How to Make Millions with Newsletters from the "Newsletter Growth Guy" | Matt McGarry

[Music] you cannot invent and Pioneer if you cannot accept failure we wanted people that were insanely great at what they did nobody was making any money at all uh most people thought the internet was going to be a fad all right today on the podcast um I like to find guests in an interesting Way by just stalking them on Twitter because they're making amazing content and then I reach out and I'm like you need to come on to the podcast and today I have someone that really inspires me of what he's putting out there and he's the newsletter Guy this is uh Matt McGarry he's done some very impressive things grown newsletters from like 10 000 subscriptions to quarter million that have been sold for seven figures and he's going to come on and give us all of our secret all of his Secrets but Matt what's up man glad to have you on hey what's up thanks for having me on it's good to connect we've talked a few times you've helped me out with my agency a lot and um so it's good to do this I think I discovered you through like the Trends Facebook group a year or two ago yeah first got connected yeah that I haven't been as active there but you know I I would do like some I try and really test some content there just to be very honest to to see if it would make noise or get business and it was really active and I was very impressed with the people that came from it um but I haven't been as active there but that that's been a fun one um and yeah you worked there but before we even you know dive in like could you just give a little background on yourself like kind of becoming the newsletter guy yeah my background is I worked in marketing direct response marketing it's my whole adult life almost and then back in around 2020 I got a job at the hustle which is a newsletter that now has I think over 2 million subscribers and so I worked there for about two years that's how I got I was in marketing before digital marketing but that's how I got my start in media and newsletters and how to actually grow a newsletter and media business and so that was awesome experience and that kind of parlayed that into starting a marketing agency for newsletters yeah and I I feel like I know like I used to work at Urban daddy which kind of was inspired by daily candy that sold for I think 150 million and they were just an email newsletter I worked there and so I I really understood the power of newsletters and how to monetize it I thought I knew some stuff but um I did a call with you a paid call which by the way very impressive on your form you make people pay to speak with you so you get the Riff Raff out so well done I've I don't that's something we might try and do but I was very like impressed with our 30-minute call but one thing you and I were talking about beforehand is I don't think people understand what it means to start a newsletter like oh cool people get a sub stack and they're just sending out content and then maybe something good will come from it they don't understand that the business behind it can you talk about first like why someone should start a newsletter and two how can you make money from having a newsletter yeah it can actually be a really awesome business model That's What attracted me to working at the hustle I was just fascinated by this business model where you send an email every day you get one or two sponsors and each um in each newsletter and it's a really profitable business it's basically you have a writing team you have a growth team you have an advertising sales team and it's a really simple and profitable business model and there's been some really interesting outcomes so like the hustle the company that I worked at sold for earned 25 to 30 million dollars in about five years um and that's just one of the outcomes that are kind of on the smaller end if you look at the biggest newsletters out there I think the biggest one people wouldn't even know of it's called industry dive they sold for over 500 million dollars and they were founded about 10 years ago and I think they sold one year ago and so it's a massive outcome that's one of the biggest media Acquisitions or biggest media company sales ever is a newsletter business called industry Dives that's really cool morning Brew which most people know that's kind of the most common and well-known one sold for 75 million um and then the milk road which is one of my first clients for this agency they sold for seven figures like the estimate is is I don't know the exact number but you know seven four to seven million and they started that company and sold it in 10 months and so there there's some like outcomes on the big end of the spectrum too like big um big businesses multiple employees um scaling quickly but there's also lots of kind of Indie businesses solopreneurs who are using newsletters to grow businesses that are at you know 10K to 100 000 per month um and you don't really hear about those either no and so I'd like to break that actually quick question on industry dive was is there a Content B2B focused or b2c focused it's B2B and that's why a lot of people haven't heard of them because they don't have um their brand as an industry dive that's kind of the holding company they have all these separate brands for different industry verticals so they have banking dive HR dive um CFO dive Etc construction dive and so they'd have all these B2B Publications for these different verticals and they have probably 20 or 25 that are super successful yeah I mean B2B is definitely where the money is from like an advertising standpoint if all of a sudden you can be like hey you can get in front of all these CMOS or director of operations or whatever that is um there's people that'll pay a lot of money for those eyeballs not to say like morning Brew or daily candy that's more consumer facing isn't great but like the cost per Impressions the cpms might not be as valuable as B2B is that is that what you see as well yeah absolutely it's a it's a same business model but different mechanics to it and so b2c newsletters that focus on Business News sports news lifestyle Etc they're selling ads more based on a CPM on opens so they pay they charge based on 1000 opens and usually that CPM is between like 25 to 50 per 1000 opens um however B2B the number is just much much higher it can be 100 per 1000 open so it could be a thousand dollars for one thousand opens the ranges are really broad for B2B because it can depend on a lot of different factors and the reason B2B can charge so much more for a sponsorship in their newsletter is because the people they have on the list they basically have a lot of business decision makers CEOs CFOs um marketing officers marketing people on these email lists and the advertisers are usually companies that have Enterprise level products products that have an LTV of over a hundred thousand dollars per year like high Enterprise software Services stuff like that so if they're able to pay tens of thousand dollars tens of a thousand dollars for one sponsorship in one of the industry Dives newsletter and they get one customer from that they get an Roi on that investment and so there's a really interesting advantage to going B2B versus b2c oh yeah and I see it too with um a lot of people kind of in our space where they've got even a list of 50k to 100K and they're making you know three to seven K per email send um and that's that's a really nice business um if you're sending like three per week or even more and so obviously there's like ways to monetize it where you're selling the ad units and obviously people are buying these companies there's an exit at the end of this rainbow so it's like all right sold let's do this as far as launching a newsletter I want to like start from scratch if I'm someone that wants to launch a newsletter how do I get started where do I go with like how I pick a niche or how I name it or should I do paid versus free like what's some of the Frameworks you use if you're trying to start something from scratch and guarantee success yeah the first thing I think about is something that I would call a Content Market fit so a lot of people have heard of product Market fit and so for news newsletters of content business of course you're going to have this a little bit different version of product Market fed and so content Market fit is kind of the intersection of what the market is interested in what people want to learn about what people want to read about um what you can actually write about so your skill set your experience your writing skills and like how they come together right so if you have experience and skill sets that a lot of people are interested in um you can kind of just start there so what I find that works best is people who have deep experience in one area maybe they've worked in the industry for multiple years maybe they had a unique life experience or maybe they're just a really skilled writer whether they're a journalist or they're just entertaining funny writer and they can parlay that into the right topic so number one is developing that so how do you develop that I think it comes down to picking a niche and starting variationally expanding later so I like to say pick one Niche and then dial that in one the two niches deeper um and so for example Tech with niche of like Tech or the niche of business or Finance or Sports it's just too broad there's so many Publications around that you want to find something you want to find your tribe kind of within that and so if you like football there's something within football maybe it's even deeper than football maybe it's fantasy football or daily fantasy if it's business maybe it's media businesses and then below media businesses what's even more niches newsletters what I talk about so there's no perfect answer to finding your Niche it really depends on what you're interested in what your experiences are and what you see what opportunities you see in the market to cover and then you really just need to start writing and getting responses to that writing it doesn't even need to be a newsletter at first necessarily you can just start writing on whatever platform or publishing on whatever platform you prefer so it could be Twitter LinkedIn or a really popular basis for newsletters I would probably recommend those but also you know publishing on Instagram or Tick Tock can be great too and you want to just publish consistently so you need to figure out what that is for you that could be for me it's one thread a week one tweet a day for someone else it might be one video a week or three videos a week and see what type of content what type of topics are hidden and getting a great response and that's going to help you identify what your newsletter is about um and so that's how it starts so Step One is like pick that Niche um and then there's lots of steps after that I can dive into it too yeah so it's it's like picking that Niche where you can really own it and have a voice and I also like even you do a great job with your your Twitter Bots like newsletter guy I know that if I see content from Matt it's like let's like turning on the TV if I go to ESPN MSC sport so I go to mtvl I'll see music and if I see you I'm gonna see newsletter content so you can own that category one thing that I've struggled with with our newsletter is how much of it is original thought leadership content versus how much of it is curated right and then I see some other communities like Trends did a great job of a curation of the community are there content formats people should think through to make content that really resonates yeah that's a really good point about the position of your of your topic to adjust the circle back to that like that's really key and that's something you want to think about as you're writing content how can you pick a category that you're the best in the world in right and how can you be the go-to person in that category and it's a lot easier for people to pay attention to you if they know exactly what they're going to get when they come to your newsletter or your social profile but to get into what that content looks like I I've seen this framework by I think Dan oshinsky if I'm saying his name right he has this this framework about the different types of newsletter voices and I think it's a good way to think about that content format and so he there's five and I think these kind of categorize all types of newslettes so there's the analyst and this is someone like a Ben Thompson who analyzes industry there's a curator like we just talked about someone who summarizes things who links to things who finds interesting things they bring value by finding the most insightful and interesting things to the readers um number three is the expert so someone who's just an awesome at a particular topic that could be like sports swimming newsletters whatever I my content probably falls into the export category then there's the reporter which is journalism essentially and then there's the writer which is kind of a catch-all category where there's like this is creative work this is someone who's sharing um I would say like personal advice personal development a lot of times art stuff like that and so I like to kind of maybe pick one category or a combination of two and um ideally I think every newsletter should have some curation however it's really hard to start with only curation uh maybe if you have an existing audience starting to only create a newsletter is helpful so people like um James clear and Tim Ferriss they have these newsletters James clear's one two three newsletter Tim Ferriss is the five bullet Friday they're both all curated newsletters and but before they started his newsletters over the years through their writing and podcast Etc they built up a massive audience and so they can kind of have a easy to produce newsletter that people subscribe to because they're just interested in what they have to say because they have already read their original work right and so I do think it's hard to start just curated however the great thing about curation is even if your original work you have in the newsletter let's say you write like a how-to piece in your newsletter about something maybe people aren't interested in learning about that topic that day however if you have you know five to ten pieces of curation below that or above that piece there's probably at least one or two things in that curated news or curated content that people are going to be into and they're going to keep coming back to your newsletter because of that curated content so I like to pick one of these and then add curation onto it that's such great advice and even that's how we did our newsletter we'll start with curation and we'd sprinkle and thought leadership pieces but it was so hard because you just get busy and like we do it even just weekly and um the curation allows you to one hopefully give something for everybody but also on those weeks where you just don't have the stuff it's like okay you can still add value without writing a 2000 word article or doing something and like what we've done for original content like this podcast is kind of one form of that we build in public that way the byproduct of us growing our startups is content so I'm always interested in how you can repurpose things but um sometimes nothing's as good as just making content that's specific for the newsletter yeah and I think there's a way to do it so it doesn't require a ton of effort because you have to think about this time if you're going to be publishing this newsletter weekly for years or daily over time eventually it just makes sense to start weekly then add more sense as you grow right so you have to have content and you can consistently do right and so like 2 000 words every week or every day just isn't doable and that may not even be what the audience wants but maybe there's other content formats that you can make consistently and that are still insightful and original in some ways yeah at the end I want to get into your your content machine and operations but we'll say on this pads like all right we're sold let's do this let's do a newsletter sell for seven figures or more like the milk road we've picked our Niche we've picked our content format um how do I get my first thousand sign ups like what are the things you do because so many people are launching newsletters now it's very crowded it's like newsletters are cool again how do you kind of Rise Up from the noise yeah I think the first 1000 is really all about publishing and getting yourself out there and most that's going to come through social media I like to pick one platform because it's hard to be especially when you're first starting out you can't do all the platforms maybe you can do too that kind of pair well together like Twitter LinkedIn seem to pair well together but I would just pick one to start with and start publishing about your topic I mean it could be if you're publishing a Weekly Newsletter you're just repurposing that content every week into a thread or into a LinkedIn post or you're purposing that content the long form content you write into five different tweets throughout the week and just you know it's gonna when you start off and you have zero followers it's gonna take time to grow that those people like the content they'll share it Twitter has you know built-in sharing so does LinkedIn and so if that content resonates it's going to grow and that's how you're going to get your first 1000. there's some other basic tactics that make sense to do too so like you know having that of course you need to make your social bios for all your platforms very clear and have a clear call to action for your newsletter so Twitter bio has to have a clear call to action linked to your newsletter same thing with LinkedIn um Instagram Etc adding that to your email footer is really helpful um sharing with like your closest friends and colleagues is really helpful to get traction and like get you to commit to something you know if you have 10 friends or 10 colleagues subscribed and expecting a newsletter every week and expecting content every week that's gonna keep you motivated to actually keep writing it so you kind of have to put those little um commitment remember things up they're out there to yourself um and that's really 1K is maybe the hardest part but also maybe the most simple when you get past that Mark and you see you have some type of content Market fit then you can start to get into the more sophisticated growth strategies that we've talked about that we could talk about yeah I'd love to get into that so it's like it's kind of Scrappy good content distribution yourself to get to the first thousand you did a really cool post on these different milestones and the different tactics you have to do based on your newsletter size I'd love for you to kind of expand on that okay so so first like zero to one K I would say is publishing publishing on Twitter LinkedIn wherever your people are that's where you're gonna start so once you have 1K subscribers you can start partnering with other newsletters to cross promote each other and so these are called cross promotions or another form would be recommendations if you're familiar with substack substack made this feature really popular call recommendations where you have to subscribe to one newsletter they recommend other newsletters and so you can start to cross-pollinate with other newsletters that are similar to you but non-competitive and start to grow with each other and so the two ways are recommendations are really the easiest to set up because they're kind of set and forget you just get a newsletter to agree to recommend with you and then everybody who signs up make sign up for someone else's and everybody who signs up to that newsletter may also sign up for yours so that's really simple hands off the second one is cross promotions or some people call this ad swaps and you're basically you're just going to have an ad for another newsletter in your newsletter and they're going to do that as well and so you want to find people who of course are a similar topic but also have a similar list size similar open rate similar click-through rate and you want to have basically a small shout out in your newsletter for them and they do the same and the best way to do this is probably with a tool called lettergrowth.com this popped up recently I also have some resources on my Twitter the device but basically this is a directory of a ton of different newsletters and you know if you're publishing the space you're probably going to know what newsletters are similar to you anyways and you can just reach out to them but if you need to find more people lettergrowth.com is a good resource for that and this can take you I mean it's a really simple strategy but people have added tens of thousands of followers or subscribers rather just by doing recommendations in cross-promotion sometimes many more just from these two different strategies that are same in some ways and so once you get to 1K where you actually have an audience to do that I would recommend doing that as your next growth strategy after social content yeah it's so interesting because um we've been very like just Bottoms Up making good I hope we think is good content and just recently we did that path of trying to partner with different platforms that connects you with other people's lists and we were getting like 200 email signups per day I have not seen letter growth I will definitely be checking that out um and so you start to grow you're getting to like five maybe ten thousand email signups what what's some of the next tactics you do after that yeah I like the next one is now we have a bigger audience and maybe now that audience will be open to sharing the newsletter With Their audience right it's the next tactic I would look into as a referral program and I think this is really popularized by morning Brew in the hustle it's what's called a milestone based referral program there's different ways to do it but this is probably the simplest ways to start and this basically is every time you refer someone or one of your readers refers someone else to the newsletter they get a sign up for you um they get a reward after a certain Milestone so that could be for my newsletter I basically have like a PDF guide I give it one referral I have another like piece of content I give five referrals and then I have online course that I give away for free when someone sends me 10 referrals there's tons of examples for this morning Brew the hustle have done a lot of like physical swag so like 10 referrals you get a t-shirt 25 you get a sweatshirt 50 you get a hat that may not be the best way to do it for most people however if you have a brand that's like has really cool branding cool visuals I think physical swag could work well it really depends on what you need so my newsletter more based on business advice so I give away digital content for people however a physical stuff works too and so the way I would do this is look at a bunch of other referral programs and see what they're doing and see how you can emulate that so morning burn the hustle are good the milk Road had a lot of success with the referral program um I have one too people can check out a newsletter operator there's probably a ton more you can look at and then the way you set this up is with tools that there's custom built tools for this so the most popular one is called spark Loop spark Loop also has a ton of content about how to set this up and then also beehive which is the email service buyer that I use has this as a filter has a feature built into their product so you don't even have to use a third party tool to set this up like James Clear I think he does like a you know refer and get a secret chapter that wasn't in atomic habits that I think performed really well for him that I like that I think low referrals and giving away a digital product or something digital it doesn't cost anything to you makes a ton of sense and so at the milk road we gave away like a report that was called like what crypto whales are buying and selling right now it was basically they interviewed 10 to 15 people who were like huge crypto investors and they asked them about their investment strategy um at the current state of the market and that generated I think over 20 or 30 000 signups just from referrals and we gave that away for people who referred one reader to the newsletter um so I like that like one to three referrals you get a digital product you know later on you can give away more if you have a product that you're open to giving away for free like you have an online course you have the physical product whatever that you can give away at 10 20 25 referrals that one works really well too that's uh that's a really good example from the milk Road um okay so now now we're approaching like 10 or 25k when do we start monetizing the newsletter and when can you start doing paid tactics for the newsletter I think depending on your newsletter topic you can start monetizing as soon it can depend a lot because like At first your ad prices are going to be really low especially if you have 1 000 subscribers so maybe it makes more sense to sell a service sell Consulting sell a digital product but when you get to 5K 10K 25k you can definitely start monetizing with sponsorships and so at that point your newsletter definitely should be monetized in some way after you get past one or two thousand subscribers whether that's with ads Affiliates something else um in the way to maybe we'll Circle back to monetization but the way once you get to maybe between 10K and 50k subscribers a great way to grow is with paid ads with paid marketing and that's what I've done a lot for newsletters like the hustle and the milk Road and the types of ads that work best are basically social ads so Facebook ads Instagram ads Tick Tock ads now Twitter ads are becoming more popular too for newsletters um just the ad platform there is changing but this is a of course there's more fun not the other tactics are mostly invest in your time now we're talking about investing money too so it's a little bit of a higher risk higher reward strategy but it's a very scalable strategy too at the hustle over I think the lifetime of our like Facebook ad campaigns over four or five years we generated over 800 000 subscribers just from Facebook ads for the milk Road I drove probably over 150 000 subscribers just from Facebook ads not including other AD platforms and so it's a great Channel um however you got to do it right because you don't want to be throwing away money you don't want to be acquiring subscribers at a crazy high cost so I can dive into how to how to do that exactly yeah because I mean I think a lot of people like without seeing our agency we do quite a bit of paid ads we're selling products we're selling software right as opposed to just going for the the cost per email sign up um you know what what are some like quick tips or advice you could give to people on on how to Think Through Those ads yeah so number one is pick your ad platform I really recommend the Facebook ad platform it's the easiest to use it's usually has the best cost most effective best targeting options your audience for most newsletters your audience is going to be there I think like 40 of people on the internet use Facebook or Instagram every single day so you're gonna find people there right A lot of people say Their audience isn't there but they really are maybe they're more active on Twitter or something else but they're on Facebook and Instagram too to hang out with their family and friends um so that's the platform I would pick and I would start with making a great landing page I have some content about this um on my Twitter website it's hard to explain how to make a landing page visually like we could talk for 20 minutes about any Pages we won't get into but it's really important and I like a simple short landing page that basically just asks someone to enter their email address to sign up um so you want to have that in place you also want to have a thank you page in place because we find that um tracking based on a URL redirect what Facebook calls a custom conversion is a lot more effective than tracking based on a button click or something else and so you want to have a great landing page able to sign up to once they sign up they're redirected to a thank you page for your newsletter um of course you want to install your pixel we won't get into every single detail about a set of Facebook ads but that's where you want to start and um after you have your landing page set up you have your pixel set up you have your custom conversion you've picked your ad platform the next step is targeting or I guess the next step would be your campaign type actually so there's the campaign type there's who you Target and then there's your ad creative and so the campaign type is simple but some people mess this up you want to use a conversion campaign I think what Facebook calls now a lead campaign you a lot of people would pick a traffic campaign because they think I want to give as much traffic to my website as possible however Facebook basically any AD platform will send you very low cost traffic that just doesn't sign up for your newsletter they almost over optimize for the objective you pick so you want to pick the right objective and that's going to be conversions or leads and then you want to do your targeting so the targeting depends on your newsletter topic but the easiest way to set up targeting is just to Target other Publications that are similar to yours so if you're about sports you're going to Target ESPN if you're about business you're going to Target Wall Street Journal stuff like that you can also use look like audiences which I think a lot of people know about where you upload your email list and Facebook goes creates audience that is similar to that and they find people that are similar to people that are on your email list right look like audiences and so the final step here is AD creative and this is one again it's kind of hard to explain without a visual but we have um one of the best ways to learn about it is just to look at what other great newsletters are doing so a lot of people know about the Facebook ad Library you can look up a Facebook page of other popular newsletters like the hustle morning Brew milk Road we'll talk about other newsletters later and just see what ads they're running and get some inspiration from the copy the types of images the types of videos what's really working best now for newsletters on on Facebook and Instagram ads is what we call ugc videos these are like short usually 15 to 25 second videos of someone shooting selfie style if you can do this to yourself as like the newsletter writer or founder that's even better but you can also pay people to do this for you on Fiverr or if you just Google ugc videos there's tons of marketplaces to find people who create videos like this for you and so basically have someone make a video that's kind of somewhat similar to a testimonial about why your newsletter is awesome and why people should read it and so that's kind of what the Facebook ad process looks like and you don't need to do every single ad platform you don't need to have 12 different ad platforms there's I think maybe a billion people on Facebook I have no idea but there's got to be hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and Instagram that you can reach so there's enough people on that platform to grow your newsletter to millions of subscribers right um and then over time you'll test more as you get good at Facebook yeah no yeah I I think so many times just with our agency we see people try and diversify too soon on channels when they haven't squeezed the most out of one channel and maximize their spin there so I I totally agree there so I'd love to hear so you join the hustle um talk to me about like coming up with a strategy for acquisition and how you kind of took the reins to do that was that something they were already figuring out or was that something you were able to innovate on or were you just putting gasoline on the fire because I'm what I'm getting to is how you really like perfected your craft at the hustle and then how that kind of led to this like move to go out on your own thing yeah I came on an interesting time where the hustle was really focused on the trends.co product which you know about you were in the Facebook group there and so that was a subscription paid newsletter and they were so focused on that that was a great product awesome product Community that's providing recurring Revenue where the hustle and newsletter was kind of left behind because the entire team was focused on that and they had no one assigned to actually grow the hustle so at the point I came on the list was actually declining we were at like 1.5 million before I came on and by the time I got there it was like churning down to 1.3 million somewhere in that range and so my job was basically be totally responsible for the hustle newsletter and growing that to over 2 million subscribers and so I kind of had to because the list was declining there wasn't a lot of marketing there going on I kind of had to figure out the marketing strategy from scratch however there was obviously years of work before me to get to over 1 million but I had to kind of start and reset the marketing strategy so number one was figuring out what we called self-serve advertising so that was figuring out Facebook ads Facebook ads have been a great channel for the hustle historically it had generated like over a hundred thousand subscribers or maybe 700 000 before I started but it had kind of fallen behind Costa got higher um the ad formats had changed and they hadn't really innovated on the Facebook side so step almost figuring out Facebook ads and then second of that was like figuring out new channels that new new paid growth channels that we wanted to explore so at the time back in 2020 Tick Tock was a somewhat new ad channel so that was the one we dove into next and so Facebook pretty soon after that Facebook and Tick Tock ads became one of the biggest growth channels for the hustle we figured out how to do ugc videos ugc video ad group like I just talked about for the hustle and we were really good at that before I came on they're basically using all images and the kind of the ad like the the way ads work to change you know it'd move from images working the best to videos working the best so we we got really good at finding dozens of different actors to make videos for the hustle and use those videos as ads on Facebook and Tech talk and Instagram so that was number one and then the second thing we did a good job of was figuring out affiliate marketing and this is something they had dabbled in a little bit but I went a lot of steps further to optimize it so it's kind of oh affiliate marketing is a lot a lot more opaque than like Facebook and Tick Tock ads anybody can get started there it's it's a little bit more challenging to start affiliate marketing for a newsletter um because if you you're not a certain size or you don't have a certain budget you can't even Explore this channel like if you don't have five or ten thousand dollars to spend with one of these affiliate Partners they're not going to consider working with you but I can talk a little bit about that it is a really interesting Channel because most people just don't know about it like they know about Facebook ads they know about all these app platforms influencer marketing but they don't know affiliate marketing is somewhat on the underbelly of like the internet if you know what I mean oh yeah a little bit about it yeah there can be like some not a lot of some things people like oh we don't do affiliate marketing or other businesses that they just like explode on the back of it yeah I'd love to know like what what worked with affiliate marketing yeah so I mean Facebook Tech talk and referrals were always core and also organic traffic we've got a lot of SEO traffic we converted the website visitors into subscribers that was like our core um high quality subscribers but we were able to get a lot of extremely low cost lower quality subscribers from affiliate marketing so I'll dive into that and so there's basically um the main type of Affiliates we use were called co-registration and so it's again this is our dictionary for the visual but let's say you sign up for a newsletter on like um readersdigest.com after you sign up you might see three to five different ads for other Publications or other products and you can check a box to select subscribing to this publication too so we did lots of co-registration marketing across literally hundreds of different websites so I'm like Readers Digest some like you know giveaway sites like they're giving away a Macbook or something people would sign up for that and then they would also select a sign up for the hustle too and we would pay 20 cents to 35 cents for subscribers from all these different websites and we would optimize which ones are bringing in the highest quality subscribers who has the highest serpent rate high school thread which ones don't it's a lot like Facebook ads where you're pausing what is not working positing what is low quality and doubling down on what is high quality and so there's a ton of optimizations we did and we worked with probably at least six different affiliate um Brokers I would call them to find these hundreds of different websites to advertise on and so that's called co-registration there's not a lot of information about it online um but it worked extremely well because the subscriber cost is so low 20 cents to 35 cents um most subscribers were coming from these co-registration Affiliates it's just it's hard to it's hard to outgrow that with Facebook when your your cost per subscriber is two dollars on Facebook and 20 cents on another platform so you're always going to have more subscribers there but we had to think about it in like a fashion where we're not allocating too much much of that so we normally kept that type of source around 20 to 25 of our marketing budget and um sources like newsletter ads Facebook Tick Tock um referral program that was more like 75 of we would actually spend gotcha oh that that's super interesting so it it's clearly going well at the household well what's interesting is like if people listen to this man listen to my first million you worked with two companies owned by people from my first million like what was it like working with Sam par it was good I didn't get to work a ton of Sam we more like just chit-chatted because I came on about I think four to six months before the hustle was sold and so once it was sold to HubSpot Sam wasn't like directly managing wasn't doing stuff like that so I worked a lot more of the rest of the team Scott Nixon many other folks there so Sam was awesome he's like what I've learned from Sam and also Sean Perry um is like the tenacity that they get after things and like the expectations they have um it reminded me a lot of like my high school football coaches like the type of management they were doing they're like let's get this done yesterday um yeah and have it kind of been reality a little bit and have the expectations that are a lot higher than your average person I think a lot of people would be happy with like a three dollar subscriber from a Facebook ad but Sam was like we need to make this 50 cents and like figure out how to do it um so yeah it's a lot of fun yeah and I think the right team members could respond really well to that or maybe they won't but that's really cool feedback and then so so it's clearly working at the hustle when do you make the move to go all in on your own thing and then how do you land the milk Road as a client I mean it's probably from your track record but that's pretty impressive yeah I kind of just somewhat dabbled into it and then fell into it because I wanted to I was working at HubSpot um or I was working on the Hostile ad HubSpot and the company changed a lot I didn't want to keep working in the big tech company um and I I applied for shipping jobs but really I was very picky and I couldn't find the job that I wanted so I was like I'll try some freelancing so I reached out to Sean Perry who started the milk grow in January I think I reached out to him like late January where I was still working at the hustle and he said yes and I started doing that on the side of my main gig and then eventually that went well I was really enjoying the work I had some more I guess referrals or like some more people I closed through code email and then at like I think only two to three clients on that kind of freelancing for other newsletters I kind of took the dive to do that full time and it wasn't until a few months later where I really decided to turn that into an agency and not just you know consulting or Contracting by myself yeah um and what who else I mean you've got a pretty impressive list of companies you worked with anybody else to like call out or like lessons learned it's cool to hear what you learned from Sam and from Sean but anybody else the milk grow is really interesting we can dive into that um 1440 is one that I worked for a lot it's one is like really under the radar kind of like industry dive is extremely successful but most people wouldn't know about them they have a newsletter of over 2.3 million people um and I've worked with over like 20 newsletters now bins bites is one I worked over recently it's like a really fast growing AI newsletter and so maybe we can talk about some of the the more recent strategies that like they're using currently yeah I'd love to hear that yeah Cody Sanchez but yeah but that's so maybe we'll dive into Ben's bites so we can Circle back to any other ones that are interesting again Ben I just started working with them really recently so I've only kind of seen what he's done and we just started in the past two or three months um and basically one thing that's helped him a lot is just like being early on the trend and so everybody when Chad GDP launched I guess it's got to be two or three or five months ago now Ben had already had AI newsletter that had launched three or four months before that and was publicly talking about it on Twitter daily and so one interesting strategy that he used to grow the newsletter was kind of being the reply guy and so every time there was a big piece of AI news they dropped Ben would reply to it and be like hey this is awesome I'm adding this to my AI newsletter tomorrow and then you would link to the newsletter and so he would reply to people like the CEO of Google and the CEO Google's tweet had millions of Impressions and then Ben will be the first reply and he would get you know 50 000 Impressions and then he would get hundreds of subscribers from that so um just owning that AI category on on Twitter and being the first and best in that category helped a ton and then now we're kind of accelerating that growth of paid acquisition with marketing on Twitter ads Facebook ads Tick Tock ads Etc the reply guy is a great tactic um I I've heard people talk about that and I've seen it work even when I've tried to do it it's like oh wow like the engagement that can get is insane so that's a really cool one he has a great referral program too that's generated a ton of signups for him and so if you look at his newsletter binsbytes.com I think it's very creative content so there's probably 20 30 different links A Day to all the different AI news different AI tools that are out there and then he has created kind of like a really organized spreadsheet for a database of all these different links that have been in the newsletter and there's thousands of them now because he's been sending every day for months and so if you refer one person the newsletter you get access to that database and so if you're already interested in the content you're going to want to have access to find more content like it or have it in a more organized fashion so that is has got to have done at least 10 000 subscribers for him man that's awesome and yeah it's really nice to ride the AI wave that's only going to get bigger and bigger and bigger as people want to learn about it so you're now this agency owner like what what has it been like being as this kind of accidental agency owner like what's your your kind of takeaway after kind of getting it going and getting it working but now you're kind of building this team yeah I've been lucky to kind of fall into the right Niche I mean I kind of I wanted to work in with the hustle for years like I DM sampar one or two years before I got hired there because I was interested in the business I was trying to share insights with him and so I guess it's been a long time coming even though I've only just started the agency about 11 months ago right um and so I guess what first of all I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do because before I started with the hustle I did a lot of freelancing I was like I don't ever want to do client work again um but then I kind of heard if you're familiar with um what's the same the guy from tiny.com Andrew Wilkinson yeah or um talk about his Agency on my personality and talk about that being the building block to build is other businesses it being a cash flow asset the advantages of building agency business really resonated with me um it's one where one of the few businesses where you can get started and have a media cash flow immediate profitability do the service yourself nothing really out there exists I mean media is kind of comparable to that where you can start a newsletter and have very low cost or start a YouTube channel or something like that but it's almost a lot harder to get traction on those types of businesses and a lot easier to get started on the agency and so I I like it in that way of course there's still struggles every day but like one one strategy has worked well for me is hiring people from other good agencies and so I have and also hiring people from other great newsletters so I've hired people from morning Brew I've hired people from other very successful e-commerce agencies and I basically just use the tactics strategies that they've learned at their other jobs and apply them to my agency so that's worked well I'm up to like five part-time people now and um I think I plan to keep using that strategy over and over again just just grabbing more people from those companies and having them work part-time for me totally getting the bin there done that person can take a lot of weight off of your shoulders and a lot of stress there I mean there are good up-and-comers that you can train but when someone just hits the ground running on day one you're like oh my goodness thank you so much so um well very cool well one question um I always like to ask is what is the nicest thing anyone's done for you in your professional career yeah I don't have a great emphasis I would say my manager of the hustle Scott Nixon he was kind of the the CEO of law school essentially he was kind of like leading the team there and I reported to him and it's talk about like the best manager I've ever had helping me grow personally and like figuring out what my goals are and what I wanted to do he pushed me there and the piece of advice he gave me I think when I left was like if you're good at something or if you have experience with something just double down on that and that's what kind of encouraged me to actually go out and do this because I didn't think um I I didn't think the category was big enough to have a marketing agency or even a media company about newsletters I thought it's such a small Niche like people don't really care about this it's so tiny when I listed out like potential clients for this agency I could only list like 20 or 30 different companies um but now there's there's literally thousands that could be clients for this and I guess it's growing a lot too but Scott giving me that advice to like like you have experience for this you're already in newsletters just keep doing it and see what happens um helps so much because people you know they look for people who have experience and Authority with other big names in the industry and if you're able to build on top of that instead of starting from scratch in another area um that helped me a time is I was going to go work in SAS or work in startups or something completely different and I would have to start and kind of build my career all over again versus just going on what I did yeah it's nice because I love this idea of escape velocity where you build up this experience at other companies but then when you burst out to do your own thing you have all this momentum and you're really able to to harness that very well and I I mean I think it's smart like my favorite agencies are the ones that do that where you do something well like you said it's like growth marketing but then you take it one step further and it's like just for newsletters because whenever people like oh I need to like grow my newsletter it's not even like oh look at all these other options like oh no go talk to Matt like he's literally like the guy and so no man I think it's it's really well done and it's it's cool to have someone that had your back and kind of gave that recommendation um but um but but very cool man um but yeah look yeah but um but what else man what what like I want to like be able to tell people where to to send you but anything else you want to hit on I feel like you just put on a master class for for newsletter growth but what didn't we cover yeah I mean there's so much I don't know how much time you have we can talk about the milk Road a little bit um that might be the most interesting case study because they sold for seven figures in ten months they grew from 10K subscribers to 250k subscribers in 10 months and that's one I was the first person hired there part-time yeah so I've I've got like five more minutes I'd love for you to just Riff on that because I think that's such a cool story and the fact that you came in at such an early point yeah it shows that like it's it's news I think we're going to see more newsletters in the future have a lot of success stories like this I think we're just getting started in the newsletter space I mean there's the daily candy the skin the morning morning Brew of like built industry but we're going to see a lot more Niche newsletters pop up and have these quick success stories um and then milk Road was like a matter of basically two things being having great content Market fit I would say three things actually great content Market fit popping on a trend that was exploding and being really good at paid acquisition and so I was really hoping that third area and so Sean and Ben Levy who created the milk Road they were amazing at explaining crypto in an easy to understand funny way um in publishing that daily obviously the trend was happening at the time back in January of last year it was actually kind of on the downturn of the trend in crypto so that was a bit of a struggle but we still rode that Trend and then being great at paid acquisition was basically taking everything that I did for the hustle and copy and pasting that strategy of the milk Road and doing the exact same thing just applying that to a different newsletter and then putting money behind that growing from you know 10K to 250k in 10 months 85 percent of that subscriber growth came from Paid acquisition so Facebook ads Tick Tock ads affiliate marketing in a little bit of referrals and so that's what made it successful I can even break down like week to kind of dive into that because I think people find the numbers interesting I think over 150k from Facebook ads north of 30k from Tick Tock ads north of 20K from referrals and the rest is kind of miscellaneous Twitter and resources stuff like that what's like the average cost per email that you're going for on that at the lower ends when the market was really booming like April of last year Marshall last year we were getting subscribers for a dollar ten to a dollar twenty and then when the market started to slow down our costs went up to you know dollar fifty dollar seventy um we started to spend less too um but that's really good I usually shoot for under two dollars and we were just crushing that that Target yeah now the other thing that I think they did really well was create a brand where they could really create kind of this following because you could just be like oh crypto weekly or whatever but instead it's like no let's create a brand around this which can be a little bit harder when you're getting started because like wait what is this but once people resonate with it it really clicks and I think that aligned with the type of content I made yeah and the funny thing is they're all about moving faster on things that are important so they got a great domain they had a great writing voice but they actually didn't create the the character and the logo in their brand colors until they've reached 100 000 subscribers they were like we're not gonna even make a logo until we're at 100K yeah so I think there's value to that too but when they did do the brand they did it amazing and it's super memorable and awesome yeah they really kind of knocked it out of the park with that because even like ours it's like startup growth by growth hit and I think it needs a little bit more soul to it but I was just like let's just go and prove this but that's uh that's really good feedback I also speaks to the speed of like let's validate this is there it gets 100 000 and then we'll invest in this or is there anything Founders or first-time Founders could be like oh let me spend a lot of time on these things that maybe not might not move the needle needle like your brand or your colors or things like that yeah you can get paralyzed by the tiny things that aren't really important oh yeah until later at least yeah well so um one last thing actually what's kind of the end goal because I think you and I are drinking the the same Kool-Aid as far as the Playbook that Andrew Wilkinson has with meta than to Tiny I mean that's kind of our goal is we're like doing the startup studio is is that kind of the end goal that you have with your agency or um what what's kind of the next thing after you get this thing really working the way you want yeah I'm trying to grow vertically right now so I'm gonna go in the agency but I'm going to basically my audience's newsletter Founders and operators and media companies and also content creators have a newsletter and so I basically want to build products um up and down the value letter for those people so right now I have an agency that's probably higher on the value letter but I want to create you know I have a free newsletter it's lower in the value letter I want to kind of fill that in so I want to create an online course that's probably going to be between 100 to 2 000 that's a broad range but it's going to be filling that in so like yeah people who can't afford my agency they can get more information from the course and maybe there's something above the agency or maybe there's parallel products in different ways I can help people so right now it's really focused on still helping newsletters but just helping them in different ways and then hopefully over time I'd love to explore different stuff but I really feel like I got to maximize this first before I go to a different type of product for different Niche rather it makes total sense that way you're helping people at every phase of their like newsletter Journey from hiring the premium agency or give them free content or course to get them started but um and what's cool is as you're building your own audience and following a newsletter you know they're going to be interested because there are different phases in the different things that you offer so no man that's that's awesome thank you yeah that's the idea yeah well cool well Matt man um where can we send people if they want to learn more about you and what you're doing thank you the place where I publish most is the news newsletter operator.com so that's my newsletter and then I'm most active on Twitter my handle is at J Matthew McGary yeah I definitely recommend uh the follow um he's just dropping knowledge like even like some of your newsletters I'm like oh my gosh I would have spaced that content out over three weeks you just put so much good stuff in there but no man really appreciate it it's so cool to see what you're building and the rate that you're building it at but uh look forward to talking more yeah thanks for having me on this is awesome I love your questions yeah thanks Pat [Music] foreign

Channel: If I Was Starting Today

Views: 50,221

Keywords: sam altman, artificial intelligence, y combinator, sam altman interview, sam altman elon musk, how to make money, how to make money online, how to make money online 2023, entrepreneur, business talks, entrepreneurship, entrepreneur motivation, entrepreneur advice, business, hopper CEO, podcast, marketing, short Selling

Id: wH0cDtGL-xg

Length: 50min 54sec (3054 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2023