Email Marketing & Why All Content Creators Should be Using SendFox | My First Million

How many emails do I send a year? Maybe 600 or 700 million.

The best business to start is something that solves your own problem. And so for me, I was using Mailchimp. I've used ConvertKit. I've checked out AWeber. One, I found them way overexpensive. I found them way overcomplicated. It took me like 45 minutes to set up a Mailchimp email. And so I was like, I just want something more affordable and simpler. And that's why we built SendFox. And I think that's something where I'll keep working on it forever with the team. I think what's interesting is trying to think about what's going to happen in the next 6 months to 6 years. And then how do I be a little bit ahead of everyone else? So if you think about it, let me ask you, Sam, do you think there's going to be more or less content creators in the future?

Absolutely more.

So I think, you know, the one problem that I noticed with all the channels like YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or any of these is that ultimately they are incentivized to get you to pay to talk to your audience. Why? Because they have to make money. And so email is the only channel I've ever found that can scale communicating with an audience that you can fully control. And so I think if SendFox becomes the number one place for people to grow their audiences, uh, one, I want it for myself, number one, and two, it's just a really big and interesting opportunity to work on.

So we send How many emails do I send a year? Maybe, uh, 600 or 700 million. I don't even know, to be honest. How many— AppSumo probably has a similar amount of emails, like hundreds of millions of sends per year. I pay— I think I pay $10,000 or $15,000 a month to send those. Is it— does that sound right?

I don't really know. I think what— there's two things that are more interesting to me. One, I've been focusing more on the total audience. That you have available, because email is a component of your audience, right? So you actually have like Hustle Facebook, Hustle Instagram, Hustle YouTube, Hustle Podcast, and your total active audience, and there's overlap. That number I'm actually more fascinated with. And the second thing with email, I think the metric— cost is one thing, but I think the metric that—

You said SendFox was trying to make it cheaper, 'cause you were saying—

More affordable. I don't like the word cheaper.

More affordable. Yeah. More affordable.

Yeah, because—

But that's what I'm asking is how much does that cost to send?

I like for us, we said, I'll tell you if you take 0.0002 and then times that by how many emails. So the thing that MailChimp and ConvertKit and all these guys, so 0.0002 times your number.

So they make money if you don't send emails because they make money off your subscriber.

Of course. And so the way that, so SendFox is free and then we're a one-time payment because most people don't actually email. And so we're trying to fix that. And work through those kind of challenges with people. But the other thing I think people need to think about in terms of growing their community or starting a newsletter, like if you don't have one, start it today, use SendFox.com, number one. But the second thing is, the number that's the most important is not your email list size, it is your active email list size. So it is the amount of people within 3 months that have opened and clicked your email. Because, you know, I've had hundreds of thousands, probably, I think in my total lifetime of OKDork, I've had 175,000. Subscribe to the newsletter. My active audience is only 55. Think about that.

Yeah. And that's what we do too, but we churn people every 3 months. Like we sunset them, uh, like where we send them an email and be like, hey, you're going to get— we're going to take you off this list.

What percentage is it?

I don't know off the top of my head, to be honest with you, but I know that like one— I can tell you this though. So like our open rate's really, really high right now. It's like 55%. And I think the average person stays 2 years. So you can somehow figure out what that is. Yeah. But, but like, like if we don't get them on the hook right away, then they're never going to get on the hook.

How do you get them on the hook?

Your welcome email needs to be really good. Your thank you page after they sign up needs to be really good. You know this shit. This is what you did.

No, it's good, dude. Here's the thing. I'm still learning.

Well, you had this. Even your unsubscribe page needs to be great, which you didn't— you have a really good unsubscribe page.

Yeah, but I gave up on that one. I think the thank you page and your welcome thing are like the two of the most neglected pieces of marketing.

Yeah. I call them like, you have to make the forgotten parts really good. So like your thank you page, your welcome email, your unsubscribe page, just like little Easter egg shit like that. That needs to be good. But, uh, to make them good.

Yeah.

Well, our— so I get accused of stealing CD Baby's email, welcome email, which I didn't even know, uh, what that was. But then when I saw it, I realized, oh yeah, I can— I totally understand why people see this, think I steal that, stole that. But my welcome email was, uh, like a really detailed welcome email that it was like really long and explained what happened when you signed up. And it was pretty funny. And like, if you Google like the Hustle welcome email, a lot of people wrote about it. People seem to like that. So just like being creative and writing long-form content about what happened after those types of things, when those people signed up, it works pretty well. But with— so let's say like ConvertKit, let's say ConvertKit is doing $20 million a year in sales, which ConvertKit is awesome because I like the guy who started it. I like ConvertKit and they reveal all their revenue numbers. If they're doing $20 million in revenue, like you said that you were trying to make SendFox more affordable. I have no idea. How much do they actually charge, think to, or how much are they, what's their COGS in order to send all those emails?

$0.002. It might be $0.00015 times how many subscribers, how many emails they're sending a month. The profit is all in the people who don't email. It's basically, I think of email marketing companies as very expensive hosting. You're basically paying a lot of money to host zeros and ones and digits that don't cost anything. And so I think more importantly, if people are trying to start businesses, like, that's a really interesting business to start. It's also an interesting business to disrupt. Like, I think Substack has done amazing with it, coming at it from like, hey, email is actually free and we're going to make money on the subscription part so you don't have to pay for email anymore. Same with SendFox. It's like, it's mostly free and we're going to be focusing— we're focusing more on like YouTubers and podcasters. So it's like, who are the audiences that aren't really emailing enough or don't know how to email for this specific type of audience.

I think a market for that is musicians, bands. I think there's a huge— like if you look at the money where musicians make it, it's in concerts and they're horrible at notifying you when they're coming into town. What are you doing? Are you typing right now?

I was typing some note, dude. Relax. But yeah, I think musicians, I mean, I think the point though, you have to serve a customer that I think you have an understanding of. I think a lot of these wantrepreneurs out there are like, oh yeah, let me go help musicians. I'm like, one, I don't know shit about musicians. I'm learning to play piano. It's right here. But the point being is like, I think we, we, it's not that you shouldn't go outside of your comfort zone. I just think that there's easier ways of success. And I think more, too many people make it too hard on themselves. And it's just like, go into your own problems or go into problems of people around you that you have easier access to.

What about, um, have you been looking into AMP for email?

Uh, yeah, some of this stuff. I mean, I also, you know, there's also talk about, hey, email's dying and all this stuff. I'm like, I don't know, people are still using it left and right. I've seen AMP where it's like a little bit more of a dynamic and faster loading emails. I think the most important thing about email is not necessarily the layouts and all that stuff. I think the most important thing is how do you build a relationship where people are expecting your email? Where like if I stopped emailing or The Hustle didn't come, They're like, something is wrong with my day. And until you get to that point, you're probably worrying about the wrong problems.

Yeah. I mean, that's the hard part, obviously. That's like, how do you create— I mean, that's just about creating good shit. But I still think the whole AMP thing is actually super interesting. What I'm working on is a few ways to hack it because I'm kind of obsessed with like storytelling in email. And so what can you like— if you think about what is a GIF? To me, a GIF is a movable image that has no sound. Well, so is most of the video that you use on Instagram and Facebook. It's just audio, or it's just video with no sound, 'cause a lot of times you don't even click, like listen, you know what I'm saying? And so what I'm interested is, how can I use AMP to tell a story in an email in a video format, or like all these other hacks like that? That's incredibly interesting to me.

I think there's something there with that. The thing that we've been doing with SendFox that we've been building in is, there's kinda like, 2 major components that I think are lacking in email. So number 1 is how do you build in like what The Hustle and Morning Brew have, which is build in referrals. So we've basically built that in so anyone can have their own referral engine within emails.

Because I think, by the way, that was a huge pain in the ass for us.

I know. So we built it and it works and I'm doing it on— okay. So if you go to sendfox.com/noah, you can see how it looks or sign up for yourself and it's built in for free. I think the second thing that we're observing, so what everyone wants is like, how do I grow my audience and how do I send consistent emails? Because if you're not sending something weekly, you get forgotten. And in this age of attention, We're all fighting for it. And so, we built this thing called Weekly Newsletter Template, or we call— I think they're branding it Smart Campaigns. And so the idea there is that we suck in all of your social information and we look at what's most popular. And then we basically just like, we recommend, like, "Hey, here's the 3 things that you should email your audience this week." And so that's what I do every Wednesday. I just pull my— 2 of my favorite things and 1 of someone else's to try to spread joy and love and build relationships with people I don't know yet.