Steph Smith - Turn Your Newsletter Into a Seven-Figure Business - The Nathan Barry Show 038

once you actually take the energy to write an idea down and it's implanted into your brain almost like a seed it starts to grow and you start to notice other things around you that are aligned with that watering that seed with different examples with intentional research with data by the time you actually want to write about it or publish it or even start a business around it you've thought about it in many different ways and given it time to breathe [Music] today's episode is with steph smith who runs trends.co which is the paid newsletter from the hustle uh so they have their 2 million subscriber newsletter and they have their paid newsletter called trends which is a little smaller but drives a ton of revenue this is super interesting we get into her approach to uh growth to research uh she's actually a chemical engineer who turned into this whole world of space so it's super fascinating she's got a bunch of tips and tricks that she shares around doing research i love her thoughts on differentiating products there's so much more she gets into business models everything she's one of those people who's basically running the show at one of the largest paid newsletters behind the scenes she's incredible so anyway i'll get out of the way let's dive in and uh meet steph steph thanks for joining me yeah thanks for having me okay so i've got to start with a question um what's it like working for a crazy person and specifically um how are you so good at managing up and before you answer this question did in fact come from the crazy person that we're talking about i asked how did sam yeah that question steph and he's like oh i don't know but you got to find out like how how she manages to deal on a day-to-day basis well i think we all are on a spectrum of like being so good at executing um like some people are great at executing and like logistics and processes and all that stuff and some people are just visionaries and just have so many ideas and it's crazy to work with them but in a great way if you can just give them the space to like be that visionary and not necessarily depend on them for certain things like processes and logistics and so i've just learned over time to not necessarily bucket people but like understand what they're great at and maybe what they're not so great at and sam will say himself like he's he loves hiring operators right and he's hired like ceos or presidents to work alongside him so i actually think one of the great things about working with sam is how self-aware he is because sometimes visionaries or people who are like the idea guy don't realize that perhaps they're not so great at some of the other things and so i just like to give sam the space to like give his ideas and like be the visionary and it's funny because sometimes when they uh when people first start working with sam they're like oh my god like he has so many ideas like do i have to do all this stuff and sam will tell you like no don't do all the things i say i just love sharing these ideas and getting things out there but you're you have to decide like what's important what should be prioritized and so i do think it was a little bit of a learning curve but now i love working with him because he does actually just give you the trust to make those decisions yeah that's interesting i think so many people run into that and i've even had the same thing with our team at convertkit where people are like okay you set this does this mean i need to start working on it you're like no no i was just talking and i'm not even like as wild and crazy as sam is like on that spectrum you know sam's off the charts but um it is a good differentiation and maybe i should be more extreme that way people would know that it's not humanly possible to do all the ideas and to just ignore well i mean sam will tell you like right away that like he's just throwing ideas out there and i think that's really great because you're just like okay like so we're on the same page i know like how much of this i need to pay attention to um and then he will explicitly say which i think is also helpful like when he does want you to do something right right versus some bosses or some people you work with it is a little more muddy and it's hard to tell what's important what's not yeah that makes sense another thing that um that sam was talking about that he wanted you to share more with listeners is um like your process around organization and creativity like i imagine at the hustle there's so much going on you have there's tons of content going into um you know there's the newsletter side the trend side like everything and um i'd love to hear more about your process for keeping all that straight making sure like you've got non-stop deadlines um crazy ideas and what do you use for organization like maybe somewhat on tools but even more so like process yeah so i think so i will candidly say that on that spectrum where there's people who are like incredible executors and organizers i may be a little further to that side than sam but like there are people who are way more organized than i am and what i try to do to like orient myself because i'm not like a a task person or like a a calendar person who's super super regimented is just to check in every like either every day or every week and just make sure that you have like very very clear priorities as to like what would i be happy with at the end of this week for example like where would i feel like we're actually moving towards something um and be okay with it if i did nothing else during that week because i think it can be the case sometimes where we just get so lost in the weeds and we feel like we did so much but then we look back and we're like the needle didn't move at all and in fact i mean i know burnout is a much more serious thing but lately i feel like some of my co-workers or other people i've worked with in the past will say that they're burnt out and honestly a lot of the times they are but one of the things that i've noticed is that sometimes people feel burnt out when they're just working very hard and they don't see that translate at all right so it's not even necessarily the degree that they're working or the amount of time that they're putting in but it's the lack of like uh relationship between the amount of time that you're putting in and then actual movement or progress and that can be really defeating um whereas i've seen you know people who work much harder but don't feel as like degraded because they feel like that movement and so i'm not again i wish i could give better tools or processes or things like that but i feel like everyone has their own thing but one thing that keeps me like really motivated and really excited about doing things and building things is that feeling of progress yeah i mean that really resonates because there's definitely times you know over the years of building convertkit in other other projects where you're like i'm working the hardest i've ever worked and it just doesn't feel that way because we're getting results and then other times you're like i'm necessarily putting in right time or it's that much harder but it's just it's a slog because it doesn't feel like it's working yeah um what do you think about like when you find yourself in that that space of like the inputs are not directly affecting the outputs uh either from a mental side or a process like how do you how do you handle that and get through yeah so i think it's like i said one just about like continuously revisiting what your priorities are and making sure that you're like if you imagine yourself as a vector like how closely aligned is your vector and like your priority vector right and sometimes they're like they're always going to be a little off but is it like you know perpendicular or is it actually aligned um and a lot of the things that we do i tweeted about this recently it's just just how much of your day is actually due to inertia versus like actual like intentional thought of like what do what do i really need to get done to reach my goals um so i think that's something that we always just continuously need to check in on um but then the other thing is when you're in that mental space where you're really struggling and you're not seeing progress is just to design really small wins for you right because another another thing that i think people sometimes do is set really really big goals audacious goals and that's awesome but then they don't set up the building blocks on the way there and so that can be again really defeating to be like i have this goal and i just don't feel like i'm making any progress and so if you find yourself in that head space obviously take a break do what you need to get in the right head space but also just one of the things that i think the most successful people do is understand the way their brain works and almost like learn to to interact with their brain most effectively and one of those things is finding those small wins if people are interested in learning about the habit loop for example like one of the parts of the habit loop is like a reward right and so if you're designing this audacious goal and you're not spinning that habit loop of getting to that reward you're not well actually if you don't have the reward you're never gonna complete the habit loop so i think it is just about learning about how your own brain works and getting those small wins along the way yeah are there small wins that you've introduced in in your process of running trends that help you or or are the big wins coming often enough that it doesn't that's a good question because it is different like at different stages of each company that you're working at um for trends i think it it really was about um at the beginning just like creating something that people loved right so that was a small one like getting the newsletter out and just you know having people write to you and and be like i love this or meeting people and finding out that they read trends and that you know they love the product so the beginning it was more of that but then you know the small ones come with growing your user base and actually like unlocking a new channel right or something like that but even on the way to unlocking a new channel it's like the mini winds of like how can i just like focus today on just this part of the landing page and running a test where i can get a small win and i feel like i'm making progress right so it's you know a small one can be anything from like just getting a little piece of user feedback or actually seeing like a really tangible but small change in in your conversion rate for example but if you're not seeing those small wins along the way like the audacious goal is like grow trends to like x thousand subscribers but if you're not actually you know taking steps and reflecting on them then that audacious goal is all of a sudden sounds actually like a crazy goal and you're not motivated to actually reach it yeah that's interesting well let's dive in let's dive and talk about trends in detail and then maybe we'll go back and and talk through like how you got to the hospital yeah and all that so maybe tell the listeners you know what is trends and what what makes it unique from other you know paid newsletters or communities and projects that people can sign up for sure yeah so trends is the hustle's premium subscription and i always like to articulate how i remember at least sam articulating trends to me which is you have the hustle which is our daily email of business and tech news and the hustle was always imagine your friend going and reading all the tech and business news for the day and then coming back to you and just being like here are the like three four things that you should know no bs no jargon just like a friend talking to you um so that was the hustle and then the extension of that was okay we have this audience of people who care about business and tech and trends was basically imagine that same friend going ahead five years let's say and coming back to you and being like this is what the future is like right and it's not even like the future as in like 40 years from now like this is what the new world will look like it's more so just like hey here are some things that you may be surprised to know emerge you know in a couple years or actually if you knew this little tidbit or fact you could actually build a business around it that many other people haven't caught on to and so that's what trends is it's basically uh trends that people can learn about that are either like in the early stage or things that people can build businesses around invest in businesses around and it came at the beginning as a weekly newsletter but now it's a community and has some other features yeah and then how is it priced and um other details there yeah so it's annual pricing which is a little different than i think a lot of paid newsletters um and it's 299 a year why go annual on that versus you know someone wanting to sign up monthly um as so many people are like i don't know a paid newsletter should be 20 bucks a month yeah so you're like no it shouldn't yeah so it's interesting and we are actually looking at toying around with the pricing model coming up but it's been that way since the very beginning and i actually i joined friends shortly after it started but even by the time i joined it was already just annual pricing like set in stone and i i guess i can talk to a couple reasons because sometimes we get people who write in who are like you must be predatory and like like why would you do annual pricing if if your product if you're proud of your product or something like that and there's a couple reasons that people don't think of all the time so one of them is just if you're a bootstrap business that cash flow can actually accelerate your growth if your annual versus monthly right so you all you get the year-long cash flow that you can reinvest into your business immediately instead of waiting for that cash flow to come in and therefore you can acquire more users which is what we did right we invested we like every dollar we made we reinvested immediately which did accelerate our growth there's other things like sure people might relate this to like the predatory aspect but just churn right so if you can really impress someone with your product immediately they will pay for the 299 be happy with it and not really mind that it goes around for a year but when you have monthly pricing there's just that much more like involvement of someone potentially thinking of churning right so they might love your product for three months and actually need it six months later but in that time period they may just cancel or you might lose them and so we have found that if you like equate an annual churn rate of ours to a monthly churn rate that most people have our churn is so so low um and so that's helped us as well um it is definitely negative in some ways so people should know some of those aspects as well of course some people 2.99 just sounds like a lot even though that's only like 25 a month that sounds like more for whatever reason right so it can restrict people um from buying your product of course there's just that like higher barrier to entry but then there's other things as well like a lot of people don't know especially because we have a trial that um even your credit card approval rates like if people have heard of like dining flows and subscription payments when you have that higher dollar value you're more likely to actually get rejected by banks even if someone's approved it so those are some of the things to keep in mind but again i was actually not even around when that final decision was made but we are playing around with other models um now and in the next couple months yeah i think what a lot of people who get into paid content i think like they see the appeal of sas right i i sold this ebook i did did this thing you know how to workshop one off it'd be amazing if that could occur and you know look at sas there's a current revenue model there so they dive into it and then are immediately shocked with churn i'm like wait no one told me like it doesn't occur forever you know this is um and obviously people know about trend but you don't like you have to be in it before you understand the math of it or like exactly feel the math of it yeah and if anyone's thinking about whether they should even do a paid newsletter and if they do monthly or annual like you have to test it right because our business is going to be much different than others and to your point a lot of people think like let's just make this like sass but think about what sas it says is like oh there's actually this tool that someone's like integrating into their business that they need to continue running their business versus something like let's be real most um even premium content is as people say like a vitamin versus a painkiller and so sas has such low churn rates because people are literally like implement like integrating into their system so that their people need it they like require the software and the only alternative is probably to switch to another piece of software which has a lot of friction versus paid content is kind of like i can either have this or i can actually be okay without this right and so that's also something to keep in mind is it's it's not the same business model there's there's like parallels but you have to keep in mind that like paid content is not sas yeah and so having that advantage of going to an annual plan and even so many sas companies right they push annual plans for the same reason because dropping churn um is so key and so i think it's a great point that the reminder once a month of like here's your receipt here's also what's coming up also do you want to cancel you know and yeah and then they're judging it based on maybe not the experience as a whole of like oh i got such great content such you know all that months ago they might be like you know the guess you had this month on trends wasn't that great exactly right but the guest we have you know next week or next month is like exactly who you need to hear from and they may not know or care right and tied to that when you have a longer time horizon with your subscription you can actually i mean we were bootstrapped so this wasn't quite true but you you can in theory have a longer horizon in improving your product right because you're not thinking about how do i retain someone tomorrow it's kind of similar to how people say like public companies with their like quarterly earnings can be detrimental to their long-term success um if you're focused on retaining someone next month that can like cloud your vision to be like what do we need to do to retain this person one year from now like that helps you to think a lot bigger about like how can we improve this product really substantially by that time um and so that's also something that i think is underrated about annual pricing yeah that makes sense so you're in this world of you know you're working on the paid newsletter side uh with trends and the hustle has the you know the massive free newsletter running sponsorships um all of that so the different revenue streams i'm curious for your take on the rise of newsletters over the last couple years and then the um well newsletters have been rising for a long time despite everyone saying every every step along the way so maybe the rise of paid newsletters in particular and just sort of what's your commentary on what you like what you're seeing in the market and then what you would recommend as far as being in this world where you can see behind the scenes of of both a sponsorship driven model and and uh you know a paid subscriber model yeah so i think there's again not always a right answer but what i would say is that like you said there's a lot of hype right now around newsletters in general but there's also just a lot of hype around paid newsletters and getting your content um and that's awesome because there are tools that have now enabled that and made it a lot easier but what i think people or a lot of people miss when they're deciding like free or paid is that a lot of people who have paid newsletters had some sort of like awareness engine before that then the hustle was a great example where we had this massive newsletter of reaching over a million people such that that was like if you imagine a funnel that was the top of our funnel right and that was doing the work of like being easily shared and driving more people to trends every single day what a lot of people i find do today is like okay like i want to start a paid newsletter i want to start like you know making money immediately and what they don't realize is they're putting their product behind a pay well and and this might sound obvious but that makes it that much harder to grow right if you don't have an awareness engine how are you expecting that people are going to find your content when it's behind a paywall and so you if you actually look up you can do this on wolfram alpha and enter substack in there and you can look at their their sub domains and how much traffic they get so you can actually see exactly which sub stacks are the most popular and i know substack has a page that does this as well but you can see the exact number of page views actually or at least wolfram's estimate of it um and if you look at them most of them you're like oh that guy used to be a very famous reporter or this guy like has 400 000 followers on twitter or whatever and you're like oh okay so it's actually you know the story that they're selling of like you know start a paid newsletter overnight and like be your own you know boss is great in some ways but just know the reality that as soon as you get your content it becomes much harder to grow and so what i tend to recommend if people are just starting out is to focus on on free to start like develop an audience and that's their top of the funnel and then some people later will either convert to paid or create a new product that's paid or do something to monetize that audience at a later point but i would focus if you have the runway to do so on a free audience and of course you can monetize that free audience with other things like ads or donations or partnerships or things like that so it's not necessarily that you have to like you know drive a non-profitable business to start even because the hustle was profitable for trends so that's the way that i'd view it and and another thing just on top of that is when people create any sort of paid uh newsletter or any sort of content is to kind of keep that vitamin painkiller model in mind and that's a spectrum as well right where if you think about it trends really is more of a painkiller than the hustle the hustle is news news is nice to have but there's so many outlets to get it but getting access to information like trends that you can actually capitalize on and build a business on that's more of a painkiller and so the more of a painkiller killer you are the more i think you can charge for your content versus if you really are a vitamin just it might be a more like prudent business model to stay free and just grow like a weed instead yeah that's interesting because all these people who have successful paid newsletters do have that funnel yeah that's still in and you know we see people make the transition and then they're so torn because you have this piece of content that you know as a flagship piece of content you're so proud of it you know maybe it's like you've worked on it over weeks or months it's kind of formed in your head and you've written it out and then there's this moment of like wait is this free because it will drive so many people or do i put it in paid so people go oh this is the incredible thing i'm so glad that i'm a paying subscriber um and it's it's a tough decision exactly so i guess i mean with hustle having the split where that you know there's effectively two different jobs to be done yeah yeah how do you think about well if you're in that position of like an incredible piece of content or or you're advising a creator who has that of should they put it free versus should they put it behind the paywall what would you say it's a good question and the way that i would put it is again there's no right answer but sometimes i equate um uh like paid newsletter as more like a bootstrap business versus a free newsletter more like a vc model and what i mean by that is you're basically anytime you open up whether it's ideally it's a great piece of content but even if it's not anytime you open up your content you're basically like trading your immediate benefit right for a future benefit right by saying like i'm using this to build my audience that i will later monetize the same way that like uber grew for years and lost money and then i mean maybe they never will fully profit but like that's the theory right um and so versus a paid newsletter is more like okay i i'm okay with maybe not having a huge audience um but i i can be really profitable and i can do that right away right um there's no need to have this like trade-off so it's really up to the person because something i also say to people um when they're deciding between free and paid overall and then also like where to put their content is just like what are your goals because i mean one of the aspects is money but also like i can say i i want to build an audience and i know other people want to as well right and so if you really want to build a big audience maybe you don't but if you do maybe kind of stray more towards the like free aspect of things right because you're ungaining your content and it can work for you to build that audience so i would write what i encourage people to do is like write down like what their goals are and pass just like i want to build a newsletter like do you want to build a brand if so do you want that brand to be you or someone else like how quickly do you need the money um like how does this integrate into any other projects you're doing like do you have a kind of paid product that you hope to launch in the future and so asking those questions i think will help you understand what your goals are and then you can align your goals to like how immediately you want them to happen yeah that's a really good way to think about it because i think companies individuals and companies end up in one world like if there's a lot of like the indie bootstrapped maker world and if you end up in that side there's a certain set of tactics and ideas that you apply and you have this mindset and then you end up in the venture-backed you know silicon valley startup world you might have a completely different set right something that i've always tried to do is play like in the middle of like borrowing things from from both sides like exactly in the early days of you know when i was self-publishing books and courses and all of that i was learning a lot from direct response marketers you know about great copywriting long-form sales pages then i go to the startup world and be like oh but they care about care about design whereas the direct responsible they're like designing right here's about design so i had these long-form sales pages that were well designed and then and people were like what is this thing it's just like oh it's just something taken from this world and then combined with something from this world and now it's a new a new thing entirely exactly actually speaking of sam he always says like go look for the like scammiest companies right that are selling something that is really like not a great product and go learn from them because don't go create scammy products but like the effort that they put in to like yeah write incredible copy or like have these like long direct response landing pages is something that now people have associated with being scammy but they work right and so you can like use those same tools for something that's not scammy and and you know do even better because people actually will like your product and so i think that's great advice like you said to go learn from other industries that aren't your own because they're probably doing things that you're not used to doing that you can almost certainly learn from yeah my favorite place um like my backgrounds as a designer and so one of my favorite places to get design inspiration was actually like clothing stores right there and they would have like their spring collection or whatever and they would have you know like repainted and re-themed the store and like the tags and stuff like that whereas everyone else was going to like i don't know the css inspiration like you know website galleries or whatever of the most inspirational sites and copying from that yeah that's why all your sites look the same like go you know but if you even walk into i don't know banana republic or something and like get inspiration from their fall collection you know on color schemes or whatever else and bring that to a site no one's going to think like oh it's ripped off of something else exactly i know we're kind of going off track but one thought i have there is on this idea of like learning from other businesses is you can do the reverse right because you kind of just went like take offline and like learn from it to implement online but for example one of the ideas i had recently that someone should go take and build i'm not going to build this is you think about how many companies like google or facebook or amazon that grew i mean partially because they're just incredible companies with incredible operators but also because they could a b test the hell out of everything right um because they could try and they could track those tests and implement them quickly and you think about how many things in in the offline world you can't a b test and one particular example is now that all the restaurants have qr codes for their menus something we actually wrote about in in the hustle a while ago was this idea that we're actually this woman who actually does it and she goes and redesigns different um restaurants menus so that you know the layout of the menu itself will result in like the average customer spending more at that restaurant and she does it in just like a very manual way right she knows best practices similar to how you know landing page best practices and she just goes in and designs it once but she only has one go right like she redesigns it and then it's implemented and i was like someone who needs to integrate into these like pos systems and actually create um this like a b testing protocol for different restaurants where you have the same products you don't need to change your menu like the actual menu items itself but even just the orientation of where things are in the menu and test that i think that would be a really interesting business where again you're learning you're like doing the opposite where you're learning from like online best practices and implementing them in a more offline setting that's fascinating because yeah you know you sit down at the restaurant and you scan the qr code you're pulling up the menu on your phone and who's to say that two people sitting at like tables near each other have to see the same menu exactly it makes me think um i have a friend who runs a bar and they were like exclusively a bar um like craft cocktails and all of that and then they like added a little bit of food and then you know they were able to open up like more of a full kitchen and and and other things and it was just fascinating their average order value went up so much not just because someone could buy that but it was also like oh i'm here to get a drink or maybe two but if you don't have food i gotta go somewhere else and then once they added food then it was like oh i'll buy that and since i'm eating food then i can stay for another drink and so it's like turned into the cycle and i i bet you could end up with very similar things with someone sitting down like oh i'm just here for a drink but you could maybe test that menu and get it designed really well where they're buying other things exactly or you can just like exactly start to design it like a webpage right where you they see the drinks and as soon as they scroll down to the drinks like a modal pops up and like you want some food or whatever um and so yeah you could play around with it but just learn from these you know different sides of the world and implementing them i think like these are i think changes like that are going to be inevitable but sometimes they just happen more slowly than than others uh trends is very much a research different product yes you know and the way that you think i can tell like you're diving into things just even what you're saying of you know you're like well obviously you're going to wool from alpha and you like drop it in page views of all of this and i think a lot of creators don't think that way and so i'm curious what are some of the other research you know tips and techniques that that you use that are just part of your like daily workflow where you're like like using wolfram alpha in that way yeah so i'll call out a couple tools and then i'll just comment broadly on on how i think people can like just be more aware of what's around them but you know certain tools like there's so many plugins like there's a similar web plugin um which basically shows you like any website that you go to how many page views it has like um what sources those page views come from or sometimes i'll just throw it into somewhere myself and browse around and even just like starting a habit of being taking things that you're already seeing and putting them in there sometimes you're shocked at like oh my gosh this site has like 90 organic traffic like how did they do that or actually they have like 90 traffic from this other source and you start to look into and understand like how these sites grew and their relationships with other things on the web were off the web as well um other things are like during throwing something into ahrefs or if you think of a product another great um tool is jungle scout because similarly you can throw in any for example when i was doing research on remote work i was like oh there's a lot of like under desk treadmills or that seems to be a thing so i throw it into um jungle scout and you're like oh my god like so many people are making like hundreds of thousands on these every single month and then you start to do a little more digging you're like oh wow there's some cool other things like under desk ellipticals or you know other products that people are also making a lot of money off of and so just the habit of like questioning what you're already taking a look at and implementing or putting it into some of these analytics tools so just learn a little more get a little bit deeper on it and one of the tools i especially love is keywords everywhere because the things i mentioned so far take a little bit of like initiative to be like it's not much but to be like okay let me look into this more but keywords everywhere is inline in the browser so when you're actually searching for something it tells you the keyword volume it also shows how that's changed over time um and some other things like secondary keywords but what's so nice about that is you're just going through your daily life and it's almost just like um highlighting things for you that are interesting right where you're like i don't know for example in california hard kombucha is has been taking off in fact like in the grocery stores you see heart kombucha like an entire section for heart kombucha but if you go to florida or i'm from toronto if you go to any of those places like i don't see any hard kombucha and actually like when i searched hard kombucha in my browser completely unrelated to like thinking about trends um you see it taking off like you can see the search volume graph um and so the thing that i think is so great about that tool is again just this idea where it's actually like just nudging you in the right direction to to notice things and that was the final thing i was gonna say is that i think what i i think we all can work on including myself is just asking questions about the things that are that seem like really obvious around us right so um on my first million which is the hustle podcast i think sean gave a great example one time where it's like you're walking along the street and you notice like a patch of grass in between the streets and most people like don't even think about the patch of grass but then you're like who actually put the grass there right because grass doesn't just like show up on its own um and so who put this grass in between these two streets right um and then who'd like why did they do that who funded this in this case it's probably the government but like who takes care of it who makes sure that's that grass is alive and all of those are some form of like business or um something that people actually invest in to some degree um and so you can do the same thing about just like anything around your home or if you're another country like why do they do things this way or so interesting that like i noticed this store that i've never seen in anywhere else in the world like why does it exist here and not elsewhere sometimes the answer is like oh because like this is just like their tradition and you know it shouldn't exist elsewhere but then sometimes you're like oh actually like it's just because they started this thing and it could actually be shared elsewhere right so it's just this idea of like taking note of other things around you um and then again you can use some of the tools that i mentioned to like dig into them more but i think really where it starts and what we try to like train our analysts on our just to ask more questions about the like really obvious things that already exist yeah yeah that's fascinating and i think people get caught up in their own world or their own world view and they're not expanding beyond that to try to see like what are things that challenge it so i love the idea of having the the browser plugins and and like keywords everywhere and stuff of just like giving you these subtle nudges towards like hey did you think about things in this way yeah like when you have those ideas you know you're noticing those trends do you have a process for like making note of them or are you just dropping them in notes or do you do you have something you know more sophisticated where you're keeping track of it so that you can then start to piece things together over time so it's not much more sophisticated than just dropping them on to notes but i what i will say is that um kind of almost what you're alluding to there what i try to do is like piece things together so if i have an idea i'll drop it in a note and sometimes the idea is terrible and i never revisit it but once you start actually once you actually take the energy to write an idea down and it's like kind of implanted into your brain almost like a seed it starts to grow and you start to notice other things around you that are aligned with that or that are similar or actually contradict that but it's the same thing with actually writing online and how i write my articles is i'll like you know see a tweet that i'm like oh that that like struck a note with me or i will talk to a friend about a particular topic and you know really having a point of view on it and then i'll just write it down and then i'll notice um or i'll just continually start to like almost file things under that particular topic or trend as we were originally talking about um because i think that often like our first encounter with something is actually not very sophisticated right um and often wrong as well and so it is actually worth like watering that seed to use the same analogy with different examples with intentional research with you know data so that by the time you actually want to write about it or publish it or even start a business around it you've thought about it in many different ways and given it time to breathe um because often like i said sometimes i'll write down ideas and when i first think of them i'm like this is the best business idea like i'm gonna quit my job and do this and then like three weeks later i'm like actually this is a terrible business idea or right it's so i think it's important to give these um ideas time and i will almost like almost like you know the dewey decimal system in the library like you have certain um you have certain topics that you like set out and then after that you're filing things under those topics so that by the time you go back at some point ideally you have more of like a full library of content that gives you a more full perspective yeah that's interesting i on the the past ideas thing i think that a lot and someone tweeted this morning i can't remember who you know is in my like random scroll through twitter of like i always think i have great ideas but then i look back at the last list of domains that i've purchased and i'm like what was i thinking you know oh man it's so true you know it comes up for renewal and you're like i can't believe i spent eight dollars on this bad idea and we're so it's like digital hoarding as well right where even if we know it's a bad idea we don't want to let go of the domains and we're like oh i guess i'll pay 30 bucks for this thing that i know i'm never gonna use yeah for sure um so i'm curious to dive into a little bit of your path to you know running trends at the hustle now because it's a job that is pretty unique as far as the skill skills that it takes and all that and so i'm curious you know where you mentioned that you grew up in canada um i'm curious a bit of your path to go from you know maybe starting out your career to into the hustle it's a very bright question i know i'm like how far back do you want me to go but basically yeah i i did my degree in chemical engineering i ended up going actually into consulting after that because most people in chemical engineering you either go work on an oil rig or in a chemical processing plant or something of that nature and neither of those really appeal to me and so i was like what did i like about science i liked problem solving and that did translate over to consulting so i was a management consultant for a year or so but i was living in toronto um pretty classic like pre-remote work story where i was like commuting two hours a day living a city i didn't love working way too hard and i only spent like 10 months there before going fully remote then i worked for a company called top towel which is a tech company i did that for three years but that's when i really started getting into marketing and growth and so i started on the growth team led their publications team and then after that i joined the hustle and it was pretty random actually because during my time at um toptal i had led their publication scene and i'd started to write online on my own as well and i guess my my own personal blog had taken off but i never considered myself a writer like i was only writing you know for on my own and i somehow found myself into this like leading this publications team but that um really was not like what i even saw myself as but sam had seen one of my like tweets of tweeting one of my articles um and he just reached out and he was like hey like basically you know how direct sam can be something along the lines of like like we need you on trends or like can i hire you or something like that um and it turns out that we actually were in touch for like six months or so really on and off um but the first role didn't really make sense and then um before actually when he first reached out trends didn't exist but then he reached out to me again and he was like um we're launching this thing called trends and i was just like oh my god this sounds amazing right where you can just like follow all your different curiosities and write about businesses and so i ended up just like it was also the right time for me to leave my job just going into this but i had no professional writing background i um really i wasn't like an analyst or anything of the sort i hadn't built my own business so i was kind of like i don't know if i'm gonna be very good at this but i it was really it was great i wrote for trends for like eight months maybe more maybe a year almost and then i ended up leading the product um but i think that's something sam's really good at is just like finding people online who maybe don't have like the like prereqs just you know as you would say for a job but then just like you know trung was the same way he was he's like one of our writers and he he worked in finance before but never really written but he's worked out well as well so um that's kind of how i ended up there um so it's been totally you know uh random i would say but um yeah i'm really happy that i ended up at the hustle and trends has been like such a great product to work on because it really does just teach you how to like be analytical and follow your curiosities and then take your curiosities and translate them into something other people might care about yeah that's interesting i didn't realize that you had a degree in chemical engineering what's the the process uh or what is it that like that you think you still use today from that degree and that you're using a lot at trends in the hustle yeah so i think i actually am so glad i took that degree because i mean there's so many other degrees that do this but it just teaches you a lot of critical thinking and problem solving and just like being analytical right where um i don't know how to size a pump anymore even though i was taught that at some point but same thing goes for anyone in in most college degrees right you don't actually remember exactly what you learned you just learned how to learn so that's like i would say that one of the more significant parts of like what i remember and the other thing is just i love this concept of thinking like a scientist which is this you know idea where actually nothing is true like nothing in this world is like a zero one true or false and in fact we don't even know it sounds like a little woo but we don't know what the truth is right and in fact a scientist is just trying to be less false over time right and if you actually because that's really what you're doing right it's like i loved in like you know grade seven or whatever chemistry where you learn about someone and their contribution to chemistry and you're like wow like that's amazing and then the next class they come in they're actually like well actually that's wrong right because 100 years later this guy or girl you know found out that you know that model was incorrect and this one is the one and then that keeps happening and you're like oh wow actually like um imagine being that scientist at the time thinking that they had solved the world and in fact like they had made a major contribution because they got us to be less false but they were not they didn't find the truth and i think that's really important when you're like just even engaging online or building things um or being a creator is just to know that like your job is not to like say what's true or false it's just to like contribute to the world and get us to be less false over time and then also to have an open mind where like anything you know today can be proven false in the future so just like to be a little more open to learning about like what else is out there and i think that actually did translate to trunks because trends is all about like what can i predict about the future that like maybe i would not understand today right or not predict today and so i do think it leads to you having that scientific mindset i do think leads to people having more of an open mind because they're not locked into like them being right or wrong and more so just like finding what's a little bit better yeah oh that's fascinating i love the idea of i mean it sort of goes it reminds me of strong opinions loosely held yeah exactly diving into that i'm curious are there things that in in your career either at trends that were those things we were like oh this is the way that you grow something or this is the this is what works for for content or all of that and then you know found you know new data and all that that proved you wrong oh that's such a good question um i mean i'm sure i'm sure of it i've been wrong so many times um i'm not sure if one like super obvious one comes to mind um but oh one this is like a very simple one as a marketer so when you first come into marketing you think that your intuition is going to be right about a lot of things so you think that like if you were to look at a line or a stack of like ad copy you'd be like oh i think these ones are going to work and i think this these ones are actually really terrible and when i first started at top towel i was on their growth team so i was responsible for like running certain ads on certain platforms and things like that and we i was just so shocked at how wrong i was and that was actually like an aha moment in the first six months or so where i was like well i truly know nothing about like what's going to convert um and after that i was able to have a much more like just test everything mindset but that is actually if you haven't worked in marketing i think even if i tell you this you're not going to fully internalize it until you experience it yourself where like you have to test things and then realize how often and also like the to the degree that you can be wrong where you're like oh these are pretty similar like surely they're gonna um perform the same way and it's like no just like a button color change can be like step changes better than something else and so i think that was something that i had to learn you know on on the job which i really didn't have the right mindset for going into it yeah it makes me think of we've been doing a lot more recruiting at convertkit over the last 18 months or two years or so um and i've had this thought always that like a short personal email is what's going to do the best you know like three sentences it feels like you know maybe it was copy and pasted in some way right but it doesn't feel like this long thing and we started testing so barrett who's our ceo he wrote this email that is ridiculously long i'm like this is never going to work you know and and we're trying to recruit a vp of product and a vp of engineering and he's like all right well let's test the emails you know so we start sending out both versions and the ridiculously long email that has like all the information you would ever want in it you know that and it's personalized somewhat but everyone knows that someone didn't like sit down and type out a 500 or a thousand word email you know about this person and it performed wildly better like right night and day difference so we have like vp of design at like major tech companies responding and going like i'm not interested but this is a great email you know really that's so funny and so it just like shattered all of my preconceived notions about you know like i was even say like we're not sending this email that'll never work you know and not only does it work but people are saying like it's you know it's a step function above you know anything that they've received before and so who knows exactly well actually another thing i'm wondering is you have the advantage now of traffic and we have the same thing at convertkit of like we can run all these a b tests because we can get to statistical significance um sometimes not as fast as we would like especially if it's a test is a ways down the funnel um right what do you do in those cases where you don't have enough traffic to reach statistical significance or you know um there's not quite a clean a b test that you can run it's a good question i think so one if you don't have a lot of traffic like you are limited to the amount of a b testing you can do but you can also there's things like mturk and you can you can test things outside of like where you're actually planning to test them that are a lot cheaper but even past that i think when you're when you're early on like you don't need to um optimize as much like obviously you can great but i think early on it's about like just getting something that's pretty good and then focusing on scaling and and then once you're at the point where you're at scale that's what really when you're looking to tweak and like fully optimize and so i wouldn't worry too much about like another thing that is worth mentioning is that there is an extent to which av testing becomes too much right where you're so focused on like tweaking and not actually focusing on like step changes so um that's something just worth calling out but if you're there early on what you're really supposed to be focused on just like validating your product right and not necessarily um fully tweaking your funnel so that it performs optimally so that's i think an important takeaway if you're at that stage where you don't have traffic yeah that makes sense something along those lines that i want to make sure we talked about is differentiation and like i'd love it's a very broad high level question but using a book on this and so i'd love for you to just talk about how you think about differentiating products from each other and and just differentiation as a whole yeah so i think when people create products um especially when they're online written content products they forget how important packaging is right so they focus so much on what they're creating and not how it's different and we can start by actually talking about like physical products right when you buy a physical product you often buy it because it's cheaper sometimes but sometimes because you like love the packaging or because you you really like what the brand stands for or it's so much like faster at achieving what you're trying to actually accomplish or whatever right it's something that you can like clearly articulate and say this is better because of x um versus whatever else exists out there and what i find when a lot of people write info or content products is they focus just so much on like i'm going to write a newsletter about business or tech or fashion or whatever i'm creating a travel blog and it's like great but like we're at the point where we all know this very entry is so low that's there's so much supply of content so how the hell are you gonna stand out and what i encourage people to do is to focus on exactly that that kind of question of like what is your very very very clear differentiator that you could tell someone else and also so that anyone reading your stuff could also tell someone else right like that's how you would get word of mouth and the way the exercise i encourage people to go through is basically go through your inbox you can do this with newsletters or other products but if a newsletter go through your inbox write down your favorite newsletters or the ones you subscribe to write what you like about them in a sentence and then parse that sentence into an adjective right is it like shorter is it more contrarian is it more um well researched is it funnier right like there's very clear adjectives that you can normally um label something as and if you can't you know there are cases where this is not true but most of the time it's like well they actually don't have a clear differentiator um and do the same thing with like something that you remove from your inbox right so something you didn't like where there's often a clear reason as well where it's like it just got too long or it became too political or you know something that was very clear and tangible which is why you took that action to either subscribe or unsubscribe and if you think about it most what you'll find is again most of the time it's like the thing that you write that you like about it isn't like i like that it writes about tech because so many things write about tech you like how it writes about tech right you like how the person engages with you how they show up in your inbox um and then the what you should do is then go back and as you're either at the stage of designing your own content you know product or if you already done that go back and make sure you you've revisited this step of identifying what yours is and i always like to give the example of costco because this actually advice spans not just content products but i find that's where it's forgotten the most but all product services startups like you need a differentiator and i always give the example of costco which is so good at having just such a clear it's in their name it's cost they're cheaper than anything else that exists and what a lot of people try to do is they're like okay well i want to be funny but i also want to be like really well researched and i really want to be like visual and i want to be like all of these things and it's like you can't be everything to everyone and so what costco did is a great you know case study of where they said you know all we care about is having the the cheapest items for our customers and in fact if you think about the laundry list of things that people might care about with within like a general retail store they might care about location they might care about like ambiance or package size or customer service or all of these things which costco was like you know what actually we're gonna trade all of those things off to get like the absolute cheapest goods for our customers you have huge package sizes like you don't really get customer service it looks like a factory because they're such big superstores they're hard to get to right but they traded all that off to be like look we have the cheapest gas or the cheapest like right donuts or whatever you buy from from costco and so that's like a lesson where if you want to stand out in a very very crowded space which pretty much everything in content is today then you really really need to think through like whatever your differentiator is so again like how you're accomplishing something versus what actually you're building oh that's so good and i'm just thinking about the number of conversations i've had about newsletters where people are talking about you know quality and consistency and but really not that much about positioning and differentiation yeah exactly and that's why someone will like spend time with you right again whether your info product or like a physical product or service it's like someone will spend time with you because in their head they might not even be conscious of this but they they're like labeling you they're like i love convertkit because it's so seamless right or it's it's you know what some other brands it's like i love this because it's so cheap right and and if you can't really articulate that again your customers can't really even consciously or unconsciously articulate that to themselves and they're just gonna be way less likely to be to work with you or read your newsletter or whatever your product is yeah yeah that's interesting um so as you kind of do that exercise right you're deeply embedded in the newsletter world maybe what are some of those newsletters that you you did that exercise with and have an adjective that come to mind like you follow this because they are the fill in the blank yeah so like so i'll give you a couple so one of them that i think a lot of people love is james clears three two one and people some of the adjectives like because i've done this exercise with people who have read the book who are like concise stress-free right and that's like again some people might have different reactions to the same newsletter but there's something about it's short right where it's just when people see that in their inbox like you said some you have to test all this stuff but sometimes when you get a huge long newsletter you're like overwhelmed you're like i don't want to open this or but that you don't get that with his three to one newsletter you love it you know he says even his tagline is something like the most um value in the least amount of words or something like that and so it's like you can clearly articulate like it may not be everything's everyone but for the people who really value like a thoughtful concise piece of work in their inbox every week like it services those people and they love it another one is charter so charter um is chart r dot co i think and um it talks about business in tech similar to the hustle similar to morning brew like there are again dozens if not hundreds of newsletters that write about business and tech what charter did and they i think they only started in 2019 or something in that like in the last like year or two and they've just grown like crazy and the reason for that is they are just purely visual and so they do have some text but most of it is like these like really snappy very cool infographics i personally love charter it's again these are the ones where i went through this exercise because they're in my own inbox where i thought you know i do even with the hustle sometimes get overwhelmed it's a lot of text um and it also um you know as they say like a picture you know is worth a thousand words where you look at this and you you the visual nature of it you understand a topic more often than if it's just written about um in long form and so charter is again it sounds simple but more visual again you could also use things like stress-free because i can get through my inbox quicker um people love the hustle sometimes or the most common reason that we get is that it's just funnier right or people might say something like more relatable um and where again it's no bs no jargon it's like your friend talking to you right so those are a couple examples of ones in my inbox and how um or why i continue to engage with them yeah oh i love that um and it's it's given me a lot of thought of i'm gonna go through and do the exercise with uh get my own inbox and the newsletters that i write or that that i read and then take that even to my own newsletter because i think it's easy as a creator to fall into the trap of like okay i need to show up consistently and then you kind of start to lose track of why you're showing up consistently and what that original angle of why people subscribed to was exactly and that's it that's what it is right an angle and and by the way like none of them are like black or white correct in the sense that for example some of the ones i just mentioned i really like that they're concise but another newsletter that i love is one called like exponential view right which is not because i mean it's not super long but it's it's so interesting and like it's maybe an adjective i would use is like intriguing or it's like kind of like trends where it's like i didn't know this right and it keeps me like educated i feel educated when i read it and i feel like ahead of the game in some way and so um that one does give me a little more like anxiety to open it sometimes sometimes i'll like you know save them for like end of the month or something like that but when i do read it i feel like i get enough value so there's not no right or wrong is something being short or long or funny or not but for your audience whoever you're trying to target um and what they need like having your angle is really important oh that's good um the last thing that i want to ask you about is kind of this balance between you know your full-time thing with hustle and running running trends and then your own content and and everything that you're writing um you know you mentioned before we started that uh or i think over twitter dm's you know you're focused much more on the hustle right now but i'm curious how you how do you balance those things and how you think about having a side hustle while you're focused on an all-consuming product yeah i mean it so it definitely depends on the person what their goals are but for me i've written about this actually because i've been creating my own projects since i left consulting which was in 20 what year was that 2016. so for the last five years on and off i've been creating my own projects and like doing things like learning to code and so what i've found is again this is not for everyone but the fact that i get paid for a job that i love actually gives me enough financial freedom to then go and pursue whatever the hell i want on the side and it just so it turns out that i like writing i like you know building tinkering with stuff online but i actually think that's like an underrated thing where a lot of people think like you know there's the like you know stanford dropout stories where you're like i need to drop out to go create like the big biggest businesses in the world and that's the only way i'm gonna be successful but i'm actually like i get paid to learn from a bunch of other people who are smart i get to work on cool projects and that gives me the financial freedom to do whatever the hell i want on the side and one of the underrated parts of that is like because i don't need to rely on them for my financial freedom my projects are not only more fun but like more authentic more like i can do whatever i want with them there's no pressure to like turn them around and monetize them overnight um that's why i could build my blog and my twitter and all these things without like we talked about like gating content before how that can really restrict your growth i don't need to do any of those things because like i i can just like get my my financial freedom through my job and then you know work on other things on the side so um again it really depends on the person but i found that to be really great and then i just pursue my curiosities on the side i love that well thanks for coming on and where should people go to follow everything that you're doing and and dig in more on differentiation and all of the things sure um so yeah we talked about trends you can find trends at trends.com or the hustle the hustle dot co um and you can find me at uh on twitter's i guess where i'm most active which is steph smith io because my personal website is stephsmith.io sounds good well yeah i'm i'm excited to dig into more of your work and and there's a bunch of research things that i'm going to be using in my workflow now going forward so thanks so much for coming on awesome thanks so much for having me [Music] you

Channel: Nathan Barry Show

Views: 29,621

Keywords: email, newsletter, email marketing, convertkit, nathan barry, podcast, sign ups, interview, build, grow, how to, trends, subscribers, email subscribers, email newsletter, email list, audience, Steph Smith, trend, profitable, business, forecast, tech

Id: Is7VfZlCBrU

Length: 59min 45sec (3585 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021