How to Make Thousands On A 1k Person Email List

Key Takeaways

um [Music] hey what's up everyone welcome to the copyblogger podcast my name is tim stoddart thank you so much for joining me as always i am with my co-host ethan brooks ethan how are you i'm doing good man happy friday what's going on busy week yeah busy week we uh we worked hard this week man it was a it's a very very successful week from the side of digital commerce a lot of the things that we're experimenting with that as you do you're not quite sure if they're going to work but you kind of feel like they should they all started working really well and so that has me feeling really really encouraged to to finish off the week but thanks for asking what about you this week this is good so i typically front load my weeks just so everybody knows we record this on a friday this is like my sunday so saturday sunday are my first two days of the work week and those are busy long days research writing all that kind of stuff monday is crazy that's when we build the email so there's like a lot of technical stuff a lot of back and forth and then the rest of the week is just kind of gliding off that work pattern so it's it's much by the time we get to this i'm like relaxed and kind of downshifted but it is always a little bit weird that everybody else is like heading into the weekend and i'm like yeah getting ready to get back to work tomorrow so funny i never knew that yeah it's been good man i think we'll talk about this a little bit in this show but i'm i'm testing something too so you're testing some new marketing stuff i'm uh testing a product idea we'll get into that in a in a minute but before we do uh i wanted to close the loop on something because a couple of weeks ago we had this podcast about relaunching sober nation talk to me a little bit about where that currently stands is there has there been any movement there or what's what's what's the news well there's been a ton of movement however we didn't launch it and you can see on the staging site if you want to the reason why we didn't launch it so did you have you ever seen the elon musk documentary about spacex it's on netflix right now no well it's it's good you should watch it i think it's called like um i don't know something about outer space but there's a line in there where he said there's nothing else that we possibly could have prepared for and as he said that it hit me where me and dave and my partner and i have been going back and forth about the site navigation and as you hover over the links on the site navigation what the pages should be on the drop down because you got to remember we're putting ourselves in the position of either somebody who is like currently in crisis mode struggling with addiction or a family member and so when i heard that i called david the very next day and i said david i'm so proud of you like the site structure is awesome you're gonna hate me but i think we need to like really really go through the navigation bar with the fine-tooth comb just to make sure that our our site experience is everything that it should be so this week we have been doing that i'll put a link in the show notes to the actual staging site you guys can look at it yourself i think it's just new sn.wpengine.staging.com but yeah we'll put a link in there and when you hover over the navigation i think you will really really recognize that the guides and the resources are like in the perfect order to to meet people where they are so the loop is still open like we we haven't closed it but i promise you it is not from a lack of effort it is sincerely from a paranoid terrified perspective that i am in [Laughter] well this is interesting so let me ask you a follow-up question about this because i know you're a seth godin guy and he's got this concept uh when it comes to launching projects that he calls thrashing which uh you're familiar which is for everybody who may not be the idea is this like you the closer you get to your launch date the more problems people are going to find with the product in order to keep it from going out the door and so his solution is like you have to set out in the beginning very clear rules for what it means to launch and then there has to be basically one person who can hit that launch button and and uh not a lot of people that can stop them how are you handling that because and the one of the reasons i'm asking is i mentioned i'm experimenting with this product idea and i'm experiencing some thrash there too so i'll talk about that but for you how do you tell the difference between a last minute change that you really need to do and a last minute change that's really just thrashing and specifically how do you avoid the thrashing on your team for projects like this yeah i am totally a proponent for publishing stuff before it's done and i mean that quite literally if you look at some of my websites so for instance on timestars.com i have a course that i give away for free and the course is halfway done and it's still just like hey take this for free and like i come in once a week and i'll write another lesson and then i'll be like hey i wrote another lesson here you go you can take it so i have absolutely no problem putting unpolished work out there for the world to see the difference with sober nation is that it's not like it's a new project where the there's consequences real significant consequences to putting it up before it meets like a certain spec or a certain demand right because i could totally leave it alone and never touched it again and just get paid you know and so who would ever change something that is like a relatively passive cash flowing asset a crazy person like me who's like never settled and nothing is ever good enough and like there's always something else to prove so it's i'm kind of contradicting myself here because if if you look at my work you'll see everywhere unpolished work being published because you got to hit publish in this case though i do think the context is a little bit different because the last thing i want to do is is like jump off a cliff and be like well i jumped and then splat on the way down right so um david can publish at any time david really does have the control and and if he says we're going live we're going live and that's that's his call oh interesting yeah well to your point too with some projects it wouldn't necessarily be you who jumped it's almost like the user jumps right so sober nation in particular as you mentioned speaks to people who are in crisis mode and i think there are some times when as a creator you have a responsibility to put out something like something that is better than just an mvp yeah i think this is becoming more popular in startup circles too and i don't know if it's because is changing or maybe our generation of entrepreneurs is just maturing a little bit but for a long time there is this concept of move fast and break things and it works you get a lot more reps in and i think you get feedback faster but it's also kind of created this ecosystem where like nothing's good anymore you know like what was the last great piece of software that you really downloaded i can tell you the one that it was for me it was dscript which is awesome but like everything's kind of half done and you get kind of sick of that and now there's like this uh change in the air where people are saying well maybe you take a little bit more time put out something that's worthwhile and it's gonna last and i think that also comes just with like financial runway it's a little easier to make those kinds of decisions yeah when there's like blank checks that go on forever where yeah or even just yeah even just a little cushion you know you're not like scrapping for your next meal mark zuckerberg talked about this on tim's podcast too he's so facebook's motto used to be move fast and break things right yeah and he said you know for a long time that actually worked and to some extent it's still a good way of thinking about development but as they got bigger and bigger and bigger they actually got to a point where it took more time to go back and fix all the tickets yeah than it would have to just spend a little bit extra time on creation so i think that's something that people need to think about as they're introducing a product into the world and the other one and this i think ties into what i'm struggling with right now is how much love do you have for the thing that you're building uh so for you i know sober nation is like close to home right it's not the same thing as just white labeling some course or creating you know lead flow for car wash like car detailing companies i'm going through something similar with this notebook company which we can get into but is there anything else you want to say about supernation that i will let you know as soon as it goes live i'm excited for it i think you're probably right there is an emotional aspect for me where i feel like an obligation you know and i don't want to let people down because it's a site that's like much bigger than me right where my tim stodd's blog or copyblogger is the same way where you don't want to let people down but i think you're right the culture of writing and people understand that it's better to publish imperfect work than to never publish your perfect work right so we can kind of get away with that but there isn't just the immediate urgency of the user in the same way that there is with sober nation so i could be struggling with a little bit of like i don't know there's a like a a complex name for it but i'm in too deep with it emotionally you know like i'm i'm clouded by my own emotion that could be the case but no i i i do feel like we are approaching this as logically as possible and when we do hit publish if the whole thing crashes and burns i will know in my heart that there wasn't anything else that we could have done that's good that works yeah ethan enough about me i am dying to hear thank you come on you've been teasing me with this notebook company all week what are we doing how's it going yeah so it's uh it's it's going for our beloved listeners i'm trying not to say for everybody listening because tim called me on that last week he's like you say for everybody listening all the time like hey for everybody listening to this and when we realized yeah everybody's listening everybody literally everybody except for you and me okay so if i say that i'm sorry for everybody listening so i've got this idea i want to start a side project and there's a few reasons for it one obviously is cash flow i just we come from this world i always want to keep growing that building things that continue to provide like more income more freedom all those kinds of things even though like i love my job i have no intention of leaving it but the income is a is a major uh driver or actually it's a driver the bigger driver is that this product is particularly meaningful to me it represents an idea that occurred to me like at an important point in my life and i think this is kind of the biggest thing my job is to write about entrepreneurship and business building it's hard to do that if you're not an entrepreneur at least it's hard to do it in a way that's really helpful and right now i'm not i'm coming back what's that it's good to hear you say that oh yeah i feel that way i mean i've certainly struggled to find good information at times when i was running businesses and i feel it too so right now i'm an employee i collect a great paycheck every two weeks it's very easy and i don't feel that stress that comes with like wondering you know where's your next meal going to come from or how am i going to pay employees or how am i going to pay you know product bill and all that kind of stuff so i know i need to keep a toe in that pool in order to write well at my day job and so i want to launch something on the side that i can just use as like a laboratory for testing different growth mechanisms for really just understanding what's going on like in the world of supply chain logistics all that stuff i need to be connected to it the issue that i'm having is that the product that i want to launch i don't want to get too deep into it here because i don't want to throw off tests actually by the time this goes up my test will be done so the idea for the product is it's a notebook specifically it's like a guided journal for people who struggle with anxiety i had an experience with this as a younger man and i ended up coming up with some strategies and like questions that have continued to help me over the years and basically what i did several years ago is i wrote myself a short book and the idea of this book i i wanted to write a book about how to like how to face anxiety for a long time that was going to be how i derived meaning from that experience in my life and i struggled with this idea of like well i don't think i have 300 pages worth of stuff to write about like what the hell do i know about this and so finally i worked myself up to a point where i said well i'm just going to write a book you can put on the shelf and then on like some it's going to be super short and on some random morning when you wake up feeling anxious you can just go to that book read it like over coffee super short by design and then hopefully it'll remind you of some things that help like with whatever the process is so i did a v1 of that back in 2017 and i re-found it recently and i was like i mean was that five years you know this is pretty good but i never really did anything with it and so i was thinking i think that's going to be the first product i want to i want to re-edit it repackage it and relaunch it instead of being a short book as like one of those field notes size notebooks and rather than just a passive reading experience it would be like the idea would be you basically grab you buy like three of them at a time and then when you feel anxious you grab one you take half an hour you go read slash work your way through the questions and then hopefully come out the other side with a clear picture of what's making you anxious or and or what to do about it so that's the idea here's the problem the problem is that product is not related to anything that i'm known for right so we talk about this a lot if you want to build products like the way to build a successful six seven figure business in this creator model is like first cash flow got my job second you build an audience third you build products i have a small audience uh even outside of this podcast i'm kind of known for like newsletter stuff how to build newsletters not known at all for anxiety or anything related to journaling or notebooks or any of that stuff so that's a long prelude to say i've been struggling man like i want to bring this product into the world but i've been struggling to decide whether it's actually worth my time or am i getting distracted by something that is going to be a major uphill battle am i thrashing because of what we talked about earlier like it's just too personal and so i'm letting those like dumb problems get in the way or is this just really not a good use of my time right now i'll pause there i have a solution i'm going to talk through just because i but i wanted to touch on the issues because i think everybody can relate to this and if you've never launched something you can relate to it even more like if you've launched a couple of things you know this is just normal and you have to push through it but if you're new to this you're probably thinking similar thoughts in your head and i just wanted to be open about the fact that like even once you've been in this game i've interviewed dozens and dozens of entrepreneurs i know what the process is it still trips me up i am thrilled to finally hear the idea when you said you wanted to launch a notebook company i thought it was much more of like a like a padded journal you know basically you were binding a journal because i know that you have a thing for like leather-bound notebooks and it's like a comfort thing for you as well and so i thought that's where you're going like i'm just going to make my own brand of leather-bound notebooks i didn't realize that it was going to be something to read and an experience that has um guided exercises and prompts that's the word i'm looking for and has prompts so i love everything about this idea ethan and if i didn't like it i would 100 tell you and i can tell you why as somebody that studies search metrics on a daily basis there is so much interest in anxiety relief online there's a ton of interest for i don't know what you would call it my i don't want to be too clinical because like i'm not a clinician right so if i phrase it improperly please forgive me but almost like secondary things like impulsive behavior type things like i'm feeling anxious and so i do this i'm feeling squirrely so i do this like how do i stop scrolling social media like secondary phrases that like are rooted in the base of anxiety and from an seo perspective which is always where my head goes that's a no-brainer to me i think you should do this right away because it would be openly applauded and accepted and i'm sure even as people listen to this episode we're going to get some dms about like wow i love that idea i would buy that book right now also in terms of like the rebranding yourself type thing i've thought about this a lot because i was that you know before i got into the twitter content marketing world i was just the sober guy on the internet and it was hard for me to kind of break out of that and there were a lot of times where i had in my head like maybe this is just my thing maybe this is just my shtick and like i should stick with it why am i trying to reinvent myself but the reason was because i have more to give right and as much as i've never met gary vaynerchuk and i respect him a lot i give him a hard time sometimes when i talk about it just because i think his message can like really really be diluted and not uh practical but every time i check out some of garyvee's videos or something like that i am continuously impressed and continuously reminded about how easily people can be in different communities at the same time and like adequately represent themselves you know he's in sports cards he's in wine he's in social media now he's in nfts what else is he in video games twitch you know he's into hip hop he's in the soundcloud sneakers and like i have this weird love hate relationship with garyvee i'm not trying to make this podcast episode about him but every time i go through that personal journey and sort of argument let's say in my head the conflict in my head about reinventing myself i always think about him and all the work that he's done because i just i know it's possible and i know that people are openly willing to accept the fact that people are more than one thing right so it's valid totally valid that you feel that way i'm not trying to like invalidate how you're feeling but i would certainly encourage you to see all of the examples about how people can break out of that and quickly totally yeah well thanks for saying that man i uh appreciate the validation of that idea and i i i think there's a part of me that knows the idea itself is uh it could work partly based on the market like you said and then partly based on just you know i've had this experience enough times in my life to know that it's it's worth pursuing something that you want to do just because you want to do it yeah and like a lot of a lot of times those things click into place and they work in a way that you couldn't have predicted beforehand and you should so you should do them but the caveat to that is you should not like leave your job to go do something that you want to do just because you want to do it again just go back to our normal model it's like cash flow first then you build the audience then you build the product if you have that cash flow you can experiment on different things until the cows come home and they can all fail it doesn't matter as much and i've made that mistake you know i've i've done hard pivots into new products before and so i've learned that lesson i think i think at this point i'm going to do it anyways the real thing i was trying to solve is like well how much of my attention should this get because i've got a full-time job you know we've got the podcast i've got travel that i want i'm you know young single like i want to have a life outside of work as well and i think it's important to be open about this too with people who are listening the reality is there's not i don't really think there's any such thing as passive cash flow i think at least at this level whatever you start is going to take up basically as much time as it possibly can right and where that starts to change is when you have enough money to hire other people in to to to manage the tasks right so sean was talking about this on my first million recently he's he had this whole big thing about how like it's ridiculous to do a whole vc backed startup because well he has lots of reasons but one of the things that he said inside of that was if you're going to try and start anything um a small business and a massive business are going to take like roughly the same amount of time so the temptation is to just go for gold and build a massive business even though the odds might be way lower so the reality is it's gonna take a lot of time and how much should i dedicate to it and so here's how i'm thinking through this the first thing that i need to know is whether or not i can reach this target audience because i know i have something to say and eventually i could reach them right so i could start building towards this but before before i'm gonna like start spending all my nights and weekends on this i need to know if right now i have the reach to make this work because if i don't fine i'll keep chipping away at it in the background and maybe i start releasing a twitter thread every once in a while about like how different founders handle anxiety or whatever it is and i can start inching my way into that so what i did to test that was i took a chapter of the book turned it into a twitter thread and released it and i've set a benchmark for engagement on that post and uh originally i was thinking like a hundred likes so i have not been tweeting very actively and as a result if i put out anything that's like really informative i'll get somewhere between like 30 and 50 likes on it right which is about uh it's like a little over one percent of my audience which i think is fine for like something that's kind of dormant i don't really do it actively so i can flip it on and get like 30 to 50 people to like a couple of shares a couple hundred impressions or whatever so i set the benchmark at double that to make it difficult right because if i'm gonna invest time that is currently free in doing this i it just really needs to kind of prove itself but also to see what kind of cross-section of my audience relates to the idea already and i'm learning two interesting things so i released this a couple hours before we hop down here and interestingly the tweet's been up for four hours and it's only got nine likes which means it's actually significantly underperformed as far as tweets go on my channel which is good data to have it's had about 3 000 impressions so the engagement rate is pretty low for me and there are like about 100 detail expands like 120 people have clicked on it no new followers more retweets than normal which is interesting right so it's like helpful but for whatever reason not a lot of people like like it so it hasn't hit the bar yet that i would have it hasn't hit the bar to be a no-brainer but i'm learning something else that's interesting right i don't think i currently have the reach to make this my top priority like i wouldn't pull a late night to get this product off the ground right now but i am getting comments dms and retweets at a rate that i don't typically where that i see but i would i'm a little bit surprised by just there it's like a higher proportion of the engagement is people reaching out and either saying that they liked it or commenting that it was helpful and what that's showing me is uh potential marketing paths so some of the people that have reached out like you know how like when you break your audience down there's kind of two audiences that you have you have your gen pop right like the audience of people who follow like kind of casually know you and then there's your other creators friends right and and sometimes they engage with your stuff and when they do it's kind of like a it's kind of like a bonus because it's like oh yeah like somebody in the game likes this work a high percentage of the engagements are coming from those types of people which is telling me that even though i can't necessarily reach this audience out of the gate i do have friends and relationships who find this important enough that there might be some kind of affiliate model that could be used to expand my reach if i decide to pull the trigger so the experiment hasn't been a complete bust but i wanted to just talk through how i'm thinking about it and i'll cap it off by saying this the priority for me right now as i mentioned was to figure out if i can reach this audience out of the gate right people who care about this also care about what i'm already talking about if they do it's a no-brainer i've been thinking about like there's kind of an equation for business it's very simple it's there's three parts to it can you reach your target audience can you talk about your product in a way that makes them want it and then can you deliver your product in an economically feasible manner if you can do those three things you've got a profitable business and there's no question to it right like that's it but i think it's easy to overthink it and also to skip those steps and over focus on product development before even reaching the audience that's what i'm trying not to do i see your viewpoint it's funny because i am too a fault much more the other direction i am much more along the lines of like you know what i don't mind waking up at 4 30 in the morning for the next month i gotta know if there's something here where i i don't think i've ever like ever tested something for viability i've gone for it and then eventually gone through i know that you and tim tim ferriss has had an impression on you and he wrote a blog post a long time ago about when to quit and i've read that blog post and i kind of use it as a reference where it's like isn't going to work it's nothing personal time to quit and so i guess i would offer a counter balance to it where people regret the things that they don't do more than they regret the things that they do do and i i suppose this is part of my personality it's a blessing it's a curse i'm not really sure but i wouldn't be able to like go to sleep at night if i felt like i had this idea that wanted to come out of me that i wasn't at least giving not necessarily my full effort but i wasn't giving what i knew inside was needed to be done because i am a realist in that way like energy is a real thing you know and like you have priorities you have relationships like you got to sleep you want to sit and relax and read books i'm not i'm not about that but i am about i'm a redliner basically like if there's something i need to do the goal for me is let me redline to see if i can get it done and at least i'll know and if i can't get it done and it's just not a thing that makes a lot of sense i'll know so my t-shirt company was a really good example of this like i gave him my best shot and it's still out there it's still live you know some stuff happens to it but it doesn't sit in my mind anymore because like i know what else was i gonna do i did everything i could have done and so you're even in your line of work like your position at your uh employment is very much along the lines of like data and aggregation and not overthinking but being methodical whereas i just can't i can't relate to that as much you know and so i suppose if there was a counter argument to it it would be yeah yeah everything that you said makes a whole lot of sense and you should totally totally forget it you should totally ignore it and just wake up at 4 30 in the morning for the next month and work on it for an hour a day yeah because i you know like the the data that you have right now is complete data but it's also very like misaligned data because there's emotional stigmas to it right like how many people saw it and thought to themselves so wow this is really interesting but they're not going to share with their friends there's there's different like mediums for it like twitter isn't probably isn't the best spot for that anyway you know like i would go to medium where everybody loves talking about their emotions to see what happens so yeah well so there's a part of me that agrees with you maybe i should clarify too this is for me about uh resource allocation and that is kind of a data nerdy thing to say but what i mean by that is i'm going to do it because i want it right oh yeah and i have i already have like a v1 because i because i already wrote the book but i want it in this like notebook form and so i'm going to do that and i've got a budget that i'm willing to i'm willing to pay a certain amount just to create this just so that i have a box of these in my closet that i can use when i want them and that's enough and i've already seen from the feedback on the on the uh tweet that these ideas would resonate with uh at least a handful of people and to me that's enough too right like it doesn't have to be a life-changing business because the impact of just helping one person is enough to make an experience like that meaningful what i'm currently testing is to determine how much of my attention my time and attention is this gonna get at a time when i also like i i feel kind of spread thin because i i am we're watching that though really spread thin or like it's actually worth it oh yeah like not not overly spread thin but this is an important enough decision for me where i'm gonna i want to i yeah i don't have a ton of extra time and attention to get to this so if it's gonna be a major priority it really needs to clear a certain hurdle for me and if not and it doesn't seem like it's gonna clear that hurdle fine that means i'm going what i have is i have basically mornings on the weekends for me are when i develop these side projects and fine then it gets that time and so it'll definitely come out it'll probably you know be the next month or so but it was really important for me to set that hurdle and put something out in public because i got to tell you man as soon as i decided to write this tweet thread i stopped for like a week because i couldn't figure out how to word things and i was really worried that i was gonna offend somebody or whatever all the normal that you go through when you try to put something out and i know i knew that and i know now that the most important thing is to push through that and just put something out so i did there's like a lot of it's checking a lot of boxes and a lot of these like they're very small wins but let me tell you something so the reason this was a priority for me the the testing is because you know at this point interviewed you know dozens of people who've built six seven eight nine figure companies off of ideas that they've had in the background and a lot of them are the ones that i like the most i'll say the ones that really appeal to me as types of successes that i want to have in my portfolio all seem to start roughly the same way which is these people are creators and they're constantly trying little things they're putting little things out but it's not a huge investment of effort they're just trying little things and then every once in a while something hits and they're like oh hey it seems like people are interested in this would you like me to offer an example so i have three examples i can throw at you if you're interested i love that cool so my favorite would be steph smith she's a colleague of mine and she's written two books now one's on content strategy one is on time management both of those books generate multi-six figures or at least six plus figures per year each which is very rare in book publishing of any kind her first book doing content right started as a tweet thread where she basically said something like i just found a document on my computer that's all about like the rules that i established in running a content team basically how to do content marketing you know it's 150 pages now if i finish this and offer it for sales there's something people would want to buy it got so much attention and by so much i mean like a couple hundred likes that she immediately that same day went and built a gumroad page and said she didn't create she didn't put any effort into the product she just said like here's what i'm making here's what you're gonna get here's the price point and then she went back to the twitter thread literally within a couple of hours and said hey it seems like there's a lot of interest i put up a page if you want you can pre-order so that's the second hurdle right like if nobody pre-orders boom i'm not investing my time in this whole bunch of people pre-ordered and then she pulled a a tim stadzi and like burnt the candle at both ends for a couple of weeks got that puppy out and like launched it and she did i couldn't believe how long it was when i was like you wrote this thing in like a month and a half and there's not a single spelling mistake in it it's gorgeous too like it's like well designed there's a kindle version of it she launched a cohort based class off of it she's incredible but it had to clear those hurdles in order to deserve her attention and i would suspect maybe you don't but i'd suspect you actually some you do some version of that yourself but maybe it's just on autopilots that like it's deeper in your intuition by the time you're ready to just go you've already seen enough signals where you're like this is gonna be a thing so i'm just gonna go do it maybe i'm wrong but personally i need to put those in place because i've i've uh i've wasted too much time building something that never gets sold to to keep doing it so i'm going to do this but it's got to clear some hurdles before it deserves more of my attention and then there's other examples too like sam does that and darmesh the guy who created hubspot does that yeah yeah and i'm with that i suppose because of my brian clark influence i approach it maybe with a longer timeline whereas because even what you're saying is very interesting where you said i want to create the product anyway just to have it and then like if i can sell them that's great i would never ever ever do that i would never spend money on a product that i know people aren't going to buy and so i think my patience has benefited me here because in anything i've ever launched i already had an audience for it so like the data point for me isn't necessarily like is there a tweet is there a survey the the data point for me is creating content that i enjoy creating at least to the extent that like i enjoy writing enough that i know people are gonna get help from it you know and then if there's an audience that gets built over the course of a month two months or whatever then i know that people will buy it because they've already basically told me by signing up to the newsletter and it's the same thing over and over again but to me i think the mistake a lot of people make especially people with physical products by the way i've written articles about this where the the example i made was like the kitchen helper some guy has like a better the the i thought about it from infomercials right where you know that crazy thing that has a little plastic container and then you hit your fist on the top yeah the chop it up type thing i was like how much money had to go into the product development of this thing you know like all the patents i was just gonna say patents trial and error right like at least a couple hundred thousand dollars and then they build the thing and they're like okay now we gotta sell it and so what do they do they go hit infomercials and i just remember seeing that thinking like that's gotta be so damn stressful so damn stressful because it's an idea that like people are gonna buy this i know they are where it's so much easier for me to cash flow you have the cash flow and what's the next step the next step isn't sell so the next step is distribution right and so like in my mind there's no rush anxiety is not going to go anywhere so write about it for a year and if you got 5 000 emails a year later you can sell it easily you can sell it on autopilot forever this is where the concept of the landing page comes in so i don't have one yet i sat down to build one and as i sat down to build one i got hamstrung between two different ideas which is because because i agree obviously we like co-created this framework i was basically thinking to myself do i want to create a landing page that tries to describe the individual product and sell it or i have this kind of bigger vision to create a broader company over time that does a lot of these guided type journals that deal with different areas sort of like best self co which does several million dollars a year and people love it and so the broader idea was well maybe i just created a landing page that talks about like hey like do you like journaling and self-reflection like sign up here to be a journal tester because we're building a whole brand around this and every once in a while we'll send you like cool interviews or like sections of journals that are in development you can let us know this is what uh the guy who founded broommate did this basically if you haven't heard of it roommate is a company that sells like basic uh insulated cups for drinks or like insulated beer koozies and they're made out of metal and they're really expensive and the guy who built it built it to like a hundred million dollars or something in the first three or four years and the first 30 million dollars he built it was a one-man show he was just working with like three pls and and uh contractors in order to do everything and the way he started was he had an idea for i think something he called the wine salader which was like a an insulated bottle of wine so like you could it was an insulin like a a yeti mug that could fit an entire bottle of wine and he put up a landing page for it he ponied up the cache to start developing this thing with a manufacturer but he created a one-page landing page and said hey if you think you want this like put your email address here and we'll let you know when it's ready and then you know he collected he would he just paid face for facebook ads to run facebook ads straight to that page gathered somewhere between like five and seven thousand emails and that was enough to keep start this product so that they were profitable from day one and the biggest problem he's ever had is just making sure they keep enough inventory on hand so i know the power of building that audience and that's what i'm working to make sure is like i i don't want to over invest in the product side before i know that i have that distribution i think that's enough about this product i wanted to give people like a quick heads up there but before we wrap this up let's give maybe one more example of this whole audience thing because we you know i wanted to we wanted to start doing like more case studies here and i have this case study for how a woman i know we've actually mentioned her on the show before lexi grant built her audience to 1 000 people and then ended up selling ads against that audience at 5 thousand bucks a pop do you are and it ties in with everything that we're talking about here so do you want to talk about this or should we do it next time i need to know how this is even possible how do you have an email list with the five thousand dollar ad cards on it totally okay so i'll go through it quick then and the first thing you need to know is that lexi has a deep background in media companies part of the reason she was able to sell ads was just because she knew the value of what she was selling a lot of newsletter creators just don't and so they're dramatically undercharging but quick background so she's basically been in the media game most of her career she was a journalist like traveled all the way through africa worked for us news and world report and then started a content company back in the mid 2000s i think that was basically aqua hired into the penny hoarder um i don't know you've heard of the penny holder of course okay tim said of course people listening to this may not have heard of it because here's the crazy thing the penny hoarder it was huge it grew to like she grew the team there to like 100 plus and tens of millions of monthly viewers and the penny order was eventually sold for a hundred million dollars that was a bootstrapped media company sold for 100 million bucks got practically no press right so media guys like tim have heard of him but most people have not so she was you know part of the growth of that company was aqua hired into it ended up leaving before the sale and started her own company called the right life which is all about teaching writers how to make money and then she had an exit on that too so she's like a total baller in the media game and knows what's going on but the thing is when she went through those different acquisitions there weren't a lot of case studies for people who'd done the same thing and the reason is because the media only focuses on like these huge business valuations huge business deals anything in the five six or seven figure range pretty much gets ignored so that became the inspiration for this new list that she's building it's called they got acquired it's all about acquisitions in like the from 500 000 up to i think or no sorry 100 000 to like 50 million so the two quick things right that's her background how did she grow the list and then how did she monetize it and this is where it ties in with what we talked about today she grew the list first by talking about the idea and i think this is something that a lot of people screw up you touched on this with the whole patent thing people take forever to talk about their ideas because they're worried somebody's gonna steal them yeah you gotta ditch that yeah you gotta ditch it if the idea is any good yeah people should try like they should try to steal it but they're probably not going to because most people don't execute on anything right but you got to get your idea out there so she specifically shared this idea uh in two places one was kernel.ai or wait actually no i've got that wrong it's just kernel c a or k e r and a dot or you know there are some shows that don't do public math we should agree not to do public spelling yeah we're writers and public grammar why on earth would i know grammar that reminds me too i'm listening to this book now on like the history of the english language and why it's so much different sorry why is american english so much different from british english wow it's really it's really interesting it was written by bill bryson it's called made in america and it's about the split between those two languages and how they ended up the way that they did it's really good i recommend listening to it because i think reading it might be a little bit tedious but several points in the book they always reference these old documents and they're like oh yeah you know in the declaration of independence they spell freedom three different ways like e-e-d-o-m d-o-m-e and i'm like yeah because they wrote it all by hand and like i screw stuff up when i'm writing by hand you know at a certain point you're just not going to make another copy of that damn thing so i don't think it's like a cultural thing you know colonel is k-e-r-n-a-l and uh it's a place to share startup ideas she shared it there got a little bit of feedback enough to keep going and then she started sharing updates on indie hackers right built and this is where to your point she started building the audience so she would do these weekly and then monthly updates on how the product how the build was going uh we'll link to it in the show notes if anybody wants to check out what that progression looked like but she shared the idea and that's the biggest thing you got to get that idea out there and don't worry about people stealing it honestly if somebody else steals it and runs off with it one of two things happened either you weren't executing fast enough or like congratulations you had a great idea like go go do it also just these days there's not a limit on the number of people who can do an idea exactly there's no zero sum of success on that that's that's that's the part of i when people do take something of mine like i remember t-shirt designs getting copied and then put out there the first thing i thought was like okay cool it's a good idea so like i should just press it harder and win because obviously people are going to buy that so i'll stop there before i go off on a tangent but if people aren't excited about your idea that's way worse think of it that way you know the next step was related to sharing the idea and list growth so as she started to build the company she built a quick landing page i looked at it before i think she used um click funnels and like just a quick click funnels page but she started sharing the idea via email with people that she knew and here's how she did it this was really smart instead of just saying like hey i'm starting this thing will you sign up she said hey i'm starting this company we want to highlight acquisitions that are in this range that never get highlighted do you know of any deals that you think we should cover and then two things would happen people would share story ideas which was great because she was sourcing data that was like hard to come by and most of the time they'd click through and sign up and they'd be like hey this is great let me know when it starts yeah so sharing that idea is going to be the key that gets you going it builds your audience it validates the plan all this kind of stuff over time she grew up to about a thousand people and it took them uh like four or five months to pre-build enough content in order to launch as soon as they hit about a thousand people she started selling ads in the newsletter and she did it with i saw it she sent it to me it's a two-page document and this is what it basically offers it says it says you know here is the idea for the company like this is the type of audience that we're going after we're gonna launch with like one thousand person email list and here's what you get for your ad you're gonna get uh let me just make sure i get this right because i wanna get the numbers right 1000 subscribers 65 open rate okay so here's what you get four newsletter placement two podcast placements and two shout outs on twitter right so that's a total of eight shout outs to a growing audience of a few thousand people cost five thousand bucks apparently was so successful that she actually changed her plan for monetizing the business originally i mean and you know she's still got other ideas for these back end products that we've talked about in other episodes yeah but she didn't plan for advertising to be a big part of it and she said there's just so much demand wow that now it's going to be part of it so the big takeaways for the audience who may or may not be listening to this is you got to share that idea right and like specifically individual outreach can be really helpful early on gave her a very active very engaged list we talked about that with the uh the episode with nathan with convertkit how he scaled it all through one-on-one outreach so yes yes yep and then know the value of those readers and you can just kind of ballpark it but start high you know eight placements roughly a thousand people she's building a high net worth audience right these are people who are interested in business acquisitions but you can sell these ads with just a two-page google doc that explains your vision lays out the opportunity and is just very open about like hey this is what we're charging do you want it it's so fascinating to me my brain is racing right now because i've always hated the ad model for the exact reason that i just never thought there was any money in it but hustle was all ads before we were acquired man doing like millions of dollars a year nas sure but you guys had a million subscribers that's different like the vast majority of people probably have a thousand to fifteen hundred five thousand subscribers you know and so if you're in a 45 cpm unless you're writing a daily newsletter you're thinking [Music] so what's 45 times five if you get an entire a 100 open rate so 250 bucks yeah something like that great so 250 bucks a week that's really really cool and that's not good yeah it's not that cool okay let's just say it but what you said i really resonated with me where the demand right now for media attention is so freaking high that it's probably like an advertiser's market right now where it's like okay you don't want to buy the ad then don't i i don't really care doesn't matter to me i'll go to the next person maybe maybe look into that is there like a wave of self-published advertising going on right now yeah it's huge it's huge because of the changes that twitter it's not twitter sorry oh the ios google facebook facebook and apple