September 5, 2025 • 55 mins
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I sat down with Jas to hear how he built Winnipeg Digest from scratch into a six-figure local media business. He broke down exactly how he grew the newsletter to over 35,000 subscribers and 73,000 social followers in just over a year, and how he monetizes through exclusive sponsorships. Jas shared his playbook on ads, open rates, subject lines, and why local newsletters are the most underrated way to build a real audience today. We also got into his new venture, Digest Lights, a Christmas lights business he launched on top of the newsletter that’s already bringing in jobs before the season starts. We talked through unit economics, sales tactics, and the bigger vision of using a local media asset as a marketing arm for other businesses.
You can find Jas on Twitter at https://x.com/Creatingjas and check out his newsletter at https://winnipeg-digest.beehiiv.com/
Enjoy!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I think there's a lot of opportunity, especially for
someone that's looking for the first business.
It's a really easy business to start.
You can easily run this whole business on 15 hours a week.
Every aspiring entrepreneur, they know that having an
audience is powerful but 95% of them have no desire to get in
front of the camera. It sucks.
I feel like this is a great loophole where you can just
(00:21):
through Claude, through ChatGPT,use emails to build an audience.
35,000 people in a city is more powerful than a million TikTok
followers that are world why it is a. $144,000 a year in revenue
just on our newsletter ad Instagram.
It's 2800 for one post. It's essentially a business that
can't lose. The longer I'm in the business,
(00:41):
the more money I'm going to make.
If I wanted to, in three years, I could run for mayor.
Now only the OG fans of this podcast will remember this, but
a whole year and a half ago whenI first started this podcast, it
originally began as a question and answer show and it was live.
People would call in, ask me questions about their business
or their business idea and I would answer it on the spot.
(01:03):
Well, in one of those first episodes, this guy from Canada
named Jazz called and he was thrown around this idea for a
business and I gave him some advice.
He took the advice and now a year later he has a profitable 6
figure business on his hands andhe just launched another
business that's already profitable that piggybacks on
that first business that I helped them launch.
This is a business that literally anyone could start
(01:25):
with almost no money. The path to growth is very clear
and outlined in this episode. So let's go I.
Think there's a lot of opportunity in local
newsletters, you know, especially for someone that's
looking for the first business even I would say, right, it's a
really easy business to start. And honestly, as step by step as
it gets right, Like, yeah, like you're just basically replacing
(01:46):
the traditional media and peopleare looking for something new,
so. OK, so why don't we start by you
telling me about your local newsletter, Where's it based?
How many subscribers do you have?
And. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
So in my local newsletter, it's called Winnipeg Digest.
It's most people don't know about Winnipeg, but it's like a
cold city here in Canada, in themiddle of it.
(02:06):
And so I started it here. I've been here for about 11-12
years, you know, and I was looking for my first business to
start on my own. Beforehand I had some experience
like growing social media followings to like 100K or
something when I was 14, sellingthem to e-commerce companies
like theme pages and things of that nature.
So wanted to start a business. Had seen Ryan Sneddon who does
(02:30):
it in Annapolis do it and had wanted to start it for a while
honestly. And so I thought OK, it can't
really be too difficult. Started it in last year April,
so 2024 April and then since then we now reach over 100,000
Winnipeggers. That's a combination of media
and newsletters. So we have both 73,000 followers
(02:51):
on social media. There's like 800,000 people in
Winnipeg right? Yeah, it's about 800 K and then
our newsletter is at about 35,000 people now, so.
OK, so 70 something on social, 35,000 on newsletter.
Yeah, Yeah. OK.
So that's for split now and yeah, it's good.
And we're now trying to start other businesses off over, so,
(03:12):
OK. We'll get into that, trust me.
I'm very curious about that now.You live in Winnipeg, right?
Yeah, yeah, I live here. How well do you know the market?
How long have you been there? I've.
Basically grown up here, like I've been here for over 1213
years now. So I know the market fairly
well, you know, and Winnipeg isn't necessarily a tech savvy
city. I could, you know, it's I kind
(03:33):
of make the joke here that I cancopy anything off of Twitter and
paste it here and it would do well, Yeah.
So it's like not a tech savvy city at all, like Calgary or
something in Canada. And so, you know, it's a really
easy market to start any business here.
And so there's low competition. How successful would you be if
you took a let's say Austin, TX 800,000 people give or take?
(03:55):
How successful would you be if you would have taken the exact
same playbook and done it in Austin?
Austin might be a bad example because they probably have like
100 local newsletter. So ignoring that, just the fact
that you were not a local, how would you have done?
Yeah, I mean, if I were to personally start it, I would
start it somewhere where you do have a first mover's advantage,
(04:16):
you know. So that's what Winnipeg did so
well for me is because there wasno not even an Instagram account
that just filed all the events here, right, let alone having a
newsletter based on it. So it was a really easy market
for me to kind of take a monopoly over.
And The thing is now if anyone else starts a local news that
are here in Winnipeg, their costfor acquiring a subscriber is
(04:38):
automatically going to be much higher, right?
So I would highly recommend if someone is starting 1.
So I know a few people in Texas that are starting one and they
are now targeting suburbs aroundAustin rather than the actual
city of Austin. Yeah, so gun to your head, if
you had to choose between a cityyou were very familiar with but
didn't have a first mover's advantage, and a city that you
(05:01):
weren't familiar with but did have a first mover's advantage,
which would you choose? Yeah, I mean, I think there's
multiple models to go about this, so you can definitely even
partner up with someone in another city.
I would probably go with the place where I have the first
mover's advantage, just because acquiring the acquisition cost
per subscriber will be much lower, right?
(05:21):
Like my I was acquiring subscribers for $0.15 Canadian,
right? So like 12-11 cents US.
Yeah. So even today, like even today,
I'm acquiring subscribers for like Max like $1.30 or something
like that. Yeah, so.
What is your subscriber worth, give or take?
Yeah. So they're worth about if I am
(05:42):
able to sell every single odd slot in my newsletter for the
year and we only do 1 odd slot per newsletter.
About 8 to $9 a year is kind of what they're worth at the
current open rate we have. Per year too and I'm guessing at
your normal open rate they're probably going to be around for
like 5 plus years. Yeah, easily.
Like we have a zero point zero 5% unsubscribe rate or something
(06:06):
like. That jeez, that's so good.
So it's like you kind of createdslash invented this money
machine that turns a dollar into40 or $50 as long as you're
willing to be patient. You don't get that immediately.
It takes five years to get the LTV lifetime value.
But nonetheless, like you created this template and now
(06:27):
put in one get out 50A. 100% I mean, it's obviously much easier
said than done. Like I think the biggest problem
that local newsletters run into is not is not building the
audience. Anyone can build the audience.
Anyone can turn on Facebook ads and put out in product.
The thing that you most likely end up will will have problems
with is getting sponsors is selling local businesses on a
(06:49):
whole new concept of advertising.
Yeah. So I think that's the biggest
problem that most folks run intois definitely the anyone can get
to 10 to 15,000 Subs anybody. It's just that acquiring
sponsors for 10 to 15,000 Subs. Well, here's a perfect example
and we're going to get into thiswhen you talk about how you're
going to launch a business basedon this.
If I want to sponsor for this podcast, they're going to pay
(07:11):
me, call it $20 per 1000 views, right?
If I use Spotify ads, like the annoying ads that Spotify puts
in themselves, which I turned onfor a week just to test and I'm
turning it off, it's $6 per 1000views downloads, which is
nothing like that is pennies, right?
So $6 from Spotify, $20 if I andor my agent go out and hustle to
(07:35):
find sponsors. But if I build my own business
that's in this niche, in this vertical, it's relevant to my
audience and I put in an ad for it, it's $200 per 1000 views.
It's not a, it's a 10X difference, right?
Like a 50X difference based on, you know, the lazy way of just
putting Spotify mid roll ads for, you know, Toyota,
(07:57):
Chevrolet, local dealers, which I'm just not going to do.
So there's so much power in having a business mind and
having a newsletter or an audience because you can
vertically integrate and sell your own stuff and not the local
bakery or whatever it is, right?Yeah, it gets me excited, You
talking about that? Because like when we started the
newsletter, my whole idea was, hey, I'm going to build
(08:18):
companies on top of this. And anybody I would talk to
would be saying, yeah, but that's like an unrealistic
thing. Like, you know, it's tough to
obviously run multiple businesses.
And I totally understand that. And, you know, we've obviously
shifted the vision a little bit,but if you're going to just go
sell ads on top of your local newsletter, it's going to be
really hard to monetize. Like you will cap out at Max
(08:38):
$500,000 a year. Like that is the absolute.
Like if you have everything perfect and a great market,
you'll still cap out at 500 KA year.
But some people are hearing thatand thinking I'm cool with that.
It's definitely not a side gig or it's not a, it's not a bad
place to start, right? But like, if you're really
trying to make serious money or trying to grow the business,
(08:59):
you'd have to vertically integrate at some point.
Yeah. OK.
So 35,000 subscribers, how many do you send per week?
We send out three times a week. OK.
How did you land on that? Did you start with that or did
you finish with that? Yeah.
So I mean, we started with once a week.
We felt that there was too much content for us to cover in just
(09:19):
a one time a week edition. Then we went to two times a week
and this was like in a span of amonth by the way.
Like this was not, we didn't wait too long.
We started once a week, felt there was too much content, then
went to two times a week, again,still too much content to cover.
Did three times a week, and thenwe sometimes started running out
of content. So we're like, OK, so three
times a week cadence is like a good amount where even if one
(09:41):
e-mail is shorter than the othertwo, no one's really complaining
about that. Let's talk about your content.
Is it like local news? Is it updates?
Is it opinion pieces? When we started, I remember Ryan
saying this one thing. When we started, it was
everything other than crime and politics, and that's exactly
what we have run with as well. So it's basically events,
(10:02):
community updates, city updates,any new bylaws, anything that is
happening in the city basically away from crime and politics is
what we promote. OK, now I understand politics.
You don't want to alienate half of your subscribers, right?
Why not crime? Like we will occasionally talk
about it saying something like, oh, the most wanted report has
come out for Winnipeg, like, youknow, just to make people aware
(10:25):
of it. We don't necessarily want to
talk about like, you know, someone getting stopped or
something like that, right? Especially like.
She's not the vibe. Yeah, it's not the vibe.
And I mean, Winnipeg is known aslike the murder capital of
Canada. And so and so because of that
reason where like, you know what, we're gonna change the
narrative. And also from a retelling
(10:46):
perspective, it sounds amazing when we say, when we say
something like, you know, where everyone says Winnipeg is boring
and we're trying to change that narrative.
Yeah, I love that. I just had an idea.
Like, if you find yourself running out of content, I feel
like you could supplement with like opinion pieces like Greg
from, you know, from this neighborhood ranks the three
best ice cream shops in Winnipeg, you know?
(11:07):
Yeah, 100%. And we are now also integrated a
lot of our socials like on socials will say here the 10
best homes listed in Winnipeg this month or something, right.
So you can integrate a lot of that into our newsletter as
well. How many words on average are
your emails? 400 to 2600.
So pretty long, pretty big. Yeah, yeah, they're fairly long,
(11:28):
but honestly half of it is events because each event like a
small description associated with it.
What are your open rates and click through rates like today
versus first couple months? Yeah.
I mean, they've stayed fairly consistent.
We've always been above 50%. Click through rate has always
been in the ballpark of like 8 to 12%.
(11:50):
Crazy high, man. Yeah.
So opening today is about 56 to 60%.
So it can vary obviously depending on the set.
Yeah. Yeah, Now I've noticed there's
like a, there's like a a law of newsletters where the bigger it
gets, the more your open rate drops.
Like in my experience are are you, have you seen that like did
it start in the 60s and then very slowly ticks its way down?
(12:12):
Yeah. I mean, it did do that.
And then what we started doing was we cleaned our list like two
or three times, but that was honestly kind of a mistake on
our end. Because sometimes what ends up
happening is, for example, Beehive in this case might be
showing that someone is not receiving an e-mail.
And they might be sometimes theymight be opening an e-mail that
(12:32):
is showing that they're not opening an e-mail, right?
So it can, so that isn't always fully trapped, right?
And so if you start cleaning your list, you might start
cleaning people that actually reading your e-mail.
I've had the same mistake. I set up an automation and
beehive to clean the list for meand I would just every day I
wake up and I see these drops overnight and it's like like, is
(12:53):
that the right thing to do? And I finally turned it off and
I'm just going to do it manuallylike once every two months.
Agreed, I think that's the best way to do it.
What is your writing style like?Are are you writing all these
emails yourself? What is the vibe of the
newsletter? It's super.
Casual. It's like a very, very casual
vibe where it's almost like I'm talking to them, you know?
It's not written in newsletter jargon.
(13:15):
It's a fifth grader reading level, super easy to understand.
Even when we're talking about like city bylaws being passed,
we're making sure everybody can understand what's happening.
And the feedback we get wheneverwe see a reader out in about it
is that that, hey, we love the positive outlook that you have
on the city and the conversational tone of your
writing. And so that's the way that we've
(13:37):
written. It's not any news, news jargon
that we're using in there. Yeah, what about AI?
Are you using AA to write this or to help write it?
Yeah. I mean, if we like started
writing this whole thing on our like just ourselves, it would
probably take like 8 hours a dayor something.
So we do definitely use like Claude and ChatGPT.
And then I have two VA's who arekind of responsible for, one is
(13:59):
responsible for events, the other ones responsible for
writing and they kind of do everything, everything for me.
So that's why it's a little bit automated.
So it's like the first draft through Claude slash JJBT and
then a human goes through and cleans it up.
Yeah. So they do that and then I go
through and usually like late atnight, probably 11:12 PM, I'm
usually going through final draft, an hour of me looking
(14:21):
over, making final changes. It's funny you say like it would
take 8 hours a day, but up untiltwo years ago that's what
everyone did, right? Yeah, yeah.
It's been super helpful for us. We haven't gotten into like
automating things just yet, likecompletely automating things.
But that's something that, you know, we're looking into.
What is your time involvement per week on this?
Because of sponsors, like bringing in sponsors and sending
(14:44):
ad drafts and things of that nature.
Like it ends up being probably close to 20 hours a week.
It used to be a lot more 'cause I used to write every edition
and also make a social post and stuff.
When we also were growing our social media following, it was
very heavy video reels. So it's going out and recording
them, editing voice overs. Now we've shifted to completely
just carousels, and so that's made our life a lot easier as
(15:07):
well. What is your revenue like your
monthly revenue today? Yeah, today it's about you can
range from 12 to 15,000 currently.
So that's the general revenue and then amazing.
Yeah, it's good. Like we've grown a decent amount
out in the last like six months is where a bunch of it's
starting to compound now. I always like to use like a
(15:28):
rough $0.50 per month per subscriber.
It sounds like you're kind of close.
Well, actually you might even beabove that because that's at
$0.05 per week. Yeah.
So if you were to extrapolate that out, you'd be probably
closer to 60 or $0.70 per subscriber per month if it was 5
per week, right? Yeah, that's about the average
that we try and go for. We also haven't explored any of
the like negative tags and things of that nature.
(15:50):
Like I think that's something that we would you want to
explore eventually. I just haven't gone around with
this yet. And for those listening or
watching negative CAC is negative customer acquisition
costs where instead of paying Facebook for your leads, like
you're getting paid for your, your new subscribers, right?
And is that kind of like from what I understand that to be you
(16:10):
pay Facebook $1.20 for a subscriber and then they go
through a flow like they subscribe and then you say hey,
check out these newsletters and then once that's done, it's like
hey, fill out this form and thenyou can kind of sell those leads
you. Can do that.
The way we would most likely go about doing it if we did, it was
like let's say if we sold a discount card or something,
right? Like go buy this discount card
(16:31):
for $20 and get 10% on these 20 restaurants or something, right?
What what we would do is let's say if we're getting a
subscriber for a dollar, right? And so even if one in 10 people
convert, right, we're basically making money every single time
we're paying Facebook, right? And that's without going to
sponsorships at all. That's just like just for seven
(16:53):
days basically. Yeah, I think people also call
it self liquidating ads, right? Where you make money for
acquiring customers and then youyou show them ads and make more
money. That's the gold standard.
Yeah, but it takes time. Like, there's a lot of things at
play, right? A. 100% and I mean a lot of
things are local newsletters, unlike traditional newsletters
where you can just plug other newsletters and you know, get
(17:15):
them to subscribe to that. The downside with local
newsletters is that you can't just plug in any other AI
newsletter or something, you know, start making money off of
that. It's true, you almost need local
offerings that you can offer these readers so it doesn't feel
like you're a foreign company orsomething like that should feel.
Yeah, I feel like someone needs to build a Spark loop for local
(17:37):
newsletters and for those listening, Spark Loop.
Spark Loop is like a referral engine for newsletters where you
subscribe to the What's the nameof your newsletter?
Winnipeg Digest. The Winnipeg Digest and then you
get a pop up five other newsletters.
What you're saying is that therearen't.
You don't want to compete with yourself in Winnipeg, so you
don't even want to refer them ABthere's no one else to refer
(17:59):
really. So if there was like a spark
loop that could aggregate all the restaurants or auto repair
businesses in Winnipeg and you could sell them leads for every
time they check that box, right?Wouldn't that be an interesting
business? I think that's a really good
business, especially because, well, we can also promote other
local newsletters, right? Because they're completely
different cities and someone living in Winnipeg doesn't care
(18:21):
about Austin, TX, right? So that's why I think that's a
big problem for at least solvingthat negative tack issue for us
is the, you know, you kind of have to make a custom offering
just for your subscribers. Yeah.
But like, if I could subscribe to your newsletter and then get
like $20 in Kohl's cash for checking a box, therefore become
(18:44):
being added to Kohl's e-mail list, that could be pretty
valuable for Kohl's and for you,right?
Agreed. I think, I think that's a that's
a good idea. And then you would obviously
have to just put in the put in place those partnerships, right?
Yeah, yeah. If you weren't chasing after
sponsors, which I know is like most of your time right now, how
much time would it be taking perweek to run this?
(19:05):
Man, like 7 hours a Max probably, yeah, it probably
takes about an hour a day for reviewing content for Instagram
sending, you know, making sure the content is good for the news
that are and things of that nature.
Yeah, about 7 hours a week. OK, outside of Claude Chacha
Petit, what does your tech stacklook like for this?
(19:26):
Yeah. I mean, we use Beehive for
sending a lot of things Beehive does, right.
So I would say analytics and everything we get from Beehive
sponsorships, I track everythingin Notion.
I don't, I haven't really invested in any specific CRM for
tracking sponsors. So I've built kind of a semi
custom one in Notion. Yeah.
(19:47):
Other than that, it's just chassis BT Claude and nothing
really other than that. And Instagram is, yeah, nothing
significant, Canva. I mean, Beehive is amazing.
Do you use like their boost features or any of their other
like monetization features? I don't because again, those
apps that don't apply to local, it's not a good experience for
the reader at the end of the day.
(20:08):
And yeah, like we want to make money based, like using the
reader as future customers for other businesses.
So if we start providing a bad experience, they're going to
start opening less. And it's just, you know,
downward spiral from there. How much are you testing?
Your subject lines or your preview lines, if at all.
Yeah. So we're usually, I mean, now
I've gone pretty good at basically knowing which ones are
(20:31):
going to do well In the beginning, we should test them
almost every edition. Now we don't really test them
because I know that I automatically almost know which
one's going to do better or not.Yeah.
Have you noticed that like on the whole shorter just does
better shorter subject lines? 100% under 5 words like time
should be in there. Something like this weekend new.
(20:52):
Urgency. Yeah, urgency.
And so you know, I would say under 5 words kind under 5 words
in under 40 characters. I love that people just want to
say everything, but it's like you're you're not leaving
anything to the imagination. The more you say, the less
reason they have to click because you're answering their
question, the subject line. I understand.
Yeah. Like I think today's was
something like new Winnipeg Costco location, that's it.
(21:15):
They click because they want to know where when, right?
You could put like, hey, on the corner of X&Y new Costco
location opening, you know, August 3rd.
How small is too small for a market?
Because I know you're in Winnipeg, but you're, you live
this world, you're talking to other local newsletter
operators. What is your experience?
Anything under 100K is too small.
(21:37):
I would say even 150K you know Iwould say anything under that is
almost too small. So you want to then broaden out,
Maybe do your county or something like that.
Anything over a million, I almost find it's too much
because then you have a weight rich to cover unless you're
doing 5 * a week. If you're doing five times, you
maybe be able to get away with it.
But over a million, you're pretty much pushing it with the
(22:00):
amount of things that you can add in there.
And it's almost over a million people.
The city is so spread out that let's say, I'm not sure with
Austin, but someone living in South Winnipeg is probably not
going to care about things happening in North Winnipeg.
It's like a different world. Exactly.
It's almost the different citiesat that point.
So if you're over a million, youshould almost have two different
newsletters for like splitting the city in half or something
(22:22):
like that. Yeah, yeah.
What are some other creative customer acquisition strategies
if if paid ads just aren't your thing?
Yeah. I mean, honestly, like you're
like, if you're going to spend $100, I would say $90.00 should
be spent on just Facebook ads. You know, if you're going more
the creative route, Instagram obviously helps you add great
success to whether using many chat.
(22:43):
We haven't fully explored that Channel.
That's something we're now exploring.
Referrals are huge though havingfor example, for us, we do
restaurant guides and hiking guides that we change those
according to the season that's about to come up.
So let's say with the winter, it's going to be top 50 things
to do in Winnipeg this winter, right?
And so we kind of changed that up according to the season.
(23:05):
And so referral guides are huge for us as well.
Are you more interested in growing horizontally and adding
more local newsletters or vertically and just going to
five days a week More sponsors like more vertical integration
by launching other businesses that you promote with this.
Yeah, I mean ideally. So I've kind of considered both
channels or both kind of ways. If you go vertically, if you go
(23:28):
horizontally, there are other companies that do this like 6:00
PM City and things like that. But I just want your CPMS drop,
really drop a lot just because then you start having national
brands which are not going to pay you $100 per 1000 views,
right? And so if you start working with
Nike, they're not looking to, they're just going to pay you a
lump sum, which is going to be like $10 CPMS, if that.
(23:51):
So that's why I find that ratherthan just going horizontal, I
would rather prove out a money model in my own city, right,
then go to other cities. So for example, if I start a
business on top of this, right? And I know that OK, on average
heat subscribers to me and rather than being worth $7.00
now is worth $15 a year, then I'm competing on a whole
(24:14):
different game when I go to another city, right?
Like let's say if I back into Calgary, what's going to happen
is when my competitor can only acquire subscribers for maybe
$2.00 a sub, I can acquire them for five and still have a great
row as on on the customer acquire.
OK, row as return on ad spend. Yeah.
(24:34):
And those are those things you, you mentioned CPM, the amount of
money you can charge per thousand opens, right?
Not per thousand Subs, but opensright.
What are you charging nowadays for ads?
Where about 70 something dollarslike probably $75 CPS wow for
local that's huge for local advertisers and then a lot of
them. So we sell annual spots like
that's kind of our business model is we sell exclusivity.
(24:58):
Like if anyone is looking to sell sponsorship, don't sell one
off sponsorships. You're not going to make money.
You want to sell annual sponsorships on an exclusivity
basis. So if we work with one HVAC
company, we're not working with any other HVAC company for that
full year, right? And so you're trying to sell
exclusivity is what your main thing you're trying to sell is.
(25:18):
So now when we go to a sponsor, we say, hey, you're basically
getting a monopoly over 100,000 and it's the only form of
advertising that lets you do that.
And you said only one ad per newsletter, so 19,000 opens per
send times 75. You're looking like 1400 for one
cent. That's our cost for a one time
(25:41):
advertiser. So if if someone's coming in
just a one time ad, like they have an event coming up or
something, that's what they'll pay.
For our Instagram it's double. So it's 2800 for one for one
post. Yeah.
And then obviously if they're annual subscribe or if they're
annual sponsor, they get much better ad rate than $70 per per
(26:02):
thousand cents. How much better?
Yeah. So right now we're charging
about $12,000 for 12 news that are on, so one per month.
One per month, OK. That way you don't like over
saturate yourself. They don't see it too often.
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And, and what ends up happening
is, you know, so we send out, give or take, let's say 12
newsletters per month, times that by $12,000 a month.
(26:26):
So that's I think $144,000 a year in revenue just on our
newsletter ads. That doesn't even include our
Instagram, right. And so, you know, we're kind of
looking at in the ballpark of about 200 K when when you kind
of combine everything together. And then we're, yeah, we have
some other like local markets and stuff that we end up running
throughout the year. Yeah.
(26:46):
If someone's launching this, like what types of local
businesses, local sponsors should they target?
Because you've probably learned like this.
I'm sure this isn't accurate, but like an auto repair store,
it may be much more likely to give you money but not get much
ROI out of it. So they're not ever going to do
a long term thing. Whereas a local bookstore might
be really hard to convert, but they see a really big return on
(27:07):
investment and therefore could become like a highly recurring
customer. What kind of things like that
have you learned about the typesof sponsors that are best for
local newsletters? I would say probably like event
venues are great, right. So we have an event venue who is
our annual sponsors. They do I think this year
they're going to be spending $40,000 a year with us, right?
So they're a huge they're probably our biggest advertiser.
(27:30):
Other than that I just tell people tell people on LTV just
say that hey for. Lifetime value.
Yeah. So if let's say a dentist is
coming to you or you're talking to a dentist, you have them,
right? What's on average a customer
worth to you? A customer is worth $5000 to me.
Great. So if you're going to spend
$10,000 with me, I just need to get you 4 customers for you to
double your return on that spendwith us, right?
(27:52):
And you're telling me I can't get you 4 out of 35,000 people,
right? So it's an easy sell to make.
Oh, I love that. And honestly, a dentist, a
customer for a dentist, probablyworth a lot more than that,
right? Because they might stay with him
for 5 or 50 years. 100% so dentist, HVAC, plumbing,
roofing. High ticket stuff, anything or
(28:13):
highly recurring. Exactly.
And like what we do is we actually run a survey.
The second someone signs up, they get straight sent to a
survey that they fill out what part of the city they live in,
do they own a home? Are they looking to sell a home,
buy a home, upsell down? Like are they looking to, what
are they looking to do essentially, like what is their
current household income? And so that then allows us to go
(28:35):
to advertisers and say, hey, 75%of our audience are homeowners.
Yeah, that's a very valuable audience for you.
So I highly like you know it, itwill end up working out for you.
What percentage of your subscribers fill out that
survey? About 87% like completion rate.
Are you serious? 87% fill out the survey.
Yeah, So what? That's insanity.
(28:56):
Yeah. That is, and how many questions
are in it? 8.
Holy cow. I would have thought 5%.
Yeah, I just. You think local newsletters are
built different. They're just so loyal, and
they're just like you're contributing to the community.
They're like being a good citizen by contributing to your
capitalism. Right?
But you're not complaining. I mean, I mean, to be, to be
(29:19):
fair though, I think if anyone is starting one, please take
this from a perspective of when you're bringing on advertisers,
don't bring on casinos or clubs.If that's not the vibe you're
trying to set right. Short term you might be shooting
yourself in the foot for turningdown revenue, but long term,
your readers really do appreciate that you know that
they don't have to cause your readers are mainly going to be
(29:40):
70% females, 80% females betweenthe ages of 35 to 65.
They're all looking to learn about clubs and casinos.
So you're much better off just like actually hand picking the
advertisers that are going to add value to their right as
well. But I'll tell you what that
demographic that you just named is like the most valuable
demographic. Those are the the spenders in
(30:01):
the household. They are right and that.
Goes back to like the new business that we're starting and
how why we have picked that business as well.
I'm going to get to that. I'm saving the best for last.
What survey tool do you use for that survey?
Beehive so you can build a survey Beehive Yeah, it's the
it's fairly. Easy.
I don't. I have a survey on my
newsletter. I feel like an idiot, like I
(30:21):
should totally do. That, yeah, that and polls, I
think those two are the most. I do polls.
Yeah, those are the most used like things that you should
probably do in in if you're running a new.
Site How successful are you in finding sponsors in your
subscriber base? Like putting an ad in there for
yourself saying you know your adhere.
Does that work? It does sometimes, but for
smaller companies, I would say, you know, and that's not really
(30:42):
your target audience, though a lot of the larger advertisers
are relationships you're building or they'll reach out or
something like their marketing coordinator is some 23 year old
that follows their Instagram andhas no idea that even our news
that are even exists. So they'll reach out wanting a
feature on the Instagram. I'll hop on the car with them,
sell them this whole new world of newsletters, and then
(31:05):
actually that's where I get the ad dollars from them from.
So it's usually like the foot inthe door is like some 23 year
old marketing coordinator who was like on their team and
thinks it's the cool idea to be featured on Instagram.
Are there any like other perks like local perks like priority
seating or you ever get recognized any intangibles like
that? Yeah.
So I mean, when I had my face associated with the brands in
(31:28):
the beginning, we did a lot of reels.
That's how I grew the Instagram following pretty heavily.
We did a lot of reels, a lot of restaurant reviews and things of
that nature. So I would be recognized like
5-6 times a day. That's amazing.
Yeah, like I would be at the gym.
Was that cool? It was.
Cool. For sure.
But then I kind of it was also concerning at the same time
because I was like, OK, if I sell this, if I ever want to
(31:50):
sell this thing, I can't have myface associated with it.
So that's why we switched more to carousels, a way where I
disassociated my face from it and then I can it's becomes a
sellable asset at the end of theday.
Yeah, that's fair. All right.
So you're dabbling in Christmas lights, is that right?
That's the new business we're starting, yeah.
OK. Yeah.
Well, is that the business or have you done other like
(32:12):
vertically integrated businessesfor this?
No. So that's like our first
business on top of this. Yeah, it was the thinking behind
it was it's seasonal, it works great.
It doesn't, we forget about it, right.
Second thing is, is that it's high LTV customers.
So let's say it's a leasing model, so you don't sell the
Christmas lights, right? So when we lease the Christmas
(32:32):
lights out to them, they're usually staying with us for
another four or five years, right?
Or even like let's say three years.
So we end up making a lot more money on them in the following
years. And then if it works out great,
then a natural upsell into it would be permanent lights.
So those are the lights that go in your under.
Jellyfish. Yeah, Yeah.
So would be the permanent lightsthat kind of go underneath your
(32:54):
gutters and stuff like that, right?
And so that's kind of the plan is OK, if it works out great.
Come next spring, we're going tostart the permanent lights
business. And then also we have a lot of
females obviously, that are readers.
That's our primary reader. And I was like, man, if I go and
start a HVAC or roofing company or something, you know, if
someone's heat goes out, they'renot going to say, let me pull up
Winnipeg Digest and find the plot, like, you know, find the
(33:17):
HVAC tech. So Christmas lights, it was
great because I feel like females are primarily the ones
making that decision and that's exactly what's happened as well.
So we started running some ads in the Winnipeg Digest have
already sold like 5-6 jobs before the season has even
started at all before the main season kind of kicks in.
So. One piece of advice, take it or
(33:38):
leave it. I have a friend that has a
Christmas light slash, roofing slash.
He has several different successful big home service
businesses in Pennsylvania and he says like stay away from
permanent lighting, stay away from jellyfish.
He says he only installs it if someone like demands it and he
can't have them as a customer any other way because it's just
(33:58):
a one time thing And then he's sometimes he has to go out there
and maintain it and fix it and he just hates his life every
time he he says if he could haveit his way, permanent lights
were never installed and he onlydoes Christmas lights on the
leasing program every year. All right.
So when you put this ad in your own newsletter for your other
business, are you calling it your other business?
Or is it does it seem just like a third party entirely?
(34:21):
Yeah, right now, I mean, we ended up doing.
So what we did is we ran a giveaway.
I had heard it in some like Alexfrom Mosey video or something
where he mentioned run a giveaway, give one thing away
and call everybody else and say,hey, you get $150.00 off for
just entering the giveaway. So with that got about 300
entries or something like that. This is a giveaway for free
(34:41):
Christmas lights. Exactly.
Yeah. And then we called it.
OK, just lights the company, no website, nothing like that at
all. But when we do do the brown,
it's going to be the same colorsas Winnipeg Digest.
Yeah, I love that you're just leaning into it.
Yeah, right. Like support.
You're supporting the newsletterby going through me for your
Christmas lights. You're probably going to go
(35:02):
through Someone Go through me. Yeah.
And then now what we're doing is, you know, we can run offers
that kind of make it seem like they're exclusive for the
readers. So we'll say something like,
hey, get your Christmas lights done before October 7th and you
get $150.00 off or something, right?
The first point for us is our season doesn't start until
October 15th anyways. So anything that we do before
(35:22):
that is just extending our season more and more.
Yes, yeah, yeah. Now are you planning on like
running this? Like are you outsourcing it to
another company? Tell me how the operations of
this looks. In an ideal world, what I would
like to do is kind of have Winnipeg Digest as a marketing
arm for multiple businesses. So let's say I either acquire
(35:42):
equity or I get get the given equity into businesses, whether
that's 1520%, of course, depending on the size of the
business. And we end up becoming like a
fully fractional CMO type of situation where we, they get
access to Winnipeg Digest, they get access to me, right?
And then we handle all their marketing for them, right.
And then in return we get some sort of equity share in it.
(36:06):
That's the ideal world situation.
But to go to a Business Today and a local business owner and
say, Hey, give me 1520% of your business, that's kind of they're
not going to believe in the factthat, hey, we can actually
deliver that about or you for about.
So that's why we started our ownbusiness for now at least that's
the Christmas lights one where we're going to run everything.
So I did a my first install yesterday and the yeah.
(36:29):
And so then the plus point aboutthis is I am learning obviously
the skill set of putting the Christmas lights and stuff.
And then this is the only company will ideally own.
And then after this, this kind of proves that the model that
hey, this works for home services and then we're able to
acquire equity into other home services after this.
Yeah, OK. Of all the businesses out there,
(36:50):
what made you think Christmas lights?
Yeah, I mean, it's biggest thingwas it's the it's seasonality,
right, so. But most people look at that as
a negative, right? Yeah, for me, it was, well, I
have a primary business which isWinnipeg.
I just, I can, I don't have to take away too much time away
from this. It's just 10 weeks.
I give 10 weeks. If it works out great, amazing,
(37:11):
I double down. If it doesn't then I'm just
going to forget about it like itnever existed and there's no
website or anything for it yet, so.
OK. I like that.
Yeah, yeah. What are the unit economics of
these jobs? What's an average job size?
What are you going to take home per job?
I know it's varies from year to year.
There's higher costs on year 1. Can you break all that down?
(37:31):
Yeah. I mean this is just our
obviously first year doing it. We've booked five job the last
week, about $1400 is our averagejob right now.
Cost of doing that job for us ismost likely going to be like two
$300.00. But like The thing is, The thing
is we're actually doing the labor right now ourselves right
as owner, Yeah. So that pricing takes into
(37:53):
account in the future when we doend up hiring labor and
everything like that and the following years of I think on
average, the average is about 85% for the amount of customers
that stay on year over year. Wow.
OK. So that 2 to 300 that includes
the lights or just labor? No 3, it's about 300 dollars,
$300 is it just includes the lights.
(38:15):
OK. So you're, you're not like
counting your labor as a cost. All I heard is you know $6000 of
net profit, you know, for on five jobs.
Yeah, yeah. So right.
It's it's fairly high, at least right now.
And then they take about fourishhours to do, 3-4 hours to do,
which is not terrible for the first year.
Second year, we've already cut them, cut the lights for them
(38:36):
and already have the bulbs free screwed.
So it's like, you know, that kind of time gets fed into half.
What are you going to have to pay in labor to have that 4 hour
job done once you do start hiring people?
Yeah, I mean, they'll be just minimum wage.
It won't be. Crazy $100 in labor per job,
give or take. It's about $15.00 an hour, you
know, give or take. Let's just say, you know, three
people doing a job rate should take 3 hours.
(38:59):
So yeah, like you ever take 150 bucks?
Wow. OK, let's say year 2, you, you
stop doing it yourself, you hireit all out.
You basically you don't have theCOGS, the cost of goods sold,
the hard cost anymore. Now you have the labor cost, but
it's half as much. So if you have call it 80%
margins year one, even if you outsource all the labor year 2
(39:19):
plus, you have 90% margins. Yeah, My goal is not to run the
business myself for sure. I'll definitely be bringing in
an operator where I can get themto like best equity or something
over a few years. Of course there'll be a whole
new world of problems, but it'llbe fun, you know, I think, I
think it'll be fun where, you know, I don't want to run the
Christmas lights business at theend of the day.
Right, but I say this all the time, like it's important that
(39:42):
people get to know the weeds before they outsource, you know,
these core competencies and get out of the weeds.
Like people are like, oh, I heard a guy on the Internet say
I, I I did outsourcing. This isn't this is I'm above
this. I'm a no you, you got to know.
Exactly what those weeds look. Like, until you're ready to get
out of them. Exactly, which is why I decided
to do the jobs myself this firstyear.
(40:03):
Easily I could have like hired someone just using the cash flow
from Winnipeg Digest like it wouldn't be too difficult.
It's just that down the road I don't want someone saying that
it took 7 hours when I should have taken 3.
Like, bro, I've been on that ladder, I know what you're
doing. Yeah, so that's why, that's the
simple reason why I was like, you know what, first year, it's
10 weeks. I just won't have a life for 10
(40:26):
weeks. That's totally fine.
Yeah, OK. How many jobs do you think
you'll do this year based on what your conversion rates are
looking like? Yes.
I mean, we sucked that sales forthe first like 7-8 quotes that
we gave out. And then now we've started
converting like I think in the last like 6 jobs, we have like
we've converted four of them or in the last 6 quotes, we've
(40:46):
converted four of them. I think I am very safely saying
that we'll hit $100,000 in revenue in the first year.
Cheers. I think so.
At least that's not. How did you get better at sales?
How did you suck before versus what you're doing today?
Yes. I mean, we would just go in
before and trying to close them on this, like at the door, you
know, and we would have a pre like we would book an
(41:08):
appointment, like a design consult and they would come out
and we would literally just try and close them there.
And I didn't realize that, OK, that's what we shouldn't do.
So then I practiced them. A friend of mine who did, who
did painting. So he did door to door painting,
like student painting or something like that.
And so he's like, yo, if you have a design console booked,
you're going to go inside their home, sit with them before and
(41:32):
after, walk them through your booklet and then you're going to
price anchor them to this price,right?
They just the whole shebang, right?
And so that's kind of what we'vestarted doing now where we go in
and we have the quoted like $3000 or something that includes
all the trees and the home and the side of the home.
And we slowly go with them and take out everything and it gets
to like $1500. And then I'm like, OK, if you
(41:54):
book before October 7th, you get$150.00 discount today, right
now, right? And so that's what we've started
doing now, yeah. And you're closing like 60. 70%
of that, that's the number that will end up.
At it after the season right? 6070% Now please tell me you're
asking for. Referrals.
Yeah, so would neighbor. Neighbors name.
So what we're doing is. There is a Christmas lights
(42:16):
person on Twitter, he always says this.
So it's like $100, the gift cardor something to a steakhouse or
something along those lines. So we're not starting to offer
those right now. We're just getting all of our
stuff still printed. Like it's way early in the
season. Most people start advertising
for this like September 15th. So we're way too early anyways.
Like the homes that we have done, we haven't asked directly
(42:38):
for referrals yet, but we will when we finish the job.
I mean you have no clue. Your conversion rate will only
get better through September, October, November even, right.
So whatever it is today, we'll get orders of magnitude better.
Yeah. And these are all, but these are
like. There's pros and cons because
all these are leads coming through Winnipeg died just
currently, so they're kind of worn leads already.
(42:59):
If we start exploring Facebook ads and stuff, those leads are
going to be a lot more colder, so our current rate should drop
there a little bit. Are you going to do other stuff
like that? Yeah, we're not just going to
rely on your newsletter. We're going to do everything.
Yeah, we're. Trying to $100,000 is like, what
do we want to do base level overthe weeks?
If we're able to do 152 hundred,that would be like ideal world,
(43:20):
Yeah. It's blows my mind that you're
going to come. Close to doubling your revenue
by adding Christmas lights to a newsletter.
Like who would have thought of that?
Ryan Snedden added luxury wedding bathroom trailers to his
newsletter. And like, that became a big
business, right, 'cause events, right?
Events. That's what you said too.
I already know that you're thinking of the spring and the
summer. What other kind of seasonal and
(43:42):
or other businesses are you thinking for this?
I know that it's like very. Not like a lot of people do the
whole gutter cleaning, window cleaning thing in the summer.
And yeah, I don't want to get into the whole door to door
hassle of it. Honestly, I am not a great
salesperson training guy and I might be able to become one, but
I'm not that right now. My bread and butter is like
(44:02):
marketing where I do Facebook ads and things of that nature.
But I want to explore businesseswhich I can utilize that in, you
know. And so most likely that's why
permanent lights was a natural sell.
Also because a lot of Christmas light owners, what ends up
happening is they'll say, hey, we're actually 5050 on whether
we want Christmas lights or not,right?
(44:23):
Because we're considering permanent lights and the
permanent lights average order value is about four to 5X
whatever Christmas lights is obviously LTV.
No, but just a one time cost. So what we're able to do is
bring in someone for Christmas light.
So let's say first season we make some money on them and then
say OK, if you do permanent lights with us the following
year, you get $500 discount. So we're basically just pre
(44:46):
selling customers for permanent lights during the Christmas
light season, right? And rather than making that
money over three years, we're just going to make that money
over 2 years because they're going to do first thing of
Christmas lights, then they're going to do permanent lights the
following season. Smart.
I should have asked this earlier, but what?
What has your timeline look likewith your newsletter and like
(45:06):
subscriber growth? When did you launch?
How many Subs did you add those first few months to today?
Yeah. I mean in the beginning we were
adding like. 4000 ish Subs a month, 4 or 5000 actually now
it's decreased to like 2:00-ish K give or take, where, you know,
we're still spending the same amount of money.
So it's about $3000. But then yeah, you start like
saturating your market and things like that.
(45:28):
So now pretty soon I think like it might be time where I just
turn off of ads and try and spend that money on referrals or
something. But if we can do whether that's
a giveaways or lead magnets or something like that for
referrals and just try and get more subscribers that way, I
think that might be the next thing we try to go into.
So how many months to get to 30?5000 it's been Yes, we started
(45:49):
in. April, whatever that is, I think
like 17 months or something likethat. 16-7 months, yeah, that's
amazing. At this time, no plans to launch
other local newsletters. You want to keep growing this
way. I've had a lot of interest from.
Other cities for sure, just because I talk about local
newsletters on Twitter and I've kind of, and obviously I've been
on your pod and Nick's pod and stuff.
So I've had a lot of interest ofpeople saying, hey, can we
(46:11):
franchise this out or something like that.
It's just that I know my dollarswill be much better spent trying
to briefly integrate this currently, right?
Like so Christmas lights took $10,000 of initial capital to
start. If I started another location
instead of Christmas lights, Christmas lights I might do
$100,000 in 10 weeks. The new location would have
(46:32):
taken me twenty $30,000 to then on sponsors make like fifty
$60,000 the first year. And then once I'm able to prove
out a money model at least in mycity.
So let's say if I know, OK, I'm going to on average make
$200,000 from just the newsletter and then another 2 to
500,000 from Christmas lights. I might not even explore other
(46:52):
businesses after that. It might just be, OK, that's the
business model. I'm going to go to other cities
and start. Yeah, start.
The media. Company based on the media.
Company start Christmas lights. That's it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you feel confident that you
could as of today with what you know now, pick another city, not
move there, not know really anything about it and have just
(47:13):
as much success? 100% I could, yeah.
Like once you've been in the space for over a year, a year
and a half. And I think for me, the USP is
the unique selling point would be the social media aspect of
things. So social media, if anyone is
going to start this, don't forget about social media
because at this point I'm a top three followed, let's say
(47:34):
account in my city, right? If I reach out to an account or
a business, they're almost obligated to reply to me.
So it makes my cold outreach so much easier and the reply rate
just skyrockets rather than me mailing them.
So if you're going to go down this road also, social media is
a great way to upsell your current sponsors into saying,
(47:55):
hey, I have two different that you can reach, right?
So that's the unique selling point if you are going to start
one. Yeah, dude, you you got.
To reach out to local businessesthat collect emails and say,
hey, I'll do a, I'll give you a free ad in exchange for your
list. Like let me share your list
basically, right, Because they're probably not using it.
Most companies that collect emails, they just sit there.
(48:17):
They don't do because it takes work, right to regularly work
your list. So a lot of them are going to be
dead, but you could say I'm going to run them through a
verifier and you can either pay them you know, $0.10 per e-mail
or just say I'll give you $2000 worth of ads for your 20,000
person list. They have no idea what it's
worth. Like would you just add them to
your list? Like rather than I guess sending
(48:37):
an e-mail saying hey subscribe, I would just feel feel it.
Out. Yeah, like try multiple angles,
like segment the list and let's say it's 20,000.
You take four groups of 5000 to 1.
You just say, hey, you know, I partnered with Mike's Bakery and
I would really like you to checkout my local newsletter, 5000.
You just kind of work them into your list, segment them
(48:57):
differently so you could track them, make sure they're cleaned
and scrubbed. How many are opening?
Well, it's not bad. OK.
And then the other two 10,000 try different kind of creative
things. It's a time game, right?
Like I love this is obviously myfirst or second business, but
I've heard a lot that businessesthat are just a time game are
the best businesses to be in. Because as long as I'm just in
(49:18):
this business and my list keeps growing, it's essentially a
business that can't lose. It's an audience that I can not
only monetize through ads, but then I can run my own businesses
on it. So it's just a time business.
As long the longer I'm in the business, the more money I'm
going to make. Oh man, I just kind.
Of had a thought where it's likeevery aspiring entrepreneur or
(49:39):
entrepreneur or entrepreneur, business owner, whatever, they
know that having an audience is powerful, but 95% of them have
no desire to get in front of thecamera and to do all that stuff
because it sucks. It's hard, and I've been there,
right? So they don't even consider it.
They're like, I know having an audience is valuable, but not
for me. I feel like this is a great
loophole into that right where you can just through the power
(50:02):
of the written word, through Claude, through Chad GBT,
through a virtual agent or or virtual assistant, you can use
emails to build an audience without having to get in front
of the camera, but you can stillhave all that power.
Like it's like 35,000 people in a city is more powerful than a
million TikTok followers that are worldwide.
It is I joke around with. Some of my friends, I'm like, if
(50:24):
I wanted to in three years, I could run for me, right?
Like if yeah, totally I could have.
Enough pull in the. City to be able to run for me,
right? But yeah, I think I completely
agree with what you said becausethe biggest problem people run
into when looking to make content is what do I talk about?
In this case, you already have what you're going to talk about
because things are happening in your local town.
(50:46):
Fresh content every day. Yeah, exactly.
And this is a business. At the very base level, the
writing and all that stuff can be given out to one or two Vas
and they can handle 90% of the business for you.
And all you really have to do isdeal with sponsorships.
If you're not even able to, you know, give that up.
If you were, if you are able to also delegate that, then good on
(51:08):
you. You know, so it's not a business
where you need 40 hours a week in the beginning of spending 40
hours a week to write and also do sponsorships.
But as you continue to grow, youcan easily run this whole
business on 15 hours a week. I just feel like this.
You know, under an hour video isprobably about as tactical and
specific as you could get on theInternet for launching a local
(51:31):
newsletter. IA. 100% agree and honestly.
If anyone is going to throw one they can reach out to like the
local news that a community is fairly friendly and you can
reach out to anyone and and other than that just go to
Facebook ads library search up any local news that you can
search up my local news that areWinnipeg digest and what's the
8020 of. Your best performing ads video
(51:53):
Instagram Facebook 15 second it's simply at the top.
Usually have some sort of a local monument as the background
video or image test boats. I would say video has done
better for me. Some sort of a drone footage of
a local monument. Then at the top it says
struggling to find things to do in Blank city, right?
(52:14):
So let's say struggling to find things to do in Winnipeg
underneath it. Say Winnipeg Digest or Blank
Newsletter sends you 50 plus events happening in the city
every single week. That's it.
That is the best performing ads that you will probably find.
One thing I love about this business.
Is how like, let's say you're once a week, you can start
(52:34):
there. It's very palatable.
You do it yourself, you sell outyour ads.
The easiest lever to pull is nowtwice a week.
Cool. I just doubled my revenue three
times a week. Tripled it 4-5 Why not 7?
Let's do 7. And if you're running out of
like current events, you just doopinion pieces and if even New
York or something like a really.Large city and you don't know
how to split things up you can also like almost niche down
(52:59):
twice so you already niche down geographically and then you can
do dads in New York you can do you can do freelancer in New
York yeah like. Freelancer in new.
York because each of those audiences is going to be a
million people on its own if they have more in larger cities.
So if I lived in Austin, I wouldhave just done something like
(53:20):
young dads in Austin or something like that.
Alone is probably like 1000 people or yeah, I mean, I I'd be
so bold as to say. You'd be dumb to be in New York
and just do a New York local newsletter.
Like you're just nothing to no one in that sense, Right?
Exactly. Yeah.
Like you. You.
Could do like a Williamsburg. Moms like pick a neighborhood,
pick a yeah demographic 100% andjust and the.
(53:41):
Higher, obviously, and your, your audience, the more, the
more expensive sponsors you can sell, right?
That's the biggest thing. Only downside to New Year in
newsletters that will say is youmight run out of sponsors
eventually. You know, if you keep providing
a great result, yeah, OK, you'reobviously always going to have
those core sponsors. So you'll have a hundred, 150,
(54:02):
two, $100,000 worth of revenue coming in.
But if that's your goal, go ahead, start one.
But you should probably look at ways to monetize on top of the
news that are eventually jazz. This was.
Great. Where can we look for you if we
have questions? Yeah, Twitter handle.
Is creating jazz so feel free toreach out if you guys have any
questions and happy to chat withwhoever wants to jam on some
(54:25):
local news that are ideas yeah and for the 14 listeners in.
Winnipeg, Canada Go check out the Winnipeg Digest Yeah, and
reach out to. Me and maybe we can grab coffee.
Yeah, OK. Thanks.
Jess. Yeah, thank you.
Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably
because you haven't had a chanceto take your Airpods out.
You're still mowing the lawn, you're still driving, what have
you. If you're still here with me, I
(54:47):
would really, really love and appreciate a five star review on
Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast.
It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra
mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an
interest in starting a business.It would mean a ton.
Hope you have the best day of your life today.
I think there's a lot of opportunity, especially for
someone that's looking for the first business.
It's a really easy business to start.
You can easily run this whole business on 15 hours a week.
Every aspiring entrepreneur, they know that having an
audience is powerful but 95% of them have no desire to get in
front of the camera. It sucks.
I feel like this is a great loophole where you can just
(00:21):
through Claude, through ChatGPT,use emails to build an audience.
35,000 people in a city is more powerful than a million TikTok
followers that are world why it is a. $144,000 a year in revenue
just on our newsletter ad Instagram.
It's 2800 for one post. It's essentially a business that
can't lose. The longer I'm in the business,
(00:41):
the more money I'm going to make.
If I wanted to, in three years, I could run for mayor.
Now only the OG fans of this podcast will remember this, but
a whole year and a half ago whenI first started this podcast, it
originally began as a question and answer show and it was live.
People would call in, ask me questions about their business
or their business idea and I would answer it on the spot.
(01:03):
Well, in one of those first episodes, this guy from Canada
named Jazz called and he was thrown around this idea for a
business and I gave him some advice.
He took the advice and now a year later he has a profitable 6
figure business on his hands andhe just launched another
business that's already profitable that piggybacks on
that first business that I helped them launch.
This is a business that literally anyone could start
(01:25):
with almost no money. The path to growth is very clear
and outlined in this episode. So let's go I.
Think there's a lot of opportunity in local
newsletters, you know, especially for someone that's
looking for the first business even I would say, right, it's a
really easy business to start. And honestly, as step by step as
it gets right, Like, yeah, like you're just basically replacing
(01:46):
the traditional media and peopleare looking for something new,
so. OK, so why don't we start by you
telling me about your local newsletter, Where's it based?
How many subscribers do you have?
And. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
So in my local newsletter, it's called Winnipeg Digest.
It's most people don't know about Winnipeg, but it's like a
cold city here in Canada, in themiddle of it.
(02:06):
And so I started it here. I've been here for about 11-12
years, you know, and I was looking for my first business to
start on my own. Beforehand I had some experience
like growing social media followings to like 100K or
something when I was 14, sellingthem to e-commerce companies
like theme pages and things of that nature.
So wanted to start a business. Had seen Ryan Sneddon who does
(02:30):
it in Annapolis do it and had wanted to start it for a while
honestly. And so I thought OK, it can't
really be too difficult. Started it in last year April,
so 2024 April and then since then we now reach over 100,000
Winnipeggers. That's a combination of media
and newsletters. So we have both 73,000 followers
(02:51):
on social media. There's like 800,000 people in
Winnipeg right? Yeah, it's about 800 K and then
our newsletter is at about 35,000 people now, so.
OK, so 70 something on social, 35,000 on newsletter.
Yeah, Yeah. OK.
So that's for split now and yeah, it's good.
And we're now trying to start other businesses off over, so,
(03:12):
OK. We'll get into that, trust me.
I'm very curious about that now.You live in Winnipeg, right?
Yeah, yeah, I live here. How well do you know the market?
How long have you been there? I've.
Basically grown up here, like I've been here for over 1213
years now. So I know the market fairly
well, you know, and Winnipeg isn't necessarily a tech savvy
city. I could, you know, it's I kind
(03:33):
of make the joke here that I cancopy anything off of Twitter and
paste it here and it would do well, Yeah.
So it's like not a tech savvy city at all, like Calgary or
something in Canada. And so, you know, it's a really
easy market to start any business here.
And so there's low competition. How successful would you be if
you took a let's say Austin, TX 800,000 people give or take?
(03:55):
How successful would you be if you would have taken the exact
same playbook and done it in Austin?
Austin might be a bad example because they probably have like
100 local newsletter. So ignoring that, just the fact
that you were not a local, how would you have done?
Yeah, I mean, if I were to personally start it, I would
start it somewhere where you do have a first mover's advantage,
(04:16):
you know. So that's what Winnipeg did so
well for me is because there wasno not even an Instagram account
that just filed all the events here, right, let alone having a
newsletter based on it. So it was a really easy market
for me to kind of take a monopoly over.
And The thing is now if anyone else starts a local news that
are here in Winnipeg, their costfor acquiring a subscriber is
(04:38):
automatically going to be much higher, right?
So I would highly recommend if someone is starting 1.
So I know a few people in Texas that are starting one and they
are now targeting suburbs aroundAustin rather than the actual
city of Austin. Yeah, so gun to your head, if
you had to choose between a cityyou were very familiar with but
didn't have a first mover's advantage, and a city that you
(05:01):
weren't familiar with but did have a first mover's advantage,
which would you choose? Yeah, I mean, I think there's
multiple models to go about this, so you can definitely even
partner up with someone in another city.
I would probably go with the place where I have the first
mover's advantage, just because acquiring the acquisition cost
per subscriber will be much lower, right?
(05:21):
Like my I was acquiring subscribers for $0.15 Canadian,
right? So like 12-11 cents US.
Yeah. So even today, like even today,
I'm acquiring subscribers for like Max like $1.30 or something
like that. Yeah, so.
What is your subscriber worth, give or take?
Yeah. So they're worth about if I am
(05:42):
able to sell every single odd slot in my newsletter for the
year and we only do 1 odd slot per newsletter.
About 8 to $9 a year is kind of what they're worth at the
current open rate we have. Per year too and I'm guessing at
your normal open rate they're probably going to be around for
like 5 plus years. Yeah, easily.
Like we have a zero point zero 5% unsubscribe rate or something
(06:06):
like. That jeez, that's so good.
So it's like you kind of createdslash invented this money
machine that turns a dollar into40 or $50 as long as you're
willing to be patient. You don't get that immediately.
It takes five years to get the LTV lifetime value.
But nonetheless, like you created this template and now
(06:27):
put in one get out 50A. 100% I mean, it's obviously much easier
said than done. Like I think the biggest problem
that local newsletters run into is not is not building the
audience. Anyone can build the audience.
Anyone can turn on Facebook ads and put out in product.
The thing that you most likely end up will will have problems
with is getting sponsors is selling local businesses on a
(06:49):
whole new concept of advertising.
Yeah. So I think that's the biggest
problem that most folks run intois definitely the anyone can get
to 10 to 15,000 Subs anybody. It's just that acquiring
sponsors for 10 to 15,000 Subs. Well, here's a perfect example
and we're going to get into thiswhen you talk about how you're
going to launch a business basedon this.
If I want to sponsor for this podcast, they're going to pay
(07:11):
me, call it $20 per 1000 views, right?
If I use Spotify ads, like the annoying ads that Spotify puts
in themselves, which I turned onfor a week just to test and I'm
turning it off, it's $6 per 1000views downloads, which is
nothing like that is pennies, right?
So $6 from Spotify, $20 if I andor my agent go out and hustle to
(07:35):
find sponsors. But if I build my own business
that's in this niche, in this vertical, it's relevant to my
audience and I put in an ad for it, it's $200 per 1000 views.
It's not a, it's a 10X difference, right?
Like a 50X difference based on, you know, the lazy way of just
putting Spotify mid roll ads for, you know, Toyota,
(07:57):
Chevrolet, local dealers, which I'm just not going to do.
So there's so much power in having a business mind and
having a newsletter or an audience because you can
vertically integrate and sell your own stuff and not the local
bakery or whatever it is, right?Yeah, it gets me excited, You
talking about that? Because like when we started the
newsletter, my whole idea was, hey, I'm going to build
(08:18):
companies on top of this. And anybody I would talk to
would be saying, yeah, but that's like an unrealistic
thing. Like, you know, it's tough to
obviously run multiple businesses.
And I totally understand that. And, you know, we've obviously
shifted the vision a little bit,but if you're going to just go
sell ads on top of your local newsletter, it's going to be
really hard to monetize. Like you will cap out at Max
(08:38):
$500,000 a year. Like that is the absolute.
Like if you have everything perfect and a great market,
you'll still cap out at 500 KA year.
But some people are hearing thatand thinking I'm cool with that.
It's definitely not a side gig or it's not a, it's not a bad
place to start, right? But like, if you're really
trying to make serious money or trying to grow the business,
(08:59):
you'd have to vertically integrate at some point.
Yeah. OK.
So 35,000 subscribers, how many do you send per week?
We send out three times a week. OK.
How did you land on that? Did you start with that or did
you finish with that? Yeah.
So I mean, we started with once a week.
We felt that there was too much content for us to cover in just
(09:19):
a one time a week edition. Then we went to two times a week
and this was like in a span of amonth by the way.
Like this was not, we didn't wait too long.
We started once a week, felt there was too much content, then
went to two times a week, again,still too much content to cover.
Did three times a week, and thenwe sometimes started running out
of content. So we're like, OK, so three
times a week cadence is like a good amount where even if one
(09:41):
e-mail is shorter than the othertwo, no one's really complaining
about that. Let's talk about your content.
Is it like local news? Is it updates?
Is it opinion pieces? When we started, I remember Ryan
saying this one thing. When we started, it was
everything other than crime and politics, and that's exactly
what we have run with as well. So it's basically events,
(10:02):
community updates, city updates,any new bylaws, anything that is
happening in the city basically away from crime and politics is
what we promote. OK, now I understand politics.
You don't want to alienate half of your subscribers, right?
Why not crime? Like we will occasionally talk
about it saying something like, oh, the most wanted report has
come out for Winnipeg, like, youknow, just to make people aware
(10:25):
of it. We don't necessarily want to
talk about like, you know, someone getting stopped or
something like that, right? Especially like.
She's not the vibe. Yeah, it's not the vibe.
And I mean, Winnipeg is known aslike the murder capital of
Canada. And so and so because of that
reason where like, you know what, we're gonna change the
narrative. And also from a retelling
(10:46):
perspective, it sounds amazing when we say, when we say
something like, you know, where everyone says Winnipeg is boring
and we're trying to change that narrative.
Yeah, I love that. I just had an idea.
Like, if you find yourself running out of content, I feel
like you could supplement with like opinion pieces like Greg
from, you know, from this neighborhood ranks the three
best ice cream shops in Winnipeg, you know?
(11:07):
Yeah, 100%. And we are now also integrated a
lot of our socials like on socials will say here the 10
best homes listed in Winnipeg this month or something, right.
So you can integrate a lot of that into our newsletter as
well. How many words on average are
your emails? 400 to 2600.
So pretty long, pretty big. Yeah, yeah, they're fairly long,
(11:28):
but honestly half of it is events because each event like a
small description associated with it.
What are your open rates and click through rates like today
versus first couple months? Yeah.
I mean, they've stayed fairly consistent.
We've always been above 50%. Click through rate has always
been in the ballpark of like 8 to 12%.
(11:50):
Crazy high, man. Yeah.
So opening today is about 56 to 60%.
So it can vary obviously depending on the set.
Yeah. Yeah, Now I've noticed there's
like a, there's like a a law of newsletters where the bigger it
gets, the more your open rate drops.
Like in my experience are are you, have you seen that like did
it start in the 60s and then very slowly ticks its way down?
(12:12):
Yeah. I mean, it did do that.
And then what we started doing was we cleaned our list like two
or three times, but that was honestly kind of a mistake on
our end. Because sometimes what ends up
happening is, for example, Beehive in this case might be
showing that someone is not receiving an e-mail.
And they might be sometimes theymight be opening an e-mail that
(12:32):
is showing that they're not opening an e-mail, right?
So it can, so that isn't always fully trapped, right?
And so if you start cleaning your list, you might start
cleaning people that actually reading your e-mail.
I've had the same mistake. I set up an automation and
beehive to clean the list for meand I would just every day I
wake up and I see these drops overnight and it's like like, is
(12:53):
that the right thing to do? And I finally turned it off and
I'm just going to do it manuallylike once every two months.
Agreed, I think that's the best way to do it.
What is your writing style like?Are are you writing all these
emails yourself? What is the vibe of the
newsletter? It's super.
Casual. It's like a very, very casual
vibe where it's almost like I'm talking to them, you know?
It's not written in newsletter jargon.
(13:15):
It's a fifth grader reading level, super easy to understand.
Even when we're talking about like city bylaws being passed,
we're making sure everybody can understand what's happening.
And the feedback we get wheneverwe see a reader out in about it
is that that, hey, we love the positive outlook that you have
on the city and the conversational tone of your
writing. And so that's the way that we've
(13:37):
written. It's not any news, news jargon
that we're using in there. Yeah, what about AI?
Are you using AA to write this or to help write it?
Yeah. I mean, if we like started
writing this whole thing on our like just ourselves, it would
probably take like 8 hours a dayor something.
So we do definitely use like Claude and ChatGPT.
And then I have two VA's who arekind of responsible for, one is
(13:59):
responsible for events, the other ones responsible for
writing and they kind of do everything, everything for me.
So that's why it's a little bit automated.
So it's like the first draft through Claude slash JJBT and
then a human goes through and cleans it up.
Yeah. So they do that and then I go
through and usually like late atnight, probably 11:12 PM, I'm
usually going through final draft, an hour of me looking
(14:21):
over, making final changes. It's funny you say like it would
take 8 hours a day, but up untiltwo years ago that's what
everyone did, right? Yeah, yeah.
It's been super helpful for us. We haven't gotten into like
automating things just yet, likecompletely automating things.
But that's something that, you know, we're looking into.
What is your time involvement per week on this?
Because of sponsors, like bringing in sponsors and sending
(14:44):
ad drafts and things of that nature.
Like it ends up being probably close to 20 hours a week.
It used to be a lot more 'cause I used to write every edition
and also make a social post and stuff.
When we also were growing our social media following, it was
very heavy video reels. So it's going out and recording
them, editing voice overs. Now we've shifted to completely
just carousels, and so that's made our life a lot easier as
(15:07):
well. What is your revenue like your
monthly revenue today? Yeah, today it's about you can
range from 12 to 15,000 currently.
So that's the general revenue and then amazing.
Yeah, it's good. Like we've grown a decent amount
out in the last like six months is where a bunch of it's
starting to compound now. I always like to use like a
(15:28):
rough $0.50 per month per subscriber.
It sounds like you're kind of close.
Well, actually you might even beabove that because that's at
$0.05 per week. Yeah.
So if you were to extrapolate that out, you'd be probably
closer to 60 or $0.70 per subscriber per month if it was 5
per week, right? Yeah, that's about the average
that we try and go for. We also haven't explored any of
the like negative tags and things of that nature.
(15:50):
Like I think that's something that we would you want to
explore eventually. I just haven't gone around with
this yet. And for those listening or
watching negative CAC is negative customer acquisition
costs where instead of paying Facebook for your leads, like
you're getting paid for your, your new subscribers, right?
And is that kind of like from what I understand that to be you
(16:10):
pay Facebook $1.20 for a subscriber and then they go
through a flow like they subscribe and then you say hey,
check out these newsletters and then once that's done, it's like
hey, fill out this form and thenyou can kind of sell those leads
you. Can do that.
The way we would most likely go about doing it if we did, it was
like let's say if we sold a discount card or something,
right? Like go buy this discount card
(16:31):
for $20 and get 10% on these 20 restaurants or something, right?
What what we would do is let's say if we're getting a
subscriber for a dollar, right? And so even if one in 10 people
convert, right, we're basically making money every single time
we're paying Facebook, right? And that's without going to
sponsorships at all. That's just like just for seven
(16:53):
days basically. Yeah, I think people also call
it self liquidating ads, right? Where you make money for
acquiring customers and then youyou show them ads and make more
money. That's the gold standard.
Yeah, but it takes time. Like, there's a lot of things at
play, right? A. 100% and I mean a lot of
things are local newsletters, unlike traditional newsletters
where you can just plug other newsletters and you know, get
(17:15):
them to subscribe to that. The downside with local
newsletters is that you can't just plug in any other AI
newsletter or something, you know, start making money off of
that. It's true, you almost need local
offerings that you can offer these readers so it doesn't feel
like you're a foreign company orsomething like that should feel.
Yeah, I feel like someone needs to build a Spark loop for local
(17:37):
newsletters and for those listening, Spark Loop.
Spark Loop is like a referral engine for newsletters where you
subscribe to the What's the nameof your newsletter?
Winnipeg Digest. The Winnipeg Digest and then you
get a pop up five other newsletters.
What you're saying is that therearen't.
You don't want to compete with yourself in Winnipeg, so you
don't even want to refer them ABthere's no one else to refer
(17:59):
really. So if there was like a spark
loop that could aggregate all the restaurants or auto repair
businesses in Winnipeg and you could sell them leads for every
time they check that box, right?Wouldn't that be an interesting
business? I think that's a really good
business, especially because, well, we can also promote other
local newsletters, right? Because they're completely
different cities and someone living in Winnipeg doesn't care
(18:21):
about Austin, TX, right? So that's why I think that's a
big problem for at least solvingthat negative tack issue for us
is the, you know, you kind of have to make a custom offering
just for your subscribers. Yeah.
But like, if I could subscribe to your newsletter and then get
like $20 in Kohl's cash for checking a box, therefore become
(18:44):
being added to Kohl's e-mail list, that could be pretty
valuable for Kohl's and for you,right?
Agreed. I think, I think that's a that's
a good idea. And then you would obviously
have to just put in the put in place those partnerships, right?
Yeah, yeah. If you weren't chasing after
sponsors, which I know is like most of your time right now, how
much time would it be taking perweek to run this?
(19:05):
Man, like 7 hours a Max probably, yeah, it probably
takes about an hour a day for reviewing content for Instagram
sending, you know, making sure the content is good for the news
that are and things of that nature.
Yeah, about 7 hours a week. OK, outside of Claude Chacha
Petit, what does your tech stacklook like for this?
(19:26):
Yeah. I mean, we use Beehive for
sending a lot of things Beehive does, right.
So I would say analytics and everything we get from Beehive
sponsorships, I track everythingin Notion.
I don't, I haven't really invested in any specific CRM for
tracking sponsors. So I've built kind of a semi
custom one in Notion. Yeah.
(19:47):
Other than that, it's just chassis BT Claude and nothing
really other than that. And Instagram is, yeah, nothing
significant, Canva. I mean, Beehive is amazing.
Do you use like their boost features or any of their other
like monetization features? I don't because again, those
apps that don't apply to local, it's not a good experience for
the reader at the end of the day.
(20:08):
And yeah, like we want to make money based, like using the
reader as future customers for other businesses.
So if we start providing a bad experience, they're going to
start opening less. And it's just, you know,
downward spiral from there. How much are you testing?
Your subject lines or your preview lines, if at all.
Yeah. So we're usually, I mean, now
I've gone pretty good at basically knowing which ones are
(20:31):
going to do well In the beginning, we should test them
almost every edition. Now we don't really test them
because I know that I automatically almost know which
one's going to do better or not.Yeah.
Have you noticed that like on the whole shorter just does
better shorter subject lines? 100% under 5 words like time
should be in there. Something like this weekend new.
(20:52):
Urgency. Yeah, urgency.
And so you know, I would say under 5 words kind under 5 words
in under 40 characters. I love that people just want to
say everything, but it's like you're you're not leaving
anything to the imagination. The more you say, the less
reason they have to click because you're answering their
question, the subject line. I understand.
Yeah. Like I think today's was
something like new Winnipeg Costco location, that's it.
(21:15):
They click because they want to know where when, right?
You could put like, hey, on the corner of X&Y new Costco
location opening, you know, August 3rd.
How small is too small for a market?
Because I know you're in Winnipeg, but you're, you live
this world, you're talking to other local newsletter
operators. What is your experience?
Anything under 100K is too small.
(21:37):
I would say even 150K you know Iwould say anything under that is
almost too small. So you want to then broaden out,
Maybe do your county or something like that.
Anything over a million, I almost find it's too much
because then you have a weight rich to cover unless you're
doing 5 * a week. If you're doing five times, you
maybe be able to get away with it.
But over a million, you're pretty much pushing it with the
(22:00):
amount of things that you can add in there.
And it's almost over a million people.
The city is so spread out that let's say, I'm not sure with
Austin, but someone living in South Winnipeg is probably not
going to care about things happening in North Winnipeg.
It's like a different world. Exactly.
It's almost the different citiesat that point.
So if you're over a million, youshould almost have two different
newsletters for like splitting the city in half or something
(22:22):
like that. Yeah, yeah.
What are some other creative customer acquisition strategies
if if paid ads just aren't your thing?
Yeah. I mean, honestly, like you're
like, if you're going to spend $100, I would say $90.00 should
be spent on just Facebook ads. You know, if you're going more
the creative route, Instagram obviously helps you add great
success to whether using many chat.
(22:43):
We haven't fully explored that Channel.
That's something we're now exploring.
Referrals are huge though havingfor example, for us, we do
restaurant guides and hiking guides that we change those
according to the season that's about to come up.
So let's say with the winter, it's going to be top 50 things
to do in Winnipeg this winter, right?
And so we kind of changed that up according to the season.
(23:05):
And so referral guides are huge for us as well.
Are you more interested in growing horizontally and adding
more local newsletters or vertically and just going to
five days a week More sponsors like more vertical integration
by launching other businesses that you promote with this.
Yeah, I mean ideally. So I've kind of considered both
channels or both kind of ways. If you go vertically, if you go
(23:28):
horizontally, there are other companies that do this like 6:00
PM City and things like that. But I just want your CPMS drop,
really drop a lot just because then you start having national
brands which are not going to pay you $100 per 1000 views,
right? And so if you start working with
Nike, they're not looking to, they're just going to pay you a
lump sum, which is going to be like $10 CPMS, if that.
(23:51):
So that's why I find that ratherthan just going horizontal, I
would rather prove out a money model in my own city, right,
then go to other cities. So for example, if I start a
business on top of this, right? And I know that OK, on average
heat subscribers to me and rather than being worth $7.00
now is worth $15 a year, then I'm competing on a whole
(24:14):
different game when I go to another city, right?
Like let's say if I back into Calgary, what's going to happen
is when my competitor can only acquire subscribers for maybe
$2.00 a sub, I can acquire them for five and still have a great
row as on on the customer acquire.
OK, row as return on ad spend. Yeah.
(24:34):
And those are those things you, you mentioned CPM, the amount of
money you can charge per thousand opens, right?
Not per thousand Subs, but opensright.
What are you charging nowadays for ads?
Where about 70 something dollarslike probably $75 CPS wow for
local that's huge for local advertisers and then a lot of
them. So we sell annual spots like
that's kind of our business model is we sell exclusivity.
(24:58):
Like if anyone is looking to sell sponsorship, don't sell one
off sponsorships. You're not going to make money.
You want to sell annual sponsorships on an exclusivity
basis. So if we work with one HVAC
company, we're not working with any other HVAC company for that
full year, right? And so you're trying to sell
exclusivity is what your main thing you're trying to sell is.
(25:18):
So now when we go to a sponsor, we say, hey, you're basically
getting a monopoly over 100,000 and it's the only form of
advertising that lets you do that.
And you said only one ad per newsletter, so 19,000 opens per
send times 75. You're looking like 1400 for one
cent. That's our cost for a one time
(25:41):
advertiser. So if if someone's coming in
just a one time ad, like they have an event coming up or
something, that's what they'll pay.
For our Instagram it's double. So it's 2800 for one for one
post. Yeah.
And then obviously if they're annual subscribe or if they're
annual sponsor, they get much better ad rate than $70 per per
(26:02):
thousand cents. How much better?
Yeah. So right now we're charging
about $12,000 for 12 news that are on, so one per month.
One per month, OK. That way you don't like over
saturate yourself. They don't see it too often.
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And, and what ends up happening
is, you know, so we send out, give or take, let's say 12
newsletters per month, times that by $12,000 a month.
(26:26):
So that's I think $144,000 a year in revenue just on our
newsletter ads. That doesn't even include our
Instagram, right. And so, you know, we're kind of
looking at in the ballpark of about 200 K when when you kind
of combine everything together. And then we're, yeah, we have
some other like local markets and stuff that we end up running
throughout the year. Yeah.
(26:46):
If someone's launching this, like what types of local
businesses, local sponsors should they target?
Because you've probably learned like this.
I'm sure this isn't accurate, but like an auto repair store,
it may be much more likely to give you money but not get much
ROI out of it. So they're not ever going to do
a long term thing. Whereas a local bookstore might
be really hard to convert, but they see a really big return on
(27:07):
investment and therefore could become like a highly recurring
customer. What kind of things like that
have you learned about the typesof sponsors that are best for
local newsletters? I would say probably like event
venues are great, right. So we have an event venue who is
our annual sponsors. They do I think this year
they're going to be spending $40,000 a year with us, right?
So they're a huge they're probably our biggest advertiser.
(27:30):
Other than that I just tell people tell people on LTV just
say that hey for. Lifetime value.
Yeah. So if let's say a dentist is
coming to you or you're talking to a dentist, you have them,
right? What's on average a customer
worth to you? A customer is worth $5000 to me.
Great. So if you're going to spend
$10,000 with me, I just need to get you 4 customers for you to
double your return on that spendwith us, right?
(27:52):
And you're telling me I can't get you 4 out of 35,000 people,
right? So it's an easy sell to make.
Oh, I love that. And honestly, a dentist, a
customer for a dentist, probablyworth a lot more than that,
right? Because they might stay with him
for 5 or 50 years. 100% so dentist, HVAC, plumbing,
roofing. High ticket stuff, anything or
(28:13):
highly recurring. Exactly.
And like what we do is we actually run a survey.
The second someone signs up, they get straight sent to a
survey that they fill out what part of the city they live in,
do they own a home? Are they looking to sell a home,
buy a home, upsell down? Like are they looking to, what
are they looking to do essentially, like what is their
current household income? And so that then allows us to go
(28:35):
to advertisers and say, hey, 75%of our audience are homeowners.
Yeah, that's a very valuable audience for you.
So I highly like you know it, itwill end up working out for you.
What percentage of your subscribers fill out that
survey? About 87% like completion rate.
Are you serious? 87% fill out the survey.
Yeah, So what? That's insanity.
(28:56):
Yeah. That is, and how many questions
are in it? 8.
Holy cow. I would have thought 5%.
Yeah, I just. You think local newsletters are
built different. They're just so loyal, and
they're just like you're contributing to the community.
They're like being a good citizen by contributing to your
capitalism. Right?
But you're not complaining. I mean, I mean, to be, to be
(29:19):
fair though, I think if anyone is starting one, please take
this from a perspective of when you're bringing on advertisers,
don't bring on casinos or clubs.If that's not the vibe you're
trying to set right. Short term you might be shooting
yourself in the foot for turningdown revenue, but long term,
your readers really do appreciate that you know that
they don't have to cause your readers are mainly going to be
(29:40):
70% females, 80% females betweenthe ages of 35 to 65.
They're all looking to learn about clubs and casinos.
So you're much better off just like actually hand picking the
advertisers that are going to add value to their right as
well. But I'll tell you what that
demographic that you just named is like the most valuable
demographic. Those are the the spenders in
(30:01):
the household. They are right and that.
Goes back to like the new business that we're starting and
how why we have picked that business as well.
I'm going to get to that. I'm saving the best for last.
What survey tool do you use for that survey?
Beehive so you can build a survey Beehive Yeah, it's the
it's fairly. Easy.
I don't. I have a survey on my
newsletter. I feel like an idiot, like I
(30:21):
should totally do. That, yeah, that and polls, I
think those two are the most. I do polls.
Yeah, those are the most used like things that you should
probably do in in if you're running a new.
Site How successful are you in finding sponsors in your
subscriber base? Like putting an ad in there for
yourself saying you know your adhere.
Does that work? It does sometimes, but for
smaller companies, I would say, you know, and that's not really
(30:42):
your target audience, though a lot of the larger advertisers
are relationships you're building or they'll reach out or
something like their marketing coordinator is some 23 year old
that follows their Instagram andhas no idea that even our news
that are even exists. So they'll reach out wanting a
feature on the Instagram. I'll hop on the car with them,
sell them this whole new world of newsletters, and then
(31:05):
actually that's where I get the ad dollars from them from.
So it's usually like the foot inthe door is like some 23 year
old marketing coordinator who was like on their team and
thinks it's the cool idea to be featured on Instagram.
Are there any like other perks like local perks like priority
seating or you ever get recognized any intangibles like
that? Yeah.
So I mean, when I had my face associated with the brands in
(31:28):
the beginning, we did a lot of reels.
That's how I grew the Instagram following pretty heavily.
We did a lot of reels, a lot of restaurant reviews and things of
that nature. So I would be recognized like
5-6 times a day. That's amazing.
Yeah, like I would be at the gym.
Was that cool? It was.
Cool. For sure.
But then I kind of it was also concerning at the same time
because I was like, OK, if I sell this, if I ever want to
(31:50):
sell this thing, I can't have myface associated with it.
So that's why we switched more to carousels, a way where I
disassociated my face from it and then I can it's becomes a
sellable asset at the end of theday.
Yeah, that's fair. All right.
So you're dabbling in Christmas lights, is that right?
That's the new business we're starting, yeah.
OK. Yeah.
Well, is that the business or have you done other like
(32:12):
vertically integrated businessesfor this?
No. So that's like our first
business on top of this. Yeah, it was the thinking behind
it was it's seasonal, it works great.
It doesn't, we forget about it, right.
Second thing is, is that it's high LTV customers.
So let's say it's a leasing model, so you don't sell the
Christmas lights, right? So when we lease the Christmas
(32:32):
lights out to them, they're usually staying with us for
another four or five years, right?
Or even like let's say three years.
So we end up making a lot more money on them in the following
years. And then if it works out great,
then a natural upsell into it would be permanent lights.
So those are the lights that go in your under.
Jellyfish. Yeah, Yeah.
So would be the permanent lightsthat kind of go underneath your
(32:54):
gutters and stuff like that, right?
And so that's kind of the plan is OK, if it works out great.
Come next spring, we're going tostart the permanent lights
business. And then also we have a lot of
females obviously, that are readers.
That's our primary reader. And I was like, man, if I go and
start a HVAC or roofing company or something, you know, if
someone's heat goes out, they'renot going to say, let me pull up
Winnipeg Digest and find the plot, like, you know, find the
(33:17):
HVAC tech. So Christmas lights, it was
great because I feel like females are primarily the ones
making that decision and that's exactly what's happened as well.
So we started running some ads in the Winnipeg Digest have
already sold like 5-6 jobs before the season has even
started at all before the main season kind of kicks in.
So. One piece of advice, take it or
(33:38):
leave it. I have a friend that has a
Christmas light slash, roofing slash.
He has several different successful big home service
businesses in Pennsylvania and he says like stay away from
permanent lighting, stay away from jellyfish.
He says he only installs it if someone like demands it and he
can't have them as a customer any other way because it's just
(33:58):
a one time thing And then he's sometimes he has to go out there
and maintain it and fix it and he just hates his life every
time he he says if he could haveit his way, permanent lights
were never installed and he onlydoes Christmas lights on the
leasing program every year. All right.
So when you put this ad in your own newsletter for your other
business, are you calling it your other business?
Or is it does it seem just like a third party entirely?
(34:21):
Yeah, right now, I mean, we ended up doing.
So what we did is we ran a giveaway.
I had heard it in some like Alexfrom Mosey video or something
where he mentioned run a giveaway, give one thing away
and call everybody else and say,hey, you get $150.00 off for
just entering the giveaway. So with that got about 300
entries or something like that. This is a giveaway for free
(34:41):
Christmas lights. Exactly.
Yeah. And then we called it.
OK, just lights the company, no website, nothing like that at
all. But when we do do the brown,
it's going to be the same colorsas Winnipeg Digest.
Yeah, I love that you're just leaning into it.
Yeah, right. Like support.
You're supporting the newsletterby going through me for your
Christmas lights. You're probably going to go
(35:02):
through Someone Go through me. Yeah.
And then now what we're doing is, you know, we can run offers
that kind of make it seem like they're exclusive for the
readers. So we'll say something like,
hey, get your Christmas lights done before October 7th and you
get $150.00 off or something, right?
The first point for us is our season doesn't start until
October 15th anyways. So anything that we do before
(35:22):
that is just extending our season more and more.
Yes, yeah, yeah. Now are you planning on like
running this? Like are you outsourcing it to
another company? Tell me how the operations of
this looks. In an ideal world, what I would
like to do is kind of have Winnipeg Digest as a marketing
arm for multiple businesses. So let's say I either acquire
(35:42):
equity or I get get the given equity into businesses, whether
that's 1520%, of course, depending on the size of the
business. And we end up becoming like a
fully fractional CMO type of situation where we, they get
access to Winnipeg Digest, they get access to me, right?
And then we handle all their marketing for them, right.
And then in return we get some sort of equity share in it.
(36:06):
That's the ideal world situation.
But to go to a Business Today and a local business owner and
say, Hey, give me 1520% of your business, that's kind of they're
not going to believe in the factthat, hey, we can actually
deliver that about or you for about.
So that's why we started our ownbusiness for now at least that's
the Christmas lights one where we're going to run everything.
So I did a my first install yesterday and the yeah.
(36:29):
And so then the plus point aboutthis is I am learning obviously
the skill set of putting the Christmas lights and stuff.
And then this is the only company will ideally own.
And then after this, this kind of proves that the model that
hey, this works for home services and then we're able to
acquire equity into other home services after this.
Yeah, OK. Of all the businesses out there,
(36:50):
what made you think Christmas lights?
Yeah, I mean, it's biggest thingwas it's the it's seasonality,
right, so. But most people look at that as
a negative, right? Yeah, for me, it was, well, I
have a primary business which isWinnipeg.
I just, I can, I don't have to take away too much time away
from this. It's just 10 weeks.
I give 10 weeks. If it works out great, amazing,
(37:11):
I double down. If it doesn't then I'm just
going to forget about it like itnever existed and there's no
website or anything for it yet, so.
OK. I like that.
Yeah, yeah. What are the unit economics of
these jobs? What's an average job size?
What are you going to take home per job?
I know it's varies from year to year.
There's higher costs on year 1. Can you break all that down?
(37:31):
Yeah. I mean this is just our
obviously first year doing it. We've booked five job the last
week, about $1400 is our averagejob right now.
Cost of doing that job for us ismost likely going to be like two
$300.00. But like The thing is, The thing
is we're actually doing the labor right now ourselves right
as owner, Yeah. So that pricing takes into
(37:53):
account in the future when we doend up hiring labor and
everything like that and the following years of I think on
average, the average is about 85% for the amount of customers
that stay on year over year. Wow.
OK. So that 2 to 300 that includes
the lights or just labor? No 3, it's about 300 dollars,
$300 is it just includes the lights.
(38:15):
OK. So you're, you're not like
counting your labor as a cost. All I heard is you know $6000 of
net profit, you know, for on five jobs.
Yeah, yeah. So right.
It's it's fairly high, at least right now.
And then they take about fourishhours to do, 3-4 hours to do,
which is not terrible for the first year.
Second year, we've already cut them, cut the lights for them
(38:36):
and already have the bulbs free screwed.
So it's like, you know, that kind of time gets fed into half.
What are you going to have to pay in labor to have that 4 hour
job done once you do start hiring people?
Yeah, I mean, they'll be just minimum wage.
It won't be. Crazy $100 in labor per job,
give or take. It's about $15.00 an hour, you
know, give or take. Let's just say, you know, three
people doing a job rate should take 3 hours.
(38:59):
So yeah, like you ever take 150 bucks?
Wow. OK, let's say year 2, you, you
stop doing it yourself, you hireit all out.
You basically you don't have theCOGS, the cost of goods sold,
the hard cost anymore. Now you have the labor cost, but
it's half as much. So if you have call it 80%
margins year one, even if you outsource all the labor year 2
(39:19):
plus, you have 90% margins. Yeah, My goal is not to run the
business myself for sure. I'll definitely be bringing in
an operator where I can get themto like best equity or something
over a few years. Of course there'll be a whole
new world of problems, but it'llbe fun, you know, I think, I
think it'll be fun where, you know, I don't want to run the
Christmas lights business at theend of the day.
Right, but I say this all the time, like it's important that
(39:42):
people get to know the weeds before they outsource, you know,
these core competencies and get out of the weeds.
Like people are like, oh, I heard a guy on the Internet say
I, I I did outsourcing. This isn't this is I'm above
this. I'm a no you, you got to know.
Exactly what those weeds look. Like, until you're ready to get
out of them. Exactly, which is why I decided
to do the jobs myself this firstyear.
(40:03):
Easily I could have like hired someone just using the cash flow
from Winnipeg Digest like it wouldn't be too difficult.
It's just that down the road I don't want someone saying that
it took 7 hours when I should have taken 3.
Like, bro, I've been on that ladder, I know what you're
doing. Yeah, so that's why, that's the
simple reason why I was like, you know what, first year, it's
10 weeks. I just won't have a life for 10
(40:26):
weeks. That's totally fine.
Yeah, OK. How many jobs do you think
you'll do this year based on what your conversion rates are
looking like? Yes.
I mean, we sucked that sales forthe first like 7-8 quotes that
we gave out. And then now we've started
converting like I think in the last like 6 jobs, we have like
we've converted four of them or in the last 6 quotes, we've
(40:46):
converted four of them. I think I am very safely saying
that we'll hit $100,000 in revenue in the first year.
Cheers. I think so.
At least that's not. How did you get better at sales?
How did you suck before versus what you're doing today?
Yes. I mean, we would just go in
before and trying to close them on this, like at the door, you
know, and we would have a pre like we would book an
(41:08):
appointment, like a design consult and they would come out
and we would literally just try and close them there.
And I didn't realize that, OK, that's what we shouldn't do.
So then I practiced them. A friend of mine who did, who
did painting. So he did door to door painting,
like student painting or something like that.
And so he's like, yo, if you have a design console booked,
you're going to go inside their home, sit with them before and
(41:32):
after, walk them through your booklet and then you're going to
price anchor them to this price,right?
They just the whole shebang, right?
And so that's kind of what we'vestarted doing now where we go in
and we have the quoted like $3000 or something that includes
all the trees and the home and the side of the home.
And we slowly go with them and take out everything and it gets
to like $1500. And then I'm like, OK, if you
(41:54):
book before October 7th, you get$150.00 discount today, right
now, right? And so that's what we've started
doing now, yeah. And you're closing like 60. 70%
of that, that's the number that will end up.
At it after the season right? 6070% Now please tell me you're
asking for. Referrals.
Yeah, so would neighbor. Neighbors name.
So what we're doing is. There is a Christmas lights
(42:16):
person on Twitter, he always says this.
So it's like $100, the gift cardor something to a steakhouse or
something along those lines. So we're not starting to offer
those right now. We're just getting all of our
stuff still printed. Like it's way early in the
season. Most people start advertising
for this like September 15th. So we're way too early anyways.
Like the homes that we have done, we haven't asked directly
(42:38):
for referrals yet, but we will when we finish the job.
I mean you have no clue. Your conversion rate will only
get better through September, October, November even, right.
So whatever it is today, we'll get orders of magnitude better.
Yeah. And these are all, but these are
like. There's pros and cons because
all these are leads coming through Winnipeg died just
currently, so they're kind of worn leads already.
(42:59):
If we start exploring Facebook ads and stuff, those leads are
going to be a lot more colder, so our current rate should drop
there a little bit. Are you going to do other stuff
like that? Yeah, we're not just going to
rely on your newsletter. We're going to do everything.
Yeah, we're. Trying to $100,000 is like, what
do we want to do base level overthe weeks?
If we're able to do 152 hundred,that would be like ideal world,
(43:20):
Yeah. It's blows my mind that you're
going to come. Close to doubling your revenue
by adding Christmas lights to a newsletter.
Like who would have thought of that?
Ryan Snedden added luxury wedding bathroom trailers to his
newsletter. And like, that became a big
business, right, 'cause events, right?
Events. That's what you said too.
I already know that you're thinking of the spring and the
summer. What other kind of seasonal and
(43:42):
or other businesses are you thinking for this?
I know that it's like very. Not like a lot of people do the
whole gutter cleaning, window cleaning thing in the summer.
And yeah, I don't want to get into the whole door to door
hassle of it. Honestly, I am not a great
salesperson training guy and I might be able to become one, but
I'm not that right now. My bread and butter is like
(44:02):
marketing where I do Facebook ads and things of that nature.
But I want to explore businesseswhich I can utilize that in, you
know. And so most likely that's why
permanent lights was a natural sell.
Also because a lot of Christmas light owners, what ends up
happening is they'll say, hey, we're actually 5050 on whether
we want Christmas lights or not,right?
(44:23):
Because we're considering permanent lights and the
permanent lights average order value is about four to 5X
whatever Christmas lights is obviously LTV.
No, but just a one time cost. So what we're able to do is
bring in someone for Christmas light.
So let's say first season we make some money on them and then
say OK, if you do permanent lights with us the following
year, you get $500 discount. So we're basically just pre
(44:46):
selling customers for permanent lights during the Christmas
light season, right? And rather than making that
money over three years, we're just going to make that money
over 2 years because they're going to do first thing of
Christmas lights, then they're going to do permanent lights the
following season. Smart.
I should have asked this earlier, but what?
What has your timeline look likewith your newsletter and like
(45:06):
subscriber growth? When did you launch?
How many Subs did you add those first few months to today?
Yeah. I mean in the beginning we were
adding like. 4000 ish Subs a month, 4 or 5000 actually now
it's decreased to like 2:00-ish K give or take, where, you know,
we're still spending the same amount of money.
So it's about $3000. But then yeah, you start like
saturating your market and things like that.
(45:28):
So now pretty soon I think like it might be time where I just
turn off of ads and try and spend that money on referrals or
something. But if we can do whether that's
a giveaways or lead magnets or something like that for
referrals and just try and get more subscribers that way, I
think that might be the next thing we try to go into.
So how many months to get to 30?5000 it's been Yes, we started
(45:49):
in. April, whatever that is, I think
like 17 months or something likethat. 16-7 months, yeah, that's
amazing. At this time, no plans to launch
other local newsletters. You want to keep growing this
way. I've had a lot of interest from.
Other cities for sure, just because I talk about local
newsletters on Twitter and I've kind of, and obviously I've been
on your pod and Nick's pod and stuff.
So I've had a lot of interest ofpeople saying, hey, can we
(46:11):
franchise this out or something like that.
It's just that I know my dollarswill be much better spent trying
to briefly integrate this currently, right?
Like so Christmas lights took $10,000 of initial capital to
start. If I started another location
instead of Christmas lights, Christmas lights I might do
$100,000 in 10 weeks. The new location would have
(46:32):
taken me twenty $30,000 to then on sponsors make like fifty
$60,000 the first year. And then once I'm able to prove
out a money model at least in mycity.
So let's say if I know, OK, I'm going to on average make
$200,000 from just the newsletter and then another 2 to
500,000 from Christmas lights. I might not even explore other
(46:52):
businesses after that. It might just be, OK, that's the
business model. I'm going to go to other cities
and start. Yeah, start.
The media. Company based on the media.
Company start Christmas lights. That's it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you feel confident that you
could as of today with what you know now, pick another city, not
move there, not know really anything about it and have just
(47:13):
as much success? 100% I could, yeah.
Like once you've been in the space for over a year, a year
and a half. And I think for me, the USP is
the unique selling point would be the social media aspect of
things. So social media, if anyone is
going to start this, don't forget about social media
because at this point I'm a top three followed, let's say
(47:34):
account in my city, right? If I reach out to an account or
a business, they're almost obligated to reply to me.
So it makes my cold outreach so much easier and the reply rate
just skyrockets rather than me mailing them.
So if you're going to go down this road also, social media is
a great way to upsell your current sponsors into saying,
(47:55):
hey, I have two different that you can reach, right?
So that's the unique selling point if you are going to start
one. Yeah, dude, you you got.
To reach out to local businessesthat collect emails and say,
hey, I'll do a, I'll give you a free ad in exchange for your
list. Like let me share your list
basically, right, Because they're probably not using it.
Most companies that collect emails, they just sit there.
(48:17):
They don't do because it takes work, right to regularly work
your list. So a lot of them are going to be
dead, but you could say I'm going to run them through a
verifier and you can either pay them you know, $0.10 per e-mail
or just say I'll give you $2000 worth of ads for your 20,000
person list. They have no idea what it's
worth. Like would you just add them to
your list? Like rather than I guess sending
(48:37):
an e-mail saying hey subscribe, I would just feel feel it.
Out. Yeah, like try multiple angles,
like segment the list and let's say it's 20,000.
You take four groups of 5000 to 1.
You just say, hey, you know, I partnered with Mike's Bakery and
I would really like you to checkout my local newsletter, 5000.
You just kind of work them into your list, segment them
(48:57):
differently so you could track them, make sure they're cleaned
and scrubbed. How many are opening?
Well, it's not bad. OK.
And then the other two 10,000 try different kind of creative
things. It's a time game, right?
Like I love this is obviously myfirst or second business, but
I've heard a lot that businessesthat are just a time game are
the best businesses to be in. Because as long as I'm just in
(49:18):
this business and my list keeps growing, it's essentially a
business that can't lose. It's an audience that I can not
only monetize through ads, but then I can run my own businesses
on it. So it's just a time business.
As long the longer I'm in the business, the more money I'm
going to make. Oh man, I just kind.
Of had a thought where it's likeevery aspiring entrepreneur or
(49:39):
entrepreneur or entrepreneur, business owner, whatever, they
know that having an audience is powerful, but 95% of them have
no desire to get in front of thecamera and to do all that stuff
because it sucks. It's hard, and I've been there,
right? So they don't even consider it.
They're like, I know having an audience is valuable, but not
for me. I feel like this is a great
loophole into that right where you can just through the power
(50:02):
of the written word, through Claude, through Chad GBT,
through a virtual agent or or virtual assistant, you can use
emails to build an audience without having to get in front
of the camera, but you can stillhave all that power.
Like it's like 35,000 people in a city is more powerful than a
million TikTok followers that are worldwide.
It is I joke around with. Some of my friends, I'm like, if
(50:24):
I wanted to in three years, I could run for me, right?
Like if yeah, totally I could have.
Enough pull in the. City to be able to run for me,
right? But yeah, I think I completely
agree with what you said becausethe biggest problem people run
into when looking to make content is what do I talk about?
In this case, you already have what you're going to talk about
because things are happening in your local town.
(50:46):
Fresh content every day. Yeah, exactly.
And this is a business. At the very base level, the
writing and all that stuff can be given out to one or two Vas
and they can handle 90% of the business for you.
And all you really have to do isdeal with sponsorships.
If you're not even able to, you know, give that up.
If you were, if you are able to also delegate that, then good on
(51:08):
you. You know, so it's not a business
where you need 40 hours a week in the beginning of spending 40
hours a week to write and also do sponsorships.
But as you continue to grow, youcan easily run this whole
business on 15 hours a week. I just feel like this.
You know, under an hour video isprobably about as tactical and
specific as you could get on theInternet for launching a local
(51:31):
newsletter. IA. 100% agree and honestly.
If anyone is going to throw one they can reach out to like the
local news that a community is fairly friendly and you can
reach out to anyone and and other than that just go to
Facebook ads library search up any local news that you can
search up my local news that areWinnipeg digest and what's the
8020 of. Your best performing ads video
(51:53):
Instagram Facebook 15 second it's simply at the top.
Usually have some sort of a local monument as the background
video or image test boats. I would say video has done
better for me. Some sort of a drone footage of
a local monument. Then at the top it says
struggling to find things to do in Blank city, right?
(52:14):
So let's say struggling to find things to do in Winnipeg
underneath it. Say Winnipeg Digest or Blank
Newsletter sends you 50 plus events happening in the city
every single week. That's it.
That is the best performing ads that you will probably find.
One thing I love about this business.
Is how like, let's say you're once a week, you can start
(52:34):
there. It's very palatable.
You do it yourself, you sell outyour ads.
The easiest lever to pull is nowtwice a week.
Cool. I just doubled my revenue three
times a week. Tripled it 4-5 Why not 7?
Let's do 7. And if you're running out of
like current events, you just doopinion pieces and if even New
York or something like a really.Large city and you don't know
how to split things up you can also like almost niche down
(52:59):
twice so you already niche down geographically and then you can
do dads in New York you can do you can do freelancer in New
York yeah like. Freelancer in new.
York because each of those audiences is going to be a
million people on its own if they have more in larger cities.
So if I lived in Austin, I wouldhave just done something like
(53:20):
young dads in Austin or something like that.
Alone is probably like 1000 people or yeah, I mean, I I'd be
so bold as to say. You'd be dumb to be in New York
and just do a New York local newsletter.
Like you're just nothing to no one in that sense, Right?
Exactly. Yeah.
Like you. You.
Could do like a Williamsburg. Moms like pick a neighborhood,
pick a yeah demographic 100% andjust and the.
(53:41):
Higher, obviously, and your, your audience, the more, the
more expensive sponsors you can sell, right?
That's the biggest thing. Only downside to New Year in
newsletters that will say is youmight run out of sponsors
eventually. You know, if you keep providing
a great result, yeah, OK, you'reobviously always going to have
those core sponsors. So you'll have a hundred, 150,
(54:02):
two, $100,000 worth of revenue coming in.
But if that's your goal, go ahead, start one.
But you should probably look at ways to monetize on top of the
news that are eventually jazz. This was.
Great. Where can we look for you if we
have questions? Yeah, Twitter handle.
Is creating jazz so feel free toreach out if you guys have any
questions and happy to chat withwhoever wants to jam on some
(54:25):
local news that are ideas yeah and for the 14 listeners in.
Winnipeg, Canada Go check out the Winnipeg Digest Yeah, and
reach out to. Me and maybe we can grab coffee.
Yeah, OK. Thanks.
Jess. Yeah, thank you.
Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably
because you haven't had a chanceto take your Airpods out.
You're still mowing the lawn, you're still driving, what have
you. If you're still here with me, I
(54:47):
would really, really love and appreciate a five star review on
Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast.
It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra
mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an
interest in starting a business.It would mean a ton.
Hope you have the best day of your life today.
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