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um [Music] well what's going on how you doing i'm good i'm feeling really good i'm great i'm glad to be home well i got a really big family both in numbers and they're also just like really big people you know like we're all like six two every year we haven't done it in a while just because everyone's gotten older and kind of moved across different places of the country and every year though growing up we used to go to sea isle seattle is like a little city in new jersey it's the jersey shore right everybody here is jersey shore and they think obviously the show and jersey shore itself i can't remember which one that was filmed in i think it was seaside heights actually but sea isle is a little city that's like really south on the jersey shore and it's quiet and like it's just really pleasant and it's chill and i've just had some of the best times of my life there it was so cool to go back there for the first time with julian and just put him in like the middle of the living room and because in these living rooms like all the houses in at seattle kind of look the same and they're all like the same exact little beach house over and over again you know and i just have all these memories of like 20 huge stoddards like packed around a living room or like around one of the uh the porches and i got i had like a real surreal moment while sitting on the couch and i was like oh my god this is the same exact moment plus everyone's like 15 years older and now there's like this new little peanut that was just kind of bouncing around like boing boing boing boing boing around from every person so it was uh it was really great it was a lot of traveling and it was like challenging because it was just me and him but i think that's going to be one of those like little moments that that burns in in your brain you know and i'll have that one for a while that's cool man it's always great to have traditions like that is your is your family mostly from pa or are they also in jersey no they're all from pi have you been keeping track so i wasn't planning to do this obviously this is not a political show but have you been watching what's going on in with uh dr oz running for a senate seat there no but i saw it on twitter the other day and i was dying at the meetings that people were coming up with being meme roasted on twitter must be like the most terrifying thing ever because i was dying laughing oh my god okay so i um i guess for people who don't know spent a little time living in pennsylvania when i was a kid really enjoyed it i love kind of the culture of the people out there and if you haven't been keeping up on this i live in texas now so i've pretty much got zero stake in pennsylvania politics as do most people who live anywhere else in the country but there's this guy i mean dr oz is like running for a senate seat and one of his main opponents is this guy i think it's john fetterman yeah who seems like a real i mean i don't know much about him but from the outside he seems like a real kind of like grassroots salt of the earth guy and the reason this is so entertaining is that fetterman is absolutely destroying dr oz on social media like it's like it's one of these situations where you have this like huge star who is running for office and then you've got like a local guy who's like nah he's you know he's a total poser and the local guy knows social media better than this like massive media legend and dude he's destroying him like there's so many hilarious things that he's done it's funny that you mentioned the jersey shore because he did a couple of things for a little bit more context there's this thing that he keeps kind of leaning on which is that dr oz does not live in pennsylvania and i think it was really recently he moved there or he changed his you know his i want to say citizenship he changed his uh wherever he lived to pennsylvania in order to run for the seat and so federer keeps saying like yeah he's like this is a new jersey guy he's not a he's not a pennsylvania guy he doesn't care about you and so all of his stunts revolve around this but he does hilarious stuff like he'll he flew a sky banner over the jersey shore that just said welcome home the met or like welcome home dr oz or something like that heart emoji john he got snooki from the jersey shore you know that uh cameo app where you can like pay people to of course yeah he got he got snooki from the jersey shore i don't know exactly how he did this but he her recording is pretty clear she's not aware that she's talking to dr oz so she opens this thing up and she's like hey mimette like i i heard you're searching for a new job in pennsylvania i'm not sure why you'd ever want to leave jersey but don't worry it's just temporary you'll be back you'll be back someday soon like jersey misses you absolutely roasting this guy and then all these people are taking pictures with dr oz going like hey i took a picture with a uh a tourist from jersey he's even funding his campaign with bumper stickers and you know how bumper like you know if you're running for office you'll usually sell a bumper sticker that says like you know studsy for tennessee or something like that this guy fetterman is funny isn't uh a good portion of his campaign by selling bumper stickers that just say oz for new jersey and i love it i love him yeah he's raised you know millions of dollars i've talked to other people from pa they seem to like this he's definitely got some support down there but i just love i love the like david and goliath use of media and by the way i mean this is not really that much of a diversion we should just kind of point out you know a lot of what we talk about on the show is related to media and attention getting and stuff like this and i think this is a perfect example of how when you really know how to tap into kind of like the humor of crowds or you have your finger on the pulse of society having a huge pre-existing audience is not as much of an advantage as it would be in other situations so here you have this guy who's i mean oz is huge how big is his show i don't even know where you find the number yeah he's got millions of viewers all over the country and um this little local guy is just like taking them down from these so anyways shout out to uh to you guys to philly pa and uh and to new jersey shout out to dr oz it's a good place to be it's a good place to be from and some days i really missed it and then other days i'm like i'm glad that i get to travel and and live in new places and check out new stuff but i'm always really grateful that like that's where i was brought up you know it's a good spot speaking of attention grabbing i want to i want to we got a bunch of stuff to get into today i have a little case study that i've been focused on for the last couple of days so i want to talk through that then i told you this via text but i want to talk about it here i'm working on my first business acquisition and i'm looking at a bunch of options we can talk about that whole project if we want to but i'm specifically vetting an option and i want to get your take on it it's a lead gen site so i'm going to [ __ ] yeah yeah like we'll dig i actually want to spend a little bit like we'll we'll go through the milk road it'll be sweet but i really want to make sure we get to the questions on this lead gen thing because i think that's going to be super actionable for people and then like i'm sure we'll get into some other stuff as well but i have like one or two other things that we have time for we got to talk about so let's start with the milk road because man like you mentioned last week we want to start doing more regular case studies here just breaking down great examples of people who are building companies whether they're services or media businesses really showing people how these things work and like calling out some of the more i don't know unique things that we see going on out there and electronics totally i'm gonna start sharing my screen now but as always oh the host has disabled you've disabled me i didn't disable you bro i would never do that to you i'll share my screen we'll talk through it like we normally do so if you're listening to this you shouldn't miss a beat i'm excited about this one man you pulled out the big guns yeah well a lot of people have asked for this so for anybody who's brand new to the show my day job is i work at this multi-million dollar newsletter called the hustle and uh part of my focus for the last couple of years has been really digging into the media industry the newsletter industry learning how multi-million dollar newsletters function and so every once in a while i'll share case studies on twitter and i ask people it was a couple months ago now i said you know i'm going to do more case studies which newsletters do you want to see me break down and a lot of people have told me the milk road and there's a reason for it first of all how familiar are you with milk right i just want to i don't want to say anything let's give me give me a pulse for where you are on this publication i'd say i'm i'm five out of ten i've talked to ben on twitter a couple times he seems really cool uh strong was on my podcast a while back he and i chat on twitter every now and then i know the subject matter of it i know that they use beehive which i thought was pretty cool because um what was his name tyler i think yep it's one of the first people that morning brew created his own sub stack competitor and i like him a lot i like to root for him and i think that beehive has a lot of advantages over sub stack we'll see if they can really get that like momentum to be able to take them on and then obviously i've read probably three or four issues i know they have kind of that new millennial type humor a lot of visuals a lot of memes a lot of like personal anecdotes and then i know their growth has been huge so i think they're probably at what like 120 000 subscribers within a year or so okay cool one more thing i would add to that that's a good that's a good summary for anybody who is not familiar with it the one or two other things that i would add just super high level is that it's a crypto newsletter so specifically focused on uh i think the name milk road is kind of a play off of silver mode yeah great name so it's a crypto newsletter and yes they're growing super fast they started january of this year it's now july when we're recording this so they went from zero to 150 000 plus subscribers in the last six months the way i want to talk through it i'll tell you the thing that i like the most about this is their content strategy these guys are doing stuff with content and like the user experience that i think it's so refreshing to see it's very rare even inside the newsletter industry even you know among other paid or or sort of like revenue generating newsletters where the stakes are high a lot of people are not doing what the milk road is doing and i think they're suffering for it so i want to talk through their we'll talk through their content strategy we'll talk through their growth their monetization strategy but to me the thing that stands out the most is to what they're doing with content so we'll get into that too so let's dive in as i mentioned we talk we're talking through more and more of these types of businesses now and so there's a model that i want people to start getting used to as we're talking through how media companies work or how creators make money tim you and i have outlined sort of the three-part model where you start with cash flow and then you build an audience and then you leverage that audience to sell paid products and i think that's a really good super clean cut basic description of how this works for newsletters specifically though there's a model that um we came up with uh at the hustle inside of like a whole bunch of research that we did on this we call the newsletter engine and i'm gonna talk through the milk road and the newsletter engine is gonna be the map for understanding how the whole business works and how these pieces play together anybody watching this is going to see sort of like a visual breakdown of what this looks like but to describe it you can basically describe you can imagine three layers that stacked on top of each other at the very bottom you have the product layer which is the foundation for everything that includes pretty much anything that's related to how people experience your newsletter and the reason it's at the bottom is because it's the most important thing if you don't have great content literally nothing else matters there's no growth hack that's going to make your newsletter great there's no special monetization strategy that's going to make it great so product is at the very bottom the next layer up is monetization and then the very top layer is growth and the reason they're stacked that way is because uh inside this visual model it's like growth feeds down into your monetization strategies and then they sort of like build on each other to turn attention into money and so we won't get too deep into the technical but i just wanted to lay out that visual model first product monetization growth because we're going to talk through it in that order product is at the very bottom you're laughing then just the milk carton character they came up with is so funny thank you yeah it's so good this is the this is my favorite part of this entire business and i'm gonna tell you why so if you're not watching tim's referring to a mascot that the milk road recently launched he's called the milkman and he's like a carton of milk with arms and legs and smile on the face kind of like if anybody's from the 90s and you remember pizza hut's old character do you remember that kind of looks like gumby it looks oh my god that's a throwback yeah he looks exactly like gumby this is brand new the milk wrote they went through a rebrand when they hit a hundred thousand users and i'm glad you pointed this out first because to me this is my favorite thing about what they're doing i talked to sean last week and specifically when i saw this this rolled out maybe i don't know a month ago or so i saw this and i said yo can i interview you because i really want to learn how you guys thought through this rebrand i think it's brilliant so the reason i think it's brilliant is not only does it look good like it's you know it's like clean cut looks it looks great but this new character now features into so many different aspects of their content they're using it i'll describe it for people who are listening like he's at the top you know he's like lounging at the top in like swim trunks and a hawaiian t-shirt and he just looks like he's there to party have a good time welcomes you right into the newsletter then as you scroll down they do some things that a lot of different financial newsletters do so they have uh like almost the equivalent of a stock ticker tracker except instead of stocks it's tracking uh the price of different crypto coins well the way this used to look is they would just use the um the logo of the crypto coins but now they have custom versions of the milkman sitting next to each one and he's been decked out specifically for each coin which is awesome and i don't know too much about crypto but i would assume people who are really into crypto i'm i'm gonna assume that the way he's been customized here probably relates to like what maximalists for each of those yeah a little bit feel like so he's customized there they have the fear greed index which is sort of like a daily take of uh what the public perception is related to these coins and you know it goes from extreme fear all the way up to extreme greed and every day they show you like what the index is and there's a little customized version of the milkman there who his whatever his uh i don't know his attitude has been adjusted for whatever today's yeah he looks he looks a little nervous he's not quite ready to jump off a cliff but he looks a little nervous yeah and then throughout the rest of the piece you'll see the milkman in two other two other ways or at least two other ways he's on all the section dividers just like which is great just like a little reminder of you know who you're really kind of talking to as you're going through this like a way to inject personality and kind of keep people oriented and very frequently you'll see him incorporate it into means that they're using for the day so you know i'm looking at like a rip off of blues glues with the milkman's face on it or kermit the frog with milkman's face on it so i think this is brilliant and i'm going to tell you why actually let me start with why shawn went with this so they did this rebrand recently we've done a rebrand in our newsletter too it took us like six months it was pretty difficult it's pretty involved you have to like understand what story you're trying to tell and stuff like that and so when i asked sean i said hey talk me through this how did this actually work and like you know how long did it take you guys they did this entire rebrand in four weeks and he said part of the reason they were able to do that is because he didn't overvalue the minutia of the rebrand they basically focused on a few key things so one he said we want to make sure that that the way the content is organized is super easy to consume because from a newsletter perspective that's one of the most important things two we want to pick like one brand color that we're gonna hammer home over time we don't care so much exactly what it is it can't be something that we hate but you know whether it's like light blue or semi-light blue or something like that doesn't really matter we just want one color that's going to be the color right and then the third thing he said is we want some kind of memeable character that's going to be the mascot for the newsletter and there's a lot of reasons for that he's part of the content he is sort of like can join the conversation because memes are such a big part of the way people uh converse and then one of the things that i asked him about is i'm like and that's the thing that jumped out at me immediately is that from an editorial perspective to have a mascot or a main character that your newsletter is kind of from completely changes the ball game in terms of what it takes to run the newsletter and this was my favorite part i don't know if this jumped out at you but you can do a whole bunch of things so at trends we have anywhere from two to four plus writers that are all writing the same newsletter week to week and one thing that's kind of difficult is for everybody to navigate the process like whose voice are we writing from am i writing from my perspective as ethan or is it more like trends perspective or is it something else completely and what the milkman allows you to do is like instantly answers that right everyone it's kind of like writing from his perspective but more importantly logistically if you're a newsletter owner if you're running one of these things it allows you to cycle riders in and out as the business continues to grow without skipping a beat or having to completely like re-figure out what the voice is or anything like that so i was really glad that you pointed out the milkman first this is my absolute favorite thing so funny dude like he's just so crypto you know what the inspiration for him was no who would it be it was you no uh the pepe the frog you know pepe the frog yeah of course that makes sense yeah yeah that makes sense we uh years ago for stasi we thought the same thing we had a little alien and um our inspiration was that alien from uh toy story you know there's a little group of aliens in the um yeah exactly that's cool yeah we used this phrase for him we since dropped it because healthcare professionals aren't as like gimmicky as media consumers but we were trying and actually the the inspiration for the character was the guy from toy story but the id in general was from moz actually i don't know if you remember mods they had the little maz robot yeah um and i always associated those kind of characters with with what maz did in the very beginning so i love it man i think he's so clever you're never gonna forget him right and you know it's extensible it's a really valuable asset to have over the years too and i think this is one of the other things so anybody who pays attention to sean knows that like he's kind of a genius when it comes to frameworks for thinking and it's frustrating sometimes because i disagree with some of his ideas and like i want to not like him sometimes like when he's super bullish on certain crypto things i'm like ah this is so i like i want to hate this guy and then the next thing he'll say is just so sharp so like he was talking about you know how he thought through this and just like you'd expect there was like a really interesting framework behind it where he's like yeah you know i think creating a character that's memeable and is like part of the public conversation on crypto is going to just be a really valuable asset to have long term and i completely agree especially given another thing he's said recently which is just related to like the times that we're working through so we've done an episode already on potential recession it's gonna be a tough time for business and a lot of people like if you're just starting something i think a lot of people are probably hearing questions like hey is this really the time to start like do you really believe in this idea stuff like that and one thing that he said is like yeah i think this is actually the time to grind for a couple of years because all the competition's gonna fall away and then i'm gonna have like two three years established in this industry as a voice and an authority and then you know when the money finally comes back where's everybody gonna go they're gonna go right to you and so that is not specific to crypto but i think that is sort of like industry agnostic at this point in time if you're thinking about getting into something obviously you have to be responsible with you know whether or not you can actually pull it off and whether you can grind through but this is not the time to be super conservative per se it's the time like this is going to separate you from future exactly competition exactly okay so we talked a lot here about the milkman but i just want to quickly recap and show or take everybody back to that model for a second okay so this product foundation which i mentioned before it deals with three main categories of how people experience your newsletter so there's your editorial or your content strategy which i think the milkman is a perfect example you've also mentioned their humor and it's a very funny email if you read it like i don't even care about crypto but i genuinely enjoy this newsletter they're funny also here's another thing that i think not enough newsletters are trying right now they're experimenting with stuff oh this was a this was a point that i wanted to try and make to other people who might be going through this so they're experimenting with a lot so if you look at things like well the milkman is brand new that's one good example but there's another which is let me see some like recent examples here so they're experimenting with different ways of inserting their writers into some of the um writing as i mentioned it can be kind of confusing when you have several writers who are all helping produce the same piece of content how do you get them in there while keeping the whole thing cohesive and so they're experimenting right now with these things called milk road reactions where yeah the whole newsletter is kind of written from one cohesive voice and then about halfway through you'll have a couple of floating heads just commenting on a story it and it's a little thing but it's like when you're in the trenches every single day trying to figure out how to navigate that this is a great idea and i think people should should steal it not just the tactical execution but this concept of experimenting and the last thing i'll say about this because i don't know how many active writers we have here don't probably want me nerding out the entire time but the last thing i'll just say about this is if you look at the archives this is a really important thing that i think not enough people do look back at the archives and you'll see how things have changed over time and the important thing to learn here is that like you don't have to be perfect in order to take something into the world in fact i think sean is like a you know he is a big advocate for this and so if you read the story of how the milk road was founded he says he's like you know we came up with a name like an hour you know or 20 minutes so just kind of brainstorming names brainstorming idea we thought about getting a logo but then uh we're like that's actually just going to take too long so why don't we just build one in canva and so for a long time their logo is literally like a clip art of a bottle of milk and then you know they decided that if they hit 100 000 readers they would rebrand them and so when they finally hit it sure they rebranded but there's like a sharp eye will still notice there's a bunch of stuff in here that's not quite the same like the extreme fear to extreme greed the colors on that have changed the fonts have you know this is the first full issue with the new rebrand and you can see that like fox has changed i think all kinds of stuff has continued to change so the big point here is that i think these guys are doing a killer job of experimenting and they're doing it in a really fun way and not enough newsletters are approaching their work like this i i really think people should check this out if you're like into editorial strategy at all so that's the content side there's two other aspects of product which are your tech stack and your community so tech you mentioned which was beehive these guys are running a beehive and one of the cool things about that which we'll talk about in a minute when we get to growth is as you said beehive is kind of a substance competitor it's a newsletter all like all in one newsletter platform built by tyler denk and he was you know the first hire at morning brew he was their growth engineer and so like a lot of people don't necessarily know this but he was instrumental in a lot of morning brews early growth but like there's two things that uh in particular that i think are pretty cool that he did so he built out the system behind their uh referral platform their referral engine and the other is the system behind their ad sale engine and um morning brew has a very robust ad sale like a custom ad sale cms that handles everything from touch points with the clients to transferring assets copywriters to all that kind of stuff so when he left and started this company he brought a lot of the things that he knows newsletter founders need to the table and the reason it's interesting for milk road is they're saying that like i saw an interview that said somewhere between 10 and 15 of their growth is just from the referral engine that's built into beehive wow yeah they don't have any beehive doesn't have like an ad network right now but you know who knows what they're going to keep building as they keep going but anyways tech stack super simple it's just beehive and if you go to their home page that's the beehive homepage great example of how you don't have to overthink this and then community last thing on the product side is dude they're great at interacting with people man like i'm still kind of digging deeper into their community strategy i think there's one or two interesting things right out of the gate one simple one is just their sign up email right after you sign up you get this kind of like welcome email and a lot of people use these welcome emails as a chance to be like hey make sure you move us to your like priority mail you don't go to spam the bulk of this is questions for whoever just signed up okay couple quick questions for you you know who are you are you beginner deep into crypto what are you hoping to get out of this and then cereal what do you put what do you put in your do you put the milk in the furnace or the cereal first so right out of the gate like fun interaction with the community that's not really necessary but definitely changes their understanding of who they're talking to and changes how you feel about the newsletter and then they have like more robust stuff too like so they did a a grant i think like 25 000 grant where they were giving away money for people to build crypto projects and that's i think an example of a much more robust community strategy but they're very community driven which have a good job of yeah okay so next level up uh monetization and then growth and these i think are gonna be a little bit well they're gonna be a lot shorter because this is still very early in its life so monetization as a quick reminder to everybody there's three ways to monetize a newsletter you have ads you have a paid front end product which is a low price newsletter then you have a high price back end product frankly i think based on the industry these guys are in they've got potential to do all three of those as they go not every newsletter necessarily has that right now though it's just ads and so i did a little bit snooping around uh it looks like they started ads about six weeks into their journey wow yeah yeah it's pretty early or that's fast for most people but the thing is that like growth wise you know shawn's got this huge twitter audience which definitely helped kick things off and their timing was perfect and their timing was perfect well this is super interesting here's something that people can do if they're if they are ever trying to break down like a newsletter that they like or any really any company just go to similar web drop their uh url into it and it'll show you a couple of things so it'll show you i don't know how accurate these are but i'm assuming they're relatively accurate for the month of may they had 295 000 website visits which is substantial obviously but it shows you too like what the trailing few months look like and to your point they were definitely in a good timing period for crypto the first two or three months four months a year crypto was on a pretty good run and you see that in their traffic numbers and then obviously when trip when it tanked uh that had an impact on their traffic as well but i don't know how much of this is paid and like how much they just adjusted their spending after collapsing like that but monetization monetization's pretty simple for them they're selling ads they have one ad spot we've done in-depth conversations about how ad inventory works in the past so we can link those up in the show notes uh long story short though if they wanted to based on what i've seen in other places they could get that one ad probably to somewhere between two and five million dollars if if they wanted to before they'd have to like build out more inventory or start segmenting their list and then in terms of growth nothing tremendously surprising here so far i mean like i said their founders got a pretty substantial audience uh top 50 podcast in the world plus got 200 and some odd thousand followers on twitter so that helps they're also just really good on social media like twitter they've written a series of viral threads i always like how they okay we're gonna start with this you and i have been talking about how to use twitter more to grow our show because we hardly ever promote it and i was thinking a lot does it make sense for us to use ourselves as the brand or should we use the copyblogger twitter as the brand and i looked at milk road and i looked at what um what dickie and cole do for ship 30 as well and i like how they actually keep it on brand and then sort of retweet the big ones through their personal handles i thought a lot about this over the last week and a half as you and i have been having these conversations and yeah milk road and ship 30 were the two um noticeable brands well and the hustle as well but i think the hustle's a little different because they're not as like thread heavy they're more like meme gif and kind of snippets from what you guys do in the actual newsletter where these guys use twitter and linkedin also they use their social as like its own sort of editorial platform so i i noticed that i i was taking what they were doing and we're going to try to apply it to the copywriter handle as well um i think that'll be good yeah it's interesting i agree with you being like native to the platform with your brand is pretty useful they're also just good at it i don't know who does their twitter their team's pretty small so it's sean ben diego who primarily write it and then they've got this guy billy the kid did you see he's the guy who did the the gallon chug challenge oh that kid yeah they just brought him on what an idiot if by idiot you mean legend you didn't even finish though he didn't finish it yeah man he got the job he runs there like tick-tock and instagram videos so i'm not sure who does their tweets but they're like they're pretty good and you'll see they they tweet a lot they tweet like five six times a day and almost every day they've got one that will go like semi-viral so not not full viral but like you know a couple hundred likes so they're really really good on twitter but i've uh heard that they're most or i read rather that interestingly and this might be a little outdated now but for a long time their biggest source of traffic was actually a viral thread that sean wrote on his personal account which is interesting because sean doesn't actually link to the milk road anywhere in that thread or anywhere in his profile yeah i noticed that yeah so wow 200 i feel like this was 245 yesterday so maybe sean said something again who knows he's always going viral and then uh it's important though one thing i want to call out a fair amount of their growth is paid people who are listening to this going man you know zero to 150 000 in six months what's what's wrong with my newsletter why am i not getting that don't don't worry about it here's what you need to know you should push your newsletter to like 10 000 plus organic right don't even think about paid until you're like above 10th out because below that maybe even 100 000 to be honest for most people below that you just you don't have enough like a product market fit to really know that you can grow with money and and make a sustainable business so yeah he grew a lot faster but that's because you know shawn's got quite like quite a few resources to deploy and they can spend five six figures on growth and it's like it's they're gonna make that money back most likely you know or at least it's not going to crush him financially or ruin their business they grew this fast in six months in part because they have a killer content product there was really good timing there you know they have they chose a topic that is growing in popularity and they made good use of like social media but also like pretty significant paid resources and so you got to take all that into account when you're comparing your own newsletter and don't benchmark yourself against this i guess another example would be sahil bloom uh we've talked about him a bunch he's been going for about two years and just hit i think 107 000 followers or 107 000 subscribers and that's a guy who has gone viral what like every week since 20 may 2020 so it takes time this is incredibly fast growth and a lot of it is because i think they're making some pretty significant paid bets and i think people just need to know that otherwise they're going to set the wrong expectations for themselves there's a lot to unpack from this because i think it's so cool how i mean you wrote this breakdown on the newsletter industry it must have been like a year ago now it was kind of right when you and i started doing this and over and over again this thing like pops back up again because it's proved positive to me that this is gonna sound like uh pessimistic almost but it's not intended to be is there's really no such thing as a new idea there's just the same idea executed in like a slightly different way and and when i see stuff like this i'm encouraged in my own newsletter because even though it's on a much smaller scale i'm seeing the thing working in the same exact way like i told myself i wasn't going to start selling ads on my newsletter until i got 10 000 and i'm at like 7 200 right now so i'm getting close um and i knew that that was going to be like my entry point to the monetization is the free newsletter on ads and then you know about a month ago i launched my front end product which is super cheap it's it's 99 bucks a year right now and i got 100 subs of that and then maybe two or three years from now i'll be the other spot where i can have a more expensive backend kind of product and and who knows what that'll look like i always bounce for ideas maybe just like a fund or i don't want to just do like another level of a membership you know like a mastermind or something i'm i'm too impatient for that and i actually don't like talking to people that much to do that kind of thing you know but but we'll see i think it's i think the thing that you said here that really really stuck out to me is where you you finished with the beginning of the end of it one the content really matters like the timing is one thing but they're very punchy poignant and humorous writers and the feel of it is just right on target for like who they're trying to operate to and you know what three actually there's the content itself which is the product there's the experimentation and that's been a relief to me as well because i think a lot of people who create things think they have to have like this perfect format and it has to be itemized perfectly and it has to have like a perfect layout and be like the same every single week and something that people can expect and rely upon i think that is true to an extent because people don't like to feel so thrown off but what they do is it's like they don't take themselves too seriously and i think there really really is like business stuff there i'm i'm just comparing this to myself because it's my own experience obviously but my version of this was those stupid pictures that i started doing where i would take stock images because i'm not a designer and i didn't want to just have stock images in every photo because they're so dumb but like i don't know how to design stuff and so i was like what can i do this little bit unique and so i took like five pictures of me smiling and then i cut off the heads and i would just put my head on top of like a stock image on on every issue and i think it's really hysterical but that was my version of like not taking myself too seriously and then uh oh yeah and the third one was um the fact that they still do keep it on brand like they associate milk road with its own brand and still have their personal media outlets to quote unquote grow it but like they're packaging it as an asset that can be autonomous from themselves and i think that's dope yeah and then the last thing is just that expectations thing i mean this is a really cool case study these guys are killing it and they came out of the gate with a daily email which is tough it doesn't matter it doesn't matter how big your audience is it doesn't matter how much money you have it's hard daily emails hard yeah it's really tough and they stuck with it so they earned this but it's still important to remember that i don't think it would be fair to benchmark yourself against this is it possible yeah it's definitely possible for somebody to replicate this and i think this like this model works across different industries too so uh what's the one it begins with the p but it's all about bankruptcy law and they do the exact same thing it's uh you know funny voice gifts memes and they crush it on like a topic that a lot of people wouldn't necessarily consider interesting traditionally so i think this concept it extends beyond this realm for sure and i would even go as far as to say like i think you could probably apply it to any industry like okay yeah you would be the interesting newsletter in that industry and i think it's like i don't know what it is people revolting against corporatism or what but it's like people want to talk to real people and so if you can write that way and have fun you're going to you're going to stand out but it's important to keep in mind that they just they started the game with a lot of resources and so when you're kind of benchmarking yourself just be realistic and or go chase down those resources that's i don't know that's the best advice i have but dude okay so that was cool that was very cool i'm dying to hear what you got cooking up your sleeve here ethan i've been like wanting to know i think you're going to do most of the talking for this because i got like a million questions but here's the deal i'm gonna buy business i'm not sure which one yet uh there's a few reasons and this actually ties in with something that we talked about earlier in the year which is i write for business owners and in order to do that well you have you have to be a business owner because there's only like there's only so long that you can be kind of a w-2 employee telling business owners what they need to care about from week to week the concerns are just totally different and so i know that i need to have one foot somewhere in the business world uh with some stakes and stuff like that so early on in the year i was like maybe i'll start and we had talked about this notebook company which i've been doing some research on and ultimately man there's a part of me that wants to do it just because i said i was gonna do it and then there's a cool passion project yeah there's a much bigger part of me that's saying like physical products are torture right now yeah why would i do that to myself so i i don't think i'm going to do that right now but what i am going to do is i want to acquire some sort of online business go all the way through that process document it sort of learn about it as i go teach other people along the way and then obviously have like a new source of cash flow and stuff like that i'm super early in the process right now just kind of researching different opportunities i've literally never done anything related to m a or anything like this everything i've ever been associated with i either was i either started or joined as an employee so the idea of buying a business that's already functioning is brand new to me and it's been a lot of fun to research it when i first outlined the project the way i actually got into that i was talking to jordan so jordan de pietro we've talked about him here before we can link up that episode in the show notes but he's a successful guy he uh led growth at the motley fool for several years and then as he was leaving there he and a business partner acquired a website have we talked about this does like no okay so they bought this website for like a half million dollars and it kicks out something like 200 grand a year 220 grand a year in revenue it's some kind of like niche content site so it makes money via a few avenues one is advertising uh display ads they also do direct ads in their newsletter and then they have a whole bunch of digital products they sell like 250 different digital products on the site so this thing generates you know 120 grand a year for both of them then there's some costs involved with like content creation and stuff but it's fairly well performing assets i think they're on track to like make their investment back here in year two after which point it just becomes you know a nice little annuity and so it was interesting i knew it was something that our readers would want to read about and so i interviewed him for it and he and i got to talk and that's when i said you know had my eye on a project like this myself i want to get into it and we had this idea maybe i'll do it and document the entire thing and when i first talked about it i said yeah okay i think my budget would be like five grand right for the acquisition like super super micro acquisition super small just get used to all the moving pieces and then you know flip something and just keep roll snowballing that money as i go and so i've started the process of looking around at different options and very briefly for anybody who's considering this what i'm finding is that actually i'm not sure the five grand mark is worth anything tim is sitting here laughing like yeah i could have told you that i want to hear from you in a second but what i found is that like any anything you can buy for five grand is somebody who basically just built a website it's got no traffic no seo no nothing and i'm like i'm a web developer by trade i've got i've already got plenty of websites that have no traffic i'm not going to pay 5 000 for you know i could do that myself my price window is going up but i found a couple options that i'm really interested in and i want to get your take on one in particular but before i go further talk to me a little bit about like what made you laugh when i said five thousand dollars because it sounds like you've kind of been through similar parts of this journey i want to hear from your perspective what what it was like for you going through those early days or or what like clicked there when i said that well just that it's it's not possible um i mean you can go on to flipa or something and you're exactly right it's somebody they create like a shopify store and then they put not even actual products just like amazon products on it and say that it's like the best keyboard company or whatever it's just some like really random esoteric type product that doesn't have a whole lot going for it what i was actually thinking through that and i'm very very anxious to see the different options that you have but i mean this truly from like not a business stance i think it's like really honest and really like self-reflective of you to be mindful of that that it'll make you better at your job and make you better at like what you want to do either now or for the next five years or for the next 50 years to put yourself in a position where like you have some skin in the game that was actually what i was thinking the whole time i think regardless of like what you choose whether it succeeds or fails is obviously relevant because you want it to succeed but also i think the bigger point is just that the decision to take that leap and like give it a shot and i think that's that's super dope man thanks man yeah i appreciate that and it's been really fun for me too like i i love my job but one of the harder things that i have to do is figure out what to write about every single week and there's a i guess there's just a part of me that knows this is this is going to help with that because everybody listening to this who's actually running a business like you know the one thing you don't have a shortage of is problems you have to solve every single week and so literally if you're if your job is to write about business just pick one problem you're solving for the week and show people how you solved it so i'm excited for it it's been a lot of fun here's how i started and maybe this would be a little bit of a documentation process so there's this great i'll link to it in the show notes there's this great resource that one of our member our trends members put together he calls it the deal flow guide and it's basically a list of all of these business brokers yeah right here the deal flow sourcing guide and this is on the business inquirer.substance.com so we'll link to in the show notes like people have heard of flippa they've heard of microacquire um maybe a couple others but what i didn't realize until i started digging into this guy's material is just how many niche brokerages there are there's so many different types and so uh people who are listening i'm just scrolling through like he's got a whole list of new and upcoming ones tiny acquisitions those are like small projects it says they sell for under 5k but actually it's less than 100k microns which is another you know micro startups get acquired so there's a lot of these like little startup marketplaces that you can go and check out and the big ones flippa indie maker um i'm sure micro acquired micro acquires on here but then there's like okay so blue chip fe international that's one of the ones that jordan recommends too uh quietly that's another one that he also likes then there's some niche ones so like specifically blogs for sale or newsletters or all kinds of stuff so this whole resource is just full of different marketplaces and what i've been doing in my spare time is just you pick one and start rolling through it and some of them charge so i bought a um six-month membership tiny acquisitions it's 150 bucks i think it was and that allows you to contact buyers directly and also see their financial numbers and you know what to be honest i'm not sure yet if i would recommend it i think if one of these deals works out then it would have been worth it because it saves you a lot of time and like yeah but i get the impression and i'm not i haven't verified this i get the impression though that when people fill out the information on this site they're just kind of asked like hey what's the revenue what are the costs and then the site just subtracts one from the other to show you how much profit it's maki