How Tiny Newsletters Are Out-Earning the Big Guys (How to Build Yours) | Ep. #165

These businesses are sitting on hundreds of thousands of emails. They're sitting on a gold mine. I think it's a huge opportunity.

That's like mid seven figure business just if you converted those emails to a daily newsletter.

The things that interest me the most right now, these operators who are building newsletters on the side, smaller capacity, yet are bringing in more revenue than newsletters 10x their size.

Where do you see local newsletters heading?

Every time I logged on Twitter or X There was like 10 new local newsletters like popping up, all having like crazy success. Like blew my mind. So very bullish on local newsletters.

What tips would you give people to start their first newsletter?

Yeah.

So, okay, if you've ever wanted to know how to better monetize your email list or how to better monetize someone else's email list if you don't have one for yourself, maybe you want to start a local newsletter from scratch or any newsletter for any topic from scratch. This is the podcast for you today with Tyler. We talked about local newsletters, interesting newsletter concepts, newsletter trends, how to grow a newsletter referral program, how to, how to start from scratch. Because most of you will be starting from scratch with a newsletter. How to use paid ads, how to use a referral program, co registration, yada yada yada, you're going to love it. Newsletters are super hot right now. They're going to be hot in 10 years. This isn't going anywhere. If you want to use Beehive. This is not a promotion. I was not paid to do this episode, but it would be appreciated if.

You used my affiliate link.

And you'll get 20% off for your first three months with my link only. And I'll get a little kickback as well. You'll find that in the show notes. Please share with a friend and enjoy. I'm just so fascinated at what you're seeing from the inside that seems to be really creative, unique, successful that people might be surprised about.

Yeah. The things that interest me the most right now are kind of like against what everyone looks at in the newsletter ecosystem. So everyone looks at like Morning Brew, Axios, the skim, the hustle, like Skale is what they went for. And scale is awesome. I think having a large distribution list and influence over that many people is like really interesting. But it's hard and it requires some money. It requires a lot of strategy. I think I'm really interested by these operators who are building newsletters kind of on the side or doing it in a smaller capacity. Call it 10, 15, 20,000 subscribers yet are bringing in more revenue than newsletters 10x their size. And so like niching down on a specific customer profile and niching down on the value and the ways that you can monetize an audience has been really interesting to see. And so to give you an example, I love Creator Spotlight. They're like, it's one of our newsletters that we send to 400,000 people and they feature creators of like all different sizes. And they featured one two weeks ago called Design Buddies. It's like a design community. I think there's maybe 10 to 15,000 people in this community. And rather than just doing paid subscriptions and advertisements, which they do advertisements, they do these design cohorts four times a year where like they already have like, you know, 15,000 people that are interested in design and they host these cohorts, call it like a two week cohort. And they make six figure revenue just from being able to tap into like events. And then they also do recruiting. Right? So all of the companies that exist who want amazing design talent, like you could do job boards, you can reach out on social, or you could just go to this newsletter community that has 15,000 designers that have already been vetted and they're like very high intent and charge a company like Whoever, you know, 20, $30,000 placement fee to find the designer for them. To me was like very interesting of thinking outside the box of how to leverage the audience that you have to extract revenue. He was curious how he can monetize this like 100,000 subscriber YouTube channel. And like me being, I'm like, oh, just do, there are some ads on it, maybe do some like brand new placements, like whatever. And someone consulted him to host like a surf school twice a year with like 50 people. It was like in person, in person, $5,000, like high ticket item. But he knows that he has an audience of 100,000 subscribers who are going to him to watch surf content. He started printing like 250, $500,000 a year off of just like hosting like these two surf events. So I actually think the content like top of funnel to like IRL event, like very high ticket. Especially because most people who follow content kind of like you, like they see your face, they hear your voice over and over again. Like you build that brand affinity and that trust over time. And so like I actually think it's easier to sell a high ticket item as like a trusted voice that people go to over and over again listening. So yeah, I don't know, I thought that Was like super smart. I felt like the design cohorts was like a really interesting, like newsletter to IRL event. I was like, that's really creative.

Well, one framework I like that that reminds me of is with any audience, like 1% of people. And this is just a totally made up number. Only 1% of people will buy your thing or click your ad or whatever, right? So on one hand it's like, all right, you got to pick that one thing. You got to pick the highest and best use of your audience. Maybe it's a $5,000 surf school, but on the other hand it's like, okay, if you find a hundred different things, then theoretically everyone in your audience will have need for something from you. Maybe 1% are clicking ads, 1% are going to a surf school, 1% are joining a paid community, 1% are attending your events, 1% are renting bathroom for their wedding. You know, like 100 different ways to monetize and then some.

Or if you like really know, have like a stranglehold on exactly who your audience is. Ideally it's 100% are interested in anything that you're kind of interested in. There is like a laundry list of things. But like, maybe it starts as a surf school, but then it's like going vertical like selling surfboards, and then it's like, you know, other types of content. It all starts with having an audience. And I think you just have to be savvy. And once you have the audience, there's so many different things to do.

I mean, if we're just going to use paid ads to acquire 10 to 15,000 targeted subs. Now these are like designers. It's not just like Facebook, but what are we talking, like 2 to $3 a subscriber, conservatively, to find those subscribers.

When I was at Morning Brew, I ran a lot of the paid acquisition and I think it was much cheaper then if done well, you could probably get a subscriber for 50 cents to like a dollar fifty.

I think you still can today. I'm just thinking of like designers specifically.

Yeah, I mean, you can acquire probably someone who's loosely interested in design, located in the US for call it 2 to $4 an email.

So 40 to $50,000 to stand up a list that big. And we're just looking at a spreadsheet. There's a lot more to it. You've got to know how to write, you've got to have a good personality, they've got to be engaging emails. You've got to have some skills. But 40 to $50,000 to stand up a business doing six figures a year through four events a year and placement fees of 20 to $50,000 or you know, 10 to 30% of first year salary. Right.

I mean, I'd even go one step further and say you don't even need the 40, $50,000 to stand it up.

So here's how this works. I make you free videos. I actually know what I'm talking about. I have no greasy sales pitch at the end. And if you implement what I talk about, you'll make a lot more money and have a better life. And all I ask for in return is that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell. Just like that. Thank you.

Typically, if you are going, let's use the design example. If you're going to create this community around designers, you're probably a designer yourself or already embedded into that community. I think that's actually where most people fail is when they try to take on something because they see an opportunity. They're not an expert in that space nor do they like have any business.

Like operating right or passion for the space.

Yeah, like I should not me personally, Tyler Dank should not create a design community. I love design. I nur down design all the time. That's not like. But that's not me, right? Like that's not the communities that I spend time in. So if you already have like this design cohort, whether it's friends, coworkers, whatever, get them to subscribe to the newsletter for free. So you have a base of like 50 to 75 if you provide value. And it all starts with value, right? It's creating content or providing value that makes them want to stick around. A lot of people think you can have the morning brew referral program and all of these different like growth tactics that we promote on Beehive. And just by growth hacking your way to scale that you're going to make it successful. And I think a lot of people find out the hard way that that doesn't work. Let's say you have good content. You have your base of 50 to 75 people that you know from like your community. If it's good content, it's very easy to share. And like you can ask them like, hey, can you share with like one person from like your design courses or like your prior job or whatever, quickly it multiplies. 150, 200. And then fortunately like leveraging some of the tools that we've built. So Boost is one of them. Boost is best basically just co Registration. And so if I. So for example, I recommend three other newsletters on Beehive. They each pay me $2 for every subscriber that I send them. So if I'm spending $2 to acquire an email on Facebook or Instagram, they come in through my flow and they subscribe to one of those three newsletters, I'm break even right off the bat. I paid $2 to acquire the subscriber. They're now on my list forever until they unsubscribe and I got paid back $2 immediately. If they subscribe to two of those emails, I'm in the black. $2. It's like I made money through growing. And if you can do that sustainably, then you put in $1,000 into this growth strategy. And if you get $2,000 out now, you have a surplus to pour that back into growth. And I think that's what a lot of these newsletters have found out, that you can create this growth flywheel where you pay to acquire subscribers, but you make more money on the back end, whether it's from Boost or ads or paid subscriptions. And once you're in the black, you just keep reinvesting it and very quickly you can get to 10, 15,000 subscribers.

I kick myself to this day for waiting so long to Boost to do co registration because I had this limiting mindset of like, I don't want to compete, I don't want to give my competitors all these subscribers. Then they're going to be distracted. Instead of getting one email from me, they're going to get three. And so we were talking about segments before I hit record. I started a segment from before and after the time I boosted and I noticed no increase in like open rate or click through rate. Like, it just, it just grew the pie. I just started getting free money essentially. Right. And it offsets your paid acquisition cost. Or if they're organic subscribers, then you're. It's just a net profit.

And Boost really came out of my experience at Morning Brew realizing that I was spending $600,000 a month acquiring subscribers from Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, like anything anywhere we could spend money we were testing. Does that turn into acquiring subscribers at a reasonable cost? And are they quality subscribers? That's the other classic mistake that I think a lot of growth marketers and definitely, like, if you're a newsletter operator who doesn't come from a growth background, you can look at a very shitty acquisition source online that maybe gets you subscribers for 10 cents. And then you do Facebook and it's $2.50. And so you'd say like, oh, well, it's obvious to invest in the 10 cent one because it's, you know, considerably cheaper than I'm trying to avoid doing math. That's why I should have chosen easier numbers. But yeah, it's considerably cheaper. Right? But what you don't realize is if the subscribers you acquired for 10 cents, they open 1 in 20 emails, but the subscribers from Facebook open 1 in 2 emails, then you're actually, you have to normalize it and get like the more active subscriber. And that was something that took me like six months to learn at Morning Brew that not all subscribers were created equal and the actual acquisition cost is really just the top of the funnel. You need to normalize it for opens.

I created a segment, I ran Facebook ads for a month, like religiously, and I tracked everything in segments and UTM parameters. And then I created a segment for the same time period of all the organic subscribers I got. And that's been like three months now. And I've gone back and looked at that segment every week or two and my paid subscribers actually open and click more than my organic ones, which is beautiful. Like that's perfect because I can, I can control that lever and I can dial up or down the ad spend as I want. That's why I mentioned like, you know, stand up a newsletter for 50 grand just because it's nice to be able to know that like, you know, can kind of find cheat codes or shortcuts where like really the long term sustainable thing, like you said, is to have something you're passionate about, something you're knowledgeable about, lead with value and then kind of figure out the monetization, leverage later or paid ads later.

Yeah, I actually remember what I was going to say now, but, but what I was going to say was I, I started off by saying how we were spending 5, $600,000 a month on paid acquisition and that we normalized or whatever. But then after like testing Facebook, Instagram, whatever, whatever, you realize that the subscribers who are the most engaged were just subscribers from other email newsletters. Which makes perfect sense, right? If someone is opening their habit, is actively opening their email and they're already subscribed to other newsletters and they're going to click on a link in another newsletter to subscribe to an additional newsletter, then like, those are your people, right? And so we started advertising in like the points guy and all of these different newsletters and that was always our highest quality acquisition source. So when we Built Beehive. We always knew from day one that we're going to build some sort of network effect of how do you promote and grow the via other newsletters in the ecosystem, knowing that those were the highest quality readers. And so long story short, that's how the recommendations and boost feature came to be.

I think that's just a great framework for business. Like, if you want to grow a podcast, the best way to do it is, is to appear on other podcasts. Because you're appearing in front of people that already have a podcast in their daily habits, there's much less friction. You're not going to convince someone to start listening to podcasts with your podcast. I think the principle applies in newsletters or really anything. You just remove the friction.

I'd also say the principle of being open minded and testing absolutely everything is the best way to grow and like experiment, right? So I think going in the low hanging fruit is, hey, I have $1,000 to spend on acquisition. I'm just going to use Twitter and Google because that's what I know best. At Morning Brew, we sponsored the New York City WI Fi in subway stations and it worked terribly. But like we were, we had the mechanisms to be able to track and we were able to say yes to any sort of acquisition source, knowing that on the back end we'd be able to track how quality it was and if it was good, we double down. But you never know what you're missing out on. And there's so many different ways to acquire readers or customers regardless of what your business is. So yeah, I think being open to experimentation is extremely important.

I probably say that once a month on this podcast, test everything except drugs. I completely agree. Like right now I have a billboard in Tomball, Texas for my podcast. There's no QR code, there's no domain name, it's not a thing. People don't do it. But I gotta know, I have to know. And I found, you know, workarounds to track it. But like testing a different marketing concept with a different industry, like cross testing, all those things is just like my crack. I just love it so much.

We tested the back of Ubers where they have the little like iPad screen that you can like play the different games on if you like. I forgot the name of the company, but it'll like shuffle through like games and like news or whatever and like every, every five slides you would see a Morning Brew ad. And like we tried that and it actually worked pretty well. I think that being open to experimentation, there's Like, a lot of alpha there. And then the other classic thing for anyone who's done like brand or not a brand marketing, but like performance marketing is like as soon as they launch a new channel and there is less competition, it's a gold mine if you're early to adopt. So Facebook launched Facebook Stories. And no one, even I, like, I've never used a Facebook story. And like the normal person, I don't know what normal is considered, but most people be like, hey, I don't even use Facebook, or I don't use Facebook stories. I don't think that's going to be successful. But if everyone thinks that, there's no competition. So if you're the first one to adopt Facebook stories, then your CPMs are so low that you get crazy high conversion. There's no competition, you're not paying a ton of money. And I think we printed subscribers for like 30, 40 cents for a month or two before more brands adopted that. So being early to a platform works really well.

Yeah, it's funny you say that. This is kind of a random side note, but I had lunch with this guy who manages multiple Instagram accounts of million millions of followers. And when Instagram stories first came out, he learned that if he pushed like a paid Instagram story to an account just to get more subscribers, he could acquire subscribers for like 3 to 6 cents. Not subscribers, Instagram followers. He would push a story with an affiliate link and that story would earn on average like 20 to 30 cents per subscriber. And he was one of the biggest spenders of Instagram story ads in the world. So much that Meta was reaching out and saying, like, why are you spending so much on Instagram stories? Like, what are you doing? And it, you know, the window closed. It always does. But while it was open, he just. He just printed money.

Yeah, there's. There's opportunity everywhere, right?

Yeah, but you got to be testing. So 99% of people listening to this have no newsletter. And I would say most of them are, are like newsletter curious. Because 30% of this podcast are business owners. 70% are aspiring business owners. So we kind of started talking about that 10 minutes ago. How to start your first newsletter. Get your first 50, 75 friends. Have them share it. What other tips would you give people to start their first newsletter?

When you ask, like, what do I see that is interesting in the newsletter space right now? The one. My initial answer was people who have figured out a way to monetize a smaller audience but have outside upside in terms of outsized upside. In terms of like the revenue that they can extract from that audience. The other thing that I think is really interesting is the way that business, like certain businesses have adopted email newsletters and like a content forward strategy for growth and the way that I describe that as like Brex for example. The, the business credit card for startups has a community newsletter on Beehive that promotes the different community events that they host in New York, Louisiana, San Francisco. But what it is not, which I think a lot of business owners can't wrap their head around is it's not, hey, we have credit cards. Here's an amazing deal. Click here to sign up and open up an account with us. I think the way that most business owners think about email is here's a list of 100,000 either existing customers, past customers, past orders, whatever it is. This database of 100,000 emails and we sell T shirts. And today we're going to do a 5% offer, 10% off. And I'm going to send an email to all 100,000 people about this 10% off promotion with the hope that 2000 people click another 500 purchase t shirt or 2. And by hitting send I just made $10,000 in sales.

So video is cool. But you know what's better? Long form audio via podcast and my newsletter tkopod.com go there to subscribe for free to my newsletter. It's one email a week, very tactical. And then go to my audio podcast, three episodes a week, stuff like this, you're gonna love it. All free, no sleazy sales pitch. Tkopod.com and so I think that's like.

Traditional e commerce and that works right? Like I think like the, the old adage for e commerce is like the easiest way to make money is just send another email because if you're sending to a large enough amount of people you will get conversions. What I think the savvier brands are doing now is building a full content strategy where there's a bit more of a long tail and the goal isn't for conversion today. It is nurturing these customers and these leads to think higher about, think more highly about you as the brand, the value that you provide and more just like general likeness. And so we do that at Behive. I'd even say like my personal newsletter, Big Desk Energy in a way is that like we, we send tons of emails as a business that is not about signing up or upgrading to our account. It is, we know who our target audience is whether it's publishers, content creators, small businesses, whatever. Let's create content that they would find valuable. Irregardless of it. It has nothing to do with beehive. We just think it's valuable to them and it's coming from our house account or me. And by doing that, they look forward and they build this habit of opening our emails. They trust us as like a thought leader in this email content creation space. And when it does come time for a purchase decision against us, who has been providing them constant content, constant value and educating them and helping them in whatever way we can via content. And this other brand that they've either never seen, never received content for or, or every time that they engage with them, it's just like a hard sale. It's easier to have more allegiance to the brand that's provided you more value. So it's like a, it's pausing like the, the instant gratification of like needing sales today with like, let's nurture these customers through content that they'd find valuable. And I think that I've seen that through a handful of brands and it works extremely well.

It's kind of like SEO. Like SEO works so well because so few people focus on it because they don't, they don't focus on it because it takes months to pay off. Right. And what you're describing to me is like brand building. I picture like YETI and Red Bull doing this perfectly. Like I'll go to YouTube and watch Yeti videos about saltwater fishing and they don't mention Yeti once. I can just see the cooler in the background. But I kind of like YETI now because I like that video and Red Bull's the same way. And both of those companies have amazing high trust, high net promoter score brands primarily driven by this content that they put out. And so what you're saying is like, it's almost like taking a transactional business and saying, hey, we're now kind of like an influencer. Like we're, we're almost like an individual influencer that has high affinity and high trust with an audience. We're taking a long term approach. We're never going to be able to attribute these dollars to these dollars, these dollars going out to these dollars coming in. But we just believe and trust that it's going to do good things for us and we're going to play the long game.

Right? Yeah. I mean, I'd even say it's not mutually exclusive. Right. Like you can play the long game and nurture these customers and provide value while also sending a once a week, like more direct Transactional email of, like, here's a new product. Here's the sale we're doing. Here's something that you should buy. But I think. So the reason I brought that up to answer your question is you said that 30% of your audience is, like, business owners. And I'd be curious how many of those 30% actually have, like, a content strategy beyond just aggressively posting and promoting their products, their promotions, versus how many think of content from, like, a first principle of, like, if we serve, if we sell outdoor gear, like, what. What is content? That is it the top trails in America. And like, every week we do, we share different trails, different hiking, different campground reviews of different types of whatever it is. Like, I think there's like a whole content strategy that can be deployed for nearly any business. And it doesn't take that much thought. I think it takes like a brainstorming session for, like, 30 minutes to kind of figure out, like, what would your customers actually want more of and if you can be a leader in that space. I mean, we do it for Creator Spotlight. Creator Spotlight started as when we were just starting off, we had so few users, and we were, like, trying to educate other people of, like, why they should use the platform and also, like, uplift those users that are having success on our platform by putting them in a Spotlight. So I would choose a user, like, more or less at random. Every week we would do a whole, like, write up on them and we'd send it to all of our customers being like, look at this user who's having success. They're using these five features. They're making this much revenue. This is how quickly that they're growing. And it was valuable to the rest of our customers because they could see and get inspiration from this other user who is having success on the platform. And now it's just its own vertical of the business. We don't even promote Beehive at all. We've even gone beyond choosing Beehive customers as the people that we promote. We promote YouTubers, influencers, content creators, publishers. Like I said, the design person that I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast for the sole purpose of we know that our customers want to get inspiration and learn from other people in the space who are having success. And where I used to think the only way to monetize an email was with ads or paid subscriptions, in reading Creator Spotlight, I found 20 other ways that these creators and publishers are finding ways to extract revenue from their audience. So it's helped me even think about the landscape. And so that's just another way of like using content as a way to nurture leads and eventually drive sales.

Where do you see local newsletters heading? Do you, do you think that's a big opportunity?

I'm not going to say we went all in on it, but we hosted this day long webinar about a month ago and then we also launched the local newsletter accelerator program at Beyve. So I think applications are still open depending on when this goes live. That's like a natural trend that we saw where I'd say December, January of this year, every time I logged on Twitter or X, There was like 10 new local newsletters like popping up like in my face who are all having like crazy success. They're like just partnered with five local brands, already sold out all of the inventory for Q1 or went from 100 of my friends signing up to like 5,000 people in the community in like a quarter. And it blew my mind the, the success that a lot of these local newsletters were having. So long term, to answer your question, very bullish on local newsletters and I think it makes perfect sense. I'm subscribed to probably two or three different newsletters in Los Angeles that are just like top restaurants that this person has tried recently, different events that are happening this week. It's just like a guide of like what's happening in the community. I think there's a lot of different flavors of local newsletter. For me it's more consumer in terms of like restaurants and events. So it's like activity based and experiences. Others are more like news related of what's happening in local politics, what, what's going on in like the community. Are there any, I don't know, other other things that are going on but like hyper focus on a specific geographical location and then I think the business opportunity there is. Every community has tons of small businesses that are looking for customers. And the hardest part about monetizing like a very large newsletter is as great as email is. It is difficult to understand exactly who these people are. And you can do surveys, you can try to hydrate the data and be like I just grew this many emails and they are you know, opening from the northeast of the United States. But like you have to work really hard to understand and like Beehive's building a lot of things to help make this easier. But to understand like what are their true interest? Is it a 25 year old female who lives in the Northeast or are they a 50 year old male who lives on the west coast and you can't really get that from the email itself. And so it's harder to be able to figure out, like if you are going to monetize with ads, who's the right advertiser to serve this audience. Whereas if you are building a newsletter for Annapolis, Maryland, then the only people who are most likely to subscribe to that newsletter are people who live in Annapolis or near Annapolis, which means any small business in Annapolis would be interested in sponsoring this newsletter because they know they're getting in front of 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 local residents who could be a customer. And so it makes the monetization angle great. Also think like it probably feels pretty good to support small local businesses. So I think a lot of them are having a ton of success.

Well, and then I think one of the big asymmetric bets is you can acquire subscribers for local newsletters at like half or a third of the cost of a any other newsletter. Like if I go look for business subscribers on Facebook ads, I'm going to spend about A$50. But if I go look for Plano, Texas residents for my Plano Texas newsletter, it's going to be about 50 cents. But then conversely, the CPMs, the amount of money I can charge for those ads is like twice because it's so targeted. So your cost to acquire is a third or half of what another newsletter would be. And the amount you can charge per viewer is significantly more. And then like if you look at oversaturation, it's not going to happen. There's 100,000 cities in America. There's hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods. Like there are neighborhoods with 20,000 people in them. You can get even more hyperlocal than just a city. And with Ryan a Naptown scoop in Annapolis, he's got more subscribers than people live in Annapolis because you have people that like used to live there or tangential to it. And then he launched a business freaking renting out bathrooms vertically integrated, you know, like, who would have thought? So I think 10 years from now, local newsletters are going to be a big opportunity.

Yeah, I mean even so now like my growth gears are turning a bit in terms of like how all the growth hacks you could do to try to scale in like a single geographical location. You could do direct mail. I would like. It's so first of all, I'm a huge fan of direct mail. We haven't had an amazing use case for using an FBI yet, but like the physical direct mail I think works super well. And like a hyper for us, it's like, where would you even send that for Beehive because. And then we could choose different locales, right? But if you have an Annapolis newsletter, it might cost $5,000 to send like a highly targeted postcard for your Annapolis newsletter to every household within like these five zip codes. Right. You could also go to five of the most popular pizza places, give them like a bunch of cards to hand out and be like, if you can get people to sign up for my new, like, your customers come in and if you can give them this, I'll add you to the newsletter at the bottom of like, here's the top pizza places and like, just do like affiliate deals where like you're actually not even taking in revenue, but you're using it for customer acquisition. I don't know the fact that I could drive to any local establishment and find a way or a partnership for them to help me grow. So as they grow their business and bring in more and more customers, they can also drive new subscribers to me. I think that's super interesting. I think local news is like a massive thing and there's probably a broader shift in terms of lack of trust in the larger media companies and even in local news. I just think the established media is going through a period where there's a lot of distrust from the general public. And I don't know if trusting someone a newsletter on the Internet that you met for the first time is more trust, but seemingly it does seem that way. I think there's a ton of opportunity there.

What other newsletter trends are you seeing that people should be looking out for? Whether it's like the type of newsletter or how people grow their newsletter or is it weekly or daily the length of the newsletter, like what are kind of some best practices that you have in mind?

Yeah, I'm seeing more like design forward emails, which I've been saying forever, in the sense that most emails look terrible. Like no one puts time into making them look good. I think there's like real alpha and like spending the hour or two to have your newsletter template totally jump out of the inbox and be something that people actually remember. Weekly versus daily versus monthly. Kind of depends on like who you're serving, like what the value prop is and the different content you're creating. So it's like hard to see like a ton of different trends around that about length depends.

Right?

Again to like your value prop. So if your value prop is I'm going to distribute information and as bite sized as possible because it is utility for the readers and like maybe shorter is better we're seeing like a lot of independent journalists leave traditional media, launch newsletters on beehive and like do like investigative journalism. I think is really interesting. It's like full scoops, like New York Times, but longer type newsletters that are just like deep dives on like any given topic. I think creativity is like all over the place in the newsletter spot. So there's like newsletters that use images and gifs to like tell a story. I'm blanking on the name and now I feel bad because I, I would have loved to give them a shout out, but it's every day they explain a different topic all through images. And so it's a cartoon draw of images to tell a story and educate someone on like how something works in the world. Email is like pretty flexible, right? It could be, it could be a short, it could be alerts like real time news happening. It could be deep dives, it could be cartoons, it could be super well designed or plain text. Like there's a lot of different things you can do with it. The biggest trend that I've seen is, is local. Outside of that, I think like everyone's going in every which direction in terms of like cadence, length, acquisition strategies.

Have you ever seen someone take like a corporate email list? Like, I'll just use one of my companies as an example. Texas Snacks. We sell Texas Snacks and it's a Shopify store. We have about 150,000 emails and we're just doing the basic, we're just sending out deals and promotions and yada yada. Is there a world where you could take that and convert it into like a daily newsletter with a tangential topic like, you know, trends happening in the south or in Texas or Texas food recipes or whatever, and treat that as a separate business entirely and literally, like, you could put your own ads in there, you could sell sponsorships in there. Because I look at newsletters and you might cringe at this. But like, I'll take the amount of subscribers, cut it in half and say, if this is a daily newsletter, if I have 100,000 subscribers, I can make $50,000 a month, top line. I like a good CPM, like in a business niche. So if I look at, you know, my Texas snacks list, it's like 150,000 subscribers at a decent CPM, that could be $60,000 a month business as a standalone. In addition to the promotional emails we're sending, is there a world where that could be another business? Or you could build an agency going into companies and saying, hey, give Me, your email list. I'm going to turn this into a new revenue line for you guys.

Yeah, I mean, what you just said sounds super smart, right? Like, I think that's like what every company should be doing is like looking at their assets in terms of what they view an asset now is like an email list or database of emails that they send the promotions and whatever else to. So, like, can we actually build media around this? If you're asking me if do I think there's a business of like, I think there's a huge opportunity for agencies or even an individual. Right. You're a high agency individual who either loves writing, has a network of writers, or knows how to use AI tools in a way that actually makes good content. On the other side of it, then to be able to go to a business that, you know, has a large database of emails and say, like, I can create a net new revenue stream for you that also has like, it'll bring in money day one, because we can monetize with ads or we could do affiliates. So like, it's a, it's net new revenue off the bat, but also should improve the NPS and you know, just like the goodwill of your core business in parallel. So kind of like what we discussed earlier, I think there's a huge opportunity for, for someone to do that.

I see it as like two different strategies. You can go the yeti route and just say, we're not going to put ads in this. This is just our content strategy. We're playing the long game. And then you could say, we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want to play the long game, but we also want to directly attribute this new revenue. I don't see a lot of people doing that, but I think that could be an interesting opportunity.

And some of these businesses have massive databases of emails, right? So there's so many of these, like smaller newsletter operators who are scrapping by to get like 10 new subscribers a day and like thrilled at the fact that they grew by 100 subscribers in a week. Where these businesses are sitting on hundreds of thousands of emails that, you know, they've been in business for, call it a decade. And every customer that's ever checked out on their website, they save their email and they like, will remarket here and there, but they're sitting on a gold mine. Yeah, I think, I think it's a huge opportunity.

This is fresh on my mind. I had a zoom a couple hours ago with a guy that's buying a company out of bankruptcy. They have A million. Not emails, but a million active emails. And he's buying the company for like a half a million dollars. And they sell physical goods. You're gonna do an e commerce play and all that. I had this conversation with him. I'm like, dude, that's, that's like a mid seven figure business. Just if you converted those emails to a daily newsletter, you'd have to sell the ads. In my experience, that's the hardest part is just filling the ad space, assuming you were doing a traditional monetization route. But he hadn't even thought of that. He's like, oh man, I could monetize the emails. I thought I was just gonna send promotions to them, but I think there's something there.

I think I might have to look at all these bankruptcy filings and see if there's any alpha there. Maybe there's some huge companies with very asset light. So low cost bankruptcy. And I just want the email list.

Yeah, that could be really interesting. Last question. This one's kind of selfish. I want to know personally, what is the 8020 of just a killer referral program? Because from what I understand the Milk Road crush it on referrals, but they seem kind of like an outlier to me. It's referral programs hard, I'm guessing, like just got to have a ton of value. Like whatever you give away for free for one or five, it just has to be really, really good. Is there more to it than that?

So from the Morning Brew experience, what we leaned into is like pure fandom. Like Morning Brew built like this cult following of people who like built it into their routine and their habit to wake up every morning and read the newsletter. And we had the mug logo, we had the conversational tone. It was super relatable. You read it and felt like you were receiving news from like best friend. And through that entire like brand building exercise, when we created a more complex referral program so there was like seven rewards call it, it was like a mug, a T shirt, a hat, a backpack, additional content. Like people were bought in because of the fandom. So that's like one thing that's like again going back to like brand building and playing like a long, long term game. Like we leaned into that. Milk Road's a great example. And I actually do think that is the 8020 rule is like far too often people either looked at the Morning Brew example or get way too greedy and thinking like, oh, if I can get my own readers just to refer more readers then like I should incentivize them to get like 10 people. And so you have like this big Reward at like 5 referrals or 10 referrals. Most people aren't going to do that. And we even saw that at Morning Brew. But one referral is so easy because the barrier is so low that you can copy a link and send it to your best friend or your mom or the person sitting next to you, and you get that instant gratification of like, whatever reward is that one referral. So what Milk Road did was Milk Road covers crypto news. They spoke to 15 crypto experts. They wrote like a one page. They spent a day and wrote like a really great one pager saying, if you refer just one person, we'll give you the advice or the projections of what's going to happen in the crypto market, according to these 15 experts. And the barrier of entry was so low at just one referral. And like, the other kicker is it was totally free. They spent a day creating that asset. But they're not going to like USPS and like shipping stickers. And every Friday they're just. They set it up on Beehive, it's fully automated, and as soon as someone got their first referral, it sent an email and like, that was it. So it took time in creating the asset, but $0 after that and the barriers were so low, they just needed people to share one referral. So I kind of think that is the 8020 rule. It's like, what is enticing enough to incentivize someone to share with just one person? And if you can do that, like, that's the hardest part is 0 to 1, 1 to 2, 1 to 5, whatever is easier because they've already done the behavior and you can continue to push them further.

Yeah. And all of that is amplified if you. If it's just a freaking great newsletter and they feel proud referring it and their fans and like the Morning Brew. Right? Like, they just felt bought into it.

It's all quality. Right? Like, I could sit here for an hour and give all of the growth tactics that we used at Morning Brew or that I use for my newsletter or what I've seen on the platform. You can't growth hack your way into success there. It has to come from, like, the nucleus actually being quality. And so that's where I'd recommend people spend the most of their time.

Okay, well, Tyler, this was perfect. We know where to find your company. I'll have links everywhere, but where can we find you?

I'll plug the newsletter. The newsletter is my number my number one thing that I'm focused on right now. So mail.bigdesk energy.com. maybe drop that in the description below. But it's a weekly newsletter for anyone who's interested in startups, entrepreneurship. It's really just me sharing the journey of building the company. A lot of transparent insights.

It's a great newsletter. I'm a subscriber myself. And what about your Spotify playlist, man? I mean, come on, you got a Spotify playlist?

I assume once they get into the funnel they'll see the Spotify playlist. But yes, it is Big Desk. I got it up in front of me as I do at all times of the day. But yes, Big Desk Energy is also a Spotify playlist with the best music to help you focus.

But you're not making much money off that one though.

I'm the only person dumb enough to build a newsletter off of a Spotify playlist, which I don't make money off of, but that's what makes me unique, I guess.

Hey, Naptown Scoop built a, you know, bathroom rental business off their newsletter. So there are no rules.

I didn't ask you about that, but I was going to be like, what the hell? This is the first I've heard of that.

Did you not know that?

Yeah, no. Can you share more? What does that mean?

I tweeted about luxury bathroom rental as a business. Like two years ago. It got a million views. He read it and he's like, that's amazing. I think that would work. I think I could find events and people to rent these out through my newsletter. And so he hopped on my podcast and we talked about it publicly. And then he bought a $20,000 like, trailer bathroom and started renting it out at weddings. And he got almost all of his bookings from his newsletter. Like, of all things, that's. He wouldn't have had a successful real world, physical, sweaty startup if it weren't for his newsletter.

All right, this is the first I've heard of that, but yeah, I've never. Of. Of all of the interesting ways that I've seen people parlay a newsletter into something. The newsletter to Bathroom Rental is brand new to me and really awesome.

It's quite the pivot.

Oh, yeah. Well, thanks for having me.

Yeah, man, thank you. All right, don't forget to come back for my episode all about local newsletters and luxury trailer bathroom event rental business. And don't forget to use my Beehive affiliate link for a discount in the show notes. Thanks again. And we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.