Andrew Warner shares a five-step process for launching profitable products, drawing on 2,000+ interviews and his own wins (a newsletter that made $277k in two months) and losses (a $300k flop). He walks through how Emmett Shear narrowed Justin.tv into Twitch, a $970 million exit, and shows how to use customer conversations and rapid testing to validate before you build.
Chapters
We are going to learn today how to build profitable products. I mean, really build a product that your customers will tell you is profitable before you ever start. And I know that this will work because it's worked for me. It's worked for others, as you'll see here today. Just for background, this is the first site that I ever created. Look at that thing, a thing of beauty. At least it used to be. This is an old site that I created where anyone can come in, tell me what their email address is, what their interest is. And I will send them a daily email about, you know, trivia a day, quote a day that inspires them, a joke a day, whatever it is that they're into. We sent it to them and we had over 20 million people join those email newsletters. It was a phenomenal success. I followed it up with the world's first billion-dollar jackpot. I was so excited. I told my mom to watch me. I was on Good Morning America. I wore my suit because back then I thought that if you want to be taken seriously in business, you need a suit.
And the business frankly did well.
We were able to sell the business. I was able to take time off and just say, all right, I'm done. I don't think I ever wanna do anything like this again because business is tough. There's a lot of figuring it out in business. There's a lot of, I don't know, in business, but I couldn't help myself. I came back. I said, you know what? The world needs better events. Better events mean better invitation site. And so I launched this. It was called Mixergy. It enabled people to create mixers with energy. And I also like the synergy word so that you can get to know people before the event and something good will come up. If that doesn't look beautiful to you, I have to say it, it wasn't even beautiful at the time. And for that design reason and for other reasons, it failed. And I lost over $300,000 building that thing. And what, when you see the number, you think is, oh, you lost a lot of money. I think the bigger loss is the loss of confidence, the loss of trust. I felt like I lost face with people because I, I'd said this thing was what I was building. I said it was going to be successful.
And it just, Failed. And I, I just wasn't sure how to regain my confidence. And also I wanted to be smarter. I didn't want to keep making the same mistake over and over again. I said, what did I do right in the first business?
What did, what did, what did I get wrong? I want to understand how successful businesses work in general. And so I started doing interviews. I don't know if any of you had heard my interviews, but I'd interviewed over 2,000 entrepreneurs, including the founders of Dropbox, of Airbnb, Pixar, LinkedIn, ChatGPT, OpenAI's founder, did an interview with me. And Reddit, Nicola is asking, was it similar to meetup.com? In some ways it was, but I wanted it to be individual events. But yes, it did have a lot of similarity to Meetup. Whoever's on that iPhone says that they did Mixergy from those days. Glad to hear that. Very few people used the invitation site back in those days. Anyway, I did over 2,000 interviews and this is the one that stuck with me for so long and helped me change the way that I think about business. Emmett Shear. Hey, EJ, glad you're back. Emmett Shear founded a website that became Twitch. And a lot of people in the Y Combinator community told me, go talk to him because he'll show you how to build a successful company. And so when I did, I learned something. I sat down with him and I learned that he had a process for taking a site that basically didn't do well and turning it into one that was a phenomenal success into Twitch, one that he was able to sell for $970 million. EJ, are you on Twitch at all?
I've never been a Twitch person. I'm not a big, I'm not big on YouTube or Twitch personally. I feel like I'm the only guy who's not.
What's your video addiction?
Usually like HBO, honestly, like traditional, a little old school. You know, it's, yeah, I never got into the YouTube phase. Maybe I'm 32. I just turned 32 yesterday. So maybe a little on the older side of things for YouTube. Although when I was in middle school, high school, like YouTube was popping off and it's like been really interesting to see that resurgence in like the ways it's really one of the older platforms out there, and it's been really cool to see how it's evolved over time.
Which for live got really, really phenomenally successful.
It took over all of live gaming, and the way that he did it was, and by the way, I use the same process that he did on a Beehive newsletter that we created. Within 2 months, we did $277,000 in revenue. That's our Stripe dashboard to give you all a sense of what it looks like. And this is the newsletter. Basically, it's my partner Jesse talking about how he's building businesses and what he's learning along the way and teaching it to other entrepreneurs. The product that we created is a course where people paid to learn sales the way that he teaches the salespeople at his company. Here's the process that we took that I learned from Emmett. It's a 5-step process. Super simple, but also super simple to get wrong. The first step is you want to find your niche. For Emmett, this is what he started with. EJ, I don't know, have you seen this website ever? Justin.tv?
You did?
Well, I'm aware of it insofar as like it's related to Twitch. This was the original Twitch, right? This was Twitch. Yeah, I was never on this, but I mean, I'm familiar with it as like the lore of like You know, what turned into Twitch?
It failed. It did kind of, in some ways you could say it did okay, but it failed because of this. If you look at the top of the site, they did everything. They were there for you if you wanted to do entertainment, if you wanted to do gaming, if you wanted to do news, if you wanted to do buff, if you wanted to do big, everything, you were able to do it and go live. And that was a problem. What he decided was, look, we can't be great for all these people. Someone who's doing gaming needs one thing. Someone who's doing interviews, for me, I was doing live interviews. Couldn't figure out how to get 2 people on there live at the same time without a big, big mess. You're from Brooklyn, so I'll say without a big mishigas, a lot of craziness. So he decided he was gonna focus on this, on gaming. And by focusing on gaming, he was able to really narrow down on a right group of people. And he did it because he said, look, the world is having more people play video games than playing soccer in the backyard or throwing a football around. So they're gonna wanna watch more gamers like them than they're gonna wanna watch football people like, You know, their grandparents, I guess. For us, this is what we did. We started asking people as soon as they signed up for our newsletter, why did you, uh, not why did you sign up, but tell us about yourself.
Just a simple survey, super simple.
And this is why, by the way, we moved to Beehive, Vijay, your company, because no other platform that we used, and we went through, I think, 5 different platforms, such a pain in the neck to move email providers. We moved and actually thankfully Beehive did it, did it for us largely because of your tools, but it's a, it's not something that you want to do. And we intentionally said, we're going to make the move because I needed to know who my audience was.
Without that, how do you know what to sell to them?
And so Beehive is the platform that we use. We highly recommend it. AJ's with Beehive, but whatever I'm showing you will work, whether you're using email as your business or something else. This is the process. And by the way, the reason that I like Beehive, it's not just that you can ask people questions after they sign up.
Look at that freaking, look at that, look at that conversion rate. 99% of people who we put that form in front of filled it out.
And it's not like I fill, I put it in front of 10 people and I said, look, 99, no, it's 5,991 people as of earlier this week when I took that screenshot.
So it's a really good number conversion, which told us a lot.
They, they told us that they were in B2B, they were selling to other businesses. They told us that they had agencies or consulting companies.
They told us that they, like, we asked the question, what do you need help with most? They told us marketing and sales. They said where their problems were. And when we asked them what growth channel works for you, they told us the ma—
the majority of them, let's say the plurality of them, told us, I need help figuring that out. What is the right sales channel? So look at this, AJ.
I end up with this group of people who are telling me.
What their problem is, who they are, what solution they want.
And of course it makes it easy to build a solution like this.
That's how we did it. And, and by the way, when we asked them what stage of business they were in, you can see in the red that the majority told us that they were young businesses. That's also helpful to know. But where I focused my energy was there was a significant number of people who were doing, let's say, what was that? $1,000, $11,000 a month in revenue. To more than $100,000 in revenue. That's a good group of people that I wanted to target. And so that's our niche. B2B people, agency who can, and consulting is what they're doing. They need help with sales. Marketing and sales is something that they haven't figured out. And finally, they have over $10,000 in monthly revenue. And I got that just from a simple fricking form. All right. I don't know why I'm saying fricking so much. I wonder if it's because you are a New Yorker or because I'm a New Yorker, but I'm going to enjoy it and go with it.
All right.
So that's the first step. You want to find your niche.
Next step is you need to talk to people.
One-on-one.
One-on-one.
For Emmett, it was using Skype. That tells you how far back we're looking. He got on Skype with people who were using his platform and left, people who were using competitive platforms, people who he thought would be good customers.
For us, what I did was I used the segmentation tool.
In Beehive to find the people who had filled out our form and to find people who clicked and to find people who would be the right customers for us within this niche that I just identified.
It makes it simple.
And you can see that with Beehive, that there are tons of different ways to create segments by clicks, by forms that they filled out. And so you pick your segment, you could even get the email addresses of the people who are in the segment, and you can do what I did. I use Google Meet to get on calls with them. And if you look at the bottom underneath the, you'll see that I use a recorder to take notes because I wanted to understand what they were saying. And sometimes in the moment I didn't really grasp it. So I'd look at the transcript and say, oh yeah, here's what they're telling me, here's what they're telling me. So you just get in one-on-one conversations. Mary, I see you in the audience. I appreciate how much you've been communicating with us. Do you do any one-on-one conversations with your customers? Does anyone out there do one-on-one conversations with their customers? I find that a lot of us still are a little too, I don't know, shy. Let's see if we can launch a quick poll on that since I like polls. EJ, do you do that? I know that Beehive is pretty big on this.
All the time. It's been—
How do you do it?
Most impactful, you know, ways for us to collect feedback. We build our platform, you know, basically to the spec of our users. We don't build anything that isn't useful or additive or accretive to the platform. And we, understand what those features and tools are by talking to our customers, whether that's talking to users who are kind of our power users, the ones who interact with us on social media. I had a meeting this morning, coffee with a creator who is considering moving over to Beehive and just discussing what their needs are, what they're looking for in a platform, keeping us even 3 years in. I'm the first employee over here, so I've been here through it all. Like even having been seen kind of seen everything, it's still so useful to be talking with those creators on the frontline every day. 'Cause it, it, you know, over time things change, but you know, you keep being reminded of things that we still have to build, ways that we can help folks. And it's, uh, the single most important thing I think that we do, uh, over here at Beehive.
Looks like our people are doing it too. If people are watching, they are having conversations. I find that conversations after form after you do a survey are incredibly helpful because people will share things that they wouldn't share in a form, like their insecurities, their worries. Oh wait, let me end the poll here.
There we go.
All right, next thing that Emmett told me to do was he said, listen, once you know who the niche is, get their goals, understand what are they trying to do on your platform? What is it that they're trying to accomplish? I'm, I'm pausing here for a second cuz I see Gaurav is saying, I do. It's hard though, especially when the customer is, has camera off. You don't know if they mean what they said. Yes, it's true. I, I force camera on so that I know that they're paying attention. I force camera on so that I can catch these little moments, especially if I put a price in front of them. And you'll see me do that in a bit. You put a price in front of someone and you see them wince or you see them go, oh no. I saw one person, EJ, we were charging $5,000. I, I, I just said, we'll charge $5,000. And he was like, I go, how's that sound? He goes, a week?
Go, no, no, one time, $5,000. But that showed me that our $5,000 price was not too much to pay for this niche.
Um, most people really loosen up when the camera's off. That makes sense. I get it. And maybe you want to try a little bit of both. I personally like the, the subtlety of it.
I agree too. I think there's also a degree of like accountability with camera on, uh, you know, with, with camera off, as I'm sure many of us have experienced or even done ourselves during the, you know, the last few years. And when there's camera off, you can be doing other things. It's easier to, to kind of hide your eyes, you know, as they flip from screen to screen or to see that you're not necessarily as engaged. So you might be on a call with someone, but, um, you know, they may be, their mind may be elsewhere and it's much better for, I think, the accountability of their attention to, to be camera on.
And you know what?
I, the other thing that's worked for me is, is Scotch nights. I'll have people over to the house. I'll have people over to the office, um, and we'll drink. And truthfully, a lot of people don't drink anymore, but it's not about the alcohol. It's about the fact that you're sitting down and I hate to say this, that I am giving you a drink.
If we were both going out and you were buying your own drink, it would be different.
It's like, what, what does it cost to pour Scotch? Even if you drink heavily, it's not gonna cost me more than $10 for really good Scotch. So it's not about that. If you go out with someone, you buy them a cup of coffee, there's something about that. That old, I took care of you and gave you a drink that gets people to open up in that conversation.
It's reciprocity. I hope our CEO Tyler is watching because he recently read Influence by Robert Cialdini and his favorite concept these days is reciprocity. He brings it up, it feels like in every meeting. And so it's classic. I mean, that's tried and true when you do something for someone, It's innate, it's kind of automatic in some ways. It's like they feel like they have some sort of obligation and obviously it's our responsibility to use that ethically and not manipulatively. But people do feel that sense of obligation to, and in this context, just have the conversation truthfully when you're able to reciprocate or when you're able to offer, they feel a sense of reciprocation.
You're 100% right that reciprocity, um, is so powerful that since I've been doing my news, my podcast for years, over 2,000 interviews, have, uh, an email list of what, 16,000 people after I pared back recently. Um, I'd had entrepreneurs tell me, go and talk to your customers.
And then when people were listening, they'd say, my customers aren't, they're not calling me back. People on LinkedIn who I'm saying, can I get on a call with? They're not getting back to me.
What I discovered was if you say, instead of this, you say, I'm doing coaching on this thing that I've done really well, and I'm doing coaching 5 times a week, every week. If you're interested, get on a call with me. They'll tell you the problem that they have with whatever it is. And then at the end you can say, you know, I have a couple of questions about people like you. I'm trying to understand. Then they'll be super open with you because you've just helped them.
All right.
So you get on there and the thing that I didn't know was what am I driving towards?
What's the goal and of the conversation?
How do I do it? And what Emmett told me was to look at their goal and make that the starting point of the conversation.
So for him, he had this realization that gamers were earning real money from streaming and that their goal was to turn professional.
Now, again, I talked to him in 2011, 13 years ago at this point. Gaming was not a big thing. Nobody really realized that there were a group of people who Seriously were working to turn pro as gamers.
And the more he dug in, the more he realized they were making a few dollars in sponsorship too.
I said, from— if you listen to the interview, you'll see how shocked I was.
Like, really? 'Cause yeah, they were doing this from things like, um, uh, Sony would, would pay some of them and others would give 'em a few bucks. It wasn't major money, but it was enough. And because he had these one-on-one conversations and said, what's your goal?
He got to see what they were doing.
For me, I realized that many agency owners could sell. They actually knew how to do it.
What they couldn't do was build a sales organization. And that's interesting, EJ, because if you look at them, you say, these guys don't need to know sales techniques.
They know it. They're selling, they're signing up because some of them who I'd get on calls with were doing over $100,000 a month, which means over $1.2 million a year. That doesn't look like a problem. The realization I had from the conversation was they don't have a process, so they can't build an organization. They don't have a process. So because they're selling based on their natural abilities, they can't hire other people to do it. What they wanted was to have a consistent system, and I could only do that through conversations where I understood that that's what it was.
And those one-on-one conversations let me see the full pain of it. Someone who would start off boasting, I'm great and a natural at sales, would end up shrinking and saying, I don't know how to find more people. I get them when they come in because of a referral. I don't have an ongoing process for getting people to come in. So some weeks I do great, some weeks I don't. The next step was to find the blocks, meaning like, okay, I know where you're trying to go. What's stopping you from getting there? For Emmett, he realized that bad video was a big one.
Check this out, EJ.
And this is one of the reasons why he needed to talk to them. He would say, what's stopping you from getting a, from going pro? They'd say, your video sucks.
What you should do is give me higher quality video. Now, one thing that he said was he said, don't listen to people's answers, listen to their problems.
I go, why?
He goes, well, look, they're telling me, give me higher quality video. It turns out the reason their video sucks is they are pumping like 4K video and higher out there. And because they're sending such good video quality, when the recipient is watching, it's bombarding their little tiny internet connection and it's causing lags and buffering. And what we actually need to do is not give them what these creators want. We need to give them the opposite of what they want to get the experience that they need.
We need to give them shitty connection speeds or bad video quality so it'll stream quickly, and that's what'll give 'em a good experience. That's number one.
The second was stats. I said, I said, what do you mean stats? I'm going to Justin.tv and I see the number of people who are watching live.
He goes, yeah, that's good if you're a viewer.
But he says, for a gamer who's selling to Sony, Sony doesn't wanna know how many people watch a stream at any given moment. They wanna know the period of 5 seconds when the guy mentioned Sony and the period of 5 minutes when he's, when he sold Sony aggressively, how many people watched that? They don't need stats generically. They need this unique type of stats. They also said it's hard to grow an audience.
I said, okay, how are you gonna solve that? You don't even have an audience for this Justin.tv.
He goes, oh, it's kind of easy. A lot of them are on these message boards. All we need to do is ping the message boards when they go live, and that's an easy API call. But so he just started to understand all these blocks that were going.
If I can say something right here, this is one of the, This is one of the things that has been a framework that I've used throughout my career. It's been incredibly invaluable and I've been spreading it with my team lately, but there's a framework called the Jobs to Be Done framework pioneered by Tony Ulwick and his strategy consultancy, Strategyn. But Jobs to Be Done is basically a framework that helps you understand when a user is considering a product or a service or any kind of help with anything. They have tons of different options. And most of the time somebody's not buying a tool or a service, they're trying to buy an outcome. And so when you realize that they're trying to buy an outcome and the service is just like the mode for that, it kind of shifts the way you can think about what it is that you're offering and how do you help the user, the customer actually get the job done that they're trying to get done. And so in this case, it's like they're not necessarily just trying to get stats, it's they're trying to make money from their advertiser. And so they do that by being able to provide stats to the advertiser. And you can basically break this down, but it's like, it's really been a pretty profound shift in the way I think when I read, he has a book that breaks this all out that is called Jobs to Be Done that I read back probably 5 or 6 years ago. And it really, really transformed the way that I think about marketing and the way that I think about product. It's kind of a product-focused thing, but in today's world, like growth, product marketing, all really kind of coalesce and flow together. Um, so if you're hearing this from Andrew and it sounds like something that'd be interesting, like, I definitely recommend you picking up that book. It's kind of required reading for the folks on my team that want to uplevel their skills.
You know, Jay, and, and the, the point you're making also helps me see that if this book had been around when he was building, he might have said, okay, they're asking for stats, I'll give them the stats that they need, but also They want to please their sponsors. What else can I do to help them please their sponsors? And that might mean going a step beyond stats and saying like, when they mention the sponsor, put a hyperlink or a banner or something that is easy for the viewer to go to the sponsor and to go a step beyond the immediate request. That's 100% right. For us, we realized that agency owners' blocks was no system. They were just going from the gut. They felt it. They knew what they needed to do to sell. They were the kinds of people who sold shoveling service, snow shoveling services in weather like we're all having in the US today. They're the kinds of people who are always into sales. And the problem is without a system, they can't just, they can't make it snow when it's not snowing. They can't bring customers when they're not there. They can't find other people who can sell like them, who can sell with them. So they have no team.
They also had no accountability. They were the ones who were constantly telling people what to do, but there was no one to make sure that they were getting things done.
And so if they decided, I'm gonna read this book and get better at creating a sales process, they still had no one to make sure that they did it. In fact, they had a lot of people at their team making sure they don't do it because everyone else needed their time. And then finally, they had no support when they got stuck. They couldn't figure out, what do I do now? They were everyone else's support, but they didn't have any support for this. And so the next step is to start to validate, to say, okay, I think I know what to create. Now I need to validate this thing to make sure that I'm not spending a ton of time creating something that was a failure. Emmett told me that one of the things that they spent a lot of time on before they started validating was this contest where it would be a contest of who can do, I don't know, some random thing on live video. Who can chug?
I don't know.
They wouldn't have done chug a gallon of milk, but it's that kind of a thing, something that's safer. But they said, this is gonna be great.
Everyone's gonna wanna do these challenges.
It ended up being such a, just a backfire and misfire and failure.
Okay.
Emmett's validation was to ask. He did have funding. He was a Y Combinator-backed entrepreneur, and so he can just start to ask and, and build. Sometimes he would build minimum viable products, these MVPs with little solutions. Sometimes he'd get on Skype chats and say, hey, is this what you're looking for? And by doing that, he could at least get a sanity check and, and hear, okay, yes, if I do this, this is gonna draw the person in. I don't like that. For me, I like to charge. PJ, do you ever use Stripe?
Um, Yes.
I mean, Stripe runs our entire payments infrastructure at Beehive. Yeah. Yeah. All of it.
It's killer.
Yeah, that's great.
I didn't know this until now, but if someone has given you a credit card in Stripe, you can go and charge them at any time. And in fact, don't misuse it, but here's what I would do. I would ask someone, okay, you told me you want to work with Jesse directly about how he does his sales. You told me that you want a guide and a process. You told me that you You told me that you want that. You told me that you'd want to be able to talk to Jesse salespeople. You told me that you want all this. If we build that, would you pay for it? And they go, yeah, sure. And then I go, okay, we're going to charge $5,000. Would you pay? They go, yeah, sure.
I go, okay, I'm going to charge you right now on this call to make sure that the charge goes through and that everything's okay.
And if they had a credit card, I go, I have your credit card in Stripe. I can charge you. And suddenly I get all kinds of feedback that was helpful. Like, how much can I talk to Jesse? Can I bring my team members in? So for a period there, we were thinking, okay, maybe we make this as a team project. What do I do if it doesn't work? I don't like cold calling. All this stuff became super helpful for me to say, okay, yes to this, no to that, here's how it would work. And then come back and say, okay, if I do this, would you pay right now? And they'd come back with more questions and I'd say, would you pay right now? And then finally they would say, yes, I am willing to pay. All my objections have been answered. I get it. And now we knew we had a product and I did about 43 of these calls and after about 6 of them, people were starting to pay. And after the first 25, they were paying consistently like, EJ, they were right there saying, shut up and take my money.
Or clearly it was not a good fit.
And we knew that right away. And I would even start my call saying, listen, we booked this before I knew what we were gonna do exactly. I know what it is. Would by the end of this call, most people will either say, shut up and take my money. You've nailed it. You're exactly creating what I want. Or they'd say, it's clearly not for me. Either way is good, but we've got this thing for the right person. And that would open 'em up. And then by the end of my 43 calls, we just created this page with everything that, that I started to talk to people and what they told me that they wanted. Every question that they had was in the frequently asked questions section. Everything that they were looking for was already addressed and that we'd created a product that was right and made sense for them. And to me, that is the way that you create something. This find a niche, know that they're all the same. Talk to people one-on-one, get their goal. Where are they struggling? What, uh, number 4 is where are they struggling? What's the block? And then validate.
Yeah.
And for us, at the end of that, we were able to do $277,000 within 2 months of just kicking this off. And you can see that things just move fast. But it's not just for us. You can see that Beehive uses this process in a version of it. You can see that obviously Emmett was able to sell his business for $970 million because he'd used this process and he figured it out. This business, this approach works in just about any business. You could do it in newsletters like we did. You can do it in SaaS companies like Emmett did. Consulting businesses can do this really easily because for them, creating a product is not about having a bunch of engineers create. You could do this in service business, health, DTC, direct-to-consumer, anything. And in a moment, I'll take your questions. Uh, Andre, Andre, Casey, anyone who wants to just get on camera and ask a question or even unmute yourselves. But I'll tell you, EJ is here because we could not have done this without Beehive. I always thought you were like a co-founder of Beehive, EJ. That's not true, huh? You were just there from the very beginning.
Yeah, I'd like to say the only difference between, I've been very, very early stage at a couple of different startups, like first, never later than employee number 3. And when you're that early, the only difference between you and the co-founders is really the cap table and arguably the responsibility if shit goes wrong. But, you know, I like being in the trenches and being, you know, putting it all out in the field. And so, yeah, I'm, you know, never the type of person to be like, oh, it's 7 o'clock, I gotta log off. You know, I'm not a co-founder, you know, I'd Be ready.
You guys are doing really well. Do you have equity?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody on the team, uh, has, uh, some degree of equity.
Um, yeah, I, and I could see why I needed a simple thing.
Ask my audience a question as soon as they sign up, add it to their records without having to create all kinds of API calls and all kinds of Zapier zaps.
Um, it was fantastic for that. If you all want to, we can get you free access to Beehiiv for a limited time, and then after that you'll get 20% off for a few months. But I say that this thing is just fantastic. Here, I put it in the chat. This is the link if you want to sign up using our URL. I don't get a commission if you sign up. I know that your life will be changed because you've used it. If you haven't done a newsletter, and I'll take questions in a moment, but if you haven't done a newsletter and you don't have an idea, by the way, for a newsletter, I love, AJ, the way that my business partner created his first newsletter. This is it. He would just find links that he saw on the internet that he liked because, you know, he's browsing around.
He said, you know what, instead of being a consumer of this stuff, I'm just gonna create too.
And so he'd put these links in a notepad and he sent out his links and it became a thing. So if you haven't yet created something, I think that's the easiest way to get started. Just like I'm crawling around the internet, I'm finding the stuff that I think is interesting. I'll just send you links with a couple of sentences or maybe one sentence per to let you know. And people love that. Even, uh, Sean Puri, who created one of the most successful beehive newsletters ever, Sold it for a huge amount of money. I did an interview with him. Even he now has a link newsletter. It's called like what, the 5 Tweets or the 5— he basically is sending 5 fun tweets that he sees each week because he's massive on Twitter. All right. So if you don't, would somebody just hit that link and let me know if it's working? Because it's supposed to take you to this page and I want to make sure that this link is working for you. I'll do a quick rundown of what's working for us and what I want to draw your attention to if you're going to sign up for them. But what I'm going to do now is If you would like to start your video, if you would like to unmute yourself, I'm going to invite you to do this and just bring, bring in any questions that you have about doing this. Joy, thank you for checking that for me. And while I'm waiting for somebody to come on with us, I'll tell you here a couple of things that I really like about it. I love that you don't just do email newsletters. You also create a website. We created a website for ourselves. This site that's now cranking out revenue and building up an audience is built just on Beehive system. And at some point in the future, we might change it to our own design or something, but it just works. You guys have nailed the design at Beehive. I love that there are these simple ways to publish. I don't like to rag on your competitors, but I'll rag on one. I freaking hate Infusionsoft.
They made it so difficult. You had to open up Chrome in order to write a simple newsletter. They had all these different bells and whistles getting in the way of writing. So I never wanted to write. On a platform that just makes it easy to write, it's fantastic.
And yes, there's AI prompts and all that to make it super simple and automations when you're getting really good at it. But if you want something simple, it does it and it makes it easy for you. There's also growth. This is what Beehive is known for, all these techniques that are meant to grow. It was built by someone who had built one of the most massive email newsletter successes, which is Morning Brew, and all the different hooks that he built into Morning Brew, he brought into Beehive and then he doubled down on it.
And added even more.
And so I've been really enjoying the fact that we're growing faster. Uh, we have someone on board who can monetize if you're not a monetizing person, if you don't have the patience for it, you can use their process, their system to, to monetize. We do, we've earned money from it. You can analyze it. We're big on data to know where's our, where our customers coming from. EJ, we discovered recently that we're not getting a lot of, uh, subscribers coming in from X, but LinkedIn is doing especially well for us. So we're going more on LinkedIn. Really helpful to just see stuff like that. And then there's just a whole bunch of all the integrations, all the A/B tests. If you don't know what to A/B test, in fact, don't go crazy with it. A/B test the subject line. That's the best. Here's my latest one. I'm testing on the subject line, replacing you with I to see, do my readers open up a you email more or an I email more? So is it for something like this? Some of you might have gotten an email that says, How I earned $250,000 from our newsletter in 2 months. Others, or something like that, I forget the actual variation. Others of you got how you can, and I've been curious to see what the open rate is on both. All right, again, I'm going to put it in the chat. If anyone has, if anyone wants to sign up, go ahead and use our link.
Can I say one thing real quick before we move on? I'm going to reveal an exclusive here to the folks in this webinar as an appreciation to Andrew for having Uh, us join today. Heck yeah, B. Representing Beehive. So, uh, we've been really, really hard at work this year. We, in the beginning of the year, beginning of 2024, uh, bought a company called TypeDream, which was a, uh, website builder that basically is entering a very, very competitive market that's saturated with like Squarespace and Wix and Framer and all of these different competitors. And unfortunately, one of the truths of business that I'm sure many of you have learned, I've certainly learned it early in my career that you can have a great product and it doesn't necessarily mean that the company is going to succeed. And this company had an amazing product, but was having some trouble breaking through that kind of next level. And so we saw the potential in their team, genius operators, and we bought the company, brought them on board, and they've been building basically their platform, their web builder, into the Beehive platform over the last year, taking everything that they learned from their experience in building the product the first time. And of course, whenever we go through a process like building something, we always look back and say, I wish I would have done something a little bit different. That goes for our team in building our web presence. And essentially our team, our existing Beehive team and these new team members that we brought on got together and said, what if we could build the very, very best, easiest to use, most powerful no-code web builder on the internet. And that's what we're launching in just about 2 weeks. We're calling it internally the Dream Builder.
2 weeks?
2 weeks, the end of January, January 22nd is the launch date, but we call it the Dream Builder because it's going to build the dreams of a lot of people. And it's going to be on its own standalone website product that is going to compete against those different players that I talked about. So right now you're really looking at Beehive at the turning point, a precipice of the company's about to just completely transform. We already have the best newsletter platform in the world. And very, very shortly, we're going to have the best place to host a web store. And with that, this new year comes a bunch of additional functionality.
Fantastic.
Audio podcasts are slated. Digital storefronts are slated for later in the year. All kinds of things that are going to make your businesses pop off and all for that Very affordable monthly fee. No lock-ins, you know, so much value.
Yeah, I love that you got it all in there. I'm a very happy Beehive user and hey, to all of you who've joined on camera, I'd like to get you on there. I just think that it's built by people who think about how do I grow this business? How do I grow my customers' audiences? Andre, am I pronouncing it right or is it Ant?
Yeah, that's right.
All right. What do you think? And what questions do you have about this?
I think it's awesome. I think it's a very efficient process for starting basically any business. And I was thinking about this and discussing it with Ionut that's also here. We live in the same town. And yeah, excuse me if I'm asking questions that you might have answered previously in your newsletters. It's the first time I heard about you, but I was wondering if you used any presentations during the validation 101s with—
Yes, great question.
I do.
What I try to do as much as possible is show the thing. Instead of showing a slide, even if it's ugly. Recently, Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup, interviewed the founder of Zapier, and he said that I, Andrew, was the first customer of Zapier. And they were talking about how when he showed me his, his first version, when I connected my form to my email newsletter, it was ugly.
And he, he looked at me and he felt a shock of realization. Oh, Andrew doesn't know what code his newsletter numbers are. Andrew doesn't know what it is. He is like looking at me, he's going, oh, this is real garbage.
Like that I created. But also look at how Andrew's excited about it.
And I needed to see the actual product for me to get excited about it and, and to, and to, for him to see the problems with it. And so wherever possible, it's better to show the product itself.
So for me, I get embarrassed sharing my screen because I'm worried that my wife is going to send me a text message about, I don't know, something embarrassing. I don't know what, but in my mind, it's always something out there that's going to just ruin me, but I found that if you just hit do not disturb and show your Slack and show your this, it's really helpful.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, stick around for a moment. Let me go to, to Kevin next and maybe come back to you. Hey Kevin, how are you gonna use this? Oh, and you're, you're muted.
Sorry. I've got a, uh, pretty big list of, uh, service businesses that I want to start kind of monetizing here and, and going after cold. So I think You know, it's always good to just start with email and getting them in, making them aware and going from there.
Cool.
Are you with Beehive or using someone else right now?
No, I'm not using anybody right now. We use like, uh, Instantly for just cold email outbound for sales primarily.
I see. And now what you're thinking is, how do I get them into my email newsletter so that I have an ongoing thing?
Yeah.
Do you have a topic for your newsletter? Do you know what you're going to write and how you're going to get it done every week?
Um, I mean, I, in my head, but it hasn't been planned out yet.
What is it?
It's just, uh, local SEO tips for service businesses.
And you're gonna write it yourself?
Yeah. Okay. All right.
I think that's a great topic, especially if you go local. Are you selling to people near you or anyone who's trying to SEO their local community?
Basically anyone. We've got some software for local SEO and listings and digital marketing. So just trying to make people aware of that. All right. Yeah.
Um, one thing that I think you're going to like about working with Beehive is if you do use Beehive, they have a Magic Link and there's an alternative that we used before, but it's clunky to connect to other platforms. But the thing about Magic Link is you can start partnering up with other newsletters and saying something like, I'm going to write about you in my newsletter. If you don't mind, here's a link that you can use to to link back to me. And we've done this actually with other newsletters. We will say, we'll link to you because we read your newsletter and we'll recommend it. Would you mind linking to us and recommending it? And if they say, sure, we'll link to you, instead of saying, here, go to send people to our homepage, we say, here's the one link. When your readers click this link, they could subscribe without having to enter their email address. Incredibly, incredibly effective.
Yeah.
Um, cool. I, I have another tip in a moment, but let me go on to, is it, It's, uh, Lanot, I think is how Andre pronounced it.
It's, uh, Ionut.
Ionut.
Okay.
I'm John. Yeah.
Or call me Johnny because it's the similar in English.
Uh, is the— how are you, how are you doing this? So do you, first of all, do you have a newsletter too?
No.
Uh, no.
Okay.
Actually, I don't have. I don't have a business. I was employed and I'm here because of Behave. I didn't hear about it until now. I just saw the Maven newsletter and I said, okay, that would be an interesting workshop. Let's join it.
Okay. So you're thinking about a business that you're going to start right now?
Yeah, actually I'm helping Andrei with his landing page and we are changing and re-changing the copy and I'm also researching about agencies that does what Andrei wants to do. And I'm really thinking, okay, how should I— how to design the website look and feel to make Andrew a great competitor for— on the market?
Yeah.
And it's not only about the look and feel. Yes, it can be wow. If I'm making it, whoa, I'm thinking people will consider it, okay, that's expensive for me. But in the same time, another secret is in the copy. And yes, it should be human. And I'm also, Andrew, thinking on the— I was looking during this workshop on the Bootstrap Giants.
Yes.
Blog library, articles library, and I'm amazed people read. I mean, personally, I'm reading a lot every day. I'm reading a lot and I lost my—
You know what, I have to say that same thing to you too. I'm shocked when I look at our open rates and see that 50% of people are opening the email and when I will hide something on the bottom of our message, Like, hey, if you wanna see my family photos, hit reply or something random like that, that people will reply. We also use this, uh, Beehive, like, link for a survey on the bottom of our message where we say, what'd you think of this email? Good, meh, bad. You know that thing? I'm surprised at how many people respond and are thoughtful. And I think it's because there's a part of me that also got a little cynical about email newsletters. Who's gonna wanna read a long email newsletter? And we go long with this email newsletter. And what I've discovered is if you hit the right people with the right pain point and the solution that they have, they're going to open it. And if you even have a bunch of things in the way, they're still going to find a way to get to it. So for us, we reach a lot of business owners who are bootstrapped and people aren't talking to them. We reach a lot of people who are in the consulting space and there's not enough written for them. And Jesse will understand the problems that they have through conversations that we have with them. And then come in with a solution. And the same thing has been going on with the calls that I'm making. I will have a conversation with someone, they will say something like, um, like, no one's holding me accountable. And I go, oh, I didn't realize that someone who has a million-dollar-plus revenue business needs accountability.
I ask why? And then they'll say something like, well, I'm holding my whole team accountable. I'm the person who makes sure that everyone gets something done, but nobody does that for me.
I would love a me CEO to be the CEO of me on the side and tell me Like what to do, and so we did a whole newsletter on accountability, which did incredibly well. All right, am I pronouncing? Actually, I don't know how to pronounce your name. Is it Peter? And you can unmute yourself.
Yeah, sure. Thank you very much. I'm actually Piotr. That's a Polish equivalent of English Peter. I don't mind being called. Both names are the same. To the contrary, I joined that webinar. I'm sorry, I was just there. I joined in the middle of it, unfortunately. But yeah, I'm on a— I'm a techie guy. So I'm trying to, you see, I'm trying to find an idea basically, which is not wanted to come to me yet, but I'm working on that. So more webinars I see, more of you guys I listen to. how you go to the market, how you come up with a strategy.
And, and, and, and, and yeah, of course, uh, you got us through, um, through Maven, right?
Uh, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, you're right. And then I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm a techie, so I can implement the technical, you know, the, the, the, uh, the guts, uh, underneath that. It's, uh, you know, any idea But then, yeah, I'm just, uh, I'm just missing that. But every webinar like this is very useful for me.
So, um, one thing that I think would help for you because you're someone who can implement is to, to reach out to people and say, look, I'm in between projects trying to figure out what to do next. And as a way of keeping my skills sharp and making sure I'm connected to people's real needs, I'm offering 50 minutes or 30 minutes of implementation conversation. And when you're talking to them and helping them implement, they will feel this sense of reciprocity as EJ talked about, where they'll feel like they need to give you the same kind of openness or support or guidance that you gave them. And then you could start asking them questions. The thing that I would say is, as you apply this whole process, start with finding the right niche. You don't want to talk to everyone. You wanna know who the right group of people are for you.
Yeah.
So that you're not getting a whole bunch of random stuff. Um, all right.
Can I ask you, how would you— well, I guess, yeah, you said I should come to people and ask them. So do you have an idea of the channels where I can reach people? Is it social media? Is it cold email? Is it what— how would I— or people I know, maybe? I don't know what you meant by I should ask people. I should basically go out to people.
I think whatever platform you're on, you should be able to find people on that platform that you can talk with.
Okay.
So if you're using LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever it is, you can use that platform. If you prefer to take it to email, I found that using a tool called ContactOut will let you get the email addresses of people who you see on LinkedIn, and then you could email them and fire off a message to them. I'm a bit more brash, and so what I'll do is I'll take their email address, I'll put it into my iPhone's iMessage, And then I'll send them a text message saying, hey, I was just thinking of you and I happen to have time today. I'm looking to give some help if you're interested. And people think, all right, Andrew has my text. I must've given it to him at some point in the past.
Great.
Let me see if I can get on with him.
Oh, can I jump in and say one thing real quick?
Yeah.
You know, I think some advice that might help if anybody else has similar questions as Peter, is that it's something we tell our newsletter creators all the time, but whenever you're creating a product, whether it's a newsletter, whether it's something you're selling, it's super important to understand who your audience is and who you're talking to. And part of that comes with defining your niche and what area you're really targeting or kind of what your step one, find the niche and really niching down. That should basically lead you to a process of really understanding who that audiences that you're talking to. You should be able to really visualize in your head like every aspect of their day. Like seriously, like go through and think about like, what do they do? What does their morning look like? What does their morning routine look like? And then where do they go to work and what do they do throughout their day? And really understand—
Why, why do you need to know their morning routine?
It just really helps you get in the mindset of who this person is, the type of media that they consume, the type of problems that they face and challenges that they're trying to address in their daily life. And an example might be if you're going after agency owners, say you're going after people who are really kind of high performance, like growth mindset people, that person probably wakes up and goes to the gym in the morning before work, gets that workout in, has a healthy breakfast. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to tailor your copy to reference their morning gym session, but it really helps you kind of visualize who that person is insofar as then when you're thinking about where do they spend their time? What does their day look like as they move from one stage of life to the next, it can help you really relate to them. And the punchline here being when you have that really, really tight persona or archetype of who you're trying to target, it becomes far easier to understand where do they spend their time online? Where do they spend their attention? Where are you going to be able to market to them if you're creating social posts? Are they spending their time on LinkedIn or are they out there executing and not spending any time on LinkedIn because they're too busy with their job? Or whatever. But when you really understand who that person is, it generally really leads to those breadcrumbs of how you reach them. And the answer isn't always digital. We like to, in today's world, like every problem seems like a nail when you have a hammer. And it's like some of these people you may not reach directly online. And that's where something like Andrew's talking about. If like they're super focused in executing all the time, they may not be spending time on social media, but if you can send them a text or you know, get in front of them with a phone call, a cold call, uh, that can be equally valid. But, uh, it comes down to really understanding that, that user persona. I'm sure Andrew would agree with that. It's kind of a universal truth of like all of these different principles.
I love that. I'm actually gonna ask that too. I wanna know what their daily morning routines are because I do think I'll start to see myself in it and I'll start to see some commonalities. And that would be really interesting to sprinkle into newsletter copy, to sprinkle into sales copy, and to just be much more aware of who they are and show I care enough about you. That I know you.
All right.
Thank you everyone. Thank you, EJ, and thank you all for watching. As I said, we promised everyone who comes into this workshop that they're, that you're going to have free access to Beehive. I highly recommend that you set up a Beehive account. Kevin, especially you, I think you're going to get a lot of value from it. Ask me any questions about it if you have any as you're building it out, Kevin, andrew@bootstrapgiants.com. And I'm a little concerned about you writing all that SEO copy yourself. I think you should copy a little bit of what Jesse had done, Kevin, and say, I'm gonna curate some of the most interesting articles that are relevant and put them together in a link. Um, it's super easy to do and you can write in addition to it.
All right.
But however way you do it, there's a link right now in the chat. Thank you all for being a part of this. I do believe that the recording worked. You never know with these things, but if we did, you'll all get a copy of it when it's done. Thank you. Bye everyone.
Thank you.
Super. Thank you, Angie. Thank you. Take care. Bye.
Thanks.
Bye.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jay.
