How 1 Story Makes Him $3 Million a Year

Here's a quote from today's guest that really stuck out to me. Start with the story, sell anything but a book and sell the most expensive thing you can.

I think this embodies the spirit of.

Going beyond the book quite well. And today's guest, Dave Vergutts, has gone beyond the book to develop a story letter that's told through 24 letters delivered to readers right to their mailbox throughout the course of a year. It's an immersive experience. It includes bonuses, collectibles, and it makes $3 million a year.

One story.

It's incredible. Today David's going to share with us how he built ScareMail and help you be able to go beyond the book to build an empire for yourself. Now, this episode is pretty special because I actually went out to the ScareMail HQ to interview David in person. I would love to do more in person episodes. So if you are someone going behind the book in a really wild way and want me to come out and visit you, I am definitely down to explore that because nothing beats an in person conversation. Here's the tragic part though. We had a video in the warehouse of me and David recording this whole podcast. We did it inside of his warehouse in the same warehouse he ships all.

Of his letters from.

Unfortunately, that video got corrupted and is now lost. I talked to the software I filmed it on. I was with their support and the.

Divigrate software just had a glitch.

Unfortunately. It happens. We move on. The good news is that if you're watching the YouTube version, I still have some B roll that I got of the warehouse. You'll still be able to see some clips here and there, but the actual conversation of me and David talking is audio only. Which I guess if you're listening to the podcast then great, life is good for you now. I'm super excited for this episode and what really stuck out to me is that David didn't have all the answers when he got started this in a great way. He barely knew what he was doing. He went all in. He dove in. He was able to test and see that it was working and then from there. Has learned so much along the way and continued growing, learning and optimizing his processes. Going beyond the book doesn't require multiple years of education. You don't even have to know what you want to do. It's about getting imaginative and using the resources, the people around you and this community we have here to be able to go out and do it. And it doesn't have to be perfect. On day One, you don't have to have all the processes down. He was literally licking the envelopes at each one himself in the beginning. But you end up learning and doing things better. And I think David embodies that better than anyone and really shares with you the roadmap for getting started, testing if something beyond the book is going to work, and then actually going and doing it. And this same process you can use not for just going beyond the book and making story letters or videos out.

Of your books or other cool products.

But you can use for your actual stories themselves, which is crucial. Now, one last reminder before I get into it. I count this on the special sim. It's called the beyond the Book Mastermind. So after working with a lot of authors, we've had this organic CUNY form.

Of it's roughly a dozen of us.

In Discord meeting every week. And it's this incredible mastermind cuny, that is probably the most special place I've ever been in to talk about marketing business and growing as authors, using new technologies, going beyond the book to do really innovative things like what David's doing. I want to start inviting more people in this community. I'm not quite ready yet to open it up to the public. I think I'm going to do a little bit of a beta and maybe 45 days, and then in maybe six months or so, I'm going to actually share it more with the world.

I want to take things slow, I.

Want to make things measured, but I really think CUNY is the best way to learn about going beyond the book through a very intentional experience. You can sign up for the wait list down below. There's a link to that. It's beyondthebookacademy.com but if you want in now, you can also email me@hellothorsidekick.com I've been letting people in ad hoc. If you think someone's a good fit, if you think you're a good fit, let me know. Things are pretty informal now, but in.

The best possible way.

Just a group of people coming together. So if you're interested in joining and think you'd be a good fit, just email me and I'm happy to chat with you from there and we can then see if you're a good fit. All right, that's enough of me yapping. Let's dive into this episode with David for guts.

Today I'm with David for guts and we're spending 24 hours with the king of story letters. He. He's taken one story and has Turned it into a business that makes $3 million a year. And what's even crazier is he's done this all in the last year using story letters. We're going to share more about what story letters are and how he's done it. But it's been a mind blowing weekend being with you and I cannot wait to get to this conversation.

Yeah. Gonna be awesome, man.

We're literally inside his warehouse where he ships out 100,000 letters a month plus.

Yeah. About a hundred thousand at this point. From this facility, from here, with just the staff. Yeah.

Mind blowing. I don't think I've even received a.

Fraction of that letters in my lifetime.

A hundred thousand letters? What does it take to ship that out?

How did you even.

This facility. This is crazy. Or like in your empire now.

Yeah. There's involvement is not really. It's not a leap. Right. It's baby steps forward. Like it's encountering problems along the way when you first get started and then taking steps forward that are not only building what you're trying to build in the future, but also like supporting your operations and making your life easier so you can continue to build along the way. So when people say baby steps, I think that's probably a good term. It's overused and people don't really know what that looks like. Like, how do you go from like to this to a facility like this? And the answer is it's just one little step at a time. So we started off in my loft of my house, but prior to that, ideation for this was just on my kitchen table. There's a picture of me on the floor mapping out all my letters, the artwork that goes with them, that type of real stuff, that type of getting down on the ground and mapping out the letters and having a storyboard and putting it all together. That's what we do automatically. Right. So we don't really look at it for big vision stuff. We're not looking at like, oh, we ideate all the time. The big vision stuff. Like, is this going to lead to a facility? And the answer is, at the time I didn't think so. But what I was doing there on the floor and mapping this out and getting strategic with it was a baby step along the way to get to here.

Ah, yeah. No, it makes no sense. But why don't you share what even are inside these letters? Shipping out a hundred thousand a month. What is a story letter? What happens here?

Yeah, so the common. It's a common theme. Like so do I just Chop up a book into 24 letters. Do I chop up a book into six letters? And the answer is no. This is a story that can only be told through letters. So it's not a story that's told within letters. Right. It's not taking a novel, putting chapter one and letter one into. We're not doing that. We're telling a story between characters that their correspondence is. It has to make sense for it to be in letters. In this story. My characters are terrified of the Internet. They believe the Internet is basically the boogeyman and it's coming out to get them. And so now the only way they can communicate is the letters. And that really limits them as far as how often they can communicate, how they can be strategic about it. And so it gives the characters. It gives the characters strengths and weaknesses, and it gives them more life and vitality through these letters than you would if you just took a novel and put it into letter format. That's not what this is. If someone's. I want to do story letters, it's. If you just chop up a novel into 24 letters and try to make it work, you're going to find really dissatisfied customers because that's not what they're looking for. They're looking for a story that's told through letters.

Makes total sense. And that story is told through letters, like multiple. So, like, how many are in your story?

Yeah, so it's linear. So it's 24 letters over 12 months. And so the conclusion doesn't happen until letter 24. So automatically. Automatically. There's this sense of desire when you buy this thing. Yeah, it's a delayed gratification for the next year. You don't know you're not going to get the answer until a year from now. And so we're selling people on that because this is an instant gratification world, and we can offer them some opportunities to not feel instantly gratified, but still feel gratified and enjoying at the same time.

Yep, yep.

That's.

You're bringing the mailbox to life and to bring people together. Now, let's zoom out before you got here. Share with us. For those who are, like, brand new to you, tell us a little bit about David for guts. Tell us a little bit about what you were doing before you had this warehouse, because I know it's a recent.

Relative thing in your life.

Give us your author story.

Yeah, so my author story is very similar to a lot of other folks. Like, I had this vision that I was going to stand in a Bookstore with all my friends there and all my fans there. And they were going to ask me questions about my book and when the next one's coming. And then we're going to do a signing and it's going to be this, like this big event. And so I wrote my first book thinking of that. Right. And I wrote, I wrote Epic Fantasy. A lot of people know my, my, my story into this. At the same time I was a personal trainer, so I was big in the fitness world. And so I was building a business there at a very lucrative business there. I had a gym and all that. And I, at the same time started writing because I was like, oh, man, I can write from anywhere. And yeah, there's a methodology to storytelling, but I can create a story. Yeah. From nothing, from whatever's in my own imagination, versus something like fitness where it's okay. We can only create in hard work that we're selling to the client. Yeah, to them. Yeah. We can say we help sculpt it. It's not really creating. I wanted to create something. I wanted to create a story. And I had all these cool stories in my head like everybody else did, and I started with one and it wasn't really gratifying for me. Like, I wrote the first book, it felt good to get to the end and I felt great about it, but it didn't feel like secure. It was dark fantasy. That's where I started writing.

Yeah.

And I had a buddy who said, write a horror book. I think your fantasy is a little too dark for dark fantasy is beyond grim dark. So it was more on the horror than it was on the fantasy. And so I said, okay. So I wrote a horror book. And at this time I was testing ads and I had gone through some self publishing courses and that sort of thing to learn the ecosystem. This new author world that I was now a part of, a beautiful world of people who care about each other and want to see others succeed. And it's not like fitness, where we're not trying to poach each other's clients and readers. If you help somebody, that's likely going to help you too. This is a great place to be. And so I was already going all in on this community and fast forward, I was doing the pretty much the KU route. Right. So we're doing, doing a book a month. I did that for eight months. And at that time I started seeing a dip in Amazon and I didn't like the way things were going where I had to either buy leads off of Facebook or I had to hope and pray. They went to the back of the book to capture their email. Because I don't want just one buyer. I'm on repeat buyers. And I was realizing the two that like these customers that I was sending to Amazon are not my customers, They're Amazon's customers. I'm the customer for Amazon. That was really tough for me to wrap my head around and trying to find ways around that. And when I felt that dissatisfaction, I started looking for other options, like where is my future going? It's not gonna be in a mailing list that I just send to Amazon. I can't trust that. Yeah, direct is where I started going. So I tried a couple of different things along the way. In the direct sales route, like I was doing, I had a subscription that was based off of writing short stories and then putting those on YouTube and multipurposing them.

Like super cool. Yeah.

Giving away my creative freedom to allow clients or customers to vote on aspects of the story based on their tier level within my subscription service. So if you were the highest tier, you could veto out other boats. So gamified the writing short stories and then monetized on YouTube.

I love that.

So that was my one of my first forays into direct sales. And then I said, I realized the Amazon algorithm wasn't helping me. I'd built up a substantial list of about 20 to 30,000 readers. And I went direct all in. And it was a mid afternoon where I said, man, something's got to change. I can't keep doing this. What is pumping out another book gonna do for me? Yes, I love to write, but I'd love to create more. And I think that was where I was like, another book is not gonna be it. It's not gonna be the solution.

And at this time in your business, this was like, what time was this? Because then we're like in February 2025. How long ago was this moment you're.

Describing when you were feeling this time last year.

Wow. So one year ago today.

One year ago today.

And you were not full time at that point?

No, I was still working a day job. I was writing at night any opportunity I could. I was doing craft shows on weekends. I like farmers markets. I was making like 500 or $1,000 a day doing those. So I was like, I'm just going to go all in on farmers markets because it's working. And.

Yeah.

And that was a route. I was going to do a combination of like my direct sales and then I was going to do the farmers craft market and Then I was going to do my subscription. Between those three, I was making a livable wage. And at that point, that's when I really started looking at the opportunities that were involved in direct sales beyond my books. Like really looking at my IP as property that can be manipulated and transformed and sent out again to collect more money for me and collect more readers for me. And so I started looking at solutions, solutions for growing the business, growing my ip, growing my customer base. And it started by, if we had time for this story, it's real quick one and this will lead into scramble.

We're here, we're not only here for stories, we're inside where all the stories are. So yes, share with us the story.

Okay, so I'm. I was looking out my front door, live in a beautiful neighborhood and there's a cul de sac. And I was like, I thought it'd be really cool to shut down the cul de sac and just have an old school book scholastic book fair with a bunch of local authors.

Yeah, yeah.

And just have it as like a monthly thing right there in the neighborhood. So it's not a parking lot of petsmart or something. It's a neighborhood and just bringing people together. And then I was like, my eyes drifted back towards the focus and I saw the mailbox. I said, there's nothing good in that thing. There's going to be bills in there, there's going to be jury duty, there's going to be pig slips. There's a scene from the grid. Jury duty pig slip. Yeah, that's what the mailbox had in store. And I said, I wonder if I can change that. I. I got an idea. And so I started looking at basically epistolic writing. Just writing books, stories, novel through letters.

Yeah.

And I said, I'm going to solve that problem for the reader right there. That mailbox sucks and we're going to fix it. And that's where the ideation started.

So that's such an interesting like framework for people to approach their lives through like looking around the world and going basically, what is boring? What is challenging for readers? It could be a moment in their lives or it could be like a physical thing that they experience their days or just a medium that is on it. And how do we inject that with something that's more. Because that's what we're trying to do here. Storytelling ultimately entertain people.

Right?

Wow.

Yeah. We're entertainers. And when. And so the non fiction guys are really great at this. Right. Because they have a list of problems they Know they want to solve that they're expert, experts in. Right. The difference is, as fiction writers is that we have a list of issues we want to solve for the reader too. And it goes beyond just entertainment. Right. So if we can solve other things, auxiliary issues for them, like the mailbox, that's why the story. So yeah, you still get to be the storyteller you want to be, but also look at opportunities for solving issues for readers within the framework of your stories. I started taking a non fiction approach to a fiction book.

And that's totally like how you can go beyond the book right there. That is going beyond the book. So now walk me through a year ago, you basically started to come up with this idea for. I think there's something in the mailbox. Now it's this massive empire where you're sending out 100,000 letters a month, which is still unbelievable. It. I'll show a picture on the screen of it as we were like shipping out and literally bringing some of these letters to the mailbox earlier today. Not the mailbox, the post office. 50,000 was just the shift today. Yeah, just today. So I was helping David and his team with Was mind blowing. Like this is just so many letters. Even just like the international letters that was. That stack of letters was insane. That was just being sent international now between where we are now, sending out literally 50,000 letters a day. And when you got this idea, what were some of the biggest mistakes you made?

Oh, man. So mistakes were probably in. I would probably the one that didn't need to be the biggest mistake, which was the story itself, getting more familiar with that medium. Because prior to this, I hadn't ever had a story letter before and I knew they existed. I'm not the first person in this space. I think I'm the first indie author in this space to tell it this way, at this scale, in this method, with the way things are done. But I'm not the first one to do it. There are plenty of other companies that do it. And so I didn't do my research. I just went all in. I said, I'm gonna try this idea 100%. And to be honest, I probably didn't need to go a hundred percent. I probably could have tested it. I probably could have tested it to a smaller market first before my list. So we talked about that before is how I hit my list with it first. And that was the good indication. I'm like, okay, I made 200 sales off my list. This is a go.

200 sales of 100 plus.

Dollar product 100 U.S. yeah. So we did $20,000 on launch, which is epic for pre order for a couple of months with nothing but an envelope and a couple of pictures. So like it doesn't take a lot. It was shot with an iPhone on my Shopify store. Like the images are still up there and you can see em. It's got my wife in them. Like those are the ones to this day that sell the best as the first one I ever took. And we don't even use those envelopes anymore.

I was literally. Yeah, that was very cool to see that. Even this morning, seeing that those are still the ads performing. That's actually really cool. Yeah, it sounds. It's the most simple, authentic thing you do.

Yep. And so I think the biggest mistake people do is okay, there are people out there who have probably done the things that you're looking to do, but maybe you can learn something from them before you overstretch yourself. Right. So you can try and reach out, try and analyze businesses, try to analyze storytelling methods. Like when I look to create products within the horror field, I don't actually don't look in horror. I don't look at what anybody else would do in horror. I look what people are doing in romance. And. And I, I think I told you about this is that that the person that I most followed to learn how to do TikTok content when that was my big push was Willow Winters.

Yeah. Yeah. She's fantastic. If you have been followed Willow Winters and TikTok, she's got 250000 followers and is actually has a warehouse of her own. Maybe I'll go visit that one day, Willow, if you'd let me visit, I would love to see your warehouse. But she also has her own empire with book boxes. And you're right, she crushes it on TikTok.

So. And the reason I watch the. The romance is because the emotional connection, right. Romance, the love feeling is something that I can tap into because I'm a horror writer. So I can tap into horror with other people. And so it's a. It's an instant connection with the audience. A lot of, A lot of genres like, have to go about it differently, right? So sci fi is not an emotion attached to it. There's. You promised an epic story and through that story there's emotions and stuff like that, but it's not inherent, it's not expected. In horror, you're expected to be horrified. In romance, you're expected to be romanced. And it's because that's why I latched on to other romance writers who are doing this, who are cultivating these rabid fan bases, who are just obsessed with the stuff that they do, where they can pretty much brand and merge anything at this point. Yeah, because the readers are just that. So that emotionally invested in what they're creating. And so that's where I would go. I would look to businesses that were already established, that were doing very well, maybe in a lateral market. Right. So like romance or horror to romance. And then that way it could save you a lot of heartache along the way. Like when we were first printing our labels, we were printing them on Avery labels, hundreds of them. And we were licking envelopes until about 3 o' clock in the morning. So that's how we got going. And if you're not willing to lick envelopes at 3 o' clock in the morning when you got to work at 4am Then you know you probably don't need to be doing this.

But there's something beautiful about that. Like you don't have to know the best way to get started. And in retrospect, what you were doing maybe was maybe not even a mistake, but not the best way to do it. But the fact that you were doing it what got you to learn. So you have to be willing to do it. I do think good advice though on being measured. You said specifically like you would have done a smaller launch before your list to test even more. What would have that looked like?

I'd look for a percentage yield. Right. So take my top fans and. And just reach out to them. And just reach out to them and probably even give it away for free just to them. Because worst case scenario, what am I out? I'm out at 24 part story letters, whatever I could possibly deliver via email if they understood it's just a test, get their forethought on it and say what do you think about this? Would you buy this? That's what I would do.

So do almost a beta launch before the pre launch.

I would. And pick your top performers. Cause that's the people who are going to pay your bills anyways. So it's the top people in your.

They're gonna have the most understanding as well. If you kill the project, they'll be like, okay, cool, I got to see something early. Didn't work, but I got to see it.

You got to see it early and maybe even continue to deliver. I know an author and we're going to meet with him this weekend that he launched his own story letters and they didn't perform very well on the ads, and he couldn't really make the conversions word. And he struggled a little bit with it, but he was able to deliver that story itself, the one, the IP he had created for the story. Letters to his super fans that are already on his subscription. So he gave them an additional product, additional promise for nothing, while testing it. And so that's what I would do. And that's where I was talking about my subscription before, where I was writing short stories and I was giving my readers the opportunity to vote on them. And then I was monetizing that by putting them up on YouTube with the AdSense money. So that's at worst. At the worst case scenario, you made.

Money on the AdSense.

I made money on the AdSense, yeah. Best case scenario, I gave my readers something that they were paying for. And so that's what I would do. I would reach out to your superfans first, start with them. And even if a percentage yield of them, it's okay, we only got 10% that, like, it's probably not a good investment. Maybe it needs tweaking. Maybe it needs some more ideation.

Totally.

And I know you talked about adapting.

Ideas from other industries and bringing it into what you do. And one thing I've noticed, seeing your warehouse is how many things you do that are so creative. And these are boxes that you have what I'm showing, because this is the box that I can put my story letters in.

Yeah.

Now, you don't just do this. You have. You were showing stickers. You are figuring out all these different ways to serve your readers. Where do you get ideas like this? And how do you still come up with ideas? What makes you think, oh, this is a good idea for scammer. That's not gonna be good with scammer.

Yeah. So I'm always looking, is this something that's going to. Is this going to find me new readers, or is this going to service the readers I currently have? And so the issue with the book box, it was that I didn't have anything to offer them at first. And so I was trying to see if maybe I can get away with them. Because producing this kind of stuff at scale is a lot more horrible than trying to produce it not at scale. And trying to create something for yourself is even more difficult. So let's say you're creating a hundred boxes somehow piecing it together. So there's this weird middle ground when you're like, okay, do I go all in on a product and buy 5,000 units and if I got 5,000 units, where am I going to store them, how am I going to ship them? And all this stuff, do I even know what they're going to buy them? So there's that big jump from, hey, we could do this cool thing. And so like we were talking about baby steps. Like before I have this book box, I had a sticker pack made because I saw people were doing their own book boxes because I didn't have one available. And so since they were doing their own book box, I was like how I called a book box, the letter box. Um, I said I can create a sticker pack because stickers a whole lot cheaper than let's say these boxes. If I was buying only a small quantities, sure. So like I bought a thousand sticker sets and it cost me 200 bucks. Not a bad investment. But what I failed to realize is that they were already offering me solutions. They're like, I don't have a place to store my letters, I don't have a place to put it. Like we started seeing this too in other, other reader groups where they have thumb holders to hold the, the book open while you're reading it with one hand. Like a little thumb thing just to give your thumb a little bit of relief. These are simple problems that you could be the solutions for. And so like having a place to store the letters reminds you of. Why shouldn't I as a author maybe sell a stand to put my books on? Especially if they buy like a special hard back leather bound.

Yeah, they want to show it off.

Want to show it off to collector's piece. They're really going to grab that, that, that leather bound and read it every year or are they going to have it there and maybe let their other copy the paperback get beat up for the reading that story over and over again. So like looking at solutions like that, we're like, can I, maybe I can sell the book? Stand alongside with the book. And so that's what this is, a box to keep the letters in. That's all. It's listening to your readers, listening to what they're asking for. And that comes from a couple things that comes from you have to stay cognizant, you have to stay engaged. You have to stay engaged beyond YouTube or beyond your newsletter. So, and that would be one more thing I'd suggest early on is like start funneling people towards a group, Facebook group, any kind of group where you can get outside stuff from them, interacting user generated content. Get that it's free and it tells you the solutions that your readers are looking for, they're in plenty of groups. They're in hundreds of groups. But on occasion, they'll scroll through your course and when they do, sometimes they'll post pictures. And those pictures will tell you everything you need to know about them. So that's what I would do. Listen to your readers and listen to em beyond the message, the occasional email they send, you, listen to em in a place where you have control. As much control as you possibly can.

Yeah, a hundred percent. And I was just thinking, as you're talking about the different boxes that you made, and I know you did a huge bulk order of, even the stickers, the letters, the printers you now have, there's like a lot of almost like manufacturing muscle that goes into this. Like, truly, how do you work with manufacturers? How do you get things made? Because you've gotten so many things made for your business, how do you do that?

Yeah. So like, when it comes down to what comes down to machinery. Like a lot of the machinery that we're doing, we, our business can survive with just our labor. Right. We don't need the machines. The machines just make the process easier. So machines are one of those things, like, if you can afford it, buy it later. Right. So do everything you can manually. So like, we looked at the option of paying for a, like a printer, a local printer to print on cardboard for us and click it out and then put, and then color it with ink and then we would assemble it. Right. And so that would offer a book box solution. So it's like, what can I work with what I have here before I can move into things like machinery and before I can move into distributors? If you're looking, if you're looking to say, oh, I want to get a bunch of book boxes made or a bunch of sleeves made, and you're. That you can't go to Sticker Mule and get like a bunch of custom made book sleeves made. You have to go to a manufacturer somewhere, and a lot of times it's offshore. Those offshore manufacturers don't want to talk to you unless your quantity is 500 or above. And if your quantity is 500, that means your cost per item is extremely high. So they'll work with you for 500. But even 500 is not really manageable for a lot of authors right now. I don't want to, I know a lot of authors don't want to carry 500 paperbacks. That's a lot of space that it takes up. And so what I would say is like Working with manufacturers is saying, okay, can we test the product first with what we have? Is it selling? Are people happy with it? Okay, now how can we reduce costs from there?

Right.

To collect up more of a margin, Then how can we get faster at it? So now we're faster, now we're more efficient. So the manufacturer is just like the machine. It's only there if you really need it. Could I make these book boxes myself? Yeah. I bought the stickers, I could buy the cardboard. I could piece them together. And it's probably what I was going to do prior to going to this. And so, like, I think there's still value in sweat equity and being able to pick up something, fold it together into something else, and having maybe that be as like your starting idea, Right.

Yeah.

That's what you test, and that's what if it works. And then once you put that sweat equity in, you're like, okay, this is selling. Now I can reduce costs. Now I can buy at scale. Now I can operate machinery. So, like, our first labels were Avery labels. Very expensive in comparison and very heavy. That's the other thing we didn't realize, too, is that labels increase the weight of our letters. So our first letter batches were very expensive getting started because it increased the weight of those individual lapses. It's stuff you don't realize until the end. Until you look back. Until you look back.

That's. Yeah, all those little details, they add up. And it gets me thinking about all operations that go into this. I want to dive into that. But my first question for you is more just big picture.

You.

I know you have a lot of things going on. Being with you the last day, there's driving to the post office, there's calls about ads. There's everything happening here every day just to get the letters packed. And I know you at your core because we've talked so much like you're an amazing business person, incredible entrepreneur, but you love storytelling. We've talked about some different ideas and, oh, you could do this, do that, because there's future things coming out which we'll talk about, which are really exciting. But you always go back to the stories. That's what you love.

Yeah.

How do you find time and space for the stories when you've also got a hundred thousand letters on your mind?

Yeah. And. And so when you're at the phase, when you've got that kind of scale, there's naturally going to be. People work free. Right. And so people don't realize that. My most valuable asset here is not this facility. It's not the machinery. It's the people over there working for me. So, like, they're literally back there right now. Literally back there right now. Yeah. So they're working there. You work today for free. I work there.

He's been a very kind host, very generous.

And. And then I got two assistants that are working for me as well. So I've got a staff, right. And I've got a night shift crew that's going to come in in a few hours as well. So, like these types of operations, once you get to a scale, you're going to need help and giving. And giving duties to your help. It needs to be very specific. So what I'm saying is, if it's taking your time away from storytelling and you can give it to somebody else who works for you and they can feel gratified and they can care about what you're trying to create. They can see the bigger vision of Scare Mail. They can see the bigger vision of the Master of Malice brand. If they can see that, then they're going to feel more invested in what they're building for you. They're not going to just be a wrench hunter. My people are not wrench turners. They care about this company. They care about us. They want to grow it. They have fun coming to work. So, like, when you're looking at. When you're at that scale and you're hiring people, you're not hiring people for an hourly wage. It's an investment. And that's what I would say is because you're investing in getting your own time back. Because if I didn't have those folks, you and me would be stuffing those envelopes right now while we're talking.

Sure.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

No, you probably wouldn't get any sleep at all. Be impossible at this stage, honestly. But then walk me through, like, how did you actually. What order do you make hires in? Like, you could share. Like, maybe you don't share exactly the order you mean hires in, but like, how. What order would you consider? Because, like, we all have. Every author talks about getting a PA to help them with this and that. We see it in so many different groups. There's, I need an ad person. I needed this person. What person do you really need to start with?

Yeah, I think the easiest move would be just ask yourself, like, do I have more time or more money right now? What do I have more of? Because if you have more time, then you don't need anybody. You have yourself. And it's very Hard to give up money when you don't have any money, but you have plenty of time. I would say the first thing you need to do is invest in yourself. If you can learn it yourself and take that over, then you should be doing that. That's the greatest investment in your business you could ever make is by saying, I'm willing to do this because I don't. Most people hire out because they don't. They want to get back to the writing. They just want to get back to the writing. I want to. I want to make sure I don't have to write my own emails each week because that takes up an hour of my time. And so they hire a VA and they, okay. At that point, you said, okay, my time is worth that VA's hourly wage. And you're like, okay, I got back that hour. But then there's the other part of it. Is, is this thing moving the needle for you? Is this thing that you're trying to task out moving the needle? Or is it just a task you're handing off so you can write more? Is writing more making you more money?

And the weird part is, which we've already touched on, but for a lot of authors, the answer might actually be the more you write, you're not actually making more money.

No, it's costing you a lot because you're not.

Yeah, you're spending a lot on editing cover design. You're not creating something that.

I have one story that makes me $3 million a year. One story.

There we go. One story, $3 million.

That's.

Yeah, that's everything. And when it comes to thinking about scaling that audience, one thing you've mentioned that is so important is, like, there's. And we were already talking about it was funny. It's. It almost feels like you're always in the middle ground.

Right.

But there's that distinct period when you're getting started and not making much money, when it's, okay, got the bootstraps there. And then there's like, this level where now every. You have the ability to hire people and things are going well. And for you, like, that happened very quickly. And it sounds like for a lot of authors, it does tend from the outside. It took you years, but there's a moment where it's like, I wasn't making very much. And then three months later, it scales. And I know even now it's funny because, oh, you're now at this scale. But, like, this still brings a lot of problems. When you get bigger, you'll have less Problems, you know, less of these headaches because you'll have larger staff to help you, better systems, all of that. But how did you scale Scaremo? And how do you think other authors should approach scaling something when let's say they do a pre launch and it works? What's your next move after that?

Yeah, and so the process of I, I would say, okay, you've got a product, you've got people who bought it, now you're looking at fulfillment. How can I get this to my customers? Most effective way so they're satisfied, and then what are their next steps after they get the product? So the beautiful part about Scaramel is that they're in my ecosystem for at least a year, at least. So I've got plenty of time for customer satisfaction. A lot of authors may not have that opportunity when they only have a book that they sold that customer. And so getting that, how could you enhance the experience beyond the book where they're like, okay, I've got the book, now what's my next step? Is it go to the back of the book and sign up for the free thing or is there something else I can encourage them to do? Each one of my books comes with a thank you card that tells my story about how I became an authority on that is a 15% off discount code for any book in my store. Like that little card, I can track the conversions on it and I can tell you how many people have used that discount code. And so we sell about $10,000 a month in books. And I can tell you that we have at least 2% of people who are using that code again, out of those 10, out of that 10. And it didn't cost me anything. So that's my next step. Right? So you buy a book. Here's the next step. Go buy another book. If it's going to the back of the book, fine. But the idea is to always look at like, where is your customer base? Where are they coming in to your system, what are they buying? And then what is their next steps? And so like, how can I get the books to them faster, cheaper or better, Right? So that's the only three options you got in this. You got good, fast and cheap. Pick two, you can have two. So most of the time people don't really care about fulfillment.

Right?

Oh, one book here, I gotta ship it out tomorrow, I can drop it off at the post office, whatever. But let's say you got 30 books and then two days later you had a weird phase and you got another 30 books.

Yeah.

You got another 30 books. Yeah. And so you start looking at, okay, 30 is not necessarily a scare at the scale of a hundred thousand. Right. But. But it's something and pack it. And that's a weird middle ground between the onesies and twosies and between the big scale operations where you've got a team of staff who are stuffing books for you. So, like that weird in between phase. Then you start looking at, okay, maybe I can hire somebody part time, maybe I can back off my hours at work so I can fulfill my own orders. So you start looking at, is this an opportunity right now to move the needle or am I just what's more useful for me right now? Is my money more useful or is my time more useful? And so when you're at that weird phase, that weird in between, I. I can't tell you where that answer is. You. You have to decide for yourself. But I can tell you that unless you have found something that is consistently moving the needle for you that you could then hire out to somebody else to do for you, you get back your time. Otherwise you're just turning the wrench. Nobody's actually progressing in anything. You're not building anything.

And I see that happen a lot of times where an author might hire someone to do social media work for them, but their social media work isn't converting to anything. So they're paying for someone a hundred dollars a week to do something for them.

Yeah. To post a couple images on Facebook and ask a question in the reader group, what are you reading today?

And it's not the person's fault who's doing.

It's not.

It's that the work in and of itself wasn't creating value for that business. And a really good book that I'll recommend everyone, it's called buy back your time by Dan Martell. Talks like all about this in detail. But there's still something really important because. Okay, so I want to buy back my time. I've got an understanding that the more I grow, I can see where things are the most valuable and taking the most of my time, outsource those and spend where I can get the highest ROI my own time. But let's say I'm still at the stage where I set up my business. I maybe have a unique. Last night I was talking about this weird thing of can you ship someone like almost like a stuffed animal that has a story over six months? Right. Something like that. Where you get this, you pay $100 to this stuffed animal that tells you a story over A period of time I get my list to like it. My existing audience, maybe my existing audience is five people, and I get them to like it. The biggest problem every author has is how do I get my audience to be bigger? So how did you get your audience to be bigger? Because I know so many people have come to you from Scaremill and that's how they know you.

Yeah. Growing an audience, it's. I would say the easiest thing to do is unite them under an idea. Unite them under an idea. If you're just like, hey, I'm a great author and you love my books, that's great. You're a dime a dozen amongst hundreds of other people saying the same thing. And you're not fighting necessarily for that reader, but you are fighting for, let's say, their attention. Because, like, you spent a lot of money to get that book in front of them with an ad, but if some other ad beats you out, then, yeah, that author's not your competitor. But you lost that time. You lost that money. That could have been your sale. So uniting a customer under an idea. Scaremail didn't start with here's a story told through letters. It's cool. It started with a message. The mailbox sucks. Let's fix it together. Let's get back to being human. And so that's the idea. Part of Scaremail too is like, there's a lot of goodwill and goodwill that supports the messaging, it supports the brand. I have been authentic with my readers since day one has not changed with Scaremail. I've not changed who I am. I still sign off on all my newsletters. Officer Friendly out. So I'll never stop being a cop. But like, I have maintained that authenticity from start to finish and readers resonate with that. And so one of the messages I said we were going to unite behind us. We're going to get back to being human. We're going to get on these screens, even if just a little bit, and we're going to do it with intent.

Yeah.

And I started something called Caramel, which is Scaremail with a silent square and it's a pen pal service and it unit it each week or each month. I'm sorry. People can sign up from my newsletter and who have purchased Scarevale, so it's entry only and my system will automatically pair them with a pen pal from across the world from my own reader list. So I'm uniting not only my readers with me, but I'm uniting them with each other. I have six people that I know are still to this Day sending letters back and forth every other day to each other through the mail. Based on the pen pal service, they're best friends and they have plans to meet each other in London next year.

Oh, that's so cute. That's adorable. Yeah, that's awesome.

So like that type of thing, that is something that you cannot just buy with a book. You have to go with it with intent. You have to have an idea said. Look, let's you like, I, I had this idea for a story. It's called Big Effing Spider. And it was going to unite people under the idea that spiders are scary. Right. And so it's. And there's going to be a bunch of merchandise and giant spider stuff and it's going to be silly and over the top, but it's still the idea of uniting people under simple thought, a simple idea. And the story can give them the solution to that. Right. The story is always the solution to that problem. But you have to be like, okay, what problem am I addressing? How can we do it together? The author, the person who has a solution, the reader who has the issue, we're going to solve this together.

I'll end it off with two more questions I have for you. My second, my second last question is, what do you see as like the big advice that you'd give to any author based on the things you've learned in your career? I think that one thing we know is true, there's only one scare amount, but people are going to go build their own empires. Maybe it's selling ebooks, audiobooks, maybe it's getting into book boxes. Maybe someone else wants to do something with letters. But how do you, what have you learned? What advice would you give to folks starting out?

Yeah, there's all kinds of platitudes we've heard in this industry, right? Community is everything. Build an audience, tell a great story. But I really think it is that if you're going to try something, you need to give it your all, your everything. If you're going to try something, even in the short term, if it's going to take your time away, it deserves every ounce of what you have. Because only then will you know if it's if it worked or not, because you tried your damnedest to make it work. So like with scare mail, it was one of those things I said, we did the test, we went all in. That's how it goes.

Yeah.

Do the test, go all in? And so at that point, what do you have? You have either lessons learned or you have an Empire, one of the two.

I've learned a lot of lessons myself. You can't go wrong.

Yeah.

You got to stay in the game, keep doing things to learn. I love it now you've come so far. It's a short period of time. It's incredible. But I know this is still the beginning of your story. What is the future of Scare Mail? What is the future of your business?

Yeah, story. From the beginning, story to the end, it all starts and ends with a story. And so I will never stop creating stories. There's a Scaremill 2 launching this year. It is a whole different product told the same way, but we're doing full immersion audio for the first time ever seen before in letter format. So innovative new things in this industry where you will not only be able to get the experience of Scare Mail, but you'll be able to listen to it and read along as the characters write it out on pen and paper on the letters. You get to hear that happening in real time and be a part of that story that is leading into a full on augmented reality game. Where we are going to turn through Scare Mail, through the brand, turn your house into a haunted house. Using props, using different mediums, podcasts, imagery, letters in the mail, emails, phone calls. We're going to turn your house into a haunted house. It starts and ends with story every single time. So while I'm doing all this stuff, I am still a storyteller.

I love it. Thank you everyone for being on this episode of the beyond the Book podcast.

So much for coming on, man.

And yeah, thanks man.

All right, everyone, thank you so much for listening. Actually filming this episode from London right now. So if you made it to the end. Hello from London. I'm hosting four story suppers throughout London, Manchester, Birmingham and Dublin because I had to deliver the big pencil, which if you don't know about the big pencil, you can see it in the background here on YouTube. But it's essentially a massive four foot pencil that someone won at the costume contest I held two or three weeks ago. Refund and I gotta deliver them. So I'm going to Dublin to do that. I'm staying with my brother in London, spending some time in Europe. I love it here. Wherever you're at in the world, I'd love to hear from you. I am being nomadic now and probably plan to be nomadic for quite some time. It's just a great way to meet people, great way to see the world. And I'm fortunate that my work, being able to serve you all and create hopefully some really helpful content, tools and technology for y' all allows me to be remote, so that's what I've been doing. I'd love to hear what y' all have been up to. It's finally close to summer and I love the summer weather, so I'm happy. I'm definitely happy. And it's been really cool to see y' all support the podcast to see y' all support of the author marketing superpowers deck. I have another cool launch towards like the end of April, beginning of May, most likely, and then another cool thing to announce, end of May, and then another cool thing, June into July. So it's a busy couple months of me coming back to the industry, but some really exciting stuff coming up. So stay tuned. You're in the right place. This podcast. I'll update you all here. My newsletter, authorsidekick.com, another great place. Always love your feedback. Let me know what episodes you want to hear. Let me know what you're looking for here. I feel like I can do multiple episodes a week of beyond the Book because I haven't even proactively tried getting guests yet. Everything's been like a mix of inbound friends and, like, authors in the CUNY saying, hey, you should talk to this person, and then connecting me to them, which I'm endlessly grateful for. I literally just feel like there's more conversations that could be had. But I'm also, like, struggling because I'm like, would two episodes a week be, like, too much for y'?

All?

I'm looking to hire a podcast editor, like the next, let's call it 90 days. And with that, I'll have more capacity to focus on the actual interviewing side and the research, because it takes me roughly two to three hours, minimum research per podcast. Some podcasts, I'm reading full books beforehand to prep. There's one coming up recently that is going to be amazing about breaking into retail. The stuff coming here is just insane. I'm mind blown and I can't wait. But when it comes to your listening habits, I would love to know, is two episodes a week too much for you? I don't want to necessarily always do two episodes a week, but if I'm able to do so, and there's just like a lot of content and a lot of great interviews, then I don't want to necessarily be closed off to it because I'm starting to get to the point now where I'm either recording interviews six weeks out and then just not recording interviews for six weeks straight or I suppose having a huge backlog or having to release more than one a week. And I'm trying to figure out what to do. So let me know. Would you listen to two episodes a week of beyond the Book? I can't make a promise it'll happen every week, but maybe sometime this year I'll try to get to my process and production so that I can deliver two high quality episodes to you a week if that's something you'd find valuable. If you don't think it'll be valuable, then one a week is what I'll try and stick to. All right, you let me know. Y' all are awesome. Have a great rest of your day. And as always, don't forget, together we are boundless.