# Building a Daily Newsletter to 2M+ Subscribers

Channel: Creator Spotlight
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaW29w7ZtQw
Duration: 40 min
Language: English
Words: 7979
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/OaW29w7ZtQw

---

[0:00] Creator businesses are great businesses and I can say we're at over 8 figure annual revenue. You know, we bootstrapped it and we've been profitable also since day one. Today was speaking with Rowan Chung, creator of the Rundown, which is one of the most successful newsletters covering the AI space. The newsletter has over 2 million subscribers and the business

[0:16] generates millions in revenue per year. 2 million on the primary daily AI newsletter and then we're actually over 3 million now across all the newsletters. Oh [music] wow. That's also at over 55% open rate. 55% is incredible. Yeah. If you find something that's working very very well, triple the volume there. Just like go all out on something that works because it's not going to work forever. The best ROI long term is always like focus on thing that works. You've interviewed a bunch of big names in this space. Mark Zuckerberg,

[0:42] Sam Alman, right? The Mark Zuckerberg interview was my first ever interview. Like my first ever appearance on video ever. Is there one or two mistakes you've made that [music] like taught you a lot? I made a lot of mistakes, hiring, and I don't recommend doing this, but like Rowan, you were actually one of the earliest Creator Spotlight guests almost a year before I took the reigns. So, it's nice to bring you back on over 3 years later. Before we get too indepth, I want to understand the current scale and consequence of your business. Any sort of recent revenue numbers you could share that will like situate the scale

[1:17] of your business at this moment in time. Yeah. Uh, I can't share exact specifics. Um, but I can share that, you know, it's it's a real business doing real numbers. I think, you know, newsletter businesses and creator businesses typically are are thrown into the the ringer on like not being able to reach big scale, but we've managed to bootstrap 3 years. I can say we're we're over eight figure annual

[1:41] revenue. You know, we bootstrapped it and we've been profitable also since day one. So, you know, uh, creator businesses are great businesses and hopefully we can get into that a little more. Yes. Uh, can you break down your revenue split? Is it is it primarily advertising and then there's the university product? How many ways is the rundown bringing in

[1:59] revenue right now? Yeah. Um, so I'd say there's three primary ways. Uh, so the first way is just traditional newsletter advertising. Um, and also now we have social media advertising. We bucket that into kind of one. Uh, then we have the education products. We built that on the back of the newsletter business. And then um, there's also another smaller portion of it which we call funnel revenue. um which we can also get into. Um I know there's lots of people are starting quiz funnels um all sorts of things and um we have some kind of unique ways we monetized it and yeah we actually consider it like a almost like its own

[2:32] product. Yeah. I I'm curious about all of these components but maybe the way that makes the most sense to go through it is to describe like your total growth and revenue funnel today. It sounds like you have a pretty dialedin well ststructured system. Um, does does it make sense to kind of tell the story of the different revenue streams and audience growth through that or should I go more

[2:55] specific? Yeah, I guess so. So, um, I guess we can kind of tie in the story to that as well. So, it it really started off just posting on Twitter. Yes. Um, it really just posting organically on Twitter. A lot of organic Twitter threads at the time. Catch went very viral and um, I just so happened to like be at the right time, right place with that. That was very You'd already been posting on Twitter for for about a year before Chat GPT

[3:21] came out in the app. It was really right time, right place for that one. And um I remember writing a thread on Chatt and just went super viral. Um and I said, "Okay, let's let's continue doing this." Um and I just kind of like 3x the output. So a lot of people were like writing [clears throat] like a thread every Sunday, but I'm like, "Let's write two threads a day and see what happens." Um so I was writing two threads every single day. And then I said, "Okay, how can I start a business out of this?" and a newsletter business was kind of the first thing that came to mind. Um, made

[3:49] the most sense. It was the best integration from the organic growth. Um, so I would just link the newsletter at the bottom of the threads and say, "Hey, if you want more, [clears throat] just subscribe to this newsletter." And that was the pitch and it worked really well at the beginning. Um, and then from there, uh, we were able to be profitable

[4:06] from day one because of Spark Loop. Um, so Spark Loop was the honestly the original, um, revenue source before we even started running ads. So again, kind of right time, right place. Uh Spark Loop was was just starting out. Um obviously Beehive now has um a similar recommendations platform where you can pay for subscribers, but at the time

[4:25] we're really early to Spark Loop. Yeah. And so to to clarify for the listener like if if they don't know what Spark Loop is, basically this means that you were bringing in subscribers organically through Twitter. This is in 2023. And you were using Spark Loop, which is where um you were then pushing subscribers to other newsletters and they were paying per subscriber. That's correct. Yeah. So, again, it was literally just me um writing a bunch of two threads a day, right? And um then I would write a newsletter every single night by myself. We had no sponsors or anything. At the beginning, I actually had like a Calendarly link um for

[4:59] sponsors to book. And on Calendarly, you can pay for like uh for like a meeting and we would say this is not a meeting, this is a sponsored link in the newsletter. It was like this super hacky workflow um just to like get some sponsors in the in the flow and we were charging like $300 per sponsor back then which was insane. We were getting like $2,000 3,000 clicks

[5:17] per ad. It's like 300. Okay, wait wait wait wait. So when you say back then like what what point in 2023 is this and how big is the audience by then? Cuz I know that you you were at like 150,000 by May of that year when you did the creator spotlight interview. Yeah, it was it was kind of around a similar time frame as that. I don't know the exact time frames in my head, but everything just moves really quickly. It was around that time. Um, but we actually turn on Spark Loop with that organic growth as well. And Spark Loop was giving us 30 $40,000 a month just

[5:45] off that alone. So that really allowed me to bootstrap it off that growth. So um, yeah, it was and literally just organic growth and we're getting, you know, 30 $40,000 a month just from Spark Loop, right? Uh, which then allowed me to hire a salesperson and a writer. Um, and that really I got very lucky in many ways. I did not know how to hire. Um, I was super lucky that my first two hires were incredible. Did

[6:09] you hire them? Um, honestly around the time of the creator spotlight, maybe a little bit earlier. So like five, six months into the newsletter. Yeah, maybe a little bit earlier than that to be honest. Maybe maybe four [clears throat] months in. Um, but again, we had we had a lot of profit just from Spark Loop alone and I knew that we need to scale it. Um, and and yeah, I guess that's that's how the newsletter really kicked off. Organic growth eventually stopped. uh as many like growth big growth levers typically they tend to eventually stop working after a lot of people catch on to it and

[6:41] those sorts of things. But yeah, that's that's kind of how that started. I became obsessed with this concept of ne negative CAC um which is essentially getting free subscribers and just making money off the funnel alone, the signup funnel alone. Um and really started with Spark Loop. Then we built this uh quizunnel. Um so with AI tools now, I mean anyone can really build their own quizunnel. You don't even have to use type form or anything like that. It's literally just in plain language. You

[7:06] can you can build something like this. And if you're on Beehive as well, like you can really easily integrate it. Well, so what what were some of the quizzes that you were building? Um, so essentially when someone comes into the newsletter, um, we're going to give them this quiz. You can a lot of people call data capture. So yes, we're capturing data from the subscriber which we then can, you know, help to sell ads, but we did it more uniquely because we can have a really dynamic quiz that sends them to custom landing pages. So um we had like 16 pages on average, but they would go down

[7:39] different paths. So um let's say you're a complete beginner in AI um but you're a founder. Well, it's going to send you down a custom path and we're going to send them to a custom landing page based on that persona. uh and that's going to sell our product. Um so it's on our educ our our education product. So like for example uh let's say I don't know you're you're a marketer, you're a beginner in AI and you really want to learn through a course. Well, we're going to give you that exact product right after you finish this

[8:07] quiz. Um we're also going to recommend a bunch of tools uh that fit like the AI marketing persona like what's actually so so from a reader perspective, we're giving them a lot of value because like we're sending them to the right thing. Um, but from a business perspective, um, the conversions just skyrocketed, right? Because like we're able to really customize landing pages based on the persona right away. Um, and you know, we do a bunch of other stuff with segmentation and then we do a lot of drip campaigns uh, using Beehive and a lot of other things. U, but really if you can get cash back immediately

[8:43] right up front. So if you're you're running a Facebook ad and you're paying $2 per subscriber, but you can get a dollar back, your payback period is half the time of another [clears throat] big newsletter. So I mean like us is like kind of up and cominging newsletter at the time. We're competing with Morning Brew. We're competing with 1440. We're competing with these huge newsletter giants with massive budgets, right? It's like how are we going to compete with them? The only way is if we can somehow beat them at the cash up front so that we can scale faster. um which we managed to do really early on and and um

[9:12] honestly I wish I was more aggressive at the time. Uh you know we still have all sorts of different things we do now but um yeah that's kind of how the the quiz worked. You can get you can get it really dynamic and again with AI tools um anyone can really do this. It's not that complex. Um my my one suggestion if someone is going to copy this is like lay it out in Figma first. Lay out like lay out the each page the flow um before building it. Yeah. because like uh if you get them down custom paths, it can get really confusing. Uh so so just build it out first and then

[9:44] like just use AI to replicate. Yeah. So okay, while we're on the topic of growth, I want to sort of fast forward to today and how the funnel looks today. So two things. One, I watched an interview with you from it was published last November. Maybe it was recorded a little bit before, I don't know, but at that point you had 1.4 million subscribers. Now the number in the footer on the rundown website says 2 million. And then I know you've got multiple newsletters, right? There's rundown AI, rundown tech, and rundown robotics, I believe. Um, and in your post on LinkedIn a couple months ago about the Electrify investment, which

[10:17] we'll get to in a little bit as well, you said you had 2.6 million total subscribers across the newsletters, but again, it's around 2 million just just to to clarify the number, it's around 2 million on the primary rundown AI newsletter right now. Correct. That's correct. two million on the primary daily AA newsletter. And then we're actually over three million now

[10:34] across all the all the letters. Wow. And that's at that's also at a like 55% over 55% open rate. Like we scrub very aggressively. Um our email hygiene is pretty important to us. So and if we didn't scrub, I think we'd be a lot bigger. But yeah, stuff 55% is incredible. I know too at the uh in that same interview I just mentioned when you were at 1.4 million subscribers, there was a screenshot of your dashboard in Beehive. It was the 1.4 4 million and then 47.4% open rate and a 1.94% click rate which those are impressive numbers at any size audience let alone as as large as as yours is. So

[11:08] today what are the primary growths? Is it like these quizbased quizbased ads other meta ads? Is it like entirely just meta ads as a category? How are you growing? How are you bringing in subscribers today for the most part? Yeah, I mean meta ads is the bread and butter. Like um if anyone listening to this is starting to scale newsletter um you can get distracted with a lot of things. You can get distracted with Reddit, LinkedIn ads, there's Google ads, right? Um there's Twitter even. Uh and some of them can work at a small scale, but like if you really want to scale past like, you know, mid like mid6

[11:43] figure per month budget when you're really scaling, um like MET is really the only thing you can get to that scale. Uh the other one that is really underrated and um people are starting to catch up on it, but like advertising in other newsletters is is really great way to get high quality readers. Um I would stress this as well is like optimize to get a high quality reader,

[12:06] not like just a cheap one. Uh I think a lot of newslet operators tend to do the opposite and there just no LTV. Um they don't convert, they don't click on ads. But if you're advertising another newsletter, for example, and someone's clicking on that ad and joining your newsletter list, well, that's someone who's reading a newsletter, first of all, and they're also clicking on an ad in your newsletter. That's your like that's that's the perfect reader. Um, so, you know, it it costs more to get a subscriber there, but those subscribers are really high quality and they're going to convert and they're going to make your sponsors happy and they're

[12:40] going to stay around for a very long time. And if you really think as the newsletter business for as a long-term thing and like we think of it as a media company and and everything really comes below the newsletter, um it's like really important to optimize for quality. So, so yeah, like basically what you said, but also I would add in like sponsor other newsletters if you

[13:00] can. That's another high quality one. Let me get right to the point. 11 Labs just launched 11v4, their most emotive voice model yet. Now you can direct the pacing, delivery, and even reactions right in your script. Do you want more excitement? A slower delivery. You are in complete control so your words actually sound performed. With V4, you can also clone your voice from just 10 seconds of audio and create versions in more than 90 languages. Think narrated newsletters, character voices for videos, or an [music] audio book

[13:29] reaching listeners around the world. 11v4 is available now and until October 12th, creator plus plans in 11 creative can use it for free up to twice their monthly credits. [snorts] Sound amazing? Check out 11 Labs at the link in the show notes. Uh let's talk about revenue a little bit. So I know you can't give specific numbers, but just sort of the program, right? So the advertising program, can you tell me like roughly again ballpark roughly how many people do you have on the team selling roughly how many slots per month across the

[14:01] business? Mhm. Yeah. Um it's funny for our size and I and I don't recommend doing this but like we don't have a big sales team. Um actually right now we only have two sellers and 100% of our ads are sold inbound. Wow. So yeah, over the last I mean we're super lucky. It's a it's a great industry to be in right now. But over the last 3 years, um we've sold out 100% of our main and secondary inventory for the daily a newsletter. So that's that's two ads every single day. Um and we've sold out completely just pure inbound uh and repeat sponsors. So um you know, we're very grateful for you

[14:39] know, the industry growing. It's it's been very helpful to us. But um yeah, we've been able to do it that way. But that that being said, you know, the sales team is what we are building right now. If anyone is listening right now and they're a great seller and they want to sell ads for us, please uh please apply. We're we're hiring. Uh but but yeah, it's it's been great to us. So that's I guess that's top down what's what's working for the for the advertising side. We also work with one agency who's starting to sell our socials. Um socials and newsletter sales are kind of different beasts. And um

[15:12] when you start building like a media company, you realize that the buyers for like these ads um the teams are actually different. So yeah, you know, if if we for example worked with um Google and they bought newsletter ads and they also want like and we also want to pitch them socials, we wouldn't be able to pitch Google's, you know, newsletter ad buying team to socials because it's a completely different team. Oftentimes they don't even know each other. So it's actually like kind of unrelated. you kind of need a different vertical and different sales team for that. Um so for now like we we're working with a great agency who's

[15:47] been we're selling our socials. Um as we start building up the sales team. Yeah. So on the topic of like who is buying these ads? One thing I want to say is the rundown has long I mean you know three I guess three and a half years lifetime isn't that long but has for basically the entire lifetime of the product been this place where emerging AI businesses and existing businesses that are you know marketing themselves as AI based products like this is a place they want to show up you've interviewed a bunch of big names in this space for your your content your YouTube channel Mark Zuckerberg Sam Alman right

[16:25] just to say like on the editorial side, these big figures want to show up in your content. And so obviously also on the advertising side, on the paid side, all these companies also want to show up. So that's why the inbound works, right? Like I I think just to describe who is advertising in the rundown, it's if if you're a business that is marketing yourself as some sort of AI based product, this is like top of the list on where you want to be, right? And that's why your inbound funnel works so

[16:53] well. Yeah. I mean definitely um exactly you hit the nail in in the head there where it's like not just the the big names who who come to us for like the big the big flagship interviews but also sponsors. Uh yeah, like there's anyone who's interested in AI and applying a to their work. They're they're on our list. They're reading our newsletter. And um I think [clears throat] it's also important to like kind of put your put yourself in the shoes of the marketing person or put yourself in the shoes of even like Mark Zuckerberg who who I had the opportunity to to interview. Um who are they really

[17:30] trying to reach, right? and and and often times it's it's not actually a huge amount of people like uh going viral on socials is great, but if you're trying to really reach like in Mark Zuckerberg's case, you know, a handful of really great researchers, right? Um and you know, I don't know if you've followed the AI researcher craze, but like they're signing huge deals, like bigger than NBA contracts, hundred million dollar deals, and like they he might be trying to reach one person on our list. Um, so I guess it just shows like the power of like really I mean we're broad, but like if if another

[18:06] newsletter operator is reading this and like they think they have a small list of 10,000 people, but if if it's really quality and niche and like you're hitting the right people, like you can get massive advertising deals, you can get massive guests to come on an interview if you really want to an interview. Um, scale doesn't really matter as much as you think uh from that

[18:28] perspective. Yeah. Um, I I don't know if you can share like specific numbers, probably not, but just the pricing and packaging of your sponsorship product maybe how you figure that out over time. Like I'm sure you said in the beginning you were selling like I don't know how your audience was probably already six figure size audience and you were selling them for like a few hundred each. You said uh a process to figure out the pricing and packaging here. Maybe you can just give us some insight into how you figured that out finally. Um, yeah, how I figured out pricing. I mean, yeah, when we started, we're completely

[19:03] underpricing. Um, but I guess I mean just to over time you kind of figure out who's buying, who's like what's a lot, what's what's cheap. Like I mean we're selling out 100% completely inbound. Like even how far in advance quickly are you sold out? Like months. Uh yeah. So I mean at the time we almost like we could book out for the year if we wanted to. It's just we grow so fast that we just can't. So we'd be underpricing yourself at this

[19:32] point. Yeah. Um so we just can't sell yearly until like we start stabilizing on the growth. Um but but yeah, I guess you just kind of figure out benchmarks. Um there's also a lot of other AI newsletters out there at the time. Uh now there's a little bit less, but when we started there was a lot and they were underpricing more than we were. So, we knew we were underpricing, but like it was kind of rough for us because, you know, if we have another competitor that's claiming that the same size of you and they're charging half your price, you know, it's it's hard to compete with that from a marketing

[20:08] person who's advertising for the first time. Um, right? All you can really share is like um the repeat customers and the fill rate and and show like, hey, like we're actually still really cheap. Um and that's kind of helped us get us get get the footing in the market. And then and then you kind of learn like you know what are the other big newsletters pricing. So eventually I started realizing you know the other big big newsletter platforms and even creators and how much they're charging and realize like how low our CPM is uh compared to them and um and then you just I mean you just fix pricing from

[20:45] there. It's a it's a big it's a it's a constantly evolving thing over time. And um as we're kind of turning from just newsletter business into also like a a creator business. So we have like multiple YouTube shows. Uh we have like Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, all those sorts of things. As we're turning into that, like we're constantly like

[21:06] re-evaluating and repricing things. Yeah. Um, but but yeah, I guess like for for tactical advice for anyone like looking at this, there's like pretty good CPM calculators on the internet, I would start there. Uh, I think Beehive has a pretty good one. So, like based on your basing your scale and like niche, how much you should charge, like an

[21:28] estimate. Uh, and then from there, like just start pitching and see what see what people say. Like literally just talk to the sponsors, see what the results are, make sure that they're getting good results. Like I think instead of like building a 40 person sales team, having like one seller, especially as you're growing, having one seller and just having a really high repeat rate for sponsors like for us that I mean that's the reason why we were able to grow fast. Like we didn't have to focus on building a sales team to start. Well, I I think something I'm hearing as well is like obviously there's a lot of money to be spent in in

[22:02] the world that you're operating and the type of sponsors you're attracting, but also the pace, you know, if there's two ad slots in every newsletter and it's daily, that allows you to learn very quickly where, okay, we are undercharging this week, but now we can start charging more and they want to buy it and we've got the slots and we're just going to like iterate literally every day. Um, that probably gave you a

[22:23] big advantage in figuring out pricing. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly it. And also like just like any other business, talk to your customers, right? Talk to your readers, but also talk to your sponsors. Like how [clears throat] can we make this experience better for you? How can we make you look better in front of your boss? Like what kind of reporting do you need? What kind of like more custom stuff can you can you give them? Like there's other newsletters who famously did like a bunch of custom ad copy integration stuff. Like really like just talk to your customer and figure out like how can you give them the most

[22:52] value, right? And just make sure they're getting value. So like at one point we had an 80% repeat rate, right? So it's just like um we're obviously doing something right. It there's a part of that is results, but then also part of that is like just speed and making the sponsor happy, right? And um yeah, I mean that'd be my advice is just like talk to your customers and and build towards that. If you're a creator, you probably did not get into this to spend hours uploading files, writing tags, organizing assets, and digging [music] through analytics. That's why Open Video

[23:23] built an MCP server just for creators. It lets an AI agent manage the operational side of your video business from a single prompt, uploading, tagging, organizing, and analyzing your entire channel for you. And unlike traditional platforms, it all happens on infrastructure you control. So, let AI do the busy work while you do the important work of creating content your audience can't live without. See how you

[23:46] can do more with AI at open.vide/mcp. That's open.MCP. So, the big news about the rundown this summer came in June that you took your first investment ever from Electrify. And so, I know Electrify, what they are, they invest in, work with, and scale creator businesses. They're typically taking a majority stake. Some other creators in their portfolio include Veritassium and Simple History. A few questions here, but first, how did this come about? Were you looking for investors either at this year or at any point previously or did they approach

[24:20] you? Um, it's funny actually. I think they approached us originally and it wasn't kind of the right time for us. We're still just scaling very very fast. Um, but kind of reapproached them when we started wanting to really scale out our YouTube. Um, so like as you just mentioned, they they work with some like the biggest brands like tech brands on

[24:43] primarily YouTubers. Yeah. We're the first newsletter. Um, so there's Veritassium, Fire Ship, uh, Mentor Pilot, like you said, and, uh, we really want to expand to YouTube. So, it's kind of the the perfect partnership here. Um, but yeah, I mean, I can't share too much about like the details or anything like that, but uh, I can say

[25:01] like the deal was structured in a way. So, um, everything sort of stays the same, but they're giving us a lot of strategic help. M so on the on the YouTube side uh we're we have these full a big plan to really scale out YouTube and really build build a real media business. Um but it was also structured in a way where like I could get a little bit liquidity while staying CEO while still running the ship while still be able to like have operational control in a way um but having like that advice from people who've scaled parts of the business that

[25:33] you know we haven't scaled yet. Yeah. Well, yeah. My big my big question, you know, going into this was like you were already profitable. Bootstrap thing, making a lot of money for the business. I'm sure you're paying yourself a nice salary. Like why would Rowan take this money from this external investor? Doesn't seem like he needs it. But that kind of clarifies their pitch to you is like, yeah, I mean, again, not sure if you're going to answer all this, but like their pitch is basically you can we we maybe aren't taking majority control, but we're going to buy a significant stake. But the main thing is

[26:02] we will help you with YouTube. you don't know how to do that, we do. Keep running the business as you have. It's great, but we'll help you with YouTube and we just want a slice. Yeah, something along those lines. I mean, there's a a little more to it, but my words, not yours. I won't I won't put in your mouth. [laughter] No, I mean, that's definitely the the the thing that really um that really stood out to us, right? U expand YouTube. They also have a lot of experience on their on their board in particular. Um they have a lot of exualingo people. So, you know, our our

[26:32] education side of the business, we we really want to scale into an app eventually as well. So, um there's just been a ton of valuable resources they've been giving us on that side as well. Yeah. So, can you speak at all to any of the the stuff in the pipeline, the video work you're going to be doing, any plans, anything that's like any of the fruit that's going to be borne from this deal? Um, I don't want to give away too many of our plans, otherwise competitors might steal our steal our ideas, but uh, a lot of video. Um, I mean, I think newsletters are amazing, and I'm

[27:08] grateful it's the first place we started. Uh, but I also think like long form video has, you know, a really long-term moat in terms of creator businesses. So, um, we already do a lot of short form stuff, but we really want to expand short uh, sorry, long form. uh we would have multiple shows. I guess you can think of us um in a way at the point where we are is like uh kind of where Morning Brew was. I think Morning Brew laid a perfect pipeline for us where they turned from a like they went from a newsletter business into like a full-on media business, right? They have multiple

[27:42] shows. Um their their long form YouTube stuff is just incredible. like really big props to the team there for like doing such an incredible job because like it lays out the perfect pipeline for us. I mean, we're obviously going to focus on AI, but um they did a great job of integrating multiple media properties into one. Um and that's I guess how you can kind of think of like what we want to do next on the media side. And then there's a whole another thing going on

[28:07] the on the education side as well. Okay. Well, we'll stay tuned. Um okay, maybe another way to talk about video. When you started doing short form video a little while ago, you made an AI avatar, cloned your voice, cloned your self video of you. You were upfront about this. This wasn't some like, hey, we're trying to trick you. Um, you know, I'm it's me doing this. You said like, hey, we're doing this as a way to get this content out. You had a team working on it, editing it, editing your scripts, etc. Today, you're actually filming and narrating the videos yourself. I'm talking to you in your studio that

[28:43] you've built for this. This is the real me. Yes, this is the real run. Um, long way of asking, can you just recount some of these decisions from like I don't really want to do video. I don't like this. Let's make an AI avatar to now I'm talking to you and on Instagram it's

[29:00] also you. Yeah. Yeah. I'm happy to dig down memory lane here. Um, so it's funny. When I first started posting on Twitter, uh, I had I had like a thousand followers or sorry, when I first started posting about AI on Twitter, I had about a thousand followers and I gained that through just like anonymous random threads here and there. I was kind of learning how to write on Twitter and then right time, right place kind of like I mentioned. But when I first started, there was this other creator,

[29:25] his name is Matt Wolf. And I remember DMing him and he had about 1,000 followers on YouTube and he was starting cover AI on YouTube and um I remember DMing him. I'm like, "Hey, like do you have any mic recommendations? I think I want to get into YouTube stuff, too." And we had this like full like conversation. He was like giving me these mic recommendations and we're both at like a thousand followers. Um I ended up not going down the path of YouTube. Uh, and I ended up starting the newsletter and really just like pushing hard on that because I felt my skills on camera just were not there

[29:59] and I was able to scale like writing much faster. Um, the video skills I always said could come later. I still don't think they're good by the way, but they're not they're definitely not. But, um, they're better than what they were to start. Um, but it's just like the opportunity cost of learning how to do the video stuff and doing the setting of the camera and all that, like the one or two months that would have taken would would have been everything. We would have lost completely the the the plot. So, I was very very lucky that we we focused on the newsletter. And it's funny, Matt

[30:29] Wolf fully focused on YouTube. He has a a secondary newsletter now as well, but he fully focused on YouTube and he just crossed a million followers on YouTube. So, he crossed a million on YouTube and we're over a million on the newsletter. Um, so I mean both thing it worked out for us, but it's crazy because we both like were DMing when we're really small just at the beginning. Um, yeah, we just went down two different paths. So, um, yeah, like long story short, um, I said or we had a lot of readers actually ask us like, "Hey, why don't you do short

[30:58] form video?" Like at least like I get the long form stuff, but at least do the short form stuff. like all of our newsletter bubble like we kind of have bubbles uh in the newsletter and uh each one of them can be its own short form video right and it was like oh I just really don't have the time um at the like I'm literally working 80 hours a week since then it was like since since then like I'm way better now um but back then just the peak of the growth building the team like I'm literally working 80 hours a week it's not even like an exaggeration

[31:29] like maybe more um so there's like no way I'm getting in front of camera learning this stuff and like embarrassing myself. So, we're like, "Okay, well, we're building an education product. Um, can we like use this as a case study and try to use an AI avatar to scale these and use my like use the newsletter content as the scripts?" So, we made this big public um announcement

[31:50] that we're going to run this experiment. Um, and yeah, basically we it's not fully AI generated. Um, because like the avatar and the voice is, but the B-roll and the editing and all that and the the scripting that's all done by us humans. Yeah. So like I have an incredible director of media who I mean he was still spending 2, three, four hours a day creating and posting those videos. like it allowed me to step back because I didn't have to spend a second on it, right? Um I didn't have to record in front of a camera and my time just wasn't like it just couldn't scale at that point. Um so it

[32:29] was really perfect for me. Um but I mean we were still having a human do like 3, four hours of editing and and posting and engaging with that. With that said, like that account grew to like 200 250,000 followers through an avatar of myself. It was just my director of media fully managing that account and using like the newsletter stories as the base scripts

[32:54] to to create these pieces. Um, but yeah, I guess I guess that's how it's how the Instagram account really started. Um, and then we switched to me back to me because we were like, okay, the experiment worked. Um, I want to say this a little bit like maybe a year ago from now. Um, so like the end of 2025.

[33:18] Mhm. Is when we like we were doing we're tinkering with it here and there. My time was slowly starting to free up. Uh, and uh, yeah, now now it's me doing the videos. Um, and the reason is pretty simple. Like we don't really think there's a long-term moat for a avatar channels. like they're really great to start and scale from the ground up. Um, and it was an experiment really to start, but like if we want to turn this Instagram account into a business on its own, right? Take sponsors, which we do take a lot of sponsors now on that account. And uh, we want to have a

[33:51] long-term mo and relationship with the audience. Like, it's got to be me. Um, so, so we spend the time and make sure it's me. Um, I still have an incredible team behind me who helps me with scripting, helps me with publishing, um, helps me with packaging and, um, even partnerships, but uh, you know, we made that switch just because it didn't make a lot more sense um, after we really

[34:14] like succeeded with the experiment. [clears throat] Um, but it was still like a pretty incredible way to start the video. It sounds like too like with what you're talking about um wanting to take the investment from Electrify because you want to focus on video that the Rowan brand is very important to this next chapter in the long-term success of the

[34:32] rundown as a business. Yeah. Yeah. Exact. I would say that and and I mean also we're starting to get a lot of big interviews. So you had the opportunity to interview Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Alman, Satina Dela Sundar Pachai from from Google. Um, actually, fun fact, the Mark Zuckerberg interview was my first ever interview either being on

[34:52] one or like as the host. That's wild. Like my first ever time appearance on video ever was with Mark Zuckerberg. And um, yeah, we're just like I mean, if we want to continue scaling these like we can't have like me as the real interviewer and you know, an AI avatar on my Instagram. A lot of people were were like I would meet people and be

[35:11] like, "Oh, you are real." Like I get it. It's just a kind of a, you know, it's a kind of funny joke and um I like it. I laugh, but at the same time it's like, wow, like the fact that that's a joke is kind of crazy. Yeah. You know, um and we just I just don't really want to be known for that. And like I think you want to be real [laughter] I want to be real. And I think like the moat of a of a channel is really like how

[35:33] authentically human you are. Um [clears throat] because if you're doing something that AI can replace one day, like there's not really a moat. Um, so, so yeah, that's just like you want to be 100% allin being as authentic as possible or you want to go the other route. Well, then scale a bunch of a avatar accounts, but um I don't really think that's, you

[35:51] know, a worthwhile mission. No. Um, you keep talking about, you know, team helping you on this and obviously you're now able to do video because you have a team around you. In mid August, a couple weeks ago, you posted that you were hiring seven people. How big is the rundown's team today? Oh, yeah. That's uh it's a great question. I think I think we just hired one more person. Um we're about 23 full-time people with maybe a few extra contractors, part-time contractors on top. And then, of course, we have, you know, electrified resources. So, they they sometimes help bring in a thumbnail person here or there to help. So, um

[36:29] like 23 full-time and then maybe a few extra part-time people. Mhm. How big was it let's say at the end of 2025? Like how much has it grown this year? Like maybe 17 or 18 people. We haven't grown like we we try to be careful with hiring to be honest. Um I made a lot of

[36:47] mistakes hiring. Uh hired way too fast. Um and didn't onboard properly and you know as a remote company I think really hire slow and fire fast should be the motto. Um, I've learned a lot. So, yeah. I mean, we're we're always hiring, but we're hiring the right people. Yeah. Um, and we're just trying to get as many leads as possible and keep the pipeline fresh. And we're really just trying to find those like true A players. Um, and sometimes they don't fit the desri

[37:21] job description perfectly, by the way. Yeah, like you'll have someone who applies to um I don't know be be an editor for video for example and turns out they should actually be one of AI educators. Nice. Uh one final question. So over the last you know three and a half four years building the rundown I know you've had probably some mistakes and failures obviously turned into lessons into you building this into a an 8 figureure business. Um, particularly in regards to revenue or audience growth, is there one or two mistakes you've made that like were pivotal for you and like taught you a lot that you would want to share with

[38:01] uh the audience? I think the best advice I could give is just focus on the things that work. um instead of like like if you find something that's working very very well whether that's growth in terms of like audience numbers or growth in terms of like revenue um like instead of building horizontally from there and like launching a b bunch of different products just like triple the volume there or like 10x the volume if you can just like go all out on something that works because it's not going to work forever and Um the best ROI long term is always like focusing on thing that works. Um so like

[38:44] for example for us like we had an AI tool database at one point we had like a job board and and by the way they didn't fail like they made money but the opportunity cost of like focusing on that instead of just tripling down and just trying to grow the AI newsletter or trying to grow education products

[39:02] longterm that that wasn't worth the ROI. Um, so, so yeah, like when something works, just like tunnel vision and 10x the output instead of building horizontally. Good advice. We'll end it there. Rowan, thank you for coming on. Thank you for your time. Thank you. It's been a blast. Yeah, great to have you listener. We

[39:18] will see you next week. Hi there. My name is Tom. I'm the producer of the Create Spotlight podcast. If you enjoyed the episode and are looking for something similar, then I would recommend this episode with Adam Biddome. It's a similar story but different. He also built an AI focused newsletter, scaled it to incredible numbers, but then he sold that newsletter to HubSpot after owning it for 17 months. So, a very similar story of scaling a newsletter in a very saturated in demand industry, but then also uh how and why you can look for acquisition and sell that product after less than 2 years. So, have a watch of

[39:57] that episode. It's a good one.

---

About this transcript
Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com).
ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts.
Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools
How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt