If You Have No Customers & No Revenue You Need This | My First Million

Key Takeaways

How long did it take for you to get to 1 million in revenue? >> Took about us about about a year to get our first million. >> Okay. So, it took you a year to get to a million in revenue. By year two, where were you at? >> About 5 million in revenue. So, 5x in year two. >> And now, where are you? >> We just did about 30 million in revenue last year, which was our fourth year in business. [laughter] >> Yeah. Your growth is bananas. And you know, you're one of the investor updates that I like to open up. But what I thought would be cool, and we were talking, we were like, what would be fun to talk about here? Really, I think it's about growth. I have this book um that's on my bookshelf called Steal Like an Artist. And this book is basically about how most of what we think is original is it's a remix or a straightup copy of something that came before it. And I feel like you kind your story is kind of like that. You were at Morning Brew and you made you helped make Morning Brew the fastest growing newsletter. and you know it got to 75 million in revenue and it exited and all this good stuff and then you took kind of like the learnings from that you remixed it into a product so that anybody could grow their product and I'm kind of wondering if we can kind of remix what you did and see if we can extract the basic principles so that anybody who's out there trying to you know get to that first million in revenue can copy what you did. So, I want you to walk me through what did you do to grow and not like the high level like build a great product, but like the real the real [ __ ] the specific stuff that actually worked. >> Yeah, let's get into it. >> What was the first thing that worked? You're ground zero. You have no customers, no revenue. How did you get going? Yeah, I actually think you already hit on it a bit of like I think about founder market fit a lot and the morning brew story of actually and you've talked about this before of taking something you did at a company or something you've learned previously become an expert in a lowrisk way as an employee and then apply those learnings to start a new business. I think in in the founders that I've backed and seen become extremely successful, there's typically a through line between them doing that previously and then launching again. Quick story that that I've never actually told before is while I was at Morning Brew, crypto between 2017 and 2020 was the biggest thing ever. I didn't even own any Bitcoin. I had no business starting a crypto business, but I wanted as like a founder, I wanted to get into crypto. And so I found this like open- source library of like a 3D model of like a cold storage wallet. I I went to found someone in China who could make them, bought a thousand of them, shipped them to New York, and then like on day two started just trying to sell cold storage crypto wallets. Now I'm the crypto guy >> and I I didn't know a single person who owned Bitcoin. I didn't know crypto at all. I wasn't in any Discord channels. And like the point of that story is like I thought I could well myself into being a founder in the space that I had no credibility whatsoever. I had no connections. Um I just wanted to be a crypto guy. Lesson learned. I sold three of those and I still have 997 in my basement at my house. In complete contrast to that, what you alluded to at the Morning Brew story, like when I joined Morning Brew as the second employee, I had built the referral program. I had built the growth mechanisms. I've seen what success looks like from the inside of that business. And Morning Brew became this golden child of the newsletter ecosystem. And as newsletters became more and more popular, I became like the newsletter person out of experience and credibility. So, I preface all of that of like what is the first step there? One was like actually just having the experience at Morning Brew and being able to lean in that credibility of I have done this before and now I'm building something that I think we could quote unquote democratize access to the same tools that Morning Brew had. >> Right. Right. So you you needed a story at the beginning. I was uh given a talk and I call this the marketing killshot. So some guy stood up and he I go tell me about your business. He says, "Uh, we're a marketing agent, uh, we're a marketing agency for CPG companies, usually D2C, CPG." I'm like, "Bro, this guy just throw an alphabet at soup at me." And then he goes, "You know, we help with copywriting, packaging, design, you name it, we could do it. We do everything." And I was like, "Okay." So, you threw an ac, you know, threw six acronyms at me and then said, "We do everything." All right. I said, "Let me, let me ask you this. When you're pitching your company, who are you trying to get on board, right? And some new brand you want to work with you." And I said, "If you couldn't tell me all that junk," and he only could say one sentence, but off that one sentence, I had to want to work with you, what would that be? And he started with, "We do like uh marketing for consumer companies." And I was like, "Cool. You and any you and a thousand other companies out there that did that didn't do it for me." And I go, "What's the most impressive thing you've done?" And he goes, "Well, we helped launch." And he named like, I don't know, Poppy or like some like huge consumer brand. We did all the all of Poppy's initial branding, marketing, positioning. And I go, "Why didn't you say that?" Cuz that's the kill shot. If I'm a new consumer brand, and I meet you and and all you say is, "We we help brands like Poppy launch with their packaging, their positioning, and their copywriting." And then I'm like, "Oh, I want to be like them, so I'm going to work with you." It's a immediate credibility and proof that no general marketing claim could ever touch. And I feel like credibility and proof is so massively underrated. And I like this forcing function of coming up with your kill shot. So for you, I think one of the the story the kill shot is I ran growth for the for the fastest growing newsletter in the world. Now I'm building a tool for you to for you to grow your newsletter. Sign me up. Right? And so that's a very very powerful story. Now, somebody listening might be like, "Well, but I didn't do that." And so, you're what you're offering is two things. One is first, go get credibility and track record in a lowcost, low stakes way. Like, go join a a fast growing company. Go join a company that has high potential and go kick ass there. That's one path. But I do think fundamentally like a story can work. So, for example, if you didn't say that you worked at Morning Brew, but you said, "I spent a,000 hours studying how Morning Brew grew." and all these tools they built internally and I've built them now so that anybody can use them that would also work right like you know you could just create so I think it all starts with story and story is so underrated and so um how did that story work for you what did you actually do with that story to get the word out there yeah and whether you raise capital or go at it bootstrapped I I think it's important to know like in the early days all you really have is that story right like when I'm pitching investors it is I did this at Morning Brew and I believe I can do it again and do it for more people after you launched beehive I launched a company and it was called Milkro and Milkro's story is very simple I was very interested in crypto I had been for a number of years and so I created I wanted to create the crypto the best crypto newsletter in the world and in one year we grew to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and we sold for millions of dollars okay so this is great success story probably the easiest and fastest business I ever built and I needed a story to start it and so I started manufacturing stories one of them was like anti-credibility. So I told this story how I said, "Can I tell you about the stupidest moment of my entire career?" And people will lean into that story. You're going to tell me about this huge mistake you made. I said, "This mistake cost me more money than every failed investment I've ever had, than every failed company I've ever had." So you're like, "How could you how could this cost you more money?" And I said, it was 2017. Uh my technical co-founder, the smartest guy I know, was supposed to come into a meeting and I was like, "Hey, man. Come on. meeting started 5 minutes ago and he goes, "Hang on, I'm just I I got to buy this." And I go, "Buy what? What are you you're on eBay? What are you doing?" And he was buying the Ethereum pre-sale. So this the Ethereum, you know, back when it was like I think 17 cents or something was the was the pre-sale. And he I should have leaned in and been like, "Why is the smartest guy I know, the most technical guy I know, have to go sign up to buy this crypto token?" I should have leaned in. Instead, I was like, "Ethereum, weird name, dude. Come on. We got to go. let's go do some real business over here in this meeting room. Of course, you know, he made hundreds of millions of dollars off that and I made zilch. And I basically vowed to not make that mistake again that I that when there's an explosive new industry where there's lots of growth potential that I might start as the dumbest guy in the room, but I'm going to ask a lot of questions. I'm going to learn really fast and I'm going to figure things out for me as a non-technical person. Well, guess what? That's what the milk road was as a newsletter. And so I told that story of almost anti-credibility as the opening, as the gateway to get people interested in my new thing. >> Yeah. I mean, I could have used that back when I was starting my crypto company and sold three of my cold storage wallets. But yeah, 100%. So yeah, I I think credibility is huge. The other thing, and it's like the the greatest thing about being online and creating content is like you can find people who are interested in the same things that you are. And so as I'm doing this like year building beehive as like a side project on nights and weekends I'm on Twitter just connecting with everyone who has a newsletter whether they are known newsletter whether they're an upand cominging whether they um are a writer an operator and I'm trying to understand what are the pain points that they're experiencing. some doing consumer research essentially just using Twitter. It is hey I'm using Substack but it doesn't let me customize XYZ or they don't have a referral program like Morning Brew has which becames like one of our big like value props in the early days. And I'm basically as I'm building with my co-founders kind of lurking on Twitter trying to see and connect with people in the industry. And I think that's incredibly important because when you fast forward to like how do you get your first users that in complete contrast to me not knowing a single person in crypto because of the credibility I built at Morning Brew and because of the people I had been connecting with for the past year on Twitter. I already had hundreds of people who I knew had a newsletter and I know what their newsletter was about, what they're interested in, what their pain points are and that became like the initial early outreach. So like early days I I think that's like an underrated aspect of just getting around and surrounding yourself with those types of people. >> Were you just cold emailing, DMing? What were you doing to get in touch with those people? So let's say how many people roughly do you think you kind of talk to? Is it like 50? Is it 100? Is it 200? Something in that order of magnitude, right? >> Directly in a few hundred. >> Okay. Couple hundred. And how did you get in touch with those couple hundred core people? >> Yeah. Either reputation because you see that that they are you can just search newsletter, right? and just see everyone who's talking about or promoting their newsletter on Twitter. I'd follow them and kind of see their story. So DMs primarily. And then what I eventually did and like as we were approaching launch for Beehive, I was never a content creator. I had 5,000 followers on Twitter. So I think when you're like giving tactics of how to scale your business, everyone always looks to like, oh, but I don't live in New York and I don't have that network or I don't have tens of thousands of followers on on Twitter and LinkedIn. At the time I had 5,000 followers. I was not big by any means, but I posted a tweet sharing what we had been building. I I talk about that we have this weight list, limited time only. Complete lie, right? Like we had zero people on this weight list, but you try to build some urgency. [clears throat] [laughter] >> Like I call out that there's only a few spots remaining. Obviously, there's unlimited spots remaining. I start to like from studying the people in the industry, I already kind of understand where the frustration points are with other competitors, right? Like what are people who have a newsletter? Who's my target customer? what are they already complaining about on social that they can't do with their current solution. And so I work that into the narrative. It's uh we have a custom website builder. Um Substack takes a cut of revenue. We won't do that. We are totally like writer and creator friendly. And so you start to work on your counterpositioning and narrative. And then comes the credibility of oh and I built this at Morning Brew and giving you access to the exact same tools that Morning Brew had. Do you want to sign up? >> Again, not a large content creator. I got 400 people to submit on this weight list and and that really became like my uh my lead list of being able to go out and target these people.