Nathan Barry Archive

Packy McCormick writes the popular newsletter Not Boring, which is all about strategy and investing, from big companies to small. Packy was the VP of experience at a company called Breather, but when he left that role to start another startup he ended up creating a blockbuster newsletter instead! Not Boring has grown to over 30,000 subscribers.Packy’s newsletter is generating fantastic revenue, and his business model is a little different from the paid subscriptions that are popular right now. He dives into all the specifics. If you’re curious just how much you can make from a 30,000-subscriber mailing list, don’t miss this episode!In additional to business models and why he chose his, Packy also talks about the tactics that worked to rapidly grow his newsletter past 30,000 subscribers, the difference between being a writer and being an investor, and more.Links & ResourcesProf. Scott Galloway: Overhauling TwitterBreather - Unique Meeting Rooms, Hourly Offices & WorkspacesDavid Perell - Write of PassageRoam Research – A note taking tool for networked thought.Benedict EvansClubhouse: Drop-in audio chatPacky McCormick’s LinksNot Boring by Packy McCormickHome page: packy - Beacons mobile websiteTwitter: @packyMEpisode TranscriptPacky: [00:00:00] It is about sitting at your computer for hours and hours and hours every week. And making sure that you’re getting it right. And then you’re finding the right angle. Find something that you actually care about if you’re not interested by the things that you’re writing in. So you could probably bake it for a little while, but I think it really comes through when the writer is really interested in the things that they’re writing about.Nathan: [00:00:25] In today’s episode, I talked to Packy McCormick who writes a really popular newsletter, Not Boring. Packy was the VP of experience at a company called Breather. And then he left that role to start another startup and then decided to start a newsletter instead. And Not Boring has grown to over 30,000 subscribers.He’s got some pretty fantastic revenue. He dives into the specifics. So if you’re curious how much you can make off of a 30,000-subscriber mailing list, we talked about that. One of my favorite things is we get into business models. Paid subscription, is that best, or selling products or sponsorships?And so we dive in Packy shares why he chose the model that he did and why he thinks that’s the best for his audience. So it’s a really fun, wide ranging conversation. I think you’re going to enjoy it. Packy, welcome to the show. Packy: [00:01:12] Great to be here. Nathan: [00:01:13] Thanks for having me. So I want to just dive in and hear a little bit about what are your, some of your favorite things to write about?Packy: [00:01:19] Yeah. So my favorite things to write about, and I actually, it took me a while to kind of get back to my favorite things to write about. I was writing about community and sleep and like just kind of all over, just doing the, I think the normal early newsletter thing of like thinking that you’re a fantastic curator of the internet.And what I really loved writing about recently is as business strategy companies, big companies, small, and mixing that with finance, that’s taken a couple of years, but I think I’ve kind of hit this sweet spot where it’s a more fun approach to these topics that are kind of. Not super fun normally, which is business analysis and finance and the stock market.So I’m just trying to, you know, make it approachable, fun, and enjoyable while you’re learning something. Yeah. Nathan: [00:02:01] So what’s an example of one of those, of like a business strategy for a particular company that you’ve, you’ve enjoyed. Packy: [00:02:06] So I, this past week I wrote about Twitter, and, and wrote about, you know, how Twitter is this company that has been, you know, that I think a lot of us use and are on all the time, but it’s done.An absolutely horrendous job of monetizing. So talked about it through the lens of professor Scott Galloway wrote a piece. And so what was wrong with that piece? And then what I thought that Twitter should do and why I think that Twitter is actually undervalued and this idea of like, you know, once things start kind of changing for Twitter, there’s so much love for the company that I think people are just gonna pile into the stock.A lot of this is about being lucky. I wrote this on Monday, they reported earnings on Tuesday and it’s up like 27% since I wrote about it. So just got super lucky on timing there, but there’s a lot of that like kind of combining how they should think about business strategy and then how that parlays into the market.So it’s less really quantitative and more like, here’s kind of what everybody’s saying about this company. Here’s what they’re doing. Here’s what maybe they should be doing. And if they do that, here’s what it might look like today. For example, I wrote about, Y angel at early stage valuations are not as crazy as they seem based on the fact that Amazon and Apple and Facebook and all these huge companies have grown actually way faster than the average startup valuation has round by round by round.And so just kind of walking through that, but then weaving in. The movie up as an analogy and, you know, the four minute mile. And so just try to like, make it super fun and approachable. Nathan: [00:03:31] Yeah. I like that one. And I have to say, I, on Monday, last week, I read your Twitter post, especially as you know, you’re diving into the creator economy and all this stuff that.It’s just so much fun. and then I was like, this is a compelling case and I’ve owned, you know, Twitter stock for years, but not very much. I bought more, after that article, so you’re already making me money. Packy: [00:03:52] That’s, that’s amazing to hear that scares the hell out of me. So I wrote about Slack a couple of weeks before they, before they got acquired and, had this, like really this, this case of like, I love this company.They’re just being mistreated by the market, all these things and, and made a, I think a fairly compelling bull case. And then they popped for totally different reasons. Something that I did not write about, but people came out of the woodwork and were like, Oh, thank you so much. I bought Slack because you said to buy Slack and bill.And I got a little bit scared, frankly, because I was like, I’m not a professional, I’m not a registered advisor. I’m not like. Amazing. If you like, then go do your own due diligence, I love that you’re investing, but it’s scary now that the audience is big enough that people are actually putting money behind the things that I’m writing, which is why.Nathan: [00:04:33] Yeah...

Today’s interview is with Nathan Baschez. There aren’t too many people more familiar with the creator economy than Nathan. He started his own company with Hardbound and was the first employee and VP of Product at Substack in the early days.Now Nathan runs a company called Every, which is a bundle of premium newsletters. In this episode we dive into how Nathan creates tons of high-quality content every week, and how to facilitate your ideas with a newsletter “mastermind” group.We also get into a great discussion about pricing and churn for premium newsletters, and what it means for creators to have Twitter, Facebook, and other big media companies getting into the newsletter game.Links & ResourcesGimletThe Nathan Barry Show 023: Tiago Forte – Building a Second Brain & Lessons From a $1M/yr Newsletterscuttleblurb – A Value Investing BlogClubhouse: Drop-in audio chatAndreessen Horowitz - Software Is Eating the WorldSlow BoringSubstackTeachable: Create and sell online courses and coachingGumroadNathan Baschez’s LinksEveryTwitter: @nbashawEpisode TranscriptN Baschez: [00:00:00] At the end of the day, writing is an act of communication. It’s a good form of communication. When you have thought deeply about what you want to say, and you’ve really crafted it, but in order to get to that point, you want to start with the more informal, casual, everyday way of talking. I think the feeling that this is a fascinating conversation is the key thing we want to get to because that’s the spark that you’re trying to like recreate for readers down the road. Nathan: [00:00:29] Today’s interview is with Nathan Baschez. There aren’t too many people more familiar with the creator economy than Nathan. And so it’s really fun to talk to him. He’s got a great background. He started his own company with Hardbound and he was the first employee and VP of product at Substack in the early days.And he was at Gimlet Media for awhile. And now he’s running a company called Every, which is a bundle of premium newsletters. They’re really focused on incredibly high quality content. And this episode we dive into how to write great content, facilitating your ideas with sort of a mastermind group.There’s a fun discussion around that. We talked about Twitter and Facebook and others getting into the newsletter game and what that means. Otherwise monetize your newsletter pricing churn. There’s actually, it’s a great discussion on insurance. You’re gonna want to stay tuned for that. Anyway. There’s a lot of good stuff,So let’s dive in and I’d love for you to meet Nathan.Nathan. Welcome to the show.N Baschez: [00:01:20] Thank you for having me.Nathan: [00:01:22] Yeah, well, we can have the Nathan and Nathan talk newsletters show.N Baschez: [00:01:27] Two white guys named Nathan talk in the newsletter business.Nathan: [00:01:31] Exactly. We have all the diversity of newsletters represented right here. I just want to call it out right away. So I love, first at a high level for you to tell listeners whatever he is and, you know, kind of where it’s at right now and, and what you and Dan have done with it.N Baschez: [00:01:50] Yeah, totally. So Every is a bundle of business-focused newsletters. And basically we cover right now, mostly strategy productivity, and then we’re kind of getting into some industry specific stuff, but that’s pretty nascent. So we have a newsletter that covers the passion economy called Means of Creation.We also have some podcasts that we do that are kind of, they’re very related to the newsletters, but basically it’s just this cluster of people that work together to create cool stuff. But there’s kind of, a lot of, we don’t really publish anything under the Every name. We publish it all under one of our individual publications.And each of those are incredibly kind of like specific is the goal. and, the interesting thing about our bundle is we’re structured as this. Thing that we’re calling a writer collective where it’s somewhere between getting a job at the New York times and running your own paid newsletter, like, you know, on, on your own sort of like whatever convert kit or sub stack or whatever other platform.And it, it gives you some of the upsides of, you know, having an editor, having some financing, having some distribution, all that kind of stuff, that you’d get by working at a traditional media company. But. Unlike working at a traditional media company, you’re building your own creative vision. Like you’ve got the final say on edits and stuff.And you know, you have the most important thing is obviously the shared upside. So you get like a huge chunk of the profits. We typically split them 50–50, but it’s a little bit case by case, depending on like what kind of team we’re assembling around a specific newsletter. And sometimes there’s more than one, you know what more than one person working on one.But roughly it’s like a 50–50 split. And, we’re also trying to kind of come up with creative ways to split the IP. But anyway, long-winded way of saying it’s like this interesting kind of new experiment, at least interesting to me, a new experiment in how to structure a media company.Nathan: [00:03:31] Yeah, I love it. So, as an example, let’s say I have a newsletter that I’ve started, I’m running separately, and I want to come to you guys and say like, Hey, let’s do a paid thing together. You know, I don’t know. I’ve got 10,000 subscribers and I’m looking to join every, what does that look like as far as what are you looking for?And, and, you know, some of the more mechanics of that.N Baschez: [00:03:55] Totally key thing that it all starts with for us is we’re really focused now on. W things that wouldn’t exist otherwise. So if you’re starting, if you’ve got your own newsletter and you’ve got 10,000, you know, free subscribers on your email list and they love what you do and you know exactly what you want to do to, to, you know, create a paid subscription around what you offer, where you’re going to maybe write one thing a week, and now you’re going to write three things a week.And two of them are going to be for people who are paying or whatever. Like ma maybe it’ll make sense to work with us. I think that it really depends on kind of like, your goals, but we’re more focused on things where like, maybe we’re really helping you like really deeply edit thing. Cause there’s like a thing you’re trying to do that, that you really value this sort of like editorial feedback.And you’re kind of figuring out what you’re writing about as you’re going. or, maybe you already have a newsletter and you want to create a new sort of like. Version of it. That’s like, maybe it’s...

Khe Hy’s been called the “Oprah for Millennials” by CNN, and his writing is all about transforming your relationship with time, work, money, and, ultimately, yourself. Today we talk about how he runs RadReads, his newsletter for over 25,000 people. It’s an incredible newsletter where Khe gets super tactical about Notion, but also goes deep on living a better life, organization, productivity, etc.The biggest highlight from this interview? Khe tells us about going from $100/hr work to $10,000/hr work. He’s not joking! Khe’s building a whole course—Supercharge your Productivity—on this very topic.Khe also shares useful insights for every newsletter author and online businessperson, including:• Finding the best marketing platform for your business. • How to get your content in front of someone else’s audience. • How to launch a premium product.And so much more!Links & ResourcesNotion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.Loom: Video Messaging for WorkFriday Forward Inspiration & Motivational E-mail - Robert GlazerPatrick O’Shaughnessy Invest Like the Best podcastKhe Hy’s LinksNewsletter: RadReadsTwitter: @khemaridhEpisode TranscriptKhe: [00:00:00] I often push people to ask, what’s this for? Right. So like, you want to switch from MailChimp to ConvertKit, like, what’s this for? Like, do you want to open it? Sorry, YouTube account. What’s this for? So don’t be satisfied with the first answer. Go one level deeper. Go to the second answer, go to the third answer.And actually ironically like copywriting, you’ll probably land on some deeper human need that you have.Nathan: [00:00:29] In this episode, I talked to Khe Hy about how he runs RadReads, his newsletter for over 25,000 people. It’s an incredible newsletter. I love everything that he features, where he’s talking about Notion, living a better life, organization, productivity, all this other stuff. And he takes it into some pretty deep conversations, which I love.Alright, few highlights that we dive into: One: $10,000 an hour work. Yep. He’s not joking. He actually means that; we dive into what exactly that looks like, what it means. We get into product launches. He shares the numbers from the launch that he’s in the middle of right as we record the episode. there’s a lot of great stuff.So I’m going to get out of the way and just let you dive in and listen to the episode with Khe.Khe, welcome to the show.Khe: [00:01:11] Nathan. Great to be here. Thank you for having me.Nathan: [00:01:14] So we were just joking before we, we talked, you and I have exchanged tons of emails, Twitter DMs, you know, Twitter mentions all of that. We have not actually ever talked until this moment.Khe: [00:01:26] You have just converted from a Twitter avatar to a real Zoom human and in the past five minutes. So it’s great to meet you. And that’s why we love the internet.Nathan: [00:01:37] Yes. Well, it’s fun to, I feel like I know, you know, your work really well and, and, um, now it’s nice to put a full, a full face to it. so I would love to dive in. Maybe if you could tell listeners really quickly about rad reads, give the high level, like why someone might subscribe and then from there, we’ll start to dive in your backstory.Khe: [00:02:00] Awesome. So read, read, I guess I would start by saying I’m the accidental entrepreneur and accidental creator. And I would just show my cards immediately that like I’ve rarely had a plan in this whole internet game thing, and it’s all kind of happened. And so. What is RadReads and what can you expect?If you sign up, when you sign up RadReads is, it’s a newsletter and the blog about that helps people live intentional and Epic lives. And so what does that mean? the informal tagline is come for the productivity. Stay for the existential. And so we will lure you in with a text expanders, financial independence, retire, early notion, and then it would be like, what’s the deep underlying need that that’s really trying to satisfy. And so that is kind of the, the ethos, the vibe it’s playful, it’s inspired by surf culture or hip hop culture. and I write, so I read a ton. And through the writing, quite, quite new, actually almost approaching two years. I’ve, started an, course business related to that, but I’ve dabbled in so many other monetization, harebrained schemes along the way, but mostly now newsletter blog leads to, online courses.Nathan: [00:03:31] Yeah, that makes sense. Well, we’ll dive into newsletter, monetization, and so much other stuff, but you did not set out to be a writer. You didn’t set out to, you know, run your own business or any of that. Let’s take us back. What was, what was your career before you drove it to this crazy internet world that we’re all in.Khe: [00:03:51] It was, as Charles Dickens said it was the best of times that it was the worst of times. So, I here’s a little detail important fact, in the stories, you know, I grew up as a child of first-generation immigrants and it was all about. School work, put your head down. Don’t take risk. And so I got on the first generation, escalator, I went to Yale, I majored in computer science.I worked on Wall Street. I was a really good kid. I like buying sat books and all that stuff. and so I just put my head down and did the work, and never really thought about anything else. Just get on the escalator and stay there. I did that, that brought me to wall street, 14 years on Wall Street.And, I had a really good career and I had, hopefully what’s a third of a life crisis. you know, it’s 30, 35 years old. I was probably a little bit, not exactly a third, but, I was just kind of, I was doing great. I was doing great. I was, yeah, in that, that world, uh, made a made man in the sense that if I just didn’t screw up, I would never have a financial worry for the rest of my life. But I was bored as heck.Nathan: [00:05:06] I was going to say, but then you hadn’t go and screw it up.Khe: [00:05:09] I know, and I did screw it up and boy, did I screw it up? I was bored as heck and I love the internet. You know, I had been making HTML pages on 28.8 modems. I had an anonymous blogs and cause you can’t do that stuff on walls. And so I was like, there’s this whole world out there.And I’m just going to be an expert in this thin, thin sliver. I, I basically studied robot trading. So like actually all this Robinhood stuff is like, Like the end of what’s happening right now is what I studied, like the rails of, of wall street. And so I was a little agitated. I was just like, what’s the point?What’s the point? I had some savings about 18 months of savings, where I could just burn through them and try something new. It took a couple years, but I just quit. I quit without a plan. the only little anchor in this crazy C of uncertainty w...

Louis Nicholls is the co-founder of SparkLoop, an email newsletter referral program where you can have each of your subscribers refer their friends to unlock cool rewards.SparkLoop is amazing. They’re growing really quickly in the audience-building space and ConvertKit actually gives away free SparkLoop accounts to all of our creative pro customers.In today’s show, Louis talks about how to increase your email list growth rate by more than 30% with a referral program. He also gives his (hot!) take on paid newsletters, discusses how best to monetize your audience, and so much more.Links & ResourcesJames ClearTim FerrissBrennan DunnAnne-Laure’s Ness LabsArt of Newsletters 018: Anne-Laure Le Cunff – Building a Loyal Audience & Growing Your NewsletterLouis Nicholls’ LinksSparkLoop’s Referral UniversityPersonal site: LouisNicholls.comTwitter: @louisnicholls_Episode TranscriptLouis: [00:00:00] I think you should be creating content probably in other places. Most often people who get to a hundred subscribers and carry on, they get there relatively quickly because they’ve been being useful in other places. For example, on Twitter, in forums, you should focus less on getting more subscribers through the door and more on being useful and creating content. Nathan: [00:00:25] In today’s episode, I talked to Louis Nicholls from SparkLoop and SparkLoop is an email newsletter referral program where you can have each of your subscribers refer their friends to unlock cool rewards. So, for example, if you refer three friends to a newsletter, you could get access to the special content, 10 friends, you get a t-shirt 50 friends, you get something extra incredible.SparkLoop is amazing. They’re growing really quickly in the audience, in the audience building space and, ConvertKit’s actually an investor in SparkLoop and we give away SparkLoop accounts for free to all of our creative pro customers. So the article is so good. Talk about how to grow your email list by more than, or increase your email list growth rate by more than 30% with a referral program, as well as Louis’ take on paid newsletters, how best to monetize your audience and so much more.So let’s dive in.Louis, welcome to the show.Louis: [00:01:17] Nathan. Thanks for having me, excited to be here.Nathan: [00:01:19] All right, so let’s talk SparkLoop right at first. you’ve been in the newsletter industry for awhile. You’ve been watching this whole space, building lists of your own. What was the impetus for wanting to start SparkLoop?Louis: [00:01:32] Yeah, I’m kind of half from me, but also half from my co-founder Manuel. So Manuel had been running a, like a generic referral tool called referral hero for a couple of years. It was, or it still is pretty successful at a lot of clients, you know, larger fortune five hundreds as well as smaller ones. And that was in like the generic referral space.So mainly e-commerce SaaS and so on. And I was at that point where I just sold my last company was kind of looking around for things to do and keeping myself kind of engaged. So I was running a small newsletter, doing a small course teaching founders, how to do sales and doing kind of like that classic.I call it marketing consulting, but really just kind of helping other founders who reached out with some kind of like consulting gigs. And one of them ended up being a paid newsletter in like the flight steals space. And they, I think they probably, at that point seeing what morning brew was doing with their referral program and they were really eager to add one in.So they asked if I knew of anyone who could help do that. And I said, well, I’ve done referral programs before. And the software I’ve used is from my friend, Manuel, who runs her federal hero. So I thought, well, if anyone knows what tool to do or what, what tool to use, it’s going to be Manuel. So I’ll ask him, reach out to Manuel.And he says, well, you can kind of make referral hero, do this with a lot of work. there isn’t really a better option out there. But it’s funny you say this cause you’re like the fourth person this week has asked me if we can get referral here at working with newsletters. So maybe we should look a bit into this together.And, that’s kind of, I think where it starts, if we didn’t originally planned the Spock week to be a new tool necessarily, we thought it could be kind of inside of referral Europe. But as we. Kind of understood more about exactly how it was supposed to work and kind of the integrations that newsletters need to be successful. We’ve realized it really needs its own dashboard and its own integrations. And at that point it may as well be a separate product.Nathan: [00:03:46] Yeah. And so we’re recording this in January, 2021. when was that? That, you two started working on.Louis: [00:03:55] I think the first time we probably started talking about it was in summer 2019. Yeah. So about a year and a half ago. Nathan: [00:04:03] Yeah. And so now, I mean, SparkLoop powering referral programs for a whole bunch of people. I know James Clear, a lot of ConvertKit customers, who are some other examples that you could share?Louis: [00:04:15] Yeah. James Clear, Tim Ferriss would be two big ones from kind of that personality author space, I guess. then we have a lot of info-product creators using us people like Vernon Dunn. and Anne-Laure from Ness Labs, who I know you had on the, on the podcast recently. And then we’re seeing a lot of interest from kind of the, the media companies as well.So, Punchbowl news, we just recently launched a using us front office sports, people like that.Nathan: [00:04:46] Nice. Okay. So when someone’s thinking about a referral program, What are some of those misconceptions, right. Someone comes in and they’re, they’re like, I’m going to copy. What morning brew does exactly. Like, and then it’s going to explode. We’re going to have viral growth. Like it’s going to solve all of my, user acquisition problems.What are some of the things that people come in with and where do you either say, no, this is actually the best practice or like sort of reset their expectations.Louis: [00:05:16] Yeah. I mean, how long do you have we could, we could go at this all day, I think. so I’ll start with some common ones. The, I think the most common one we see straight off the bat is that some people that newsletters are just too small for it to be worth one. so if you have, if you’re a hundred or 200 subscribers, yes, you can grow.I don’t know, 20%, 50% faster with a referral program, but 20 or 50% of five new subscribers a week, just isn’t worth the time you’d put into it. Right. And you could be cross posting or doing something way more useful at the tim...

Dan Frommer runs a popular newsletter called The New Consumer, which discusses topics on technology and consumer brands. Beginning his career at Forbes, Dan has a long history in the technology field. His extensive experience includes Editor in Chief at Recode, Vox Media’s tech and business news publication, and technology editor at Quartz. He also spent years building up Business Insider as its second employee. In this episode, Dan discusses how email is the most effective way to reach influential people, explaining how he leverages his newsletter, The New Consumer, in a way that will capture the attention of CEOs, board members, and investors.Dan shares newsletter insights, including:Important questions to ask yourself about newsletter tools.Avoiding the optimization trap.How he creates a quality experience for his readers.Links and ResourcesForbesRecodeVoxQuartzBusiness InsiderStratecheryHodinkeeBenedict EvansDan Frommer LinksDan’s Newsletter: The New ConsumerDan’s Website: FromeDomeDan’s Other Website: Points PartyTwitter: @fromedomeEpisode Transcript:Nathan: [00:00:00] In this episode I talk to Dan Frommer. He runs a popular newsletter called The New Consumer. He’s had a long career in tech, tech journalism, he started at Forbes and then he was at Quartz and Recode and was basically employee number two at Business Insider, and worked to build that whole business for a long time.And he’s always had this one-man-band sort of style, which really resonates with me. That’s basically where you learn to, design code, you know, put together plugins, build out your site, as well as writing and publishing and being a journalist and all this other stuff. So he’s done something really impressive and going from the editor in chief of Recode, which is a publication owned by Vox, which is quite large and popular, to running The New Consumer, which he’s had for two years now.It’s more than paying his bills. He’s earning a full-time living from it and he gets to control his own destiny. I love it. We dive into all kinds of interesting topics. We talked about why he has only an annual subscription, rather than going for just monthly, like most people do with paid newsletter, his tech stack, what he thinks about free versus paid subscribers and so much more. Let’s dive in.Dan, Welcome to the show.Dan: [00:05:00] Thanks for having me.Nathan: [00:05:02] So I want to go back a little bit, as we talked about in the intro, you’ve got all kinds of history and journalism and everything else. Now you’re running your own newsletter, so when you got into journalism, where did you think that that career would end?What was the pinnacle? You know, like, as we go through the, the years, like. Was it ending with editor and chief of, of Recode? Like how far ahead did you, did you think? And,sand what did success look like when you were just starting out?Dan: [00:05:31] Yeah. I’m from Chicago originally. I, you know, my background is both in, creating websites, web design. I started doing web design and, and building websites when I was in middle school, in the nineties, and then I went to journalism school at Medill at Northwestern. So my background and my interests have always kind of been at the intersection of.Journalism like real ethical. proper journalism, but also creating new things on the internet. So new media brands and building websites, building audiences, and I’ve always kind of, I guess, optimize my career for both of those things. so that’s, that’s one way to say, like, I never really sat back and was like, Oh man, I really need to work at the New York times or the wall street journal or something like that. snothing against those places. It’d be cool to perhaps, you know, contribute there one day or something like that. But there wasn’t some bucket list where I was like, I must work for. A big network or a big newspaper or something like that. I, you know, I actually started my career interning at,sthe public radio station in Chicago WBZ.And I really did a lot of,syou know, I trained to be a broadcaster. I was really interested in broadcasting, but,swhen I moved to New York to start my professional career, it was clear that. All the jobs were in what was called digital or interactive journalism. And also that’s where my skills were really helpful. sit, it actually was useful that I knew how to edit pictures and build webpages and. you know, and do video work because most, most of my peers were not trained to and, and thought that that wasn’t really part of their job. So,snot only was able to do that, but I really enjoyed it and I still do now.So, you know, thinking, thinking back now, 15 years ago, there was never a point where I was like, Oh man, I really need to get a big title at a big magazine or at the New York times or something like that. I didn’t probably know. Right then, you know, my first job was, was at Forbes, which was kind of, but the, the forbes.com.So it was like the interactive,ssubsidiary of Forbes magazine. So I got to see that kind of big brand. Big media world, but,salso be kind of on a scrappier side of things. And, and from there it just kind of became like, you know what, what’s something interesting that I could work on. that, that took advantage of both my interest in storytelling and journalism, but also,sadvantage of the, of the tools of technology.Nathan: [00:08:07] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I have a similar background of, you know, starting in high school of figuring out HTML and grabbing books in the library and trying to, trying to piece it all together. And that served me a lot. Do you think that,slike journalists today or anyone getting into. Writing or building an audience.Do you think that pursuing those skills of video and code and, and maybe some simple design is worthwhile and worth the effort, you know, in addition to figuring out and learning how to be a good writer.Dan: [00:08:36] It’s certainly helped me a lot. You know, I hate to prescribe something to someone because you can do great stuff without any of it. but it really helped me a lot. I, you know, I, I really love being a one man band, which is, it is a term that was used a lot in like broadcast media, where you would have to, you know, hold the big camera over your shoulder and shoot and edit and do that kind of stuff.[00:09:00]sI never had one of those jobs. Those were some of my peers starting off in, you know, small town, local,sbroadcast,steams where you had to do that because there were no resources. I, I love being kind of a one man band on the internet though. Creating my own website, doing my own writing and reporting,syou know, editing my own work, producing it, publishing it, promoting it, all those things.

Tiago Forte is one of the world’s foremost experts on productivity. He runs Forte Labs, an education company that helps knowledge workers use technology to become more productive. He earns over $1,000,000 per year by using his 40,000-subscriber newsletter to sell his online masterclass, Build a Second Brain.In this interview, Tiago shares newsletter essentials, including: How to get your first 10 newsletter subscribers.The best time to send your newsletter.How many subscribers you need to launch a course.Tiago addresses fears about sharing too much in your newsletters, explaining how we live in an age where people want to follow real humans with real problems that aren’t afraid to be vulnerable.Listen in to find out why Tiago, despite having a successful newsletter and online course, is still traditionally publishing a book about building a second brain.Stick around to the end of the show to hear Tiago talk about how he’s using the revenue he earns online to help his family build businesses offline. Links & ResourcesDavid PerellBuilding a Second BrainJames ClearTeachable: Create and sell online courses and coachingGumroadTiago Forte’s LinksNewsletter: Forte LabsBlog: Blog - Forte LabsTwitter: @fortelabsEpisode TranscriptTiago: [00:00:00] In the short term, picking one theme and just hammering on that theme week after week after week after week, I’m sure is good for the early days.People know what you’re writing about. They know what to expect, they know what problem you’re going to solve. But I really think that’s short-sighted because in the long term they’re going to not have that problem anymore, or they’re going to develop more sophisticated problems or they’re just going to move their attention to some other part of their lives.And if you are this one-dimensional caricature of a person, you pretend you’re this person who thinks about SEO 24/7—which none of us are—they’re going to move on from you.Nathan: [00:00:41] In this episode, I talked to Tiago Forte about building an online course, growing his newsletter and so much more. There is a lot of great stuff in there. One: he’s earning over a million dollars a year off of his newsletter. He’s got 40,000 subscribers. We get into monetization, book launches, course launches, cohort based courses, so much stuff.And then actually, if you stick around to the end, we dive into, actually tiny houses and container homes and taking online revenue and bringing it offline, which I think is one of my favorite things. I’ve always seen me talk about that some on Twitter, but I haven’t talked about it a lot on the podcast or anything like that.So I love the idea of doing that, of getting family involved and really using it to teach business lessons to kids. So it’s a longer episode, but I think you’re going to love it.Let’s dive in.Tiago. Welcome to the show.Tiago: [00:01:32] Thanks, Nathan, really, really excited to be here.Nathan: [00:01:34] So you’ve done a crazy amount of stuff for the email,sover the last few years. And I think a lot of people look to you for successful strategies and all of that.sone thing that you did before we started recording this is you asked on Twitter,syou know, what should we talk about? You know,swhat your audience would like to hear.And one thing that that would be a fun place to start, w we’ll get into how to grow the audience and, and monetization and so much other stuff. I just love to hear it starting from zero. What are the first three things that you would do to grow your audience? So, you know, you’re giving advice to someone who’s has nothing going.All they know is I was told I should have an email newsletter and growing at I growing audiences. The thing I want to do this year,Tiago: [00:02:19] Yeah. Okay. Let’s see. Three top things. I think first one is manually add people.sin the early days, I don’t know if you want stories behind these, but if I had coffee with someone, last thing I asked, can I add you to my email list?If I met them on the subway, can I tell you it was one name and email address at a time? Because I knew there wasn’t much traffic to my website. People weren’t going to sign up just because I was really religious about getting people on there.Nathan: [00:02:50] but I’m just diving into that one for a second.sit’s so many people don’t ask right where they just say,sI’m doing all of these things. And over here, I’m trying to grow a newsletter and you can really grow an audience just by saying, Hey, will you join the list? And especially when you’re looking at a point where you’re say at the first.One two or three subscribers a day coming in you’re at that point, you’re going to wait. This is going to turn into 50 subscribers this month. Something, additional send an additional two to three texts, a day, emails, coffee meetings, any of that, like you could increase your growth rate by 50% by adding an extra couple of people.And so you could cut the time to a hundred subscribers in half just by asking. So I love that point.Tiago: [00:03:38] Exactly. I would add something else too, which is, it’s not just, it’s especially not about quantity in the early days, but quality too. Like when you have coffee with someone, you have such a deeper and closer connection to them.Which means, you know, maybe from a, like a numbers point of view at the time it takes for you to write down their email address, go home, open up the website, put it in, isn’t worth it. But that person is so much more likely to be someone who reads it, opens it and reads it. Who recommends others who engages with you? sin the early days, I really think quality matters more than quantity because you just don’t have the quantity.Nathan: [00:04:12] Right. Well, and actually we’ve talked to a few people like burn Hobart comes to mind who writes the which diff,swhich is a popular publication on subs deck. He doesn’t have the biggest audience out there, but he’s read by, by brothers Collison brothers Collison so many influential people in tech where they’re like, he’s, he’s just of right at the intersection of the things that they care so deeply about.And so. He has an incredibly high quality list. I also think about,sJim’s Clara and Ryan holiday, where they are getting replies to their email newsletter. It’s like, Hey man, we come out and talk to my team. What’s your team. You look, and it’s a professional NFL team, you know, and that’s the head coach, you know?And so you’re like, Oh right. Of course so-and-so is on my newsletter.sand so that point that you’re making about quality over quantity, I think is really good. And when you’re getting those first few subscribers from Twitter from wherever else, yes. You have some control of the quality based on the content you’re putt...

Lenny Rachitsky sold his company to Airbnb years ago and he spent a bunch of time there as a product manager, working on growth.Now Lenny’s full-time job is his simply-titled “Lenny’s Newsletter”, where he shares everything he’s learned about building products and teams. With over 3,200 paying subscribers, Lenny’s Newsletter brings him a larger income than he had at his tech job!In this fun interview, Lenny shares his journey—how he went from wanting to found another startup to being a one-man newsletter business, and the lessons he’s learned along the way.You’ll learn the “value-add” for a paid newsletter that’s been a great success for Lenny, and how he’s avoiding the trap of workaholism as he builds his business.Lenny also shares how he never runs out of topics, and how he stays interested and curious so he can enjoy running his newsletter for years to come.Plus, as popular as paid newsletters are, they come with some important downsides! Lenny reports from the trenches on what they are and how to deal with them.Links & ResourcesAirbnbCoda - A new doc for teams.Why a Paid Newsletter Won’t Be Enough Money for Most Writers (And That’s Fine): The Multi-SKU Creator - Hunter WalkLenny Rachitsky’s LinksSign up for Lenny’s NewsletterTwitter: @LennySanLinkedIn: Lenny RachitskyEpisode TranscriptLenny: [00:00:00] I find there’s any time not spent creating high quality content is not time well spent over the long run. It’s all about just valuable content. You know, if you provide value to people, they’re going to want it and they’re going to subscribe and follow and pay.Nathan: [00:00:18] Today’s interview is with Lenny Rachitsky. Lenny’s company was acquired by Airbnb more than seven years ago. He spent a bunch of time at Airbnb as a product manager, working on growth, where he became fascinated with things like, how do you manage a team? How do you grow a company? What are the product management best practices?All of these things after leaving Airbnb, he started a newsletter just called Lenny’s Newsletter, and it now has over 3,200 paying subscribers. he’s now earning more from his newsletter than he was at his tech job. Quite a bit more actually. And we get into so many things, but how to keep writing newsletter really fun, how to grow and scale your audience using guest posts to get those first subscribers so much good stuff.Let’s dive in. Lenny. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me. So you actually kicked off our call and kind of a fun spot. So I want to start the interview there. And that was, you just said, so did you read the New Yorker article, you know, and, the New Yorker just did another article about newsletters.Why don’t you give us a high level? Cause it kind of takes us into the state of newsletters, you know, on the web right now. Lenny: [00:01:28] Oh, so I find, I generally try to avoid pontificating on the state of media and newsletters, because I feel like that’s not my depth. There’s a lot of newsletter writers that like come from media, I’ve thought about, you know, this whole space of newsletters for a long time.And it’s fun to think about it and talk about, and, and tweet about sometimes. But yeah, I don’t have the most thorough opinions of the whole industry, but. What I find is when people do this kind of like overview of what’s happening, it’s always this interesting combination of like, Oh, here’s all the good elements.People can write whatever they want. And they have freedom. They’re running their own business and creating their own kind of life. And then there’s like, Oh, but all these dangers, what are they, what’s going to happen? They need health insurance. And how do we moderate all these folks? And who’s going to win.And how do you, how do you not create this? Just like 1% that does well. And so, so the post is kind of essentially going through a bunch of stories of all those things happening. And I think the conclusion as always, as it’s complicated and there’s good and bad end, we’ll see where it all goes. Nathan: [00:02:32] Yeah.It’s been fascinating to watch how the landscape has changed over the last, you know, seven or eight years since I’ve been working in this space. But you know, particularly the last say 18 months as Substack has gained a ton of traction. I think a lot of people, this is kinda what I want to talk about next.Who maybe in the past would look at newsletters and go, that’s an interesting business. Like that’s a thing. Maybe that’s your lifestyle business. I don’t know I’m going to go do a startup, you know? that was all the mindset. And now Lenny: [00:03:05] that’s exactly what I did. That was my whole plan is start a company.And then I started this newsletter on the side just to like play around with something and magically, it turned around and the newsletter became the main thing that I do. Nathan: [00:03:16] Yeah. So let’s talk about that more. Cause you spent what? Seven, eight years at Airbnb working on, on growth and product management. and so I’d love to hear, well, let’s see, let’s talk about just the transition out of Airbnb and then what was next?Lenny: [00:03:34] Yeah, so I left Airbnb about a year and a half ago. Last March. I was there for seven years, sold my company to them and. My plan a, when I left, first of all, I had no real plan. I was just like, I need to, I need to do something different. I need to move on to some new, and so plan a was, likely start a company again.Plan B was maybe do some advising consulting plan C was maybe join a startup plan. D was maybe join a big company. And now are on those lists of plans that I have make a living off writing a newsletter. But what started happening is I first started collecting my thoughts of what I learned at Airbnb and things I’ve done in the past, just so that I don’t have to relearn them.When I start a company is I put out medi posts and that did shockingly well, and then I put out a few more medi posts and those did well. And then somebody suggested I switched to sub stack to, you know, to the classic reasons to have your newsletter it’s own your audience, to not give all the benefits and medi and those kinds of things, which we can talk about.And that just kept going well. And it was always a side project that everyone around me was like, okay, stop this writing thing you’re doing. And you really want to do a startup. You should really focus on that. And just spending so much time writing, what are you doing? But I just kept doing it cause it was interesting and fun and people seem to value it.And I had a good conversation with a friend, maybe six months into it. And his advice was okay, this seems to be working well. People seem to value it. You seem to enjoy it. Maybe just try that for a little while longer. And don’t put all this pressure on yourself to st...

Byrne Hobart is a chartered financial analyst who loves writing about the intersection between finance and technology. He writes The Diff, one of Silicon Valley’s most popular newsletters. In this episode, we dive into how Byrne launched his newsletter, how much he’s earning, and how he publishes five times a week!You’ll learn why Byrne isn’t worried about pirates getting their hands on paid newsletters, and why you should worry about selling hard enough, instead.Byrne talks about how to build recurring revenue, and writing for different types of readers. He also points out an important factor that affects the churn rate of your newsletter!Byrne shares further insights on using free social media to lead people to the channels you monetize, and why he competes for readers’ highest-value time, instead of appealing to the lowest common denominator.Links & ResourcesJonathan Haidt - Social psychologist - Author - ProfessorManhattan Project - WikipediaApollo program - WikipediaStratechery by Ben Thompson – On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.BitTorrent - WikipediaSnopes.com - The definitive fact-checking site and reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.Byrne Hobart’s LinksSign up for The DiffMedium: Byrne Hobart on MediumTwitter: @ByrneHobartLinkedIn: Byrne HobartEpisode TranscriptByrne: [00:00:00] I wasn’t really thinking of the paid newsletter as this is going to be the main thing I do. you look at tech companies, they often have multiple lines of revenue, one thing they do is 95% of revenue. And the next thing they do is 2% of revenue, and when companies get more mature, it’s sometimes spreads out a little bit, but early on you find one thing that works really well. And that’s what you focus on.Nathan: [00:00:25] Today’s interview is with Byrne Hobart who writes The Diff. Now Byrne is a chartered financial analyst who loves writing about the intersection between finance and technology. What’s really interesting about his writing is that he’s read by basically the who’s who of Silicon Valley. So it’s not just, you know, a larger email list that we’re talking about today, but really we’re talking about writing the kind of quality content that, You know, billionaires are reading that.Like I first heard about him from Patrick Collison at Stripe. So this is the kind of thing that a lot of really important, really interesting people are paying attention to.So in this episode, we’re going to dive into how he launched his paid newsletter, how much he earns. He publishes five days a week.These are long form detailed con detailed articles that Bern is posting basically five days a week, which is, is a crazy consistency. So his writing process, what inspires them and so much more what’s that then.Byrne Welcome to the show.Byrne: [00:01:23] Great to be here.Nathan: [00:01:25] So I’ve been following your newsletter for awhile and I’d love if you just gave a quick intro from your side what you write about and why you find it interesting.Byrne: [00:01:35] Yeah, sure. So the idea is that I like reading history and I found that if you read We contemporary coverage of things that are happening at any given time you do get a lot of the details and then you get a lot of stuff that ends up being totally irrelevant And a lot of really interesting developments just are below the surface or they they matter in retrospect but no one really understood them at the time And so what I’m always trying to do which is a really high bar to reach is to write Right things today from a perspective that will still make sense it’d be relevant in the distant future So it’s basically trying to spot the important technology trends trying to spot what mattered what people thought mattered didn’t matter how those perceptions changed how how perception and reality have interacted and the way to do that is one to talk about financial markets because financial markets are Aggregating knowledge preferences expectations et cetera from everyone around the world And then the other thing to do is talk about technology particularly technology companies And the nice one of the nice things about those companies is that they have to be somewhat open because they’re all constrained by their ability to hire people And one way to hire people if if you’re trying to compete with Facebook and Google and Amazon and Microsoft and they can all offer a really generous comp package The way to hire people is to to give them some expectation that this company is going to be totally transformative and amazing So even if the base pay is not quite what you get at Facebook it’s still worth doing either to make an impact on the world or to cash in some stock options So a lot of companies have this incentive to actually tell their story in a way that that doesn’t happen as much in in other fields But at the same time companies have an incentive to hide their story Because if the story is we’re doing X but we’re actually going to kill Google And here’s how you don’t want Google to know that So there’s there’s always this corporate stress He doesn’t where you have to be really appealing and inspiring but you can’t tell the whole truth because it’s too dangerous So I try to parse thatNathan: [00:03:42] yeah, I think that’s fascinating. And I’m spacing on who talks about this a lot is a book that I read fairly recently, but about how, Now, this is going to bother me of who I never, what book it’s from, if you’ll know it, but how the closer like a startup is going to talk about how they can create a monopoly and they can have all the success.And then the closer they are to actually creating a monopoly, in and succeeding the less they’re like, Oh no, no, no. It’s not a monopoly at all. No. W like, look at all this competition. We have, everybody has a competitor.Byrne: [00:04:14] One has that, they have this, this like nber line of. Here’s like everyone, if you’re, if you’re an airline, you’re like, here’s why we’re really special. Here’s why everyone loves Delta. And the United is like, no, here’s why everyone wants United. And then, if you’re Google, you’re like, well, we’re one advertising company among many.And our customers could go to all sorts of different media, but really Google has a, basically a monopoly on search and search is an incredibly lucrative business, but yeah, they, they can’t quite talk about that. And there are, there are other companies that have these little monopolies, like sometimes, If you, if you look at the, some of the large us companies that had large research labs in the thirties, forties, fifties, in some cases it seems like part of the point of those labs was to give them somewhere.Somewhere, they could dp their excess profits so that they just didn’t look that profitable. So if you’re at and T you...

Dan Runcie is the founder of Trapital, the newsletter that breaks down the business of hip hop. We learn all about his favorite hip hop artists, of course, but he also shares what indie creators can learn from the world of hip hop and so much more.Having switched from a lucrative paid newsletter to a consulting business, Dan explains the thinking that went into his new business model, and what it means for anyone trying to monetize their newsletter.Dan shares his opinion on Substack—the out-of-the-box newsletter service that seems to be everywhere these days. You’ll find out why Dan started Trapital on Substack, and why he later switched to ConvertKit.You’ll also learn unexpected insights from the world of hip hop, including lessons indie creators can take from Beyoncé’s sales funnel, and why Master P’s cutting-edge albums in the ‘90s show that consistency might just matter more to creators than quality!Links & ResourcesSubstackConvertKit - Email Marketing for Online CreatorsGhost: Turn your audience into a businessBlog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS — WordPress.orgOnlyFansDan Runcie’s LinksSign up for TrapitalTwitter: @RuncieDanInstagram: @RuncieDanLinkedIn: Dan RuncieEpisode TranscriptDan: [00:00:00] If they’re using Gmail or using any other service, they see my face in the icon come up, they see my name there. And it’s a familiar thing where it is coming from a person. I want to make sure this reads like an email you would get from someone, not just like a marketing email. So I try to make sure that even though I am sending the email, it’s not just the straight copy from the essay, they are getting something that reads like a note that they would get from a friend.Nathan: [00:00:33] In this episode, I talked to Dan Runcie who runs Trapital, which is the newsletter that breaks down the business of hip hop. He’s really fun to talk to. We learn all about his favorite hip hop artists, right. Specifically what indie creators can learn from the world of hip hop and so much more. So let’s dive in.Nathan: [00:00:50] Dan. Welcome to the show.Dan: [00:00:51] Nathan, thanks for having me.Nathan: [00:00:53] Yeah. Well, I want to dive right in. You have a love for specifically the business of hip hop and I would love to hear from you where, where that started.Why. You know why you care so much about the business side and, what brought you to this point?Dan: [00:01:09] yeah, for me, the love for the business of hip hop really started with loving hip hop. I was pretty early on with gravitating towards this culture and. It was deeper than music. I mean, I remember elementary school. I was really getting into different artists who were the people that are making moves, but it’s also the people that were making movies behind the scenes.Right. I was very interested in the persona of someone like a show ignite or someone like a Puff Daddy and the people that were both being very deeply involved with what was happening. But. Pulling the strings and making things happen and all of the criticism and successes that both of those people achieved.And I think as I continued to grow up, seeing what that was like at the time, I never truly saw that as a career path for myself, but I was intrigued with it. So it was almost like a hobby and something I pursued and kept up and would always talk about with friends pretty much all through life, but it wasn’t until.Let’s see, six, seven years ago. And this was when I was in business school. We were doing case studies on all different type of topics. And one of them that stuck out, we did this case study on Beyonce. He had just released this surprise albno one had done albums, surprise albums like that at that particular timeframe.And it was this huge marketing case study on how these things happened. And it was a case study that was done by Harvard business school. It spread across to other schools. And that stuck out to me almost like a reminder, like, Oh, Hey, you know, this is something that is huge. And. It stuck out for a few reasons.One, the topic, the subject matter, I’ve been a Beyonce fan since the Destiny’s child days, but second, it stuck out to me just how big of a deal that case study was, how it was from a business perspective. And there weren’t that many articles or breakdowns that were talking about hip hop artists or.Artists in entertainment that we’re doing and making the same type of strategic moves that other industries were making in the type of jobs that I was working in and was playing into working thereafter. So for me, it was really an opportunity to look at that. And that was how I had started doing some freelance writing on the side.Started a blog. It was a personal endeavor just to explore hobbies, my own interest topics that snowballed into publications, reaching out where I started writing for them. But then that snowballed again into writing for more and more reputable spots. And then eventually I saw where media was going. I saw hip-hop’s continued rise and said, you know, I have an interest for this.I clearly have some skills that ability to convey these thoughts. Well, let’s merge these two together and started diff publication focused on the business of hip hop and that CellTrak capital was born.Nathan: [00:04:05] Yeah, that’s awesome. So I’m just imagining, you know, you in elementary school with the love of music, but then you’re actually diving in like, You know, when, when something happens or when someone makes a move, you’re diving into the story behind that. Are there any early ones that really stand out to you that you know of an artist making some move where you’re like, wait, Whoa, what was the deal there?Or that you were fascinated to hear every little detail about.Dan: [00:04:31] fascinating. One to me when I was that age was Master P So I remember this was around the time where I was really starting to buy CDs and I bought a single. Of make Em Say Uhh so not even just the alblike the single, I just had like one side and then maybe like a B side album with it. And I played that single.I don’t even know how many times. And That stuck out because master P wasn’t just an artist that had this record label behind him, his whole business model. And how he went about just running and being so popular for that stretch in hip hop was so monumental for people across the entire country. He was putting out an album from him and his group every other week.And. They did not go on tour at all. During this stretch, they just monetized their ability to market extremely well, made sure people knew there was a style and a cover of what that No limit album looked like. There was a distinctive sound. And to be honest, even if the music itself wasn’t always the best they mastered the art of branding.So when I think about that fast forwa...

Dan Oshinsky was the Director of Newsletters at both Buzzfeed and The New Yorker. Today he runs his own email consultancy called Inbox Collective. Dan has seen newsletters from the early days, and has been instrumental in developing the newsletter strategy for some of the largest publications around. In this fantastic interview, Dan shares takeaways for large newsletters and indie creators alike. He shares how his newsletter led to the Buzzfeed job, and how, once there, he discovered the building blocks that make newsletters resonate with their audience (spoiler: cats ARE involved).Dan also warns us of the danger of obsessing over open rates (or any “silver bullet” metric), and how Job #1 for your newsletter is to earn its place in people’s inboxes.After talking about the importance of carefully defining your newsletter’s audience, Dan answers these burning questions:Can I really build a business around an email newsletter?Is email going away?Tune in for the answers, and so much more!Links & ResourcesBuzzfeed NewslettersThe New Yorker NewslettersThe Wall Street Journal NewslettersDan Oshinsky’s LinksDan’s Website: danoshinsky.comLinkedIn: Dan OshinskyTwitter: @danoshinskyInbox Collective - Together, let’s make better newsletters.Sign up for Not a NewsletterEpisode TranscriptDan: [00:00:00] It sounds kind of corny, but you kind of have to have a mission. When you start with the newsletter you have to have, this is the thing that I’m doing for this audience.This is why I think I can be useful and how I can be helpful. And if I do a good job, I build that loyalty. I build the audience in the long run. there’s going to be a return on that investment. Nathan: [00:00:24] In this episode, I talked to Dan Oshinsky, who was the director of newsletters at Buzzfeed, and then the same job at The New Yorker. And now he runs his own email consultancy called Inbox Collective, and Dan has seen newsletters from the early days. He’s seen multiple waves of newsletters become popular.And then of course he’s run, some of the largest publications around. So it’s a fantastic interview. He has a lot of takeaways that are good for, you know, large newsletters and indie creators alike. So I’m excited to dive in. All right, Dan, thanks for joining me today.Dan: [00:01:00] Thanks for having me.Nathan: [00:01:01] So let’s, let’s dive right in. You’ve got an interesting background in that we have all of these newsletter creators who. Come into it from, you know, any number of things, but, but they’re often indie creators where they’re brand new to the space, you know, or they’re growing up through one path and you’ve taken a different path of building newsletters at Buzzfeed than The New Yorker.And now you’ve got a bit more of the indie path as you’re doing the consulting and everything else, but I’d love to just take us back to when you first started to get into running newsletters at Buzzfeed and what, what started that path?Dan: [00:01:36] So it actually started a little before Buzzfeed. The first newsletter that I really launched was a newsletter called Tools for Reporters. It launched in 2012 and it was.I’ve been doing it a little while. It was Tools for Reporters is exactly what you think it was. It was a newsletter where we share tools that reporters could use.It’s actually still going. I went to the university of Missouri journalism school and some Mizzou J school grads have picked up that mantle and run with it. And it’s all it just hit earlier this year. Something like 200 additions of this thing has been going for a long, long time. despite my efforts over the years to, to accidentally kill it with, you know, having a job and having other things to do, it turns out when you get hired at Buzzfeed and you have a thousand things to do the like side newsletter, you’re working on becomes a little less of a priority, but it’s my entire newsletter story really starts with this thing Tools for Reporters.I was playing with lots of different types of tools. And it had stuff that I wanted to share figured a newsletter would be a good place to share it. set up a fairly basic, you know, at the time this was MailChimp. I went to MailChimp, set up a newsletter, pretty straightforward to get something off the ground.And in a couple of, you know, first couple of weeks, I got to a place where there were a few hundred subscribers. And for me, the game changer with email was I had, I don’t know how many Twitter followers or Facebook, you know, Followers or friends I had at the time, but I had more of those than I did newsletter subscribers.But if I put something out into the world on Facebook, or I sent out a tweet, nothing would happen, literally nothing would happen. I’d say here’s this exciting new thing I’m working on and nothing would happen. And then I would email a few hundred people and say Hey, here’s this thing I’ve been working on.And I would get Requests from people that, you know we want you to come in and sit down with us and have coffee, job interviews, the Buzzfeed job partially came at a result of at, or out of me working on Tools for Reporters. They. You know, when I started talking with them, I shared with them my newsletter and they’re like, this is really good.We like this. We can do more stuff like this. It was amazing to me how much more impact email had. the conversations I had out of email was really the exciting part because it wasn’t just me broadcasting, whatever news right out into the world but Putting stuff out there and then people writing back and saying I actually have some more stuff I want to talk to you about this, or I want to go deeper on that subject.Or how do you feel about this? I really got to build relationships with my readers and that always struck me as something that was really, really powerful, that set email apart. when I got to Buzzfeed, our, our thinking was twofold. One is we were going to have a chance to build an audience and really have ownership of that audience.of the relationship with them it wasn’t something where. Social media giant could just say one day, you know, We know you have X number of people who follow you on this channel, but, we’ve made some changes to the algorithm and you no longer have access to that audience. You know, we really have the ability to build relationships through email, which was exciting, but the other thing was the potential for conversations, the potential to ask people questions, to get their feedback and to really get to know our readers.That was really, really exciting and something we knew there was huge potential for Nathan: [00:04:57] Yeah, that’s big. And then, I mean, that’s the exact same experience that I had earlier with. Now of like, I actually expected social channels to outperform email, but peopl...