspaper. 34:43 I intended to be an aggregator, which is still what we are. And, uh, so I said to all of them, "I'm doing this thing. We're gonna drive people to your website. I can't wait to work with you." 34:53 I have no idea why I sent this email. It was stupid. But I told them all exactly what we were doing, and I think I sent this email to five publishers. One answered and was like, "Oh, cool. 35:04 Great to, um, I'm excited to be working with you." And then he's been not so nice ever since. It's like always a... It's like a cold relationship. 35:10 He's not mean, but you can just tell it's like, it's a little awkward, and I very much enjoy that, and I lean into it hard. 35:17 And then another one got really mad and they were like, "Your landing page calls us out," uh, because it said, "We tell you the news like a friend, not a faceless news organization," and they just, they took that personally. 35:26 Uh, so I changed it eventually. But, um, yeah, I, I... If I were them and I had read that, I would've been like, "Oh, that's a really smart idea. Let's do that instead of him, and let's crush him." 35:37 And they could have in the beginning, 'cause we had no people that paid attention to us, no subscribers. 35:42 Um, and if, and if any one of these things had started the newsletter just like we had, they would've absolutely wiped the floor with me. But now they can't. It's too late. We have 15,000 subscribers. 35:53 We're one of the big media sources in town, and they, they can't anymore. It's, they missed the opportunity, but they should have. That's funny. 36:03 There, there's a big disconnect between, like, media startups, more newer entrepreneurs, and legacy media that's been around for decades. Like, I'm assuming a lot of these newsletters have... 36:13 new- newspapers, excuse me, have been. You mentioned this, like, a local newspaper in your town, do you know how, how many people get that newspaper physically? Is that n- a number available? [laughs] Physically, no. 36:24 Um, I think there's 2016 numbers out thereI want to say something like fifteen, sixteen, seventeen thousand people used to get the physical copy. It's much, much less than that now. I don't know. 36:35 If you wanna extrapolate from my neighborhood, which is not a great idea, but, uh, we probably have about fifty houses in my neighborhood, and I think less than five of them have the newspaper thing on their mailbox. 36:51 But, you know, it's obviously anecdotal data, and I'm not... Maybe they don't have the paper thing, and they throw out the newspaper in their driveway. But, uh, yeah, the physical copies are very much disappearing. 37:01 It's... They-- I think I would say most of their subscribers are digital now. They would have to be. 37:06 One other question I had is, like, talking about advertisers, what type of advertisers buy ads in your newsletter or just local newsletters in general? You mentioned realtor. Like, is it... What, what type of companies? 37:16 And that will help us inform, like, what type of advertisers we should reach out to if we're gonna sell ads in, in a local newsletter. Yeah. 37:22 So I wanted to charge a lot for ads, uh, so most of my people end up being people that can pay a lot. It's, it's mostly high-ticket items. We have... Our biggest advertiser is a realtor. 37:32 He has average sale price is over two million dollars. He doesn't need to get a lot of listings from us to make his money back and then some. 37:41 He needs to get one for the whole year to make four or five times his money back. And so that's pretty attainable, right? I know for a fact he gets one. We've gotten him some, some pretty big listings. 37:52 But, um, yeah, we, we have that. We have mortgage brokers who, again, that's a high-ticket thing. One transaction for them is worth a lot. 37:59 Uh, we have a pressure washing company where it's not worth as much as a mortgage company or a luxury real estate agent, but it's still a pretty high-ticket item, and they're doing multiple jobs a year for people. 38:10 They're coming back year after year, so the lifetime value is there. Uh, we have a financial advisor, also a very high customer value. Who are our other big ones? 38:19 Oh, this is a great one, and, uh, this is something I think definitely you should look into in any town you're in, is that we have a meal delivery service, and that is an incredible ad value for them. 38:30 So last week, we set an ad for them. Uh, I think the net cost of the individual ad we bill on a monthly basis, so I think like... 38:39 And they're, they have a hybrid package of two of our ad types, so it's not a cut and dry thing, but I think they end up spending around six hundred dollars a month total. 38:48 Um, and we run one ad for them that generated like ten thousand dollars of customer value. Um, now that's lifetime. They have to stay on for the year of the subscription. 38:56 I, I think that they probably will, 'cause once you're on it, there's no reason to cancel it. I'm on it. I, I love how they cook my meals. It, it's mostly high-ticket things. It's not a lot of restaurants. 39:06 It's not a lot of ice cream shops where they're selling six dollar cones. It's, it's big things. 39:12 Um, it's either big things, big high-ticket items, or big companies that have marketing budget to burn, and they don't care as much about return on ad spend. We don't have any individual restaurants. 39:23 We don't have any super locally owned restaurants, but we have a huge restaurant group from Baltimore that advertises with us. 39:31 And to them, they're not as concerned as, uh, "Hey, Naptown Scoop costs a thousand dollars a month to advertise in. 39:37 Are we getting three thousand dollars of, or ten thousand dollars of people eating at our restaurant each month because of Naptown Scoop?" They're not doing that math. They're not concerned with that. 39:47 Um, the mall here advertises with us. You're talking about a three billion dollar, uh, international conglomerate. They're not concerned with, "Hey, are we getting our value out of advertising with Naptown Scoop?" 39:58 It's just something they have to do because they have to put their budget somewhere, and they may as well put it here. So those are the two kinda... 40:05 That's our bread and butter is b- high-ticket items and then big companies who don't care as much about calculating the return on their investment. 40:14 And if I ever have an empty ad spot, there's a little shout-out to my friends at Swapstack. I always go on there and grab an affiliate deal and throw that in there. 40:22 That's like free money basically 'cause you don't have to actually sell an ad. You just grab the thing, and affiliate marketing is awesome in that way. I've completely forgotten about it. 40:31 I logged in to Swapstack last night to grab two affiliate spots for today's newsletter, and I realized, um, we got two conversions on this really expensive software and made four hundred bucks just that I completely didn't know about. 40:45 And, uh, four hundred bucks is four hundred bucks. 40:48 Yeah, Swapstack is, is great, and having that ability to monetize, especially for someone who maybe necessarily doesn't have, uh, inbound sponsors, I think that's a great call-out. 40:59 Yeah, Swapstack didn't exist when I first started. That would definitely be something I'd jump into now, uh, right from day one is, is to have those affiliate deals in there. 41:09 If not only to hopefully make a little bit of money, just to get your audience used to seeing advertising so that it's not a, a jarring thing when you do start advertising on a larger scale. Yeah, a hundred percent. 41:20 No, it makes total sense and, like I said, I think a great call-out. So I, I do wanna talk a little bit, this last, this last little section that we have, about your expansion plans. 41:29 Uh, I know you said in, in your Twitter bio, it's like you're, you're planning to expand to a hundred cities. I, I'm interested to know, do you know what's next? 41:36 Do you know the next, uh, the next city, next metro area you're going for? Uh, and if you do, why have you chosen that place knowing what you know now from having built Naptown Scoop? Yeah. I've got the next two picked. 41:48 After that, I have a pool, but I don't know exactly the order yet. Um, picked the other two or the next two based on being relatively close by. 41:58 One of them is an easy drive, one of them is a less easy drive, but they're both great cities. I need cities that fit in that eighty to one hundred and fifty thousand person region. I want them to not be suburbs. 42:10 I need them to have their own identity. Like Bethesda would be a great city to do this in. It's got a lot of money. It's got probably things going on, but Bethesda's like a suburb of DC. 42:20 It, it doesn't have its own identity aside from DC. And, uh, I want to... I want places that have their own identity, and then it needs to be a cool place to live. There needs... 42:29 You know, we'll, we'll end up doing this in the Midwest at some point, if I haven't sold it by then, and we'll go to cities that-You know, they're, they're in the flyover states. 42:36 They're not super exciting, but they still need stuff like this. But for the beginning, the core, I wanna give this the best chance of succeeding, so I want cities where really desirable to live. 42:47 There's a lot of cool things happening that we can write about and go to and, and be at. So Annapolis has the water. The next city that we're gonna go to has some mountains that people like. 42:58 The city after that is-- it's got a, a huge college and a ton of history, and also mountains. So there's really exciting things there. 43:06 And then the, the final thing that's kind of a silly characterization, but it's one of those things where it's either you're an idiot or in 10 years it'll be like, "Did you really do that? Wow, you're really cool." 43:17 Um, I, I want each city to have a microbrewery in it, and it needs to be a, like a cool one. 43:23 My-- the town that I grew up in, which has like 6,000 people, has a microbrewery, but the moment you walk in you'd be like, "No, this doesn't fit the vibe that I need." 43:30 But most of the time a microbrewery in a city or even better, several of them, is a sign of cool investment in the town. They're probably gonna have other good restaurants, probably gonna have a good music scene. 43:42 Any kind of thing like that, like a, a microbrewery or a cool vineyard or a distillery, something like that, that kind of business is a really good sign of investment in the city. 43:56 That's a great way to analyze, like what to go after. Give us the-- we have five minutes left. Give us, give us like the go-to-market plan for the next couple you launch. Like how do you... Do you find a writer? 44:05 How do you write content? How do you grow it? How do you get the initial money coming in? 44:09 Like at the high level, a high-level summary of like how you go to market in these new cities, what would that look like or what's the strategy and tactics there? Yeah. 44:16 We kind of talked about it when we, when you asked, you know, how would you start. But, uh, like to super, super simplify it, I would say pick the city first. That's the most important. 44:27 And then make the website, which could be very simple, just a landing page. Start collecting advertise-- or y- start collecting email addresses. Go on Facebook and start running Facebook ads. 44:39 Uh, and I would encourage people just to start with the music. 44:42 Start the live music schedule, and if you really want to make this as easy as possible, you can hire someone to go compile that for you and do-- they'll do it every day. 44:52 They'll spend the two to three hours that it takes to do that, and that can be really helpful, or you could just do it yourself. Um, but that's, that's how I would do it. 44:59 I would start off with that, and then as you start to get more subscribers, add sections of the newsletter like the, "Hey, new restaurant's opening. I went and checked it out. Here's some pictures of the food. 45:12 This is what I thought." And then do that, you know, recycle that content onto Instagram, and you'll start to become known as a source of information for the city. 45:21 I have a pretty detailed go-to-market plan that is much, much more established than that. 45:26 Um, but that is sort of kind of our secret sauce and, uh, I was writing a Twitter thread about it one day and I was like, "You know what? I can't actually release this." 45:36 This would be like Apple releasing their product schematics. Um, I'm not-- I guess I did just compare myself to Apple. I don't think I'm that good at this, but, uh, I'm not gonna give away the total secret sauce. 45:48 But I have a pretty detailed go-to-market plan. 45:51 I think it's like 17 steps of things that need to happen based on two and a half years of doing this with Scoope, uh, here in Annapolis, what works, what doesn't, and don't waste your time with things that don't. 46:03 Only do the things that you need. I love it. 46:05 And I, I'm excited to see more of your threads on Twitter, especially about like the becoming the most popular person in the city, whatever that, that catchy name you had for it was. Th- that's super fun. 46:13 Where can people find you online? So best place to find me online right now is, is just Twitter. Uh, handle is lifeof_scoope. I've really leaned into the Scoope thing. 46:25 I only tweet about local newsletters, writing, and a little bit of marketing. So otherwise, uh, if you don't, uh, don't find that stuff interesting, you won't find this interesting. 46:34 But if you do find that interesting, then that's all you'll get from me, and I do-- I try to write a lot. 46:40 I have like six or seven really good, I think they're good, interesting things to share in drafts right now that are, uh, getting scheduled out over the next couple w- days and weeks. 46:51 So I try to be super consistent and make-- add value on there. 46:54 'Cause there's nothing new under the sun, but, you know, tell, uh, your little slant of how you do things and how it's a little bit different from someone else and maybe that teaches someone something about their local newsletter or not a local newsletter, different, different newsletter entirely. 47:09 But, uh, something that helps people get their own newsletter better. But yeah, if you don't like email newsletters, don't follow me on Twitter [chuckles] for sure. Sounds good. It's been fun chatting. 47:18 This was really-- it's not our typical, uh, conversation. We're all so much like digital marketing, scaling stuff, broad markets, and I think this is much more interesting to me, so I personally appreciate it. Yeah. 47:31 It's, it's really interesting and, and I think something we didn't, didn't really hit on in the, in the conversation, which isn't that important, but, um, I've just figured out over the ne- the last two and a half, three years is if you 47:45 treat this like that, uh, like the, like you have this, you know, 10 million person or 10, yeah, 10 million person TAM and, and you treat it with that like high tech marketing kind of mindset, 47:59 you'll be so much better than everybody else in the town that you're in because they're not thinking like that. It's very easy to be a big fish in a little pond in this game. 48:09 If I were to go make an AI newsletter, would it be any better than any other ones? Maybe some of them, but it wouldn't be as much better the other ones as Scoope is better than the other things. 48:21 Um, they're-- these people are not spending time on Twitter meeting people that can help them, people they can learn from. They're not reading about, you know, what's the new thing in marketing. 48:32 They're not leveraging, uh, generative AI to help them be better. It's, it's really easy to be a big fish in a little pond in this game. Makes sense. It's good to know. 48:42 If I ever start and dabble in a local newsletter, I'll let you know. It's something I wanna do, I just don't have a lot of time for it. 48:47 But I wanna do it as I think it'll be a really fun experiment, so I'll keep you posted on that. [upbeat music] Thanks for listening. 49:00 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. 49:10 If you wanna learn even more about how to grow and monetize a newsletter, go to newsletteroperator.com. 49:15 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. 49:22 [upbeat music]
