January 17, 2025 • 30 mins
In this episode, Kyle Scott discusses the current state of newsletters, responding to Sam Parr's claims that the medium is dead and saturated. He argues that while some areas may be competitive, there are still ample opportunities in niche markets and local newsletters. He compares the newsletter space to blogging and podcasting and how those platforms took decades to reach normal people. He concludes by encouraging listeners to think about newsletters as owned audience, and not just a single format, comparing Beehiiv to Shopify.
Sam's posts:
https://x.com/thesamparr/status/1866565501012545597
https://x.com/thesamparr/status/1761433621447979122
Chapters
00:00 The State of Newsletters: Are They Really Dead?
02:27 Understanding Market Saturation in Newsletters
13:41 Opportunities in Niche Newsletters
22:14 The Future of Newsletters and Owned Audiences
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
All right, welcome back toMonetize Media. I am Kyle Scott.
Today I want to dig in to thenotion that newsletters are dead
or somehow saturated.Piggybacking on a tweet put out by
Sam Parr, who obviouslyfounded the Hustle. And I want to
start off by saying that firstof all, I'm a big fan of Sam's. I've
(00:24):
listened to a lot of my firstmillion. I was an early subscriber
to the Hustle and Trends andreally admire sort of the path he's
taken. But I do find it alittle bit rich that someone who's
had so much success innewsletters and is speaking at a
newsletter conference nextmonth, you know, puts out tweets
like newsletters are lame lastyear and then a more recent one in
December, which we'll get toin a second, about how the whole
(00:46):
space has kind of played outand too competitive and everyone
is kind of copying hisplaybook and it's not gonna work.
I think there's some merit tothat, but there's a lot that he's
getting wrong and I disagreewith. So really want to dig into
that concept and then alsotalk about where the opportunities
are because indee indeed, thenewsletter market is saturated in
some spots and in others it'swide open. But before we get to it,
(01:08):
I want to ask you a favor. Ifyou enjoy this podcast, take 22 seconds
to leave five stars or athumbs up on your podcast app of
choice. Apple Podcasts,Spotify, whatever the heck Google
uses, if you're listening onYouTube and write a review or a reply
or a comment. This does twothings. One, it helps the algorithm
(01:30):
recommend us. So that's a veryselfish ask on my part. And two,
it gives me valuable feedbackfor how to improve future episodes.
And that's for you. Leaveconstructive feedback what you like,
what you don't like, what wecould do better. And really, just
what sorts of topics would youlike me to cover going forward? And
if you hate it, all right,maybe don't leave a review then,
but DM me on xylescott L allone word and tell me what you don't
(01:54):
like or what I could dobetter. Happy to have a conversation.
This definitely isn't perfect.I will say I've heard from a number
of listeners over the lastweek to 10 days who have been listening
to just the four or fiveepisodes I've put out since bringing
the two year old podcast backin December. And the feedback's been
really great. So I appreciateit. I love the interaction Happy
(02:17):
to chat with any and all ofyou. Had an hour long conversation
before with somebody abouttheir local newsletter. Nothing in
it for me other than just agood exchange of ideas. So yeah,
keep the feedback coming.Okay, so I want to turn my attention
to this tweet from Decemberfrom Sampar. Now I'm not going to
read all of it, but the gistof the tweet is that the newsletters
as content space is playedout, saturated. Lol. It's dumb, dead
(02:41):
so on. And you know, I'mparaphrasing a bit there. But earlier
in 2024 he put out a tweetsaying newsletters are lame last
February and then in 20 as wayback as 2020, the year he sold the
Hustle, I believe he declarednewsletters dead and said that blogging
was making a comeback in 2021,which it most certainly has not.
So I'm not going to read thiswhole tweet because it was kind of
(03:03):
a long thread ish style post.But I will read a little of it, he
says. But when I see peoplecopy our results, I want to tell
them that's a mistake. Or atleast if they do copy, the results
may not be as good. And alsoif you're going to copy it, you for
sure need to make a handful ofchanges to really make it great,
which most don't. It's forsure possible. But things are different
(03:25):
today. The world felt smallerthen. We covered tech news and we
did it via a business emailnewsletter. There was very, very
little competition. It feltlike it was us, the Skim and Morning
Brew. Now there's thousands ofpeople doing it. So his point is,
is that there's a whole lot ofcopycats out there in the tech startup
business and now AI spacecopying the format popularized by
(03:48):
Morning Brew, the Hustle,which is generally short quip in
the beginning, three or fourmain stories, a couple of side sections,
a poll and move on with yourday. That sort of aggregation, digest
style content which is easy toread and consume in email. And he's
right, it is definitely asaturated space. A number of people
(04:09):
have tried to copy thatplaybook, put a slightly unique,
if at all spin on it andcompete with much more established,
well financed, well ironedmachines that are the Hustle and
Morning Brews of the world.And that's that's almost certainly
a bad business model todaywhere I think he is very, very and
(04:30):
he kind of went on to before Iget into it, he kind of went on to
say that, you know, they hadto build A lot of the tools and services
that we have today. So it madetheir businesses more defensible,
which is true. They didn'thave access to a beehive or substack.
I tried to do some stuffpersonally in the subscription space.
I worked with John Clayton,rest in peace, former ESPN football
(04:52):
personality. He had over amillion followers on Twitter and
in 2017 we tried to launch asubscription thing with him that
was largely built around emailand we had to piece together all
these tools. So to Sam'spoint, I understand what he's saying,
that in the kind of mid 2010s,the tools didn't exist and if you
were able to build thenewsletter list and have a content
based CMS to plug inadvertisers and do polls, you had
(05:13):
to build it yourself, whichmade it less competitive because
not as many people are able todo it. So he is 100% right there
and I don't mean to discountthat portion of his take. However.
However, this sounds a lotlike people who were early in blogging
or early in podcastingdeclaring those things dead long
before they ever wentmainstream. And what I would say
is the tech startup AIbusiness circles are often very,
(05:39):
very early on new mediums. Youknow, blogging took the form of a
wall of text by tech bros. AndI don't know, the late 90s, early
2000s, but it didn't reallyhit its apex till the mid 2010s,
almost 20 years later. Istarted my site in Philly, crossing
Broad in 2009, and at the timeI had looked at a bunch of early
(06:02):
tech websites, actually evenTMZ a little bit, and said, you know,
there's a lot of businesseshere, there's a lot of modern media
companies that have been builton the Internet in kind of that blog
style, reverse chronolog,chronological, chronological order.
And there's only maybe ahandful of people doing that in sports,
which at the time was Deadspinand Barstool and maybe Yahoo was
(06:22):
doing it a little. So I did itfor local sports and treated it like
a business. It wasn't playedout at all yet it was still a relatively
novel concept to Philadelphiasports fans, something that was maybe
a 10 year old format to peoplethat had been reading, I don't know,
TechCrunch or Daring Fireball.Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball, popular
(06:42):
Apple blog, said in a speechabout 10 years ago that when he started
his site, which was again aclassic blog in the mid 2000s, he
thought he was late. And whathe learned over Time was he wasn't
late at all. He was actuallyvery early, even in the tech space.
And oftentimes when you feellike you're late, the reality is
you're not. It just may beeverybody around you is aware of
(07:03):
this space and you're viewingthings a bit myopically and not realizing
that 90, 95% of normal peopleout there don't run in these same
circles. And these mediums canbe very new to them. Podcasting,
another great example. By theearly 2010s, podcasting really took
the form of usually a coupleof tech guys, often developers, sitting
(07:25):
around experimenting with anew format with little structure,
poor production quality, andin some cases, lots of listeners.
And there's probably a lot ofpeople in the same tech and startup
scene that Sam is a part of inSan Francisco and Austin who would
have told you in 2012 that youwere late to podcasting. Now, I think
we all know that, and I wouldextend that to comedians. Comedians
(07:48):
also tend to be very early onnew mediums. Adam Kroll and Marc
Maron, with Podcasting again,early 2010s, they found a new medium
where they can kind of delivertheir fiery, unfiltered takes. And
they used it to become. To getvery successful. They had already
been successful, these guys,but build a huge audience, build
their own media company. DaneCook established himself on MySpace.
(08:11):
Right? There may have beencomedians who said you were late
to social media if you weren'ton MySpace in 2006. So you kind of
get the point. The reality is,in 2012, you weren't late to podcasting.
It probably really didn't kindof eclipse mainstream media until
last year, 2024, at least.It's being credited with eclipsing
mainstream media and kind ofpotentially influencing the election.
(08:34):
The point is, you know, youmay have been late to tech podcasting
by the mid-2010s, but food,politics, news, local news, you know,
whatever, B2B niches, it'sstill a developing space. And I think
Sam's a bit guilty of that.And there's a number of cohorts,
I think, who are early to thenewsletter space who think everybody's
(08:54):
now late because these toolsnow exist because they don't have
to blaze the trail and it'seasy for everybody else. And listen,
these tools are built on thebacks of some of this trailblazing.
Tyler Dank at Beehive builtthese systems for Morning Brew, and
he productized it with BeehiveSubstack didn't exist then, so it
is much easier to Start anewsletter now, but that doesn't
(09:16):
mean the space is dead andthere's not as much competition as
you think. Yes, if you aregoing to start a tech newsletter,
a digest style newsletter, anAI updates newsletter, yes, you're
late, there's a million peopledoing that, your chances of success
are very, very. But thereality is for things like local
media, which we talk about alot here and I'll get to in a second,
(09:37):
and other specific niches oreven broad topics, newsletters are
not played out. The averageperson, the average 48 year old woman
or 52 year old man doesn'treceive 50 newsletters in their inbox
every morning the way maybeSam Par and a bunch of the SF Austin
types do or have been for thelast five years. In fact, it's still
(09:59):
a newsletters as contentmedium are still relatively new format
to a number of normal everydaypeople. And I think that often gets
lost on people that are earlyto something just how long that adoption
curve is. The other part ofhis argument is that the tools that
exist now make it easier forpeople and thus invite competition,
(10:21):
which is true. But let's thinkabout this rationally. Let's look
at blogging and podcasting.Early on blogging you had to create
your own website. You had toget in and do HTML.WordPress and
type pad were still veryearly, if they, if they existed at
all. There wasn't. I used tohave a blog in 2006 that I had a
run through. I think it waslike Angelfire or something. And
(10:41):
I would, each time I put up anew post, I had to move text and
I had to update HTML in thebackground. It was, it was awful.
And maybe I was a little,maybe could have used some tools
that were available at thetime. But the point is, you know,
it wasn't just like, oh yeah,I'll just go sign up for WordPress.
That went mainstream sometimelate 2000s, early 2000s. And I think
(11:04):
very few people would actuallyargue with a straight face that the
introduction of WordPress andthe popularity of WordPress because
it made blogging socompetitive, made it very difficult
space to enter and that yourelate to the space if you got in
because you weren't like theearly tech guys who created their
own blogs through blood, sweatand tears. Obviously that wasn't
(11:24):
true. Lots of huge webbusinesses, huge businesses that
have been sold to publiclytraded hundred million dollar Companies
run on WordPress and werebuilt originally on WordPress. Same
with podcasting early on, youknow, if it was 2006 and I asked
you to put out a podcast. Howwould you do that exactly? Do you
know how you would do that? Idon't. Right now. The tools exist.
(11:45):
I can record this inRiverside, save it, upload it to
Captivate, and it throws it on15 different platforms for me. Back
then, you used to have tocreate, I guess, an I Tunes account,
develop, I don't know, aproducer account, save an MP3, upload
it. You know, the point iscreate an RSS feed. It wasn't as
easy. And no one would claimthat. The introduction of the tools
(12:06):
to distribute podcasts, like,I'm gonna. I'm gonna forget some
of the names. I'm not gonnaattempt to enter them. But, you know,
these tools have been aroundfor over a decade. The introduction
of them, yes, it created morecompetition, but it didn't mean the
space was dead or saturated.You were still very early ten years
ago in podcasting. I'd argueyou're still early today in podcasting.
And, you know, if we extendthis to Substack and Beehive as platforms,
(12:28):
yeah, they make it easier forpeople and they're inviting a lot
more people into the space.But it frees people to think more
about the content format thanthe logistics of how do I send this
to 10,000 people and how do Iinsert an ad and how do I clean my
list or create a segment. Youknow, this is what we call progress,
(12:50):
right? The introduction of thetractor didn't make farming dead.
It just sort of changed it andallowed for higher yield. And sure,
maybe, I don't know, I don'tknow, maybe it created more farmers,
more people could buy atractor and have a small farm or
whatever it is. But thereality is it made them more efficient
and created moreopportunities. And I think the tools
we have now for newslettersand communities, I would extend that
(13:13):
mean we're just gettingstarted in the space. So, yeah, if
you're entering podcastingtoday in business, tech, AI, finance,
yeah, you're a little latewith digest style stuff. I definitely
think there are areas you cango deep niche on and find a huge
audience. Maybe it's CFOs of Xtype of company or AI for HR professionals,
(13:34):
whatever it is, you can nichedown and find a large addressable
market in sub niches thatprobably is more valuable than a
kind of general digest styleaudience like the Hustle and Morning
Brew have. And you're seeing alot of businesses do this, like Adam
Ryan's Workweek. I thinkyou're seeing Morning Brew kind of
niche down with some of theirsub newsletters, Axios is doing this.
This isn't like a new idea andthat's just in these supposedly crowded
(13:56):
spaces. What are theopportunities outside of that? I
would say, and we talk aboutthis a lot on here. I think local
is inherently slow on theuptake to embrace new mediums. There
are a number of reasons forthis, but typically local ecosystems
don't plug into the modernInternet the same way that 20 and
(14:19):
30 something guys and girls inSan Francisco and Austin plug into
the Internet. So if you showup and you try to sell a company
like lmnt, the hydrationcompany, a newsletter ad, they're
going to say, oh yeah, youknow, we advertise in newsletters
a lot. It's a way we reach 28year olds who are taking their health
seriously because they listento Peter Attia and Huberman Labs.
(14:41):
But if you go to your locallyowned grocery store and say, hey,
you want to put an ad in mylocal newsletter? They're going to
say, explain to me whatexactly a local newsletter is. And
the point is, you know, localis much slower on the uptake. More
importantly, there is lesscompetition. To explain that, I want
to call your attention to acomment made by Morgan Housel on
(15:04):
a recent podcast. So if youdon't know Morgan, he wrote the book
Psychology of Money a coupleof years ago. It's a bestseller.
It is one of the best booksI've ever read for thinking about
just your personal finances atreally any income level. I love his
way of thinking about theworld in kind of from first principles
and practicality. And he has asimple way of viewing things that
(15:24):
I think is fascinating acrossthe board, but especially his views
on finance. Anyway, he putsout a podcast a couple times a month
where he kind of breaks downconventional wisdom and maybe talks
about why society is generallyright or wrong. And as he often does,
he quoted, or at least itattributed the following comment
to Warren Buffett. And he said100 years ago every town had an opera
(15:45):
singer. And what he meant bythat was that today, whether it's
in business or contentcreation, we increasingly see the
most successful, the mosttalented go viral, get famous, make
lots of money, and then nobodyelse gets anything or they're left
(16:05):
fighting over scraps. This isthe power of the Internet. The best
musician, the best fun videomaker like Mr. Beast or Dude Perfect
can go viral and reach tens orhundreds of millions of people and
build a billion dollarbusiness on the back of it. But there
are less opportunities for thethe middle to earn Livable wages,
(16:31):
entertaining people,especially online, because you're
either as good as those guysor you're not. And the money will
all accrue. And we see this inpodcasting. There was some stat like
something like the top 1% ofpodcasts earn 70% of the money. And
so the point about the operasinger is that when 100 years ago
(16:52):
people wanted theirentertainment, they would go see
the local opera singer. Andthat local opera singer didn't have
to be great, they just had tobe the best in town, the best in
their area, the best in theirsmall category, and enough people
would pay to see them andthey'd earn a livable wage and they
wouldn't become rich andfamous like Taylor Swift, but they
(17:12):
would be well known in theirtown and they'd be able to have a
successful living. Today, thatobviously no longer exists. We show
up to see football stadiumsfull of people, to see Taylor Swift
or Zach Brown band or KennyChesney or whoever it is, and then
we get the rest of ourentertainment fill by scrolling TikTok
(17:33):
and Instagram, where there areno shortage of people creating entertaining
content for free. I wouldinclude YouTube, obviously. And because
the algorithms increasinglyand rightfully feed us the best,
most engaging and watchablecontent, there are a few winners
and lots and lots of, I don'twant to say losers, but people who
aren't able to earn a middlewage. If you're sitting down to watch
(17:56):
something entertaining for thenext 25 minutes and you can see the
crazy stunts being pulled offby Dude Perfect or some guy who's
entertaining but doing thosesame things in his backyard with
less production value and lessshock value, which are you going
to watch? Well, you're goingto watch dude perfect. And 100 years
ago, that guy may have beenable to entertain people locally
(18:17):
and sell 150 people tickets,and now it's just like, you know
what? I'll watch Dude Perfect,right? So that's kind of the point
of this. Every town had anopera singer. And in content creation,
you want to try to find theareas where you can still be the
opera singer, where you don'thave to be the best in the world,
but you can be the best inyour area. Like local newsletters
(18:39):
or a category like a niche B2Bthing. One example I love is I found
the newsletter called MoreThan Teeth targeted at Sleep Dental
professionals. They had 14,000sleep dental dental sleep professionals
like Think like sleep apneamachines who subscribe to their specialized
(19:01):
info on how to treat patientswith sleeping additions through dental
Devices. You talk about aspecialized niche and a high value
audience. Now, fun fact, thisnewsletter was for sale, induced
for only $20,000. And Iactually contacted them about it
and I put out a tweet about itand it turns out they had actually
recommended they listed atthis low price, I would argue 14,000
(19:21):
sleek dental professionals issuch a high value audience, I could
do a whole podcast about it.And one of the readers of the newsletter
actually wound up buying it,although price undisclosed. But I
guarantee you it was way lessthan that audience is worth because
of how much of a high valueniche that is. But the point being
is the guy who created thatdidn't create a general medical newsletter,
a general health and wellnessnewsletter, not even a general how
(19:44):
to sleep better newsletter. Hecreated a newsletter targeted at
dental sleep professionals. Sohe didn't have to be great, he didn't
have to be as good as Hubermanor Peter Attia or Tim Ferriss. He
just had to be the best atspecific content geared toward dentists
who do these procedures. Samewith local newsletters. This is why
(20:06):
they're having such a momentright now. Sure, the morning brews
of the world are tapped out.If you start a general news newsletter.
And I own one in TIP News. TIPNews subscribe. It's free, right?
But it's a crowded space.Morning brew, crowded space. But
the reason why so many peopleare experimenting with local newsletters
and why Beehive frankly, as aplatform is embracing this is because
(20:28):
I don't know how many downsare there in America in the world,
right? Each town can havethese and to have quote unquote success.
And we can, you know, theykind of haggle over how you define
that. But to build anaudience, you don't have to be great,
you don't have to be asengaging as the Hustle is or Milk
Road was. All you gotta be isthe best in your town and good enough
and bring value to people. Andif there's maybe one or two other
(20:51):
people in your area maybedoing the same thing or some other
old local newspaper, you justhave to be as good or better than
them or just be on a differentmedium like email, you know, just
like the teeth guy, I'mguessing that he's probably not the
most engaging writer, but ifyou're a dental sleep professional,
he was bringing you thecontent you needed. And I would extend
(21:12):
this to so, so many top that,you know, they're almost limitless
lifestyle stuff like food anddrinks, certainly B2B niches speaking
to some type of professionalin some type of area or some type
of athlete in some age range.Any of these niches have tens of
thousands of people and manyof them are kind of normal, everyday
(21:33):
people who aren't up on thelatest thing. They just came around
to listening to podcasts lastyear. They don't even know what the
Morning Brew or the Hustle is.And if you send them a newsletter
about the thing that theyreally like or the job or service
they perform, that's highvalue, you might be the only newsletter
they're receiving and you'regoing to get 60% open rates and you're
going to have no competition,much like local newsletters. Now
(21:55):
we talk a lot aboutmonetization on here and I think
there's a whole separateepisode about how to monetize these.
But again, step one isobviously building an audience and
there's huge audience to bebuilt in these and huge money to
be made. I honestly think themore niche you are, as long as the
audience is some number ofthousands of people, you can build
a very, very lucrative mediabusiness. So I think the idea that
(22:19):
newsletters are lame, thatthey're dead, that the space is saturated,
is entirely incorrect for mostpeople, yes. For people in certain
circles that may be the caseor you may be in the middle innings.
But I actually think that thecreation of these tools will free
people up to think about theformat. I think what we're learning
lately is that shorter isbetter. It is a lift to read a long
(22:43):
email. You're scrollingthrough your inbox in the morning,
you're trying to get through abunch of stuff you want to provide,
something that people want toopen and they want to consume. Right
then a lot of people don'tcome back to those flagged emails.
I know. I certainly don't.It's not like a website. You leave
a tab open like you'rescrolling, you either read the email
or you don't. And I imagine awhole lot of people don't double
back. So we're learningshorter is better. Consistency is
(23:06):
obviously better. There areall sorts of different formats that
people are going to play with.And I think eventually newsletters
is going to come to me, be astand in for owned audience. And
that's going to includemessaging communities and frankly,
in person events. And this iswhere I bring in Shopify. I don't
think a lot of people wouldhave told you that you were late
to the E Commerce game whenShopify became widely available.
(23:29):
You were still very, veryearly in the DTC space. And what
Harvey Finkelstein, CEOpresident of Shopify, always says
is they want to be the os, theoperating system for retail, and
they don't care if you use theShopify app, which they have and
it's fine. And they aggregatestores and the experience is pretty
good, but they don't care ifthey come to your website, if you
(23:49):
sell on Facebook, Instagram,TikTok or in person. Shopify aims
to be the backend for all ofthat. Your inventory is cataloged
across all those platforms.The transaction happens in the same
place in the background acrossall those platforms. Your settings
and SKUs are set in one placeand can be distributed and sold anywhere.
(24:10):
And I think when we use thephrase newsletters, we should really
be thinking about the phraseowned audience. And I think what
Beehive is doing muchdifferent than Substack, which I'll
get to in a second, is thatthey want to be the operating system
for your own audience. And itstarts with newsletters much the
same way Shopify started withwebsites. But it will eventually
(24:31):
extend, I think tocommunities, to messaging groups,
to organizing in personevents, to paid subscriptions. Anything
a quote unquote media companycan do to engage its audience. Shop
Beehive wants to help powerthat. Now that differs a lot from
Substack, which feels muchmore increasingly like a walled garden.
(24:54):
They are pushing out creatorsto make vertical real style videos,
I think not coincidentally onthe back of TikTok, maybe as a request
recording this being banned inthe U.S. you know, if we're using
the analogy, I think they'remore like Amazon. You can build your
own store on Amazon, you canbuild your own audience on Substack,
you can own a portion of thatcustomer relationship. But ultimately
(25:18):
the E commerce and this isbuilt solely on Amazon are at the
whim of how Amazon wants todisplay and sell and market their
products. And I think that'sthe case for creators and journalists
who are building on Substack.Long term they're going to be at
the whim. They might haveaccess to these email addresses,
they might earn money, butlong term their audience's attention
will be at the whim ofSubstack and its algorithm and its
(25:41):
app and how it wants todisplay their content. Whereas Beehive,
I think will function morelike Shopify. Maybe they do have
an app, maybe they do have adirectory, just like Shopify does.
But at the end of the day theywon't care if you engage your audience
in their inboxes or through amessage group or even plan an event
in person. I think they wantto be the OS for owned audience.
(26:03):
And so to kind of put a bow onit, if you have a newsletter, you're
thinking of starting anewsletter, you're a business that
thinks you can benefit fromkind of the content style of a newsletter.
I would extend the phrasenewsletter to be owned audience.
Algorithms are increasinglydifficult on social. Whether or not
TikTok gets banned, whateverhappens on X this year, it doesn't
(26:24):
matter. These are great toolsto build audience and gain recognition
and you should definitely usethem. You always want to be thinking
about how you can own andengage your audience today. Owning
and engaging your audience.Newsletters are a great format to
do that. It's a great platformand medium to do that, much like
podcasting is as well. And Ithink that unless you are creating
a media brand in one of thesenarrow, slim vertical of tech and
(26:48):
startup aimed at tech andstartup people, the opportunity is
still massive to create a bigmedia business to have a large owned
audience that you can sellyour products and services to using
newsletters as a leadingformat. One last point about Sam's
tweet. One of the things hementioned was, you know, everyone's
copying what we did. It's notgoing to work. They're doing the
(27:10):
same thing in newsletters withthe same types of newsletters. And
I agree with him, him and hesaid he has always had success looking
at people throughout historyand the way they've done things and
then tried to apply thosethings to his business, to the hustle
in this case. An example I'veseen in the past is, you know, some
of these early. I want to sayit was like Budweiser was successful
early on because they reallycracked distribution and they were
(27:32):
able to get their cases ofbeer on the rail lines and send them
around the country. I don'tknow, that might, may or may not
be accurate, but I think thepoint still stands is that it was
about like, hey, how importantdistribution is not just your product,
right? And that's a lesson youcould certainly take in media and
almost any type of business.And so Sam's point was he's looked
at these examples throughouthistory and how do you apply it to
(27:52):
your business? Don't juststeal my newsletter idea and put
it in a newsletter. Steal mynewsletter idea and put it in whatever
the next medium is or whateveryour business is, and maybe there's
something you can learn.Totally fair point. But what I would
argue is you can actually takesome of these newsletters concept
that him and people at theMorning Brew have developed and Then
apply them to topics wherethey haven't yet been applied. Right.
(28:15):
The morning brew of X workswhen it's talking about real estate
in a local vacation town.Right. The people in that town don't
receive 20 emails about thattopic. They receive precisely zero
of those emails. And justbecause you're using a style that
Sam and the people at theHustle may have pioneered, it doesn't
(28:36):
mean that it is not novel anduseful elsewhere in the newsletter
space. You just gotta pivotthe topic. So I think the point is
good. You can always takelessons from different verticals
and different industries andapply em to your own. But sometimes
it's just as easy as lookingat the things that worked in your
industry and then finding ahook, a niche, a subgroup to apply
(28:56):
it to. And there's plenty ofopportunities to build and expand
upon that and find success.All right, hopefully you found this
insightful. This is a littlebit longer than I usually go on,
kind of the sole, but I thinkit was a really important point to
make about how I think we'restill early days, especially in owning
your audience. If you likedwhat you heard, again, do me a favor,
go on Apple podcasts, Spotify,whatever the heck Google has. Leave
(29:19):
a five star review, leave somecommentary about what you like, what
you didn't like, expand on atopic. I promise I will get in the
comments on some of these andmix it up. And certainly to the extent
we have to play by thealgorithm on some of these recommendation
engines, that will definitelyhelp. If you didn't like it or if
you did, hit me up onxylescott L. You can DM me, you can
me. I will engage with justabout anybody who's said they've
(29:42):
put the time in to listen tothe show. Again, I've heard from
a number of you. I'm happy tohave a call if you have a topic,
anything like that. I'm doinga lot in local media right now at
Access media we have 15websites in and around the Philly
area. We're building outnewsletters. We have a sports brand,
I own a general interest newsnational newsletter and TIP News.
(30:02):
We're experimenting with somethings in local real estate as it
comes to product and obviouslyI'm doing this with monetized media.
So I have lots of thoughts onany and all the above. Happy to engage,
appreciate you listening, likeand subscribe, all that fun stuff.
See you next time.
All right, welcome back toMonetize Media. I am Kyle Scott.
Today I want to dig in to thenotion that newsletters are dead
or somehow saturated.Piggybacking on a tweet put out by
Sam Parr, who obviouslyfounded the Hustle. And I want to
start off by saying that firstof all, I'm a big fan of Sam's. I've
(00:24):
listened to a lot of my firstmillion. I was an early subscriber
to the Hustle and Trends andreally admire sort of the path he's
taken. But I do find it alittle bit rich that someone who's
had so much success innewsletters and is speaking at a
newsletter conference nextmonth, you know, puts out tweets
like newsletters are lame lastyear and then a more recent one in
December, which we'll get toin a second, about how the whole
(00:46):
space has kind of played outand too competitive and everyone
is kind of copying hisplaybook and it's not gonna work.
I think there's some merit tothat, but there's a lot that he's
getting wrong and I disagreewith. So really want to dig into
that concept and then alsotalk about where the opportunities
are because indee indeed, thenewsletter market is saturated in
some spots and in others it'swide open. But before we get to it,
(01:08):
I want to ask you a favor. Ifyou enjoy this podcast, take 22 seconds
to leave five stars or athumbs up on your podcast app of
choice. Apple Podcasts,Spotify, whatever the heck Google
uses, if you're listening onYouTube and write a review or a reply
or a comment. This does twothings. One, it helps the algorithm
(01:30):
recommend us. So that's a veryselfish ask on my part. And two,
it gives me valuable feedbackfor how to improve future episodes.
And that's for you. Leaveconstructive feedback what you like,
what you don't like, what wecould do better. And really, just
what sorts of topics would youlike me to cover going forward? And
if you hate it, all right,maybe don't leave a review then,
but DM me on xylescott L allone word and tell me what you don't
(01:54):
like or what I could dobetter. Happy to have a conversation.
This definitely isn't perfect.I will say I've heard from a number
of listeners over the lastweek to 10 days who have been listening
to just the four or fiveepisodes I've put out since bringing
the two year old podcast backin December. And the feedback's been
really great. So I appreciateit. I love the interaction Happy
(02:17):
to chat with any and all ofyou. Had an hour long conversation
before with somebody abouttheir local newsletter. Nothing in
it for me other than just agood exchange of ideas. So yeah,
keep the feedback coming.Okay, so I want to turn my attention
to this tweet from Decemberfrom Sampar. Now I'm not going to
read all of it, but the gistof the tweet is that the newsletters
as content space is playedout, saturated. Lol. It's dumb, dead
(02:41):
so on. And you know, I'mparaphrasing a bit there. But earlier
in 2024 he put out a tweetsaying newsletters are lame last
February and then in 20 as wayback as 2020, the year he sold the
Hustle, I believe he declarednewsletters dead and said that blogging
was making a comeback in 2021,which it most certainly has not.
So I'm not going to read thiswhole tweet because it was kind of
(03:03):
a long thread ish style post.But I will read a little of it, he
says. But when I see peoplecopy our results, I want to tell
them that's a mistake. Or atleast if they do copy, the results
may not be as good. And alsoif you're going to copy it, you for
sure need to make a handful ofchanges to really make it great,
which most don't. It's forsure possible. But things are different
(03:25):
today. The world felt smallerthen. We covered tech news and we
did it via a business emailnewsletter. There was very, very
little competition. It feltlike it was us, the Skim and Morning
Brew. Now there's thousands ofpeople doing it. So his point is,
is that there's a whole lot ofcopycats out there in the tech startup
business and now AI spacecopying the format popularized by
(03:48):
Morning Brew, the Hustle,which is generally short quip in
the beginning, three or fourmain stories, a couple of side sections,
a poll and move on with yourday. That sort of aggregation, digest
style content which is easy toread and consume in email. And he's
right, it is definitely asaturated space. A number of people
(04:09):
have tried to copy thatplaybook, put a slightly unique,
if at all spin on it andcompete with much more established,
well financed, well ironedmachines that are the Hustle and
Morning Brews of the world.And that's that's almost certainly
a bad business model todaywhere I think he is very, very and
(04:30):
he kind of went on to before Iget into it, he kind of went on to
say that, you know, they hadto build A lot of the tools and services
that we have today. So it madetheir businesses more defensible,
which is true. They didn'thave access to a beehive or substack.
I tried to do some stuffpersonally in the subscription space.
I worked with John Clayton,rest in peace, former ESPN football
(04:52):
personality. He had over amillion followers on Twitter and
in 2017 we tried to launch asubscription thing with him that
was largely built around emailand we had to piece together all
these tools. So to Sam'spoint, I understand what he's saying,
that in the kind of mid 2010s,the tools didn't exist and if you
were able to build thenewsletter list and have a content
based CMS to plug inadvertisers and do polls, you had
(05:13):
to build it yourself, whichmade it less competitive because
not as many people are able todo it. So he is 100% right there
and I don't mean to discountthat portion of his take. However.
However, this sounds a lotlike people who were early in blogging
or early in podcastingdeclaring those things dead long
before they ever wentmainstream. And what I would say
is the tech startup AIbusiness circles are often very,
(05:39):
very early on new mediums. Youknow, blogging took the form of a
wall of text by tech bros. AndI don't know, the late 90s, early
2000s, but it didn't reallyhit its apex till the mid 2010s,
almost 20 years later. Istarted my site in Philly, crossing
Broad in 2009, and at the timeI had looked at a bunch of early
(06:02):
tech websites, actually evenTMZ a little bit, and said, you know,
there's a lot of businesseshere, there's a lot of modern media
companies that have been builton the Internet in kind of that blog
style, reverse chronolog,chronological, chronological order.
And there's only maybe ahandful of people doing that in sports,
which at the time was Deadspinand Barstool and maybe Yahoo was
(06:22):
doing it a little. So I did itfor local sports and treated it like
a business. It wasn't playedout at all yet it was still a relatively
novel concept to Philadelphiasports fans, something that was maybe
a 10 year old format to peoplethat had been reading, I don't know,
TechCrunch or Daring Fireball.Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball, popular
(06:42):
Apple blog, said in a speechabout 10 years ago that when he started
his site, which was again aclassic blog in the mid 2000s, he
thought he was late. And whathe learned over Time was he wasn't
late at all. He was actuallyvery early, even in the tech space.
And oftentimes when you feellike you're late, the reality is
you're not. It just may beeverybody around you is aware of
(07:03):
this space and you're viewingthings a bit myopically and not realizing
that 90, 95% of normal peopleout there don't run in these same
circles. And these mediums canbe very new to them. Podcasting,
another great example. By theearly 2010s, podcasting really took
the form of usually a coupleof tech guys, often developers, sitting
(07:25):
around experimenting with anew format with little structure,
poor production quality, andin some cases, lots of listeners.
And there's probably a lot ofpeople in the same tech and startup
scene that Sam is a part of inSan Francisco and Austin who would
have told you in 2012 that youwere late to podcasting. Now, I think
we all know that, and I wouldextend that to comedians. Comedians
(07:48):
also tend to be very early onnew mediums. Adam Kroll and Marc
Maron, with Podcasting again,early 2010s, they found a new medium
where they can kind of delivertheir fiery, unfiltered takes. And
they used it to become. To getvery successful. They had already
been successful, these guys,but build a huge audience, build
their own media company. DaneCook established himself on MySpace.
(08:11):
Right? There may have beencomedians who said you were late
to social media if you weren'ton MySpace in 2006. So you kind of
get the point. The reality is,in 2012, you weren't late to podcasting.
It probably really didn't kindof eclipse mainstream media until
last year, 2024, at least.It's being credited with eclipsing
mainstream media and kind ofpotentially influencing the election.
(08:34):
The point is, you know, youmay have been late to tech podcasting
by the mid-2010s, but food,politics, news, local news, you know,
whatever, B2B niches, it'sstill a developing space. And I think
Sam's a bit guilty of that.And there's a number of cohorts,
I think, who are early to thenewsletter space who think everybody's
(08:54):
now late because these toolsnow exist because they don't have
to blaze the trail and it'seasy for everybody else. And listen,
these tools are built on thebacks of some of this trailblazing.
Tyler Dank at Beehive builtthese systems for Morning Brew, and
he productized it with BeehiveSubstack didn't exist then, so it
is much easier to Start anewsletter now, but that doesn't
(09:16):
mean the space is dead andthere's not as much competition as
you think. Yes, if you aregoing to start a tech newsletter,
a digest style newsletter, anAI updates newsletter, yes, you're
late, there's a million peopledoing that, your chances of success
are very, very. But thereality is for things like local
media, which we talk about alot here and I'll get to in a second,
(09:37):
and other specific niches oreven broad topics, newsletters are
not played out. The averageperson, the average 48 year old woman
or 52 year old man doesn'treceive 50 newsletters in their inbox
every morning the way maybeSam Par and a bunch of the SF Austin
types do or have been for thelast five years. In fact, it's still
(09:59):
a newsletters as contentmedium are still relatively new format
to a number of normal everydaypeople. And I think that often gets
lost on people that are earlyto something just how long that adoption
curve is. The other part ofhis argument is that the tools that
exist now make it easier forpeople and thus invite competition,
(10:21):
which is true. But let's thinkabout this rationally. Let's look
at blogging and podcasting.Early on blogging you had to create
your own website. You had toget in and do HTML.WordPress and
type pad were still veryearly, if they, if they existed at
all. There wasn't. I used tohave a blog in 2006 that I had a
run through. I think it waslike Angelfire or something. And
(10:41):
I would, each time I put up anew post, I had to move text and
I had to update HTML in thebackground. It was, it was awful.
And maybe I was a little,maybe could have used some tools
that were available at thetime. But the point is, you know,
it wasn't just like, oh yeah,I'll just go sign up for WordPress.
That went mainstream sometimelate 2000s, early 2000s. And I think
(11:04):
very few people would actuallyargue with a straight face that the
introduction of WordPress andthe popularity of WordPress because
it made blogging socompetitive, made it very difficult
space to enter and that yourelate to the space if you got in
because you weren't like theearly tech guys who created their
own blogs through blood, sweatand tears. Obviously that wasn't
(11:24):
true. Lots of huge webbusinesses, huge businesses that
have been sold to publiclytraded hundred million dollar Companies
run on WordPress and werebuilt originally on WordPress. Same
with podcasting early on, youknow, if it was 2006 and I asked
you to put out a podcast. Howwould you do that exactly? Do you
know how you would do that? Idon't. Right now. The tools exist.
(11:45):
I can record this inRiverside, save it, upload it to
Captivate, and it throws it on15 different platforms for me. Back
then, you used to have tocreate, I guess, an I Tunes account,
develop, I don't know, aproducer account, save an MP3, upload
it. You know, the point iscreate an RSS feed. It wasn't as
easy. And no one would claimthat. The introduction of the tools
(12:06):
to distribute podcasts, like,I'm gonna. I'm gonna forget some
of the names. I'm not gonnaattempt to enter them. But, you know,
these tools have been aroundfor over a decade. The introduction
of them, yes, it created morecompetition, but it didn't mean the
space was dead or saturated.You were still very early ten years
ago in podcasting. I'd argueyou're still early today in podcasting.
And, you know, if we extendthis to Substack and Beehive as platforms,
(12:28):
yeah, they make it easier forpeople and they're inviting a lot
more people into the space.But it frees people to think more
about the content format thanthe logistics of how do I send this
to 10,000 people and how do Iinsert an ad and how do I clean my
list or create a segment. Youknow, this is what we call progress,
(12:50):
right? The introduction of thetractor didn't make farming dead.
It just sort of changed it andallowed for higher yield. And sure,
maybe, I don't know, I don'tknow, maybe it created more farmers,
more people could buy atractor and have a small farm or
whatever it is. But thereality is it made them more efficient
and created moreopportunities. And I think the tools
we have now for newslettersand communities, I would extend that
(13:13):
mean we're just gettingstarted in the space. So, yeah, if
you're entering podcastingtoday in business, tech, AI, finance,
yeah, you're a little latewith digest style stuff. I definitely
think there are areas you cango deep niche on and find a huge
audience. Maybe it's CFOs of Xtype of company or AI for HR professionals,
(13:34):
whatever it is, you can nichedown and find a large addressable
market in sub niches thatprobably is more valuable than a
kind of general digest styleaudience like the Hustle and Morning
Brew have. And you're seeing alot of businesses do this, like Adam
Ryan's Workweek. I thinkyou're seeing Morning Brew kind of
niche down with some of theirsub newsletters, Axios is doing this.
This isn't like a new idea andthat's just in these supposedly crowded
(13:56):
spaces. What are theopportunities outside of that? I
would say, and we talk aboutthis a lot on here. I think local
is inherently slow on theuptake to embrace new mediums. There
are a number of reasons forthis, but typically local ecosystems
don't plug into the modernInternet the same way that 20 and
(14:19):
30 something guys and girls inSan Francisco and Austin plug into
the Internet. So if you showup and you try to sell a company
like lmnt, the hydrationcompany, a newsletter ad, they're
going to say, oh yeah, youknow, we advertise in newsletters
a lot. It's a way we reach 28year olds who are taking their health
seriously because they listento Peter Attia and Huberman Labs.
(14:41):
But if you go to your locallyowned grocery store and say, hey,
you want to put an ad in mylocal newsletter? They're going to
say, explain to me whatexactly a local newsletter is. And
the point is, you know, localis much slower on the uptake. More
importantly, there is lesscompetition. To explain that, I want
to call your attention to acomment made by Morgan Housel on
(15:04):
a recent podcast. So if youdon't know Morgan, he wrote the book
Psychology of Money a coupleof years ago. It's a bestseller.
It is one of the best booksI've ever read for thinking about
just your personal finances atreally any income level. I love his
way of thinking about theworld in kind of from first principles
and practicality. And he has asimple way of viewing things that
(15:24):
I think is fascinating acrossthe board, but especially his views
on finance. Anyway, he putsout a podcast a couple times a month
where he kind of breaks downconventional wisdom and maybe talks
about why society is generallyright or wrong. And as he often does,
he quoted, or at least itattributed the following comment
to Warren Buffett. And he said100 years ago every town had an opera
(15:45):
singer. And what he meant bythat was that today, whether it's
in business or contentcreation, we increasingly see the
most successful, the mosttalented go viral, get famous, make
lots of money, and then nobodyelse gets anything or they're left
(16:05):
fighting over scraps. This isthe power of the Internet. The best
musician, the best fun videomaker like Mr. Beast or Dude Perfect
can go viral and reach tens orhundreds of millions of people and
build a billion dollarbusiness on the back of it. But there
are less opportunities for thethe middle to earn Livable wages,
(16:31):
entertaining people,especially online, because you're
either as good as those guysor you're not. And the money will
all accrue. And we see this inpodcasting. There was some stat like
something like the top 1% ofpodcasts earn 70% of the money. And
so the point about the operasinger is that when 100 years ago
(16:52):
people wanted theirentertainment, they would go see
the local opera singer. Andthat local opera singer didn't have
to be great, they just had tobe the best in town, the best in
their area, the best in theirsmall category, and enough people
would pay to see them andthey'd earn a livable wage and they
wouldn't become rich andfamous like Taylor Swift, but they
(17:12):
would be well known in theirtown and they'd be able to have a
successful living. Today, thatobviously no longer exists. We show
up to see football stadiumsfull of people, to see Taylor Swift
or Zach Brown band or KennyChesney or whoever it is, and then
we get the rest of ourentertainment fill by scrolling TikTok
(17:33):
and Instagram, where there areno shortage of people creating entertaining
content for free. I wouldinclude YouTube, obviously. And because
the algorithms increasinglyand rightfully feed us the best,
most engaging and watchablecontent, there are a few winners
and lots and lots of, I don'twant to say losers, but people who
aren't able to earn a middlewage. If you're sitting down to watch
(17:56):
something entertaining for thenext 25 minutes and you can see the
crazy stunts being pulled offby Dude Perfect or some guy who's
entertaining but doing thosesame things in his backyard with
less production value and lessshock value, which are you going
to watch? Well, you're goingto watch dude perfect. And 100 years
ago, that guy may have beenable to entertain people locally
(18:17):
and sell 150 people tickets,and now it's just like, you know
what? I'll watch Dude Perfect,right? So that's kind of the point
of this. Every town had anopera singer. And in content creation,
you want to try to find theareas where you can still be the
opera singer, where you don'thave to be the best in the world,
but you can be the best inyour area. Like local newsletters
(18:39):
or a category like a niche B2Bthing. One example I love is I found
the newsletter called MoreThan Teeth targeted at Sleep Dental
professionals. They had 14,000sleep dental dental sleep professionals
like Think like sleep apneamachines who subscribe to their specialized
(19:01):
info on how to treat patientswith sleeping additions through dental
Devices. You talk about aspecialized niche and a high value
audience. Now, fun fact, thisnewsletter was for sale, induced
for only $20,000. And Iactually contacted them about it
and I put out a tweet about itand it turns out they had actually
recommended they listed atthis low price, I would argue 14,000
(19:21):
sleek dental professionals issuch a high value audience, I could
do a whole podcast about it.And one of the readers of the newsletter
actually wound up buying it,although price undisclosed. But I
guarantee you it was way lessthan that audience is worth because
of how much of a high valueniche that is. But the point being
is the guy who created thatdidn't create a general medical newsletter,
a general health and wellnessnewsletter, not even a general how
(19:44):
to sleep better newsletter. Hecreated a newsletter targeted at
dental sleep professionals. Sohe didn't have to be great, he didn't
have to be as good as Hubermanor Peter Attia or Tim Ferriss. He
just had to be the best atspecific content geared toward dentists
who do these procedures. Samewith local newsletters. This is why
(20:06):
they're having such a momentright now. Sure, the morning brews
of the world are tapped out.If you start a general news newsletter.
And I own one in TIP News. TIPNews subscribe. It's free, right?
But it's a crowded space.Morning brew, crowded space. But
the reason why so many peopleare experimenting with local newsletters
and why Beehive frankly, as aplatform is embracing this is because
(20:28):
I don't know how many downsare there in America in the world,
right? Each town can havethese and to have quote unquote success.
And we can, you know, theykind of haggle over how you define
that. But to build anaudience, you don't have to be great,
you don't have to be asengaging as the Hustle is or Milk
Road was. All you gotta be isthe best in your town and good enough
and bring value to people. Andif there's maybe one or two other
(20:51):
people in your area maybedoing the same thing or some other
old local newspaper, you justhave to be as good or better than
them or just be on a differentmedium like email, you know, just
like the teeth guy, I'mguessing that he's probably not the
most engaging writer, but ifyou're a dental sleep professional,
he was bringing you thecontent you needed. And I would extend
(21:12):
this to so, so many top that,you know, they're almost limitless
lifestyle stuff like food anddrinks, certainly B2B niches speaking
to some type of professionalin some type of area or some type
of athlete in some age range.Any of these niches have tens of
thousands of people and manyof them are kind of normal, everyday
(21:33):
people who aren't up on thelatest thing. They just came around
to listening to podcasts lastyear. They don't even know what the
Morning Brew or the Hustle is.And if you send them a newsletter
about the thing that theyreally like or the job or service
they perform, that's highvalue, you might be the only newsletter
they're receiving and you'regoing to get 60% open rates and you're
going to have no competition,much like local newsletters. Now
(21:55):
we talk a lot aboutmonetization on here and I think
there's a whole separateepisode about how to monetize these.
But again, step one isobviously building an audience and
there's huge audience to bebuilt in these and huge money to
be made. I honestly think themore niche you are, as long as the
audience is some number ofthousands of people, you can build
a very, very lucrative mediabusiness. So I think the idea that
(22:19):
newsletters are lame, thatthey're dead, that the space is saturated,
is entirely incorrect for mostpeople, yes. For people in certain
circles that may be the caseor you may be in the middle innings.
But I actually think that thecreation of these tools will free
people up to think about theformat. I think what we're learning
lately is that shorter isbetter. It is a lift to read a long
(22:43):
email. You're scrollingthrough your inbox in the morning,
you're trying to get through abunch of stuff you want to provide,
something that people want toopen and they want to consume. Right
then a lot of people don'tcome back to those flagged emails.
I know. I certainly don't.It's not like a website. You leave
a tab open like you'rescrolling, you either read the email
or you don't. And I imagine awhole lot of people don't double
back. So we're learningshorter is better. Consistency is
(23:06):
obviously better. There areall sorts of different formats that
people are going to play with.And I think eventually newsletters
is going to come to me, be astand in for owned audience. And
that's going to includemessaging communities and frankly,
in person events. And this iswhere I bring in Shopify. I don't
think a lot of people wouldhave told you that you were late
to the E Commerce game whenShopify became widely available.
(23:29):
You were still very, veryearly in the DTC space. And what
Harvey Finkelstein, CEOpresident of Shopify, always says
is they want to be the os, theoperating system for retail, and
they don't care if you use theShopify app, which they have and
it's fine. And they aggregatestores and the experience is pretty
good, but they don't care ifthey come to your website, if you
(23:49):
sell on Facebook, Instagram,TikTok or in person. Shopify aims
to be the backend for all ofthat. Your inventory is cataloged
across all those platforms.The transaction happens in the same
place in the background acrossall those platforms. Your settings
and SKUs are set in one placeand can be distributed and sold anywhere.
(24:10):
And I think when we use thephrase newsletters, we should really
be thinking about the phraseowned audience. And I think what
Beehive is doing muchdifferent than Substack, which I'll
get to in a second, is thatthey want to be the operating system
for your own audience. And itstarts with newsletters much the
same way Shopify started withwebsites. But it will eventually
(24:31):
extend, I think tocommunities, to messaging groups,
to organizing in personevents, to paid subscriptions. Anything
a quote unquote media companycan do to engage its audience. Shop
Beehive wants to help powerthat. Now that differs a lot from
Substack, which feels muchmore increasingly like a walled garden.
(24:54):
They are pushing out creatorsto make vertical real style videos,
I think not coincidentally onthe back of TikTok, maybe as a request
recording this being banned inthe U.S. you know, if we're using
the analogy, I think they'remore like Amazon. You can build your
own store on Amazon, you canbuild your own audience on Substack,
you can own a portion of thatcustomer relationship. But ultimately
(25:18):
the E commerce and this isbuilt solely on Amazon are at the
whim of how Amazon wants todisplay and sell and market their
products. And I think that'sthe case for creators and journalists
who are building on Substack.Long term they're going to be at
the whim. They might haveaccess to these email addresses,
they might earn money, butlong term their audience's attention
will be at the whim ofSubstack and its algorithm and its
(25:41):
app and how it wants todisplay their content. Whereas Beehive,
I think will function morelike Shopify. Maybe they do have
an app, maybe they do have adirectory, just like Shopify does.
But at the end of the day theywon't care if you engage your audience
in their inboxes or through amessage group or even plan an event
in person. I think they wantto be the OS for owned audience.
(26:03):
And so to kind of put a bow onit, if you have a newsletter, you're
thinking of starting anewsletter, you're a business that
thinks you can benefit fromkind of the content style of a newsletter.
I would extend the phrasenewsletter to be owned audience.
Algorithms are increasinglydifficult on social. Whether or not
TikTok gets banned, whateverhappens on X this year, it doesn't
(26:24):
matter. These are great toolsto build audience and gain recognition
and you should definitely usethem. You always want to be thinking
about how you can own andengage your audience today. Owning
and engaging your audience.Newsletters are a great format to
do that. It's a great platformand medium to do that, much like
podcasting is as well. And Ithink that unless you are creating
a media brand in one of thesenarrow, slim vertical of tech and
(26:48):
startup aimed at tech andstartup people, the opportunity is
still massive to create a bigmedia business to have a large owned
audience that you can sellyour products and services to using
newsletters as a leadingformat. One last point about Sam's
tweet. One of the things hementioned was, you know, everyone's
copying what we did. It's notgoing to work. They're doing the
(27:10):
same thing in newsletters withthe same types of newsletters. And
I agree with him, him and hesaid he has always had success looking
at people throughout historyand the way they've done things and
then tried to apply thosethings to his business, to the hustle
in this case. An example I'veseen in the past is, you know, some
of these early. I want to sayit was like Budweiser was successful
early on because they reallycracked distribution and they were
(27:32):
able to get their cases ofbeer on the rail lines and send them
around the country. I don'tknow, that might, may or may not
be accurate, but I think thepoint still stands is that it was
about like, hey, how importantdistribution is not just your product,
right? And that's a lesson youcould certainly take in media and
almost any type of business.And so Sam's point was he's looked
at these examples throughouthistory and how do you apply it to
(27:52):
your business? Don't juststeal my newsletter idea and put
it in a newsletter. Steal mynewsletter idea and put it in whatever
the next medium is or whateveryour business is, and maybe there's
something you can learn.Totally fair point. But what I would
argue is you can actually takesome of these newsletters concept
that him and people at theMorning Brew have developed and Then
apply them to topics wherethey haven't yet been applied. Right.
(28:15):
The morning brew of X workswhen it's talking about real estate
in a local vacation town.Right. The people in that town don't
receive 20 emails about thattopic. They receive precisely zero
of those emails. And justbecause you're using a style that
Sam and the people at theHustle may have pioneered, it doesn't
(28:36):
mean that it is not novel anduseful elsewhere in the newsletter
space. You just gotta pivotthe topic. So I think the point is
good. You can always takelessons from different verticals
and different industries andapply em to your own. But sometimes
it's just as easy as lookingat the things that worked in your
industry and then finding ahook, a niche, a subgroup to apply
(28:56):
it to. And there's plenty ofopportunities to build and expand
upon that and find success.All right, hopefully you found this
insightful. This is a littlebit longer than I usually go on,
kind of the sole, but I thinkit was a really important point to
make about how I think we'restill early days, especially in owning
your audience. If you likedwhat you heard, again, do me a favor,
go on Apple podcasts, Spotify,whatever the heck Google has. Leave
(29:19):
a five star review, leave somecommentary about what you like, what
you didn't like, expand on atopic. I promise I will get in the
comments on some of these andmix it up. And certainly to the extent
we have to play by thealgorithm on some of these recommendation
engines, that will definitelyhelp. If you didn't like it or if
you did, hit me up onxylescott L. You can DM me, you can
me. I will engage with justabout anybody who's said they've
(29:42):
put the time in to listen tothe show. Again, I've heard from
a number of you. I'm happy tohave a call if you have a topic,
anything like that. I'm doinga lot in local media right now at
Access media we have 15websites in and around the Philly
area. We're building outnewsletters. We have a sports brand,
I own a general interest newsnational newsletter and TIP News.
(30:02):
We're experimenting with somethings in local real estate as it
comes to product and obviouslyI'm doing this with monetized media.
So I have lots of thoughts onany and all the above. Happy to engage,
appreciate you listening, likeand subscribe, all that fun stuff.
See you next time.
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