The Exchanges

Q Yeah. So I want to dive deep into this and just highlight the fact that there are many people building great businesses with this model. You look at Sam part, the hustle, you look at a lot of people, it's just really email and kind of email only really. So case, take us back to day one. When'd you launch the company?

A Yeah. So I actually launched a pursuit like four years ago, but it was a traditional publisher, traditional online publisher focused on monetizing through programmatic advertising, direct buys, banner ads, right. Or maybe some native, uh, pivoted, uh, about a year ago, actually to the email only model. Obviously I think that's in line with a lot of what's going on in the digital publishing space. It's increasingly difficult to monetize given the, the nuances and the changes with Facebook, Instagram, Google, it could really screw you over. So I took this idea of, I didn't want to build my presence on rented land, as I call it, took a look at our assets, saw that email was very engaged, took a look at what Sam was doing at the hustle or what Alex and Austin are doing at the morning brew. And I love that concept. And I really wanted to focus on doing one thing and one thing, right? So just did a simple pivot and then started to host all of our content in a daily email.

AI assessment note: “I actually launched a pursuit like four years ago, but it was a traditional publisher”

Q right now, whether you're SAS company or anything, every, every brand is a media brand. And if you don't have some kind of your own channel, you're really screwed. So You're building something special here. I want to dive back into actually how you're doing it in a second, the machine that makes the spaghetti, but first talking about economics, I mean, how do you make money from this thing?

A Yeah, for sure. So right now we're, we're live with what I would say is one third of the monetization pizza pie here, which is advertisers. The other two would be digital products and events. That's really where we're scoping to go in the back half of this year. Right now, front half of the year, uh, and last year we're focused on brands. We've had over 40 in the past call it eight months. Authority brands and that's, it's sponsorships, right? It's a native sponsorship sponsored by logo and then a native editorial, which I write as well in my voice, in the same voice of the content. They pay us, uh, call it a CPM. It's really a CPV cost per 1000 opens. Uh, it's a pretty competitive rate. It's a nice rate.

AI assessment note: “one third of the monetization pizza pie here, which is advertisers.”

Q the podcasting game is that, um, the, the, um, the, like Google ads, if you want to spend a million dollars, you easily could like if someone, if you kill it for someone, they can't go buy like a million dollars worth of case, right? Like, like the inventory doesn't exist. Like they hit your audience once and then like, boom, that happens. Like, how do you think about that?

A Yeah. I mean, uh, I mean, whenever I schedule a brand, like we try to do things pretty strategically. Like I'm not going to dilute our audience. I'm not going to take 50 grand from you and gobble up all of our inventory. We'll do one to three cents for a brand in a month max. We don't want to beat folks over the head, but I mean, we have 150,000 followers on Instagram. I got my Instagram. We got the podcast. We have private ambassador group. Like we can spread things out to make sense. So I will take your money obviously, but I will do it strategically. I'm not going to take your money and beat our email audience over the head. In fact, one of the things that we do is the way that our funnel works when we take a subscriber in is we don't introduce, we don't expose them to our advertisers until they've been in our funnel for at least 28 days until they hit a certain score within our segmentation. And the reason we do that is we want to make sure that they're engaged, they understand our content, and then we'll start introducing them to advertisers.

AI assessment note: “I'm not going to take 50 grand from you and gobble up all of our inventory.”

Q So, so how does that work? Right? So like Sam, they've got a team of four people that kind of sit around and drink coffee all day and, you know, throw different headlines out and laugh and say that works. That doesn't, how does your actual content creation work?

A Yeah. Again, it's a little nuanced because we're not focused on being dynamic and updated relative to current events or business news. That's not our model. We're all about self-development, which I think is inherently more personable. It needs to be more personal, more relatable, more authentic. So I spend a lot of time myself writing. Obviously I do the podcast. I do a lot of speaking engagements and then I write, uh, and then I have an editor helps me firm it up, but there is obviously a lot of pressure on me to create that content, but I've found what I think is a unique voice within the quote self-help space. Uh, and that just takes the format of an email.

AI assessment note: “I spend a lot of time myself writing... and then I have an editor”

Q Yeah. That's great. Now do you do walk me through as you start thinking about monetizing your own stuff? How do you, you know, product development is not easy. It can be costly. Are you thinking you'll start with physical products or digital?

A Probably digital and probably events. Frankly, there's a lot of interest. Everyone's always asking, oh, when are you going to do Chicago meetup, LA, New York, something like that. I think that'd be easy for us to scale it. There's, there's no overhead initially. Um, so we'll probably start with events and then, uh, probably from their digital products. But one of the reasons that we're adamant about testing and we even discount our rates for brands right now is to understand what types of products resonate with our audience, whether they are digital, whether they are service or whether they are, um, some kind of offline CPG or something like that. Is using that experience to then fulfill our own internal development of those products potentially, but for now advertisers and then events, and then the products will come.

AI assessment note: “Probably digital and probably events. Frankly, there's a lot of interest.”

Q Yeah. That's, I mean, look, it's pretty solid. And why have you decided to cost? Why have you decided to charge? You're not a CPM base. You're not a, uh, cost per click base. You're a cost per open base. Why that metric?

A Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the value for us. I mean, I don't want to play a CPA game. I don't want to play a CPC game. I think most, most, Publishers don't want to do that. We also don't really play in affiliates either. I think our value is that we think we've created a great, uh, piece of, of content as a publisher and the value there certainly is eyeballs on with opens, but it's, it's the clicks from there. So it's a, it's a cost per thousand opens, um, which I think one at scale, like the value is always there. So yeah, obviously we offer make goods and if we don't always hit our stride, but we're after great case studies with our advertisers. So we're willing to, you know, make sure that we perform.

AI assessment note: “that's the value for us. I mean, I don't want to play a CPA game”