How he built a $20M/year newsletter (Tim Huelskamp of 1440)

We like to say it's kinda like if Wikipedia and Reddit had a baby. Reddit's really fascinating, or social media's really fascinating, but like, I can't trust it because I don't know like what's real on there. At its core, it's like this, the concept is there's so much terrific knowledge out there that's buried so deep on the internet that we think like needs to have like be brought to light. And we just wanna bring that together in like an ecosystem platform where it's like everything on here has been summarized, it's been contextualized, you can find everything really easily, and then it's all real. 'Cause at the end of the day, like with your business as well, This is all about trust, right? If you have trust with the reader and they're like, they feel like they're in this safe space where like whatever's gonna be put in front of me, I can like trust. It's such a huge competitive advantage.

I think it's so freaking smart that you're doing it cuz you're basically monetizing from the endless treadmill that is news by curating. And then you're end— you're monetizing from evergreen, which is phenomenal if you can do it right.

I've been spending a lot of our time and, uh, and energy kind of going from a, what I call like a, a standalone newsletter business into that larger media company. We have 4.5 million readers now. We have 21 employees, over a million revenue per employee right now. So it's actually like a benchmark. We try to like make sure we don't go over that. We just kept it super simple. Like, as I said, like write the newsletter, sell ads, grow the list, you know, keep doing over and over again.

Welcome to Just Go Grind. I'm your host, Justin Gordon. On today's episode, we have Tim Huleskamp, who's the co-founder and CEO of 1440, which is delivering knowledge without motives to millions of intellectually curious readers. He's a former The NBC guy got started with his newsletter and has absolutely crushed it. One of the things Tim talked about in this interview was getting feedback from readers, and that aligns well with today's sponsor, which is Ro, a business banking platform built for high-growth businesses. Now this relates because they have a community growth approach. When I talked to Everett, the CEO and co-founder of Ro, on this podcast, actually, he talked about how core community was to helping grow. This business banking platform and how we still use that today, hosting tons of different events to bring together founders and operators and essentially growing through community. And one of the core things they have is a person for every customer at Ro, 24/7 customer support. That's phone, text, email. They're with you every step of the journey. To learn why startups choose Ro, visit ro.co today. That's R-H-O.co today. Visit ro.co today to learn why startups choose Ro. Tim, welcome to the show.

Justin, awesome to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

You know, with how fast 1440 is growing and all the things you are doing, new things coming out as well with like topics, give us an overview of 1440 today as it stands. We're in like March 2025, because I feel like if we record this 6 months later, it'd be like a whole different spot. Where are we at today with 1440?

Yeah, appreciate that. Yeah, so let's see, we have, uh, 4.5 million readers now. We have 21 employees. We're doing about a million, over a million in revenue per employee right now. So it's actually like a benchmark. We try to like make sure we don't go over that. Yeah, and then as you said, like we're working on this new topics page strategy, which is basically like, we haven't totally nailed the positioning of it, but we like to say it's kind of like if Wikipedia and Reddit had a baby.

Mm-hmm.

So basically what we've learned about our audience over and over again is we have, you know, 4.5 million intellectually curious readers. that love learning, and they've told us over and over again, like, you know, they run into things like the gut microbiome and CRISPR and inflation and Burning Man, and they wanna learn deeply about them, and they feel like they go try to do that and everything gets in the way of the knowledge. So from 7 years of building our newsletter, we found like all these great pockets on the internet that have all this wonderful, terrific knowledge, but like people can't access them. Like they're buried so deep on the internet that we're trying to like bring those together in one place where folks can kind of, know, go down rabbit holes efficiently. So we're still trying to figure it out, but like, we're really excited about it. And, uh, yeah, I've been spending a lot of our time and, uh, and energy kind of going from a, what I call like a standalone newsletter business into that larger media company.

You know, I wanted to bring this part of it up later, but since we're on it, we'll just start with it and then we'll go back later on in the show. With Topics, like you said, 7 years into this business, why was the timing now? How long ago did you start thinking about this as your expansion? Because, you You've been very, very focused narrowly for the entire time until this point. Yeah. Take me through that.

Yeah, totally. So, okay. So basically if you start, so 2018, we started the company, right? Like the, we did it once a week and then twice a week and 3 times a week. So the first year was just like true product market fit journey, understanding what the customer wanted, et cetera, et cetera. So then like 2019 and 2020 were kind of like initial scale. So like de-risk the business. So basically if you break down our core business, it's really just 3 things. Write a wonderful product every day that delights our user. So we have like a 65% daily open rate. We pour our heart and soul into the product. You do this as well. Like you have to like really like put your heart and soul into the newsletter. And then we sell ad placements to that smart audience, to our partners. And then we basically reinvest that money back into growth. So we have a little flywheel business model. So like 2020 was kind of like figuring that stuff out, right? Like what are our unit economics? How do we de-risk the selling, the sell, the sales part of the house, uh, the growth part of the house. And then like, yeah, starting in like late 2021, we started like the, the business was scaling. I think that's when we hit about a million subscribers. And then right around then, um, Drew, who's my, our co-founder, PhD scientist, really smart guy that works on Capitol Hill. We, we, we, we like, we're running into this with the product that is now Topics. We were running into it and we're basically like, we could feel it because I actually answer every email you send into 1440. They still come to me. And people would tell us this all the time, like, I love how you guys go curate all this knowledge and information around the daily news, but like, I'm having trouble understanding this thing and like, it's like really bothering me. So we heard that from them. They're like, I wish you guys could help me more. And we're like, what do you mean by that? And they're like, I don't know, but I just wish like you could help me learn way more and go deeper. So then we'd get on calls with them and understand what that was. Uh, and then also we had a lot of cool data with, um, so when we did like a top 3 in our newsletter, which tend to be a couple hundred words, say it was on inflation, you know, uh, Chairman Powell, uh, increases BIPS 25 points, blah, blah, blah, stock market's up. At the very bottom, we would put something in like, kind of know what the Fed is, but kind of don't. Click here for a great 101, which might go to like a Reuters or a Forbes or something like that. And we'd see like 50,000 people click on that. So I think we have like a lot of, yeah, a lot of evidence too, like from a product market perspective that people were like, don't really know these things and they're curious to learn about them. But like they, you know, again, like they, they, they're butting their heads against the wall. So I, I think it was a combination of seeing the data and then hearing the anecdotal data as well, like i.e., people writing in and asking for it. So really it was like late 2021, 2022, we actually like Drew and I started thinking about it. And the first iteration of it, uh, we've actually taken this to market like 3 or 4 times and kind of misfired on product market fit and then came back and like, you know, bucketed back up and went in again. The first one was actually around like experts. So the thesis there was like, actually, Justin, you'd be a perfect example of this, right? So if we had like a founder's page or like an entrepreneur's page, like, you know so much because you've been one yourself and you've founded, you've spent most of your life studying them that like, you know, if we had your basically like your your product essentially, like that expertise, like on our site somehow. And like we could like work with Justin to ask him questions and, and, and, and yeah, dive deeper alongside him. Like that would be really helpful. So that was actually our first iteration of the product. Like, do we get an expert to come in? And we called it like 1440 Experts and you could like ask them questions. The thing we learned pretty quickly was like, these people tend to be very busy and like doing their own things. Yeah, right, exactly. Go figure, like an orthopedic surgeon doesn't have time to like help with the help of the newsletter.

That's what we're doing, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, they were really— they wanted to help and they wanted to help other people learn, but like we just saw like pretty quickly they didn't have enough time. So that was our first iteration of it. Then our second one was what we call like Pinterest for knowledge. So again, like we would find— we still do— we find all these incredible resources. We actually have a really cool feed internally where we pipe them all in, and watching it's incredible because like you literally are going down journeys of knowledge from all the different Topics and all the different verticals we cover. But yeah, so what we'd see there is say you want to learn about CRISPR. Like MIT has this 12-minute video that describes it at 101 level, and it's like literally the best piece of content on the internet on CRISPR. Okay, so we would find that, and we would always run into that. We'd put it in the 101 section of our of our newsletter. And so originally our thesis was like all these all this gold exists on the internet. It's only like It's a very small percentage of actually of most links on the internet because of all the SEO clickbait and just like, you know, now you have like what a lot of people call like AI slop where people are just creating a bunch of content that's actually not that good. So like we found all these awesome pieces and we're like, let's just put those in an ecosystem and then allow people to essentially like save them and share them and comment on them like basically like Pinterest, but instead of pictures of lofts, it would be the best knowledge on the internet. So that was our next go-round. That was probably 2 years ago. We like took that to market. And what we heard from our readers was, this is great. And I love sharing that, sharing and, excuse me, learning about these topics or these resources, but 1440, you guys are world-class at curating knowledge and like explaining it to me at a 101 level. And CRISPR is like very, very deep science. And like, I don't really understand it. So before I can watch the 12-minute video from MIT, Can you help me understand it first? That's what you guys do so well. So that was the feedback we got. So now, like, our latest iteration is kind of like all those things into one. Like, we talk to experts to create the body of knowledge. We have all the best pieces of knowledge in there, kind of like Pinterest, but we put, like, our curatorial layer on top of it where we help you, like, go down the rabbit hole. And what we've found is some people— so, like, walking through, like, one page, like, you know, if you're on the CRISPR page or inflation page, What we're seeing is people want that like 2 to 3 minute overview of like, what is inflation? Why does it matter to society? How's it going to affect me personally? What are some really cool, interesting nuggets about inflation? So like, why does the Fed target 2 to 3% per year? What's like, when was inflation at its highest? Which by the way, it was at 30% after the Revolutionary War and it was at double digits in the World Wars, right? So like, there's like these really cool like knowledge nuggets we call them. We're working on how to like exactly define what what to call them from a positioning perspective. But you like, you go do all this work, you learn about this topic and you come out, you do this so well in your newsletter, right? And you're like, wow, look at this fascinating insight I learned about this awesome founder. And we're trying to basically just like organize that in a way where it's like, you have a quick 101, you have a bunch of like knowledge nuggets that like are quick, like quips that you can take away. And then if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, the best 30 to 50 resources from the internet. Podcasts, data visualizations, articles, interactives. They're all there. But like the big thing is, so that's where it kind of gets like, you know, Reddit-y in a way. It's like kind of like UGC, but it's all stuff that we're putting into the ecosystem that's been fact-checked by a human. And like, it's real. Because one of the pain points we hear all the time from our readers is like, Reddit's really fascinating or social media is really fascinating, but like, I can't trust it because I don't know like what's real on there. Or like if it's even, if it's like Russian propaganda or like, if it's like, you know, like when you're learning about science, like you can't be messing around with, you know, fake stuff basically.

Yeah.

So yeah, we're, so we're, as you can't tell, we're still trying to like figure it out a little bit, but like at its core, it's like this, the concept is there's so much terrific knowledge out there that's buried so deep on the internet that we think like needs to have like, get, get to be brought to light. And we just wanna bring that together in like an ecosystem platform where it's like, Everything on here has been summarized. It's been contextualized. You can find everything really easily, and then it's all real. Like it's you know like it's crazy we have to say that, but everything on here can be trusted because at the end of the day, like with your business as well, this is all about trust, right? If you have trust with the reader and they're like they feel like they're in this safe space where like whatever is going to be put in front of me, I can like trust. It's such a huge competitive advantage with a product like this.

You said obviously multiple iterations. You're trying to. Figure it out. When you say that, like what are you looking for that tells you you figured it out? Because you're like you say that and like it's the third iteration and you know let's say four years it's been or whatever. What does that mean for you? What do you want from this? Tell me tell me more of that.

Yeah, I hate I hate this answer I'm gonna give because it's so vague and like when I was when we were building like if someone would have said this to me I would have been so angry. But um Mark Andreessen always talks about this like how do you know when you have product market fit? And one of his quotes is. It's like being in love. It's very hard to describe, but you know it when you have it. And like, I think it's that plus some data too. There's actually some really good— you've covered this before, but the Superhuman, which I think borrowed it from First Round, has like actually a formula for how to find product-market fit. And you actually ask people questions. It's something like, if this product were to disappear, how disappointed would you be? And it's like very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, not at all disappointed. And if you have like, if 40% or higher of people say very disappointed, it means you have like, historically they did those tests and those are the companies that had product market fit and scaled successfully. So we're constantly doing that, but it's also like the Marc Andreessen feel it part too, which it's, again, it's tough to describe, but like, okay, so our newsletter with a 65% open rate and 4.5 million subscribers, like clear, clear product market fit. Wow. Right? And like that one, like, so what that means to me every morning, like, how do I feel that? I read all our emails. We get hundreds of emails a day, and most of them are like, I love your product. It helps me learn every day. It's a breath of fresh air. I used to watch the TV news and everyone was just yelling at each other. My blood pressure would get up. Now I just read 1440 in a few minutes. I learn more knowledge and I'm smarter and I'm calmer. So like, you can— I can literally feel that every morning, like the product-market fit it. And that was one of the blessings we had. Like, we knew that. And when we took our first product out, like the Pinterest one or the experts one, like we put it out to the world and like no one said they loved it.

Hmm.

And that's where like, it's again, like when I— before I was an entrepreneur, I couldn't have like said what this is, but that's what it is. Like, people tell you, like when Marc Andreessen says that, like you can feel it. People tell you like, I love your product. This is really helping me. They'll email you. Like your your friends who might be reading it will come up to you and be like, that really added a lot of value to my life. I love the Shakespeare article you guys did on Sunday. So it's it's hard to describe, but you can actually feel people telling you it, which I think is like a huge a huge part of it. So those two, it's like data and like gut too.

One thing with that when you're saying that, it's like well the email, it's really easy for someone to reply to the email though. The topics page is they're clicking on a link to get to the topics page. And it's not like they are then from the topics necessarily responding to that. Now I know you've played with some iterations maybe. I think you can subscribe to those different topics pages. So like, how do you think about that in terms of gathering data? 'Cause I know like we were at the newsletter conference by Matt McGarry hosted recently in Austin, which was great. And you mentioned like you beg for feedback. How are you getting feedback on these topics pages to know if you actually do have like product-market fit?

Yeah, it's one of the things I worry, do we have enough feedback on? what you just said. So yeah, to your point, you can sign up for the emails as well. So every Thursday, like for our business and finance topic deep dives, which are like, you know, every week it's like venture capital, Ethereum, IPOs, Warren Buffett, like just different themes. So you can sign up and get an email. So we have like over 200,000 subscribers now that are receiving those emails. So we still receive it that way. But then to your point, on our page, we're adding the same like equivalent things, like little popups. That'll ask like, how is your experience going? And then our, our, our head of product is constantly like reaching out to people and talking to them as well. But it's definitely like one of the huge advantages of a newsletter is to your point, you can like hit reply and it comes to you. Um, it's definitely harder on the, on the website. You have to like go, go like ask for it a little bit more and like do more to get that, get that feedback.

The, the other obvious kind of question with that too is you figured out the business model, which we're going to get into all that with The 1440 newsletter, but I know you've covered it kind of ad nauseam on other podcasts, so I'm trying to go a little bit different angle, but we'll cover it. With topics though, you obviously had figured out the monetization side of we have advertisers for this newsletter, there are placements in the newsletter, people click those, like it works very, very well. You can have this whole flywheel with topics. How did you think about the monetization side of it or what you wanted from this product eventually? It's obviously early days of like the third round of it. How'd you think about that? How do you think about it now of monetization with this new product?

Yeah, great question. The way we're thinking about that is basically, so we've sold our, like, business and finance is our first one, and we're like, that's like kind of our guinea pig. Are you allowed to say guinea pig anymore? I think so, right? I think so. Okay.

The Tim Ferriss thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah, so the way we're thinking about that is we have a team of writers creating the content. And like, you know, so we've gone from— so we have, we now have inventory on our website and then in the email as well. So one of the beautiful things here, and like, we're not— we haven't executed on this yet, but the vision is basically, you know, do the work once on what is an IPO, why that matters to society, how it works, you know, how the math works, the biggest IPOs. You do all that work and then you can essentially hopefully monetize it many ways, right? So as you put on the website, You send an email out. We're working on podcasts as well, like kind of 20-minute deep dives on just like 101 level. We think there's like a hole on that on the internet, like 101 level. I want to quickly learn about this. I'm not an expert in IPOs. I'm a doctor that wants to learn about IPOs, so help me learn about them in 20 minutes. That's one. We think eventually there's an opportunity to do some sort of events, like live events, like the head of Goldman Sachs and the biggest IPO banker of ever, and 1440's business editor come on and answer your questions about IPOs. So, we're trying to figure out the ways, like, do the work once and then sell it 4 or 5 times. To date, we're selling it like 2 times, and like, it's already very profitable. And then the beautiful thing too is one of the reasons we're working on topics is we think there's a big hole on the internet for evergreen knowledge, right? I think everyone does the what happened today in the news, like, the news, right? That whole thing. Yeah, it's very overwhelming. Like a lot of people, again, like especially if you're like intellectually curious, smart people like the doctors and the engineers and the lawyers, they like, they hear about it all the time, but then no one ever like helps them understand it at a conceptual level. So what's really nice about that for our business too, and again, we have a long way to go here, but like, you know, so if we write the IPOs page once and there's inventory on there, like every time we talk about an IPO in the newsletter, we know people like want to know about IPOs. So we can say, you know, Reddit IPO is at $12 billion valuation. And then like right to the right of it, like, you know, 1440's IPO page 101. And like, we'll drive a ton of traffic from our readers to that site, which then monetizes it on the website. So it's kind of like, it's, I need to think of a better example, but I tell the team, it's like, we're kind of like making Disney movies, you know, like Disney, like makes a movie and then they monetize it for like centuries or, well, I guess decades. Right.

Yeah.

It's like, and like they may, they, they update it every once in a while. You got to make sure it's like, you know, the latest. Latest, whatever the term is, right? Like Pixar or whatever. But yeah, so like we're trying to create these like long-term assets and like we have to go in every once in a while and update them and make sure that they're still relevant. But yeah, it's like, how do you make this thing that's like the best IPO 101 on the internet where you can go down the rabbit hole and then like, how do we just constantly send people back to it? And then also we can like ship it out multiple ways with a newsletter. And then we think eventually, as I said, like podcasts and events. So, but that, that, that, that the short, the initial unit economics is already profitable. We don't do things that aren't profitable. Like we just don't do them. Actually, let me say that again. We don't do things that aren't like, like year 2 profitable. Like sometimes you have to like invest in them, but a lot of, a lot of companies in media, with all due respect, they, I think they chase, they chase unprofitable revenues and we just don't do that. So with us, like we already have a playbook on how it's profitable without all those, the, uh, the 3rd, 4th, and 5th options. So like if we can add those on, it increases like our lifetime value even more.

For the record, I think it's so freaking smart that you're doing it because you're basically monetizing from the endless treadmill that is news by curating. And then you're monetizing from evergreen, which is phenomenal if you can do it right with both this current product. And I agree, podcast slash if you can figure out YouTube. Like the value in that is tremendous, just monetizing multiple ways from the same content. And I know we talked about this a while ago when you were thinking about topics and this kind of what this could be. And I already made so much sense because you could see how this newsletter, okay, how many links are going to go to these topics pages? A lot of them that you're already monetizing both, then it makes a ton of sense. Anything else you're thinking of with this before we kind of go back to the story of the OG, how do you get started with this and like The early days a little bit.

I think that's the big thing. It's just basically how do we— we have a long way to go, but like our thing is, yeah, it's evergreen big topics. So obviously, you know, people are listening, probably like, this guy, does he not know that AI is coming to the space?

Like, I was gonna bring it up. I was waiting.

Yeah, right. Like, so like clearly AI is like, you know, incredible tool. I use Perplexity like 20 times a day. It's replaced Google for me. I love, you know, our team uses it. It's wonderful. But I think the thing that it doesn't do really well is, it probably will eventually, but if you have a question, it gives you an answer better than anyone in the world. And that's not what we're trying to do, right? So like I always say, like, if we're not trying to do, what was, I'm in Chicago, what was Sammy Sosa's batting average in 1984? Like, you know, a search and AI is gonna do a really good job at that.

Yeah.

It doesn't do an awesome job. What we think is like basically leaning into human serendipity. So like, By that we mean, if you want to learn about venture capital, you could go on any of the things and type in like, what is VC? And then you get a couple questions and sources. And then how does VC work, right? But we think what's really magical is like when an expert who knows about the topic has learned about it deeply and then summarizes it for you and shares like insights. It's kind of like a professor, right? Like when you go to— you see the syllabus on the first day of class, they're going there like, hey, okay, we're gonna learn about venture capital this semester, and like, here's the key themes, and we're gonna learn about the, you know, the IPO window, and like how the— what an investment banker does, and all these different things. And like, it helps you like contextualize and lay it out, and then you can kind of like choose your own adventure. So like, we think like that part of it where AI is really good at like giving you quick answers, and like, I know they're working— I know all the tools work on like the deep research tools, but we just think that— Like the human experience of like going down a rabbit hole and like finding out what's fascinating. What is venture capital? How do they make money? What was the first deal? This Midas list keeps popping up. What is the Midas list? Why does that matter, right? That like human work, we think that that's like really beautiful. And like that part of it actually is like a really— it makes it a better experience. We actually are— we compare our pages to the AI pages all the time. We have better pages. I hope we will every day, like in the future. The difference is we can make one a week and they can make one every 10th of a second, right? Or like they literally can make infinite, infinite pages, right? But, you know, Bezos always talks about this. We'd love your take, but Bezos, the end consumer doesn't really care like what the technology is in the background. They just wanna have a better user experience.

Yeah.

So if all we're doing, we're not trying to outcompete them on, you know, how to Q&A things, which we would never do that. We have no shot at that. But the, like, the 10,000 topics on the internet, like, you know, the 4 or 5 that I mentioned, and, you know, uh, cities and like colleges and like dog, these big, these things that have big, uh, scale behind them, we think we can win there. And like one, one cool little anecdote we found is a quarter of— so there's like Google long-tail searches. There's like that, that great stat that something like I think it's 14% of all Google searches have never been searched before because they're so long tail. But again, that's the long tail. Like most of them are like Chicago, Los Angeles, OpenAI, Ronaldo, right? These big topics. So what we're wondering, what we think is like, if the topics, like it's something like the top 10,000 topics on the internet or something about like, or something like 20% to 25% of all searches, discrete searches. So it's like, again, like we're not going to win the Q&A battle, but can we win the topics battle? Like we think we have a fighting shot there. And if we do, it's like a really large prize.

Well, and the big part of that too, that obviously with AI is that you have to know what to search. They're finding things in through click one, the convenience, right? You're just clicking from the newsletter to topics. Makes total sense. But also you're seeing things on the page you didn't know to search for. What if you don't know what the Midas List was? Until you saw it on the page. Like that's that's the whole difference as well in AI. It's like obviously you can prompt AI and be like ChatGPT, hey, what topics? What should I ask about IPOs? And it could tell you some things you could ask about. But you're just showing them things that they wouldn't even know necessarily to ask for, which is a benefit of curating, having experts, etc., which is why I'm like super interested in this product. For people who aren't familiar though with 1440, you came from PE, like the private equity world. Why start a newsletter? You could have done many other things. Why a newsletter?

Yeah, it was the biggest pain point I had, like, in my own personal life at the time. So me and my co-founder, Drew, he's a PhD scientist, super brilliant guy, worked on Capitol Hill, was like chief of staff for senators and stuff like that. Yeah, we just both had the same pain point, which I'll get into in a second, but the The second part of it was, I actually, we launched like, I think right around the time Axios launched and you had like the Skimm and Morning Brew probably been around for about a year at the time. The Hustle was around. And one of the things I really liked about the business model was kind of putting my like PE hat on. I was like, wow, you know, if you have a big white space and you can deliver for the client every day, the unit economics in these businesses like work really well. Um, yeah, really, really well. And we can, we can get into that, um, as we've done before. But, but it just, I think like, I think that's, that was one of the things too I realized, like maybe not like, I think they, they were wrong about this originally. They're like, there's no venture-scale newsletter companies. And I think like, like most markets, what you do is like once you actually build them, you realize they're bigger than you thought they were.

Or you grow the market too by being in there.

Exactly, exactly. So I think like it was It was, it was really those 2 things. I was like, wow, like these businesses, like they have incredible unit economics. They can scale, you can grow them pretty nicely. And then I saw that and we had the pain point as well. So that, those are like the 2 reasons why we, uh, we built it.

How'd you decide to work with your co-founder on this? Because that's always a whole other discussion around, you know, I don't think you've ever talked about it much, at least from podcasts I listen to.

Yeah. Uh, so this is actually a really cool story. I, or I think so anyway. So my brother-in-law went to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and this is how I met Drew. So basically, he— him and his buds would watch college football every Saturday while at the Kennedy School. They left— really cool, really smart group of guys from all walks of life, lawyers and data people and people in Congress, like just really smart people. And they left, and then they had this email chain. Where that they would talk about college football and like politics and what's going on in the stock market, just all this stuff, like very, very interesting thing. Anyway, so I love college football, that's my sport. I go to a game, new game every year. It's like what I watch, like the only thing I can watch these days as I get older. And so I got added to this list and Drew was on that list. So basically there was this like kind of 16 guys where they talk about a bunch of stuff and we learn from each other. And Drew and I were both talking about this pain point that I had about like, God, it's so hard to learn. Like, why is it so? And he's like, dude, I had that too. And he's like, literally responded to one of my emails where I was like, we should build something. He's like, I'm in, let's do it. Like, literally it started like that. And then I was like, all right. And I sent him a separate email and then we like sketched out what the thing would look like, which by the way, the name was different. It was called like, I think it was called Streamlined or something like that. And then we had like did a naming thing, but If you look at our initial product, I mean, it looks terrible. It was in a Google Doc, but it's not that far off from what our current newsletter is. It's very similar, like sections and like what the value is. So even despite like all of the extra, all like the year or so of like product market fit work we did, like it's pretty similar to like the initial pain point Drew and I had was like, if like we, 'cause we wanted this thing to exist and we couldn't find it, right? So it's like, if I was, If I could get a newsletter every day that solved this problem for me and looked like this, that's what that would look like. And that was our first draft, and it's not that far off at all. It's like 90% the same as is the one that goes out today to four and a half.

That's like I think Alex Lieberman mentioned he had like a PDF as a starting version of Morning Brew. Like that was their original thing: send out this PDF as like an attachment or something in the email. Like that was the original Morning Brew, and obviously it progressed since then with you and Drew. Was Drew like, did he have some writing experience? He ended up writing the thing first, right?

Yeah, yeah, he's, he does, he did all the writing. Yeah, he's got deep writing experience, but from like a scientific perspective. So he would be writing like big papers. And I think like, that's one of the reasons why, like one of his jobs, I should know exactly what it was. But one of his jobs is basically to read like scientific documents, like white papers, and then like summarize them in a page for folks on Capitol Hill. Hill. So guy's like got a huge brain, and but he's like really good at reading all the different things and be like, all right, here's the key takeaways, and like here's what you should take away from it. And then also, this is in our DNA too, is like, you know, we, we try to be like fact first, and like a third of our audience is Democrat, a third's Republican, a third's independent, right? So like we just basically try to like, here's what happened yesterday, and like kind of make your own decision. And that's very much so because Drew's Like, like if you think about scientists, like they don't really think in opinions. They have a hypothesis, they have a thesis, they do the experimentation, they have data. And like, that's kind of what our product is too, right? So he's like, he's thinking about things and he's trying to get to the answer with like data and facts. And then he just summarizes it for us. And like, you know, it started about 78 friends and family. Now it's 4.5 million people.

4.5 million friends and family. Yeah, it's—

There we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

With that, you said it's like a year of experimentation. And you also mentioned that you, I think you said, started at one time a week or twice a week and progressed. Take me through more of that in terms of what the format kind of was initially and how that progressed.

Yeah, so it was the first one was in a Google Doc, and then we sent it out to 78 friends and family. And we basically said, I mean, the beautiful thing about the newsletter space is like, there's so much benchmark data, so you can know like how well you're doing. So we, I believe we said, if we don't have a full 40% open rate and a 5% weekly organic growth rate. Like we shouldn't do this. So we basically, we recruited 78 people. Like literally it's like my groomsmen, Drew's groomsmen, my aunts, my uncles, like just, you know, like our closest people. And we basically said, hey, we're working on this project. I'm going to send it out to you tomorrow. Would love for you to read it. We didn't want them to like push it unnecessarily, but could you just give it a shot? And yeah, we tried to like follow like by the book, like the whole like MVP thing, like make it as like true of a Excuse me, true of an experiment as possible. And like, yeah, we sent out to 78 friends and family the first one. And basically like, I think that had— sorry, we sent the first one out and then we eventually moved over to MailChimp, right? Because that has— it was free up to 10. Yeah, exactly. It's free. So we set— we signed it up and then we could see the open rate and everything. And we had a 60-something percent open, 65, 68% open rate. What's actually crazy is our open rate hasn't really changed since like '78 up into 4.5 million because like we like to say like, it's like, we think that, um, we'd love your take here, but like the open rate is kind of like the value you add to your readers ratio. You know what I mean? Like it's basically like that and living in data form. So it was wild that that was, that was very similar. Um, but yeah, so we basically had like We had a 65% daily open rate and then we put the little thing in where you could share it like because it was on Mailchimp already and after— so we sent it out the first week and then it had 78 friends and family and then by the time we sent out the next one, there were 91 people on the list and I was like whoa, dude. That graphic, man. Yeah, right, and Drew's like that what? I'm like dude, that's like what's that, 20% of people shared it with someone, that's huge, right? So and then it was like 104 the next week so like you could see it working. And then to my point earlier about, you know, feeling the product-market fit, people would write in and be like, this is really cool. Like, I really like this. It actually adds a lot of value to my life. Granted, it was like my cousin or whatever, but like, they were like being very genuine. Yeah, exactly. So, so yeah, we just, we did that. So it was like once a week. And then, you know, Drew was working full-time on Capitol Hill at this time while he was raising his 2-year-old daughter. She might've been 1 at the time. And like, talk about grit, right? Like, geez, grit and like belief in your product. Like, he would wake up at 4 in the morning to like ship the product for like a year and a half before we could like afford to launch the thing. And like talk about believing in your vision and mission. Like most people, like we're not here today if he doesn't do that, right? And most people like would just not have done that. So guys working a full-time job, raising a kid, and he wakes up at 4 to ship the thing. Incredible. And like, yeah, so it was once a week and I think maybe like a quarter in where he started doing it twice a week and then 3 3 times a week. The whole time we're begging for feedback. All of the emails, like, please, please, like, let us know. As an example of some of the feedback, like, so we used to have pictures in there. A lot of people ask us why we don't have pictures, um, and they automatically think we're lazy. But, uh, like, but, but what it is is like, you know, our product, as we said earlier, is all about putting knowledge efficiently into your brain. And what our readers have told us is like pictures get in the way of that. So now clearly, like, there's pictures, uh, it's worth a thousand words and all that. But when we tested pictures in there, like actually our readers told us they didn't like them because again, they were getting in the way of the knowledge of like the summaries and the knowledge. So we had pictures like those, they rolled off after like a quarter. We had different sections that eventually got killed off. But again, like it's pretty similar to how it looked like, but it was just like, it was like writing feedback, how long things were. Um, different sections, the pictures. So like every week we were like taking that feedback and we'd just do another version and just kind of keep going. So yeah.

In the early days though, so Drew is writing this, you know, obviously it progressed from once to multiple times a week when he had a full-time job. Were you still at your full-time job then in PE at this time as well when Drew was still like—

No, I was, I was like a freelancer at the time. So.

Oh, nice. Love that. So at what point did, Obviously Drew committed as well by spending all his time on it, working up early to do it, but you also committed some of your own capital to be able to pull this off. What made you have the confidence to invest your own money into this, and also at what point was the newsletter at when that happened?

Yeah, so we started, so for the first couple quarters we did the whole MVP process, and then the whole time we were tracking the data, and you could see the cohort data really really strong. So even today, it's something like our cohort from 2018, like 40% of them are still around, something crazy like that, right?

Yeah.

So we have like very similar curves in all of our monthly cohorts. So I could see them staying and retaining and like liking the product. And then also they were giving us the feedback, as I said earlier, like the anecdotal feedback. So I have to check the numbers, but I was essentially like dribbling a little bit of capital in throughout the thing. So like we had to get a, you know, we had to pay for Mailchimp eventually. So I got to pay like the $100, right? And then we had to like set up whatever, get a logo. So we, you know, pay for Fiverr. So we're just slowly dribbling it in. But I think after like after about a year in, maybe like 9 months in, I would say like there was very clear evidence that like, okay, the people that signed up 9 months ago, like some of them were getting it at this time, we're doing it 4 or 5, I think 5 days a week at that point. These people like this product and they're gonna stick around. So that gave me the confidence to be like, this model, which because of the other folks in the space that came before us and like taught us the unit economics game and showed us what that could look like, gave us confidence that we could, we had the awareness and their attention, and then you can monetize that attention, turn to revenue. But that's what really gave me confidence to say like, all right, this model's working because we have Were you the first, like, ad salesperson then?

Or when did you start having ads in this thing? Because obviously it grew organically early on, very high retention rate, like sticky, people are opening, everything's growing like phenomenal organically. But eventually you have to have ads in this thing to make money off of it. At what point did that come in? Were you the first one kind of just selling ads? Did you hire someone? Like, take me through more of that because a lot of these things aren't talked about. I'm always curious.

Yeah, so we started advertising at about 50,000. So we kind of like grew organically to call it maybe 10,000 or something like that. And then we did like cross-promos and just like however we could get it. And then we did— then I started— we started investing in Facebook to prove out, like, back to our original thing, like this whole Flywheel's 3 things. It's write a wonderful newsletter, delight your customer, sell ad placements, and then grow the list. So on the grow the list one was the next one we did before ads, which which was like, can we add more people to this product using capital? So that's where I started, we started dribbling in a little bit of money on Facebook ads. So I think it was like $2,000 to $3,000 a month or something like that, just to prove that can we acquire a subscriber and will they stick around? So that was the next process. And then we used that money to get up to about 50,000. I think we were getting subscribers for like a buck back then, maybe even cheaper, right?

Phenomenal.

Glory days, glory days, right? Yeah. And then, yeah, once we got up to $50,000, then we actually brought on a 3rd co-founder who did all the sales. So it was kind of like Drew wrote the thing. I was helping with writing, like I do, like I did our business section for a long time and some of the other sections, but he's writing the large, large majority of it. I was doing kind of the growth side, and then we had another person doing our, the sales side.

So obviously, you knew you had this flywheel working that was kind of taking off. Reach 50,000 subscribers. You then have ads because you have an ad salesperson to do ads with that. I know you mentioned that we've chatted before about kind of raising some like debt or using debt instruments, mixture of debt and equity, whatever, mostly debt, very small piece of equity to grow this thing. What was the confidence on that? You just see the numbers again. You're just like, well, we just need a little bit of capital. We'll keep kind of reinvesting into this flywheel to kick it off until to get to a certain point because it's just I want to hear more about that piece because it's kind of glossed over. over as well in terms of like funding these things. So you didn't want to go VC-backed, which is a whole different game that doesn't always work, especially in media. It's hard. Tell me more like the funding side of it then.

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we had like evidence that our unit economics were working, and we could scale the business. And I think we were doing, you know, $10,000 a month-ish in revenue or something like that. So like you could see that it was working. We actually went to a lot of the VCs because like I wanted to explore that option. And like basically the thing we heard, which I don't think they're necessarily— they were wrong about the time was, you know, VCs are unicorn hunters, right? So they need like 50x, 100x. They're looking for the TikToks and the Twitters and the big, big companies. So like a lot of the feedback we got when we went to the VCs was, you have a great business model, I believe in your TAM, got an awesome team, you have the unit economics figured out, but I just think this is only like a, you know, $10, $20, $30 million revenue company, which Would be a wonderful. You know, I hate this term, like mom-paw business, but it's not. It's not venture scale, which I don't think they're they're wrong about that. I think I think they were a little wrong about like you know since then you have like Axios like exit for five hundred twenty five million and Industry Dive out for five hundred million and Politico, which had another part of the business was essentially newsletter first business go for a billion dollars. So there's like I think they may have been wrong like how big they can get, but but understood right like that that's good. That's fair feedback. So we took that feedback. We also didn't want to do like the hamster wheel, like raise a ton of money, always be like not profitable and like doing that thing with venture. So we took that feedback and then, yeah, actually we ran into this business that did— if folks watch Shark Tank and Mr. Wonderful sometimes offers like royalty-based deals, it's basically like that. So I think like there's a lot of companies like ours that basically like are kind of like private equity-backed capital, but they're not big enough to get private equity money because you got to do like a $50 million check. And then they might— they're not venture scale or like, you know, rocket ship growth companies. So they're kind of like in no man's land where no one really funds them. So there's this company out in San Francisco that kind of realized that and had this new solution where basically what they did was they would give you money. So like, I think it was like $500,000 or $1 million. And then you, starting a year later, you would pay back like 3% or 5% of your revenues until you paid back 3x on the initial capital. And then there was like a small equity kicker, like, which basically schmuck insurance in case like this company was like a— it ended up being like a billion-dollar company and they didn't get like a little bit of equity. Yeah, exactly. So there was this really fascinating model that I saw. We applied for that, actually did not get get it. But then I took that model to my old private equity bosses and mentors. And I was like, this is really interesting. And I think there's gonna be like an industry around these companies. Like, would you guys want to look at this? And they really liked it. Because with most investments, especially like for early-stage companies, you either get like, you know, 10x your money in 10 years or like a donut. And like with this, like after a year, you actually start like get a coupon, like they get some of their money back. So it was really, really brilliant in my opinion, structure that they came up with, and we kind of leaned into that. So we did that first and basically took that $500,000, invested in Facebook ads and growing, and it brought our list from, call it, 50,000 to maybe like 500,000 subscribers after all the retention. And then we were doing, I should know these numbers, but then we were doing like $80,000 in monthly revenue, right? So it was working, and then so we just kind of kept doing that. We actually raised another debt round after that. And then there were these really cool company called Pipe down in Miami. Yeah, that does like you could basically borrow against your future revenue. So we didn't go with them. But there was a competitor that had a very similar product where you could essentially like borrow against your future revenues, which you got to be careful with that, obviously. But like, we were so confident in our, in our unit economics and our retention that we did that. So we got like a million 2 line, I think, and then you could recycle it. So we recycled that a bunch of times and use that as well. And like, you know, with our unit economics, it's like we acquire a subscriber now, it's for like $2 or $3. And like when we were growing, it was kind of like $2, but we were making it back in like 6 months, right? So like we had the— so basically you'd borrow $100 grand, say, buy 50,000 new subscribers, know that the revenue from them, if you continue delivering every day for your customers, which is a huge if, you gotta do that, of course. But like knowing that after about 6 months you paid that back, the interest rate on it was something really low. It was like 6 or 7%, which I was always amazed by for like the risk associated with the capital. And then, yeah, and then like, you know, then we're spitting out 100 grand, whatever the math is for the next 6 months in like profit, and we're reinvesting that and it makes the flywheel spin even faster. So yeah, that's kind of how we thought about it was, Once we got on that on that train, so to speak, how do you? You got to be careful. Obviously, debt, right? Like so just for the folks out here that that aren't familiar with this, and I'm happy to answer any questions ever. But like debt, like if you raise a venture round and things go bad, like you know you can you can like recover that with debt. Like if you you know if you don't things get bad, right? Like still yeah yeah yeah yeah the bank comes through they take they take the company. So there's definitely some risk. risk. Like, our partners, like, saw our unit economics every day. They were comfortable with that. We had, you know, my old bosses from private equity, they're really smart financiers, like, were very supportive of it as well. So we basically used that as the tool to get up to where we are now. And, like, you know, one of the big things is, like, we, you know, now own, like, you know, over 90% of the company is the management team, which is great.

Which is a massive plus. And that model, that kind of flywheel thing, is the same Jeff Bezos, same with Amazon, right? Like they offer more products, they can charge lower prices because they're doing more in sales. They kind of reinvest that into lower prices again. Like it's kind of this flywheel that they built over time. And then when they wanted to turn on profitability, they can do that. Like eventually, there's so much to that story, which is phenomenal. And anyone that has a flywheel type of business is ideal, especially if you can just kind of keep reinvesting. I had a question, I think from someone on Twitter, I want to say that was saying, or it might've been LinkedIn, is asking about with your flywheel and kind of How do you think about pulling liquidity out? How you want to handle that? Obviously, you said you're doing more than $1 million per employee in revenue with 21 employees. We can do the math on that, $21 million plus. Like, how do you think about pulling money out versus reinvesting? How much do you reinvest back into growth? Love to hear more about that. Yeah.

So in the early days, we literally put every dollar— well, not only every dollar, but then also like what we were borrowing, we put it back into the business. Like, so we were like kind of, you were losing money on the P&L. So we were investing like more than 100% of our revenues into growth, right? Because like the flywheel would spin even faster. As we've gotten bigger, it's like we kind of think about that in 2 ways. It's like, so one, we don't do that anymore just because we kind of grew out of it. But then now it's like, it's kind of 2 different flywheels. So it's basically like we have the revenue every day. Or every every month, and it's like what's the best long-term return on that capital, right? So like you can always just keep going back to the flywheel model again, assuming we deliver for our customers every day and our wonderful partners come back to us that we work so hard to deliver for on the revenue side too. But like you know, we could always go back to that, and there's kind of like a return on that capital, which is like very nice. Call it like mid-teens, twenty percent return. Like just keep doing that over and over again. So but then we what we've done is we've scaled is, or as we've gotten bigger, is like we're thinking about 2 like near-term level-ups. So like the first one is basically, so we have like, how do we get like Fortune 50 revenues? So like we're trying to get some revenues from like, you know, we just got like Apple as an advertiser and Fisher Investments as an advertiser, right? So like these guys with like these huge budgets, they pay more, like they're looking for like a different type of audience, which we have. So can we use some of the capital to invest in the team that then goes gets us higher revenues that then makes our flywheel spin even faster. That was the first level up. And the second one is the topics thing we discussed, right? So like, that thing's— it's not cheap. Like, we've like— we were not making— we just started making money on it for the first time, but like, it was an investment. It's almost like a—

R&D.

Yeah, it's like a venture investment inside our company, right? So like, we're looking at that, like, that's kind of how I look at every month. We look at every month. It's like we could either get another 50,000 subscribers, which will be worth, they're like $20, $30 LTV. So that's worth like $1.5 million over the next couple years. Or we can take that, the 50,000 subscribers this month and invest it in topics and like swing for the fences, you know? And that's one of our things. Like one of our principles is like, we always want to make sure like we're taking like a big, big swing. A lot, I think a lot of companies like do like a lot of like little things, respectfully. Like, so, and we've had the opportunities to do those. Like, we could launch a science newsletter and all these tangential newsletters, but like, we always said, like, it's not that big of a swing. We want to take a big swing. So yeah, we're basically reinvesting our growth money into that big swing. But the beautiful thing is it's like our capital, so we don't have to go raise it all the time.

There's so many things with that I have to say. Like, I love that there's— you see with the information. So like Jessica Lessin, She's now starting to do way more investments, small investments into like niche media companies, which makes total sense. You also see like in terms of people who kind of have done that, it's like look at Dharmesh from HubSpot. First, he had a successful company, had money before he wanted to take the big swing, which actually was HubSpot. They were going for the home run on HubSpot because they knew they already had money from that. Same with Ryan Peterson from Flexport. He had Imports Genius or Import Genius, which makes millions in revenue now. That was like secure. So he had money, and then he could take that huge massive VC swing with Flexport. Jeff Bezos, same thing with Amazon, them taking a swing on something like Alexa, something like the Amazon Echo, like Kindle, all these different things where they already have their kind of one main thing that works, which for you guys is the 1440 newsletter. And then you can also use that to then take the bigger swings, which I mean, people understand that inherently. But like, it's hard to do that always and know which thing you should do. And like, Which obviously, it's working well for you guys now at this point, which, which is phenomenal. One thing I'm curious about now, because I don't know if I've heard anything about this yet, is like, with those 21 employees, roughly, what's the mix between like editorial, or like curation and like sales or like R&D on this new product? Like, what does that look like? Kind of?

Yeah, so we, I think we got to like $10 million in revenue with, I think it was 5, 6 employees. 4 or 5 employees. I should go check the math on that. But like, we just kept it super simple. Like, as I said, like, write the newsletter, sell ads, grow the list, you know, keep, keep doing over and over again. Uh, and then like probably 3 years ago, we started saying like, okay, like we need to like actually build a real business here and like have, like scale it up. So then we added a couple more people to editorial. Um, we added like a full-time— I was kind of doing our growth for the first 4 years. Now we have Erica, who you've match, freaking all-star. So like we brought her in, and then so I would say like the core business is probably about like 10 to 12 people, and then we're going, and then those 2 level-ups we mentioned. So like we have like new sellers that are Fortune 50 sellers, so like they're going after that level-up.

Mm-hmm.

And then we brought in a whole like product team and developers and more editors and curators on the the topic side of the house. So, we actually have like more editorial people than any group, but it's, you know, 7 or 8 editorial, 4 or 5 sellers, growth person, 3 or 4 product people. We have a head of HR now, chief people officer. So, like, it's pretty scattered, but like the biggest one is actually on the editorial side, which kind of makes sense because like we're an editorial company, and we're trying to scale up the whole like the topic side of the business.

Yeah, that's interesting to hear how that has gone. You're still adding from the newsletter conference, you mentioned this, like adding 300,000 or something subscribers a month, even with this investment in topics and other things. You're still growing a lot, which is, which is impressive when you've had this flywheel model, which makes sense. I know we're like almost out of time here. One thing I'm curious about is with that, how does AI fit into the process of creating the newsletter, helping your curators/editorial side of it? Like, uh, any side, like where does AI fit into your business in general? I'm just curious on how you think about it.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we use it all the time on like, you know, for, um, ad creative and, um, that side of the house. So we've been using that for a couple of years. The thing we're trying to figure out now is basically with these topics pages, like to, to my, to our discussion earlier, we can take, you know, it takes us like a week to make one and like AI can make them in tenths of a second. So the way we think about it is like, how can we use AI? Like our whole thing is it's not like humans versus AI, but it's like humans plus AI, right? So like, how do you supercharge your employees to be even better? And like, we're starting, we're starting to experiment with this now is like, if we're going to go do a topic page on Shakespeare. Like, we want to make sure that at the end of the day, the human has the time to like go do that serendipitous work and like learn by themselves and like talk to experts and like do that stuff. But also, like, if you're looking for like the best 30 to 50 resources in the world to pull into that page, like AI can help you with that, right? So we're trying to figure out like, how do we balance using AI and computers and whatever, whatever tooling to like help the human be better at their job because like, if we don't do it, someone else is going to do it. But we do think it's like very, very important that what you said earlier, right? Like someone, like we think like the human guiding you through the experience and not just like prompting things is like what the beauty behind the Topics product. And if we just immediately outsource everything to AI, like we're just going to be like them and we're going to, it's not going to end well for us at all. Like very quickly it won't end well. So yeah, it's like, so So it's like, how do we basically use the tooling and all these wonderful products that exist and these prompts to make our humans better at their jobs? The way we're thinking about it.

That makes sense. I know we're almost out of time. One last thing I'm just curious about is if you were starting today or like just seeing the market now, where are these, where's the opportunity in newsletters, maybe media more broadly? Like what do you see or how would you approach starting something now? 'Cause a lot of people listening are gonna be like, I wanna start a newsletter. Are there starting newsletters? They're interested in this idea, they hear about 1440, like, oh my God, it's amazing. But obviously you can't just copy the same thing that worked to start off then. Like, what would you do now in terms of thinking about starting a media company today?

It's interesting because it kind of helps me that, or helps us that people say this, but there's like the, there's a big theme out there, which is like, you have to go like super, super, super niche. Um, and I don't know if that's always right. Because I think one of the things that that fails to take into consideration is like the TAM, right? So the total addressable market. So if you're doing like a very specific like B2B niche, like there's a lot of competition over there and like those markets aren't that big. So I think one of the things like I read like all the market chatter about media companies and one of the things I think like maybe some people aren't totally thinking about is, yeah, you can, yeah, the CPMs, 5 to 10 times higher, but the market's also like many, many orders of magnitude smaller. So one of the things like VCs always look for is like, you know, massive markets because like you can be wrong, but like still be like a big company. So I don't know. I hate to like negotiate against myself here because I kind of like that everyone's talking about like going niche, doing local news. Like that's kind of the flavor of the month right now. But I don't know if sometimes those entrepreneurs are thinking through like how big is the market behind that, one, and then two, like is there a lot of competition too? So I think like one of the reasons like we started this was like we thought about the TAM from the beginning and we always said like this is a huge market, 100 million Americans read the news on their phone, it's a big problem. So like that was one of the reasons we were excited to go tackle it. And also like we thought at the time, it's basically still true, like no one really does what we do, like the combination of comprehensive, inch deep, mile wide, and like just the facts, get rid of all the extras. So I think like the, you gotta be unique and then you gotta think about your TAM. It's just, I see a lot of companies that are launching products and they're putting their heart and soul into it. And then I step back and I'm like, is that ever gonna be big enough though?

When you say big enough for you, it's a specific Oh, sorry.

I mean big enough to like make, you can make a couple hundred thousand dollars in revenue to like, to support you as a, as like a solopreneur. That's what I mean. I mean like that level, right? So like, I don't mean like creating another, you know, Hustle or Morning Brew or 1440 or whatever, but even like some of the entrepreneurs are going after like certain industries to like, to be like a Substack founder or like a Beehive person. It just, I don't know. Sometimes I think like they're, they might be thinking like, is, I don't know if they're doing the TAM math, the total addressable market math on it. Right.

So, um, there's value in niches, but also if your niche is only $50K, like, yeah.

Like how big, how big, and then how much of the market can you actually capture? Like it's really hard to get a big, big per big chunk of the market. And then yeah, like once you cap, if you get it, if you get a quarter of a market of $50K, 50,000 people, that's what, 10,000, 12,000 people? Like, can you make $10 a year off them, right? Like, to make $100 grand in revenue? Yeah, it's like, is that worth it? Yeah, exactly right.

And like, one thing if it's 50,000 like watch collectors.

Correct, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

But I think that's a good example. Like, so watch collectors, huge LTVs, like they're spending tons of thousands, thousands of dollars on watches. But so But there's 50,000 of those people. But like, if that same audience, if it was something, can we think of something on the corner? I don't know, stationery collector, whatever, right? Like maybe they're not spending as much, so their LTV is way, way, way lower, and it's an equally small audience. And now like your lifetime value for that customer is $2 or $3, and there's only 50,000 of them. Like that math's not gonna end well. I think like this is what like VCs and private equity people are really good at, like where the big markets and which ones to go attack. And I worry like sometimes founders are a little bit too— don't think through all that, which to be fair, like that's part of it. You kind of have to like struggle and like learn and see what's right and wrong. But I just, I see a lot of takes where it's like, I don't think that guy, I don't think that person's thinking through the how big is this market side of it, which is actually— there's a lot of the VCs talk about this. Like you can make a lot of mistakes and if you have a big market, you can, you can still like make it where when you're in like a smaller market with like a bunch of competition, like it gets pretty tough pretty quick.

Yeah, that makes sense. I know we're at time. What's the best place for people to reach out to you, connect with you, and also learn more about 1440?

Yeah, so love for folks to subscribe if they haven't already. We're at join1440.com. I'm on LinkedIn. I try to be super helpful however I can. If anyone has any questions on On, uh, yeah, scaling a business or launching a business or just a lonely founder, which we've been before. Like, it sucks sometimes if you need someone to talk to. Yeah, just reach out and I'm more than happy to help however I can.

Thanks so much, Tim.

Cool. Thanks, Justin, so much. Appreciate the time.