Derek - How to master the art of growing and monetizing newsletters from scratch!

I never thought of myself as quote unquote a community builder or an expert in any of these domains. But what I have realized through trial and error, what works is trying to build a flywheel and not a funnel.

Hmm.

By that, I mean, there's, there's for a long time, there was kind of this approach for the internet and Anything is, you know, you need a funnel, you need a message to promote, and then you have to show customers something, and you have to get people into this funnel. And I think if you actually create something that other people can share, you create a flywheel effect, and that's kind of more valuable in the long run.

Welcome to the Undefeated Underdogs Podcast, where I unpack and narrate stories of ambitious people who turn obstacles into opportunities. My goal for this podcast is to create a platform to narrate underdog stories and maybe play a small, teeny tiny role in inspiring you. I intend to highlight the underdog mentality and make authentic conversations with people who play the long game, take action with a chip on their shoulder, and convert obstacles into opportunities. Buckle up as I'll be bringing some authentic founders, VCs, community builders, and content creators who got underestimated their whole lives. And yet they beat all the odds to become insanely successful. Now, today I want to tell you a little bit about our awesome sponsor, acquire.com. Selling a business is as tough as building a business. As someone who went through this process once, selling my own startup, I know the pain it takes to get to the end zone. This is where our sponsor shines. Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product. Acquired customers and generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is you're not growing for, for whatever reason— lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest— and you feel stuck. What should you do? The story I'd like to hear is you buckle down, somehow reignited the fire, get past yourself and the clichés, and start working on your business rather than just in the business. You start building an audience, move out of your comfort zone to do sales and marketing, and in 6 months you triple your revenue. The reality isn't as simple. Situations may be different from every founder facing these crossroads, but too many times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the become business— the business becomes less valuable or worse. Worthless. If you find yourself here, or your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move. Acquire.com is free to list, and they've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/sharath and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. Now let's get into today's episode. My next guest is the founder of remotejobs.com, which features, as the name suggests, remote gigs around the world. It has over half a million subscribers, and he shares about latest jobs, remote news and trends, and exclusive job invites, and so on and so forth. I can go on and on about how impactful Remote Jobs is. He also started a design challenge called Daily UI. back in 2016, and over, I think, 300,000 people participated from 190 countries and have created over 15 million designs. So this guy's like a master of building newsletters and big-ass audiences. Derek, welcome to the show. How are you feeling?

Hey, Sharath, thanks so much for having me. I'm feeling good. Things are great. Thanks for kind of postponing it. I've been sick for the last few days, so I'm on the mend now. I'm at the tail end. I'm healing. So things are good. This podcast will probably heal me. I'll get the energy from this. So we'll be good.

Yay. There you go. That's what I want to hear from my guests. So funny thing I have to mention about Derek is he has, I think I would say 0% presence on the internet. Meanwhile, he's actually building these big-ass newsletters. So know, when I, when I started doing research, I couldn't find anything about you, Derek. So the first question, obvious question to me is like, yeah, you have no LinkedIn if I'm not wrong.

Sure.

You have no personal website if I'm not wrong again. And I think you've done very least, very less podcasts again, you know. So my first question is like, how the hell are you maintaining like such a big

So

newsletter while being so anonymous on the internet.

So I'll take you, I'll walk you through this journey. And basically, I had no experience in technology or working in tech. I grew up in a very, very small town, incredibly small. Okay. Crazy small. You know, my high school graduating class was like 40 kids. Wow. So after that, you know, you go into college. I didn't really have that network and I didn't have that drive to study computer science or anything like that. I just kind of went into business and I liked to travel. So I thought I need a career in business and travel, economics, something like that. And then, you know, I had this, I kind of floated through a few different jobs and, you know, I worked at a casino in Reno, that's in Nevada. And I then I I was kind of living in London for a little bit, and I was going to these meetup groups. And I realized, you know what, these are kind of these central hubs of people where you can network with your entire community, and everyone's interconnected. And that's kind of when I got the bug. I want to work in tech, and I want to do something.

I don't

know how to do it. So I had started this meetup group, meetup.com. And the whole idea was basically to embed myself in these little communities. And, you know, when I get back to Reno, embed myself in this tech community, meet people, and try to get a job in something I had no, no experience in. And that's kind of what I did. So I kind of worked my way through a few. And then I kept that meetup growing. So even today, Like I, we still do this meetup once a month. There's kind of other guys in the city that help out and organize it, but there's, you know, over 800 people in the meetup group. So if you just put in the time, things will just kind of compound. And so back to your point, yeah, I was totally a ghost. I, I wanted a side hustle. I wanted a little, little gig I could work on, just a little pet project, something you could do to challenge yourself to make money. And I felt like I was in Alcatraz at this job where there was, it felt like there was no, it wasn't exciting. It felt like it was a grind. It felt like I was just rowing somebody else's boat that you feel, you know, you can feel underappreciated and you, you just want to do something. You want to own something. So I got that urge to do something and I had built little websites on the side and done some freelancing things and slowly acclimating. to it. And then, you know, I tried a few projects like a little, little web agency, and I ended up selling that. And the guy has since shut it down, which is a huge bummer. But you go through these ways when you find little things. And I love the idea of a newsletter, right? Because it has this compounding value where if you just keep growing your user base, your subscribers, um, your— the price you can charge for sponsorship kind of increases proportionally. Whereas if you had a website and you were driving a lot of traffic, you pretty much You pretty much have to maintain consistent traffic if you want to achieve those same rates. So there's a lot of appealing things about newsletters. And I stayed anonymous because I stayed at my job and I didn't want anybody— Wow. You don't want coworkers, you don't want your boss finding out that you're trying to grow this side hustle because that was me in Alcatraz, you know, and I'm like saving clippings from the barbershop and, you know, at night, Working on carving out some of the wall and that's what it felt like. So I could take you kind of through that journey, but that's kind of the origin of why I stayed under the radar for so long. And then it just kind of, after a while you're just used to it and I felt, I don't want to be that type of person that is ego-driven, that I have this personal brand and website, et cetera, et cetera. I do think that's very valuable though. And in hindsight, you know, I do think it's actually pretty powerful if you are building a personal brand. I just approached it from the opposite path because that's kind of where I was. And then it was much easier to springboard into a personal brand once you had something established, once you had an audience where they, you know, kind of built trust over the years. But I can talk you through You know, acquiring small projects, growing them, selling them, whatever, building, whatever you want to chat about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I do have, I do have a set of questions though. So we'll have, we'll have a jam-packed episode for sure, listeners. But I want to, I want to go back to your answer and kind of break down 3 things. One is you started like, so you don't belong in tech, but you want to be part of tech. So that's why you started like these community meetups. That's one thing I want to cover and then the rest I'll just kind of take it from there. So talk to me about like doing meetups, right? Is it the same when this happened? Like the first meetup you hosted, do the rules apply the same? Bringing community people together, building that community over and over and over again. What have you learned from that experience?

You know, they do share this similar thread of building a community online versus building it in person. And the common denominator is that so many people are passive. Most people are passive. And you hear that Pareto's Law, the 80/20 rule, where, you know, 20% of the output is from— or 80% out of the output is from 20% of the input, things like that. I actually think it's really amplified online where like it is— it might even be 10% of—

Interesting.

What you just— you just don't know. There's huge network effects that are at play online and things can spread and move so much faster and bigger, but The common denominator of most people being passive is most people are just consumers and there's very few producers. And when I started this meetup group, yeah, I wanted to hustle it and meet people and just to see what would happen. And at the time, meetup was free until you had 50 members. So, and you know, you start at zero. So I thought worst case scenario, this is free. It costs me nothing. I'm going to go to a coffee shop and hang out anyway. Might have been 20 people. Right. I think the first meetup, there were zero people. I think it was just me because you're broadcasting to nobody and there's nobody in your meetup group. So you schedule another one and the more you kind of schedule, the more you can kind of appear in the app or be seen. And when new people are joining and they're like, oh, and it, at the time it was specifically focused on software. All right, I want to meet everybody in software in Reno. I'm gonna sneak into a gig somewhere at maybe a startup. I don't know.

Was Reno like a, like a tech hub? What's the situation? Tech scene?

Yeah, so there was kind of this massive migration to Reno recently where the last 5 to 10 years the population has absolutely exploded. And part of that is you have just increasing costs in California. Cost of housing is very high, income taxes are very high. And in Nevada, you had much lower cost of living, or at least significantly, no, or, you know, not as low as like the South or something like that, but much lower than California. And there's no personal income tax in Nevada. So if you had a business in California or you had a decent income and you were mobile, maybe you do kind of jump ship and you go to Nevada. So we saw a lot of companies come into the Reno area. There's a massive Amazon distribution warehouse. Chewy.com is out there. Tesla's huge Gigafactory, this partnership with Tesla and Panasonic came in and they started producing these batteries. And there's Microsoft global licensing headquarters in Reno. And nobody knows that either. And then Intuit, massive, you know, company owns TurboTax and they acquired Mailchimp and all of these things. Yeah. They've got a huge headquarters in Reno as well. It's not the main headquarters, but really established tech companies moving in and growing. And it, I think it just attracted a lot of talent. It's 1 hour from Lake Tahoe. I'm originally from Lake Tahoe, so I kind of wound up there and it's a pretty good place. So that's, that was kind of the cause for the migration. So you really did see a lot blowing up. And so I kind of just really started at the right time. Meetup was still new. And it grew slowly. There was a small community of people interested in software. And then I kind of discovered after a couple years that there's only so much content that you can host for specifically a software meetup. People will pitch their app ideas, some people showcase what they're working on, good connections, good insights. You know, I met guys from eBay and Google and a lot of people that were Working remotely there. And so I really, I liked it and I still like the group and now it's transitioned to being focused around startups. So that's, that's kind of how it's made the leap, but that, that was my first stepping stone into building community, I guess.

Yeah. Any breakthrough moments that happened? When did this happen, by the way? When did you start building the meetup community?

The meetup first started about 10 years ago.

Wow.

I think it was 2014 or something like that. And I'll have to pull up my meetup group and look back at it, but I was kind of early on that. And I was not in the tech scene whatsoever. And so it took a while to kind of ramp up and make connections and then find a job here and there.

Right.

And then I just went down the rabbit hole of how do you run a business? How do you run side projects while you're working? I think it's really smart to stay employed while you're going through those changes and thinking, because you still have all these expenses. So—

Absolutely. Yeah. So that was my kind of like another follow-up question. Before we dive into that, do you want to talk a little bit about building community in today's world? Like from your experience of building that meetup community and the newsletters, so on and so forth, anything that you want to offer the listeners, founders who are listening? I'm a big— I'm big on community. I've been building communities for a while now and there are no shortcuts. It's a long game. You just have to show up, be present, listen more. And there are some fundamentals that I preach, and I'm curious to know what you kind of preach from your end when it comes to building a community.

Right. I love the— I like the setting of this conversation because I don't know, these aren't predefined questions, so everything's just going to be live fire. That's— I love that approach to things because then you really get to see what's under the hood. And if—

Exactly.

If they have a quick comeback, it means they've thought about it before. It's just not off the cuff. So my answer to that for communities is I never thought of myself as, quote unquote, a community builder or an expert in any of these domains. But what I have realized Through trial and error, what works is trying to build a flywheel and not a funnel.

Hmm.

By that, I mean, there's, there's, for a long time, there was kind of this approach for the internet and anything is, you know, you need a funnel, you need a message to promote, and then you have to show customers something and you have to get people into this funnel. And I think if you actually create something that other people can share, you create a flywheel effect, and that's kind of more valuable in the long run. It's also different if you're doing a free product versus a paid product. So I have some paid products that are like a paid digital download, and then I have free products. If you have a free product, obviously there's no barrier to entry, so someone could just try it out. So why not? So it makes it easier and removing that friction means it can grow faster. So you do something for free, share some value, try to get some distribution around it. The second thing, have you ever heard of the watering hole method? I think this is what it's called. Yeah. It's essentially you're looking for this, you know, you're looking for some type of prey. where do they hang out? They kind of all congregate at some specific watering hole. That's the theory. Someone in marketing could help us out, but that's the general concept. And so I thought, all right, well, where do these people congregate? Where do they hang out? And I actually acquired this tiny design newsletter. It was really small. It was on auction. Nobody even bid on it. And So I approached the guy because I had all these marketing ideas of, oh, how I could grow it, how I could change the brand, things like that, or just rebuild it. And after I acquired it, there was just zero, zero growth.

Hmm.

Months. Okay. It was dead. And I thought I would probably just abandon it. And then I kind of put myself into that marketing mentality and said, well, where is the watering hole? Where do these people hang out? And how can I embed myself in that community? Just like Meetup, same concept. And that's pretty much it. That'd be my advice is try to create a flywheel for that distribution and try to embed yourself in those communities and not making it just a one-way transactional. I'm just spreading a message, just being a messenger. You have to be a participant.

Yeah, that's one of the things. One of the key things is I too kind of can echo to that. When you build a community, you're not just the facilitator. Of course, you start as a facilitator. You kind of are the one who is, you know, bringing the, you know, the people together. But I feel once you remove that label and you just go on and you find more facilitators like you, like just the way you started,

true,

then it— that's like the flywheel you're talking about, right? It's not a funnel, it's a flywheel. Is how the community runs without you being the facilitator. That's when I feel is like the classic win situation for a community, or it's self-sustained for the longer term. When you remove yourself and this community is still running because they hang out, they become the facilitators and they find other people who are facilitators.

The analogy I would give is it's like a steam train and it's very hard to get it in motion. But it's easier to keep up than it is to catch up. And if you can actually find a way to get that train in motion and keep adding fuel to the fire, you're, you're gonna get to ride on that momentum for a long time. And

I love, I love that. Yeah.

It's, it's building this train and you just, it, it takes a, a lot of inertia to, to try to get it out of the gate and get it in motion. But another thing is that I've come to notice that the bigger you get, The easier it is to get big. And when your meetup group has 9 people, it doesn't— it's probably not gonna be exciting. Like maybe 1 will show up, maybe 2 will turn out. And then when you have 100 people, it's like, okay, I could actually meet somebody. And now, you know, over 800-some-odd people, you're gonna get a decent amount of people that actually show up in an event. Right. And it could be exciting, it could be interesting. It seems like there's more social proof. That it's kind of the same online. And the bigger you get, the bigger your odds are that someone else is going to share it. And you can just kind of achieve that, the compounding effects of that momentum.

I love that. I think I love the analogy, steam engine. That's, I think, something I never heard before, like someone explaining community. Yeah, I love that. So there is like a part 2 from your first answer, which is Hustling. You've built this community, you met people, you wanted to build a business while you have a full-time job. Talk to me about the hustle, the back and forth, because I was there before and it's freaking hard. It's like so hard to focus on 9 to 5, come home, work on weekends, work during the nights, stretch a little bit, sneak out a little bit during the office hours, and then, you know, build that little thing that you always wanted. So it's like a very, you know, it's like hustler, like that's how you do. And I wanted to hear your story, like how you picked up out of nowhere newsletters, why newsletters is something that you wanted to do versus like building products or creating content or whatever it is that, you know, there are like many paths when you want to like pick a side hustle.

Right. So, okay, I'll approach that in a few parts. So the first part is, how do you— I think the first part of that question was basically, how do you navigate juggling a side project with the demands of full-time job? Yeah. And it comes down to how badly you want it. And I wanted out. Once again, I was on Alcatraz. I felt trapped. So And I felt like I could see these other people, you know, for anyone listening, Alcatraz is on a little island and it is looking at San Francisco. So you're out in this bay and I felt like I, I was in my little cell and I could see people on the other side and you can hear sounds and the fun of the city and you wanted that freedom. And that's what it felt like.

What were you doing there? I'm curious.

Um, okay, so after I worked at a casino, I got this job at a mobile app startup. And they had kind of relocated from San Francisco and were slowly trimming off, you know, expensive San Francisco salaries and kind of just onboarding people in Reno. So I was one of those people that was kind of lucky enough to do that.

Okay.

So it was just a lot of Success, which, yeah, I hate that it's like this, but a lot of it is right time, right place, right preparation. And you also, you don't find what you're not looking for. And I was looking for it. So I was actively seeking out opportunities. I found that on Craigslist. I love Craigslist.

And, uh, oh, okay.

So I took that job, worked it. It did feel stressful. It felt weird. You know, it was a VC-funded startup. And I just—

wait, you got hired in a startup through Craigslist?

Yeah.

That's crazy. I never heard like—

Right. So, and it was actually kind of well established already at the time. And I just kind of, I just had enough after, you know, a while you work at something for a year and you're just, you might be burned out on it. And So I was in Alcatraz and I did try to juggle little things on the side and on weekends, and I wasn't dead set on a newsletter. And I was looking at all kinds of different projects.

Hmm.

And I thought, well, should I have a mobile app? Because kind of that's what the company's been doing. You feel like you have some insight there, maybe that will transition. And I just looked through, I was trolling through all these sites seeing like, well, should you buy something? Should you build something, et cetera? And the quick start is to buy something. And I think this was like a couple thousand dollars. It was very cheap. So it was enough to where it was meaningful that you could, you know, I didn't want to just let it die and lose it, but not too much to where like I was totally out. And yeah, I actually had acquired and sold a blog before too on, you know, that was like a content blog, and that seemed like a real grind because you'd have to produce content. I didn't really know anything about SEO, so I ended up buying it and then selling it. And then this newsletter, I really thought that I could just work on it on the side, and it's actually an automated newsletter, so I don't actually manually write it or curate it.

Interesting.

I used to write a lot of weekly roundup issues. And then once it took on a life of its own and kind of had that momentum, um, it was just a runaway train. So,

well,

so it was— I, I liked the grind and the balance. I thought it was fun. And, uh, these opportunities kind of start cropping up once you plant the seeds. You'll start to see some trees grow and you'll start to see something bear fruit eventually. And that's pretty much what happened is you get cold outreach from people who want to be a sponsor, you can list on marketplaces, you can do a lot of things. And like I said, the bigger you get, the easier it is to get big. So you hit 10,000 subscribers, you feel like, all right, I, I got something here, 20, 50, 100, etc. That visibility starts to take care of itself, like the trees are big enough to where they're just dropping apples. So yeah. That was that.

Side projects are so much fun. Yes. Because you can't— you kind of have zero expectations or less expectations from them, but you kind of also, if you're finding something you really love, it's fun to work and that motivates you to like stretch, especially when you have a 9-to-5 job.

And there's a challenge too of growing something, of making something. It's like, can I do this? Can I build this? And I also thought that, well, if you build an app and you, but you're going to need users. So what if you actually build that distribution first? Can you leverage that to where you can sell ads and sponsorships to that audience? And then later when you have a product ready, you can start selling your own product. Sure.

Right.

So I think that's, that, that was a better approach for me. That's what I did. And now I can, now I have a direct pipeline to start selling products to my own audience. And yeah, I've never spent a dollar on ads. I've never—

wow—

never spent on Facebook or Google, um, or any of these sites. It's all

organic,

totally organic. And I think if you can nail that and achieve organic growth just through guerrilla tactics and being creative, you're going to win more later, uh, because you're putting the time to plant those seeds. You're not relying on someone else to You know, pick and pull on the farm for you.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And out of all, again, I'm curious, do you have like failed side projects that you tried while you were working 9 to 5? Was it like newsletter is the first one you were like, okay, this is the one I have to do it? What was your try and learn process look like during that time?

A lot of things kind of came and went, and it's just like I say where it's it's the mentality of shifting from an employee to a founder to running your own business to becoming an entrepreneur. The analogy I would give, excuse me, is it's making the transition from fishing to farming when you're an employee. It's kind of true when you're when when you're an employee. You go to work. All I have to do is go out on this ship. I cast my pole. I'm going to catch something. Some days you do, some days you don't. And at the end of the day, I get to go home and it's not my ship. It's not my catch. I don't really have to worry about it. That's kind of similar to being just at a regular 9-to-5 job. When you're an entrepreneur, You don't have a boat, you don't have any bait, there's nothing to just go out and do. And so you have to start farming. So you have to go out and clear this land and start planting seeds and curating this crop. And you have to be patient. It takes time because, you know, maybe some people get lucky and the first seed they plant, boom, it's this magic beanstalk.

Yeah.

Very rare. You see those stories all the time, but it's extremely rare. And you can't rely on luck as a strategy.

Right.

So if you start planting a lot of seeds and you're strategic about it, something is going to take off. Something will eventually. So that's kind of how I landed on newsletters is I had done the website style. I had done the little agency. It was called tinysites.com. And that was a side thing to where I could just find local people. It actually sprang up from the meetup group where I would meet people in the meetup group and they would always say like, oh yeah, you— so you guys are kind of like the tech group. I need somebody to do my website. And if you're that central hub, you're the organizer, people will message the organizer and say, hey, who's a web developer? And then I'd say, let's get coffee. And I would take them to coffee and then eventually just land it as a client. Right. It was very easy. It was a great way to do it. But I had this awakening. And the awakening was that, and I would tell myself this and it's kind of crazy, but the awakening one day was service work is the devil's work.

Yeah.

I realized I didn't want to keep doing services because there's no, there isn't the compounding value of having a product. You can't achieve the same distribution as product. There's just so much more leverage with a product. So

yeah,

after that awakening is when I realized I needed to swap like a service, little agency freelance style for a product. Yeah. One that I managed to just keep hustling and working on was the newsletter and finding new ways to get coverage or distribution and get links on it. And it's a single page. It's just one little funnel. You love it or you leave it. You either subscribe or you don't. And the benefit of that is you kind of start to find which channels work for you. So that's kind of how I grew it and made that leap from fisher to farmer.

Yeah, I love— man, you're dropping incredible analogies. Like, I love— Yeah, that's the thing.

I do a lot of analogies.

The steam engine one was spot on. Fishing, farming, that's spot on. And I think what you said about service business is so true. Fun fact, I started as well in my entrepreneurship, if that's like the thing right now. Everybody's like an entrepreneur. I started my journey as well in service. We used to, I used to help founders design pitch decks.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, that was like a, like a fun way to meet a lot of founders, but it's so exhausting in the work, the revisions. The back and forth, it's so time-consuming. It's not like plug and play. It's like, you know, there is so much involvement required.

You, it's kind of like the fishing farming analogy again, where service work is the fishing because I can go out and I can land this huge whale client, but then I don't know how to find one again or how to catch one or when it's going to come along. So you go through this feast or famine cycle. Right. And that's hard. And unless you've built up enough awareness, credibility, clientele to kind of keep yourself sustaining, or you have some kind of backlog, um, it's that feast and famine cycle. It's really hard.

Yeah.

Product that is self-sustaining, that is your steam engine that is still running, can keep running with very minimal input.

Got it.

So that was another thing is if you have an automated newsletter, It's a huge win because there's huge weight off your shoulder that you don't need to worry about hitting deadlines and doing things. And that can be a grind too, but it is worth it.

Let's talk about newsletters. I'm curious, you know, what an awesome journey, man. Like, you know, 9 to 5 hustle, then, you know, finding the right one, right project, again, right timing. And I think you have like an intention where you just want to try stuff and see how it goes. I think that's by far like the best mindset I generally observe among founders. Like some of them have these big-ass goals, deadlines, you know, or like, I want to achieve this, which are absolutely fine. But I feel when you're just starting out, it's all about being very curious and trying multiple things and taking, I think, expanding your luck surface area by taking multiple shots and multiple chances. So I feel, I think you have like a— Like in, like a similar mindset. So

the more shots you take, the more baskets you make. It's, it's basically as simple as that. And eventually you'll stumble across the right connections and the right tactics that work for you and that get you excited. And now you're excited to go do something. And that's why when I left my job, I knew that it was going to be fun. It was already something that was making money.

Yeah.

It's much more comfortable if you just go straight into farming and you have to live off that crop. That's really tough because now you have to have a ton of runway because those might not bear fruit for weeks, months, years. You don't know.

It's so long.

It's hard to say. So

yeah. And I think one of the things when you're— one of the things I learned personally, I just want to share, while you take so many shots, There'll be a point where, yeah, some baskets, they go in, awesome wins.

Totally.

A lot, lot many times they don't go in. They just, we just miss. And I feel we just have to really like bring ourselves together and just show up and do another shot. I think not giving up is, is I think by far the biggest unlock for any, any kind of success, right? Because once you stop Giving up, I think you'll hit or you'll make the basket whenever it happens. So that is something that you just can't give up. You just keep going, keep going, keep going. No, I just want to quickly ask about— let's talk about newsletters. I feel

anything you want. Yeah, anything you want. Yeah,

newsletters. I am curious, when you started, you said there wasn't much growth. I think you bought a newsletter. So how did you figure out building a newsletter, growing it, monetizing it, taking to the next level? Were there any tips that you want to share? Like, okay, this is how newsletters should be built. Like, there are different ways right now. I'm curious about your take. And I think particularly your method is curation, right? You're not like writing content or anything like that. It's all curating. So curious about curation as well. I'm a big, big, big, big believer in curation because it actually resembles your taste.

Sure.

Like the taste you have. So, yeah.

Okay, I'll take you through this journey. So basically, when I bought it, I had made offers on all kinds of different projects and things. And I saw this one for sale, I had this idea for a good turnaround. Nobody bid on it. I approached the guy outside of Flippa, which was the marketplace site, and just bought it through a straight transaction on escrow.com. And after it flatlined, things go through this pop and drop phase. And after it totally flatlined for a while, I really had to circle back and put on the marketing hat and think like, okay, how do I embed myself in that community? What is the watering hole? What can I do to kickstart that? And design—

Is this Daily UI?

Yes. Yes. Daily UI. So, uh, and that's dailyui.co. I did recently buy the .com.

Oh, nice. So you spend like a million dollars on that?

No, I think it was maybe— I want to say I paid $17,500 or something like that. So, wow, and some change. So, which, that's not bad.

That's not bad.

I could have had it for way less years earlier, but I honestly thought, one, I'm cheap. You're a Craigslistor, okay? And I thought, I won't need it because—

I'm a hustler.

What if this doesn't work out? I don't want to spend more on the domain name than I did on the initial project. So that wouldn't make sense. In hindsight, it totally makes sense because the brand is the car body. It's what is attractive and it's like having a nice storefront. It's a clean, nice storefront. People are going to want to come inside. So I should have bought it years earlier, but back to the idea of, okay, so how do you grow something? I embedded myself in those design communities and I thought from the perspective of a designer of what do you want as a designer? What are you trying to achieve? What's your outcome? Well, there's a few things. It's kind of like being an artist. A, You want to have more paying gigs. That'd be great. Okay, so how do you get more paying gigs? Well, you have to have a great portfolio. You have to have substantial body of work. Okay, how do you have a great body of work? Well, you have to work for great clients. So there's this kind of chicken and the egg. How do you get great clients without great work? You have to make work. You have to do free work. You have to do speculative work. Just start creating. And these challenges are that they're just little text prompts. They used to be accompanied with, I put images for a while where I actually spent a ton of time going through designs and putting in images. Then I would get this feedback from subscribers and they'd say, you know what? I feel like you're influencing what is good design by sharing what you, what you think an e-commerce site should look like or something like that, for example. So I did a poll. Most people said don't show inspiration. It was over 70%. So easy. I just removed it all, kept it all text, and I positioned it as a design challenge, not a newsletter. It is a newsletter. It's delivered as a newsletter, but I didn't pitch it as that. And I didn't position it as a newsletter because then it doesn't sound exciting. And then if you search, if you Google search design challenge, I think it's number 1 right now. I mean, it's been number 1 a lot on that. And—

Wow.

If you had just pitched it as design newsletter, for example, I hope that ranking is still in the books for people that search it. But that was the idea of looking Just through a lens of what could you do that's clever that everyone else isn't doing? If it's just a design newsletter, okay, what is that? It's kind of like, oh, I have a newsletter on the stock market. Well, kind of anybody could have that. But if you do this design challenge, it's different, it's unique. And if you're incentivized to share your designs, it's going to encourage distribution of the brand. So throughout the challenge, you're encouraged to say, oh, hey, what'd you do for Daily UI 15, et cetera. Daily UI— UI stands for user interface. So—

Yep.

Elements of websites, of software, of mobile apps, everything's got this interface and they need to be designed. So that was the idea. Encourage sharing, pitch it differently, and find interesting outlets where these designers hang out and how you can reach out to them. That was the goal.

It's so interesting because I'm just going through the website and yeah, I did, I did the Google search and it came second. So,

okay. Not bad.

That's, that's awesome.

That's good.

Design challenge, second ranked website. And you did, I think, discover the 100 Days Challenge before it was very popular, if I'm not wrong, because nowadays, or even like back in—

There's 20—

2022, 2021, a lot. 100 Days of No Code was there. 100 Days of Code was there.

Writing, everything. Um, 100 Days of Yoga. There's anything. It's an easy catchphrase. And that website, the one you're looking at now, single page, you know, single landing page, I haven't updated in years. And, or maybe, maybe I changed the subscriber number a year ago or something like that, which I should make it. Just dynamic. But it was going through the process of learning what makes a great landing page, what's convincing, and ultimately your audience is everything. So a terrible landing page could still have a high conversion rate if it's pitched to the right audience and it's the right problem or opportunity. And I just pulled on all these little levers So you can kind of go through the site and break down and look at, okay, he has social proof, there's good testimonials, there's a couple images. It's not bad. It's a clean look. It's so focused. You can't go elsewhere.

Yeah.

So that helped. But kicking off, being early on a trend like challenges, if you're early and you keep building that momentum, You can just become an established player. And I think I acquired this in maybe 2017, either 2017, 2018. It was early enough in the newsletter space where it wasn't a total buzz. It wasn't totally everywhere. And so you had a little less competition and something pitched in a different way. And I still think someone else could do it now. And I've seen many, many variants of Daily UI come out. Right. And the reason they didn't succeed or didn't succeed to this level is design is very visual. So if you do 100 Days of Code and your code, what, it differs a little from my code? Maybe. Is that visual? Is that interesting? Is it worth sharing? Not really. It's not that appealing. It's good from the perspective of you receiving challenges and maybe you getting the solutions later. Mm-hmm. But in terms of that distribution and building that flywheel, the visibility is huge. And that's why right now you see a lot of these AI apps really blowing up and the growth is explosive because it's so visual, it's so appealing, it's easy to share.

Is that how it blew up? Like the ethos of putting your work in public, sharing with others? Is that like a turning point? Or I'm curious how it went from— I think if I remember correctly, when we were chatting before, you said it's so hard to grow a newsletter. Once you reach 1K, it feels so impossible to go to, you know, so on and so forth. Then once you reach 10K, you'll be like, I think this is it. This is the maximum I can go, or the number of designers hang out, and it keeps on growing. So. I want to understand where is like the tipping point? How did you break it?

Okay. So yeah, and I'll take you back because in the, in the intro too, so, um, Remote Jobs is now over a year and a half old. Um, this December it's going to be 2 years old and that's over 100,000 subscribers. Not— you had mentioned 500. I have over 500 combined. Daily UI itself alone is over 450, which I should update the website, but the compounding effects of one newsletter swapping with another is huge. So if you do have audience overlap, it's very easy to grow that second one. So the very first day, first issue of Remote Jobs, if you're broadcasting to zero people, obviously, actually, you're not going to get any open. So it's very slow to grow it. So you use social media, you use Your own website, it's very slow. But if you have another massive newsletter and you can just cross-promote it instantly, you're gonna get clicks and visibility instantly. And you own that audience. Not everyone will make the leap because maybe they don't want a remote job. Or maybe if I had picked something else like, um, classic cars, and there, there might be a small subset of subscribers that were interested in that. That'll be good. Yeah. But I went for a more broad category that could be appealing to almost basically all of them. Certainly most of them.

Any, any, so cross-promoting on one newsletter to the other newsletter is, you know, it's like a cool trick. What about, what about your hacks or how you approached growing a newsletter from zero, like zero to 1K to 10K? 100,000, 200,000, like so on and so forth. Like, that's massive, massive numbers. It's not like something you get. There should be a lot of grunt work you must have, you know, put into work.

It all starts with the communities that you embed yourself in, what websites you can get yourself featured on, and how you can do that. That's where it starts. Driving, driving the traffic is where you start it. And the second thing is optimizing your landing page so that it's very clear, it's simple, it's concise. There's a value proposition, there's a reason for people to subscribe. And then the third is you need to get them, you need to get your emails into the primary tab, not promotions or social or things like that. And so you need to optimize for primary. Basically Google dominates email, you know, all these clients, there's Outlook and Yahoo and Hotmail and all that. It's heavily weighted towards Google, to Gmail. So how do you, how do you get into the primary tab? Well, you have a welcome email, you know, you have an opt-in, people opt in, they click, you have this interactivity with a subscriber. Right. And being responsive when somebody emails you, you respond. That helps. And not over-promoting. So if you do Daily UI now, you probably go through 4 or 5, 6 days or something. You don't see any ads or anything. There's nothing. There's just the challenge, text only. It's very simple. So it's not promotional. So Google doesn't see it as that because that's not what it is. It's a challenge. Right. And after a while you build this Domain authority, your IP rating goes up as a sender, and all of those factors help you stay in the primary tab. And then when you start doing promotional things and you do campaigns, I'll do a paid campaign in a few weeks. You stay in the primary tab because the ratio is very low. You know, sending a lot of value and not a lot of promo. So that's kind of how you maintain that. Right. And people respect that. You don't want to alienate your audience early on by sending just promotional stuff day one. Too many people try to send emails that it's all images, it's only images because they want to be able to track the open rates. Well, if you do that, that sounds promotional. It's just images. Interesting. So prefer start with text, offer value. That's how I would angle that and embed yourself in those communities, incentivize people to share it. Those compounding effects start to take place. You know, 10, 20, 30, 50,000 subscribers. You can start to see your data and you can start to think, well, if I kept growing at this rate, it would reach X. If I kept doing this, that would happen. And you You start to see these wins here and there, just curating that crop. Just, you got to keep walking.

Yeah, curation is the name of the game. I think at least for the newsletter type you mentioned, like, automate it, show up, change a little bit here and there, make it better a little bit week over week. You've talked a lot about what you need to do as someone who wants to grow a newsletter. And I also want to talk about or ask about like monetization. You know, what are the ways you found that are very effective that people can replicate? But before that, what are some things people make mistakes about running a newsletter? Do you have any experience or experiments? I would say, hey, I ran this, man, that sucks. You should never do that. I should never do that. Any of those experiences you want to share with us?

Sure. Which it is funny because I'm not one of these quote unquote newsletter gurus where if you go on some of these websites, you see people, I see people every day sharing tips on here's how I grew from 0 to 1,000 subscribers in 2 months or something like that. And I'll think to myself and be like, dang, I've done like 1,800 subscribers today.

Wow.

I think like, should I be sharing these tips? Or—

Yeah, why not?

A lot of the time I do prefer the mentality of bad boys move in silence, and I would like to just keep flying by, flying by under the radar. But after a while, it's just kind of unavoidable, right? So some tips, some things. Let's see, some of these hot topics I see people post about that I probably disagree with. People go just crazy hog wild on it. You need to A/B test things. You need to be very scientific about this and that. And if you're just smart and just a normal person, it will make sense. If you have to A/B test every subject line, I think you're just going to kind of keep digging yourself into a hole. There comes a time where you should just have— it should become second nature where Yeah. You know what's a good line and what's a bad line. Just use common sense, use your judgment. You don't have to A/B test it. Another thing is I actually did, I got like free access to some A/B testing tools. And so I would try to be scientific at the time and say like, I'm gonna A/B test landing pages. I'm gonna do, you know, colors for 2 months. And then I'm gonna do left and right layout for a while, single column layout, do all of that. For me, I couldn't tell if A/B tests were a scam or not because The longer you run these tests, the more similar the results would be. And it's like, well, does a red button convert better or a blue button? Well,

right.

If, if it's a red button and everyone starts using a red button and your website uses a blue button, now yours is probably going to be better because everyone's using red. So, so I don't know if they're a scam or not. And I would just run these tests and look at it in 30 days and you're like, dang, okay. This single column layout is better. That is better. That's winning. Right.

You

can let it go for 60, 90 days and then you're like, oh shoot, they're exactly the same.

Yeah.

At some point, just trust, trust your gut. Run with it.

Yeah.

And be open to criticism. If someone is a designer, be open to what they say. Don't just run with whatever you think works. Learn.

Right.

Yeah. So, so there's that. Other tips that I see people do—

Anything, anything like that have— that haven't, like, you know, that hasn't been talked about a lot on, on the internet that you discovered? Because I think—

I got you.

You, you wanted— you, you never shared, if I'm not wrong. Again, that's what I feel like. You're like under the radar, I do my own thing type of a person. So I mean, this might be the opportunity, like Spill your secrets.

I'll give you a tip right here. Here's, here's one that I think about and I kind of get a chuckle when I see it, when I see people post about it. A lot of people try to— I'm just not great with social media or coming up with good content. All my stuff is like dog pictures and memes. But what I see a lot of people do is they say, all right, well, if you don't have an audience, you have to build one. How do you do that? Where do you start? A lot of people write these viral threads. So it's just kind of this little thought piece on something, either a how-to or an analysis. And if you can get that viral thread, you see that all the time.

Yep.

People will plug their newsletter or plug their— a lot of the time that's automated and they do that all the time, or, or they'll manually do a follow-up comment and be like, hey, for my insights on how to build a business, subscribe here.

Yeah. Follow more. Yeah.

Okay. That, that is kind of cool. And I see how that can work. I've never done it. So I don't have a lot of insight on how to keep doing that. And how do you engineer that virality every time and the algorithm changes and things like that? So how do you keep that going? I think people trust a third party more than yourself. So if I say subscribe to my newsletter is the best, of course I'm biased. I'm going to say that.

Right. Of course.

Even if it's true, but coming from someone else, that third-party social proof is so powerful. So I really looked for what opportunities exist that no one else is doing that I can do and embed myself into that. One of these was there are a lot of these educational sites. So this could be a good little tip for people if they haven't discovered this nugget. There's a lot of these sites, like there's Coursera, There's Udemy, Udacity, there's a ton of these, Codecademy. There's a lot.

Hmm.

You have a product, like I had a design newsletter that I pitched as a challenge, and these are, there's already these courses and instructors. How can you embed yourself in one of those communities that they're gonna repeat that course over and over? So like every quarter new students are moving in and out. How do you get into that? Yeah. And I cold emailed a lot of these instructors and I'd say, hey, I've got this sweet design challenge, da da da. It would help your students build their portfolio, create better work, share. I would also feature people. So feature designers and you get thousands of new followers from that, or you might land new clients from getting featured. So I would pitch that. Most instructors would either not reply or say, no thanks, I get pitched every day. So no thank you. What did work for me was looking for the associate or whoever was their sidekick, not going to the top, going one tier down and saying like, oh, hey Amanda, I saw you're, you know, a co-instructor of this course. Really cool. I thought this would be neat. And you send a link or a sample to a student's—

Flower.

Not to my landing page. Say, check, check out what this guy did, how he made this page. I thought this might be neat. Maybe it's worth showing. Mm-hmm. You send them to a link of a guy who has a very popular, successful daily UI design. And eventually they say, you know what? Oh, I like that. He did a very clever thing. And since I didn't pitch my own immediately, they're seeing someone, someone else's, a third party. They think, oh, let's share this. Okay. You guys should do daily UI, or if you want to check out something, Do Daily Why, and then they put that in their list of resources. And then it's kind of this self-fulfilling prophecy where it keeps running. And then every quarter, a new cohort of students is passing in, they're seeing those same resources, they're checking out that exposure, and then it grows and grows. That's one way that's worked for me. Interesting. Yeah, a lot of— I don't see people post about that, but it definitely worked for me. So if you can do it and you can find those little niches, you got to go for it.

Yeah, I think that's the— that's, I feel, is like a personal experience. Like most things we see on Twitter threads, they're high level, right? Like very few people write insane amount of, you know, insane thread with high packed, high value packed, you know, nuggets, tips, content inside. But that to me, what you described is to me is more of like when you ask someone, hey, how did it work? That, that is one of those type of answers. Not, you can't put that in thread is what I'm saying. That's really hard.

It's harder to articulate that into a little thread. I could probably do it and show a demo of how it works. Yeah. But I think a lot of people would fail because they would just pitch theirs directly as a newsletter and say, hey, I have a newsletter about AI, stay up to date with the latest and greatest. There's no differentiation between these other 40 AI newsletters. So I didn't, never pitched it as a newsletter.

Right.

It's all about the challenge. That's another key is it's something else.

Yeah.

And then it can be viewed differently and then you can kind of rank for that.

I love that.

That's another, another little tip. Monetization is—

Monetization. Let's talk about monetization. How did you go from— yeah, the money.

That's a tricky thing because monetizing a newsletter, I think it's easy now because I'm kind of more at scale. But in the early days, it is hard because it takes the same time and effort to sponsor a newsletter with, you know, 20,000 subscribers as it does 200,000. It's the exact same. I'm just providing the content. All that's different is the price. And so if you worked in marketing and you could find deals, you'd probably be more likely to land on these bigger ones. You don't want to manage 10,000, 20,000 subscriber newsletters. It's way easier to just communicate on this one. So it is a challenge to break through that. I would list on marketplaces and I would suggest other people list on these marketplaces as well. Other brands that are sponsoring, they troll through those, they'll find you. Even if they don't book, that visibility is helpful. It's important. And you, you should always have something in your newsletter that says, you know, sponsor this or a link back to a specific page. That's one thing. And it's okay to offer free sponsorships for neat products or something just to have content and just to promote things. A lot of people don't want to give out that value because it's worth something, but it's kind of like a free sample.

And yeah, like the Costco free sample.

Yeah, they'll do that with new drinks. They'll walk around with a tray and say, hey, would you like a sample of this new latte or something? That happens all the time. You do that free sample and then now you have some proof. You have a portfolio of what a sponsored campaign can look like. You have some data on how it can perform and you can use that to optimize for the next.

Nice.

I also didn't try to monetize too soon. First of all, I was too scared. I didn't wanna alienate the audience, but doing it too soon makes it look like you're greedy or that this is just a profit-driven thing. And so I really wanted it to grow before I—

It's also you're earning trust with the audience.

Right. You're still in that community. You don't want to be the wolf in sheep's clothing. It's like I just walked into the chicken coop

and

I have a tail.

Oh man.

Yeah.

Just dropped one again.

Right. So also there are no rules on monetizing. So if If you see someone charging this rate, you could charge double, you could charge 10 times, or you could charge half. You can kind of do whatever you want and see what works. One thing I did is I offered repeat sponsors. So if you booked one and you booked another one, you got 15% off your second campaign. That does 2 things. One, it looks like you're getting something extra for nothing.

The bundling always works. Yeah.

Which is good for psychology. So if you buy one, you're gonna get a discount on your next one. That's, that just seems great. The other benefit for me is because newsletters have a compounding effect and they're growing month over month, you can actually charge more because the audience is bigger. So your next campaign actually might be more expensive. So even with the discount, you can make more money. And it's easy to rope them back in because I can write a follow-up email and say, oh, hey Dave, we booked a campaign 6 months ago. Just letting you know, I'm gonna be raising prices for October because the audience growth is at X. Yeah. If you guys wanted to slip in, just to—

There's a chance.

Get 15% off. So, and a lot of those people will reactivate and say, oh yeah, I kind of totally forgot about that. Sweet, I'll take that 15%. You know, where's the link? It's great. And I've had people literally do it over a dozen times where they've booked repeat campaigns over and over a long time. So that's one thing. So that's the key and good products too. If you're finding interesting things like you're trying to be on the cutting edge of your industry, what's new? What's exciting? Become a, become a user of those products. Suggest things, try it. I tried this app called playbook.com. It's kind of like Dropbox for designers. Hmm. And you can store all kinds of assets for AI, your own, you know, work from Figma, all kinds of things. It's amazing. It was kind of brand new a couple years ago. You try it, you comment and you say something interesting. Reach out to some founders or the core team, and then a couple months later they're a sponsor, you know what I mean? So stay embedded in your community, not just for users but for the sponsors too. Be active.

I think the other way, the other way, I think one thing it worked for me is really tap into your network, who you know. For me, it's like the podcast sponsor. Getting sponsors for the podcast is Bring someone on as a guest, really provide value to them during the conversation. And it's like, hey, now that we had a good rapport, do you want to sponsor one edition? And they're like, yeah, let's do it. Like, you know, so that's something that I, you know, that worked for me. I'm just adding on top of what you said.

Yeah, totally. And it's, it's a funny thing that once you build a relationship with a sponsor and you've really performed, they're gonna compare your metrics to another. So you can kind of tell what's probably not working for people, but after a while, you, you, it's like building this muscle where I feel like I know what campaigns can perform. I know the language and I know the look and the ones that are totally over-promotional and crazy. Yeah. Are just gonna get lost in the noise. And there's clever, smart things you can do that here's one that's just worked over and over for me for sponsored ads. You, You can build in some scarcity and say 50% off for the first 500 people. Now, if you have a small newsletter, you're probably not gonna get 500 clicks. You're not even gonna get 500 purchases, much less 500 clicks. But as it scales and it's big, there's an incentive to be early and to check it out immediately. Yeah. And that's so powerful. Um, I love that. You can offer those insights to other brands. So I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. I use a lot of apps. I could just offer some advice to yours and say, hey, this has worked for me. I've done this a bunch of times. You should try this. You should use this, um, use this tactic. That founder or that brand will say, that's, that's awesome. That's very clever. Um, We should jump on a call. Nice. Now I've just kind of dropped the bait and I've got someone on the line and you were offering that value first. So if your value first, I think you can win. That's one tip.

Yeah, so many. I think you've spilled so many secrets. So what's next, Derek? Like anything that exciting, any exciting projects you're working on that you want to like Give a sneak peek for our listeners.

Sure. So what I've been doing is mostly I've looked at— there's 2 ways to approach whatever product you want to work on. There's just whatever excites you or whether you see an opportunity in something that's kind of missing in the market. Or if you already have an audience, how can you supplement that? What can you upsell? What can you do? And so supplemented the design audience. With a remote job board that worked out well. That thing is kind of becoming self-sustaining. I'm rebuilding it, kind of making it much bigger and better. So the next one of remotejobs.com is really great.

Nice.

You notice little things along the way. I noticed nobody was paying for a freelance job. Not a single person would pay to post a freelance. I thought maybe, maybe people just don't want to because the value discrepancy is too big to where

Right.

You need a $2,000 logo, that's your budget. You don't want to pay a couple hundred dollars to promote it. So I'm coming out with a free job board just for freelancers. That's gigs.co. That's the upcoming newbie. And then I, after analyzing just hundreds of campaigns, you get a sense for what sells, what clicks, and you get some ideas. And so you kind of know what works. That's kind of the Amazon model. We have a marketplace, we see what sells, and then maybe they just kind of clone one of those products.

Yeah.

Or you think you can do it better. And so I'm coming out with a new little downloadable pack, basically templates for designers, the things that I think are missing that could be useful. And that's going to be called Pixel Kit, pixelkit.com. Nice.

Nice.

I like those types of domain names. I can't help myself. So that's another thing, another secret that's in the works. Nice. And then along the way, I acquired this other little product for freelancers to help you build, you know, it's just templates basically for contracts.

Oh.

And so I sell that as well. That's called notionpack.co.

Oh,

and I'm always on the hunt for these little things that I can feed in.

I can sense that.

But you get to ride on that momentum once you have 1 or 2 lead dogs that are pulling it. And so that's newsletter, job board, different, but there's a lot of overlap.

Perfect.

Yeah. Kind of the coming soon things. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll, we'll link all that. in the show notes. And man, this has been like a blast for— this should— this is a must-listen episode for newsletter writers for sure.

We could do a deep dive in the future, or, uh, yeah, you should have a paid episode where people like— we do a serious deep dive and I go over these are the exact sites that I tried to launch on, these are the ones that work

nice,

these are the rates that I charge, these are how I find those people. You should do a deep dive of that. That's a serious under the hood for the real enthusiasts. And you should charge, like unlock this. I would do that. I would pay $20 to unlock a really good episode.

Yeah, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. That's a good idea. Maybe you should do that. Maybe I'll bring you as a first guest.

You do that. You host, you charge for it. And yeah, I'll come on as an episode and Just an idea, because then you do build up this repertoire of experience where now I feel like I know how to pitch and position a job board. I feel like I know what's attractive about that marketplace and how to grow that, how to monetize that one as well. That would be helpful. A lot of people want to do the job board. How do you do

it? 1,000%.

1,000%. Yeah.

Any, any closing thoughts before we wrap up? Derek, it's been a blast already, but any last thoughts?

No, just, uh, regret being sick.

Oh man.

That's okay. Yeah, just I'm excited for new products. I'm excited for what's happening in tech and excited to keep discovering things like this.

Yeah.

Podcast, you know, I'm a listener. I never thought of myself as an underdog, but I actually think it does resonate, so I totally That's why I

invited. There you go. That's one of the reasons I invited.

We are underdog over here.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's it, folks. That's a wrap for today. I highly, highly am very excited to listen to your post comments because I think Derek gave away a lot of secrets. I'm very excited to see how you grow your newsletters as you listen to the episode and try to come up with new experiments. So

Sure.

Keep, keep doing, keep, keep shipping newsletter editions. And it's a grind. And I think you'll get, you'll get there.

And if anyone has a question to where they have a really technical question or a marketing question or anything that they want to see on a deep dive one, comment on, you know, the post when you release this, comment on that, ask that question, and we could address it in a future one or something.

Yes, there you go.

Get that out and open book over here.

Perfect. Let's do that. Let's— I think the deep dive is a very interesting segment we can, we can test out in the, in the future. Uh, Derek, thank you so much for joining. Appreciate you. And everybody listening, cheers. Keep going. Appreciate you guys.

Thanks so much, man. Good seeing you.