# How to Build a $1M Newsletter in 9 Months

Channel: Nikonomics
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-0zclHr9x4
Duration: 40 min
Language: English
Words: 8389
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/m-0zclHr9x4

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[0:00] Dude, this is so crazy to me. There's like a freaking cheat code. You don't have to make anything up. You can literally just go and see what the best are doing and copy it. It's nuts. If I like actually wanted to start a newsletter and make money as fast as possible, I would start content market fit, right? If nobody at all would subscribe to this organically, you probably don't want to bury money into it. Local newsletters are a fun hobby business. I think they're probably one of the lowest leveraged newsletters you can start. And let me tell you why. So, I would 100% stay away from local

[0:32] newsletters. Narrative violation. All right, Nick Connelly, I'm stoked to have you because you are the avatar that people look at and say, "Man, I want to be that guy." You were working at Amazon as a product manager, probably making really good money. I'm just going to say a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. You leave Amazon and within nine months you sell a million dollars worth of ad sponsorships. You've got multiple revenue streams. The journey has just been sort of crazy. You've got a

[1:04] newsletter with over 22,000 subscribers. You got YouTube channel with over 10,000 subscribers. So, you're you're making money a bunch of different ways. What were you doing before you jumped in full-time to entrepreneurship? You're working at Amazon, right? Yeah. So, I would say like, you know, I've always been into entrepreneurship stuff growing up. I was the guy that, you know, I grew up in Massachusetts outside Boston. So, I was knocking on all my neighbors doors and, you know, I'd come back after a snow day with like $300 in cash in my pocket. Then

[1:29] graduated like flipping Jordans, right? I was the, you know, 16 years old in high school. We'd camp out all night outside Foot Locker and and uh buy up as many pairs of Jordans as we could and then flip those on eBay. So, like I always had sort of that background. After school, I just got into into sales uh a few different more like startup companies. So I feel like I cut my teeth there and then went to Amazon where you know very much the opposite. I was still on a small team but you're at a small team at you know a company with a million employees and and very different

[2:02] scene. Yeah. How long were you there? I was there for I think just about 3 years. Oh that's a good amount of time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. How much were you making at Amazon in your last year? It was high six figure. Well high one six figures. How do I say that correctly? Yeah. Yeah.

[2:19] Like 200 grand. Yeah. Just under. Like close to 200. Yeah. Yeah. I would say that. Okay. You're obviously a hustler. I think there's different types of entrepreneurs. Hustlers are are one type that I've identified, which is like you're always just scheming, right? Like could I buy something for five bucks and sell it for six and oh man, how do I how do I make a little more money? When you were at Amazon, did you have side hustles? Were you like constantly launching different things to see what

[2:43] was going to work? Oh yeah. Uh yeah, 100%. The thing that comes to mind is I started getting into newsletters actually when I was at Amazon. I think you know just listening to to uh you know Sean Pur and Sam Parr talk about the hustle and other newsletters. Um that originally got me interested in newsletters. I started writing on Substack probably like four, five years ago. Yeah. like around the time I was in Amazon and I had read this article from Tyler Denk at the time about how Morning Brew grew like 30% of their subscribers through referral programs. Now there's an issue is because Substack one they had no API

[3:21] access so you couldn't build external tools to use a referral program and they didn't have one themselves. So I was like oh I should build a referral tool for Substack and you know everyone would want to use it. So I met my co-founder engineer on Reddit. He was an engineer at Google at the time and uh we built it and it was not successful. We sold it for like six grand but you know it uh it it got my my toes dipped in the water and also technically my first acquisition right say that. So for people who are listening, you probably know what newsletters are, but I'm just going to

[4:00] like highle overview. Anybody who is who has a business or who's has an audience, they're dependent on these platforms to reach customers or potential end users. And so if you've got a lot of followers on YouTube or you've got a a lot of customers, you're relying on the algorithm that those platforms generate in order to reach people. So one change in the algorithm and all of a sudden you're not able to reach them. The reason that newsletters are so popular is because it removes that friction. If I have someone's email, I can go to them directly and I don't need to rely on Google to decide

[4:33] whether or not my post was good enough. So, these have become more and more popular for people who are trying to go directly to end users. Newsletters are growing like crazy. Tyler Deng started a company called Beehive. I think they just reached $30 million ARR, I think. I think that's like where they are. Probably a nine figure valuation. And it's only becoming more and more popular because ad dollars are shifting from traditional legacy media media to these niche media plays where they can actually put dollars to work and get the return out that they want. You what you're saying is you saw this opportunity in the newsletter space to

[5:07] help other newsletter operators grow through a referral program. So you built this tool. Obviously the tool flopped, but out of that the thesis of newsletters stuck for you. You were like, "No, I need to stay in the newsletter game." Yeah. I was just like, you know, something about newsletters. I was like addicted to. I was like, "Oh, this is like the most straightforward path I've ever I've ever seen in like a business, right?" And now getting into it, it's it's not straightforward, but like the three steps to to, you know, making money with a newsletter is essentially just you grow an audience. So, you have an email list that advertisers are

[5:40] interested in reaching. You send them good content so they open that email and then you send you sell ad space to advertisers that want to reach that list, right? So like it's like oh I can understand that anybody can understand that I can explain that I can explain that to my mom right it uh it's it's pretty simple executing that I would say is a different story but like the the concept in itself is is very simple high level I would say there's like four different types of newsletters there are geographic newsletters so it's like local newsletters become super popular right now in many ways think of it as

[6:13] like what the old newspaper was so like the the one ads or the classifies or what people would would advertise it's it's kind of replacing the newsletter. So there's local newsletters, super hot there, I would say demographic based newsletters. So it's like newsletters for men or newsletters for women's or dads in their 30s or whatever else like

[6:29] hobby demographic specific newsletters. And then there are brand related newsletters like personal brand people who have audiences maybe that people are following them for specific reasons. And then there's in my opinion business newsletters where it's like oh I'm a business I should keep my my customers warm and so I'll I'll create a newsletter. Those are the four broad

[6:47] categories that I think of newsletters. Did I miss anything? No, I think that's I think that's uh pretty solid. Yeah, I think you could like take those and put them in in different categories if you wanted to, but like overall you could definitely classify pretty much every newsletter into those four. Local newsletters have been super hot. Everyone's like, "Oh, I could start a local newsletter and make a ton of money." And I've had a couple guys who've come on here that have started local newsletters and they're doing great. Talk about the economics of newsletters really quickly before we get into, I guess, the specifics. What Why

[7:14] do people like them? like how do you make money? Yeah, totally. So, the the way that most newsletters basically grow an audience or or build their asset, right? So, you could look at a newsletter in that like the whole entire asset of the business is that list of people that are looking for your content or that you can send

[7:33] advertisements to essentially, right? So, the way that a lot of people, most large newsletters will grow their email list is through paid acquisition, right? So, this is setting up Facebook ads, paying a dollar to $3 for someone to um click on that and then subscribe to your newsletter and then you have that audience that's expecting that newsletter from you. Then you can go to advertisers and based on a CPM rate, right? So CPMs are anywhere from, you know, call it $10 all the way up to, you know, I've seen hundreds of dollars per CPM, which is essentially the cost per mill or cost per thousand. And this is

[8:09] done on opens, right? So, let's say you have 20,000 people on your list. You have a 50% open rate. So, really, you only have 10,000 readers each time, right? So, you're not selling that CPM based on 20,000. You're selling it based on 10. So, you just take that that 10,000. So, that would just be 10 times

[8:27] the CPM rate. Call it 10 time $10 CPM. You get $100 to sell that ad, right? B2B is going to be much higher than that. You know, anywhere I've seen like 100 to, you know, 500 CPM. your consumer or maybe local. We can talk about local later, but your consumer uh is probably going to be closer to like that $20 range. So, that's how most newsletters make money. You also have like paid subscriptions, right? So, if it's really high quality content, people want to subscribe for call it $5 to $50 a month to read that content. That's another way of doing it. Or you build a business on

[9:02] the back of it, right? So, let's say you run an agency for marketing. You get marketers to sign up and you sell them a service on the back end or whatever product you sell to them. So video is cool, but I have what scientists call a face for radio. And so what's even cooler is long form audio via my podcast and my newsletter,

[9:20] nicknomicspod.com. Go there for free. Subscribe to my newsletter. It's one email per week, super tactical. And then go to my audio podcast. I do three to five episodes a week depending on how curious I am. And it's stuff like this. It's all free. No sleazy sales pitches. nicknomicspod.com. Yeah. Yeah. The only other thing I'd say is affiliate or you have an affiliate agreement where somebody sells through you and for everyone that they click and

[9:40] buy, you get a certain percentage for. Okay. So, you looked at this and you're like, "Dude, newsletters are freaking cool. I'm going to start a newsletter." What did you start? The very first one I actually started was a personal newsletter. It's called three ideas on Sunday. I essentially just sent out business ideas that I had. I don't really talk about that one ever, but that was the actual original one I started writing on Substack. The first one that I I started as like a legitimate business is called the

[10:06] follow-up. I still write it to this day. It actually went out a couple hours ago for today's email. And the follow-up is all about B2B sales. So, we looked at like the hustle, the morning bruise. There's there's tons of newsletters about marketing or finance or general business. There just wasn't a ton on B2B sales, which was my background. So, I started that as a twice weekly

[10:28] newsletter every Tuesday and Thursday. and I've been operating that for about the last 2 and a half years. We just crossed over about 22,000 subscribers and jeez that's awesome. Recently this year it joined the the HubSpot uh newsletter network. So essentially they're our biggest advertising partner. What are your CPMs on a newsletter like that? So 22,000 subs. What's your open

[10:49] rate? CPMs? I'm curious. Open rate's right around 55%. Click rate depends a lot on the advertiser. Yeah, we can talk about ads as well because I've seen behind the scenes of a lot of them and what works well for for advertising and newsletters and and what doesn't. Talk about that. Okay, so what works

[11:06] well and what doesn't. A lot of advertiser or a lot of companies when they buy newsletter ads, they're just like, "Awesome, we're just going to write some cool copy, send them to like our landing page, and they can book a demo from there." That's never going to get as good of a click-through rate as a resource, right? So, it all comes back to the offer. So, when someone offers like a lead magnet, and if you want examples of this, find any HubSpot ad in a in a newsletter. It's never going to be, hey, do you want to check out, you know, our HubSpot CRM? It has like all this intelligence. It's

[11:34] always going to be, do you want to download these top 100 chatbt prompts or these top 50 cold email templates? They then get the the email from there and they can remarket to them later. that's always going to like I'd go as far to say like two to fivex the performance as just like a general sort of what you

[11:52] consider. So that's interesting. So from the because from the ad buyers perspective, HubSpot in this example or me, let's say I wanted to grow my podcast and I'm going to go find someone who has a similar audience to me and oh, I'm going to go to their newsletter. You would think, oh, it's going to 22,000 people, open rate's 50 plus%. Clickthrough rate is going to be X. Cool. Well, as long as I have something that's like quippy or I grabbing, they're going to click through and they're going to subscribe because there's overlap there. But really, it's about the lead magnet. It's like, why is the offer matter so much more than just

[12:23] the copy? It's just it's always about the offer, right? Whether you're sending a cold email or or anything like that. This is why like, you know, when cold emailers originally found out, like there you probably still get cold emails like this, like, "Hey, can I send you a two-minute video that I made of you or made for you custom?" like that worked way better than like, hey, are you available for like a 15-minute call, right? It always comes back to the offer. So, I said lead magnets and resource downloads, but it could also be like, you know, the follow-up readers get, you know, 500 free credits if you

[12:53] sign up through this link. The the audience just wants to feel like, you know, there's an offer there that there's a reason that I should click on this. They're not just trying to sell me something. I kind of have this theory that I've been working on for a while where I think that everything's built on trust. Anybody who's listening to that is like really everything's built on trust. But hear me, hear me out. Hear me out. Any purchasing decision, any switch listening to this podcast, right? If you want somebody to do something, they have to trust you. They have to say like, "Oh, I'm going to listen to Nick because

[13:25] he knows how to grow a newsletter as evidenced by X, Y, and Z." Or, "I'm going to listen to, you know, me, Nick, because he's bought and sold businesses as evidenced by X, Y, and Z." So, in my mind, like you need that level of trust before somebody will make a purchasing decision. That's why there are these metrics where it's like you have to have seven touches with somebody before you close a sale because like they need to get to know you and and get a feel for you and trust you before they spend their dollars. And I wonder if the lead magnets and again I'm sorry people who

[13:53] are listening are like uh dur noi but it's like the lead magnets are kind of a cheat code to building trust because if I create a lead magnet that's really valuable. It's hey here's a here's a template for valuing any business and I give it for free immediately someone takes that they use it and they're like oh this works. Nick must know what he's talking about. I'm going to go click through. Right? or if you create a lead magnet of like here are the top 10 newsletters that you should do in your industry and like I click and I read through it and I'm like oh Nick Connelly

[14:21] knows what he's talking about when it comes to newsletters trust is automatically built therefore there's a higher likelihood of a purchasing decision being made in your favor and again that's the first time I've like really vocalized it like that but I does that make sense I think it's spot on like I think the like the perfect example of this is like Alex Hormosi probably arguably has like the most trust of any business influencer on the internet right now so whenever he tries to go sell something like his book, it's just like a blowout event and like everyone's buying it, right? Because like he's built up so much trust with

[14:53] his audience that just like, you know, when you see his videos, you automatically know like this guy's going to give me a ton of value and and not ask for anything in return right now. Sorry, I'm thinking of it from the advertisers perspective now and, you know, business owners who are trying to figure out how to grow their business and they're doing pay-per-click and they're doing SEO. that one shift in your mindset. Hey, what's a lead magnet that you could provide for people? I would test that. I think it might translate to more sales. If you're doing paper click on on Facebook and it's like here's my offer versus here's my offer

[15:23] with a lead magnet, the lead magnet offer has to outperform that. I I would assume. So, anyways, I I just think that's a really interesting perspective to think from for you in in your newsletter. So, as you bring on sponsors, do you tell them that? Are you like, "Hey, it's actually going to work a lot better if you have a a a lead

[15:40] magnet." Yep. Absolutely. Basically, I'll be like, "Hey, look, you can run whatever you want, right? You're buying the the ad placement as long as like I've, you know, pre-qualified them and I'm like, "Hey, I like their brand. I'm fine with them running in the newsletter." It's like, "Hey, look, you can run whatever you want." Sometimes they have like a big launch coming up and they're like, "Yeah, we we need to use this ad placement, right?" Because it all comes back to like there's someone on the marketing team buying that because they have a specific goal that they're like, you know, goalled out that they have to

[16:06] go back to the CEO and say this is why we're making this purchase. But it's like, hey, look, if you just want to like deliver the most clicks and most leads possible, like this is what you should do. Now, if you don't want to do that, if you just want to drive traffic and show that you got traffic to a landing page about your new launch, that's totally fine as well. But like, if this is the metric, here's what you

[16:25] should do. How are you growing your newsletter? So right now I actually just shut off Facebook ads like yesterday. So I've used Facebook ads traditionally to grow a lot of it. So I'm getting anywhere from like a $150 to $2 per per subscriber. And when you do that $150 to $2 per subscriber. Are you including a lead

[16:45] magnet or no? No. No. That's uh that just like a an iPhone notes app or like an app screenshot. Right. If you go to actually newsletter ads.co. It's a website that I built. It's just like a I think I built it on card. It's just like links to to the Facebook ads library. But if you want to see like all of the ads that a big newsletter is running right now to grab subscribers and basically just want inspiration, just go there, click on any newsletter that you look up to or maybe is in your niche and then scroll to the bottom to find the ad they've been running for the

[17:18] longest. And that's how you're going to find out like what's really working, right? If they've been running it for 6 months, I've got it up. Yeah, I've got it up. So, we've got the hustle on here. We've got CR Daily, Sahil Bloom, Tim Ferrris. Let's go Cody Sanchez. I want to see what Cody Sanchez is doing. So, I click on Cody Sanchez and I'm Oh, these are all the Facebook ads that she has been running in order

[17:41] to get subscribers to her newsletter. Yep. And these for How did you build this? Yeah. I mean, I essentially just uh opened up card, put a landing page, and then it's just links to to um you know, the Facebook ads library. So, you could search any other newsletter. So you can see like in the search tab right there it says Cody Sanchez. Any newsletter you want to look at like you go to TLDDR Morning Brew, you know, you could find any newsletter you want. That's what you should use as inspiration, right? So it's like you don't have to reinvent the wheel, nor should you. You should just

[18:11] see what's working. Go back as far as you can, find out the the ad they've been running for a year because it's still crushing and use something similar to that. Broadly speaking, I can come here and I can just look at what ads are working for them. This is freaking awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like the the best place to start, right? It's like don't don't take a guess. Just know. And like

[18:32] Yeah. When you first get started, you don't have to worry about like making a video like that. I would just get started with like just image image ads. That's basically what's what's worked for me. Like sometimes the videos take a long time to produce and like if it flops it feels like a waste of time. So like yeah, you know, just get started running

[18:51] these. A lot of newsletters use these. So, it's basically just like take a B-roll video of like a skyline and then put text over it, right? So, it shows this is how this is Hul's newsletter. I don't I don't know who they are. Or called Founding Journey. Yep. So, it's all about like startups

[19:08] and raising money and things like that. And this is one ad that they've been running since March 8th, 2024. So, a year and a halfish. and a fire. At my last startup, we raised $15 million, including a series A from A16Z. I created a free pitch deck template crafted to help founders clearly present their startup values to investors. Click

[19:31] below to download for free. That was my voice over. Uh but yeah, it's against the New York skyline. It looks great. That's interesting. Yeah. So, for something like that, if I'm starting a newsletter, that's a very low lift. I don't like that is not high quality. It's literally like 16 seconds. Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but when we started this podcast, we entered into a social contract. I would spend time, energy, and money producing this podcast, interviewing these individuals, and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business, and you would like, subscribe, and leave me five star review. Now, out

[20:08] of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. We both get a ton of value, but I just want to help you keep your word. So, would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a fivestar review for me on Apple or Spotify? It would really help. And if you want, even share this with a

[20:23] friend. Yeah. And you can also reverse engineer that to say, "Okay, he's been running that for a year. It's working really well." And he's using a lead magnet there, right? So, he's not saying, "Sign up to my newsletter." He's saying, "I created this free template. Download it here." And when you download it, it's going to subscribe you to the to the

[20:38] newsletter automatically. This is so crazy to me. This is like a freaking cheat code. You can go and see not only what ads they're running, but by virtue of the fact that their ads been running for a long time, you're like, "Oh, that's the best one. I'm going to go reverse engineer it." You don't like you don't have to make anything up. You can literally just go and see what the best are doing and copy

[20:56] it. It's nuts. 100%. Yep. Oh my gosh. Okay. If you were getting into newsletters again, what would you do? You go you go to 26-year-old 27y old Nick Conway. He's like, "I want to get into newsletters. I want to do a local newsletter because I know I'm going to make a lot of money in local. I've heard all that on the podcast. What would you

[21:16] say to local Nick? Or not local Nick. What would you say to 26 27y old Nick? So, I would 100% stay away from local newsletters. I I I say that as someone that owns news just narrative violation. I just lost all my friends on Twitter. Yep. I think local newsletters are a fun hobby business. I don't think I think they're probably one of the lowest leveraged newsletters you can start. And let me tell you why. When you try to go sell an ad to like the local real estate shop or to the local pizza shop or landscaping company, like that is playing business on hard mode. when you

[21:56] send like a a $15,000 invoice like a B2B company and like it's just a line item for them that like a rounding air that is a much easier sale to to actually like make real money on. Now, the local newsletters are much more approachable, right? Because it's like, oh, I can I can run Facebook ads to people just in my town. It's actually really cheap to acquire subscribers. I think our average subscriber like CPA is like 22 cents for

[22:23] the local newsletter, which is awesome. We built a list like 10,000 right away. But having conversations with these local businesses where it's like, "Hey, it's going to cost you 500 bucks a month." They're like, " $500 a month? Like, are you kidding me? That's like our entire marketing budget." It's like those are the worst type of customers in my opinion to work with. So like if I was restarting, I would stay away from local newsletters. Now, if that's like a hobby project you want to work on or like experiment with, I think that's totally fine. But if you expect that you're going to make like a million

[22:56] dollars or have like a million dollar exit for from a local newsletter, like I think you should probably look somewhere else. So, I'm going to say it a different way. It's not that you would stay away from local newsletters. It's that you would stay away from low ticket advertisers. For the most part, local newsletters are going to be lower ticket. B2B sales are going to be higher ticket. So, is that probably a fairer characterization? I think it's low leverage. Like, and I think the way to look at this is like there's one newsletter, one local newsletter that I know of owned by like 6 a.m. City and I

[23:28] think they do just crack seven figures a year and it's the like largest local newsletter that I know of. To me, like if that is the pinnacle of what you can get to, that doesn't seem like a very high leverage business. Now, like I could go on and build a list of like 10 B2B newsletters that are making over seven figures on like crazy margins right now and arguably they probably work less hard, right? Like that's what

[23:56] I mean. But you know now how much they make, right? But if you're just starting out and you're like, I want to pick a newsletter, how would I even find out what I could make, right? Like there's a saying in in tech where it's like, what's my TAM? What's my total addressable market? Like how big could my business be? How would you even go about identifying that? Obviously, you've gotten to B2B, but how do you find out the CPMs, their average in those industries? How do you find out

[24:18] what an advertiser is going to pay? Where do you go? Yeah, I think you could look at like other media channels and like who's already advertising, right? So, the issue with local, right, is a lot of those people like local businesses maybe they've advert advertised on like a billboard or like bought Google ads before. They've never done it in a newsletter, right? Like look where companies are already spending money in newsletters. That's the easiest sponsor you're ever going to you're ever going to sell is when you reach out to them and say, "Hey, I noticed that you're you're you know running ads in this

[24:48] newsletter. We have a similar audience." I agree. How do I do that though? Like I like I don't How would I find out a company's running ads or not? You got to look in those newsletters. No, you got to you got to go out subscribe to every newsletter you can find in your niche, right? If you're interested in a niche, that's what you're looking for. So, the real first thing though is like you want to look at a niche that you're actually interested in, right? Like I can't go write a newsletter about finance because I'm not into finance. I have no background in finance. Start with your

[25:14] background. What niche are you in? What are you most interested in? What do you want to go learn more about and actually be able to write about every single week? So, that's where you start. You go subscribe to every newsletter in that niche. You find out what they're talking about. you find out who the big dogs are in that category, who are like just coming up and who you can like befriend and and become friends with and and learn from and figure out like who's

[25:35] advertising in those newsletters, right? Who's showing up every single week? Who's spending a ton of money in there? And and the way that you know if like newsletters are are working is like if you see that advertiser show up in that newsletter a lot, right? If they show up one time and they never show up ever again, probably didn't get an ROI or it was just like a one-off buy, right? If you see like an advertiser showing up in one newsletter over and over and over and over, there's a reason behind that, right? Because it's it's performing well. That's where I would start. But

[26:04] even like, let's rewind a little bit. And before I'd even do that, I would try to do some freelancing or or find a way to work with someone that's already has like a a successful newsletter, right? Like you're just going to shortcut all those learnings, figure out like what they're doing that's successful. And like that's the actual first way to make money in newsletters is to provide a service to to me to me it sounds like what you're saying is if you want to get into newsletters first what are you

[26:35] interested in? Where is your skill set? It's like starting a business, right? It's like okay well I want to start a business. What should I do? The best way to make money is to do something that you already know how to do. Don't you know if you're an engineer don't all of a sudden try and start a fitness brand necessarily. Maybe there's exceptions, whatever. But go and subscribe to all those newsletters and like you said identify who are the upandcomers in the space that are writing content. Who are the brands in the space that continue to spend? And then befriend those people who are upandcomers and probably offer

[27:04] your services in some way. Hey dude, I I've been working as a tech salesperson for Google for the last 3 years. I'd love to just write once a month an op-ed on like my best sales practices. Is that cool with you? and you're going to say yes because you're like always need content and they're going to get experience of just understanding how to write for a newsletter, how it works on the back end. They're going to build a relationship with you and then over time, you know, you get to the point where you can kind of spin off and start your own newsletter, but get in the game

[27:32] effectively by consulting or doing some work for newsletters that are already existing. Is that what you're saying? Yes. Yes, absolutely. And by the way, the hardest thing to hire for in newsletters, in my opinion, is a good writer. So like every newsletter out there is going to be looking for good content if you can provide it, right? So like before you go and try to write your own, like you could absolutely help write another newsletter if if you actually have the skill uh or the knowledge to to write in that niche. So absolutely I think you could start there. It's such a cheat code just reaching out to people and saying like,

[28:06] "Hey, I'll do some work for you for free." Anyways, there is a caveat to that piece, but it is such a cheat code to go and just offer somebody who's 10 steps ahead of you to work for them for free. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think like the the big thing there is like you actually have to like do the work or come with the ideas, right? It's not like, hey, where can I help you? It's like I don't want to figure out a place for you to help me at, right? Like tell me how you can help me and tell me the ideas that you have because that's where like the

[28:30] real value is, not just, you know, finding where to stick somebody. So to recap, if you're starting over again, find a niche that you know something about and are interested in. Consume as much content as you can. Subscribe to those newsletters. Reach out to upandcomers in the space. keep a list of advertisers, network, do some work with them, and then launch. That's the

[28:51] process you go through. That's the tried andrue process. I want to throw a curveball in there as well of one of the worst parts that can feel like one of the worst parts about running a newsletter that's based on ads is that you're 100% dependent on advertisers to make revenue, right? So, if they stop spending, basically like all of your revenue is drive or is uh

[29:11] completely dried up. If I like actually wanted to start a newsletter and make money as fast as possible, I would start something that essentially acts like a service, right? So, you're sending something of value that actually takes time to put together. I wouldn't even call them necessarily a reader, but like a customer. So, this could be digital templates. This could be like local listings that are put together. Think about like different things you could scrape from the government that are hard to find. Think about like the movie War

[29:42] Dogs and how they bid on those projects. Like imagine scraping a list of, you know, all of those projects that are up for bid and that like you don't need like extreme like knowledge in order to do like putting all of that in a newsletter and then charging call it you know $5 to $30 a month in in order to access it, right? And the reason why I love that is one you have MR right off the bat. You're providing a service that people get a ton of value from. And three, like you can go to Facebook ads and you're not just like spending money and hoping an advertiser is going to

[30:15] help you recoup that money in the long run. You're spending money that's making you money right away, right? So like you have an infinite growth loop. In that scenario though, you're only making money if you have an audience. Like you only add MR if you get people to opt in. So what comes first? like do you build a newsletter subscriber list and then turn it into this MR thing or or do you do

[30:39] that from the get-go? Yeah, I think there's there's a few ways you could go about it, right? So, a lot of paid newsletters will have like a free edition, right? So, it's like, hey, if you want to get like the monthly roundup, sign up here, but like if you want like the weekly or daily one, you're going to have to actually pay to receive it. So, you could build a free list that way. But if you have like a good offer set up and and you feel confident you can provide value in that newsletter, like I would you could even test this out with like seven different

[31:07] niches with Facebook ads just like we just did, right? So you could start you could spend $100 on Facebook ads to see if you get anybody can to convert to that paid subscription and just try out like you know different types of templates, different types of listings, tons of different niches until you you've proven it. I think that's an amazing strategy. I think what we talked about of like identifying your niche and your skill set and then kind of working your way up is an amazing strategy as well. And

[31:32] those two things together are fantastic. But if I'm just starting out, like the thing that I'm trying to reconcile is I'm going to have to spend money to get subs cuz my whole business model is predicated on subscribers. How much money would I need to set aside to get started? Like in your mind, okay, you got to come in here with 50 grand. Is it 10 grand? Is it 100? Like where would you go? Like if you're advising somebody who's like, "Hey, I want to start a newsletter. It's B2B. I'm specifically targeting home services business owners that are struggling with marketing and I want to get started tomorrow." Like what

[32:09] would you tell them? How much money? Depending on the niche, like maybe $1,000, but like if you really want something, if you really want to like grow something and you don't have any money, you could 100% do it organic. I mean, some of the best newsletters out there have done it organic. It's extremely hard. So, you can't just go start tomorrow and expect to grow a hundred new subscribers every day, but you can 100% or do it organic as well. Like Reddit, I've gotten a ton of subscribers from early on. I actually would cold email a ton of different sales reps. I would just get their numbers from Apollo

[32:42] and and use Smartly to send them emails and say like, "Hey, thought you might find this newsletter interesting. Would you like to subscribe?" That's how I got like my first couple hundred subscribers. So you can 100% get creative and and find free ways to do it and then basically like you know throwing Facebook ads on that is like

[32:59] gasoline. Would you suggest you do that first or let's say I'm somebody who has the money? Say I'm like hey I got 50 grand. I'll put 50 grand in right now. Would you tell me like don't spend yet go do these other ways first and then throw money on it. Or would you say like okay cool you got 50 grand. This is exactly

[33:16] what you should do. I would try to build up an organic base first. basically like content market fit, right? Like if nobody at all would subscribe to this organically, you probably don't want to bury money into it, right? Most of the best like newsletters start organic and then they throw Facebook ads on the mix to like really grow because Facebook ads is the one channel where it's like you put $1 in, you get one subscriber out. That's impossible to do with organic. You're just chasing that next like viral post that's hopefully going to send you more subscribers. So like absolutely I' I'd start organic at least a few hundred

[33:53] subscribers and then push push the uh Okay. What platform would you go and start organic on? Like where's the best platform for organic newsletter subscriber growth? That depends on the niche and you have to just look at like where your ideal subscribers are hanging out, right? So like on X it's probably like people into AI right now. Could be people into marketing. your platforms you're probably going to go after are like X, Reddit, YouTube can be really good like in the comments. Instagram is pretty tough, but again, if you can go viral on Instagram, you can definitely blow up. So, I feel like I just said every single platform,

[34:30] but it really depends on what platform you like posting on. That's it. It's what platform you like posting on and that you can go viral. Well, that you can get reach on. Yeah. And I have an idea there. This is going in a totally different direction in the AI space, but AI avatars are I

[34:47] think like a huge opportunity right now. So, I have a team really basically building an AI. It's me talking at this desk and every other day they have a video of me go live on Instagram and Tik Tok and YouTube shorts and it's just discussing a new AI trend or topic and I didn't have to sit there and write the script. I didn't sit there. It is my avatar. It is me talking

[35:10] on that. Shut the freak up. We put out What are you using? We put out just we put out just over 20 videos by the way and we've had maybe one comment saying I think this guy's AI. So like that's where you know we we understand AI and and like we live in a bubble of X but like people don't it's

[35:27] not clocking right. Okay. Time. Okay. Wait, how did you do it? How did you how did you call yourself? How do you have Yeah, totally. So it's just it's just heyen. So, I don't know the exact word. Hey, genen. H E Y G E N AI. So, you feed it like a twominute video of you talking directly to the camera. It's going to clone you. So, then you can ask it to, you know, say anything you want. This is like an AI avatar right here. It's pretty good at voice, but what we found is there's better voices, right? So, I think it's 11 Labs is like the big voice

[36:01] one. There's also one called like Fish Audio that I think we're using right now. It's just better at like enthusiasm and also like content breaks. So it's not like run on sentences. And so yeah, we're just feeding it into here. Now the real the real alpha right now is not just letting like your AI avatar talk for 5 minutes cuz people will be able to tell, but it's all in like the clipping, right? So only showing your AI avatar for like 4 seconds, jumping to like a a screen share of like the AI app doing something like a green screen. So like that's the real alpha right here. At

[36:34] least right now, I think probably within the next six months, you won't be able to tell, but right now, you know, you can see how are you editing that, right? Like, so how are you? Okay, AI avatar. Boop. Jump to screen share. Back to AI avatar. Jump to screen share. Like, is that being generated by AI or that requires a team still, right? So,

[36:53] that's a team. Okay. Yep. So, I have a team that does all that for me. So yeah, basically what this like every I feel like right now every business owner knows that like short form is a big opportunity and they probably should be on there, but no business owner like has the time to sit in front of a camera every day, think of a new topic and record themselves and then figure out how to edit it or get it off to the editors, right? At least not most of them. And so that's what like this completely changes, right? It's like Okay, so I'm

[37:21] I just signed up. So free creator team. Which one are you on? I think we're probably on team for the 4K exports. Just think about that. You could have Nick Connley USA. You could have Nick Connley Japan, Nick Connley Mexico, right? See where your content like takes off at because you just have no idea where it's going to go viral at. And so yeah, with a team of editors and this, you can pump out multiple videos a day

[37:47] without ever even thinking about it. Okay, dude. I can't wait to mess around with this. Connelly is freaking blowing my mind, bro. There's just so much so much cool stuff going on with AI in the internet right now. It's just like, you know, how can you not be excited about it? You brought that up as a way to like, okay, if you're if you can't spend a bunch of money to go acquire customers and you need to organic content, this is one way to potentially, I guess, juice the system. So like more content equals

[38:16] potentially more eyeballs. Let's say you had a budget of, you know, to have an editing team, right? So, it's like you could just put out multiple videos per day without actually, you know, take you could take that excuse out of the picture of like, well, I can't like sit in front of my phone all

[38:29] day and record. Oh my gosh. All right. I can't wait to try this. Nick, where is the best place for people to come find you? Probably on X. Nick Connley on X. Yep. I'll be on there. All right. I can't wait to have you back on, man. I need to have you back on.

[38:43] This is great. Beautiful. This is fun. Thank you for having me. All right. Hopefully you like that episode. And if you've made it this far, you're either really committed or you're stuck doing yard work and you can't actually skip on your phone. So, while I have you, the show is growing, but I I have a favor to ask of you. Will you please help me grow the show? I want to reach more people. There's a couple things that you can do. Like and

[39:03] subscribe is the simplest thing. Obviously, you want to get notifications for when the next episode is coming out. But if you go the next step, will you leave me a review? Five star on Spotify or Apple. What that does is it tells the algorithm that oh hey this is a highv value podcast because more people are leaving reviews for it and it then pushes it out to more people. So that's why when people are like will you like and subscribe and put a fivestar rating it's not just to make themselves feel better it's actually to get more exposure for the show. So, if you do that for me, I would greatly appreciate

[39:34] it.

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