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 podcast. We are here with Tim Huelskamp. How's it going? Hey, guys. Awesome. Things are going well so far. 0:33 Thanks so much for this opportunity to be here. Super excited to join with you both. Yeah, thanks for coming on, Tim. When we started this podcast, you were at the top of the list for people that we wanted to have on. 0:42 So I'm excited to finally chat. And for those who don't know, you're the CEO of, of Fourteen40 Media. Can you tell us what that is? 0:50 I think a lot of people will know, especially if they're savvy and smart about this space. At least in, like, the marketing space, Fourteen40 is not as well known as it should be. I have a funny story about this. 1:00 When I go to Thanksgiving dinner, I tell my family about my industry and what type of people that we know and work with. They all know about Fourteen40, but they don't know [chuckles] about any of the other clients. 1:09 And sometimes when I talk to direct response marketers and, like, even some people in media, they know about a lot of our other clients, but they don't know about Fourteen40. 1:15 So, like, you're much well-known across America, but maybe not as much in this community as much as you should. That's what I've seen at least. Let, let us know what's going on. 1:23 Yeah, there's definitely a reason for that I'd love to get into. But first, fi-first, curious to you both on, on your products. I'm not just saying this, Matt, your newsletter is my favorite read every weekend. 1:31 I-- That thing is jam-packed with information. So yeah, just super honored to be here with you both. I'm Tim. I'm the CEO of Fourteen40. We're a daily new- uh, email newsletter. 1:40 We send out to over three million Americans now. Our founder story, right? So, like, I actually come from, like, the, the private equity world, and my co-founder, Drew, is a PhD scientist that worked on Capitol Hill. 1:49 And basically, we were frustrated news consumers ourselves and busy professionals, and we felt like the media landscape wasn't delivering in two key ways. 1:57 So, like, one, media by design is very niche-y or verticalized, right? 2:01 You have, like, sports and politics and local news because, as you guys well know, if you do that really well, you can sell higher CPMs because there's, like, really targeted audiences. 2:10 But we felt as busy professionals, there wasn't-- Like, if you're-- if you only had, like, ten minutes in the morning, you wanted to know everything, who's kind of like the inch deep, mile wide folks in a world of the opposite? 2:21 So that was, like, our original intent with the first pain point, to create a comprehensive newsletter that gave you sports, politics, business, you know, the latest company IPO-ing, what's going on in Ukraine, just kind of all across the board. 2:33 And then also some fun stuff like, you know, fall foliage schedules and Michelin stars as well, so that we could be well-rounded individuals. So that's point one. 2:41 And then point two is, yeah, like, there's this growing, like, [chuckles] 2:45 desire where, you know, the right hates the left, and there's opinions in the news everywhere, and there's bias, and some people can't decipher, like, what, what's misinformation and what's real. 2:54 So we just try to lean into, like, being that, like, just the facts, remove the opinions newsletter and just basically tell people what happened. 3:02 This actually bec- uh, is, is a result of Drew, our, um, our, our editor-in-chief, who, again, he's not from the media industry either. We now have a bunch of people from the media industry, but he's a PhD scientist. 3:11 He's a brilliant guy, and he just, by trade, he just wears the facts, show me the facts, like kind of the scientific method, and that's allowed us to basically have this, this product that if we work hard every day and obviously, like, you can never be truly unbiased. 3:25 We try to make it, as we say, like, unbiased as humanly possible. That was the second pain point, kind of the, the, the unbiased, impartial. So, like, with that one-two punch of comprehensive and impartial, we set out. 3:36 We did the whole minimum viable product process. We sent it out to seventy-eight friends and family. Like, unsure if anyone else would even care. You know, at the time, we said, "This is our pain point. 3:44 We think others have it. We're unsure. Let's go do some testing." So, like, we developed our product. 3:49 We sent it out once a week, and then twice a week, and three times a week, and kept on iterating on it and learning from the user. 3:55 We started with seventy-eight friends and family, and we said, "If we can't get at least, like, a, a high open rate and a high organic growth rate, i.e. 4:02 people like the product and are opening it, and then people are forwarding it to their friends, like, we should just give up 'cause it-- there's no-- there's nothing here." 4:09 So at the time, we said we were looking at The Hustle as a great example. We said, like, if it's not in the forties and we're not growing, like, ten percent a week, we probably shouldn't be doing this. 4:18 But in our first couple weeks, we were at like a sixty percent open rate and we're growing over ten percent. I think our first was seventy-eight, and then it was ninety-one, and it was one oh four. 4:26 And we didn't even, like, really ask for people to forward it. It was just naturally happening. So we saw some, like, early evidence of product market fit there. 4:34 Fast-forward much later, I'm happy to go through, like, all of our growth and everything, of course, but yeah, like, today we have-- we just passed three million subscribers last week. 4:41 We're really proud that it's roughly a third Democrat, a third Republican, and a third independent. So it really leans into that impartial value prop that I mentioned earlier. 4:50 So we like to say, like, our readers, it's like almost like a psychographic, not a demographic, and it's these, like, open-minded readers across the political spectrum who are just, like, a little bit frustrated with, like, I'm a lawyer in Louisiana or doctor in Detroit or a nurse in Nebraska, and it's just like, hey, I just wanna know, [chuckles] I just wanna know what happened yesterday. 5:10 Like, I, I like opinion pieces and I like it, but can you just help me figure out what's happening in the world? 5:15 And there's this growing need, growing up, there's a large, large percentage of America, I think, that that's like a real pain point for them, and that's who we serve. So again, third to third to third. 5:24 It's about fifty-fifty male, female. It's, it's spread almost perfectly across America. So if you look at like the state population rates, it's almost exactly what our state population rates look like. 5:34 The only thing it really overindexes is education. So about a third of our audience has a, um, a graduate degree versus about ten percent of the United States. 5:42 Matt, that might be why you're, uh, you have some smart aunts and uncles that, that are at the dinner table. 5:45 But yeah, so it's like because of that, right, because of that, they have th-they, they tend to have affluence as well, and then they buy products, and they like learning about new products, and they have a lot of time. 5:55 So like when we work with our advertisers who wanna get in front of our affluent audience, they tend to buy things, and I'm happy to walk through like how that all works. But yeah, that's kinda who we are. 6:04 Like, at the end of the day, I would say likeWe are the consumer. So we started this thing six years ago because we were frustrated news consumers ourselves. 6:12 We built the product we wanted, and then we iterated on it for like multiple, multiple quarters before focusing on, you know, monetization and growth. And then, you know, now three million people read it. 6:23 We think there's like a much larger TAM than three million, because again, like we're not the niche-y folks, we're the, the up here folks. And you've done an amazing job. 6:32 Like three million subscribers at the engagement rates you're at is incredible. It like, it's the pinnacle of like the example that I point to when I talk to other newsletter operators. 6:42 Tell us about what the engagement looks like now. Like at your size, what type of open rates and click-through rates are you seeing for the newsletter? And what type of retention too, if you have any data on that? 6:50 Yeah, totally. So our open rate hovers around sixty%, six zero, even before... 6:56 We, we, we try to do, do some data where we pull out the MPP and some of those like, you know, fake opens that's, that's plaguing the industry. 7:02 But like we, we always look at clicks as like a metric, is, is the click rate staying consistent as a, as a proxy. But yeah, our open rate is sixty%, it's been that since we started. 7:11 I think when we were smaller, when we were at ten thousand we had it, and someone said like when you get to fifty thousand that'll drop down to the forties. We're really proud that it's stayed in the sixty% range. 7:20 I like to think that it's 'cause we put our heart and soul into the product every day, right? 7:24 It's like we work very, very hard to deliver for that user who we know, who's ourselves, and we're building this product every day and we help them. We help them learn, we help them [chuckles] find nice things to... 7:35 cool things to talk about. We help them understand what's going on in the Middle East. Again, we help them with fall foliage schedules and fun stuff. 7:40 So just like a little menu of information that people can go on every day and read a bunch and learn a lot and, and gain a lot of knowledge, and that's like, I think the biggest driver of our, of our high open rate. 7:52 On the retention side, it's about a fifty% long-term retention rate. So what we see with our data is there's about a... Matt, you spoke about this in one of your newsletters once. There's like, if you... 8:02 We do single opt-in, so there's always like a fifteen% of folks just never get the email or it's a bad email or it's spam, which is really frustrating but kind of out of our control. 8:12 And then kind of from eighty-five to fifty, those people are feeling us out in the first quarter. 8:17 Uh, some people think we're far left, some people think we're far li-right, which is amazing reading that in the inbox every morning. You know, you can't win everyone, but again, uh, the... 8:25 So like the, the eighty-five to fifty, kind of like if you lo-look at our retention curves, uh, I just realized for the people not listening that doesn't make any sense. 8:31 But [chuckles] it falls to like to about fifty%, and then it flat lines and stays there kind of in perpetuity. So that like allows our business model to be really successful because we have such great retention. 8:42 I'm actually... I don't know if you guys have seen that. We... I look for that number all the time, like what is the, like the best retention rate on, on newsletters. I don't know if you've seen that data. 8:51 I ask around for it, but we think it's pretty good. And like this goes back to our cohorts from like twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen as well, like those folks are still with us. 8:59 I think as a benchmark or knowing, knowing benchmarks acro-across other media companies, that is a really, really good retention rate. And I'm curious, I mean, you mentioned that you've been able to... 9:09 I mean, the fact that you're able to maintain that level of engagement over that period of time and at the scale that you're currently operating at is super impressive. 9:17 I know you mentioned putting your heart and soul into it. 9:19 Are there other factors, maybe more tactical factors that you would say contribute to building an audience that sticks around, opens, and engages in the long haul? 9:27 I would answer that y-yes, of course, there's some like smaller ones. But I think the big thing that most people miss when I talk to like younger entrepreneurs and young-younger newsletter busi- builders, 9:38 is they might be over-focused on, you know, retention strategies and drip campaigns and all that, and it's very important obviously to keep... 9:46 It's like, you know, scaled strategies to keep the, the retention rate high, but at the end of the day, it's all about quality. It's all about helping people. Yeah. It's about delivering value. And like, so 9:56 we do all that other stuff and it's, you know, got a retention rate from fift- you know, fif- instead of forty-seven, it's at fifty. 10:02 But I think the big thing is just like the love and the product and constantly helping the reader. I don't want that to be a cop-out, but like we just think about that every day. 10:11 We put a l- so much love into our product. Our whole team's reviewing it, our whole team's helping with the product, right? We're like just... 10:18 We're all that, that consumer that's frustrated, and we're just building this for ourselves every day. 10:22 You mentioned these two big problems you're solving at the beginning, so biased news and news not being comprehensive. 10:28 I find that the most successful media companies' newsletters, like their newsletter value proposition and what they do, it just solves a problem. 10:34 This is like a hard question to ask, but like, do you have any tips for people who like they're, they're creating content but they're not really solving a problem? 10:40 Like they're giving news analysis summaries, but like they're not really solving a problem for people. 10:45 Was that just like kind of scratching your own itch that you discovered those problems and that's how you went about solving them? 10:49 Is there any way we can give some type of anecdote or, or advice to people who, who wanna do a better job of this? 10:55 Because I think that's kind of the secret to great engagement is like actually helping people fixing their problems. 11:01 The beauty of the newsletter industry, as we know, is like there's so much benchmark data and you can kind of see what your quality is based on how... like with the open rate. 11:09 Again, like there's some of that, the, the open rate stuff we have to worry about, but generally speaking you can tell if people like your product if they're opening it, if they're clicking it, and if they're retaining it in their inbox. 11:20 So like one of the things I, I t- I meet a lot of like younger newsletter folks starting out and, you know, they're like, they ask me questions about, "How do we monetize the business?" 11:28 and, "Can you give me creative growth tips on how to grow the list?" And I'm like, "Hey man, what's your open rate?" And they're like, "Twenty percent." And I'm like, "Why?" Like, respectfully the, the... 11:36 this business model doesn't work with a twenty% open rate. The whole... I'd love to walk you through it, and I know you guys know this well. For the audience, we can do it. 11:42 But the whole way this business model works is you're acquiring a couple, a user for a couple dollars, and then if you have a world-class product with a high open rate and a high retention rate, you're making... 11:52 m you're monetizing them over like multiple quarters, if not years. So if you have a twenty% open rate, you're just... 11:58 Like, I hate to say this, but I try to tell this in a nice way 'cause I know people are building their dreams, but you're, you're not gonna make it. 12:04 [chuckles] So like what I tell these, these folks all the time is like, "Hey, slow down.And go back to the drawing board and like really try to figure out how you can help the, a reader and figure out what that... 12:13 Like we use the jobs to be done framework. What is that? Where can you add value to their lives? Ask them. 12:19 Like one of the beautiful things about newsletters is they can reply to anything and talk to the, the writer directly, if you set it up the right way anyways. That's what we do. 12:25 Like all the inbo- all the emails still come to my inbox. We beg for feedback every day, uh, in our email, and we get it every day. Some of it's not fun, right? 12:33 And some of it's, like I said, like you're, you're pro right and pro left, and there's some weird stuff we get too. 12:39 But a lot of it is like this frustrated consumer that is us that's like, "Hey, I love what you're doing, but have you thought about this or have you thought about this new product or have you..." Right? 12:46 And it's so helpful. So every company ins- is a service that a user is hiring them to do a job for. 12:55 So the, the way, the way I break it down, the-- I think the best analogy I've heard is, say you live in a suburb and you have kids, and basically there's two Italian restaurants in the suburb. 13:05 One of them is a pizza place and one of them is a two hundred dollar, you know, fancy caviar dinner, right? For your anniversary, you're taking your wife to the caviar dinner for two hundred dollars. 13:16 If it's Friday night and your kids are hungry and they need pizza, you're calling Domino's or whatever, like the, the local pizza place. So if you think about those jobs, like that's kind of how that framework works. 13:25 You, you, like you have a problem, someone y- you're in search of someone solving it, s- someone to solve it for you. 13:32 So you reach out to, for the pizza, it's Domino's, and for the fancy dinner, it's, you know, Emilio's or whatever the, the restaurant's called. 13:38 And I think that's what like as I look around the space, if you, if you do it like, like Matt, to use yours, if you're a newsletter operator, it doesn't matter if you're three million like us or three thousand, and you're trying to learn how to grow your business, Matt McGarry's newsletter is, I think, the b- one of the best ones in the world. 13:53 I'm not, I'm not-- he didn't tell me to say this. That thing is awesome. Like you go, you scour the internet for all these links. You give me all these awesome anecdotes and ways to grow and creative strategies. 14:04 Like that's-- your job to be done is this super smart guy that knows this industry better than anyone is scouring the internet and then helping me learn as a business operator. That's your job to be done for me. 14:15 So that's kind of what we do, right? But it's for, for the busy professional, right? And it's not around a certain industry, it's around news. 14:23 Like another example, it could be entertainment, and that could be Barstool, for example. The other one could be, you know, 1440 has a mix of different jobs to be done. 14:30 One, one is like eliminating the bias and giving you straight from the middle, one is being comprehensive. And so it doesn't always have to be one job either. 14:37 But I think that's a great thing to think about, and honestly, most people don't even know this framework, so I wanted to break it down. Yeah. It's a great one. 14:43 Yeah, Politico, I don't read it 'cause I'm not a political news junkie, but Drew, my PhD scientist, Capitol Hill guy, he loves it. You know, he wants to know the Washington Insider stuff. That's what they're doing. 14:52 That's their jobs to be done. Drew reads it, right? Br- Dan Primack on, uh, Axios Pro Rata, if you're a private equity guy that wants to know what's going on in the business world, you read that. That's a job to be done. 15:03 So yeah, it's like, who are you serving and how can you help them? 15:06 And like one of the things we try to think about too is like, this is why I think like we're- we've been growing pretty rapidly, is like, as you're coming through, coming up with that as a, as a newsletter entrepreneur, one of the things I challenge you is like what's the TAM of that as well? 15:18 Like can you monetize it and what's the TAM? TAM meaning like total addressable market, right? So like if you're doing, I don't know, lo- you know, city of Chic- I live in Chicago, Chicago local news for concert events. 15:32 Really cool, like engaged audience, but, uh, how many people care about that in America? It, it... Twenty thousand people, right? So your TAM's pretty small. 15:40 One of the advantages we think we have is our TAM is very large, right? It's again, it's like a third, a third, a third. 15:45 It's people across the, the professional class of America that wanna know news and that one-two punch of comprehensive and impartial. So we think our TAM's really large too, and that's why we're trying to grow into it. 15:56 But I'm getting off topic, so I'll, uh, I'll stop. No, I mean, that's a good framework. There's a lot of people who wanna kind of start... They're newsletter entrepreneurs who wanna start something. 16:03 I mean, that's a good framework for them to think about starting something. Do you have like an idea for that? So should we like, if we're starting a newsletter or be coming from scratch, do we look at TAM? 16:11 How do we monetize it? Jobs to be done? Or like how do you think about that for people who are starting out? Oh, man. Such a good question. 16:19 W- uh, dusting off the cobwebs here 'cause we haven't done this in a while, but, um, when I look at this industry, I kind of... it reminds me of like newspapers and magazines back like 20 years ago, right? 16:31 It's like, 'cause a lot of it's like human interest or helping people learn or, or that. So when we started looking, like first looking at this space, so one of the things I looked at was like, yeah, like USA Today. 16:41 Some people told us we're like kind of a digital version of them, which at first I was like, "Huh, I don't know if I like-- I don't know if I love that or not." 16:47 But then when you look at it, I think they're the second biggest publication. At the time they were, like their TAM was very large. 16:54 So I don't know, like maybe I'd do something like, yeah, look at these like magazine subscriptions and like a combination of like maybe magazines, newsletters, Reddits, you know, subreddit threads, Wikipedia pages. 17:07 Like what are people interested in and like wanna learn about and like is there a lot of demand there? Now, if you go for like a big market, you also get a lot of competition there. 17:15 But I don't know, like I, I- we get a ton of newsletters, the three of us. Is there like a, um... just trying to think, like Better Homes and Gardens newsletter? I, I don't, I don't know actually. Is there? 17:28 There probably is. I don't know of it though, but probably not of significant size. Yeah, like that, that job's to be done, right? Like that Better Homes and Gardens used to do that had, whatever, two million readers. 17:37 Like people still like that stuff. Are they... I don't... I, I maybe haven't come across it, but like that might be a good example. 17:41 Like maybe that's, uh, two million Americans would love to have a daily email about gardening. You know? I, I, I just don't. I'm not a gardener, so. No, there's actually a company called Ep- Epic Gardening. 17:51 It's actually really successful, but I don't know if they have a newsletter. I know there's a YouTube channel and blog, but that's a good analog. Do you think about monetization, reverse engineer that? 17:58 Do you think about like, are there lucrative sponsorship opportunities in this space, or is that something you don't consider as much as TAM and jobs to be done? No, we definitely look at that. 18:08 I think it's like n- I think it's not as important because-The first one is basically product market fit, and if you don't find that and deliver a TAM, like, none of-- [chuckles] the monetization doesn't matter. 18:19 I will say, like, the way I think about growing startups, and this is all from, like, the, you know, the VCs, I'm just kinda regurgitating what they say, but, like, there's basically three-- there's three steps in that process, right? 18:27 There's finding product market fit, as, like, Y Combinator says, it's making something people want. It's really hard. A lot of people don't do it. A lot of people don't focus on the right things. 18:36 And then there's, like, do you have a scalable, profitable business model? So to your point, I think that's where that would come in. 18:42 You know, if you're doing-- you know, if you're, like, a finance newsletter, like, obviously there's really, really rich data there because they can sell those ad placements to mortgage companies and credit card companies that have really rich, like, lifetime values on their products, so they can pay up in their cost per acquisition. 18:59 So we think about it, and we thought about it when we started, but... Oh, and sorry, just to throw that out. 19:05 F-product market fit builds, you know, scalable, profitable unit economics, and if you have those two, you can just, like, you know, hopefully make the business get, get pretty big. 19:13 So, like, we thought about that a lot when we started, but we basically said, "If we can get this educated consumer to read our product, like, monetization will come. So, like, kinda don't worry about that now. 19:25 Just build the best product in the world that they're gonna love, and then we'll revisit it once we, once we get there." 19:31 So I would say it's, like, it's definitely important to factor in, but I think, like, the TAM and the product is way more important because, Matt, you probably have way more better data on this than me, but, you know, the difference between, like, a great monetizable newsletter and, like, a mediocre one, if they have the same open rates and TAM, it's, like, what? 19:47 Maybe $20 CPMs and $50 CPMs, but you're still like-- I mean, that, that's big. 19:53 That's, that's, that's one X, but you're still, like, you know, you're still around at that point, where if you can't figure out the TAM and the product, it just doesn't-- none of that matters. Yeah. 20:05 I, I mean, so you, you mentioned how rapidly you've been growing. I mean, you said you started out with 78, you just hit three million recently, which is awesome, and congrats on that. 20:14 So you've seen this incredible growth. How has your team's approach to growth changed over that time? Obviously, you mentioned organic at the beginning, referral-based. You're now at this massive scale. 20:25 We definitely wanna hear about the channel mix, but then also maybe you could touch about how the metrics you look at have changed over time as well, and how you gauge the value of a net new subscriber. Yeah. 20:34 Yeah, absolutely. When we started, like, we didn't have any-- 20:38 Basically, we t- worked really hard to keep the business lean and mean, one, because I think, like, that's really important generally, and then two, because these successful models in this space are flywheel business models. 20:49 So using us as an example, we make about five cents an open on an email, right? So basically, we have these partners that wanna get in front of our affluent audience. 20:58 There's a fif- there's a, a certain price on the CPM, but when you really break it down, th- they care about opens, and then they care about return on their investment because they're investing in Google and Facebook and all these other places, and also newsletters, but they need a return on their investment. 21:10 They-- but at a high level, they charge us f- uh, five cents. We charge them about five cents an open. 21:15 So again, going back to the business model there, we wanna-- if you have retention and open rates, you know, like, the average user, we send 25 emails a month now. 21:24 We take Sundays off still, but that's worth about 75 cents a user to, s- per an active, active sub. And then we just-- they, they stick around forever, and we continue to monetize them, 50% of them anyways. 21:37 This is actually super valuable information on how you calculate LTV, and I think it's, uh, probably a lot more sophisticated than how a lot of operators that are listening are currently doing it. 21:46 But yeah, I mean, I think that- that's definitely part of the question. And then the other piece of it is just how your growth mix has changed over time. Yeah. 21:52 So when we started out and, like, didn't have money, basically, like, we now have money. That's where I was going with that, via our flywheel. So we reinvest almost all of our revenue back into growth. 22:01 But when we were starting out, we didn't have that. We wanted to get there as fast as possible because we-- like Warren Buffett says, like, you know, compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world. 22:10 That's basically our, our business model, right? We just reinvest it all back, and it keeps getting bigger, and we added 240,000 subscribers last month, which is the highest ever. It just kinda keeps spinning. 22:20 But yeah, when we were small and getting from 78 to 10,000, it was like, you know, we were-- [chuckles] it was cross promos, giveaways. 22:30 There was this, uh, it's still around, but Dojo Mojo, which allowed, like, brands to come together and do giveaways. We were just doing anything we could to, to grow the list. 22:39 And then we basically start-- uh, when we got to about 10,000, we started figuring out how the unit economics game worked and how that could make the business, like, the flywheel spin faster. 22:51 So then at that point, we basically started investing our revenues and then a little bit of capital as well. So we were lucky enough to raise money. We actually did a, a non-dilutive, like, kinda debt f- financing. 23:02 So, like, that's good for us in the long term now, but it just kickstarted the, the flywheel a little bit more. 23:07 So we raised a little bit of money, and then because of that, you know, our curve bent up at a higher rate, and then it allowed us to, uh, to grow. So, like, from the beginning, we said, "Keep the thing lean and mean, 23:18 get it profitable as fast as possible, and just reinvest all the c- all the money, most of the money back into growth if you believe in your product for the long term." 23:26 Again, if you have a t- 20% open rate and, like, 10% retention, you shouldn't do that 'cause it's not gonna end well. But if you have the world-class metrics, like, this business model works really well. 23:36 So I think, like, as we got bigger, we went from, you know, kinda hand-to-hand combat doing swaps and giveaways and those type things, and then said, "Okay, where are, like, the really scalable channels and how do we learn those?" 23:47 So today, you know, as we do it, we-- we're basically about, like, call it a third 23:52 organic word of mouth-y, referral-y stuff where people, like, hear about us somehow, and then two-thirds is just paid, like, building that flywheel. 24:02 So from an early, from an early stage, we did-- early on, it was mostly Facebook, Facebook and Instagram. I think at one point, like, three years ago, like, 90% of our spend was going into that channel. 24:11 It was risky at the time, but the CPAs were really strong. Today, we're basically-- it fluctuates every month. We're just looking at the data and then pushing it around. 24:19 But yeah, we do Facebook and Instagram, GoogleOther newsletters. Actually, if we could only do one channel, it would be other newsletters. So there's some scaled platforms like LiveIntent where you can buy, buy traffic. 24:31 The reason why it would only be other newsletters is because what we find historically, not historically, in the future as well, is basically those, those users are just worth twice as much. 24:41 So you might pay twice the CPA, but the long-term reve-- the, the lifetime value and the revenue from them is hi- is about two X. So we do other newsletters. 24:50 And then we're constantly testing like Quora and Pinterest and Reddit and TikTok and all those. We've fuck- Twitter, we've done, we've done them all. Matt, Matt's helped us a lot of this. 24:59 We're basically just like constantly looking at what's the best return on investment. Again, like the unit economics, right? 25:04 So like the top, the numerator of that unit economics calc is the lifetime value, that's that seventy-five cent number I can't keep alluding to. Five cents, five cents an open, we have twenty-five cents a month 25:16 at a sixty percent open rate is about fifteen opens a month. Fifteen times five cents is about seventy-five cents, so an active subscriber is worth seventy-five cents to us. 25:25 And then the denominator of that calculation is the, the, the CPA or the CAC. So like that's how much does it cost to acquire a subscriber. When we were smaller, we were getting subs on Facebook for like two bucks. 25:36 It's now kind of like three, like mid-threes, and then on the other channels it's a little higher, but again, you get a better, better return on your, on the unit economics there. 25:45 So yeah, we're just constantly trying to figure out like where the best return is there. For like the, the early stage folks, generally speaking, like in the venture capital world, if you can get to... 25:54 And this, this, this space isn't always like VC backable, but just like as a benchmark, if you can get to like a three-to-one lifetime value to CAC, that's really good. 26:03 If you're less, if you're point eight to one, you're going out of business really quickly. If you're two to one, it's pretty good. 26:08 But three to one is kind of like the golden number that a lot of the, the companies look for. 26:12 So yeah, with us it's like, you know, double that right now, so we're really proud of that, and we just keep on working on, you know, how do you maximize the lifetime value and then lower the CPA. 26:21 And if you think about that, everything in your business touches those two numbers, right? So obviously like you're creative and, and I'd love to get into that with w- shortly because Matt's been so helpful there. 26:31 On, on the bottom of the denominator, like how do I lower the cost? But on the top it's like, you know, how do I monetize better? How do we drive better, uh, partnerships with salespeople? 26:40 How do we increase the retention rate? How do we make our product better every day so the open rate increases? And if you think about like everything we touch in our, in our company really goes into those two numbers. 26:50 And that, in my opinion, the unit economics calc is like the magic of most companies. 26:54 So yeah, we just focus a ton on how do we, how do we optimize that as best as possible, because again, we take most of our revenues and just keep reinvesting them. 27:03 So it creates these, this flywheel and these just, these cohorts of, of users that we continue to monetize and then use their profit to buy more, and it just compounds on top of it- of itself. 27:14 And then just, just to clarify the unit economics, we said seventy-five cents, I'm gonna say clarify per month. And so if someone's staying for multiple years, the LTV can be really high. 27:23 Do you know what the LTV is like roughly? It depends on how long they stay, of course, but like what does LTV look like for you guys? It's like twenty bucks-ish. It depends. 27:32 There's different calculations, like do you do a five-year, do you do a, an annual val- or a terminal value? Do you do a three-year? Kind of everyone thinks about it differently, but, um, ours is about twenty bucks. 27:42 So, so if you acquire a subscriber for three to five dollars from an ad, you know, that's, that's a good CAC to LTV ratio. Exactly. Like that's awesome. And a lot of people... 27:50 I wanted to break that down because a lot of people don't realize what those ratios are in this business and what they can be. 27:54 Obviously, this is based on really good execution across the board, and most people aren't seeing ratios that good, but it's, it's possible. But let's, let's dive deeper into like the, the growth side. 28:05 So like you mentioned Facebook being an awesome channel, meaning Facebook ads, so Facebook and Instagram, the platform. 28:10 When you say ninety percent of the growth, I think some people get scared by that, but I think that's a smart thing because basically every business early on, they kind of find one acquisition channel that works for them. 28:18 They grow based on that, and then later on when they're bigger, they diversify. That's a very common thing I've seen across a lot of different company types. 28:24 Tell us a little bit about Facebook ads, like what's been a- the secret to success there for y'all, and how does that work? Yeah. I think the secret there is like how do you differentiate the creative pa- part of it? 28:36 So we brought on our head of growth, Erica, six months ago, and she's just totally transformed our organization. It, it's been like amazing watching her do her, work her magic. 28:45 And she's got this concept that we call like targeting as creative. But basically like what we find is going back to like that jobs to be done conversation that we had earlier, it all kind of comes together, right? 28:54 So we think that there's 28:58 fifty million Americans, something like that, that are frustrated with the current news environment, and they have the pain that Drew and I had when we started this thing, and they're searching for us, and they haven't found us yet. 29:09 So like our job is to get in front of them, right? 29:11 So the thing that we've done best on, on the creative side of the house, which n- you guys know way more about this than me, but creative is every day gets more and more important. 29:21 Like four years ago was all about how you're setting up your, your, your ads, and are you targeting the right people. Now with like Facebook and Google's AI and machine learning, you just kind of like let the... 29:31 Get out of its way, you feed it awesome creative, and like let the machine do its work and like trust it and amazing things happen. 29:38 But on the creative itself, like what we learned is the more we can lean into that pain point that we have, we, we had, we have and other, millions of others have, and you can display that to folks, and they can see you as a, as a antidote to that pain, the better our CPAs have become. 29:55 So like as an example there, what we see, we use a lot of like testimonials. What we see is like we kind of have this... 30:01 The ads will be something like this, and there's, there's mil- there's different ones we're testing all the time. 30:05 Some are video, some are, are static, some are leaning into like other jobs to be done, like, you know, the comprehensive angle, bringing a lot of things together. 30:12 But our best ads tend to be like something like, "I was so sick of watching the news and all the bias that I turned the television off. 30:22 However, because of that, I was out of the loop."I found 1440, they provide just the facts news, and I love it. And like, it's basically that in a, in a news- in an ad. It's like that, like, what's the hook? 30:37 You guys are way more sophisticated at this stuff than me, but what's the hook? Like, how am I... 30:40 Like, w- but i- for, for the average person who doesn't know, like hooks and all these fancy terms mean, like me, it's basically what is that person that you're trying to find for that jobs to be done has this pain, and you're showing that pain to them, and they resonate with, like, "I have that pain. 30:55 That hurts. I want to fix that pain." So then the next line is like, how do you solve it? You-- We're, we're gonna help you with that, right? 31:02 And then you come to the landing page, and on the landing page, it's like, you know, unbiased, comprehensive news. We s- we're, we're mindful of your time. We're not gonna send you opinions. 31:11 That whole like, you know, left and right, everyone yelling at each other, you're not gonna get any of that here. 31:15 Your blood pressure's gonna be lower because you're just learning facts, and you can move on with your day. So that's like the big thing we've learned is like creative, creative, creative, creative. 31:24 But like what I've learned person- personally is like, yeah, the more you can lean into that, the jobs to be done and the pain you have for your audience, like magic happens that way. Yeah. 31:34 And I'm, I'm looking at your Facebook ad library now, and I think it's worth pointing out that like basically all these ads have a... 31:40 not all of them, but almost all of them have a problem-solution angle or a problem agitate solution angle, whether that's an image or a video or whatever. 31:48 There's also a hundred and forty active ads that you're testing right now, which is... 31:53 I mean, if people don't have a, a sense of how, how much that is, it's, it's way more, maybe like five to 10X more than the average company running Facebook ads, for example. So there's lots of creative testing going on. 32:02 How do you do all this testing? Obviously, you have Erica, of course, is, is doing a lot of this. What's helped you just make so many good ad creatives? Yeah. 32:10 I think here the answer to that question is, so we've always used ad agencies, and one of the awesome changes Erica made for us recently was we went from one agency to three agencies, but they only focus on creative for us because like she had the, the brilliant concept that that's where all the, you know, all the, 32:29 the value is in how good the creative is. So how do we get more really, really smart creative minds on our team? So we currently have three creative agencies. We might even do more going forward. 32:40 It's a little bit tough to manage, but we've-- Matt helped us find one of them, and then [chuckles] like it-- It's, it's just amazing though because like they have different strengths. 32:49 Like I think one of the agencies is really good at like UGC. One of the agencies is a little bit more old school, might be better at statics. 32:55 One of them is better like visually design, you know, like making things look like a big company ads, which don't always mean that they're gonna convert, by the way. Like that's one of the things we've learned. 33:04 So I think it's just like Erica's just done an incredible job because we have all these really smart agencies and people working for us now, and then they're all like learning from each other and off each other and like kind of like, not competing against each other because we, we, we really like all three of them, but they're l- you know, they're trying to, "Oh, what are those guys doing? 33:21 What are we... What do we do? Can we pull that hook into our static ad?" 33:24 And that's why you get whatever it was, a hundred and fifty um, uh, live right now, and we're just throwing it against the wall and seeing what sticks. So Erica manages that for us. 33:33 It's kind of been our, our strategy all along. How do we just come up with as many great ideas as possible? 33:40 And like these algorithms that Facebook and Google have, and even some other platforms, really those two though, you can just, you just throw it up there, and then you have to massage it a little bit, but like, you know very quickly if it's gonna be a successful ad or not. 33:52 And then it's like, what was it about this ad that, that did well? And you just keep on iterating on it. Can we make that a video ad? Can we add a new hook to it? Is there a new background? 34:01 What's-- What is it about that ad that's resonating? But that's... Sorry, that... I was gonna say to answer it shortly, that wasn't a short answer. 34:06 But, so just having really brilliant creative minds on our team, as many of them as possible, to come up with as many concepts as possible to just feed the algorithm the best creative as possible. 34:18 I wanna talk really briefly about buying ads in other newsletters. 34:22 Just any like high-level best practices and tips for p- like people who wanna use that as a growth channel, 'cause like most marketers have never bought an ad in a newsletter. 34:30 So just like quick three to five tips of things to look out for and how to do that. If we could only do one channel, it would be this, buying individual newsletters. It just doesn't scale very well. 34:39 But again, like when we were going from ten thousand to fifty thousand, this was one of our biggest ways to grow, and you get really high quality newsletters if you're partnering with the right folks. 34:49 I would say the biggest thing to look for is the quality of the other newsletter. So like unfortunately, that usually means a higher price. 34:57 If someone has a twenty percent open rate, like you shouldn't be running an ad in them 'cause they really probably have like a ten percent open rate, and like they're just... people don't really... 35:06 they don't like the product unfortunately, and they're not reading it, and they're not gonna engage with an ad. 35:11 So the way I always thought about it when I used to manage these four years ago was if they don't have like a forty-five, four... 35:17 something like that, forty-ish percent open rate, like I just, I generally like don't work with them because you just don't get a lot of return out of them. 35:25 Now, there's some awesome new platforms that do like the CPC selling and that make that not necessarily true, but I'm just talking about like specifically buying from another newsletter in a one-to-one relationship. 35:35 You just want a quality audience, and then if you have a quality audience, you have a high open rate as well. So people that like it, because just like with 1440 or Matt's... 35:43 your newsletter, I think you have a sixty percent open rate as well, last I read. It's like when you send me that newsletter, I'm reading that thing for ten minutes, and I'm scanning every link in it. 35:52 And if you-- if there's an ad in there, I'm like, I trust Matt to deliver me a partner. Like, he's not gonna put any weird company in there. It's gonna be some awesome new marketing company I've never learned about. 36:02 So like I trust you to deliver that to me, and I'm gonna read that, and I'm gonna click on that. So like, if someone... 36:07 if there's Matt's competitor that has a ten percent open rate, that you're just not even looking at it, you're not... you don't have that trust with them. 36:13 So I think it's like only working with partners that are just like world-class or like try to be like the best they can be. It makes sense with like food and restaurants and clothing, right? It's the same thing. 36:22 Like you would... if you were like, you'd want to partner with like one of the best restaurants in your neighborhood. It's... I think it's the same thing, and people sometimes over, overthink it a little bit. 36:29 It's just like, where's the quality? 36:32 And then just go partner with the folks that, that deliver the quality because they have great readers.You said on a recent podcast you're doing over a million dollars in revenue per employee. 36:41 Maybe you could tell the audience, like, you know, I think we- we've talked a little bit about LTV to CAC ratio. How does the newsletter make money? How has this changed over time? 36:49 And then outside of sponsorship, like, have you and the team ever considered or are you thinking about adding additional streams of revenue to Fourteen40? 36:57 The way we make money is we sell placements to our wonderful partners who we love very much. You know, we have like a seventy-five percent rebookings rate. 37:04 So basically, going back to what I just said with, with Matt's newsletter, right? 37:07 Like, people really love our product, and they trust us, and we only-- we only-- we have a rubric for what type of products make it into our newsletter. 37:17 One of the things is someone from our team has had to use the product before. So like, we're not just putting like any, like s-snake... 37:22 Not that other people do that, but like the, the snake oil is not making it in there. Because, again, if you break that trust with the reader o-once, they're not gonna click on an ad next time, right? 37:30 So it's gotta be a great product. So like we all wear, like we use Cariuma once a month. Like Drew wears their sh... Five people on their te- on our team wears their shoes. We do Motley Fool. I still read their... 37:39 I just read their email an hour ago about their next pick of the month. It's all things we're using and we believe in, is the first thing. 37:46 And then, yeah, it's just like we're basically providing them access to three million and growing Americans that have, again, like that trusted relationship with us, that wanna learn about new products. 37:56 That's one thing I think that no-most people don't really grasp, and I didn't either until you hear it. But a lot of people, especially if like they're busy professionals, they actually look for... 38:04 It sounds crazy, but they look forward to the ads because they're like, "Wow, you guys find these really cool companies that I never have heard of before, and I get to like explore." It's like a new type of learning. 38:14 It's like new product learning, but it's a learning thing too. A lot of the people like the ads, so they've actually asked us to keep them. 38:20 So yeah, it's just delivering that, that relationship with them, and then basically like some partners do, um, you know, once a month, some people do twice a month, some people do once a quarter. 38:31 It all comes down to like just what I said earlier, the unit economics, right? So like if we're working with, uh, a credit card company, they... 38:38 Like our, our unit economics, we're making, you know, twenty dollars a lifе- in the lifetime value and spending three bucks on a, a credit card. 38:45 If someone signs up for one, you know, the, the, the company makes a couple hundred dollars, two hundred bucks, two hundred and fifty dollars I think it is. 38:51 So they can spend a hundred and fifty dollars, a hundred dollars acquiring that customer. 38:55 So they're just doing the same thing that we do, but just at a much bigger scale with bigger budgets, and they're just looking for returns. And they're basically saying like, [sniffs] "What's your audience look like? 39:05 Are they gonna click well? Do they perform?" So I think like for us early on, it was how do we get in front of new businesses that we see in other newsletters. Like that was another strategy we did. 39:15 It's like we weren't-- when we were small and had three people on the team, we didn't think it was the best idea to try to sell a new company on why they should be using newsletters. 39:24 We instead were like, "Hey, they're in the hustle." [chuckles] Ma-Matt's team already did that, so like they already like newsletters. They're seeing returns on newsletters. Now we're another like arrow in their quiver. 39:34 So that was like always our strategy going forward. We're now, as we get bigger, we're starting to, to, to do the, the, the former. 39:40 But yeah, just like, you know, th-these, these companies, they have like really large budgets, and if you're worth their time, what's one thing I think like that, you guys have mentioned this on prior podcasts, but like, you know, when you have ten thousand subscribers and you're reaching out to like a big brand, unfortunately it's just like not worth their time. 39:56 "Hey man, even if you get me great unit economics return, you're gonna-- I'm gonna spend two hundred dollars on this today. Like it's just not worth my time. I gotta deploy a ten million dollar quarterly budget." 40:05 So they have to work with larger partners. So it, it almost like in a weird way, it almost gets easier as you get bigger. 40:11 I hate to say that, but it kinda does, 'cause like you can-- you have access to these larger brands that have big budgets. Like, like ButcherBox is one of our clients. We run them all the time. 40:19 We have their meat in our fr- in our freezer, great product. And like they, you know, they have huge, rich unit economics. They have an awesome lifetime value calculation. 40:27 They don't tell us what it is, but I'm sure it's hundreds of dollars, if not thousands of dollars. 40:32 So they can pay money just like we do, but at a much higher CAC, and then they're just, they're just doing the same thing. 40:39 With this boom that we have in the medium that's currently happening right now, how do you contextualize that? Like we've seen some people say things like we're in a newsletter bubble. 40:48 Like what is your take on the framing of this kind of big boom and this big cycle that we're in right now? I, I, I think there, there is, there is like definitely a little bubble. 40:56 I think like a lot of people are getting into this industry, and like rightfully so. 40:59 I think they, they see what, what we've all seen, which is like if you can build a world-class product in a big TAM, you can build a really cool business. 41:07 And even if you're just like a solo operator, like we're seeing a lot of the companies like the, the, uh, like reporters for The New York Times start their own Substack and like have a, a cool little business of their, of their own. 41:17 I think with all of them, though, it's not too dissimilar from like, I'm gonna use the tech bubble in like the '90s or the crypto bubble from three years ago. 41:26 Actually, let's do the tech bu- [chuckles] the tech bubble from the '90s. It's like, yeah, there was like a race, there's a race, and everyone wants to get it in. People are really excited about it. 41:33 But at the end of the day, if you aren't delivering like a world-class quality product, like those guys are gonna fend o- they're, they're not gonna make it in the next six months or nine months, and I think there'll probably be a lot of that, like people like getting into this space and then, "Oh, I have a twenty-five percent open rate," and like they're just, they don't make it. 41:49 But I do think the quality newsletters are gonna keep growing and keep taking share because at the end of the day, like what's so beautiful about our industry is... It's hard to keep bringing up Matt. 42:01 I, I promise that's how I came on here. But like it's like what Matt does or it's like what we do for our- [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] It's like what we do for our reader, right? 42:08 It's like some smart dude who like y-you m-may have ne-never met before. I've met Matt before, but like great. 42:15 He's like out scouring the internet and reading all these awesome things and then using his brain to provide insights on top of that, and he's sending it to my inbox every morning. 42:23 Like I get, I get like I think 100 newsletters. If I wasn't in this space, it might be, might be like 50. 42:29 But some brilliant person loves a space, whether that's like sneakers or Chicago restaurants or politics or newsletters, right? 42:40 It's like some brilliant person is like putting their heart and soul into this thing that they love and researching it for 30 hours a week, and they send it to your inbox, and then you get to click on it whatever the F you want.It's so awesome. 42:52 Like I love them. They're incredible. I'm not just saying this 'cause I'm a [chuckles] newsletter guy. Like they are such an awesome tool for knowledge and learning. 42:58 And if I-- like I, I snooze my like-- I, I do Tuesday nights and Saturday mornings. 43:04 Like I read newsletters for three hours on Tuesday nights from all these different things because, again, some super smart person just did all that work for me for the whole week, and I just get to read the, the output. 43:14 Like how awesome is that as like a human who's like interested in knowledge? So sorry to go on a ramble there, but it's just like I think that that's what's so exciting about this space. 43:22 So I think like, you know, s- a lot of people are gonna come in because like maybe they wanna ma-make a quick buck, or they're entrepreneurial, and they wanna try something. 43:29 But the ones that are gonna win are, again, like just delivering that world-class content because they care, and they have that pain as well or that interest as well. 43:37 And I think like beautiful things are gonna come from that. So will everyone that starts a newsletter make it? Of course not. Just like all the companies in the bubble like didn't make it. 43:45 But like also in the bubble, there was like the tech bubble, sorry. It was like Amazon and Intel, and all these incredible companies were launched back then. Google, right? 43:54 So, and I'm not trying to say like newsletters are, are, are Google or anything like that, but th-there's-- that's how I see it. 43:59 Like there's a rush, and like maybe a rush is bad in some ways, but it's really good because you're getting more people, more creators, more smart people creating items, creating knowledge, which helps the world. 44:11 And it's-- that, that's like a net good thing. Not everyone, not-- they're not all gonna make it, but it's a net good thing. Yeah. I think the product is the problem, right? 44:18 We have a lot of people who kind of-- there's a lot of newsletters in some categories that all kinda look the same. 44:23 The challenge is now like a lot of people have decent open rates, but they don't have good engagement, right? 44:27 They have a newsletter that's kind of a commodity content, and like they have a forty percent open rate, but it's not really an amazing product. 44:33 Like any tips to just make this an awesome product so that I can-- we can succeed through this like newsletter rush? What do you think? Beg your users for feedback. Like literally beg them for feedback. 44:45 Like send them, put it in every email, send them a drip campaign where you're asking them for feedback. Like they tell you. Again, like it's this whole thing about quality and knowledge. 44:55 Like th-they, they signed up because they're eager to learn about something, and if you ask them for feedback, they will help you. So the biggest thing I would say is like just... 45:03 I mean, you're just trying to delight the user, right? So ask them, and they'll tell you. 45:07 And all you have to do is put it in your little-- in the, in the newsletter, and they-- all they have to do is press reply, and they'll tell you. 45:12 Like with a lot of products, I think I've said before, like if you're like a T-shirt company or whatever and you're in Walmart, [chuckles] you don't get to see why that guy chose the other T-shirt versus yours, right? 45:22 With the newsletter, they can tell you, "Your product doesn't help me with this. Can you add this? What about insights? What about fun stuff? What about fascinating tidbits?" Just ask them. 45:32 It's like it's, it's, it's very obvious, but like I think a lot of people just don't listen to the user. And like at the end of the day, that's like all businesses are. 45:39 They're helping people with whatever job they have, and like you're creating-- you're, you're building a service and making someone's life like just like a little bit better. So ask them how you can help do that. Yeah. 45:48 Very few newsletters do that, and then also the ones that do, they don't really put in the work to deliver on what, what people want. 45:55 And so I think if you do those two things, ask for feedback, then deliver on it, uh, you can win. But if you're not gonna do that, it's gonna be much tougher. I wanna get into like the future of Fourteen40. 46:05 Oh, we can go in a lot of different directions with that, but, uh, maybe like a tactical question off that to start with is like, are you gonna explore any more revenue streams? I think you have a Fourteen40, 46:16 I forget, it's like plus or a premium subscription where people can like subscribe to that and not get ads maybe. But I might be wrong about what that product is. 46:23 Tell me about that product, if it's worked, and if there's any more products or revenue streams you wanna explore in the future or not. Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. So I think like we do have a premium product. 46:31 It's got thousands of users, but it's not a huge movele-- uh, needle mover for us. It's basically like an ad-free version. It's almost like Patreon minus the ads. 46:40 So like a lot of people just like wanna support what we're doing, and they lo-love our product, so they pay us ten bucks a month. But again, it's not like moving the needle. 46:47 Love their support, but it's not, it's not the future. Yeah, you know, to date, we've thought about this like basically we could clearly launch like tangential newsletters. 46:55 The way we've thought about that to date is like because our TAM is so large, total addressable market is so large, again, like a third, a third, a third, fifty-fifty male, female spread across America, like we think it's like over fifty million Americans. 47:08 To date, we've basically said that's a large TAM. We still have a relatively small percentage of it. We figured out delivering a world-class product, retention, open rate, all these things we've said. 47:18 So let's like just let that thing keep spinning into that large TAM. 47:22 I think some companies get in trouble because first of all, like having product market fit and like delivering a world-class product, it's not easy, and like a lot of it's like not luck, but you get lucky too. 47:31 Like you were in the right place at the right time. So I think some companies think like because they can do it once, they can do it like fifty times. And we've always basically said like let's... 47:40 So as an example, we, we, we have like a, a lot of scientist readers 'cause of like Drew and, and just like the, the-- we cover CRISPR a lot, and we have a science section. 47:47 We could totally launch a science newsletter like tomorrow. We could've done it three years ago. But like when we look into that, one of the things we find is you have to basically rebuild the entire business, right? 47:56 You need like a new editorial team. You need a new marketer. You might need a product person. You might need a seller. And like when we look at that, it's like, 48:05 is the long-term profitability, like does that make sense for us? If we're just focused on growing eyeballs and growing revenues, it totally makes sense for you. 48:13 But when you start doing that math and you're like, "Okay, I could get a million and a half dollars out of a newsletter in two or three years, but then I have to have a whole team behind it and technology behind it and kinda complicate the business behind it, is that worth it?" 48:25 To date, we've said no, and we've tried to be really disciplined on just delivering that one product and not doing like the tangential newsletter thing. 48:34 I don't know if that's the right strategy, like we're wrong all the [chuckles] time, all the time, but that's how we've thought about it. But we are working on another product. 48:41 We might go that way eventually, but to date, we've just been like focused, focused, focused, be disciplined, focus on the product. It's a big TAM, everything I just said. We are looking at some other things though. 48:51 Like we think we have an opportunity around like just doing what we do best, which is curationWe're not sure what that totally looks like, so we've been MVPing some new product offerings. 49:00 We'd love to tell you more, like, when it's ready. It's not ready right now. But it's, it's all around, like, the thing that we do best, which is curate the entire internet, 49:09 summarize the knowledge, and then deliver that to the user in their inbox. 49:12 And it feels like there's something bigger in there, like, maybe, like, helping them understand what, like, you know, CRISPR is or something like that. 49:20 So we've been MVPing a bunch of things, but we don't have anything yet. So to date, we've always said, like, there's door number one, which is just be a lean and mean business, grow into the TAM, and focus, focus, focus. 49:33 And then door number two is kind of like tangential newsletters, podcasts, kind of like the-- the thing that a lot of companies do in our space, and it, it makes sense for most of them, 49:40 is door two, and we've kind of skipped that, and we're trying to go, like, something bigger with door three, but it might not work, [chuckles] right? 49:47 So we're trying to keep that in mind and just not take our eye off the ball that we have a three million newsletter with sixty percent open rates and world-class retention, and people love our product. 49:55 So we're trying not to forget that and just really focus on it as well. [clears throat] I really admire the focus. 50:01 One question I have is, like, y-you have-- at different stages of the business, you have different growth levers that you use. 50:06 Like when to get to ten thousand subscribers we talked about earlier, to get to five hundred K to, like, three million, you had, you had different growth drivers. 50:13 I think you'll get to five million plus or more with the s- kind of same type of tactics you're doing now. 50:18 What gets Fourteen40 to, like, ten million subscribers, twenty million subscribers, where you're starting to really fill out the TAM that, that you have? Do you-- Are you thinking about what that is now, or any ideas? 50:29 Yeah, that's basically the, the MVP stuff we're trying to do. 50:32 So how do we, like, yeah, go out of just newsletters and into more delivering the same thing we do, but at, like, a larger scale, and that's like-- I would say stay tuned. 50:42 [laughs] We'll see if we can-- We're working on it. We'll see if we can figure it out. I think you will. Do you think about, like, what type of market penetration you can have in that TAM? 50:50 Is that, like, a goal you have in mind, or are you just taking it day to day? Yeah, it's more day to day. I mean, on the newsletter, you know, like the Skimm got-- you know these numbers better than me. 50:59 Like just what, the Skimm got to eight million subscribers just on their newsletter, I think was their, their peak. They do what? Just female millennial or largely, largely female. 51:08 I think our TAM is larger than theirs, so could we get to ten with our standalone product if they got to eight with just, what, thirty, forty percent of the, the market? That doesn't seem crazy to me. 51:20 So yeah, again, like we're, we're trying to think through how to go from five million to ten million to twenty million to a hundred million, but I, I don't think a newsletter gets us to... 51:30 I, I, I think we can get to, like, ten million with a newsletter. We're at three now. 51:33 I think to, like, really make it like a big thing, like, you know, fifty million, like the numbers you threw out, Matt, I think we have to do like another product offering, and that's what we're trying to figure out. 51:41 How do we take what we do best, what we know the customer wants, but give it to them in a slightly-- deliver it to them in a slightly different way? 51:49 And, like, that's what we're spending our time on because we think if we can figure that out, that's like orders of magnitude the volume-- excuse me, the value created versus like a tangential newsletter is like, you know, you grow revenues five percent or whatever. 52:02 Like, it doesn't-- It's wonderful, and we'd love to do that, but we'd rather focus on like Google has that thing like, you know, show me ten X, not ten percent. We're trying to think about that way. 52:11 Where can people learn more about Fourteen40? You like any call to actions for the audience? If I can be helpful to anyone, like this industry is really helpful, I think. 52:19 If folks don't realize that yet, like it's, it's, it's incredible how helpful everyone is in this space. So like, you know, people when I was getting-- when we were getting going, were like incredibly helpful with me. 52:27 I would love to return the favor. Just feel free to email me. I'm at, I'm at Tim, T-I-M, @joinfourteenforty.com. 52:32 I always say this, very few people actually take me up on it, but if I can be helpful in any way with creative growth, business model, unit economics, like you name it. 52:40 If even it's just like a lonely founder that needs like [chuckles] someone to talk to 'cause it's like really, really tough when you first start, yeah, I would love to be helpful. I think that's it. 52:48 Like, just really gr-grateful and honored to, to come on today. 52:51 I admire you both and everything you're building, and it's like really cool what this like whole new media movement's doing for, for knowledge and everything. 52:58 So yeah, joinfourteenforty.com, and then, yeah, Tim @joinfourteenforty if I can help anyone out there in any way. Yeah. Thank you so much, Tim. 53:05 You've really been helpful to me throughout my journey, so I appreciate it, and thank you for coming on. Cool. Thanks so much for the opportunity, guys. [outro jingle] Thanks for listening. 53:18 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. 53:28 If you wanna learn even more about how to grow and monetize a newsletter, go to newsletteroperator.com. 53:33 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. 53:41 [upbeat music]
