- Duration: 18 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JGYDXJ4F1VHQDCY1DVDKXCDB (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JGYDXJ4F1VHQDCY1DVDKXCDB)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Even to Tahoe, the hiking there is great. [Abhinav A]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, correct. Yeah, Tahoe is like 40 minutes from here, so. [Michael Houck]: Nice, not a bad place. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Where are you? [Michael Houck]: Where are you located? I travel around. Right now I’m in Mendoza, Argentina, in wine country. [Abhinav A]: Oh, really? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Wow. [Michael Houck]: But was in New York for a long time, San Francisco before that. Now I’m just kind of going around to different places. Nice, that’s cool. [Abhinav A]: How do you like Argentina? [Michael Houck]: Um, I liked Chile more. I was in Chile before this. [Abhinav A]: Argentina is fine. [Michael Houck]: It’s just a little, it’s a little rundown compared to, but it’s nice. [Abhinav A]: It’s good. Yeah. Nice. [Michael Houck]: Um, well look, man, excited to chat. Sorry. [Abhinav A]: We had the, uh, sort of miscommunication. Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. I normally always get an invite and it’s always in my calendar, but I didn’t get one. [Abhinav A]: So I thought maybe you didn’t send one and yeah, I should have checked. I should have messaged you on Slack or you should have messaged me, but anyway, at least this worked out. So yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, excited to learn, I guess, first about the newsletters and the business. And then, I guess, second, like what growth stuff you guys are doing? It sounds like the ads are going well. So I want to understand what’s working there for you. You can dive into what we do and answer. [Abhinav A]: Yeah, sounds good. Oh, yeah. So we don’t like a digital media publishing business. It, it’s been probably like 10 years that I’ve been doing, more than 10 years that I’ve been doing this stuff, but I got into it seriously like in 2016, 2017. And at that time it was mainly, the focus was, you know, we would build sites and drive traffic through organic search, mainly Google and stuff. So we did that for a few years and, you know, that went well. Last few years, I don’t know how familiar you are with that space, but it’s gotten a lot harder, you know, to rank and get traffic and stuff with AI and anyway, all that stuff. Year ago, we started to pivot into other drivers of traffic, so like newsletter, social, like Facebook. But newsletters started doing well, and we kind of did this for sites that we already had. So we had built up an audience over time, maybe of like few tens of thousands of users who would just come to our site organically. But we didn’t do as much with the But yeah, so a year ago, we started doing more when we started seeing that, OK, Google is starting to, you know, it’s getting harder to rank and get traffic from there. And so we started leaning more onto our email lists that we had collected organically. And then, you know, we saw that, OK, you know, we were sending these emails like daily, and people were engaging. And we were like, hey, you know, we should work on growing our email stuff, because that’s at least something that’s more under our control compared to, you know, search or something. So yeah, you know, We started doing Facebook ads and they were doing pretty well for us. And yeah, so yeah, it’s been a year. I mean, we have been growing almost every month. But we have been looking at other sources too. We are testing out one or two other partners and then just other lead sources and stuff and see how we can optimize our costs, I guess. We had been spending pretty heavily. And then last like two, three months, we pulled back, you know, as you know, like the CPMs go really high on Facebook, the election span, and then obviously all the holiday stuff. So now we want to lean back in, you know, because RPMs are lower. And so, you know, we’re just looking at, you know, places that we can spend efficiently. So yeah, yeah. So that’s kind of where we are at. Yeah, and I think I had mentioned, like, you know, we operate a few different newsletters. And again, they they were all an add-on to existing websites that we had. So one of them was in the retail grocery space. Another one was in the TV, the soap opera space. So yeah, that’s kind of cool. [Michael Houck]: That’s really helpful context. Sort of good to know that the focus is on the newsletters and you’re sort of experimenting with different growth channels as we head into 2025 basically. Can you give me some context on what the breakthroughs of the business is, like how many newsletters is it? How many different niches is it? [Abhinav A]: Give me some context on that. Yeah, so right now we are mainly interested in growing. So we have multiple newsletters for our grocery, you know, one that I was talking about, the retail. I don’t know, we probably have at least five or six, you know, at least, yeah. And they all have at least 50, probably even more, 50,000 or even more subs each. And then the other one that we’re looking to grow is the soap opera one, so that’s just one. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah. Cool, so six newsletters, approximately 50,000 subscribers each, let’s say. Okay, that’s helpful. And then, okay, that makes sense. And then how much are you spending on growth right now? Just so I have some context, like size of the business. [Abhinav A]: Yeah, I mean, I think I mentioned, right, like we were usually spending like mid-five figures on Facebook that we pulled down for the last few months. Yeah, so this one we kind of have to re-evaluate and see kind of where things land. You know, my partner has been traveling and also we haven’t leaned back in yet. But yeah, we will start doing that once, you know, we get an early read on how things are performing. But I think, I mean, what I saw early that the CPMs are lower and we are seeing better CPLs. So definitely the plan is to, you know, Cool. Okay, that’s, that’s helpful. [Michael Houck]: Thanks for giving me all the context and answering my questions. I give you some context on me and also sort of on what we do. So let’s see, before I even got in the newsletter world, I was in big tech, I worked at Uber and Airbnb, and then I started a company called Launch House. We raised a Series A from Andreessen Horowitz, and I raised a venture fund and invested in a bunch of startups. That kind of became the venture fund over time. And then Since then, I built up my personal newsletter for startup founders to 70,000 subscribers. And we also have some other smaller newsletters that we have internally as well. But within the last few months, we’ve built basically the largest data set of emails tagged by interests that I’m aware of It’s over 200 million, and we’re adding to that every week. Basically, these are people who we have the emails that they’re actively opening. We know how recently they opened their inbox. And we also know what they talk about, what they have in their bio, and who they follow on social media. And so that basically lets us do hyper-specific targeting like you would through Facebook ads, but directly to people’s inbox. You already have that. We think it’s really powerful in a lot of ways, but the first way we’re starting to implement it is through newsletters. We’ve taken on a few clients over the past few months, and the results have been really good. Open rates, 70% plus on average. Click rates obviously vary a lot based on the content, but above what they see from other channels. And so we basically can deliver those subscribers to you for, it depends on the niche, and I need to look at these specific niches to make sure that I’m accurate when I say this, but in the 70 to 75 cent range per subscriber. [Abhinav A]: What did you say? You said 50 to 75? [Michael Houck]: 50 to 75 times per subscriber. And that would depend on scale. It would depend on the niche. But once we know what the scale would be, it would be easy to give you a quote there. And so, yeah, we have a process. Basically, we add them to the Beehive newsletter. I’m sorry. Good question. Do you use Beehive? [Abhinav A]: Yeah, so we do. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: We add them to the Beehive newsletter. They go through a custom automation and they’d be segmented so you can exclude them from your main newsletter. And then once they meet the engagement criteria in that initial sequence, they sort of graduate from our process and automatically get added to your main newsletter. And then the ones who don’t make it, they get turned out automatically as well. So you don’t have to worry about them. [Abhinav A]: Yeah, got it. So can you talk about like how you build this, you know, like, you know, how you can like get to 200 million or whatever, just some info there would be good. [Michael Houck]: My team and I are very, very good at data collection, very, very good at getting data from publicly available, nothing below board, everything above board, places on the internet. So that’s social media sites, that’s other databases that we use as keys. I can’t share too much about it, but it’s our process, right? It’s our secret sauce. Basically, we take data that’s publicly available on the internet, we organize it, and we tag it. And we do that at massive, massive scale. My co founder is a teal fellow and a former Y Combinator founder. He’s a good friend of mine. And he’s like the best data scraper and cold emailer that I’ve ever met in my life. I built this. And now we’re using my expertise with newsletters and media business. [Abhinav A]: Got it. Okay. Um, yeah, no, that makes sense. So in terms of leads, can you talk about the cost? Can you talk about like the, you know, scale and to get the so, you know, I think I mentioned like, so we have honed down our processes pretty well. And even through Facebook and stuff, we are able to hit like 50 cents or even a little lower than that. Right. So my hope was that we can get leads either that are a lot more engaged, right, or at a lower cost, because otherwise, you know, we, you know, we have been just leaning in on Facebook. So would be good to understand. Like, you know, the pricing and in terms of like, okay, if you scale a lot more, if you’re buying more per month, you know, what that price could, could be dropped down to? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, 50 to 75 cents is the range that we’ve been able to deliver so far. But if we’re going to talk about mid five figures of spend, if we’re anywhere close to that, we could likely get the cost down below 50 cents. I’m not sure exactly what that would be too. But I feel pretty confident saying that we’d be able to get it below that. For that scale. Got it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Abhinav A]: Okay. Yeah. So what, and then what, like what, you know, what would the next steps look like if we wanted to maybe do a trial run? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we could do, we could do a one month trial where we deliver a certain amount of subscribers. [Michael Houck]: They go through our process. We see how many of them graduate into the main newsletter. We see what the metrics look like, And yeah, we could do that with no long-term commitment or anything like that. We could do that at the 50 cent range. I can give you a custom quote once I talk to my co-founder today, but I feel pretty confident saying it’d be in the range of 50 cents. And then we can just touch base throughout that week. We’d get in there, we’d handle all the operations and the accounts. You wouldn’t have to change anything or touch anything. And yeah, we’d just check in near the end of the month, see how you’re feeling. And we can go from there if we want to scale it up. [Abhinav A]: Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that’s fine. Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve heard of these guys. Newsletters. [Michael Houck]: Have you heard of them? Yes. Yeah. So the main difference between what they do and what we do is that they buy email lists from people and then they import them into your newsletter. [Abhinav A]: Right. [Michael Houck]: We have proprietary data collection methods that have our own tagging system layered on top. [Abhinav A]: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Because we are testing them out to like we are running with them. And same thing, you know, they are in the BI with their importing lists and all that. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, similar, similar operational process in terms of into the newsletter. But before it gets into the newsletter, we have a much more sophisticated process. [Abhinav A]: Got it. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, send over the thing. And then I’ll talk to my co founder too. And then we can figure out, you know, yeah, cool. Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: And I can set up a shared Slack channel for us as well, and your co-founder too, just so you can be in the loop every step of the way as we go. For the test, how many subscribers roughly, I know you probably have to talk to your co-founder, but how many subscribers roughly do you think you’d want to do? [Abhinav A]: I don’t know. So here, let me do some quick math. I mean, we’re looking at, okay, 50 cents, right? So yeah, I mean, I feel like we’ll get a read fairly quickly just because we have other sources, right? So we’ll have a good idea if this is worth it or not pretty quickly. So I don’t know, probably like a few thousand leads, like four or 5,000 leads probably would be enough for us to know, to determine if this works or not. Yeah. Okay. Sounds great to me. [Michael Houck]: Talk to your co-founder. I’ll shoot you over an email with a summary of everything we talked about. And once we’re ready to go, I’ll get a Slack channel set up for us and we’ll get rolling. [Abhinav A]: Okay. Yeah. Sounds good. Great to meet you, Avi. Yeah. Nice to meet you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [Michael Houck]: Bye.