Welcome to the second episode of the Creator Spotlight Podcast. Today's episode is with Eric Cantor and Adam Katz from finance media company Vincent. Vincent's offerings include three weekly newsletters and a podcast.
Their work is about keeping their audience of around seventy thousand subscribers informed on what's happening in the world of alternative investments, meaning things like crypto, real estate, collectibles, art or venture opportunities.
Enjoy. So tell me, Eric, I guess you start. Who are you and what is Vincent? And start from the beginning of what is Vincent. Yeah. So my name is Eric Cantor. Vincent is the fifth company that I've started.
Uh, so I guess you could say I'm a technologist. I've also been very deep in private market investing.
So I've done at this point a, a little less than a hundred, been counting, counted recently, a little less than a hundred, uh, angel and seed checks into early-stage companies, many of which were people who I worked with, people who spun off from my companies.
Um, the way Vincent got going is in, in twenty nineteen we were seeing this, this real increase in interest among friends, family, you know, users we were seeing and talking to in, in, in different types of testing around wanting to invest in these asset classes.
And, and we're talking about venture capital, we're talking about crypto, private real estate, private credit, art and collectibles, all these sort of hard to access asset classes, whether it's because you need this specialized knowledge, um, like s- like what a couple of our partners bring to the table with, with collectibles and cards or whether it's, uh, sort of gated like venture capital is very hard to access that just because you gotta write million-dollar checks.
And as we were seeing this increase in interest because people wanted to get into different, you know, diversified portfolios, we were also seeing this explosion of, of new managers, new asset classes, th-this theme of the democratization of investing.
Um, and with the background of the founders, and we will tell you about Adam, we also have myself, um, who's been in the space for a while, Slava Rubin, who was one of the founders of Indiegogo as well as one of the authors of the Jobs Act which was the, the congressional, uh, legislation in twenty twelve that really opened the door for a lot of these new investment types to exist.
All that came together and we said, you know, let's go out and help these investors understand these confusing, fascinating, challenging, frustrating, profitable markets that, that we've been navigating ourselves.
So, so that's really what, what Vincent is and why we're here. Okay. Yeah. Uh, Adam, can you give your, your intro? Yeah, for sure. So I have a legal background.
I'm a lawyer, but, uh, about ten years ago I started getting into real estate investing and spent quite a bit of time.
I live in Brooklyn, and so the New York real estate market is obviously very desirable and with a few good investments I saw how powerful that could be.
And like Eric said, it's a very difficult thing to access, obviously in New York specifically, but any kind of real estate investing. That was sort of my entry way into alternative investing was with real estate.
And I have a- an interest in sports and art and collectibles, and over the last, you know, four or five years as those spaces have become a little bit more democratized, I've done a lot of research and done a lot of writing on those areas
and I, I was drawn to this idea of opening up historically difficult asset classes to everyday investors. It's still very much a work in progress.
Um, you know, there's still a lot of things that are very difficult to access, difficult to understand. They're very opaque markets.
Some of them are open to only accredited investors, some of them are opening up to everybody.
And there's a lot of companies, a lot of platforms, a lot of things in this space that are claiming to offer certain things, and some of them do great jobs and some of them don't. And so
what drew me to this was the ability to help people who were like me a decade ago get into this market because I do think that it can be life-changing financially if you do your research, you understand what you're doing, and you make smart decisions.
Cool.
So it's-- you guys keep talking about this like, like access and giving access to these asset classes which if I'm correct, like looking back at those-- the TechCrunch article, like the early maybe first iteration of Vincent was like a, a search engine for the- these kind of, these kind of assets.
Uh, correct me if I'm wrong. And then now it's developed into like instead of search engine being the way to provide access and, you know, give access to an audience, now it's content.
And it seems to me like you guys have gone from being sort of a, a tech company to now a media company. Is that, is that correct? Yeah.
I mean, you know, we're on a mission to, to help people navigate this challenging market, and there's a lot of ways to get there, right? Um, building apps is frankly what I-- that, that's my,
my main path whereas like the, the content stuff is more of a passion or a hobby. It's not something I've ever done professionally, but I do really enjoy it.
You know, it's really like how are we gonna help solve this problem of information, of access? And like, yes, you're right.
We've, we've built some tech, we've built some, uh, websites, we've built an app, we raised a fund, um, but really now we're focused on, on just like telling the story, engaging the investors,
and this is just the way that we're, we're delivering that mission today. Uh, and I think the evolution is, is actually pretty sensible and it's really been consistent in terms of what we want to accomplish.
We've just realized that, you know, okay, if approach A doesn't work, try the next one. Yeah. That's, that's really interesting. Like again, again, what I was, what I was saying earlier about how it's like
it seems like you guys have come to this in a different way than like most other creators, but I would put you in this category of creators where it's like, you know, you are the-- you're coming from the expert angle where you've got these years of experience- Mm-hmm.
-on the topic. So like that then... is why people come to you, which, uh, I do wanna ask about the audience.
I, I think looking at the site there's-- you say you have seventy thousand subscribers to Vincent Spotlight, and there's the three newsletters. Uh, there's the Spotlight, Premoney, and the Real Estate. Correct?
Um, so is the seventy thousand, like, is that total? Is that just for Vincent Spotlight? That is just for Vincent Spotlight.
We've got about forty thousand on the Real Estate Report, and I think about thirty-six on Premoney. Nice. Nice.
Um, and then, like, who that audience is, I'm curious if you know, if like how much of that is people who are, like, actively investing and, you know, like, engaging these activities, and then how much is more, like, aspirational, like they're just interested in the space but not necessarily engaging.
Do you-- do you have any idea? It definitely runs the gamut, right? I mean, this...
We've been building this audience for four years now, because even when we were doing the other chapters you referred to, we were really digging deep into...
We, we had this weekly newsletter, Spot, which is now Spotlight- Mm. -um, since twenty nineteen.
We also, when, when we were in more in the investing game, we were doing a lot of memos and deal analysis and, and quantitative analysis, so we were writing and, and communicating that way.
The audience, frankly, is sort of the accumulation of all these different pieces of outreach and all these programs, and people we know and people who've seen us on LinkedIn, and it really runs the gamut.
I mean, you know, when we ask, you know, we, we, we find that about a third of our audience is accredited investors, which means they have a net worth of a million dollars or more, excluding the primary residence, or they make two hundred thousand dollars, which puts them in position to participate in a lot more of the opportunities that we talk about and share.
However, there's also a number of opportunities for, for investors that are looking to write smaller checks, and there's many of those. Uh, and then you've got the handful of, of folks who can write, you know, uh, uh,
get my arithmetic out, write like a nine-figure check. [chuckles] Um, I'm not gonna say that, that, that the audience is full of those, but, you know, we, we really don't differentiate on how big is your check.
It's more about do you wanna really get in the weeds on how these industries work, what the opportunities are, what the patterns are, so that whatever investment level you're at, you, you can engage. Yeah.
Um, but the audience is, you know, it's all US-based. It's a third accredited. Um, it's, it's, you know, people that are somewhere on that investment journey.
To add to that, when we've done surveys, we found that about seventy percent of people have come in already having invested in one of the alternative assets. But, you know, there's not a lot of
knowledge overlap necessarily between real estate and collectibles and venture capital and crypto. I mean, there are fundamental investing maxims that we try. You know, do your research.
Make sure that everything is on the level. Due diligence is important. Evaluate every opportunity separately.
There are things that are universal between these things, but what I think we try to offer is if you are interested in real estate, you can come in and learn about all these other alternative asset classes.
Um, and we also have found that about, like Eric said, a third are accredited, but about a third are actively looking to invest five figures or more into some sort of alternative investing opportunity. Yeah. That's...
I mean, that's really impressive you guys have, have built that kind of data profile and that's like a... I mean, that's...
The, the fact that a third of seventy thousand people, you know, are coming in with like the, the two hundred... That are, are accredited, that's, that's amazing.
Um, you said, Eric, that you've been doing the weekly Spotlight since twenty nineteen, but when I, when I was looking, I've only seen, you know, what's on Beehive, which goes back about a year.
So I, I'm curious like how that newsletter has evolved, 'cause that...
If, you know, the Vincent itself has changed and evolved a lot in the past five years, but the newsletter is like that constant that now is your hero product, it seems like.
How has that changed, and like what was the intent with the newsletter at the beginning, and what's been the evolution? What is it now? Is it different than it, like it was five years ago?
It's a good que- I mean, you know, the, the, the inspiration of, of Spotlight was that, hey, we're gonna be in this market. We're serious about this market. We want to, you know, help.
We wanna give before we take, right?
That's kind of like how I operate in general, and, and I think it's also happens to be a very effective tactic at building trust with your industry before you start, you know, trying to sell them some product.
So really before we even had a proper website with Vincent, we would go through the week's news and private markets, cobble together a few bullet points, and send a little memo to our audience, and that through many evolutions is now Spotlight.
Um, but I'm sure if you went... We should go back for fun and take a look at the, you know, March twenty nineteen, uh, pulse w- and, and see what, what that looks like. But really, you know...
Somebody asked me this the other day, uh, you know, "Why are you doing it?" You know, I enjoy-- we enjoy, like Adam and I are geeking out on like, how much did this baseball card go for at the auction?
What are the factors in that? We would be talking about that even if we weren't sending an email about it. We would be talking about that even if we weren't trying to build a company.
So to do this service to everyone and say, "Hey, let's let you in our thinking and save you some time, tell you what the important stuff is, 'cause we just studied it anyway and we're not gonna shut up about it," um, that just seems like a natural thing to do.
So we started doing that, and it kind of accompanied us through these different patterns of the journey, and then a-as you said, we, we woke up one day and said, "Wow, this, this is really the most powerful asset we've built, and the one that we have fun with."
You know? It's... I'm not gonna say it's not stressful, but like,
I mean, we actually look forward to putting this in people's hands, and we look forward to these events, discussions, and podcasts that we do with interesting people, investors, um, and we, we take it quite seriously 'cause it's-- we're also part of that audience.
So I think it's just an outgrowth of, of-You know, what comes naturally to us. I, I would say in the couple of years that I've been, you know, writing these newsletters, it's-- I would say the mission hasn't changed.
It's to educate the audience and it-- keep them informed. We've certainly gone through a lot of different design iterations.
Uh, and like Eric said, if we-- you look back at the ones from, you know, twenty twenty-one, uh, I think we've made significant improvements and, you know, in different kinds of-- different just formats to get people to get this information in the most concise and effective way possible, so that they don't have to spend the hours and hours that we spend reading about this stuff and researching it and looking into it.
They can get in five minutes, get it delivered to them for free once a week and feel like they understand what is happening in these markets. Yeah. That's-- So what you said about like...
Eric, I think what you said about like, you know, that you were already doing this, you guys would be like texting or whatever, meeting up and chatting about this baseball card that went for this price, whatever.
Anyways, I think like that, that, that's like such a commonality with, with people I talk to.
Like I talked to this guy a few weeks ago who runs a, uh, fantasy Premier League, you know, like the English Soccer League, fantasy Premier League newsletter, and it's like he was-- what, what he said was about a different topic, but it's the same thing, right?
He's like, "Me and my friends are like the hardcore experts who are going in and like listening to the podcast, reading the Reddit posts, doing all this."
So it's like distilling that into a, you know, a thing you can read in three minutes is like the value we bring.
And I think that's, you know, that's not the only m-model of newsletter, but I think it's one that like, again, because to really make a good product, you have to be doing it in your own time and, and absorbing it.
So yeah, I don't know. Did, did you like-- did you expect that like you would end up like building this kind of one... It's 'cause it's kind of like a one to many...
It's not consulting, but it's like this one to many like... Is that what you expected to build here? Is that like- I mean, you know, startups are fun.
You, you, you sort of find where the opportunity is and go after it, and by the time you perfect that, you realize that it's already obsolete and you gotta take it to the next level.
So getting our thoughts together and building this like honest and, and complete sort of thorough, um, you know, communication with a broad audience, it has been part of what we've been since day one.
If you asked me four years ago, would that be the focus right now? I, I probably would've said no. But- Yeah... you know, you gotta follow where your passion is, and you gotta follow where the opportunity is.
And, and I feel like- Mm-hmm... you know, th-this has been the best, this is the best quarter we ever had as a, as a business, um, probably because we're doing the thing that we're, we're meant to be doing. Yeah.
How many of you is it, by the way, who make up Vincent? We have a team of five now. Uh, so we have a couple- Okay... c- uh, contributors on the content design side.
We have Adam and myself who run the, the, you know, research and publications. We have Slava who does the podcast. Uh, and then we do some-- we, we from time to time we'll, we'll pull some events together.
Always hard 'cause it's like herding cats. You know, getting everybody to show up at the same Zoom link or, or, uh, physical location at time, but those are really impactful. Uh, we wanna do more of them this year.
Uh, I wanted to ask, so you mentioned Slava in the podcast, and I, I listened to the most recent episode earlier, and I was looking back at like some of the names, people you've had on there, and it's like this congressman, Anthony Scaramucci.
You know, there's, there's all these names where I was like, "Oh, wow." You know, I didn't-- and then I looked up, I was like, okay, Slava was, you know, founded Indiegogo, et cetera. Mm-hmm. Um, starts to make sense.
But I think it's interesting that like there's that, and that is kind of a personality-driven thing where he is really the face of it. But then you guys aren't so much the bylines of the newsletter.
Um, and I, I'm curious like why you've made that decision and if that's something you think about, like branding it more as like p- these are Eric's thoughts or these are Adam's thoughts.
You know, like is there a reason why you haven't done that? And why the...
I mean, the podcast obviously, it's like a one person recorded talking to another person, so you can't really avoid that kind of personal branding.
But yeah, but my question is like, uh, if you have thoughts about that around the byline on the newsletters. I mean, you know, Slava is-- does have that pedigree, right?
He started Indiegogo, which w- you could argue was kind of version one of where we're now in version three of sort of crowd-based finance. He was part of that Jobs Act.
You, you referred to Congressman McHenry, who he knows quite well. Uh, you know, Joe Lonsdale's in there. Scaramucci fits in on the, on the crypto side. So a lot of these like
the types of investments we're talking about, like he had a hand in making possible like ten years ago, um, and he more has that personality.
Um, so yeah, he takes the lead on, on sort of that opinion and, and interacting with, with people who wanna like come on our podcast and share their, their thoughts and backgrounds.
My appro-- I mean, I'm more into the sort of news you can use approach, which is just here's the important stuff, th-there's opinion on it for sure, but there's not, not trying to convince you of some way of thinking or some religious dogma or some, uh,
you know, thesis. I do think that's interesting.
I think we have room for that in the Vincent content universe, but it's like, you know, you wanna get something right before you go and do like five other things, and we just haven't gotten there yet.
Oh, and to answer your question about the bylines, that was a conscious decision we made many years ago that we felt that the newsletter should come from Vincent the company, rather than- Mm-hmm...
you know, this is written by Adam Katz or Eric Kanter. It's also somewhat of a collaborative thing, so it's not necessarily just one of us writing the entire newsletter.
We, we look over these things, and so it really is like a company-wide thing.
And I feel like when you can do that and build trust from the company, that's, that's gonna be more valuable than just, here's what I think about this collectible thing that happened or this art thing that happened.
Especially because, at least for me, I think that the core of the mission isn't, "Hey, we're gonna tell you what to think or what to do."
It's more that we're gonna teach you what's important to look for, and that it is important to do your own research and to diligence things and toTake into consideration all of the information out there before coming to a decision.
And so I think that the way that we have it now where it's just coming from Vincent rather than one of us kind of reflects that ethos the best way. Yeah.
On the-- kind of on the same topic, do you have like editorial guidelines you've baked in? We definitely have it. We talk about it a lot, like on a week to week, um, and, you know, just on-- in the Slack group.
Um, there's definitely principles. If you asked me to send you like forty-seven pages of them like Financial Times, we-- that's not something we can do. But like there's definitely places we go and don't go.
And it also evolves. I mean, we're talking about, well, what's the next frontier?
What's the next investment area that, that our, that our users are asking for, and do we feel like we can deliver that, or how do we get there to do that? Incidentally, just as a side note, um,
I did not go to journalism school, but I did get a Master's of International Affairs degree in between a couple of my companies. And I took a... And it was at Columbia.
I took a number of classes at the journalism school.
And when I finished the, the, the master's degree, I, I said to my advisor, I said, "You know, I think I wanna either build another business with all this stuff I've learned here or be a journalist."
Um, ended up going to East Africa and having another different adventure w- more about building tech and, and a business.
But I, I always did have that kind of interest there, and, and I'm, you know, I'm finding it very satisfying to pursue that now. Um, I don't know.
I don't think I'd call myself a journalist, but like the, the idea of taking complicated ideas, synthesizing them, looking for truth, and then sharing it with people in a way that, that helps them save some time and frustration is, is definitely wired into me pretty deep.
To jump in to answer your question, Francis, there's...
You know, within the worlds that we are covering, which, uh, you know, tend to be pretty discreet, you know, I don't think there's, there's areas or things that we're avoiding writing about, you know.
I think that we all... Eric and I are both interested, and Slava, very interested in this world. We're interested in the different asset classes.
We each have, you know, our own opinions and own favorites and things that we might not be as interested in.
But I think what, what I-- what's important is that we-- even if I might not think that I would invest in a certain thing personally, it might be something that somebody else is interested in and might find informative and might find interesting, and also it might be a good investment for them.
And so I think that we do our best not to editorialize as much, to try and keep this, at least in the newsletters, m- a more neutral space. We never wanna say, "Hey, like this is a great investment.
You need to get your money in right now." And we also don't wanna say, "Oh, this is a terrible investment," like, "Stay away," unless it is very obviously a terrible investment.
But it's, it's more informative and shaping people towards what they should be looking for as opposed to like giving them the opinion that they should have, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm.
No, that make-- yeah, I mean, that makes sense. You're, you're, you're presenting this information. People can do with it what they will. Um,
s-still thinking about kind of this journalistic aspect, you know, I'm a big believer in the idea that any, any content anybody is putting out online is in competition with any other piece of content anyone could be consuming, whether it's a TV show or, you know, s- just comments.
You're reading comments on social media, you're on Twitter, whatever. It's all in competition, right?
And I think big picture, like macro level of what you guys are doing, you're in competition, like I said, with like a Financial Times from like a Robinhood, you know, weekly newsletter to people chatting on like Reddit, WallStreetBets, right?
Like anybody feasibly interested in investment is like potentially spending some of their time doing that.
And like I'm-- do you guys think about like your, your content in relation to these other things that anybody feasibly in-interested in investing could be looking at it?
Like how do you make sure that your story stands out and people are coming to you instead of spending, you know, their hour of time every afternoon reading content from any of those other sources?
Hopefully you're spending five minutes, not an hour.
But, um, and maybe you're reading a few newsletters c- because we believe that newsletters and this type of sort of more intimate affinity-based communication is how people are gonna get their information.
G- because they trust the source, they're interested in the con- in the material being covered, and they wanna save time, right?
They don't wanna go Googling twenty-nine different stories, fighting through paywalls, trying to interpret what it means. They just sort of wanna digest. I, I'm the same way with other fields.
Like, you know, I read a newsletter in the morning, tell me what happened in the news, in politics, 'cause I don't wanna go dig into that. You know, we're not breaking stories, right?
We're not like the first to find out about, about OpenAI's financing. What we are able to do is tell a certain type of investor, right? And it's not a big hedge fund.
You know, we get a couple of those, but s- we're not focused on that big institutional need, and it's not somebody who just got their first, you know, uh, Robinhood, you know, app and a couple of free shares.
It's, it's the people, the everyday people like us, like the people in between who are really fascinated by these asset classes and, and know there's an opportunity there and wanna sort of learn about it as they go and, and get exposed to some interesting and potentially, uh, hopefully profitable and, and, um, you know, learning-based opportunities to invest.
And that need isn't being served as much. There's a lot of the inside baseball, and there's a lot of the 101 beginner stuff, but there's not a lot of like, let's call it the 201, right?
[chuckles] You know a little bit to be dangerous. Now let's really help you refine that. Um, so that's the audience we have, and that's, you know, we feel like there's a massive audience for this out there.
So it's, it's less about knowing some scoop that somebody else does or doesn't have, and it's more about just meeting people really where they are and where they wanna go. Yeah.
I mean, to be perfectly frank, we don't really think aboutOther people doing this stuff, we're not, we're not sitting around thinking like, how can we differentiate ourselves from, you know, Robin Hood Snacks or Morning Brew or whatever.
Like, we feel pretty comfortable with our place in this particular ecosystem, and we do know that there aren't a lot of people doing what we're doing and covering the asset classes that we're covering and that have our kind of expertise in it.
So, you know, I'm not saying that we're, we're the, the best thing out there, but we don't really take a lot of time to consider what the competition is doing.
I think we have a good idea of what we want to accomplish and how we can accomplish that, and I think we're on the path.
There's obviously s- still a lot of room to improve, but I think that we have gotten better at it, and I think that by focusing on this newsletter stuff, we're getting closer to fulfilling like our mission, our original mission of bringing these asset classes to the general public.
I mean, yeah, if you're spending too much time thinking about the competition, you're just gonna make stuff that looks like the competition too.
And like I said too, it's not necessarily like direct competition, but more so the like baseline content level competition, uh, attention economy competition. Um,
so I wanted to ask about like, again, the audience and growing the audience. So it's at seventy thousand. How, how have you got to seventy thousand? Like, what were the ways...
How did you get like the first, you know, a thousand, first ten thousand? Was there any inflection points? Like, where have those people come from to, to your content?
Yeah, I mean, there's been a number of chapters on them. Yeah, so the first thousand, just like people we knew, right?
We're, we're fairly well connected in like the venture startup community, and, you know, we said, "Hey, we, we're starting this company. Sign up." And then, "Okay, we have all these email addresses.
What should we do with them? Oh, I know, let's send them an update that might be interesting." And, and, you know, it's not so different from user seventy thousand, right?
Like [chuckles] they still gotta put out something interesting that's compelling, and they don't care, right?
If, if you're the seventy thousandth person, you don't really care that there are sixty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine others, right? You want it... This is like a context for me that I wanna get into.
And if I don't wanna get into, it's pretty easy. I just hit this one button, and I'm done. I don't have to think about that again, which I do.
You know, I unsubscribe from newsletters like almost every day 'cause I'm on a lot of them. Um,
so I, I think we've just gone through these different chapters of evolution, and in each chapter, the people who wanna be in, you know, hunker down, and the ones who don't leave.
So by, by a few years down the road, you really have a strong audience in, in the sense that like the people that wanna be there are there. Um, and it's really morphed through... There's a lot of, uh, word of mouth.
There's a lot of different press and launches that we've done.
Um, we do a little bit of acquisition through some of the ecosystems we're in, like Beehive, Spark Loop, just piggybacking on other like similar interest areas and trying to share, um, you know, that way cost effectively.
But yeah, it's, it's... You know, there's a lot of ways to reach the right reader, uh, and they know who they are, and they're, they're [chuckles] they vote quickly, right? Getting in, getting out.
I mean, they make the decision. Um, I don't know if you wanna add anything to that, Adam. I mean, I think that for newsletters, growth is always one of the top concerns, if not the top concern.
You know, you wanna bring more people. And we know that there... We feel there is a large audience for this, and we've just kind of scratched the surface.
Um, and you know, if we were to talk next year, w- I would hope that our audience would be as committed and as passionate, but significantly larger. [chuckles] Hopefully. Knock on wood.
Um, so what about with the, the other newsletters that it's-- I think it's what, six months and three months they've been around respectively, and you said you've got in the thirty thousands for both of them.
Is that just like people... Did you just opt in people from the spotlight, or did you like give the option, "Hey, you can sign up for this"? How did, how did you get those counts?
Like Eric said, we've spent years in kind of different iterations of the business bringing people onto our like master list
from the search engine, from our investors, from people who went to our events or podcast listeners, people who were early readers of, you know, what was then called Pulse is now called Spotlight.
I mean, there, there's, there's a lot of different paths that people got in there. But we--
I would say j- just before we got onto Beehive with our old provider, we, we did a large audience survey, and we were trying to drill down what asset classes people were most interested in.
And we've actually done some version of that survey, uh, many times over the last three or four years. And consistently, the top two were real estate and venture.
And so we knew that those were gonna be the ones that we wanted to have people... You know, that we wanted to introduce as our like specific deeper dive newsletters. And so we knew who was interested in those things.
We invited them in, and we've done a lot of work to grow those lists separately than Spotlight itself. Like where we, we have these growth programs for each one of the newsletters separately, if that makes sense. Yeah.
There, there is a... There's always been this thesis we've had, and it proves out in the data, right?
Like, Adam, I think you just said that, you know, last survey or one of the surveys we did, eighty percent are interested in venture and eighty percent are interested in real estate.
So, you know, depending how overlap-- It's clearly more overlapping than not, right? So a lot of people wanna be on both of those. Some wanna be on one but not the other. Some wanna be on neither.
Um, the broader publication, Spotlight, is kind of like all-encompassing, so it talks about a lot of different assets. The other ones go a little deeper, which some people like. Um, so again, people filter.
You know, we invite certain people, "Hey, it seems like you're interested in venture. You wanna try this?" Some say yes, some say no, but they, they get themselves to where they need to be.
Um, and, and we think that there's at least two other verticals that areHigh interest, maybe not as much as these two, but two other verticals that we could really engage people in pretty richly and, and meet what, what we believe they're asking us for, uh, just in the private market investment world.
Which is... I mean, it makes sense that people are signed up for all three of them because I think one-- they all go on different days of the week.
I forget if one's like Monday, one, one's Wednesday, one's Friday, whatever. Mm-hmm.
And so it would make complete sense to then have two more, and then you-you're sending a newsletter every day of the week, but it's so like choose your own adventure. You don't have to get...
Like you can be subscribed to only one, and yeah. So I th-I think that, that makes a lot of sense and like, you know, then you're only focusing on one thing. That is definitely the path that we are headed down, for sure.
Yeah. No, that's, that's smart. Um, I wanted to ask like the next... So five years you've got to this from a, a very different start. How are you thinking about the next five years?
Are, are you thinking that far in advance, or is it kind of just like we're, we're, we're sending, we're sending this newsletter issue by issue and we see where we go? Or is there kind of this five-year vision of that?
Five years is a lot, but we definitely are thinking of the future, and we probably look at more like eighteen to twenty-four month increments.
Um, you know, we believe there's a story to be told here that's really at like, at-- such as scratching the surface. So what does that look like at a, at a more, more serious scale?
Like you said, daily newsletters on different topics so people can choose their own adventure, but also a lot more engagement around, you know, a lot of people are thinking about who am I investing with, right?
So there needs to be some either in-person events and conferences which exist in our industry, but they're still very like primitively organized and, and thought through.
Um, and/or, you know, some kind of club or community that you can be, you can be a part of. So we see a roadmap of eighteen months where we just do what we're doing bigger, better, um, and engaging more people with it.
There's also a lot of, of other like complimentary components we can bring in once we get there. Ideally, you're gonna be hearing about Vincent Media on a much bigger stage in, in five years, but even, even two. Yeah.
I would, I would add to that. We're-- we definitely plan for the future. There's always alterations to be made as you continue on, but I do think that there's...
I mean, everybody that I talk to who asks me what I'm doing, you know, what do I do for a living, whether it's friends or people I've just met, when I tell them, there-- I see that there's an interest there from pretty much everybody.
And maybe they're not interested in crypto or maybe they're not interested in real estate, but one of these things that we talk about is gonna catch your attention.
And when you're talking about art or you're talking about collectibles, these things are really interesting.
I mean, that's how I got involved with it in the first place, is that I think that these things are very interesting.
And I think that the newsletter is a great way to get people in, but I would love to expand it further and be able to tell more in-depth stories about these things and the companies and the investments and just the asset classes in general.
And I think that that is a path that we're trying to get towards. Um, and in the short term, we definitely wanna build out our, our brand and also, you know, get to a point where we are sending something out every day.
And then past that, just expand our offerings. You know, we're, we're focusing more on the podcast as well now.
I think that, I think that there is a lot of interest in a lot of these asset classes, and I don't think there's a lot of other people covering them the way that we are. Yeah.
Do you-- so right now it's just newsletters and a podcast. You know, you have a Twitter account, you have a LinkedIn account, et cetera, but it's not really a social presence. I'm wondering too if that's like...
If there's, you know, do you expand and you have like somebody talking about these on TikTok every day or whatever? Like do you, do you think about expanding to these other media, or is it just like newsletters?
I mean, obviously newsletters are so perfectly suited for this, right? It's, it's intimate. You can send, you send it out like once a week for each thing, and that's like enough people need.
Um, but yeah, do you think about like getting on social and expanding kind of the media offering, the content offering in that way? Definitely. We wanna be telling these stories in, in various channels.
I, I think we've had a pretty strong belief in do one thing really well [chuckles] and then do the next thing, which is why we haven't gotten as deeply invested in any particular social channel. Um,
and we're, you know, we're a very small team. We'd like to hire, you know.
If you, if you know of anybody who's super skilled in these areas and wants to create and wants to engage, like we definitely wanna go bigger now that we've got like the core team locked down.
But yes, I mean, we definitely think those channels are really relevant to telling any story, and we should avail that to ourselves and to the partners that we work with. Okay.
Next thing I do, I do wanna definitely talk about while you guys are both here is monetization, right? So, you know, I, I know you have ads, um, but I'm curious like what sustains Vincent as a business.
Obviously, all of you who are involved in it are like-- are investing and you have income that way. This isn't your only source of income. That's kind of, you know, just part of the, part of the whole thing here.
Um, but I am curious if like Vincent is sustainable as a business. Is there a, in a revenue stream that allows you to hire a whole another person, et cetera?
Or is it like you are actively investing in the business yourselves to, to keep it going? How-- what is kind of the, the, the revenue situation? Yeah. So, um, we're pretty close to being a profitable business.
We're not there yet. Made a ton of progress on it. Uh, we do have investors, so we do have some capital to rely on to run these experiments or to invest in a new person or a growth tactic prior to it becoming profitable.
But like, you know, we're, we're...
Like everyone else in the ecosystem today, you know, that, that investment better yield some fruit in like three to six months or else it was a bad one, uh, which is really different from the climate of a couple years ago.
But, um, our revenue mainly right now comes from partnerships. So people sponsor our newsletter. They sponsor links in our different newsletters. They create events with us.
They come on our podcast.Um, they pull us into other bits and pieces of their marketing and, and content efforts.
Um, and that is the revenue stream we have and a revenue stream we, we believe we can grow pretty substantially. There, there's a huge need...
Remember we talked at, at the beginning about how this whole ecosystem of investment managers and platforms and providers and issuers now, if you're familiar with Reg A, uh, have, have come to light after the Jobs Act.
So all of those people need to tell their story, and they're generally consumed with either, you know, regulatory and compliance, which is a huge burden in our space as we've all lived ourselves as well and understand, and just running the investment operation of the business.
So this idea of going out and getting customers and telling the story doesn't always come super naturally to them. So that's where we step in. They trust us, the audience trusts us.
We have to try to convey some of that trust. And, and like Adam said, that, that is challenging. We've had situations where...
We had one recently where we said-- we, you know, we looked at one of the investments that want-- somebody wanted to talk about, and we weren't really comfortable with it.
You know, our test is, would you evaluate this for your grandmother's, you know, retirement account? You know, understanding that these are, you know, edgy assets, right?
Like, th-there's always risk in a startup or any of these, these deals we're talking about, but you wanna feel like it's mitigated enough that these are real serious people with serious conversations to have.
And so if it's not that, we won't even run it. Luckily, there's this whole ecosystem of providers and managers and they all want help telling that story. So that's really the opportunity for, for Vincent Media right now.
That's, that's, that's really interesting. I think with the, with, with the ads too, it's like,
you know, you have, you, you have good data about your audience, and you know that it's such a high value audience that, that then allows you to charge a pretty nice fee to, to, you know, to sponsor a newsletter, advertise in a newsletter.
Um, so is that like... Is one hundred percent of your revenue these kind of partnerships inclusive of ads and events and whatever, that's a hundred percent? That is our revenue to date on the media business.
We have, you know, had other types of arrangements in, in the prior chapters of Vincent, some of which still pay royalties to us. But yeah, like, this is, this is all we're selling and doing right now. Um- Mm-hmm.
And this is what needs to sustain the business and, and that's really where the opportunity is that, that we're focused on.
Do you have like a, a couple other revenue streams that you're like hoping to launch in the next eighteen to twenty-four months, or is it still like just scaling partnerships? Um, yes and no.
I mean, we wanna get this right before we move on to the next thing, but there's a lot of services and products that our investors demand and need, and so we are open to how can we help provide that.
For instance, a lot of people would like to take a course on being a better investor in one or more of these asset categories. We have some partners who wanna build that course.
So, you know, do we trust what they're building and wanna launch it with them? Do we wanna let them be a partner and just sponsor us, or do we wanna actually get involved a little more deeply in the delivery of that?
Um, and there, you know, I just mentioned courses as one popular area, but there, there's a lot of different, um, services that would make sense to introduce to our channel.
Something that I just wanna make sure is out there is that we are-- we have no plans and we do not want to, and we are never going to charge for the newsletters.
You know, this is something that we're very committed to, keeping the newsletters free for the readers, because I think that's a big part of
our, you know, our mission is to, to democratize this, these assets, but also democratize this information. So
it w- like, I know that a-- that there's a very natural thing for newsletters to start as a free thing, and then maybe they start charging and you get-- you, you pay a little bit more and you get better features or whatever.
That, that is not something that we are intending to do. Yeah. So I, I like that, like having that, that guarantee, guarantee to the audience.
Um, and I'm always curious when I talk to people who like are building an audience like this, like what you think your responsibility to your audience is.
Like, again, going back to traditional journalism, there's usually this assumption of like the responsibility of, you know, X like national publication is to give readers like some version of truth, right? To this...
The objective journalistic truth, whatever. Um, how do you think about your responsibility to your audience?
Like what, what i-- in what level are you accountable to the seventy thousand people reading the newsletter, right? Like, how do you... Because that's kind of, you know, that's a lot of people.
What do they-- what, what's your responsibility to them?
You know, I mean, I, I, I think we talk to them the way we would talk at a cocktail party or on a stage or in a text message thread with, with your cousin, which is, you know, I don't know everything, but I wanna give you the guidelines to be successful in the space.
And, you know, when we talk about these partners and sponsors, like, people understand that we're giving them a platform to introduce a deal, but you still have to like go look at it for yourself.
Um, th-that's really the, the ethos that we're trying to, you know, perpetuate here.
I mean, I think, I think it's a great question, and I think that it's something that we talk about a lot because we wanna make sure that we're acting with like the utmost integrity and honesty here when communicating, because we don't want to lead anybody astray 'cause this is...
To a lot of people, this is a new and foreign world of investing. And like Eric said, there's a lot of risk inherent in a lot of these asset classes, and specifically in some of the opportunities in the asset classes.
There's a lot of potential reward, but there's a lot of risk, and I think it's really, really important to communicate that. And
I think my goal, and I think our goal for these newsletters, and something that we've talked about a lot, is that we wanna have somebody who's a regular reader.
If you, if you read our newsletters every week, you will come awayNot as a expert or somebody who has a deep knowledge, but you will have a strong understanding of what is currently happening in those worlds right now,
that you aren't gonna feel like you've missed something big that we haven't covered or something important that we haven't covered.
And I think that that, that's what we're trying to, to promise the audience here, is that give us f- five minutes of your time to read this newsletter every week, and you're gonna come away learning a lot more than you knew before.
It's a good proposition, yeah. I have to jump in two minutes, but can I-- I just wanna make one point that you didn't really ask about, but- Yeah... I just wanted to make sure it was in part of this chat.
So, you know, the newsletter business is evolving, and one of the things we geek out on that's pretty fascinating is this trade of newsletters and subscribers and the economics underneath it.
We s- we spoke a little bit about on the call. I just wanted to acknowledge that like a tool like Beehiiv
that goes a lot deeper than, you know, the prior email system we were using that just, you know, you put in a list of emails and you sent some emails, but there was no notion of how many are there?
How m- how much is this worth? How can you earn money? How can you get more of these people? Like, just that, that end-to-end tooling, it-it's, it's...
I mean, A, it's, it's been very influential in like what we've been able to... how we've been able to approach this. B, it's fascinating.
C, I think I have like 17 items on the Beehiiv roadmap, four support tickets in, nine people that I'm harassing on a regular basis. And so like, in a way, I, I do feel like a connection to, to the company. Um- Mm-hmm...
unfortunately, I was never given the option to invest in the company, but, you know, we'll leave that aside.
But, but really, you know, Beehiiv is a part of our operation in a, in a pretty profound way, more than many other tools that we've used in the past or are using now. And I just wanted to
acknowledge that just as part of the chat. No, thank you for that. Yeah. I would, I would add to that, that, you know, we moved to Beehiiv last May, last June, and that has profoundly changed
how we've conceived of this business and the business model, because at that time, we hadn't fully committed to focus the newsletter as our primary source of income and our primary product.
That was part of the transition. We were thinking, "Okay, if this works, this could be a direction that we go down." But I do think that that w- that was a, a big part of it was, was switching over to Beehiiv.
And, you know, I think that it, it's a large reason that we are doing what we are doing right now. It sounds like it was a pretty, like, you know, big switch was flipped. But what specifically?
In my view, I'm gonna answer then I'm gonna jump off. Uh, in my view, it's actually just that Beehiiv understands. Like, it's, it's philosophical.
It's not like the feature, "Oh, yeah, that button on your site's really cool," you know? It's, it's
you guys are like backing up the business we're trying to build and all of the features and all of the roadmaps are driving toward making that more successful. And it's not perfect, right?
You're on the quest to make it perfect, but like the, the concept, the idea is very aligned with what we're doing. That, that's where it's special, I think. Anyway, I gotta jump. Thank you for- Pleasure to meet you.
I'll be in touch soon. Thank you. Um, Adam, if you could stick around for a second, there's... I'd love to ask you a couple more questions. Yeah. Sure. Um- Of course.
Big one that I always like to get as kind of like something to extract for the audience is just any really tactical advice about creating a newsletter, sustaining a newsletter, growing a newsletter, writing a newsletter, whatever it is, any tactical advice about operating a newsletter that's like a, something anybody reading this who also operates a newsletter could take away and, and apply to their work?
Sure.
I mean, this might not be exactly the answer because I don't know how tactical it is, and, and we touched upon it before, and I think you even were talking about it, but it's you need to find something that you believe in and something that you are interested in, because I think the audience is gonna know that, you know?
I think, I think your passion for something and your interest in something is gonna come through in your writing. And like Eric said, this is something, you know, uh,
if you were in our, our weekly meetings, a lot, you know, Slava and I especially are, you know, talking about, you know, these collectible sales and these things. Like, it's, it's, it's what we're interested in. And- Mm.
And also just investing. We all come from slightly different investing backgrounds, but I think we have very similar philosophies. So what I would say to somebody who...
I, I guess this is more advice for somebody who's starting a newsletter as opposed to- Yeah... who currently has one. But if, if you're starting one, you know, you need to...
I-if you, you know, if you love sports or you love a sports team, or like you said, with the Fantasy Premier League stuff, like... Or if you are super...
Even, you know, I know there's a ton of crypto and AI newsletters out there, but if it's something you're passionate about, I think that's gonna come through. Yeah. I guess for existing newsletters,
I think that two things.
One, like, I think it is very important to know your audience, and I think that in this quest for like growing, growing, growing, growing your list, you need to make sure you're growing your list with the right people, with the people who are gonna stick around.
Because if you add 1,000 people in a week, and then two weeks later, three-quarters of those people aren't reading or are unsubscribing or whatever, aren't, are not engaged, it's really not helping you.
It's not helping grow your audience. It's not helping, you know, you, you as a, as a newsletter business because you, you wanna have people...
You know, we have readers who've been reading us every week for four years, you know? And so we can think like, "Okay, those people are gonna probably be with us two, three, four years down the line." And so
I think this kind of like grow, grow your list at all costs mentality can be kind of counterproductive. You, you wanna have the right people. You wanna make sure there's an overlap thereYeah.
I, I very much agree with that. I think like it's not just about newsletters too. It's like, you know, venture funded businesses or whatever, this kind of growth at all costs thing is so... I think is becoming...
People are be-becoming more cautious about it, which is good. Um, that's, uh, I guess that's a whole nother, that's a whole nother conversation.
But, um, I did wanna ask about like maybe for, to underline the tactical bit of advice, like it sounds like you guys run surveys pretty regularly and are quite good at collecting data about your audience and like, and knowing, you know, affirming that these are the right people and probably cleaning your list sometimes too.
Um, so my question would just be like- Yeah. [chuckles] How do you... What do you do to gather that?
Like, what's your advice for like understanding your audience and actually learning about them so you can know these things and make these decisions?
I mean, I think the easiest way is just like an onboarding, a quick onboarding survey. Mm.
Um, 'cause I think that's gonna be when you're gonna catch people's attention the most, uh, is when they sign up, 'cause they've signed up for this thing.
It's also a way to, to filter out people who might have not intended to sign up or, you know, didn't exactly know what they're getting. I think that that's important too.
And there's, there's a give and take 'cause you don't wanna bother people with surveys too often. Um, but I think if you do it when they sign up, that's gonna give you some very good data.
And I think it's important to know what your audience is interested in. I mean- Mm... if, if we hadn't run these surveys, we would not...
I would not have expected real estate and venture to be so overwhelmingly like the most popular thing. So we, you know, we might have launched a different vertical first.
But I think that knowing that made us very comfortable and very confident in doing those as our first two. Yeah.
I, uh, so I imagine you've probably changed your survey, your onboarding survey a few times and, you know, experimented to, to make it better. What's... Can you share anything about like what's the sweet spot?
Like is it like only ask this many questions or like make sure that you're giving, you know, radio button choices instead of a text answer? Like what's, what makes a good onboarding survey?
I mean, keep it, keep it short, right? Short and sweet. Something that you, you can tell them, you know, this is gonna take you a minute to do, and it's gonna take them a minute at most.
'Cause I mean, even I'm sure you've seen, but you know, even in any survey, you're gonna see a huge drop off, uh, after the first question. And so- Mm...
you know, you gotta pick the three things that you really wanna know. And, and I think people are willing to, to click a few times and do it if it takes you 30 seconds. But, and I also, you know, maybe
I think people have different philosophies on this, but I, I think, you know, multiple choice or whatever, giving them the click rather than like having a box is g- is gonna get you a lot more answers because
asking somebody to, to provide the answer rather than just clicking a button is, is such a bigger ask. Maybe like at the end, like, you know, you throw like any, any additional thoughts or whatever, but- Mm-hmm...
uh, you wanna make sure you get the information you, you need, and so you're gonna have to distill it down to- Yeah... to make sure they're gonna give it to you. No, I, I agree.
It's almost like shocking how unwilling people are to give, to give that information. I... There's like some newsletter I was trying to onboard for recently too, and I like... I'm, I'm very patient.
I work in new- you know, I'm very patient about this. Yeah. Sure. Like I'll entertain you. And there was like, I was on like page 10 of like a type form, and I, I gave up. I was like- Yeah...
I'm not, I don't wanna give you all this information. Like I don't care. I'm pretty free with my information. Whatever, it's 2024, you know? The, but I, yeah, it was just like...
Anyways, um, there is, uh, maybe just one more question I wanna ask you and then probably wrap up. Uh- Sure. A- again, talking about like you gotta be passionate about it, you're gonna be working on it a lot.
Do you have any idea how much time you spend on this per week? And maybe it's like, I don't know, you know, I don't know if you're doing Bits at full time and that's, you know, 40 plus hours a week or whatever.
Or like maybe you focus on focusing on just one of the newsletters you do.
Like, 'cause every time I ask this too, I will say, people can rarely give me a good answer 'cause it's like, again, it's like this is just what I'm interested in, so like even when I'm not working on this, I am actually, you know, working on it, and then what I'm like reading for fun while eating my sandwich is like what trickles down into the newsletter.
Um, so now I'm just rambling a bit. But yeah, my question is like, do you have any idea how much you spend on like writing one of these newsletters per week? Sure.
I mean, so to answer one part of that question, it is, it is our full-time job, you know, all of us. Um, and but the newsletter is a substantial part of it. There's also a lot of other business stuff,
uh, and, you know, sales and, and all sorts of fun stuff that doesn't go into writing the newsletter. So, but to answer your question, for one newsletter, I mean, it is... Like what do you count, right?
Like do you count all the time that I'm wasting scrolling on Twitter or [chuckles] you know? I mean, I, I don't know how productive that is necessarily. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. Um, you know, I would say
i- i- some week, like it, it also really depends on the week. Like we have, I've actually, as we speak, Spotlight is coming out right now at 4:00 PM. Um, and, and this issue
I felt was like one of the easy, one of the best ones that I've written in a long, long time and one of the easiest ones because it was just like there's so much good stuff this week. Like so much good stuff.
There's these great auctions, this great article about art. This, you know, big real estate news came out.
Like there's a, a bunch of like big IPOs, you know, Reddit and, and Klarna, and then there's like S- Stripe had a new valuation.
Like there's all this stuff, and then there's some weeks where it's like, oh my god, nothing happened this week. Like, and so you've really gotta dig deeper and be like, okay, how can I make this interesting?
Like where, how, what... 'Cause I don't, I, I wanna make sure that the stuff is coming from that week. I don't wanna dig back to two, three weeks ago to try and find something. Like it has to be current stuff.
And so like- Mm-hmm... on a good week, it's not like it writes itself, but like it feels more like that. Sometimes it, it takes two or three times longer because I have to really figure out what
stories to write about and how to make it interesting and informative. So, you know- Yeah... it, it can be, it can be, you know, five to 10 hours, or it could be 10 plus hours. It re- really depends.