[Music] we are here with Michael H my co-host Ryan car is on the phone too let's get right into it we've been working together for a while we know each other everybody in this group has chatted before but for the audience Michael like tell us who you are what you do what's your newsletter called and what's your newsletter about yeah absolutely so hey everyone Michael Hal I am a startup founder my last company raised series a from andreon harwit also raised a venture fund and have invested in over 50 early stage startups over the last few years now I write a newsletter called Hal's newsletter it's an advice column for startup Founders and anybody who's looking to build a startup either now or in the future on Saturdays I write a deep dive about a specific topic or lesson that can be valuable to Founders based on my experience or the experience of of a guest and then on Tuesdays I curate my favorite resources of the week so framework Trend startup opportunity quote uh and Tool as well as some like curated links uh of the week that I'm really excited about so it goes out twice a week we're at 75,000 subscribers as of this past week and yeah that's where we're at right now that sounds good one question is this is a pretty new Venture for you when did you start this and when you go full time on this yeah so it started as sort of a side project when I was at my last company the idea was you know let's build up personal brand of me founder of the company so that we can attract more folks to what was our our founder community at the time the ended up going under unfortunately but the newsletter sort of persisted as this side project and so this was last September by January I had moved on and had just kept writing the newsletter and basically it had taken off a bit on its own we were about nine or 10,000 subscribers by that point and I realized that you know there was a business to be built there and so I decided to spend this year focus on the newsletter I told myself if I could hit 50,000 subscribers by the end of the year I'd call that a success we hit that by July basically in q1 I went full-time on it started working together with you which is a big a big unlock for us and then have built up a community around it a subscription around it and some other business lines as well including a new a new like Creator growth and amplification product called megaphone how do you know a newsletter could be a business like a lot of people are new to this who are listening and they're like how how do you have that inspiration or idea where you could take the newsletter into business or was it just you know I want to do something I'm going to keep writing this news and see what happens or did you have a plan going into it yeah I mean when I started it definitely no plan but when I went full-time I'd say like fully by by March so about you know what is that six or seven months ago now by that point I had a plan and I didn't know what growth channel was going to be the one that worked the best for us or the couple that worked the best for us but I knew that the economics would work out on like on my time and on the upside of the business right so you know talked to a couple friends people like sill bloom L ritky whove built businesses in this space and kind of learned kind of what works and what doesn't work uh to some degree and basically saw that there wasn't a newsletter that was focused on Startup Founders written by somebody who had done it recently and could provide like actual tactical advice that was really modern you know a lot of startup Founders will reference like Paul Graham essays Paul Graham is a genius I you know have learned a ton from him and his writing you he hasn't built a company in a long time right and so nothing against Paul Graham but I think there's there's needs for more modern voices about people who have done things more recently and so I saw that Gap and so I talk about fundraising I talk about hiring I talk about leadership and management growth getting product Market fit and I just basically saw that you know no one with recent credibility was doing that really really well in an accessible format so once I saw that and once I saw the economics could work just made sense to go in got it it's good into how you grew the newsletter especially initially when you were starting um from scrap so maybe a break down I want to talk a ton about growth because I think you're really good at that but when you were just starting how did you get the first 10,000 subscribers or maybe it could be first zero to 20,000 like that first initial chunk what tactics helped you there yeah I mean it was different tactics at different periods right so I had a couple hundred maybe eight or 900 emails that I had from a previous like little newsletter project I'd done like two years ago and so they they seated the newsletter right and so that I was getting feedback right away about what people were liking what people weren't liking but on the growth side yeah I I did a lot of like swaps and recommendations with other people early on and also a lot of content marketing on on Twitter SLX now and then LinkedIn you know I have decent sized audiences on both I 50,000 on Twitter 40,000 on LinkedIn a little lower than that earlier in the year and so just creating good content and putting my you know newsletter CTA a in the replies to those posts putting them all over my profile and Plastering it everywhere making it very clear where I was driving people to that worked and that brought in a lot of like high quality High open rate high click rate subscribers early on but also swaps as I mentioned so I was diving into this new world newsletter operator world and building relationships is always really important to me whenever I'm diving into something new and so I sought out relationships with folks on Twitter who were posting about their newsletters and doing really well and had these very defined niches got to know them we shared tactics back and forth we shared recommendations after people sign up then also swapped like ad placements in the newsletter for free and that cross-pollinated our audiences and did really well uh early on I would say that got us to that probably got us to like around 10 to 13,000 subscribers and then from there to 25k which is when you and I started working together at 25k the Delta there was like lead magnets so I made a couple of these like air table databases with like you know investor information in different niches or accelerators and how to apply to them or curated threads and and podcasts that might be useful to Startup Founders that are tagged by different categories and I put them all on air table and I email gated access to the air table and so posted those on Twitter made sure people like commented and retweeted the post to drive engagement signals and then had like an autod DM set up through tweet Hunter so that when people did that I'd Auto DM them the link they'd go to the link put their email in and get access to the the database and we did like six of those I think over the course of a month and a half or two months or so and that got us from from yeah about 13k to about 25 no more than that from about 10K to to 25k in in that short period of time so those were lower quality I'd say like you know 37 to 40% open rates rather than you know 55 to 60 or more and so some of those folks have turned out by now but still super valuable to get us kickstarted and off the ground and another thing that let us do was generate Revenue really early bring in sponsors only a couple months into the business which was a huge unlock because then let me start working with you invest in growth on on the paid side and kind of just like you know rise up that exponential curve of of how fast are we growing do you remember at what what subscriber count you were at when you started finding success in monetizing through sponsors so once I knew I wanted to go kind of all in on the business for this year I I started reaching out to folks both a gencies and individual like Brands who I've seen sponsor other newsletters or people that I know who I thought might be interested in sponsoring that was around around 10K because I think I think Matt you and I actually had a conversation when I was when I was in Cape Town in January and I think you you advised me like 10K was like the right number to start there and and that has proved true in my experience so started reaching out to folks around 10K hit rate was low but we did get some some success startup Founders is obviously a very valuable Niche and at the time was even less crowded than it than it is now so yeah we started reaching out then I would say we didn't really start having massive success until until we were in the 20s like 20 to 25k and then once we got closer to 30k that's when the agencies started taking us like really seriously and rather than me pinging them be like hey can you send me some some sponsors they were like hey here's some sponsors who want to work with you that's cool we got to dive into how you got your first sponsor too but to go back to those growth strategies a lot of people don't know what recommendations are or cross promos or stuff like that so let's just dive into that so start of recommendations explain what that is and how you got your initial recommendations it's it's pretty straightforward but it' be good to dive into it a little bit yeah sure so I mean when you subscribe to a newsletter that newsletter can choose to show you other newsletters that it thinks people who sign up to it will also enjoy right so for me that would be like other newsletters that start a founders would want to read and so I look for folks who have you know a newsletter about you know Finance for startups legal for startups growth for startups you know whatever it might be these are like very specific niches that I'll touch on from time to time but I'm not writing a full newsletter about it every week and so might be useful for folks to go deeper on those topics so I find those creators I dm with them a bit get to know them you know if I enjoy their newsletter I'm super authentic about that I'm like hey your newsletter's great and so when people sign up to my newsletter then through beehive they see a screen that shows them a couple newsletters that I recommend and they can choose to opt in to also subscribe to those at the same time and you can do those for free or you can do paid ones and so in the early days I was just doing free ones just newsletters that I was you know super excited to promote no matter what we weren't generating much revenue at the time so that wasn't our focus it was just growth and and building those relationships now you know I also use spark Loop now so spark Loop is a great tool for these paid recommendations beehive has their own version beehive boost which is also good they're different happy to talk about the the differences between them if if you want to dive into that but yeah both are great and so when people sign up now they see some paid recommendations and some free ones all of them are newsletters that I personally like and enjoy it's just some of them offer offer a a little bonus to me for for referring them and then related to that is cross promotions which is a promotion within your newsletter for another newsletter that you like shout at each other mutually did those work for you if so how do you set them up and should people consider them now if if they're kind of in that Z to 10,000 phase or zero to 20,000 subscriber phas yeah those those were great for us I would totally totally totally recommend them as long as you you know form the relationships is really the number one value but getting the cross-pollinated audience early on and speeding up growth is is valuable too the way that works is you know beehive makes it really easy because you can just put like a little magic Link in the post and so if people click this little button in your post they're subscribed to the other newsletter but basically instead of running an ad you can kind of like train your audience to expect ads in the future when you get big enough to to be able to command them and that's that's a smart thing to do too outside of growth even yeah you just the product experience right that that that matters to uh us your expectations but you you write a little blurb about the newsletter why you're excited about it it's always better to do it in your voice you know you can provide a blurb from the other person or you can uh just use the one sentence that beye has in like the one lineer the newsletter but it's always always better to use your voice because your audience will will trust it more so you do that you include it somewhere in your newsletter where you would include an ad in the future and then they return the favor and do the same to you and hopefully the subscriber numbers that you each exchange kind of net out somewhere near each other which is usually the case if you're doing with people around the same size as you and that's the hard part about both of these recommendations and is like do you equal do you send the equal amount of subscribers right so like do you have any tips for trying to make make sure these things balance they're never going to perfectly balance and maybe that's one tip is like don't expect them to be one to one totally but what do you think about that yeah I mean again the relationship is the most important thing to me it always is and so I've never worried too much about like making sure I was getting my my fill making sure I was getting my allocated subscribers you know the other person is going to be happier if I'm sending as many subscribers to them as possible so I don't want to like artificially limit that if they're sending me less and if they're sending me more obviously like I'm super grateful and like I'll I'll message them and I'll be like oh thanks for all these amazing you know subscribers one thing to keep in mind though is you you should pay attention to the actual engagement of those subscribers right because you have limited slots where you can offer these recommendations and so if you're offering recommendation that you know either is not getting a lot of opt-in from people who sign up to your newsletter which you can see in beehive or if the folks you're getting in return from them are you know maybe only opening your newsletter like a 20% open open rate or only clicking through at like a 05% CTR you know that's not super valuable and it kind of communicates that maybe the match between the two audiences isn't there and so at that point you talk about like hey whether it makes sense to even continue or find another newsletter to kind of take that slot you're someone who's doing newsletter monetization I think really right I mean you have like a very comprehensive Diversified approach to like taking the audience that you've built and you're providing with you're providing them with a variety of ways to better engage with your brand and like all of them providing a ton of value you've got like the membership you've got your own products you mentioned megaphone I noticed you have like a recruiting firm kind of aspect Consulting that you do so like few questions first of which being which of these is currently the most successful for you like the most prominent piece of the business yeah so sponsorships are definitely still number one for us I think that will not be true by the end of the year I think megaphone will will overtake it and I can share a little bit about what megaphone is in more detail but yeah sponsorships are still number one for us we sell featured placement we sell uh a tool of the week which is like a a SAS tool or some resource that's useful for Founders uh as like a secondary placement in our Tuesday issue and then we sometimes will include like a one sponsored link of the week in our broader list of links of the week and then one thing we've started doing in the last couple months which our audience has actually really really loved is I will interview the founders of like successful startups or Founders who have really interesting stories and I'll take a lesson like extract a lesson from their Journey that other Founders can take and apply to their own Journeys or their own companies and how they're set up and it's great or exposure for the brands because they get in front of all these startup Founders they build their their social brand it's something that their Partners or future investors can look at to learn more about how they operate and so we've worked with YC companies on that we've worked with a couple others that I can't announce yet that'll be coming out soon I think we've signed six six of those so far and so those like deep Dives have become a really big Revenue Stream force in a very short period of time and we're we're looking to continue continue doing those but yeah sponsorship still number one probably won't be by the end of the year but but for now yes and you think that the kind of membership the masterminds that you mentioned um you think those will overtake sponsorships is that kind of how you're how you're for seeing it or is there another are there others that have more momentum right now as well well I mean the memberships membership is going well we have like 500 500 paid subscribers now um which is exciting that's more than I thought we would get in in a short period of time but I think the the strength of the community the Fireside Chats that we do with you know people like Amil Michael from Uber or Adrien schagger from growth assistant have really resonated with people we have like a curated library of founder resources IRL meetups and cities all over the world that we just announced there's a ton going on in the membership that that folks are getting a ton of value out of and so growth there is accelerating but the fastest growing Revenue St that we have is actually megaphone so megaphone is a managed Marketplace for Content amplification and growth on social media so basically if a Founder who's built a great product or wants to build their personal brand you know just wants to get the word out about what they're doing they can subscribe to megaphone and any time they share a post URL with us from like Twitter or LinkedIn uh our algorithm will match that with the best creators who are most aligned to their Niche and who are currently online who within a budget that they set and they'll comment or retweet or repost or quote post or whatever on it and that drives Impressions which drives followers or leads and so that's been growing like crazy we have creators with over seven million followers on the platform now in Aggregate and we have over 120 actually actually as of today 130 paid users on the platform too so it's growing really quickly I've hired a couple Engineers to actually help build that out because it's just it's just growing to F and so I think by by the end of the year that should be our number one Revenue stream but we'll see it's still early in that Journey only like two months old yeah so there's three main new streams sponsorships membership SL subscription I don't know what you call it exactly or premium newsletter and then megaphone the software product we won't touch on all of these because there's a lot to to cover but I want to talk about sponsorships because that's something that a lot of the audience struggles with it's maybe the best place for newsletters to start monetizing or maybe not if you think differently but talk about that so let's break it down from this perspective let's say we're talking to a newsletter that has they're big enough to get sponsorship so they're like 10 to 25,000 subscribers so at the point where they can now comfortably from your perspective how should they go about that like how should they price a sponsorship how should they get the first sponsor and then we'll go from there I would agree that it's the easiest way to get meaningful Revenue in the door early on if I were to go back I would actually probably start my paid subscription from from day one that's one change I would make if I had the bandwidth and you know to do so and invest in the community right away I would do that uh but that's not going to be meaningful Revenue right away unless you're you know serving up a really high-end premium Community experience and it's like a backend offer and it's you know $2,000 a year or something like that most of the time you you're going to be probably under $20 a month per per user so it's not going to be meaningful revenue from from day one but important to start early I think yeah sponsorship is probably the most meaningful Revenue you can get early on also I would say Consulting so early on I took on uh a decent amount of like advising Consulting clients where I would help them with fundraising or growth or go to market or you know anything about their startup really there are a couple different ones in there but that was good for cash flow right away but as far as more scalable like not linear time to Output Revenue stream yeah sponsorships would make more sense as far as how to get your first sponsor you know I just talk to people I know right I know I'm you know fortunate to know a bunch of people who run businesses startups and who want to get in front of other founders so I was able to reach out to some of them oneon-one just in like text messages and got some folks in but I do think one-on-one Outreach is probably your best bet early on you know you can use a service like like an agency or you can use a platform like like paved or or something like that but you're competing for attention on those in those scenarios against much bigger newsletters and that's where the platform or the agency is going to be incentivized to spend their time they're not going to be incentivized to spend it on you know you small potatoes so for me one1 Outreach just getting really good at Cold Outreach really good at personalized messages has made a huge difference in my career more broadly and specifically in this case too so that's what I would recommend I'm interested to know tactically how for the premium membership specifically and I guess the Consulting as well how do you go about converting your free subscribers to the to the paid membership to the Consulting how early on in the journey do you introduce it do you have automations in place that that that kind of remind folks if that's an option um yeah curious to know yeah so these days i' I've sort of toned down the the push the Consulting just because again with how fast megaphone is going with how much you know Revenue we're doing from sponsors now I'm trying to be more intentional about how I spend my time with that said I do open up some Consulting time for one-off calls every every week uh or so but but yeah not as not as big of a focus anymore but on the on the membership side I'm super aggressive with that I hit people with that right away know when you think about what an incremental subscriber is worth Revenue wise if they're on the free tier you know that's like how much extra ad Revenue are you able to generate per issue per subscriber right it's very very small it's probably like I don't know probably like 10 cents maybe under that in some cases depends on your CPM but yeah I mean that's that's nothing right over the course of a year even if you're sending twice a week that's that's a very low amount of Revenue versus if you have someone on a subscription for a year you know they pay us $15 a month or $150 for a year you know that's somewhere between a five and 10x difference in terms of how much you can you can make maybe even you know more than that I'm not doing the math right now but it's substantial and so for me I hit them in the welcome email I hit them in the automated drip campaign that we run for two weeks after that with a couple extra emails I hit them in every single issue underneath every ad that they see if they're on the free tier there'll be a little a little thing that says like you know want to stop seeing ads upgrade here right right I hit him again in the footer it's all over my social media I'm I'm hitting them in as many places as I can I want to remind them time and time again that hey not only do you not need to see ads but there's this whole community of Founders globally who are helping each other who I'm sharing Resources with who I'm opening up my time with I do office hours every week with them and yeah I'm just trying to remind it as many many times as possible I think it's super important do you know which of those placements is most successful or drives the most volume just out of curiosity you could share if you want or not but oh I totally would honestly this is this is my weak point I never spend the time to like set up the right like little UTM tracking and stuff so I literally don't know I should and I feel you know my my the former data scientists at at Uber and Airbnb and me hates me for this but no I I haven't set up robust tracking because we test different things so much that's no it makes sense and I think the coverage to your point like just having it everywhere is more important than like the the individual placement anyway so it makes a ton of sense yeah I mean that it would be different if if I was like oh well if I put it here am I increasing my turn rate right because then it's a trade-off between what am I getting versus what am I losing but I haven't seen anything I haven't heard anything in feedback to indicate because I talk to my my readers all the time I hav't heard anything in feedback to indicate that like you know it's driving people to unsubscribe or not open the emails or anything like that so I don't think it's I don't think there's any like downside has there been any type of type of promotion or type of messaging or type of copy that has worked a to convert people no matter where it's at it could be discounts probably discounts isn't the best example or like certain benefits that people like so we do do a free trial and we get we get good conversion from the free Tri I think it's like 75% convert from The Trial to actually continuing on to be a paid subscriber which is honestly higher than I I expected so that drove up our our our our Revenue growth for the new for the subscription a bit I I'm just super direct with my copy like I'm I'm like you know upgrade now like here's the benefits you'll get being super explicit about what those are whenever I post like one of the IRL meetups or happy hours that we do in in a different city I always post like photos afterwards and people actually see that hey I can meet Founders by doing this that drives it when I post like fires side chats that I'm going to do with with experts that'll drive that'll drive some but the biggest bumps we always get are when we actually send out the email so I send out you know a newsletter Saturdays and Tuesdays the Saturday sends are three out of the four we send each month are are pay walled like you know 25% of the way down so you read the first 25% you read the hook and then you're like oh man I want to read the rest of this but you can't because it's pay wall that works really well that drives a bunch of subscribers every week and then second way is in Tuesdays then we like will conditionally show some information to paid subscribers only so extra Links of the week more analysis of the trend of the week deeper dive on like the business model of the startup opportunity of the week right if you want to get that extra analysis be a paid subscriber I like that you're selling by showing right so like every time every example you mention like you're showing what they're getting not all of it and like you're selling that way instead of making some big promise or something in the copy or some crazy long sales letter yeah it was it was funny I think we talked about this when when I first launched the community and then the subscription back in like the very end of May early June when we just had like a sales page and we were like hey here are all the benefits you're going to get it's great you should join conversion lower than we expected right but then when we're showing people things either content they can get or experiences they can have that's what motivates people to actually pull the trigger and I think one of the key learnings for me since launching has been you have to make the newsletter content good enough to pay for on its own you also have to make every other component individually worth the $15 a month because some people are going to pay for the content some people are going to pay for the community right and so you have to make sure that the vector that people are using to make the decision is a no-brainer $15 a month it's not like oh well this is part of something else and the other stuff I'll probably use it so I'll pay for it no that's not going to drive conversion it's got to be the exact thing they're thinking about that's a good Insight Ryan do you have any other insights on free to pay conversion or other benefits that have worked because you do a ton of like freet to pay stuff you did trends.co anything that you've seen that might be good advice for people well I mean I really like how you mentioned gated content I feel like that was always a big um seller for us especially like at Trend specifically sending out either gated reports or previews of reports that we were releasing we would always expect like a big flood of conversion when we would drop a new report and then kind of like send out a preview of that and I also like how you mentioned that if you you know day one if you were going to go back that was one of the questions I had you wouldn't answered it which is you know if you were going to go back and prioritize a route to monetization earlier on and you mentioned that you would start the the premium membership first which I think is pretty emphatic answer to a question that Matt and I get a lot which is when should I start that premium membership you mentioned that you collect a lot of reader feedback did you utilize feedback in crafting that premium membership at all like were you asking your users what would be most valuable yeah I I ask my users as often as I can in as many places as I can you know I know a good portion of my readers um from you know just like my network so I'll like text them get their take on things communities like like Matt what you have with the newsletter operator Community super valuable to see what's working for other people but yeah I listen to my readers all the time I have feedback surveys that I put out every issue we're getting we put a poll in there and we see what people like and don't like about it they leave comments they leave votes and whenever there's a negative vote I not only just like leave at that I like will reach out to the person and I'll be like hey like sorry this sorry this sucked tell me tell me what could have been better about it and so that helps me make the newsletter better but yeah whenever you're planning a new product launch whether it's a community or a software product or even an info product or a course or whatever super important to talk to as many people as possible do the brunt Force like 15 minute you know 40 US 40 15 minute user interviews and kind of just like learn what problem people actually have and what they see you your value of being able to solve them is and then position your messaging around that so yes 100% I do it all the time and and totally recommend everyone else to do it if you launch without talking to your customers then you're just kind of shouting in the wind and hoping for the best on that note let's say some we have a lot of people who have a free newsletter they have 10,000 even 100,000 subscribers they're using sponsorships Affiliates but they don't have their own product they're selling to people what advice would you have for people who want to either start a paid subscription a membership let's let's think like education digital products because SAS is a totally different ballpark of totally different Dynamics right any advice for people who want to launch their first digital product could be a course too how they should go about that what they should do yeah I mean you you gotta do you gotta do two things you got to find a trend and then you got to find individual problems to solve within that Trend right so you got to be really really specific so if you wanted to make if I wanted to make a course maybe I would say oh I want to make some course about fundraising right and so I'd go talk to a bunch of my readers who have filled out my info survey who have said they're interested in fundraising content I'd be like okay cool tell me like what fundraising advice would be most useful what stage of the process are you at where did you run into the most pain points and I just look for patterns between those right if there's more than a couple people who are saying the same thing and it's something that is like a painful problem for them though that the index of those two things probably means that there's there's willingness to pay there so what I would do is is super simple you know I've done this with every product I built in my entire career just talk to people talk to your users prompt them in certain ways but don't lead them to an answer right it's very important that you kind of let them find their way there give you authentic responses not what they want not what they think you want to hear from them if you have people who can do that for you that's the most important and First Essential step every single time and so that's how we develop the product what would be the go to market strategy I don't love that term but like so we develop the product we make the product how do we sell it now to our free subscribers to free subscri I mean you know there's it depends how big your list is first of all right if your list is big enough to just sell it through there then just sell it through there you can do a specific email blast for the product you can include it as like a like a secondary email in your welcome drip campaign right so for us we have our welcome email where you see like oh here's like the details about the newsletter you know remember to put in your primary folder not your ads promotions folder all that stuff and then the second email they get the next day is like hey megaphone is super cool we can amplify your content you should pay for this right here's why it's valuable and that's another good place social media content marketing is really big I actually seen uh a lot of creators use like affiliate programs really well and I'm evaluating that myself for For an upcoming product launch as well but you know offering generous affiliate commissions like 40 50% either for at least a year or maybe indefinitely that incentivizes people to to make moves because it stands out so the more that you can align incentives with other people who maybe have bigger audiences than you you should it's worth it not only for the revenue you'll get from the product that you wouldn't get otherwise but also for that relationship and they can continue helping you the social brand Capital that you'll accumulate by working with them is good so yeah I would just say those are some places that it could go things you could do with it there's definitely more but just just put it everywhere you can just get it out there and I think also the other thing is have like a coordinated launch plan a lot of people I feel like we'll just throw it out into the wind and then like try to build it over time but if you can drive a ton of attention to that one moment in time and own that moment on social media whatever it might be it's going to be more beneficial than like gradually dragging it out over over a longer period that's a really important note and I think those two last pieces of advice I I would emphas size people you say put it everywhere it seems obvious people don't do that they barely promote their paid product it's like the fifth email on their welcome sequence when it should be the second and should be in five places on their website instead of one and they don't have a launch plan either so very very smart stuff there yeah we we learned that my last company with our fundraises right like we did a really really good job when we the two times we raised outside Capital to to drive a lot of attention to it and as a result of that it raised the profile of our company forever right I was you know we were getting talked to by Publications great Founders wanted to come be our customers and and join our community so yeah it's super important to have that launch moment and to really own it and like brand it in in your voice and in your way I want to talk a little bit about social media growth in megaphone and they relate to each other of course and so you you've grown a ton on social I forget where you're at on Twitter in LinkedIn now but it's it's big and you've also generated a ton of newsletter subscribers and customers from social media Twitter and Linkedin and so we don't need to dive into like an overview of how to grow on Twitter so it's a little bit maybe too high level but maybe talk about what megaphone does with I don't know what you what you call it engagement getting engagement from other creators in your nich and how that boost your content so if you have great content you can go even further maybe explain just like not just megafone the product as you give a brief overview but how that helps people reach more people so they can grow on social and grow their business yeah I mean look the the dirty secret of newsletters is that paid ads runs the majority of growth for all the biggest newsletters in the world right the similar dirty secret of social media is that engagement groups where you share posts between big creators and cross PA at your audiences and share engagement and comments and stuff that drives majority of growth for for big creators too right so finding that who's going to be in that group chat has been super important to people on social media for years and years and years and years and years it's how meme accounts meme networks grew it's how big big folks on on Twitter have grown in the past like you know three to four years um it's just how it works um and so that's why those relationships are really really important but not everyone has access to those relationships right um it's like you can't just go and ask uh Elon Musk to comment on your stuff it it's gonna be a huge impact when he does anyone with a big audience is going to drive a ton of Impressions a ton of views to your profile and your profile if your profile is optimized you'll convert some of them to followers but you can't like just ask these big accounts to do that right and so for me I was fortunate to build a lot of those relationships and be able to grow that way over the course of the last three years or so I think I'm at 50 50k on Twitter now and 40 on LinkedIn so not huge but you know not not huge and it's been great it's been super beneficial having those people comment on your posts or repost them or quote post them or whatever it might be within the first you know hour or so of you making the post will drive a ton of Impressions because these social platforms want to show what's fresh what's new what's happening right now where the conversation is and so if they see big influential accounts commenting on something the algorithm will naturally push it more because I think that's an important an important conversation to to have right so what megaphone does is we basically take that idea and democratize it make it accessible to anyone you don't have to have the relationships that I was able to build to get the benefits of growing faster social media so what we do is yeah you share a post with us and we find the most optimal creators within your Niche and you know respecting the budget you have for the post and we share it with them and they'll go engage with it and drive Impressions and followers and leads to your content yeah I I like that it's like a productized way to do it which I don't think is existed before um so ex so if you have good content it makes sense to use that I think I'm I'm going to try more of that myself when I take content more serious I haven't posted enough recently but talking about like the the dirty secret and the engagement groups I want to talk a little bit about that because like I haven't really heard any information about it like how do you I guess it's pretty straightforward like you bu relationships you DM people you ask them about this but like how do you build like for someone who wants to do it like I do I don't have an engagement group how how do I build that and make it successful so we can all reach more people yeah I mean look building the engagement group is is tough they die easily when people don't add value to them when they're just like extracting the best engagement groups are where you're not only just sharing Links of posts back and forth but you're also sharing advice on content you're giving each other feedback you're invested in each other's growth you know I've been in groups where that's happened that have lasted for years and I've been in groups there where that hasn't happened that have died out within two months right even if it's like the same people to some degree so it's just a matter of are you intentionally driving the group forward and making sure people are engaged so most groups that do all have like a group leader who organizes it and kind of keeps it going and keeps people engaged with it so they usually have rules like oh you can only post this amount of times per week or uh Post in the group right post like in the group request your your content to be engaged with right the amount of requests you can make per per week or whatever but yeah again the problem the problem with that is that a you have to know the right people to make the group they have to be in your Niche they have to be similar or slightly larger Siz audience because people who are really big won't want to get in a group with someone who's super small just that they have no there's no benefit to them to do so really unless you're paying them or something so what megaphone does is it basically abstracts away that work but it gives you the same benefit if not more because you're pulling from a larger group of of creators with bigger audiences so I saw it as just like uh hey you know this worked for me it's not something a lot of people know about or have access to let's let's solve that and let's let creators kind of earn earn some money along the way too yeah I think that's smart it's something that literally everybody does it's like you can see it from the outside but you can't like confirm it you're like oh this these people are always engagement with each other I know there's something going on there you also get the Outreach from like Anon Twitter accounts saying like I can blow up your following like and it's just like kind of a retweet like it's probably the same thing but they just like retweet you pretty much right like yeah yeah dude I love those guys because they help so much those anonymous groups with like you know where are their followers from are they engaged are they real followers there's a lot of questions that folks come to us being like Oh I got approached by this group like what do you know about them and it's like well you know I don't know for a fact where their followers come from but yeah it just helps a service like megaphone that you know works with very reputable creators who are not these Anonymous meme Pages or trusted people that I know it just makes a stand out even more on that note one more topic and then we have to wrap up so that's one way to promote your content with like I wouldn't call it paid but I guess paid paid promotion of social content so you can grow that way let's talk about paid ads real quick or just paid acquisition as a as a channel in general how has that work for you for you what paid ad platforms do you do what recommendations would you have for newsletters that want to get into paid ads if they're just starting from scratch that's a couple questions I'll let you get into this yeah I mean they should talk to you or or you Ryan one one of you guys right no honestly like I tried my hand at paid acquisition before we started working together and I like I was not good at it right I think I was getting like a 35ish CPA at the time which you know I didn't know what I was doing working with someone who actually knows what they were doing brought that down considerably by by quite a lot actually and so yeah if you have the capital if you're bringing in sponsorship revenue or Consulting revenue or affiliate revenue or whatever it might be reinvesting that in growth is super super smart you know I like to tell people that I'm not running a solar preneur business I'm running a startup right and so I'm thinking about my newsletter like a startup which means that I'm not trying to take 95% margin off the top I'm trying to run 0% margin or negative margin even for as long as I possibly can afford to so that I can grow to a big enough size where the business is you has a center of gravity around it is known and and has a firm place in the market it's not fighting for for market share to the same degree that it would be if it was if it was smaller so yeah for me paid growth is a great way to do that if you're super clear on your messaging if you're super clear on your Target customer which you should be if you're writing a newsletter then yeah it's it's a great way to it's a great way to grow I think we do a lot of stuff on Facebook and Instagram Instagram in particular we do a lot of stuff on Twitter we've tested out various types of ads I think the videos tend to work the best but a lot of meme ads a lot of testimonials other things like that you know I'm I'm very I'm very big advocate for it there's also platforms like as I mentioned the paid recommendations on on spark Loop or beehive boost those you know those can be a little a little lower open rate because nctr because folks are not necessarily subscribing to for your newsletter if you see an ad about a newsletter you subscribe to it you're making that decision if you subscribe through like one of these like recommendation networks beehive lets you opt in spark loot makes you opt out so it's a little bit of a different mental calculation but in both cases I think we've gotten our highest quality paid subs from from the ads that we run I think it's interesting that you run at this low margin where most entrepreneurs and creators and solar preneurs do the opposite way they want to have a 95% profit margin but you want to grow as fast as possible and I think that's smart is in this business it's kind of unlike some startups where some sometimes they grow really fast and profitably and they can't cut it so they're and they don't ever become profitable with a newsletter you can just cut your marketing spend and it becomes a very profitable business so is that your philosophy behind it or what do yeah you think 1,000% and it's funny because our margins have naturally gotten better because we've grown so fast right and we're able to charge more for sponsorships our subscription Reven is growing up megaphones growing so fast all that stuff is making it so their margins are getting better even though I'm not trying to like improve them but yeah look you know every new industry or every new and not the newsletters a new industry but there's definitely like they're having a moment right now right beehive has kind of accelerated this trend a lot of people are jumping in and creating newsletters right now if you want to be one of the ones who you know in a year or two from now is acquiring the losers versus being one of the losers who gets IR ired you have to grow there's no other way about it and so when I think about starting a new business I don't want to be in a vulnerable position for any longer than I have to be I want to get big enough so that I can choose where I eat versus let myself get eat right so personally I think there's going to be a wave of newsletter m&a at some point in 2024 maybe into early 2025 if that happens you know I want to be acquiring some of these newsletters that that you know aren't sustainable and seeing if I can either turn them around or fold them into my own I've done two of these already and they've they've worked pretty well they folded in their open rates and CTR are are good so yeah I just think it's really really important to to Chomp on new trends rather than rather than letting yourself kind of grow at the pace of the trend you gotta get ahead of it yeah that's a good point to wrap up and I think a really a really smart insight for people so where can people find you like where should they go the Subscribe your newsletter where can they follow you what's your handle stuff like that yeah sure this was great so join. how.new is sign up for the newsletter if you're startup founder or thinking about building a business at any point would love to have you there megaphone network is our growth service and then if you want to find me I'm on Twitter at call mehal and I'm on LinkedIn just Michael H is my name awesome thank you for coming on thanks Michael thanks for having me guys this is great always always love to chat with you [Music] guys
