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Welcome to the Letter Stack podcast. The Letterstack podcast is the only podcast you need to listen to if you want to learn how to build, grow, and make money off a newsletter. We are going to talk to the top 1% of newsletter creators worldwide. So, regardless of what niche your newsletter is on, there's always going to be something new you will learn on the latest tech podcast. So, stay tuned for more. [Music] Welcome to episode two of the Letter Sack podcast. This episode is with Nathan May. He's one of the best people

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you could go to to learn how to scale your newsletters through paid media. So, if you want to go from zero to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, Nathan May has done it with some of the best newsletters you've ever heard of. The neuron, the rundown, Bootstrap giants. You might want to stay tuned for this one. Welcome to Letter Stack. We are on episode two and I have Nathan May with me who's going to teach us about how to scale your newsletter through paid media. Nathan and I met in Austin in

00:01:06 - 00:02:13
February and I told him, man, you've come you've got to come to the show and make sure that our viewers and subscribers understand how and when to get started with paid media for that newsletter. Now, Nathan runs the feed media which has worked with some of the biggest newsletters. you know, the rundown, the neuron, bootstrap gens, you name it. So, he actually has experience scaling from zero to hundreds and thousands of newsletter subscribers. So, he's going to actually give us a breakdown on when do you get started

00:01:40 - 00:02:37
with paid media on newsletters and what's the right way to go about it. So, first things, welcome to the show, Nathan.  Hey, thanks uh thanks for having me. I'm excited to do this.  Absolutely. And before we get started on newsletters, Nathan, I understand we both have some shared battle scars working in consulting. So would you mind just sharing your experience briefly on before you started on newsletters and the feed media, you know, what what was your work experience like and could you

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talk about how you stumbled into newsletters and founded the feed media? Yeah. Um, I guess I did probably three things before TFM. So one, um, when I was super young, I was like I don't know 14 or 15. and I I built this company called BlockbyBlock and we uh built custom Minecraft maps for famous YouTubers. That was the first thing I ever ever did when I was a kid. Um then after college, I went into consulting uh for BCG. And I did like a lot of work for private equity companies. So kind of like M&A like diligence stuff. Did a lot

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of marketing work. And some of that over overlapped with like uh with media. So I did some stuff with uh like Roger Lynch who now runs Kai Nast like we did like a a big five-year strategy thing for Meredith. one of the big, you know, media companies. Uh, and then, uh, I think a little a little bit after that, I helped built this company called AEX that was acquiring mobile apps and got to meet all these cool indie entrepreneurs. And that's a little bit of how I actually discovered newsletters

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was uh, was was through them.  Awesome. Awesome. So, this was way back when. Would you mind telling us about when did you get started with newsletters and the feed media? How did it come about?  So, um, it's interesting. So I I knew a little bit about media newsletters because when I was working at BCG, people were all um people wanted like more first-party data like and at that time there was this sort of niche nerdy thing happening in in the web in general which is like Google was getting rid of

00:03:32 - 00:04:25
this thing called uh third party cookies and that was going to impact everybody and you know everybody cared about first party data because of that. Now it's more because of SEOs and  out on that one by the way.  I know way yeah that's good. So, so Google totally renanged on that one cuz everybody threw a fit. Uh, but at the time, yeah, people were really, uh, people were really worried about it. Uh, when I really, I think, learned more about newsletters operationally. Um, yeah. So, so when I joined Appex, this

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was, uh, cool company. We were acquiring mobile apps from, you know, entrepreneurs who bootstrapped, you know, maybe they didn't go to college or they they went to college and dropped out and they doing, you know,$1 to10 million a year, you know, all to them. super super cool 40 50% 60% yada margin businesses and um two of those guys we bought a big 12 million uh a year portfolio from they had that they had a newsletter that was doing a million dollars a year they had uh a supplement brand doing a million dollar a year

00:04:32 - 00:05:44
they're just great marketers and so I originally thought  almost a decade ago is that right  yeah this was um when was this probably in like 2020 20 uh 2 2022 2021 2022 a couple years ago and um I thought like mobile apps are like um like widgets they're like oh like this is cute and then I got into that business like wow these are like this is serious. I mean, these are awesome like entrepreneurs and they made me see the same thing in newsletters because they had a couple newsletters uh

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and they had they knew about like Sean Pur and the Milk Road and they knew a little bit about Beehive um because of that and so they they got me onto this idea of starting a couple newsletters and so I did that. I had one that was uh a crypto newsletter uh called Nifty Nest that we ended up selling to Milk Road, not for a lot of money, but but just was like a small small thing. I had another newsletter for creators. So, and I really loved writing newsletters. I love growing them. I hated selling

00:05:36 - 00:06:36
sponsorships. And so, um what I'm just kind of doing was like, oh well, why don't I just do the part I like, like the growth part for other newsletters. And that's sort of how the feed got started in let's call it February of 2024, something like that.  Wow. Amazing. And and you've covered a huge breath of newsletters in various niches in this space. So I believe you've been fortunate enough to work with all of these. So I believe you know Atletak most of our audience are early

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newsletter creators. They're finding their audience. They are in their first,000 2,000 subscribers. and they're still finding that niche as well. So I would say audience content fit if I might put it that way. So I understand Nathan you have a a wonderful formula that you've described in various uh YouTube videos before where you talk about the propensity to be able to succeed and the amount of time and effort it takes to be able to do that. Um would you mind talking a bit about that for our audience too help to help

00:06:40 - 00:07:37
them understand you know when is the right time to actually get started with the growth prospects for a newsletter? Yeah I mean um I think that we can talk about like the offer formula thing. I think that's very good for like you know for ads or putting together like um like a sales pitch or or something. But I would say like if if you want to go back even before that and say hey you know should I even start a newsletter? Um, yeah,  maybe there's  maybe there's a couple things I've learned. So, so, um,

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number one, I think that, uh, too many people start newsletters that are super general. Like, you need to, uh, you really need to choose a niche and ideally a niche within a niche. So, as an example, like what is the feed? Well, like we're we're an agency and we work with um, newsletter brands, but we've chosen really two specific ICPS or ideal customer profiles. one are like big personal brands that's like Schwarzenegger or Tyler Dank or Jesse Pooie and we've chosen um more like

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newsletter native media companies like the Neuron and the Rundown and then we specifically help them with mainly one thing which is growing with paid ads on Facebook. So that that's a lot of like niche down decisions right in there. We don't do like growth operating for creators where we take 20% of their revenue and help them scale their their newsletter business and their info product business. Right. That's another variation of that.  That sounds familiar. Yeah. We don't do like we don't do

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Google ads. We don't do Reddit ads. We don't do Tik Tok. We don't do Twitter. Right. There all these choices. And so it's a similar thing for like newsletters. Um, I think that I I don't know if your person has like an audience already or how they're thinking about it, but like if maybe there's a couple ways you might start a newsletter. There's probably three. One is like you start a newsletter because you want the newsletter to be like a business, you know, and you're you're sort of like an

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opportunist, which is what I was. Like I started newsletters in specific niches cuz I thought maybe they could make a good amount of money. Category two is like maybe you're a creator, so you're already in some kind of niche and you you want to use a newsletter accelerate that. I think category three is you already have some type of business that's not media at all. Maybe you have an agency or you know whatever is maybe some type of B2B some consumer business you know hey can a newsletter help

00:08:52 - 00:09:50
accelerate that or do something there. So I think it it really depends based on which of those buckets you're in but I'm talking about the the opportunist like if you're starting a newsletter from scratch yeah you don't want to do AI you want to do like AI for um you know marketers specifically in e-commerce and how they can make ads. How could you make better ads with AI? That's a fantastic niche. I would start with that kind of ideation. Um, yeah.  And that itself, you know, considering you tell

00:09:21 - 00:10:16
me that this is a subniche, but that itself is a very big niche. There's a lot of players in there. So, that's sufficiently broad enough for people to get comfortable too if they're thinking, oh, this might be too niche or too small, right?  Yeah. Yeah. I think that's fair. Um, I mean there's tons of examples of like like uh two of my friends, Ali and Alex, they run uh an agency that is two years old, does multise seven figures per year, and a lot of their niche, a lot of what they

00:09:48 - 00:10:53
talk about is just AI for ads in DOC. Like that's that's great. I have um what's another great example? There's a newsletter called um The Ankler, which is just like uh news specifically for like Hollywood executives. bets like talent agency owners, production companies, right? All the backend, you know, people who kind of make Hollywood work because it's B2B. They're doing call it somewhere between5 and $10 million a year basically on uh I believe a subscription and an events business

00:10:21 - 00:11:14
and they actually they have a portfolio of newsletters. One of those is an AI newsletter. It's called AI real and it's specifically for how you can use AI in the production process, in the script writing process, in the post-production process within film and television. Like that's that's what a niche within a niche would look like. And that's why you're able to do where I think like most uh newsletters fail at is like everyone wants to start a newsletter and they think they're just going to make a

00:10:48 - 00:11:51
quarter of a million dollars a year selling ads, you know, with a 20 to $40 CPM. And that's possible. There are people who do that, but um I think it is much easier to start with like uh something that is a very high value niche. So generally not B to B T B T B T B T B T B T B T B T B T B T B TOC, generally some kind of B2B thing and think about you're going to do ads and something else even if it's not at first, but ads and something else um down the road.  Sure. So So let's actually break down that process. So

00:11:19 - 00:12:27
let's say I'm a newsletter creator in the AI for marketers for e-commerce business, right? Let's let's think about that. And let's say I'm trying to do both organic and some bit of paid content. So what would be the right space or the right time for a early newsletter creator who's still finding the,000 2,000 subscribers but not scaled up to 5 or 10,000 subscribers yet? uh is that a good timeline to break into and start exploring paid ads and and any any I I believe you are you know an expert

00:11:53 - 00:12:49
in the meta ad space but are there any other ad network that they should pay attention to or still meta is the best option to go forward with and what is the mindset typically that they need to have to understand how to get into this in the first place would you mind talking about that Nathan? Yeah. So, so if Yeah. If you've picked a niche, you're like writing your newsletter and you're like, "How do I grow it?" Um, I think the mistake that most people make is they want to grow for growth sake.

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They go, "Oh, I got to get to five. Yeah, I got to get to 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 subscribers, and then I'll um and then I'll figure out if I can make ad monetization work." That is the wrong way to think about it. I think there is um there are there are two ways that you can that you pay for things in general. You can pay for things with your money, with your dollars. You can pay for things with your time. And in general, I'm a firm believer that I think that um your time is it is the most valuable

00:12:50 - 00:13:45
thing that you have. And so, if you're starting a newsletter, particularly from scratch, you want to be able to understand without spending more than 10 or $15,000, without spending more than, let's call it, three to maximum six months of your time if that idea is going to work out. If it's not going to work out, you should kill it and you should pick another idea. Um the the bad thing is sitting in an idea that's not never going to work, sitting it for a year or 2 years. And so what does that

00:13:18 - 00:14:15
mean? What does it mean? What it means is that you should be trying to think about your monetization first, right? Are you going to do ads and maybe subscription? Are you going to do events? Are you going to have B2B services in your newsletter? Are you going to sell an information product? Are you going to start a community? Right? Pick something that is high LTV on the back end of your newsletter. So what I mean by that is most newsletters that are making a lot of money have what I call the media mullet. And and the

00:13:46 - 00:14:42
media mullet is like adup supported content in the front end, right? Free, but you monetize it with ads. That's low LTV, but it's something. And then you have high ticket stuff, a myriad of high ticket things that sit behind. It's sort of like a party in the back, right? Uh on the back end. And um most people should be thinking in terms of that. And so the idea is whether you do it via paid or organic, you should be able to have a good understanding by the time you get to 5,000 subscribers what the

00:14:14 - 00:15:01
average revenue per subscriber that you're making is. So if you're doing sponsorships, you need to um test some sponsorships as early as a th000 subscribers. You don't doesn't mean you have to close somebody. Just put somebody's logo in there and see how many clicks it gets and try to take that to somebody and see if you can say, "Hey, cool. You know, we we did this much. Could we would you just want to do a test for 50 bucks for 100 bucks and choose your then high LTV thing? Let's

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say that's coaching. Let's say you you know let's say you were in um we'll pick DTOC again and you've worked with a bunch of DDC companies and you have a DDC newsletter. You could probably find one to five people who would pay you $500 to $1,000 a month on your list of 1,000 people. Um, that's how you start to validate an idea before you've tried to pay to get to 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 subscribers. I'd highly recommend that that approach,  right? That and and that

00:15:07 - 00:16:17
seems like a good amount of money to understand if there's real revenue behind this or do they decide and pivot into something else entirely. So, I think, you know, that's a good test, Nathan. Thank you so much for that. Now let's say you decide to pitch that and you're able to achieve some reasonable validation with that approach that you just described. How would you proceed and how much money would you actually put down let's say on on meta ads for example? Yeah. So um when so here's what

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validated would look like. So validated would look like if you're actively selling sponsorships and you're making let's say something between even 10 to 20 cents per reader per month. Maybe you're not selling all your sponsorships, maybe just selling some of them. That's enough where it goes, okay, cool. Well, if you can go acquire a subscriber from Facebook for $1 to $2 um at a low level of spend, let's say, you know, a hundred to $300 a day, that's going to be anywhere between $300 to

00:16:12 - 00:17:08
$10,000 a month on ads. Um if you can continue to sell into those same sponsors, I you know your break even period right away because you validated your monetization in the beginning. That's the important part. So, you make if you make 20 cents per reader per month, how how long does it take you to break even on a dollar per reader? Well, it's it's going to take you a dollar divided by 20 cents 5 months. Okay, that's a reasonable payback period in terms of like a media business. Like,

00:16:41 - 00:17:29
you could continue to grow at that rate. So, then you can go and invest confidently. Now, you may make even more than 10 or 20 cents per month per reader if you've got like the Hallel TV thing. You're getting a couple coaching clients, you know, per month. Like there's a there's a newsletter called the bottleneck and they do um you know tens of thousands of dollars a month just in coaching. It's focused on cos and people who want to become cos and so uh Rile his coaching is all for those

00:17:04 - 00:18:00
kinds of people and they sell ads and they write the newsletter a couple times a week and so that monetization model uh makes sense. It combines B2B niche with ads on the front end with a higher ticket on the back end and then it works. And so like he could scale um with paid advertising. But the important thing is like it just it's all easier if if it can be math and it can be math if you know how much you make per reader. That's like the number one thing you should figure out as fast as possible,

00:17:33 - 00:18:31
right? And and the math that you explained hopefully gives enough context for anybody looking to decide, okay, how long can I, you know, burn money on this or be able to put money on this to be able to understand if they're going to break even or not. So glad that you did that. By the way, uh let's talk about the ad formats themselves. So let's say you're deciding to spend money on ads. You have figured out the math and how long does it take for the payback period to materialize successfully for you? Um

00:18:01 - 00:19:07
I believe you have talked a lot about you know UGC content and social proof related content formats. Would you mind talking about at such an early stage what formats work well because they don't have high subscriber counts at this point because they're early but they do have validation in in terms of okay there's some semblance of signals from the audience itself that this is a great offering they would look to buy. So how do they actually put that into a winning ad format? Yeah. So um there's sort of three

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components of like an ad. I mean, I I think the simple simplest answer actually if if you're just getting started, um, copy copy other people's ads. Like it your goal as like an operator should be to try to monetize as quickly as possible. You don't need to have to master and be 10 out of 10 execution out of ads right out of the gate. You just need to have something that works. And so if you to go look at the big ad accounts like the rundown or the points guy or 1440, you'll see all

00:18:59 - 00:19:59
kinds of ads that are um mockups of basically tweets or Reddit uh or Google searches like all all these kind of like social hacking ads where they or notes ads where they kind of look like user interfaces you've seen before so they can stop the scroll so you'll read the copy and then the copies about you know why you should join the newsletter. Um that format tends to work very well as statics. Um, the other two formats that work quite well are what I call text over video ads, which are uh sort of

00:19:29 - 00:20:37
B-roll with static text over it. And then finally, uh, UGC, you just somebody organically like authentically talking about why they like the newsletter. So that's like that's the format. That's like what what vehicle does my ad go into? Um, beyond that, there's uh there's the angle of your ad, which is like who who are you trying to talk to? So, as an example, um, if I'm, you know, the rundown or superhuman or the neurons, some of the big AI newsletters, there's not like one type of person who

00:20:04 - 00:20:51
reads my newsletter. There's there's like 20, 30, 40 different types who read for all different kinds of reasons. And so you actually need to think about like what are the main things, what are the different cohorts of your readers that are very different from each other. What do they care about? So I call this like the dream outcome. Like what's the thing they really really want to get out of the newsletter? So that would be like um you know getting a raise at work or sounding really smart or you know what

00:20:28 - 00:21:25
whatever some some version of like what would make them feel good like what are the problems getting in the way of that dream outcome and then you write your ads around that. So, as an example, if I'm superhuman, there are probably, let's say there's two different ICPs. Let's say one is entrepreneurs and one is like um you know, just regular individual contributor, you know, white collar workers. Um well, like you're not going to talk to an entrepreneur the way you talk to a white collar, you know, uh

00:20:56 - 00:21:49
professional. So like the entrepreneur there I remember there's a hook that we did that worked quite well that was like um you know how um uh how companies are going from like 0 to$10 million with five employees using AI, right? And then it was leading back into how one of the AI newsletters basically was like teach you how to get a ton of leverage out of AI so you don't have to massively overhire um for your business. That's really great language to somebody who's starting a startup, somebody who's a

00:21:23 - 00:22:21
white collar worker, they don't care about that at all. But another but that's ultimately AI for productivity. So what's the version of that for the white collar worker? I think we had another hook that was like um you know um it's like the best employees act like CEOs. They they delegate you know manual tasks like PowerPoint and uh and Excel to AI so they can focus on strategic initiatives or whatever the thing was. Uh, and so like that's again a version of AI that's like how do you be more

00:21:52 - 00:22:39
productive but more like tailored for somebody who's just like an individual contributor. And so the whole idea there is like you want to be focused on the important stuff. You don't want to be doing anything that's like super menial. So they both lead down to the newsletter. But the reason that we're able to get really strong CPLs and uh most people overlook this really strong engagement on the other side. almost no one actually pays attention to that is because we're doing that work and we're

00:22:15 - 00:23:17
doing ads that are hyper specific to one person with one type of dream outcome with one problem. That's how you do the best ads. Right. So those are actually a great example that you broke down for superhuman. I believe you have talked about this briefly, but you do most of your research on Reddit and other answer forum sites like Kora for example. And I believe you spend a lot of time being able to research these pain areas in these public forums to be able to understand how the copy can relate so

00:22:46 - 00:23:49
much to all of these personas within that single news set of business. Right. uh would you mind diving a bit for on how you actually research your copy and your ad formats uh in in this particular example? Yeah. So um usually there's maybe three to five things that we'll typically look at when we're thinking about trying to come up with a bunch of different ads. So yeah, one is Reddit. Um that can mean going to individual Reddit threads. So like uh there's a subreddit called Singularity

00:23:18 - 00:24:11
that's very focused on AI. There's all different kinds of AI focused subreddits and just just like hearing from I I'm a big fan of like the let the customer be the copywriter. Like you if you just take what your customer or in this case readers believe like what their dream comes, what their pain points are and just play that back to them that will work really well as effective copy. Like we found winning hooks around like um being afraid that you know you know AI is like like they're going to get

00:23:45 - 00:24:40
outperformed from somebody's going to get outperformed or outpromoted because someone else in their team is using AI really really well like that that kind of style of hook came from us looking at Reddit comments and we've used that in all kinds of AI ads that have done it quite well. Um a lot of times we'll use a tool called Gigabrain uh for that. It's newer. It's sort of like uh Perplexity uh meets like Reddit. Um, and it it does an awesome job of like doing all that manual teasing out of like what

00:24:12 - 00:25:15
the trends are in multiple Reddits for you. So you just ask some questions. It's quite good. The other area um organic social, so like looking at Instagram, Tik Tok feeds for ideas, for hooks, um, is really effective. We look at competitor ads. Um there's like one or two other places but I I would say most of them come from yeah competitors uh internal uh or I should say rather Reddit uh organic social and there's actually a fourth I should mention which is um signals from inside the newsletter

00:24:43 - 00:25:45
itself. So if you were running an e-commerce company you would probably be mining your reviews just on your products fairly often to um determine what your ad concept should be. The newsletter version of that is looking at like um what subject lines were your highest opened uh and what content was in those those uh those emails,  which links were clicked the most.  Yeah, exactly. Like use that stuff. Have chat throw that all into Chatbt have tease out themes and then write your ads around those themes. Um yeah, a couple

00:25:14 - 00:26:27
different ways.  Perfect. This is amazing. By the way, Nan, you talk a lot about, you know, user generated content. What's your take? And it could be a hot take on AI UGC content ads and AIGC organic content. You see a lot of that in Tik Tok and Insta these days. I want to know if you've had a chance to explore that. What's your view on that? Yeah, we use H uh AI tools pretty frequently, I would say. Um particularly um oh gosh, Arc ads. I'm a huge fan of Arc ads. So I uh yeah, I

00:25:51 - 00:26:44
think in general they're very very good. The tricky thing is like sometimes you have to like clients it will take a second for them to be okay with uh some of that stuff. But as long as you can I mean if you are your own client right if you're just an operator I would say absolutely test them. They're dramatically cheaper than going and paying you know $150 to $300 for UGC actor to do your your ad. you can make a arc ads ad for, you know, 10 bucks, right? And so, and the nice thing is

00:26:16 - 00:27:13
that that can let you test into formats and scripts that are winning. And then if you want to, great, go pay the $300 to hire an actor to redo that same script. But, you know, why why pay $300 just to find out whether or not the ad is going to work? I'd rather do it for cheaper, validate, and then scale up after that. Um there's one caveat which is that most of these AI UC tools uh it's sort of like um it's like when you see like the Big Mac and like the McDonald's commercial and it's it's

00:26:45 - 00:27:47
beautiful and the the buns are just chiseled and toasted and they they look amazing and then you get the thing and like  and everything. Yeah.  Yeah. And it's it's kind of like all over the place. Um, like it's sort of that with the AI tools like maybe maybe they're maybe 20 to 30% of the actors are really really good and the rest are like very clearly AI and then even within that 20 to 30%. You would never want to have them on screen the entire time. You want to be cutting them speaking with either

00:27:16 - 00:28:14
them with a green screen so they're minimized because sometimes their mouth movement can be a little weird or cutting them with B-roll. The fingers could be weird. Cutting them with B-roll uh as well. So B-roll of your newsletter of you know whatever something related to your ICP if your AI maybe you know be an AI tool or something. Um so that they're not they should not be 100% share of screen uh throughout the full ad.  Yeah. And I think that goes for any ad that you would shoot with real actors

00:27:45 - 00:28:49
too. So that goes without saying it's good editing and good storytelling on how you are able to keep the pace of the ad itself. But this actually covers a lot of the ground that we wanted to cover for paid ads. Uh if just one last question to be able to wrap up, Nathan, if you were to start today, uh do you think your start and your growth journey would be any different from how you started out way back when? Uh would you start with the IUTC directly? Are there any different ad networks like Reddit

00:28:17 - 00:29:22
ads or something that you would try? Any any opinion on that? Yeah, I think um I think everyone wants like a wants like a silver bullet secret. Like there's there's some channel that nobody knows about and if we can just uncover that channel, everything's going to blow up and it's going to be amazing. And um it's not really how how it works. So the nice thing is is that like a lot of the playbooks that are around exist in a way that is public and often is free. Um, like you can go look at 1440's ads or

00:28:50 - 00:29:59
the rundown's ads like right now and see what like good good newsletter ads look like. Um, if I was starting like a newsletter from scratch today, um, I would I would start by playing I if I did not have a large organic audience um, which you have a larger audience, I would say stick to whatever niche you're already in. But if I was literally starting from scratch, I would choose some niche that either helps people um save money or make money or learn or do better in their job or uh in some kind

00:29:24 - 00:30:18
of luxury hobby. So, so basically I would I you want to work with people who have a lot of money. So like the daily upside focuses entirely on financial advisors. Um, the ankler I mentioned before is the business side of the Hollywood, you know, uh, sort of the Hollywood uh, uh, scene. Um, there's a, what are other newsletters I should be thinking about? I think there's a newsletter that's, uh, called Freight Waves that's purely on like the logistics industry. Like you, you want

00:29:51 - 00:31:06
to get deeper into like niche B2B where the CPMs and you can sell ads for like a lot of money. Um or you could do more proumer like uh I if I if you can do some kind of coaching or info product business on the back of it. So any kind of like AI copywriting or you know I'm not a huge fan of this but like crypto or like uh trading there's big trading newsletters uh like marketbeat um and um bullseye trades like those companies make a ton of money from just teaching people how to trade those kinds of things. Those are the

00:30:29 - 00:31:33
niches that you should be choosing. Um and then I would uh yeah I I would grow with paid ads almost religiously measure the quality of readers and arpoo average revenue per user on the other side make sure people are actually buying um and I would I would validate the idea within 3 to six months and I couldn't validate it I would kill it and I would choose another newsletter in different niche. Awesome. Awesome. But this was a ton of information packed within like 30 40 minutes of what we went through. Nathan,

00:31:01 - 00:31:57
anything else as a closing notes that you would like the audience to know?  Um, yeah. I mean, I I I I just would uh I would say like I would just reiterate some things I said before like you want to niche down. You want to figure out monetization as fast as possible. trying not to spend more than a certain amount of money or a certain amount of time. Like I everybody's like very very excited about newsers right now and they should be, but there's a lot of people who are trying things who aren't that

00:31:29 - 00:32:23
aren't going to work. And that's fine. Not all ideas work. But the important thing is like you you want to you want to set guard rails to those types of ideas. Um and so I think like if you're trying to get deeper in the space then like um I think we do a good job of like putting out a lot of free content. We do a lot of workshops with Beehive and kind of free decks and um and newsletters and stuff to help I hope teach people about like basically open you know I'm a big fan of like um try to make your free

00:31:56 - 00:32:43
stuff as good as other people's paid stuff. So like we have we out we open source our whole paid ads playbook. So you can go learn how we develop ads for like the rundown or Schwarzenegger's newsletter or if you want to go see you know we did a $270,000 product launch for a 15,000 person newsletter in this newsletter called Bootstrap Giants. If we look at like how we came up with the product and like how did we write the sales emails and the sales pages and like how did we research with the

00:32:19 - 00:33:07
customer and like validate that was even going to be a good idea to launch like we have a whole playbook on that. If you're a founder and you've got you know a company like a BB services company like how do I use a newsletter to grow that that's how I built my agency and I just open source the things I've done there. Um so we try to be good stewards um of of that stuff.  Yeah. And and I love the fact that you don't keep these secrets. You let people figure out because even after that the hard part is

00:32:43 - 00:33:41
to be able to be persistent in executing and bringing out that much value for months and years if possible. So, so I'm so glad that you actually came on the show, Nathan, and shared all of this value. I would encourage all our listeners to be able to go back, check out the feed media, and if you figured out all the things that Nathan has actually talked about, I want you to check out the feed media and see if you can collaborate with Nathan because, man, the kind of names that he has on his roster are impressive. So, I would

00:33:12 - 00:33:41
love for one of you folks to be able to do that with Nathan all over again. But, thank you so much for your time, Nathan. It's been a pleasure having you here and uh thank you so much for recording with us. Yeah.  Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. Thank you.

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