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I started my first business when I was fourteen. That business is my second most successful business. I had a lot of failures after that. You kind of get obsessed with newsletters and see this business opportunity.

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AI was growing. Newsletters work. Fundamentally, if you can get enough people to read it, you can sell ads against it. That was enough fuel I needed to get started.

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That's kind of your skill is to see that opportunity coming and just to act on it. Yeah. We went from making like five to six thousand bucks to twenty to thirty, like in one month.

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[instrumental music] Welcome back to the Creator Spotlight podcast.

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Today, we're speaking with Adam Biddlecombe, co-founder of Mindstream, a daily newsletter about AI and tech that he started with a friend, Matt Village, in June of twenty twenty-three.

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Just under a year and a half later, it was acquired by HubSpot for an undisclosed sum.

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They're both still working on the newsletter, just as part of that larger organization, and today, Adam and I will be speaking about how he grew the audience, the time they acquired another newsletter, pivoting from music to newsletters, and plenty more.

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Adam, thank you for coming on. Thanks for having me. That was so smooth. You really have a radio voice. You know, it's, it's taken me a year and a half to get here and a lot of voice control.

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I will say, I was at a wedding, uh, in October, and I had to do a speech, um, and I was really glad that I'd been podcasting for a year because otherwise I would not have known how to use the mic. Love that.

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It is different in person though, right? Oh, yeah. It's a bit translatable, but not directly. Yeah.

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I mean, well, for one, my hands were really sweaty, and right now they're not because it's just me and you, and I'm just sat in my, in my office.

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And at that time, I was in front of, you know, a couple hundred people or whatever. Uh, anyways, neither here nor there.

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[chuckles] Um, before we get into talking about Mindstream, 'cause that's obviously what we'll be doing most of the time here, I did want to talk about that you come from a background as a musician, um, because this came up in another interview I just did.

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It'll be, I think, um-- actually it might be as when this comes out, the one directly before. I just interviewed Jesse Feister, who is the executive director of Webby Media Group, so they do the Webbys.

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Um, and he also has this background as a musician, except in a different era, in like the MySpace era, in the, in the, in the aughts.

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He was signed to multiple labels, et cetera, and then he got an MBA, and he now is, you know-- b-before he was the executive director of Webby Media Group, he was the head of creator marketing at Twitch.

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So it's this great arc that you kind of mirror, and you, you really lay it out on your LinkedIn.

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You specifically say that being a musician taught you how to sell your band, how to organize travel logistics, how to manage finances, and how to build a brand.

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And I should also say before you went from music to newsletters, you spent a few years in sales. So tell me about like how you spun the, that experience and skills into like more of a white-collar professional realm.

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Yeah. It, it, it certainly wasn't intentional. Um, music was everything for me. Um, I started playing drums when I was like ten years old, and all I wanted to be was a musician.

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Um, I started my first business when I was fourteen, and it came from, um, me and my like friends at school had put together a little band, um, and we wanted to do some gigs.

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We'd like got a set list together, some originals, some covers, um, and I kinda went door-knocking. So my first experience of sales, trying to get venues, pubs, whatever to like put on our band. Mm-hmm.

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But we didn't have like a media kit. We didn't have a CD. We didn't have anything. So obviously- You didn't even know what a media kit was. You were fourteen. [chuckles] Exactly. Exactly.

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So, um, then I-- and, and to, to, to this day, this is probably one of my best skills. I just found another way to do something. Hmm. I just went out and hired a venue.

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So I hired a music venue, and I paid like, I think I paid a hundred pounds for this venue, and it came with a sound engineer.

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And then I went online and got some tickets printed, booked a support band, got some posters done, went and flyered like all around my town and my school, and then we sold out this show.

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So I played my first gig, happened to be one that I'd organized, to a sold-out room of a hundred people, and I made like five hundred pounds. Hmm. You know? I sold it out, made some money.

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Um, and then over the next four years, I part-time doing music alongside being events organizer. Oh, okay. And that business is my second most successful business. Um, a lot-- I had a lot of failures after that.

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[chuckles] But putting on shows, I expanded to like three cities, um, a couple of shows a month in each city and managed to keep selling shows out, making a load of money.

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Um, and that, you know, really set me off down a path of, uh, of business. Yeah.

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I think I wanna talk about the events organizing aspect of that for a little while because that's something that I know even people I know who are really good at it kind of hate it because there's so many moving parts.

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But because it's this thing with so many moving parts and like you have to, you know, satisfy so many people on the organizing side and, you know, the customers, the attendees, um, I think it's kind of like a...

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It's something that can really forge a lot of skills as it seems to have for you. So tell me more about like, about your experience with organizing events and how much it sucks.

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To, to relate it to tech, I sort of cracked affiliate marketing without knowing what it was. Hmm.

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Um, the, the format that I used to do these shows is I'd book a good headliner, um, pay them a little bit of money, and then I'd book four or five support bands that would all be, um, like school bands- Yeah...

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like sixteen, seventeen-year-olds, you know, like, like I was in that same situation of I couldn't get a gig. No one would take a chance on me.

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So I book all these bands, and 'cause a lot of these bands were doing their first or second gig, um, they would be able to sell loads of tickets.

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So I would give them ten percent of ticket sales, and I would take ninety percent of the revenue, and then they would sell all of the tickets for me.

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And the people that would come to the shows would be like moms of the band, like cousins, sisters, school mates. But they're buying tickets. They're buying tickets.

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[chuckles] And then, you know, a lot of these bands were pretty good.Um, some of them weren't, but a lot of them were, and it was a great breeding ground for, like, young talented musicians, and then everyone to- got to have a good time at the end watching the headliner.

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Yeah. You know, the real kind of like pull, pull for the, uh, event. Um, so luckily when I was doing these events, you know, I had these venues that I had long-term relationships with.

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The hardest part was discovery, but as soon as I found these bands, that was it. They'd, they'd sell the event for me.

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You know, I'd turn up on the day and make sure everyone was happy and make sure everyone was, you know, had everything they need. But these shows would sell themselves eventually. Yeah. This is...

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Okay, I'm gonna float this, this, this idea I've been working on, this framework, which I also brought up to Jesse kind of talking about the same thing. Um, I w- I'm, I'm calling it the, the agency horseshoe.

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You might call it the graft horseshoe. You know, uh, you're somebody who clearly has a lot of graft, as they say over there in the UK.

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Um, but on one side, you know, the horseshoe theory where basically there's kind of maybe two... an ideological difference going f- to, to either end, but they kind of at the other end, they, they become similar.

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So it's, I call it kind of the, the tech startup business, you can just do things as- like culture on one side, and then more of like DIY, punk, like warehouse party type of artist culture on the other end.

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Um, and maybe one is more about profit, and the other might be more about art or whatever.

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You know, it's not a, it's not perfect, but people like you are really, you kind of are at the middle there, and I think that's what it means to be, like, a, a successful creator in the sense that we talk about creators, is you have to have a, a good grasp of both that business side and the art side.

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But the important thing is, like, the ability to just do things, to have graft, um, and you kind of have to be able to, to speak to both sides of it in the creator economy to be successful. Thoughts? Yeah, 100%.

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I think there's a lot of similarities between the creator economy and, um, art, music, whatever. Um, and we weren't massively successful when I then went on to do music full time.

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You know, I said I did this events business for four years. I then went and did four years [crosstalking] You were an events organizer more than you were a musician, you're saying. [laughs] Four years for each.

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[laughs] So I s- I spent four years, um, making a living out of music, like fully supporting myself and my band. Mm-hmm. We, like, lived together in a flat down in London- Mm-hmm... out music, and we weren't very good.

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[laughs] We, we didn't create very good music. We never, um, we never found the right artistic message or- Mm-hmm... profile or, or sound that, that makes musicians successful, successful in the eyes of the world. Yeah.

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Do you know what I mean? But we were incredibly successful in that we spent four years traveling around the world playing music. You paid your rent in London with this music.

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We pa- we paid our rent in London, and the, and the, the reason that we were able to do that is we had business sense. Mm-hmm.

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You know, we didn't really have the necessary artistry, but we had the business sense, and we knew how to make money. Uh, we knew how to market ourselves. We knew how to build a brand. Yeah.

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And that was, that was enough. Um, and it's very rare to find somebody who has the artistry to be a musician, yet also has the bin- business sense to make money out of it. Yeah.

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This is why a lot of the artists that we see being successful, you know, they sort of do the artistry thing, and then they have a team of people around them who do the business thing. Yeah.

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You know, you look at maybe Ed Sheeran as one of the exceptions. Um, and I think the creative economy is v- very much the same.

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There are a lot of people out there who, um, build big followings online, but then when you kinda dig into it, they're not actually making very much money. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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And to get the perfect balance, you can build huge, huge, huge businesses, and there are some examples of people doing this correctly. You know, on the, on the big scale, you have someone like Ryan Reynolds- Mm-hmm...

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who is paid a lot of money for making movies and could be very, very happy with that amount of money. But he manages to build up all of these other assets by being- Yeah...

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or at least surrounding himself with real business people. Well, somebody like him too, it's like I feel like he doesn't, even, even his movies, it's like he doesn't really make movies.

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He makes franchisable creative assets, right? Like, he's not really an actor's actor. He's, he's, he's a, he's a producer's actor. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. He... At the core, he's a, he's a businessperson- Yeah...

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that, uh, is able to market himself, and that's what every good creator is. They are a businessperson first and foremost who are able to create an image of themselves that, that people want to buy into. Yeah.

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Okay, so we should talk about Mindstream and, and where this comes in, and I think this is actually a, a, a good transition in that [sighs]

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the kind of graft as a service, and I, I'm using the word graft just because I think it's, uh, it's rolls off the tongue better than high agency.

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Graft as a service is kind of one thing that you bring, and you start it with your longtime friend, Matt Village, who's a copywriter, and what I understand, and maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, is you kind of get obsessed with newsletters and see this business opportunity, and you come to him and you say, "Hey, you're a great writer, and I know you can, like, pull off writing every day, and I'll grow the audience, and I, and I will, you know, sell the ads, whatever.

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I'll monetize this thing."

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Um, which that's kind of this graft as a service I'm saying, where there's these people like you who really understand the business sense and then can work with people who can crack the creative sense to ultimately really nail a project like this.

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Uh, but the way we want to, I want to [chuckles] go into Mindstream is I want to know how you, how you identified, like, this specific opportunity and decided that you wanted to make an AI newsletter.

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I know you were one, you're one of these people who listened to The Hustle or listened to, uh, My First Million, heard about The Hustle, heard about Milk Road and said, "I can do that." Yeah.

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So, um, it's lovely looking back at it in hindsight. It looks incredible, incredibly agentic and intentional. It wasn't really that in reality. [laughs] Um, I, I had spent a lot of time being an entrepreneur doing music.

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You know, it was ar- artistic, but it was entrepreneurial at the core of it, and then, um, the reason I gave that up is when COVID hit-Um, obviously all the gigs were canceled, and that was the end of it.

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Um, so I-I had moved back from London to my hometown in Leamington, and, uh, and had to get a job. I'd never had a job before.

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I was twenty-two years old, hadn't gone to university and spent- Only done the entrepreneurial thing. Yeah. And like music, man, it was fun. It was a lot of fun.

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So [chuckles] I had to go and get jobs, and I quickly realized that they suck, and I, and I don't like it. Um, so I-I knew that there were other ways to make money, and I started trying to make money in different ways.

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The first thing I did was matched betting, which made like a little bit of money. Um, then I tried for a good year and a half at e-com, made a little bit of money.

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Um, but I wa- None of these things were growing quick enough. So there was one day where I had just pure frustration. I'd hit a wall- [chuckles] -with this e-com business I was trying to build.

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And I, I called Matt, who is my best friend. Um, and we-- When we were younger, when we were like thirteen, fourteen, we used to say we'd build a business together. Yeah.

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We would hang out after school and think about business ideas. Were you in a band together? Or was he not part of the music? No, he wasn't music. He wasn't musical at all.

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Um, I called him, and we were both pretty unhappy with where we were in life at, at that time. We were both working jobs and, you know, we weren't doing anything particularly impressive.

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And I just berated him for like an hour on the phone. And it was, it was mostly me venting my anger at myself, but it was like, "What, what, what are we doing, man? Like, we're not where we want to be."

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You're lighting a fire under his ass, but also your own. Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. Um, and I said to him, um, "Come around to my house, and we won't leave until we have a business."

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Um, I had a little office at the bottom of my garden, two by two meters, tiny little space. We went in, locked the door, and we said we're gonna, we're gonna make a business. Yeah.

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The reason we landed on newsletters is because I had been sort of, I think, subconsciously building up the knowledge to build a newsletter. Um, I'd listened to My First Million. I'd followed The Hustle's success.

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I'd followed Milk Road's success. I'd heard, um, Sham Puri say six months before someone needs to go and do the Milk Road for AI. So this was the idea that I said to Matt, "How about newsletters?" Yeah. "And why not AI?"

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Because it's, it's, it's-- AI was growing rapidly. Newsletters were growing rapidly, like especially with the launch of Beehiiv, it was so easy to build newsletters.

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Um, so I said, "Let's just go after this AI newsletter thing." Um, it, it seemed the obvious thing, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't massively- Yeah... intentional.

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We hadn't really studied the marketplace and saw that there was a gap straight away. I just knew that, um, AI was growing. Newsletters work. Fundamentally, they're simple.

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If you can get enough people to read it, you can sell ads against it. Yeah. That was enough fuel I needed to get started. Hey, if you're enjoying this conversation, consider subscribing to the podcast.

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We release a new episode every Tuesday. All right, back to the show. Okay, so tell me, um, I think on your LinkedIn it said that at month five, you, you both quit your jobs to go all in on this.

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Tell me about the path from like you're locked in your garden shed to, "Okay, now we can quit our jobs." Yeah. So 24th of May, we locked in the garden shed. Um, 1st of June, we sent the first issue of Mindstream.

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And you talked earlier about Matt being the creative. Um, he's a great writer. He's always been a great writer. Um, he made a bit of money, um, with a, with a blog, like when he was about fifteen years old.

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He wrote a book and like sold it. Like quite impressive stuff for a, for a kid. What was the- So knew he- What was the blog and book about? Uh, how to make money online. [laughs] Just a little, uh, manifestation.

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Yeah, exactly. Um, so, um, yeah, I said to Matt at the time, like, "I need you to commit like a couple of hours a day to write this thing. That's kind of all I need you to do, and, and we'll sort everything else out."

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So day one, 24th of May, the same day, um, we like bought the domain. Uh, we designed a logo with, um, some, some AI image generator back in 2023. Um, set up emails, like set up our Beehiiv account.

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I created a new LinkedIn account because I had my LinkedIn account that I was doing like outbound for my sales job.

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I created a net new LinkedIn account, which you're not supposed to do, and just started posting about AI.

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Um, the reason I wanted to go after LinkedIn, 'cause I mentioned I was using LinkedIn as a salesperson for the last couple of years.

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I had spent a bunch of time when I was kinda supposed to be working, just scrolling through my LinkedIn feed, and I'd started to follow AI creators, but also personal branding creators. Um, the main one was Lara Acosta.

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Mm-hmm. And day one, I bought her like how to get started guide for thirty bucks, and I just copied it. Like I posted every day. I used carousels, infographics. I connected with people in my niche.

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I did all the like basics of like personal branding 101 on LinkedIn.

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Um, and then anybody who had gave me like a sniff of interest, you know, liked a post or viewed my profile, I'd then send them hundreds of DMs to sign up to Mindstream until they, they gave in and signed up.

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Um, and I just like, we just, uh, yeah, grafted, like you said. Mm-hmm. Just grafted at that stage until we got to maybe like a thousand subscribers. And then Beehiiv did a, uh, uh, boost promo.

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Um, they dropped like if you'd spend two and a half grand on boosts, they'd match it. So me and Matt put in two and a half grand out of our pockets, uh, bought those boost credits, and started growing with Beehiiv.

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Um, and then by the point that we were at like two and a half, three thousand subscribers, we had this outbound from this, uh, guy in Canada who wanted to invest. And I remember talking to Matt and being like,

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"We don't have anything." Like we weren't even registered as a company at this point. [chuckles] Um, we hadn't made a dollar. Um, like, "What the hell are we gonna charge?" And I sent him this, uh, deck.

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Like I did all this projections and stuff, sent this deck, and I asked to raise at a half a million dollar valuation.Um, he said no, unsurprisingly.

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Um, but then I was chatting to, um, my colleague at work, my, like, fellow salesperson. Yeah. And we, we were just chatting about the newsletter and how we were trying to grow and all of that.

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Um, and he mentioned that his cousin likes investing in startups. So we met, um, with Paul, Paul Ingram, um, and we hashed out a deal. Um, again, we had, like, two and a half thousand subscribers.

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I think I had, like, ten thousand followers on LinkedIn. Um, and we secured this investment that meant that me and Matt- From wa- from the cousin, not the Canadian. From the cousin. Yeah.

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The Canadian, um, the Canadian didn't, didn't, didn't bite, but my friend's cousin- Well, but he, you know, he got the ball rolling [chuckles] on the investment. Exactly. Exactly. And it's, it's-- that's the thing.

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You know, when I'm sitting here now, I'm, I'm spending a lot of time trying to understand what my real assets are- Mm-hmm... like, what I can double down on, uh, to make success.

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And I, and I really think it is seeing opportunity rather than being very good at any one particular thing. You know, this guy reached out to us who wanted to invest in us. He was a seasoned investor. You know- Mm-hmm...

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he was part of, like, a family-- I'm not even sure what you call it, like a family investment group type of thing. Oh, like a family wealth management fund.

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I, I'm, I'm financially illiterate, so I forget what they're called. Family office. Yes. That's the thing. Yeah. Like, he had, he had money to spend. He had targets set by the family- Newsletters are hot at this time.

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You know, people want to invest in them. Yeah. Yeah.

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Um, but we had nothing to show him, so he couldn't, you know, we- Well, also, wait, well, what do you, what do you want the money for besides just like, "Oh, now we can maybe quit our jobs and pay ourselves to do it"?

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Is it just that? Is it paid growth? What are you-- How are you using the money? It was, it was time. It was really time.

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Um, but the deal that we hashed out with Paul, um, my friend's cousin, he ran a, uh, still runs a marketing agency called KWeb.

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So the other thing we locked in in part of the deal was we had a bunch of infrastructure support from them. Mm-hmm. So they ran our books, they ran our sysad, um, they, um, gave us marketing support.

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They, like, built our website so that we had a bunch of other things- So then you're act- you're actually acting like a proper business. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

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So that, that deal, um, we sort of like penciled that out, um, and that was enough for us to leave our jobs. We hadn't, we hadn't actually signed this deal.

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It happened a couple of months later, but just sort of seeing that and also a little bit of revenue starting to come in, we realized we could quit our jobs.

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Um, and then, um, another opportunity landed on my lap, which really, really changed the game for us. Um, I started connecting with a guy called Matics.

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Um, he reached out to us on LinkedIn 'cause we were building up a following on LinkedIn. Um, he could see that we were like- It's all happened on LinkedIn. It was all on LinkedIn.

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He could see we were making money through, like, sponsorships. Um, and Matics had quite a large newsletter, um, but was struggling to really monetize it in the right way, hire a team or whatever.

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So we-- me, me and this guy just started going on, like, weekly- Which this is also, for the audience, this is also an AI-focused newsletter. It's called AutoGPT, correct? That's the one. Yeah. Yeah.

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So we just started going on weekly calls, um, sharing information, and AutoGPT had, like, a hundred and seventy thousand subscribers at this point.

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And the way that Matics had got all these subscribers is he had bought the domain autogpt.net, um, started creating articles and blogs on there as, like, a bit of an SEO play, and then the open source tool, AutoGPT, got launched like three months after he'd launched his, uh, he'd launched his site, and he just took all their traffic.

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It was a hugely viral tool, um, crazy on, like, X- Mm-hmm... and he was suddenly getting, like, hundreds of thousands of visits a day on his site and managed to capture all these emails. So

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I was in a position where we had five, ten thousand subscribers at this point, like a little bit of money, but a very, very clear plan. Whereas Matics had a huge number of subscribers,

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but didn't really know the industry. No clear plan. [chuckles] No clear plan.

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Um, so eventually, we were able, we were able to secure a deal that Matics joined Mindstream, bought his subscribers, brought his domain in exchange for thirty percent of our company, and that just took us to another level.

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Like- So he comes in basically as a co-founder with that sort of investment. He comes in as a co-founder.

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Um, and, and when you look at it on paper, you know, some people might say it wasn't a great deal for Matics, um, because there was a, there was a value against those subscribers, there was a value against that domain, and he was getting thirty percent of an idea, really.

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Um, and again, that's where I pride myself on, on being able to see an opportunity and make a deal happen. Um, and at the end of the day, we're all very, very happy. Yeah. Paul's very happy with his investment.

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Matics is very happy with the deal we made, and we're all very happy with the eventual deal we made with HubSpot. Um, so yeah. It's not a traditional newsletter growth story.

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Um, it's a, it's a story of deal-making, really. Yeah. Well, this is, uh... I mean, it's funny, the way that he comes in, he's got all these, l- like, you know, what, ten times more, as many subscribers- Yeah...

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as you guys, um, and he's willing to take a chance on you guys in that way. It seems to me that, again, it's like you having this, like, graft as a service almost.

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Like, I, uh, uh, I promise this isn't just because you're, you're, you're British, but I've been watching a lot of soccer, a lot of football recently, and it's almost like you are situating yourself as the person who can make that line-breaking pass, right?

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And, like, somebody like him can maybe be the pacey winger who can go run, but you're the one who's gonna have the line-breaking pass, and that's kind of your skill, is to see that opportunity coming and, and just to act on it.

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Mm-hmm. A hundred percent. The, the deal was very, very difficult to get along the line. It very nearly didn't happen. Um, Matics had had a bad experience with a previous co-founder, so- Oh...

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he was reserved against going into business with people. He was in Slovenia- Mm-hmm...

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um, so, uh, all of this conversation was happening online, and I'd sort of pitched him on the deal, shared the terms we were happy with, and I remember him calling me. I remember I was driving.

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He called me and said, "Dude, I just can't do it."And I said, "Drop whatever you're doing, get on a plane, and just come and see us." And the next day he flew out. To meet in person for the first time.

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For the first time. He flew out, and we rolled out the red carpet for him. Um, we took him to a soccer game. Yeah. We took him to see Aston Villa, and then we spent two days at Kweb's office.

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So I mentioned Paul, our investor. Yeah, yeah. We took him to his offices. We got all of the team in, so there was like a huge buzz about the place. Booked out the conference room.

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Um, the Kweb team had worked on, like, an amazing deck. Um, you know, Paul Ingram, the investor, he's been around the block. Had a lot of successful companies, exits, investments. And- He knows how to land a deal.

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He knew-- Yeah, exactly. And what I did, and I said to Paul and, and the team, there's a guy called Adam Dunning, who is an investor as well, and, uh, Matt Village. I said, "I need you to lead this.

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I don't wanna say a word in any of these meetings 'cause I have already said everything I could possibly say to- Yeah... Matts. I need you guys to lead this." And they absolutely smashed it.

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And Matts, you know, he told me after, he was sold on the infrastructure, and he was sold on the value of Paul as an investor and a strategic partner for the business, and the, um, and the, the marketing services that Kweb were gonna offer us and, you know, that whole infrastructure.

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Um, so getting that deal over the line was integral. We couldn't grow fast enough, um, to compete with the other AI newsletters.

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If-- for us to go from that ten, fifteen thousand subscribers we had at the time of the acquisition to a hundred, hundred... It was a hundred thousand we eventually imported.

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To a hundred thousand subscribers, it would've taken us maybe a couple of years doing it organically- Yeah... or probably two to three hundred thousand dollars if we were to do that.

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Well, I mean, I-- about a year ago, I spoke to one of your competitors at the time. Maybe you were just on their podcast, uh, the other day. AI- AI Report.

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Yeah, AI Report, formerly AI Tool Report, and when I spoke to Martin Crowley there, like, he was able to scale very quickly.

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I forget, like, the exact number at the exact time, but, uh, around when I spoke to him, it was already, like, five hundred thousand. They'd been doing it for, like, ten months.

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Um, so they would've started right around the same time as you and- Mm-hmm... scaling quicker, but through paid ads, and you guys- Mm-hmm...

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didn't have the money to invest in paid ads, whereas he already had the personal fortune to be able to invest in that. Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. We, we couldn't compete. Um, we didn't have the money.

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That model that Martin has, has taken, he'll probably take quite a long time to make his money back. Yeah.

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Um, I mean it-- I mean, I'm not gonna speak for him, but, um, when you acquire a newsletter subscriber, you're looking at six to twelve months before you're making, making that money back on, uh, on, on advertisements.

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So it doesn't, it doesn't, um, recycle quickly. Yeah. You know, you can't acquire a bunch of subscribers one month and then have the money back at the end of the month, um, you know, with a traditional sponsorship model.

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After you acquire AutoGPT, you now have one hundred some thousand subscribers. Uh, how do you... Uh, how are people coming in after that? Is it word of mouth? Do you start paid growth? Is it kind of self-sustaining?

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How are-- what's the, what's the s- the churn and acquisition looking like? So we were able to turn on, uh, monetization very quickly. Mm.

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At this-- At the point that the deal was done, we were making most of our money through LinkedIn sponsorships, so we probably had twenty or thirty c-clients who'd bought a LinkedIn post off us. Mm.

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So we were able to quickly go back to all those clients and say, "We now have a substantial newsletter list of, of engaged subscribers. Do you wanna buy some ads?"

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Um, and we were able to quickly sell out our ad inventory. Um, we also found this, like, huge hack for getting leads of advertisers.

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Um, we were able to get the top spot in the top AI newsletter blogs for the top three searches on Google. Um, so one of them, uh, [lip smack] oh, I can't remember the name of it.

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Two of them we kind of reached out to and negotiated to put us in that top spot, and the other one, we created that article on AutoGPT and bought a load of backlinks on it and put our- put ourselves at the top spot.

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And we would get, it was at least a lead a day who came through and said, "Oh, I've seen you on this blog," or whatever.

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And people were just going into Google and searching AI newsletters or best AI newsletters, and this is how they were doing their discovery on who to advertise for, who to advertise with.

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[lip smack] So we were always on the top of that list. So we were able to turn on monetization.

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We were making, like, twenty to thirty thousand bucks a month, so we were then able to invest, you know, the majority of that money. This is, this is post-AutoGPT. This is about- Yeah... eight months in.

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You're making twenty to thirty thousand dollars a month. Yeah. We went from making, like, five to six thousand bucks to twenty, thirty, like, in one month after the acquisition.

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How long- Um, we- When, when-- Did, did you make your first dollar in month one? How long did it take to make, to start making money? Um, it was probably one to two months. I, I remember the client.

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It was a, a company called Dante who do chatbots, and they'd reached out to us and bought a LinkedIn post for about a hundred bucks. Um, so yeah, that's, that was, that was where it started.

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What did you have-- What were you offering at that point? Like, how large was your LinkedIn following approximately, do you think? [exhales] It's gotta be under 10K, I think. Yeah. Like, close to 10K.

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Um, I should look back through the messages and find out, but yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't much at all. Mm-hmm.

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Um, what-- Tell me about the, the evolution of your revenue model and, like, your revenue streams over time until, up until the acquisition. W-we were quite simply a, a sponsorship, um, newsletter.

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Um, we did a couple of other things. So, um, we created a digital product that we sold on the thank you page. The whole p-point of that was to try and, um...

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[lip smack] We were always trying to reduce our, our CPA of subscribers and then, um, uh, increase the instant revenue. Mm.

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So we'd make a little bit of money from SparkLoop or Boosts, and then we'd make a little bit of money from selling a digital product, like, averaged across, um, all of the subscribers.

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I think we got it about to, up to about 80 cent or a buck that we would make, like, instantly. Um, and we were acquiring subscribers for about $2.

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So our-- we used to call it, like, real subscriber acquisition cost was, like, a dollar. Yeah. Um, so we were always optimizing for that. Um, we were-We were always making a decent amount of money from LinkedIn.

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Like, even when we were making twenty, thirty thousand, it was probably still like ten thousand coming in from LinkedIn, and that was always increasing. Um, we started selling webinars as well.

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So I would interview, like, founder of a company on LinkedIn, and we'd always bundle that in with a bunch of newsletter ads to promote the webinar, um, some LinkedIn posts to promote the webinar, and we'd get like, you know, a few thousand people sign up to these things to come and see like a, essentially a product demo of, um, you know, AI company or whatever.

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Yeah. Um, that was it really. Um, you know, sponsorships, digital products, and, uh, monetization through LinkedIn. Uh, tell me more about the types of digital products.

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Um, we had, we had, only had one that became successful, which was ironically an email [chuckles] course. So it was like a twenty-eight-day, uh, master AI content creation.

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So it had like, you know, how to write copy with AI, how to create images with Midjourney, how to create like blog posts.

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It's just like twenty-eight days of a, of this, um, premium email, and people paid thirty bucks for it. Not bad. Um, I do wanna talk more about the LinkedIn growth.

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So you, as of today, I just checked right before we hopped on here, have like two hundred thousand and seven hundred.

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When I was prepping for this a couple days ago, not forty-eight hours ago, you had not yet cracked two hundred thousand. It was like one hundred and ninety-nine seven hundred.

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And I, I was-- I saw that, I was like, "I'm gonna come- When we, when we get on the call, he's gonna have passed it already," and, and you did.

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You're, you're bringing in hundreds of new followers a day on LinkedIn, and I think Matt is around a hundred and forty-seven thousand. Now it's clearly just self-sustaining.

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You know, people are attracted to the big number. You post a lot of content, they flow in. I know you said it was the Lara Acosta course at the beginning that really got, got the wheels turning.

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You had no real social media presence. That it was just like following the basic principles, but actually following them. We've already established you're somebody who, who follows through.

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Is there anything that, like, people who are trying to grow on, grow on LinkedIn maybe don't understand that you think you do? Or is it literally just to like, just actually do the things that you're supposed to do?

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Yeah. So one thing that people do, which I think is a mistake, is when they have five hundred followers, they'll emulate what someone who has a million followers does and then go, "Well, why does that not work for me?"

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I always think a great example of this is Sahil Bloom. Mm. Um, for anyone who doesn't follow Sahil, he has like huge following. I think he's got over a million on, uh, X and like five hundred thousand on LinkedIn.

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And the best way I can describe Sahil is he takes like-- He takes advice that we should all know- Yeah... and wraps it in, wraps it in the most beautiful way.

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And when you- Well, he's also, he's one of these male lifestyle type of people who, he's very handsome. You know, he, he, he's rich. He does have that as well. It's, it's, it's, it's very well packaged, right?

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It's like you wanna be like him, and so you- Yes, exactly... that's why you wanna follow his advice. Exactly. And when you read one of his posts, you go like, "Oh, yeah, that's right." Like, "Of course."

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Like, "Thank you, Sahil." Um, but it, but it means something because it's from him. Mm. Those points you just made. He's like in great shape, so he clearly looks after himself. Um- Got a family. He has a family.

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He, he is very public with his family, uh, and he's very wealthy. So he has all these things. So he gets to post generic advice on the internet and get hundreds of thousands of- Yes... impressions. You don't, right?

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Like, if you don't have anything behind you, you don't get to do that generic advice. You've got to work harder.

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Um, and I'm pretty sure if you looked at what Sahil was posting when he had five hundred followers, it would be a little bit deeper. Mm-hmm. You know, he would be working a little bit harder.

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And, and, and that's not to discredit the work he does now. As we said, he wraps these things very beautifully. Um,

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so, um, when I was growing, I would look, I would look at what the biggest creators were doing for inspiration, and you can look at them for best practices, how to structure your post, how to format your copy.

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But in terms of the actual content, I was looking at creators who had like two to five thousand followers, and I was jumping on calls with them, and I was networking with people.

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I had, um, so many, like, WhatsApp groups over the, over the years of people who'd just be like, "I've just got my first viral post." Like, "This is how I did it."

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And I, and I just started, like, bumping up them, networking with, with people who were, like, growing more and more. Um, I used to have probably like five to ten calls a week with LinkedIn creators.

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Um, and we-- I was just hacking. I was just learning every possible thing I could on how to grow.

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And, you know, the way that you grow today is probably different to how you grow on LinkedIn eighteen months ago when I started doing it.

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Still, I think, I think it's very, it's telling that you just said you were part of these groups and people collaborating, sharing feedback, et cetera.

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Like, I, I think that in all this talk of like solopreneurship and the creator economy, a lot is lost that I firmly believe work is a social endeavor, and especially- Yeah...

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on social media, like you need to be allying with people.

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I'm working on an essay for, for tomorrow's issue of the newsletter, and I'm, I'm [chuckles] still working out the argument here, but one thing I'm, I'm talking about is, you know, in the, the creator economy is made up of,

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uh, humans doing things, offering services, and software around the three core tasks of creating, growing, and selling.

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And within that, there are many opportunities to compete with people, collaborate with other people, and exploit people.

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Somebody who's really good at selling might be really exploiting the labor of somebody who's really good at creating but doesn't understand how to sell. So that's one side of it.

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But you're, you're illustrating this aspect of like you need to look for opportunities to collaborate, but you're also competing with those collaborators.

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You're, you're playing multiple games at once, but you're, you're, you have to be conscious that these are the games available to be played, and you have to play them. Yeah.

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If you, if you go out there just to exploit, you'll get found out eventually. You'll end up very quickly, um, swimming with sharks.

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Um, so, you know, me and the people I was engaging with, um-Very aware that we were competing in some ways. But there's, like, so many people on LinkedIn, and we were all doing something slightly different.

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You know, I was building a, an AI newsletter that made money out of sponsorships. Somebody that I was sort of directly competing with for audience on LinkedIn was running a ghostwriting agency. Yeah.

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Somebody else was-- had a copywriting course they were trying to sell. So, you know, I didn't collaborate too much with people who were also building AI newsletters, or if I did, they were a, a different scale to me.

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You know- Mm-hmm... I remember, um, a walk away- You're competing in different games. Yeah. Owaiz from Superhuman, um, was very helpful to us when we started.

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You know, they had, like, half a million subscribers at the time, but he took time out of his day to chat with me and give me some advice when I had two thousand subscribers.

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So, um, yeah, you've just gotta, you know, build relationships with people, um, be there for them as they are there for you. Um, try and give as much as you take, um, and that will compound over time. Mm-hmm.

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I do wanna talk about you as a creator now that your company has been acquired, but I think first we have to get to the actual acquisition.

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So at the time you get acquired, you've been doing it for around seventeen months. I think in October of last year, of twenty twenty-four, was when this formally happened.

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Before the actual offer comes in, tell me what you'd built the business to. I think there was, like, ten employees, some full-time, some part-time. Mm-hmm. I'm not sure.

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Tell me the state of the business, let's say in, like, August, September twenty twenty-four, shortly before the acquisition. Yeah. So we started negotiating with HubSpot in April. So- Oh, wow...

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when April hit and those conversations started- So you guys all-- You've been doing this... Y- y- the, the garden shed moment is, is, like, eleven months before only. [chuckles] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

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It was, it was insane. Um, HubSpot started advertising with us in February, and that was a huge moment for us.

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And then, um, they were, they were obviously out looking for an AI newsletter, and they saw great results from our advertisement and accelerated the conversations pretty quickly.

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But as soon as things got serious in those conversations, my role as the leader and the CEO of the business changed from, um, you know, grow to maintain. Mm. I didn't want to, um, I didn't want to rock the boat.

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Um, HubSpot, HubSpot coming to acquire us was, you know, the dream that we didn't even think was a thing that could possibly happen, so I wanted to do everything I could to make that deal happen.

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Um, and it took a lot of work, you know. Being acquired by a company the size of HubSpot is not like a phone call. It's not like when we acquired AutoGPT- Yeah [chuckles]... you know.

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It, it, it's a lot of conversations with lawyers, a lot of information sharing, a lot of presentations and spreadsheets and whatever. So my- You didn't do much due diligence on AutoGPT is what you're saying.

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[laughs] Not a lot, no. [laughs] Um, yeah, so my, my job became manage that process and then also just steady the ship. Mm.

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You know, keep executing, keep the quality up, um, keep growing, keep making money, but not really change anything. Yeah.

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You know, I think, I think if, if we hadn't started having those conversations with HubSpot, we would have, um, grown horizontally. We would have launched, um, we were looking at launching an, a tool directory.

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That was, like, in the works. Um, we were looking into the possibility of some sort of education-based platform. You see, um, I think AI, AI Report, Rundown, Superhuman have all launched, like, university-type things.

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Mm. So we were looking into that at the time. Um, and we just kind of put all those plans on hold and just focused on getting the deal done.

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So they come in in, in April, and they are starting, that conversation's starting to happen, and you're like, "Well, I need to keep sustaining the business so- Mm...

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I can keep making a living and my colleagues can keep making a living," but also kind of starting to lay out the carpet for HubSpot coming in and buying us. So I guess,

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what does that transition look like where you're balancing, okay, we've gotta keep money coming in. HubSpot doesn't necessarily need to make ad revenue off of this. That's a whole 'nother conversation we can get to.

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Uh, but, like, preparing for that acquisition over these six months, I know there was a team of around ten. I know they couldn't all come with you to HubSpot.

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How are you paving the way for, like, all the adjustments in the business? A lot of focus went onto editorial.

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I mean, the focus was always on editorial, but we knew we had to keep the quality of the product at the highest order. Um, whereas maybe, like, growing the revenue became less of a priority. Sure.

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You know, it was important to maintain the revenue, but, um, there was a kind of- Especially when, when the ink's not dry, you never know what's gonna happen.

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Yeah, we, we were n- we were never sure it was gonna happen until the day it happened.

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But I knew that if we kinda kept the ship operating properly, obviously made sure there were no skeletons in our closet and that we had, like, you know, business infrastructure set up correctly and all that kind of stuff.

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Um, and it was very difficult for me to, like,

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keep motivated on the day-to-day, um, and keep my team motivated because I was always selling them on, on this dream, and I had to keep selling them on the dream without telling them that I was kind of working on this other dream.

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So until, until we, uh, actually signed the paperwork, most of the team didn't know. You know, we weren't allowed to tell them. We were under, we were under NDA. Um, our employee, uh, Maria,

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HubSpot, um, wanted to bring her on, so she was relocated to the UK, and she came and joined the team.

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Um, we, we didn't tell her until about a month before the acquisition, and that conversation was, "Hey, HubSpot are probably gonna acquire us.

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Also, you live in Lebanon, and they can't employ you there, so you're gonna need to move to, like, either the UK or the US. Are you cool with that?" You can leave or you can, or you can move. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.

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And, and, and fortunately, it had always been Maria's dream to come to the UK- Mm-hmm... so she's here now- Good times... and having a great time.

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Uh, but yeah, that was, that was difficult, um, especially, you know-Not knowing whether it was ever gonna happen.

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And I can't tell you how many conversations I had with Matt and Mattis where I went, "Okay, do we proceed with like-- do we proceed as if nothing's gonna happen, or do we try and optimize for the deal to happen?"

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Like, we, we went back and forth on that like a hundred times. Constantly having to kinda test your conviction. Um- Mm-hmm... I would love if you could tell me one or two

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specific growth or revenue experiments that we haven't spoken about that were failures, things that you- Okay... kind of learned from the dust. Yeah.

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So, um, my main one that I was, like, really excited about is the idea that you could do email outbound to drive subscribers for a newsletter. I haven't heard anybody do this successfully.

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Um- Maybe there's a good reason. Yeah. Maybe there is. Um, but fundamentally, it made sense to me.

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You know, we would-- We-- So when we tried it, we, like, acquired leads through Apollo for like, I don't know, less than a cent a lead, and then we bought, we bought like twenty domains, variations of MindStream.news or whatever, um, used instantly to s-send these outbound emails.

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Um, and yeah, we, we tested, like, reply to subscribe. So we'd just email people and say, like, you know, "In your position, you might wanna read this newsletter. It'll be great," whatever.

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Um, and, um, when we kinda did it manually, and it was like, "Do this action," like reply to subscribe, we got good enough numbers, but the, um, the, the, um, cost per acquisition wasn't good enough.

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Um, we really messed up at one point, and we put a Beehiiv magic link in these emails, um, and then everyone's, like, email spam scraper things were, like, auto-subscribing them to the newsletter. So we put this, uh...

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I remember when we kicked off this campaign, we were like, "We've, we've, we've got it. We've cracked it." Like, the subscribers were flying in. It's rocketing. And then- Yeah. Yeah.

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And then when they had, like, zero percent open rate and, like, a hundred percent spam rate, we were like, "Okay, something's wrong here. We've broken something." Um, so yeah. We never got that done.

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I still think it can be done if you're a great copywriter and you can do, like, outbound emails because essentially you are just giving someone something valuable, you know? Yeah.

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If you can convey that you have a great newsletter that is specifically tailored to them, I think it'd be better for a niche newsletter. Like, you know, if you had a, a- Mm-hmm... like a newsletter to help

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real estate developers or whatever, and you kinda like- It's not really a mass market tactic because those mass market leads are gonna end up being too expensive or the lifetime value of them w- if they become subscribers isn't really gonna be able to offset the cost of acquisition.

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Mm. Mm. Yeah. I agree. Um, so I think, I think that there is something there. Um, we just never hacked that. Um, and we spent, we spent quite a lot of money trying to make that happen.

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Probably like five to ten thousand bucks went down the drain with that experiment. Well, you, you gotta, you gotta spend some money. You gotta [chuckles] break some eggs to make an omelet to, to get acquired by HubSpot.

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[chuckles] Exactly. Exactly. That's, that's how the saying goes, right? [laughs] Um, okay.

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I- Let-- A little bit more about the, the HubSpot acquisition 'cause I know we are running up on time here, and there's a few things I wanna get to.

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Um, the revenue model for listeners who maybe, maybe, I don't know if we've said it explicitly, is now very different. You don't sell ads.

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HubSpot is basically the, the advertiser in that you have this high-quality content pr-product. I understand this is kind of the, the model for the entire HubSpot media ecosystem, which has grown quite large.

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Um, you deliver great content to different audiences that are tech and business related. I'm speaking there to the HubSpot media network.

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You're specifically AI and tech, and the advertising product is an maybe gated content, a digital product that's free, but you give your email and become a HubSpot lead. Mm-hmm. Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, I love it.

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Um, it gives us so much creative freedom. Like, I think, you know, we, when we talk about our competitors now, um, like the AI Report, they're not, they're not competitors anymore.

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Um- You're not competing for the same ad dollars. No, no. They're competitors editorially, though. We're both trying to create a great, um, resource that people wanna read.

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You're competing for the same attention hours still. Yeah. Exactly. But the huge advantage we have is we don't need to make money off people. So these are the newsletters. They're making money through advertisement.

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They're also making money through gated content that you have to pay for.

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Um, you know, a lot of them, like I said, are launching these universities, so their highest value educational content, they have to put behind a paywall. We, we, we don't.

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We have the freedom to make our editorial product as good as possible, and the goal of that is to keep people reading it. The other amazing thing, like, we talk about HubSpot being the advertiser.

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Um, when we worked with external advertisers, um, we used to have deliverability problems. Like, we always had deliverability problems running MindStream. Yeah.

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Um, you know, we would have a forty percent open rate one day and then a twenty-five percent open rate the, the day after. Since the HubSpot acquisition, we've sat at forty-five percent.

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Like, every single issue gets forty-five. You know, it'll go up or down one or two percent. Um, and I think that's 'cause of the consistency in advertiser. You know, we're not bringing in all these new names.

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Um, HubSpot isn't using, like, spammy ad copy, you know, like free trial and all of this kind of stuff.

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And the, the, all the ads that HubSpot place, they are gated resources that, like, a great team of people at HubSpot have spent hours and hours and hours creating.

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Like, our, the monetization team at HubSpot is like, like, m- I think it's more than ten people, and their job is just to make amazing resources.

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So I don't feel bad, like, putting these, these resources in our newsletter. I feel great about it. And, like, I'm using them myself all the time.

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Like, they create amazing, like, prompting templates and, like, um, um, lists of business ideas and e-books and, and all of these things. Um, so when you're a MindStream reader, you get...

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I, I can, I can say you get the best editorial content, and then you get all this amazing stuff that youYou know, have to type your email in to get Yeah.

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Uh, about the acquisition process for any other newsletter operators who have a product that they maybe want to sell, that they wanna be acquired, what would you say are maybe three things that they should focus on or how to set yourself up as, as attractive to acquisition?

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Yeah. So, um, we had some other offers along the way. Um, if you're looking to sell your newsletter, you need to think about what an exit is like for you.

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I think there's, there's, there's three types of exits with a newsletter business. The first one is, um, somebody who sees the money you're making and wants to have a part of it, so they're gonna acquire it

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contingent on you continuing to run it and make money for them. This is one of the offers that we had. It was someone who wasn't from the media business.

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They were just like, "We wanna, like, buy it, and you keep running it, and we're gonna-" They're from the money business. [laughs] Yeah. So I, I would have gone from

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making money for myself to making money for someone else. Obviously, I'd have got money- You get a short-term payout, but you have to keep doing the job, and eventually it kind of--

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what, you know, you, you scale and you actually might end up making less money over time. Yeah. Yeah. Um, the, the second option is you get bought up by a larger media organization that makes money through advertisement.

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Um, The Neuron has just- Mm-hmm... been acquired. Um, I, I think it's a German company that's acquired them, and I think they make money through, like, lead, finding leads and stuff.

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I don't think it's purely advertisement. But you get, get sucked into a, um, a, a bigger organization that, that does a similar thing to what you do.

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And then the third example is what we had where you get acquired into a SaaS company that has a media arm.

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Um, they're all very, very different things, and if you're gonna go and work on your newsletter for a longer period after, think about what that means for you.

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If I'd have gone for option A, I would've gone from selling ads every day to selling ads every day with KPIs, whereas now I've gone from selling ads every day to being able to spend all my time marketing the brand.

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So my job has got better. [laughs] Um, assuming, like, you don't love sales. I don't think anyone loves sales. Yeah. So my, my job has got better. Um, okay. So three things to, like, prepare yourself for the deal.

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Um, understand all of your numbers. Um, understand your, your, you know, basics like your open rate, your click-through rate, the amount of money you make. Understand the LTV of a subscriber.

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Um, understand your growth rate. Understand your churn. The churn was, like, the hardest ones f-for us, for us to understand.

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Um, because we'd been, not been running for very long, um, when we looked at, like, the last year's churn, the subscribers that we acquired on, like, month one was, like, my dad and my cousin- [laughs]...

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and then you're looking at how they behave a year later, like, there's 50 subscribers on day one. So hopefully you have a bit longer than a year's data, and you can really understand all those things.

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Because you might get valued on, um, purely revenue, like a simple revenue multiple. You might get valued on the asset of your subscribers and how engaged they are, so you have to truly understand them. Okay. Let's say

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you get laid off. HubSpot lays you off tomorrow. You're out on the street. You've got no job. Uh, would you do this again? Would you do a newsletter again? Would you do a newsletter in AI again?

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Or do you think you'd be on some new harebrained scheme? What would you do? I'm really interested in influencer marketing at the moment. Mm-hmm. Um, I think

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obviously I monetize a newsletter through advertisement, which is essentially influencer marketing.

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Um, my LinkedIn account has grown to 200,000, uh, followers, and I see the value that I create for the brands I partner with.

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Um, some of the brands I'm working with now, like, I couldn't have believed that I'd be working with six months ago. Um, and also

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the, the way that I kinda sold ads on LinkedIn over time has changed and the type of brands that are coming to the platform have changed, and I really think that this is a, um, big wave that's coming, essentially B2B influencer marketing.

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Mm-hmm. So I'm very excited in this. Um, I think the next company I build will be in this space. Um, I have spoken to a few friends who are building in this space. Um, my friend, uh, Lindsay.

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Lindsay is building a company, um, of, like, micro-influencing, so the idea that a company can go, um, onto a platform and place ads with, like, a s- a CMO at a software company that's got 3,000 followers rather than going to, like, a tech influencer.

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Like, reaching out to, like, people with, like, true credibility. I think it's fascinating.

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Um, and I don't-- And I think newsletters, LinkedIn, and also potentially YouTube is gonna really, really grow in this, um, in this, in this business to business marketing space. So I think I'd build something there.

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I would agree. I think, I think there's a big opportunity there.

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Uh, partially as you were saying that too I started thinking like, you know, in a year, in, in three years, let's say I'm still doing this podcast and, and this, this future comes to pass, right? Is then everybody...

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Like, if I reached out to you, would you be, "Hey, actually, you're gonna have to pay me $1,000 to come on the podcast"? Um, and I think there's different things.

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There's, you know, there's financial capital, cultural capital, content capital that can all be exchanged, and it doesn't have to be only financial capital. Um, but yeah.

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[laughs] I'm, I'm just wondering what a future looks like where everybody is a marketer all the time. Yeah. I think, I think, um, I, I, I think, I think people are charging for podcasts, but people- Mm...

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people are charging for podcasts because they're good podcasters and they're gonna bring a bunch of distribution.

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Um, I'm not in the podcast world, but I, I don't think-I don't think there's a lot of charging that goes on. I feel like it's like- Certain nightmare... people go on,

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people go on podcasts that are sort of beneficial for both parties. Um,

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the, the, the crazy thing is with B2B influencer marketing is if a brand partners with a creator, um, the CPMs that you can get at the moment are, like, better.

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If you partner with a creator on LinkedIn, you'll get better CPMs than buying LinkedIn ads, which is insane because those- LinkedIn ads are, are terribly inefficient from what I understand. Yeah.

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And those, um, those impressions are so much more valuable 'cause they're tied to a trusted creator rather than just, like, distributed ads.

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So, um, you know, I think, I think it's a little bit like Meta was like ten years ago. Mm-hmm. Like, they're- I wonder if LinkedIn would introduce a, a creator advertising market within the platform.

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They've, they've, they've just launched, launched the ability to kind of mark a post as a brand partnership. Mm-hmm. So it, it shows up- I've seen some of these in my feed. Shows up as an ad.

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They also launched thought leadership ads, so a, a brand can, uh, partner with an individual on LinkedIn, so they can put ad spend behind an individual creator's post.

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Um, so they are moving in that space, but it's, it's, like, not good at the moment. Like- Mm-hmm... LinkedIn is not a good... Like, for example, when I do a post, I can't get analytics to show, um, show the advertiser.

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I can tell them how many impressions it got. I can tell them the top five cities of the people that viewed it.

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But imagine if I could get a report that said, you know, fifteen thousand impressions, seventy-three percent male, um, you know, top job title is CMO. Mm-hmm.

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Um, here are twenty target leads based on, um, the content you gave out. Like, that would be an, that would be an insane offering. I think this, so this makes me think. One reason may be that there's al...

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people are always talking about how, like, why does LinkedIn, like, you know, hamstring itself as a social network.

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Uh, you know, they, they could, like, the, the kind of thing you're talking about or, like, why do they make it so links get suppressed in the feed, et cetera.

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But I also know that LinkedIn as a social media platform makes far more money than Twitter, X, and, and a number of others because it's the only social media platform that people pay for, that people will pay fifty dollars a month for or whatever it is now.

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Because it's, it is a social media platform, but all the more it's a job site. I've gotten multiple jobs there. Um- I would pay a thousand dollars a month for LinkedIn to give me proper an-analytics.

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And then that's a tier. There's LinkedIn Premium, and then there's, like, LinkedIn Creator or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. A hundred percent. So sorry, you product managers, if you're listening.

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No, I was just gonna say, tell me about Adam as creator now that you aren't-- don't have to be a creator on LinkedIn to, to grow your audience, um, and make revenue specifically from Mindstream.

355
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Your incentives and priorities are, are changing, but you [chuckles] you're still bringing in hundreds of followers every day. So what is the Adam as creator project now? Yeah.

356
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So a, a, a large part of it is I still like to promote my newsletter. Um, I still send across my account and Matt's account probably, like, three to five thousand subscribers to Mindstream, uh, every month.

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And selfishly, it just, like, helps me hit my KPIs at HubSpot and keeps everyone happy there. Um, so, um, I, I do that. I use LinkedIn as a distribution channel for, like, Mindstream events.

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So every month I host a webinar, which is, like, a m- a Mindstream event, and we use mine and Matt's personal brands to, like, build up hype for that as well as advertising it across the newsletter network.

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So that's just, like, a purely brand-boosting play for, um, for, for Mindstream and HubSpot, which again is a thing I can do in my role. Like, I can put on these events that don't have to make money.

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They can just be boosting the brand. Um, so I get to work on these, like, fun creative things.

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Um, at the same time, um, I'm kind of leveraging my, um, position at HubSpot and the relationships that are available to me there to do, like, really cool things.

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So, um, like yesterday, I was, um, speaking at the finance offsite for HubSpot alongside our VP of marketing, Kieran Flanagan, who's, like, one of the best voices in AI. Um, so because of the fact that I am a

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influencer with two hundred thousand followers and I'm an employee at HubSpot, I get asked to do all these cool things, so that was super fun.

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Um, I'm going out to San Francisco in a couple of months to speak at the, um, the HubSpot for Startups AI Growth Summit, so I'll be moderating events there.

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I'm moderating a, an event with the CRO of Vanta and the CEO of Clay next week. Mm-hmm. So, like, because I am an influencer at HubSpot, people at HubSpot go like, "Oh, I'll get him to do this cool thing." Yeah.

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So that's a lot of fun, and it's all, it's all brand-building and experience-building for me. Um, and at the same time, I partner with, like, really cool brands to promote their products. There you go.

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The machine keeps on rolling. Uh, this was a great conversation. Thank you for coming on. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah.

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Any, any last thing you wanna plug before I, uh, hit that, hit that [chuckles] stop recording button? Um, just reach out, um, if there's anything I can do to help anybody.

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If someone wants to know, um, how to grow their newsletter, how to build on LinkedIn, um, how to do cool stuff with AI, like, I'm always happy to chat. So, um, don't hesitate to reach out. He's available.

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All right, folks, thank you for listening. I will see you next week.

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