Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Adam Biddlecombe - Mindstream Founder | Building an AI Media Business from $1K to Multi-Million Exit

Transcript

Adam Biddlecombe - Mindstream Founder | Building an AI Media Business from $1K to Multi-Million Exit · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  When I was a musician playing in a band, I thought I was like a rock star.
• 0:03
  So I spent eight years in my professional career, all the time begging people to come.
• 0:06
  When we first did a public webinar on LinkedIn and we had like 2,000 people registered to come,
• 0:13
  that's when I realized that my stream was a big deal.
• 0:15
  What if you could build and sell a company to a tech giant in just 17 months without funding,
• 0:20
  a degree, or a business plan? Adam Biddlecomb did exactly that. From launching
• 0:24
  Mindstream, an AI newsletter in a garden shed, he scaled it to over 150,000 subscribers
• 0:30
  and sold it to HubSpot in under a year and a half.
• 0:32
  Being a successful musician was my dream. My dream was ripped away from me from COVID-19.
• 0:37
  It almost gave me an opportunity to get out. And then I jumped into my first job.
• 0:41
  That next period of three years was very difficult for me. I went for a walk and I called my friend Matt Village
• 0:47
  and I told him, come round to my house, start a business. I said, we're going to do this
• 0:50
  newsletter thing. You write it, I'll work out everything else and let's go.
• 0:54
  Two, three hours, we started, everything was ready to go. That was our runway.
• 0:57
  We achieved the goal of can we quit our jobs?
• 0:59
  Today he leads brand strategy at Mindstream and shares his journey with an audience of over 200,000
• 1:05
  followers on LinkedIn. In this episode we explore how Adam turned a simple idea into a thriving
• 1:10
  business and how he's helping others navigate the intersection of AI, media, and entrepreneurship.
• 1:15
  I have been a failure for 10 years and it's successful too. You have to choose your regrets.
• 1:20
  Every decision that you make. If you do one of the things, there's always a regret that you
• 1:24
  didn't do the other. When you make a decision in life, you have to choose the regret that you can live with.
• 1:32
  Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the
• 1:38
  Habsbot podcast network. Now Habsbot doesn't just have great podcasts. They also have great
• 1:43
  tools for entrepreneurs. Let me tell you a story. I'm sure you've all heard of the Angel City
• 1:47
  Football Club. Well, you don't just become the world's most valuable women sports franchise by
• 1:52
  accident. Angel City Football Club did it. The little help from Habsbot. When they started,
• 1:57
  data was housed across multiple systems and Habsbot unified their website, their email marketing
• 2:03
  and fan experience in one platform. This allowed their small team of three to build an entire
• 2:09
  website in just three days. The result for nearly 350 new fan signups a week and a 300% database
• 2:15
  growth in just two years. Sure, you can be a great team in the arena. But if you truly want to build
• 2:22
  a legacy of franchise and a dynasty, you have to build a community outside of the arena and Habsbot
• 2:28
  helped Angel City Football Club do just that. If you want to learn about how Habsbot can help
• 2:33
  your business, visit Habsbot.com, visit some other great case studies and you'll learn how Habsbot
• 2:38
  can help your business grow better. And one quick ask, before we dive into today's episode,
• 2:43
  I need your help with something important. I've just launched a quick survey to better understand
• 2:49
  what you guys want from the show. And your feedback is going to directly shape our upcoming
• 2:54
  content. It's only going to take a few minutes of your time and I made it super easy to find.
• 2:58
  Just head over to ScottyClarry.com slash survey. And as a thank you for helping me out,
• 3:04
  I'm giving away a free gift card to one lucky responsive chosen at random once we hit 100 responses.
• 3:11
  So not only will your feedback help make this show even better,
• 3:13
  you might score something cool just for sharing your thought. I really appreciate your help with
• 3:18
  this one. Adam, you scaled Mindstream from zero to 150,000 subs in 17 months before selling
• 3:35
  the Habsbot. That is a wild ride. That's fast. That's very fast. A lot of creators,
• 3:40
  they struggle to build audiences like this. You built it relatively quickly. So what was the moment
• 3:46
  when you were a creator and you were building this thing and was moving kind of at break next
• 3:51
  speed in terms of list building and creator economy building? What was the moment when you realized
• 3:57
  that you had something special? So I spent most of my career trying to be a musician. I think it's
• 4:02
  a good way to preface this and at the time when I was a musician playing in a band creating content,
• 4:08
  I was a content creator. I didn't know I was a content creator. I thought I was like a rock star,
• 4:13
  you know? And even before that, I used to promote and put on shows. It was like my first business.
• 4:19
  I was an event promoter. So I spent probably the first seven, eight years of my professional career
• 4:24
  every day begging people either to come to my shows or come and watch my band. This was literally
• 4:32
  everything we did was like, come on, make sure you listen to my music, check out our YouTube
• 4:36
  series like all the time begging people to come and it was such a hard sell all the time.
• 4:41
  And then when we first did a public webinar on LinkedIn for Mindstream and we had like 2,000
• 4:48
  people registered to come and then I sat down to go and do this this webinar and saw the comments
• 4:54
  start flying in and hundreds of people like excited to hear about what I had to say about AI.
• 5:00
  I kind of had a moment where I compared that to how hard I got people to listen to my art.
• 5:05
  And you know, that's when I realized that Mindstream was a big deal. I'd inadvertently like
• 5:10
  being successful with audience building in this kind of B2B media landscape in a way that I never
• 5:17
  had been able to do with music. I mean, that's 2,000 people showing up for a live stream. There's
• 5:23
  a lot of people. So it's not just building audience at that point. People show up and they want to
• 5:28
  hear that's building community. And I think we can talk about that in a bit. I want to just go
• 5:32
  back and sort of unpack your origin story a little bit more. But that's that is a huge signal.
• 5:39
  And I think that if I even look at some big podcasters that built audiences as sort of my world that
• 5:46
  I live in right now, the switch from the sort of audience building into community buildings to
• 5:52
  start do like live events and to do live shows. And that's it. That's like very anything live is
• 5:57
  very stressful because you're like, I need to not only be someone's dog walk or someone's drive
• 6:05
  into work, but I need them to take time out of their day to show up in real time and care about
• 6:10
  what I'm building. So that's a great signal. So musician and and and promoter to a degree to AI
• 6:19
  newsletter writer obviously super simplified, but at the end of the day, that's sort of the career
• 6:24
  transition you went through. Where's the connection between your two worlds? Yeah, so I think
• 6:31
  I think as I alluded to it the start, like I didn't really know it when I was trying to be a musician,
• 6:36
  but I was I was learning all the skills of building businesses, you know, like our band,
• 6:42
  we were called Chasing Deer and we released albums, we did shows, we did tours, but at the back
• 6:47
  end of it, we were we were actually building quite a successful business, you know, we were looking
• 6:51
  at it with business fundamentals and we were able to support a living for the band, like we all
• 6:56
  lived together down in London and we managed to make enough money to pay the rent and that was sort
• 7:02
  of the role that I took on when we were doing the band. I had like a co founder, you know, who was
• 7:07
  like my front man and he was the creative guy, he was doing most of the writing, most of like the
• 7:12
  art and all these things. And I was just trying to survive. So it was making sure we had enough
• 7:17
  shows, we were getting enough money, we were marketing ourselves in the right way. I mean,
• 7:21
  even back in like 2017, like we started a newsletter for the for the band. So I didn't really
• 7:28
  realise it at the time, but I was picking up all these skills to build businesses. I also think
• 7:33
  at the time like being a successful musician was the biggest the biggest thing ever to me,
• 7:40
  it was my dream, you know, I was like when I started, I was like 14 years old and it's
• 7:44
  like I want to be on stage playing music, that's the life I want it to be. So doing that for so long
• 7:49
  and trying for so hard and having so much failure, I almost think has given me a free pass for the
• 7:54
  rest of life, because in a way, I have failed the ultimate dream. So everything else is like,
• 8:00
  I can kind of be a little bit nonchalant about it if you know what I mean.
• 8:03
  Yeah, it's an interesting take. I don't think that many people think like that when they fail
• 8:12
  at something. I think that it's very positive. It's very, very positive. Is there a reason why
• 8:19
  after I guess it sounds like harsh, but like failing at the main dream, it almost gave you agency
• 8:26
  or inspired you to go do something versus kind of killed a creative spark that you had and made you
• 8:35
  almost move in the other direction from being a creative and just like, you know, like,
• 8:40
  fuck this, I'm not going to be creative. It's not working out for me. I'm going to go, you know,
• 8:44
  I'm going to go get a job or do something that's a little bit less creative. I'm just curious why
• 8:49
  after putting so much of your like life and heart and soul and blood and sweat and tears into
• 8:55
  trying to be a musician, you had the energy of their willpower to go on another creative pursuit.
• 9:01
  Yeah, to be honest, I didn't at the time. So when I talk about my journey, I often like missed
• 9:07
  this period out, but it was quite a long period of time where I was like truly lost, you know,
• 9:11
  I'd spent all my time trying to do this thing. And you know, the kind of sexy way to tell the
• 9:17
  story is that like, my dream was ripped away from me from COVID-19. And that is essentially what
• 9:23
  put the nail in the coffin, you know, we went into lockdown, we couldn't go out and perform shows,
• 9:28
  money stopped coming in, we couldn't pay the rent now flat and we left. But even running up like
• 9:33
  the previous few months running up to COVID hitting, I was starting to realize that the kind of,
• 9:40
  we weren't moving forward really. We were making a little bit more money, we were kind of
• 9:46
  perfecting our craft a little bit. But something we were doing creatively wasn't connecting with
• 9:51
  people when we weren't building that audience. And I was starting to get a little bit disillusioned.
• 9:56
  And then like I say, when COVID came, that was the end. And it also gave, it almost gave me an
• 10:00
  opportunity to get out. But it didn't happen quickly. I moved back in with my parents. I was
• 10:09
  2020. So I was 22 years old. And I just like 22 years old and my dream had kind of essentially ended.
• 10:17
  And I was like not in a good place. I was back with my parents. I was drinking quite a lot. I
• 10:23
  didn't have a job. I'd never had a job. Like I didn't really know where to go. And it took me
• 10:29
  three or four months before I kind of got up off my ass and started working again,
• 10:35
  started getting fit, started reading, started learning. And then I jumped into my first job.
• 10:42
  I got a sales position. And the reason I went into sales is I thought, like learning the
• 10:48
  skill of sales is going to set me up for the future. But I didn't really know what that future was.
• 10:52
  And I had worked for three years in three different sales jobs before I started Mindstream. So
• 10:57
  that period of coming back from London, sitting down into COVID-19 like life where I was doing
• 11:06
  anything. That next period of three years was very difficult for me. It took me a long time to
• 11:11
  kind of really have the energy to go again and go and do something super creative.
• 11:16
  Yeah, it's interesting because COVID, COVID was, it's always, you have to be careful how you say
• 11:24
  this, but COVID for you technically was a blessing because that's what eventually put the nail in
• 11:28
  the coffin that allowed you to sort of go through this really difficult kind of shitty transition
• 11:32
  period, but ultimately coming on the other side and built something successful. But it's interesting
• 11:37
  because for creatives, for people that are kind of in the world that that were in you, you're writing,
• 11:44
  I'm podcasting. Before that, you were creating art, creating music.
• 11:53
  I never know when to tell a creative that they should keep iterating and pivoting and trying to
• 11:59
  refine the product versus to quote Kevin O'Leary, take it behind the barn and shoot it. And COVID forced
• 12:06
  you to do that. The COVID forced you to shut it down. So what's your feedback for any kind of
• 12:12
  creative? Because I don't, I don't consider music or writing or podcasting or even
• 12:18
  influence around social. I all consider them creative. They are. They're just, they're just
• 12:23
  creators trying to figure out how to build audience, how to have their message resonate. When is it,
• 12:29
  when is it something you should iterate through and test new ideas versus when is it something
• 12:32
  that you should shut down if global pandemic doesn't force you? Yeah, I think, I think it's very
• 12:37
  difficult when you're in the moment. And especially, you know, when we talk about creative,
• 12:41
  normally when someone's doing a creative venture is a very, very passionate, emotional thing for them.
• 12:47
  I think you need to kind of get out of the day to day a little bit. And there's ways to do that,
• 12:53
  you know, you can look at like meditation, you can look at journaling, you can look at all these
• 12:57
  strategies. But you need to break yourself out of execution because you can, you can kind of
• 13:03
  optimize anything to infinity. And I think somehow when you're stuck in the weeds, that is, that is
• 13:08
  the the solution. Like take podcasting for example, if you have someone who's not got a successful
• 13:12
  podcast, you know, they could be saying, oh, it's, it's because of like, I'm using the wrong
• 13:17
  camera or the wrong microphone or I'm not iterating the right way or I need to have different guests
• 13:22
  and all of these things. And you can, you can do that forever. But if you were able to kind of take
• 13:27
  yourself out of the weeds and really, really step back and look at data over a long period of time
• 13:34
  and really kind of, I think you have to decide on like what the key metrics are for you. And I
• 13:38
  think that's different for every person, you know, for, for me in the band, it was like, how many
• 13:42
  people are becoming super fans? And that was always the metric for the person who would book the
• 13:49
  show ticket as soon as you announced, they would buy the new CD as soon as it was launched, they
• 13:53
  would buy all of your merchandise, they would tag you on their socials. Like these, these were the
• 13:58
  super fans. And when I realized that that for us like, we weren't getting more and more of them
• 14:03
  over time, that was the one metric that made me realize that we weren't actually progressing.
• 14:09
  Does that, does that mean like, I was going to ask like from a, from a creative
• 14:13
  content perspective, does that mean that like, the music's not good or you're not good marketers?
• 14:18
  Like, what's the thing that would create more music? Super. I've never been a, I've never been in a band.
• 14:23
  Yeah. I play music, but I've never tried to build an audience around it. So what's the metric?
• 14:28
  So I think, I think our problem with, with chasing there is that we, we tried to please everybody.
• 14:35
  And, and we, part of the reason we did this is we were, we were an originals band writing music,
• 14:41
  going on tour, like trying to sell our music, but the way we made most of our money was doing
• 14:45
  corporate events, weddings, parties and playing, and playing covers. So we had always had this
• 14:51
  strange like mix between, do we, how we promote ourselves and like, all we probably shouldn't say,
• 14:58
  like, this thing in our song lyric on the original site, just in case someone wanted to book us
• 15:03
  for their corporate event or whatever. You know, that's where the money was coming in. So there
• 15:07
  was always this balance. That could be one of the root causes. Another root causes like in our
• 15:13
  mission, in our mission statement, we, we always used to say, like, say, we were, we were kind of
• 15:19
  fun. This is what we are. We're just like a fun party band and everyone who comes to our gig is
• 15:23
  just going to have a great time. But I almost think that's too broad, you know, like most,
• 15:28
  most musicians have them have a statement, like they have really quirky character types,
• 15:34
  or they are anti-establishment, or they're pro this, or they're, or they're anti that, like they
• 15:38
  have something that they can really like live and die on. And that is going to attract that type
• 15:43
  of person, you know, we were almost trying to do like, cold play, um, yeah, cold play. Now the line
• 15:51
  not cold play from day one. And, and you know, if you look at that in a business sense, it's like,
• 15:56
  we didn't niche down, you know, that's really, I think that that's probably one of the hardest
• 16:00
  lessons that I've had to learn. And I see a lot of creators screw this up because what they do,
• 16:04
  myself included, is a look at like the big influencer that's kind of doing the same thing
• 16:09
  that they are. And they're like, oh, I just want to, I want to be the, you know, the 10th
• 16:13
  Ferris Joe Rogan diary of a CEO podcast, or I want to be the whatever Gary Vee of social media,
• 16:19
  pick a pick a influencer that somebody looks up to. And those people are, are at this point,
• 16:26
  so famous, they can afford to be a little bit of a generalist in their content. And they can
• 16:31
  afford to interview, you know, all these different people or post all these different ideas on
• 16:35
  their social. But a lot of them started so niche down, and people forget that. People forget that
• 16:40
  the Gary Vee started with wine. Um, uh, if you're a, I mean, if you're a grant card own fan and you
• 16:46
  can see all his stuff now, now he's gone to the politics. He started with sales training. Yeah,
• 16:49
  it was very, very niche. It was very niche. And now he has a big audience, right? Um, everybody,
• 16:54
  I think even, uh, I'm not sure how like the, the, the, the, the, I think Joe Rogan started with
• 17:01
  like comedians. And it was just comedians. And now he interviews everyone and anyone about politics,
• 17:07
  cultures, society, whatever. So, so cliche, right? It's so, but you know, don't compare your,
• 17:14
  your day one to someone else's like your 10, which is really what everyone's doing when they start
• 17:18
  creating got to 100%. In, in my world, um, like, um, obviously newsletters, but in, in linkeding
• 17:25
  content creation, one of your previous guests, like, Sahil Bloom, um, I think what he is doing now is
• 17:31
  he's taking like, um, quite generalist advice, but like wrapping it so beautifully. And someone will
• 17:38
  say to me, like, how does Sahil Bloom, like post this quote and get like thousands of likes on,
• 17:43
  on LinkedIn. But when I post the same quote, I don't get any likes. And it's like, he's built up
• 17:48
  the credibility over years of hard work that people trust, trust his message. You know, you have,
• 17:53
  you haven't done, done the work. So you don't almost get the luxury of being generalist.
• 17:57
  No, you can't yet. And that's where, that's where, I think that's why a lot of creators burn out
• 18:01
  because they try and be generalist day one. And they don't see the traction. But if they niche down
• 18:06
  for a period of time, I mean, this is like, my, my stream was a, a, I, like you, you did niche. Um,
• 18:11
  and I, and I, I assumed that was a lesson that you learned. I don't know consciously or subconsciously
• 18:18
  when you decided to move from, you know, create adventure to life sucks. I hate sales.
• 18:23
  I want to go build something. I just don't want to make sure that I don't want to make the mistakes
• 18:28
  with the newsletter that I'm building. And I'm curious why you even decided to start a newsletter
• 18:33
  amongst all other things in the world that you could ever start. But I'm assuming one of the
• 18:36
  lessons was, don't generalize and don't be the cold play 20 years into their career when we
• 18:42
  first started. Is that sort of how you were thinking through my stream when you, when you first
• 18:47
  kicked it off? Um, I, um, that, that might have been a small, a small part of it. But, um,
• 18:53
  maybe I'm giving you too much credit. I have no idea. Like, yeah, I think, I think you might be,
• 18:59
  you know, it's, it's, it's very tempting to look back in hindsight and like draw all the dots
• 19:04
  that tell the nicest story. But, um, my stream really came out of like pure frustration when I
• 19:09
  started my stream. So at the time, um, I was working a sales job and I had this like small e-commerce
• 19:16
  business that I was running. Um, I was selling, um, snooker and pool accessories. So like tips and
• 19:22
  chalk and all this stuff, um, like dropshipping through Amazon FBA. Um, and I'd scaled it to doing
• 19:30
  about £80,000 in revenue with like, I think I had like a 12% profit margin. Um, but what I was
• 19:36
  selling wasn't my own product. I was competing against other FBA sellers. So the price was, um,
• 19:42
  the price was controlled by like five or six sellers. So I got to £80,000 in revenue and when you
• 19:48
  hit £85,000 in revenue in the UK, you have to register for VAT and you have to start charging,
• 19:55
  £20% VAT on top of your product. And that just killed my margin completely. I think it took
• 20:01
  it down to like 4%. Um, and when I kind of modeled it out, um, at the, at the rate I needed to scale
• 20:09
  to make it worth it, I'd have to start looking at, um, hiring staff and like a warehouse with 4%
• 20:14
  profit margin. It just didn't make any sense to me. Um, and that like was like a real kick in the
• 20:20
  teeth, you know, I thought that this was my way out. I'd like tried and tested loads of things.
• 20:25
  I landed on this one thing. I'd spent loads of money on a coach and, and like coach at the time,
• 20:30
  like I said to her, like, yeah, this VAT thing, like, how do I get around this? And she didn't have
• 20:35
  an answer. When your coach doesn't have an answer, it's like, oh dear. Um, yeah, you're, that's not
• 20:41
  good. Yeah. So I had to, I don't know if it was that, that day where, where it kind of clicked to
• 20:46
  me or like a couple of days later, but I, I went for a walk. I went to walk like a couple of hours
• 20:53
  and I called my friend Matt Village. He'd been my like best friend since I was like four years old
• 20:59
  and we, we'd always talked about starting a business together. And I just like shouted at him for
• 21:03
  like an hour on the phone. Like what has become of our lives? Like we're going to, you know, we're 23,
• 21:08
  24 now. We haven't done this thing that we always said we were going to do. Like we're both just
• 21:13
  in like jobs, you know, I have to be careful because I do actually, I don't actually love the last
• 21:18
  sales. Don't know how to work with some great people, but we weren't where we wanted to be.
• 21:23
  And I told him, like, come on, come out into my house and we're going to like lock ourselves
• 21:28
  in my office and start a business. And the reason we landed on a newsletter is because he was a
• 21:35
  copywriter. He was working as a copywriter for a copywriting agency. And I had spent the last two,
• 21:42
  three years with my first million as the like number one podcast in my years. That was like my
• 21:48
  main entrepreneurial motivation. And two hosts of that podcast had started an ex-tid successful
• 21:54
  newsletter businesses. So it was like the freshest thing in my mind. So that's one piece of the
• 22:01
  puzzle. Another piece of the puzzle was in my previous sales job. I did most of my outbound through
• 22:07
  LinkedIn. So I would just spend so much time on LinkedIn. And I started following these AI
• 22:13
  creators who were getting like a load of buzz. It was like Zayn Khan and Adit Safe in back in
• 22:18
  their days, like mid 2023. And they they had AI newsletters that were starting to grow. There
• 22:25
  was like a load of buzz behind them. So couple like me having listened a bunch to the newsletter
• 22:32
  business from Salmon Shan on my first million, my co founder who I wanted to start this business with
• 22:37
  being a copywriter, me seeing all these AI LinkedIn content creators. That all just came together
• 22:42
  and I said, look, we're going to do this newsletter thing. It's not going to cost us any money to
• 22:46
  really get it started. And we're just going to try it. You write it. I'll work out everything
• 22:50
  else. And let's go. And and within like two, three hours of being locked in this office, we
• 22:56
  we'd started. We had the name we bought the main we'd created a logo like everything was ready to go.
• 23:01
  Lingoda is a partner of success story. Look, I'll be real with you. My French used to be solid.
• 23:07
  I learned it in school. I even had decent pronunciation. But when I booked trip to France
• 23:12
  last year, it was a total blank. I could barely order a croissant without sounding like a tourist.
• 23:17
  So I jumped into the Lingoda sprint challenge. And man, it changed everything. I'd take live classes
• 23:23
  late at night after podcasting, only five students max, real teachers, real conversations. And then
• 23:29
  just two months, I went from a bonjour to holding full conversations at a Paris cafe. Confidence
• 23:38
  unlocked. Now here's the play. 30 or 60 classes in 60 days. And if you finish them all, you get 50%
• 23:46
  cash back. That's basically four euros or five dollars per class. That's insane value. Go to try.lingoda.com slash
• 23:57
  success underscore sprint and then use my code Scott sprint for an extra 20 euro off on top of
• 24:05
  their current deal. Let's get fluent. Fresh books is supporting today's episode. And if you've ever
• 24:09
  wondered how successful entrepreneurs stay on top of their finances while growing their business,
• 24:13
  the answer is fresh books. The numbers don't lie. Over 30 million people have chosen fresh books
• 24:17
  processing more than 60 billion and invoices and saving an incredible 192 hours every year on
• 24:22
  accounting tasks. Think about it. That's nearly eight full days. You can get back to focus on what
• 24:27
  really matters, growing your business. Fresh books is more than just accounting software. It's your
• 24:31
  all-in-one financial command center, create professional estimates, track time, automatically build
• 24:36
  clients and capture expenses on the go plus it integrates seamlessly with over 100 business tools.
• 24:41
  You already use all backed by award-winning customer service. If you're ready to stop drowning in
• 24:45
  receipts and you're ready to stop chasing down payments, here's what I want you to do. Head over
• 24:50
  to freshbooks.com to start your 30-day free trial. No credit card required. And for all you
• 24:54
  success or listeners out there, I've got something special. Get an exclusive 60% off for six months
• 25:00
  when you visit freshbooks.com slash pricing dash offer. Transform your business with fresh books
• 25:05
  today. That's freshbooks.com slash pricing dash offer for 60% off. Today's episode is brought
• 25:11
  to you by Vanta. Now listen up, this matters for your business. In today's digital landscape,
• 25:16
  security isn't optional. It's essential. Without it, deal stall. Sale cycle stretch on and
• 25:22
  scaling becomes very difficult. Now why? Because investors, customers, and partners, all expect
• 25:27
  businesses to demonstrate strong security practices before they commit. If you can't prove trust,
• 25:33
  you lose opportunities. So whether you're a startup founder, trying to land that first big client
• 25:39
  or an established company scaling your security program, Vanta helps businesses of all sizes
• 25:45
  prove that they're trustworthy by automating compliance across 35 frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001
• 25:53
  and HIPAA. The exact certifications your prospects are demanding. Here's why you need to pay attention.
• 25:59
  Vanta gives you back precious time that you're currently wasting on compliance. Their platform
• 26:04
  automates up to 90% of the tedious compliance work. It helps you respond to those endless
• 26:09
  security questionnaires at the five times faster and it connects you with experts to get your
• 26:13
  security program running immediately. The results speak for themselves. A recent IDC report found
• 26:19
  that Vanta customers achieve over $535,000 per year in benefits and the platform pays for itself
• 26:26
  in just three months. So you're going to join over 10,000 global companies like Atlassian,
• 26:32
  Korra and Factory who use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. And don't miss
• 26:38
  this. For a limited time only, my listeners can get $1,000 off Vanta. That's a real money
• 26:43
  backing your pocket. Visit vanta.com slash Scott right now before the software expires. That is
• 26:49
  vant.com slash Scott. What were the outside of lessons that you learned from like my first
• 26:57
  million and obviously, you know, Sam built the hustle, Sean built Melk Road. So two great
• 27:04
  examples there. And I think they speak about them a lot. Some strategies at how to grow scale.
• 27:09
  And I actually think it's a really interesting business model. We can talk about if it's
• 27:13
  something that can be done almost like predictably as a business model to sort of copy the playbook
• 27:19
  that they had that you had. And if you can, you know, someone listening can start one today and
• 27:24
  build it and exit. I think that's an interesting conversation because they seem to be so confident
• 27:28
  about it. And I guess you're a living example of listening to some advice and then running with
• 27:33
  it. But outside of the newsletter, um, uh, advice that you got, well, were some of the,
• 27:39
  because you've gone through sales jobs, Amazon, FBA, building a, building a, a band and, and being
• 27:47
  a creator before, well, were some of the most important ideas that you've learned up to this point
• 27:52
  in your career. I know you're still young, but what were some of the most important business ideas
• 27:56
  that helped you make mindstream successful? I think at the core of it is just having a bias for
• 28:01
  action. I think the majority of people, um, today are consumers, um, at the load of people who
• 28:10
  think they're being productive listening to, um, loads of business podcasts. Um, and the year,
• 28:17
  the year before I started mindstream, like 20, 2023, uh, sort of January when I was looking at my
• 28:24
  goals for the year, my main goal for that year was I want to become someone who does something
• 28:29
  rather than say something because I've always been able to, to sell myself. It's one of the best
• 28:34
  assets I have. The problem is when you're selling yourself, but you're not actually doing anything,
• 28:38
  it's just, it's just a lie at the core of it, you know what I mean? Um, so, um, I set myself
• 28:44
  the challenge that year of becoming the person who continues to sell itself, but has some, has
• 28:49
  something that's really exciting to sell. So having that bias for action, um, is something I'm very,
• 28:56
  very grateful to have, to have it kind of like in my core. And it's been there all my life, you know,
• 29:02
  started my first business at 14 doing events, went out and did the band, you know, I've always had
• 29:06
  the energy to kind of go out and do things. Um, and then also, um, the thing I'm really like my,
• 29:14
  my word of the year of 2025 is intention. Like I'm working quite hard to analyze all aspects of my
• 29:21
  life and optimize and really work on a life building. And, um, whenever I like discuss it, it always
• 29:30
  comes down to like being intentional. That's how I get happiness and success out of something.
• 29:37
  Um, and to be intentional, you have to have like a big, you have to have a big picture. I don't
• 29:43
  think you can be intentional of you're really in the weeds. You, you just end up being reactive.
• 29:48
  So being able to kind of step out, analyze a situation, know the angle you're going towards,
• 29:53
  and then make intentional decisions that will help you get there.
• 29:56
  Yeah. I think those having those two things really is kind of the core of what you need to go out and
• 30:03
  be successful in something. Yeah. I think that's very wise. I think that even without intention,
• 30:08
  um, her mostly speaks about this a lot, how entrepreneurs sometimes last in this cycle their entire
• 30:13
  life about starting something, get it, you know, getting excited about it, then the hardship happens,
• 30:17
  and then, uh, you know, you get kind of disenchanted with it, then you start the next thing, and then
• 30:22
  you get the motivation to start it, and then the hardship happens, and then you move onto the next
• 30:26
  thing. And I think it's because you don't have that big picture or that North Star, and you, and you
• 30:30
  aren't intentional about what you're doing. Like intention in my mind is what gets you through
• 30:36
  all those inevitably hard moments that are going to occur whenever you're building anything
• 30:40
  meaningful. You need to have intention and you need to have North Star and you need to have a vision
• 30:44
  bigger than, you know, the, the shitty, the shitty thing that's bound to happen on the way to
• 30:52
  building the impressive, incredible, amazing thing. Um, it's so, so, so important. Uh, I know that
• 30:59
  when you started mind stream, um, it didn't like blow up right away. It took a, it took a second.
• 31:07
  So early days of sending that newsletter, um, actually before we even talked about early
• 31:12
  days of sending newsletter, what made you want to focus on AI content? What was like, what was
• 31:17
  the signal in the market that that was the good idea? So this is a May, May, the 24th of May, 2023
• 31:24
  that we sat down, um, and when we sat down to decide on what we're going to start, we didn't know
• 31:29
  it was going to be a newsletter and we didn't know it was going to be AI. We made that decision
• 31:33
  in the space of two or three hours. So I have to think about what I was influenced by at that time.
• 31:40
  Um, and most of my, like I said earlier, most of my time at work was spent outbounding on LinkedIn.
• 31:47
  That's a little bit of a lie. Most of my time at work was spent scrolling through LinkedIn,
• 31:50
  right? You know, and, uh, maybe, of course, maybe a little bit of our bound. Yeah.
• 31:57
  And obviously there's a algorithmic effect to like someone's LinkedIn feed, but mine became
• 32:02
  all about AI. And I was following these, these creators who were, who was building these, um,
• 32:09
  following, talking about AI. If anyone thinks back to that time, it was just everything. Like,
• 32:14
  someone could put a lead magnet of 100 chat GPT prompts and get like thousands of emails overnight.
• 32:20
  Um, so it was the obvious thing to go for at the time. That's not the, that's not enough. I don't
• 32:27
  think. So when me and Matt sat down and talking about it, I said, I think AI is the thing. Do you,
• 32:33
  as the copyrighter care enough about this technology to write about it every day? And luckily,
• 32:39
  Matt did. Otherwise, we might have picked something totally different and not be where we are today.
• 32:43
  I think that, listen, um, there's something to be said for, for like riding a trend. I think that's,
• 32:49
  I think that's a, it's smart, but the trends are also busy. So that means that there was probably
• 32:54
  a whole bunch of other people riding AI newsletter. So I think that just jumping on like a bandwagon trend,
• 32:59
  it sounds compelling and it sounds like a great idea, but then you realize that everybody's doing it.
• 33:04
  So you still have to differentiate somehow. Um, it's not like it's, it's not like it's easy. Do you think,
• 33:10
  do you think that if you had chosen to write about anything else, you would have been as successful as
• 33:17
  fast? Definitely not. Definitely not. Um, you mentioned about the competition, even when we sat down
• 33:24
  to, to start mind stream, they're, I remember looking at it and there were more than a thousand AI
• 33:29
  newsletters on Beehive, like on our pay one, there was more than a thousand, uh, uh, that's ridiculous.
• 33:35
  I think, I think a reason for that is Sean Peary had said six months before someone needs to go and
• 33:40
  do the hustle for AI. Um, so I was, I was late. Like we were late, um, superhuman, the rundown already had
• 33:49
  I think half a million subscribers. So we were so late. There was big players in the game and there
• 33:53
  were hundreds and hundreds of smaller players in the game. So in those very early days when we kind of
• 33:58
  analyzed the market, what we realized is that most of the newsletters, um, were quite smartly using
• 34:06
  AI technology to, um, to just consolidate what's going on. They were doing like a pretty good job
• 34:12
  of curating all of the buzz and there were so much buzz and then using AI to write these newsletters
• 34:18
  and they were just basically saying like, here's what happened. That, that, that was it. And they were
• 34:23
  all formatted in the same way, um, because they were all being built on Beehive, which had this like,
• 34:28
  you know, amazing way of building these newsletters. So they all kind of looked the same.
• 34:32
  Um, what we had was, with Matt was like a real copywriter, like a real experienced copywriter
• 34:38
  who, who, who knew, who knew how to connect with people, who knew how to, you know, have a
• 34:43
  journalistic angle to something. And from day one, what we tried to do is not just report on the
• 34:48
  biggest AI news, but the AI news that we thought was really interesting and then to give an opinion
• 34:54
  on that news. So it's not just here, it happened. It's here's what happened and this, this is what
• 34:58
  it might mean for you. This is what it means for X. This is what it means for Y. And that's how
• 35:03
  we differentiate it from day one. Yes, Martin, you make it to include a human component into it,
• 35:08
  not just, not just aggregating. And also we signed off every newsletter with written by humans.
• 35:15
  That was like our little tag at the end. In this time when everyone was like using AI to write
• 35:20
  copy in the early days and it was all rubbish, we were in buttons. So this brings you back to the,
• 35:26
  sort of the point I was alluding to before. When you first started, you did not get the traction
• 35:29
  that you were looking for. I think that from what I understood, you were getting like,
• 35:35
  you were sending this newsletter to 30, 40 people a day, your dad was reading it like really,
• 35:41
  really early startup shit, right? Not like, not like immediately you get a thousand subs. So
• 35:47
  how long did you go through this period of just trying to figure it out, what kept you motivated,
• 35:58
  what made you think, you know what, even though it's not picking up, we're definitely on the right
• 36:02
  track because just to frame it, whatever, a couple hundred or a thousand AI newsletters,
• 36:10
  there's some with 500,000 subs, you start, you've never built a newsletter business before.
• 36:16
  I mean, you realize that it's a sort of kind of like a crowded competitive space, you're not
• 36:21
  getting traction. There's some people throwing the towel very quickly. I think that if you look at
• 36:25
  like even stats for podcasters, if you've done more than 10 podcasts, I'm pretty sure it's
• 36:30
  something ridiculous like you're in the top one percent of podcasters just by releasing 10 plus
• 36:33
  episodes. So what made you continue? So we had, we had pretty humble goals at the start.
• 36:42
  We both invested £500 to get it started and that runway like gave us I think a few months just
• 36:48
  in terms of like the small SaaS cost we had at the start. And our goal was, can we both quit our
• 36:55
  jobs before the end of the year? And this was May. So in six months time, can we replace our
• 37:01
  our sales and copyrighting jobs? And we weren't earning a lot of money here in the UK at the time.
• 37:08
  So it was just about these tiny building blocks. And my day used to be wake up at 6am, go to the
• 37:16
  gym, come home, write a piece of content for LinkedIn. Like Matt was writing the newsletter,
• 37:21
  I was trying to build a following on LinkedIn to generate subscribers. I then scheduled that
• 37:26
  piece of content, go to work and do my sales job. I would then run home for my lunch break,
• 37:33
  like five, five, five, ten minute walk from my house. So I would literally run home,
• 37:37
  get on my laptop and engage on LinkedIn around the time of the post. As you'll know,
• 37:44
  like creating content on LinkedIn, like engagement is pretty key. So I'd literally be sat on LinkedIn,
• 37:48
  like writing, writing comments to all these people, lines of comments on my post.
• 37:53
  Then I'd run back to the office, finish my job, come home at the end of the day and spend
• 37:58
  another couple of hours on LinkedIn. And when you're like that focused on essentially things that
• 38:06
  don't scale, you know, it was like DMing people asking them to join the newsletter. It was
• 38:12
  posting this content, commenting on all these people's posts. You can get like obsessed with
• 38:20
  the small wins, you know, oh, I've got a thousand impressions on the post for the first time.
• 38:23
  I've just hit a thousand followers on LinkedIn. And that was probably the first six or seven weeks,
• 38:29
  and we probably got like a thousand subscribers from LinkedIn. Then at that point,
• 38:36
  Beehive did this like promotion where they were offering like they'd match your investment
• 38:44
  into their boosts program, which is like a paid cross collaboration across newsletters.
• 38:49
  So we then dropped in two and a half thousand, which was the maximum. So we got five thousand
• 38:55
  dollars of boost credits and started paying for subscribers that way. So suddenly we were having
• 39:00
  like two thousand, three thousand subscribers. And at that point, we made some money. Someone wanted
• 39:06
  to advertise in the newsletter, and they also paid me to post about their content on LinkedIn.
• 39:12
  I think it was like two, three hundred dollars for our first sponsor.
• 39:17
  And it's amazing. So that's like now you validated.
• 39:20
  It's been in a small way, the idea. Yeah, that was it. You hit the nail on the head. It was,
• 39:24
  it was validation. And then you could start to build a model, right? You could go, okay,
• 39:29
  we have this many subscribers we charged at this CPM. I charged at this CPM from my LinkedIn.
• 39:35
  And you can just model it out from there. And with this model, we were able to secure some
• 39:42
  investment. So we had two and a half thousand subscribers. We'd made like maybe five,
• 39:48
  six hundred pounds at this point. And I secured a 40,000 pound investment for 10% of the company.
• 39:54
  So it was like four hundred thousand pound valuation. And that was it. That was our runway. We'd
• 40:01
  achieve the goal of can we quit our jobs? You know, three. So what, I'll go ahead, sorry.
• 40:06
  Three months in this was. So it was launched in May. And then yes, September, October,
• 40:12
  we got this deal over the line. Do you feel that more creators, when they start, because most
• 40:17
  creators, they start creating because they're passionate about a topic. They're not going into it,
• 40:23
  thinking, I'm sure they want to scale it and monetize it and maybe eventually exit. You can
• 40:30
  make the argument that for some creators, it's very hard to exit because they're the face of the
• 40:33
  business versus a newsletter where it's faceless. But do you think that it's healthy for creators to
• 40:41
  go into it in the same way that you did? Do you think that that would lead to a more successful
• 40:45
  outcome for the majority of creators, writers, YouTubers, podcasters to go in thinking,
• 40:50
  okay, I love the creative pursuit. But how do I apply a business mind to this and monetize it
• 40:55
  and quit my job or secure investment as quick as possible? Because candidly, I know a lot of creators.
• 41:03
  And they all go into a thinking I want to make money. But I've never seen somebody be so
• 41:08
  purposeful. Not many creators take an investment, a $40,000 investment, 10%, $400,000 valuation
• 41:15
  in the first couple of months. I don't think that's a normal thing for most creators.
• 41:20
  Yeah, I think the problem is often the gene or the mindset of creativity,
• 41:28
  like, whatever it is, doesn't normally come in parallel with like a business mindset.
• 41:33
  And this is what I saw in music. You'd sit in a room with all these musicians and they'd be
• 41:42
  talking about the latest strings they've got for their guitar or the new time signature they were
• 41:49
  writing their new songs in. A very, very, very rarely met another musician who was like,
• 41:55
  I just charged this much money for a show. It just didn't matter to those creatives.
• 42:02
  And I think maybe when you look at like someone who wants to be a YouTuber or a podcaster,
• 42:06
  they're probably kind of a little bit more business focused, but still a creative endeavor is
• 42:12
  still the most important bit. If you have somebody who has kind of a business first principles,
• 42:19
  but they also have that little bit of creativity, that's like a magic combination. And they can go out
• 42:25
  and win. When you're competing with people who aren't thinking that way, now that's the key thing.
• 42:30
  Yeah, I think it's very, I think it's very smart. So let's talk about, let's talk about
• 42:36
  scaling the newsletter. So I mean, he just mentioned sort of one strategy that worked well.
• 42:41
  Obviously, I think I have to, I think that you'll agree with me like before we talk about any
• 42:45
  scaling strategies, you have to make sure that the product like the newsletter itself is good.
• 42:50
  I mean, you can talk about all the scaling strategies in the world and running paid and doing,
• 42:55
  swaps, if the quality of the content's garbage, first of all, it's going to be a huge waste of
• 43:01
  money, but you're just attracting people to garbage. So like the quality of the product has to be
• 43:04
  incredible. The thoughts on that, how do you know what's your metric to figure out whether or not
• 43:12
  your newsletter is what people want to read? Like how do you benchmark it? Is it open rates?
• 43:17
  Is it click through? Is it people responding back saying, oh my god, I love your newsletter.
• 43:22
  Like what is the thing that you actually look for? Yeah, so the two top line ones are obviously
• 43:26
  open rate and click through rate. That's that's kind of the main metric you're looking at every
• 43:30
  every day. Unsubscribe rate is pretty important. You know, you have like an industry benchmark of like
• 43:36
  5%, so if you can be below that, you know, people are unsubscribing your newsletter and a better rate.
• 43:41
  The others reply rate. This is so key. You know, if you put a call to action out, so like
• 43:47
  what did you think about newsletter today? And you get ghosted by your audience of thousands of
• 43:53
  people, then that's that's pretty scary. And another key one, like when people started to tweet
• 44:01
  about us or post about us on LinkedIn with no prompting, you know, that's that's a really key
• 44:06
  signal. So you start to get a connection with your audience. It becomes a little bit more of a
• 44:12
  community. I still don't think that newsletter businesses are communities, but it has that
• 44:17
  bit more of that feel and vibe to it. Those maybe kind of less intangible metrics are so much more
• 44:23
  important than open rate and click through rate. Yeah, I mean, if somebody's if somebody's
• 44:28
  constantly replying or reposting you were like, you know, like saying like, hey, I just read about
• 44:34
  this and in this newsletter and posted a little tweet about it. Like that's incredible.
• 44:39
  It's not community, but it's like pretty damn close, right? You know, you know what I mean,
• 44:43
  it's yeah, I yeah, that's that's a good signal. It's like something that I don't think enough
• 44:49
  people look for. But all the best newsletter writers, I see it all the time with with your
• 44:55
  content with the hills content. They're getting clipped out and the ideas are getting shared
• 45:00
  everywhere with no prompting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, sir. Yeah, I think you know, you talk about
• 45:07
  quality of a newsletter. You also have to compare a lot like comparison is the thief of joy,
• 45:12
  but maybe analysis is the opposite of that or something. But yeah, we would very regularly sit
• 45:20
  down and analyze our competition. We didn't at least every month like a proper like, let's stop
• 45:26
  what we're doing. Let's look at what the competition are doing. Let's let's try and see what
• 45:29
  people are reacting to. We had a we had an inbox that we had like thousands of newsletters
• 45:35
  subscribe to and we analyze AI newsletters, business newsletters, marketing newsletters. So
• 45:40
  you have to you have to constantly regenerate and constantly improve your your content
• 45:45
  to ensure that the readers keep coming back. You know, I think a lot of people who make newsletters
• 45:51
  just build a format and find a way to execute on that format with the least input as possible.
• 45:57
  And then you can view six from this down the line when it gets a bit stale. Yeah, because it
• 46:01
  works and again, people get lazy. They don't reinvent themselves. Out of all the different ways
• 46:07
  that I mean, in terms of like growing a newsletter, you obviously are promoting it everywhere.
• 46:14
  You mentioned that you run paid against it. One strategy that you said didn't work was a cold email
• 46:21
  strategy. So let's talk about the strategies that work the best. Let's talk about strategies that
• 46:26
  you tried that didn't work at all or didn't work as well. And also, if you think those lessons
• 46:32
  are still relevant, I guess, I mean, it hasn't been that long, but in 2025, the strategies that you
• 46:36
  thought worked or did work well with you, would they still work well for somebody else who's building
• 46:40
  a list right now? Yeah, so our main success actually came from acquisition. Our first big acquisition
• 46:48
  was right after we got the investment. I started connecting with a guy called Matt Hitz. He was a
• 46:54
  Slovenian guy who had built up a huge email database sort of accidentally. He'd bought a
• 47:03
  domain called AutoGPT.net. I think this was late 2022 and was doing an SEO play collecting emails
• 47:14
  and then selling digital products through email sequences like AI digital products. And a couple
• 47:19
  of months after he'd launched this, there was this open source project called AutoGPT that started
• 47:25
  getting like loads and loads of buzz. The idea at the time was it was like AI agents which are coming
• 47:31
  now, but this was like 2023. People believe this open source project was going to create fully
• 47:38
  autonomous agents. And they had so much buzz and so much hype, but because they were open source,
• 47:45
  they weren't very strategic with their marketing. And Matt Hitz, his website, AutoGPT.net,
• 47:51
  remained in the number one place on Google. So people were searching AutoGPT to try and find
• 47:56
  this open source product, landing on his website, clicking join now and joining his newsletter list
• 48:02
  inadvertently. Amazing, good for him. And once he realized what was happening, he doubled down on it
• 48:09
  and was like a proper SEO whiz to like keep that place and like optimize. And he made quite a lot
• 48:15
  of money early on selling these digital products. Six or so months down the line, he had this list of
• 48:21
  like 200,000 subscribers and decided to transition his business model from selling digital products
• 48:28
  into a newsletter, like a traditional newsletter business model of sponsorships premium, etc.
• 48:36
  But he was struggling to operate. He was struggling to hire. He was struggling to sell ads.
• 48:41
  He was a developer by trade. So I had like an amazing set of skills, but was struggling to turn
• 48:46
  this thing around. And we just started networking, sharing strategies on newsletter growth.
• 48:53
  And in the end, I pitched to him that we would partner up. We would actually merge the newsletters.
• 48:58
  So at the time, we had 15,000 subscribers. He had close to 200,000. And I managed to broker a deal
• 49:05
  that he would get 30% equity in mind stream. And then he would bring all of his newsletter
• 49:12
  subscribers, his blog revenue from product sales over to mind stream. So that took us from
• 49:21
  15,000 subscribers. We went to 110,000. We didn't import the whole list. We imported the most
• 49:26
  active people. Went to 110,000 basically overnight. A big thank you to indeed for supporting
• 49:31
  success story because hiring people is one of the hardest things you're ever going to have to do
• 49:35
  as an entrepreneur as a founder as somebody who's trying to build a business. It's important to
• 49:39
  hire well and find the right person, but it takes so much time and it's so labor intensive. Because
• 49:45
  like most entrepreneurs, you have a thousand things going on. And there's a good chance that you
• 49:49
  just realized your business needed to hire somebody yesterday. So how can you find that great,
• 49:54
  amazing, right fit candidate fast? It's easy. Just use indeed because you don't have to waste time
• 49:59
  struggling to get your job post seen on all these other job sites. If you're using indeed,
• 50:04
  you can just use their sponsored jobs to help you stand out and hire fast. Your post jumps right
• 50:08
  to the top of the page for relevant candidates. So you can reach out to exactly who you're looking for
• 50:13
  faster. And the results really speak for themselves. According to indeed data, sponsored jobs
• 50:17
  posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. And you know what I love
• 50:22
  most about indeed? It really just makes hiring so fast because everything is streamlined in one
• 50:27
  place. No more juggling multiple platforms or waiting weeks for the right candidate. And how
• 50:32
  fast is indeed in the minute I've been talking to you 23 hires were made on indeed. According to
• 50:38
  indeed data worldwide, there's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with
• 50:43
  indeed. And listeners of success story will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more
• 50:49
  visibility at indeed.com slash clary terms of conditions do apply. Just go to indeed.com slash clary.
• 50:56
  A huge thank you to net suite for supporting today's episode now. What does the future hold for
• 51:01
  business? If you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers bull market bear market inflation
• 51:06
  up inflation down. Honestly, at this point, you just need a crystal ball. But until we get one over
• 51:11
  41,000 businesses have found the next best thing. They future proof their businesses, their operations
• 51:18
  with net suite by Oracle, which is the number one cloud ERP. Imagine having your accounting,
• 51:23
  your financial management, your inventory, your HR, all flowing together in one fluid platform.
• 51:29
  And here's what makes net suite different. It gives you one source of truth for your business.
• 51:33
  You get the visibility and control to make quick, confident decisions while others are guessing.
• 51:37
  You're working with real-time data insights forecasting. You're basically looking in the future of
• 51:42
  your business with actionable data, whether your company earns a couple million or even hundreds
• 51:48
  of millions. Net suite helps you respond to immediate challenges and helps you grab your biggest
• 51:52
  opportunities. And speaking of opportunities, they put together the CFO's guide to AI and
• 51:57
  machine learning and net suite dot com slash Scott Clary. This is the playbook for understanding
• 52:02
  how to use AI for your business. The guide is free. That is net suite dot com slash Scott Clary.
• 52:08
  I just want to take a quick second to thank Habspot for supporting today's episode now.
• 52:12
  Success story is one of the many podcasts in the Habspot podcast network, which is the audio
• 52:17
  destination for business professionals. If you like success story, you're also going to like
• 52:21
  billion dollar moves. Another incredible podcast hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling. Sarah is an
• 52:26
  incredible interviewer. She asks the hard questions on her show. You're going to learn about the
• 52:31
  triumphs, failures of all her guests, the hard lessons of the best and brightest in business so
• 52:36
  that you too can make billion dollar moves, adventure and investing in business and in life.
• 52:42
  I want you to go listen to billion dollar moves wherever you get your podcasts. It is one of my
• 52:46
  favorites. Sarah is one of my favorite hosts. If you like success story, you're going to love this
• 52:50
  show and a quick pause. If you haven't had a chance yet, I'd love your input on our listener survey
• 52:55
  at scottdcleary.com slash survey. It takes just a few minutes and one lucky respondent
• 53:01
  when a gift card once we hit 100 responses. Your feedback directly impacts what we cover on the show.
• 53:08
  I really appreciate it. I mean, that's amazing. And what happens when people realize that they're
• 53:14
  now part of a new email list? Are they as responsive to people drop off? Are they as valuable to
• 53:20
  the advertiser? Yeah. So we we churned quite a lot of those subscribers over time.
• 53:29
  And the subscribers that came through this process of thinking they were
• 53:34
  thinking they were joining this open source product project and then getting this newsletter.
• 53:38
  They were never like the highest quality of subscriber. We'd get like 25% open rate from them and
• 53:45
  you know, one to two percent click rate. They weren't amazing subscribers. But the
• 53:49
  quantity of them was so high and we were still bringing in like three to five thousand subscribers
• 53:53
  every month from this blog. Over the course of the next year, we we managed to take the
• 53:59
  amount of traffic towards a GPT from like 90% home page traffic. So these were the ones we thought
• 54:06
  were going to the project to like 30 and brought and wound on loads of other keyword topics and
• 54:11
  got better and better subscribers. But at the time when we had these new 100,000 subscribers,
• 54:16
  the engagement that the lifts did drop quite a bit. But even so, this gave us an opportunity to
• 54:22
  really start making some money to go and sell some ad slots. You know, when we had 10, 15,000
• 54:28
  subscribers, we were struggling to negotiate deals with bigger advertisers because they didn't
• 54:34
  even though they'd got good results from Mindstream, it was too little of a fish for them to
• 54:38
  bother even making a P.O. You know. So suddenly when we had 110,000, 115,000 subscribers,
• 54:44
  I was able to secure deals with companies like Guide, Tapio who had a bunch of advertising money
• 54:51
  to spend. We started, HubSpot started advertising with us not long after. We were able to get enough
• 54:58
  money coming in the door to go and execute paid strategies that would start to replace these
• 55:04
  subscribers. We had quite a lot of churn, but we were recycling and improving the quality of the
• 55:11
  list. And now, you know, our open right now is like 46, 47%, whereas this time a year ago,
• 55:19
  just after the acquisition, we were sitting like 27, 28%. Oh, amazing. So it's tough because it's
• 55:26
  always like a chicken and anything, right? Because you need the subscribers and even a 100,000
• 55:32
  subscribers opening at a 20% open right is not perfect, but it's enough to interest an advertiser
• 55:39
  to write a P.O. Because then they can actually cut a check and they'll get results and they won't
• 55:43
  be as good, but there'll still be decent results. And then the advertiser will still be happy.
• 55:48
  Then you take that money, you put it into paid strategies, and then now you get even better results,
• 55:53
  you can charge a higher CPM. And it's like this great beautiful flywheel of newsletter growth
• 55:58
  and revenue, but you have to get critical amounts at the beginning. And that's where a lot of
• 56:03
  people struggle. Yeah. Or they just take longer. It just takes a long time. Yeah. And for us,
• 56:07
  if we were to go out and get 100,000 subscribers at that sort of quality through like paid strategy,
• 56:13
  we'd probably be paying best case dollar 50 per subscriber. So we'd be looking at, you know,
• 56:22
  $150,000 to replicate what we got from from that deal, which was really just a well-negotiated deal.
• 56:29
  Yeah. Yeah. And we, by the way, Mattis came on a CTO. He was a great, great help in building
• 56:35
  mindstream. And you know, all of the founders have been very happy with how it's worked out. So,
• 56:41
  you know, it was a great journey. Amazing. So yeah, getting getting to that critical mass,
• 56:48
  as you as you mentioned, where you can start making money and start recycling and start spending
• 56:53
  on paid is important. And it's very, very, very difficult to deal with out a lot of money.
• 56:58
  This is one of the reasons that, you know, these styles and AI newsletters, most of them are gone now.
• 57:02
  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, not a lot of people have 150, 200 grand to build a list, right?
• 57:11
  Not the, I mean, even if you do have money, you don't put 150, 200 grand into building a list,
• 57:17
  because you don't even know what the results are going to be. Like that's, that's a, for everybody,
• 57:21
  doesn't matter if you have a business, I've never seen somebody who's running, has had an exit,
• 57:26
  is running a successful cash flowing business, business from day one, put like 200 grand into
• 57:33
  building an email list. That's a significant investment for anybody with, when they don't know
• 57:37
  the result, right? That's scary. That's really smart, very, very smart.
• 57:42
  Out of all the, now, for paid, that was the other strategy said about a dollar, $1.50 per subscriber.
• 57:52
  Just talk to me about how, assuming that somebody has some money to spend on their newsletter,
• 57:57
  how should they do this properly? Where should they spend the money so that they get that result?
• 58:03
  And not $3, $4 per subscriber.
• 58:05
  Yes, you can get, you can get $1.50 to $1.50 per subscriber with paid co-reads pretty easily.
• 58:12
  So, Spark, Group, and Beehive Boosts. I think there's something inside to,
• 58:17
  Substack that does it as well, but those are the areas that we played in.
• 58:22
  Now, these subscribers are good for a couple of reasons. One is that they are generally,
• 58:29
  they're generally upscrived. So, somebody is subscribing to your newsletter and you say,
• 58:34
  I recommend you also subscribe to Mindstream, and then that subscriber has the option to go and do that.
• 58:42
  So, they are in, they are a newsletter consumer, first and foremost, so they're used to the format.
• 58:49
  The other thing that's good about Spark, Group, and Beehive is they have,
• 58:52
  they have software that analyzes the metrics of these subscribers, so you can only pay for engage
• 58:59
  subscribers, so you can kind of promise to get, you can be sure that you're going to get engage
• 59:04
  subscribers. The one problem with Spark, Group, Boosts though is, as you know, like in your email
• 59:12
  inbox, you've probably got three or four newsletters that you read religiously. You've probably got
• 59:16
  hundreds that you kind of, every day. I don't think it's possible for anybody to have
• 59:24
  10, 20 newsletters that they read regularly or 10, 20 podcasts. So, when you are getting
• 59:31
  subscribers through this strategy, they're probably subscribing to four newsletters at the same time,
• 59:36
  and your newsletter isn't even the one that they wanted to subscribe to in the first place.
• 59:41
  So, you've got to do a really, really, really good job of turning that subscriber from someone who
• 59:46
  thought your newsletter sounded interesting and joined to somebody who is really,
• 59:50
  truly engaged and is going to go and spend money with the advertisers that you recommend,
• 59:56
  or is going to convert into a paid subscriber. If you go out and run ads on like meta or x, for
• 1:00:02
  example, and subscribers are coming to your landing page because they've seen something about
• 1:00:08
  your newsletter they like, and then they've gone to make the intentional decision to subscribe
• 1:00:13
  to your newsletter. Even if their engagement metrics are similar to Sparkloup or Beehive,
• 1:00:20
  they're going to be more emotionally connected with you as a brand because they actually made
• 1:00:26
  that decision to subscribe to your newsletter. And I think over a long period of time, they're going
• 1:00:31
  to give you more returns, they're going to give more returns for your advertisers. They're more
• 1:00:37
  likely to convert to your paid products if that's what you do or buy your products or come to your
• 1:00:42
  talk or whatever. I think they're always going to be more invested in you because it's not just
• 1:00:46
  it's like a, there's like an extra level of action required to go through this process versus
• 1:00:53
  like a one click subscribe to four emails at the same, as we subscribe to four newsletters at the
• 1:00:58
  same time. Yeah, I guess the answer is then you have to figure out how to run ads, how to set up
• 1:01:04
  landing pages, how to optimize that funnel, which is that's just business. At the end of the day,
• 1:01:08
  all creative ventures are business. So I mean, people ask me like, how do you wear a podcast?
• 1:01:12
  I'm like, how do you market it? I'm like, well, how do you market any business? You do, you do all
• 1:01:16
  of it. All of it. Now, anything you can possibly think of run paid due collaborations, figure out how
• 1:01:23
  to, you know, turn a podcast into a newsletter, put it up on your website. How do you get that
• 1:01:28
  article to rank and everything that you can possibly think of for a business. You do it for
• 1:01:34
  the newsletter for the creative product you've made. One strategy that you said didn't work,
• 1:01:43
  which is interesting is a cold email strategy to grow newsletter subscribers. So I'm assuming
• 1:01:49
  that just means that you're reaching out to people saying, Hey, I have a newsletter. Do you
• 1:01:53
  want to sign up if there's something that you're interested in? Why did that not work?
• 1:01:56
  This was one of the things that I was like most excited about, you know, when you're kind of
• 1:01:59
  running the early numbers in a spreadsheet and you've seen like dollar signs at the end,
• 1:02:04
  it was one of those moments and the logic was like, could we buy leads cheap enough through like
• 1:02:09
  Apollo or other strategies in the, you know, hundreds of thousands and then across like, you know,
• 1:02:16
  50 email domains with three emails each send emails at such a scale that you get enough people
• 1:02:26
  to kind of take that CTA and join the newsletter. And I remember this one moment where we were
• 1:02:33
  putting what's called a magic link in these emails, whereas like one click on this link, you
• 1:02:39
  would subscribe to the newsletter. And when we turned on this magic link campaign, we sent out to
• 1:02:44
  like 10,000 emails and like 3000 of them subscribed. So we were like, Oh, shit, this is this is it.
• 1:02:52
  That's awesome. Yeah. What we didn't realize is they're kind of, they're like a bot, bot analysis of
• 1:02:58
  like Gmail was checking all of the links and automatically subscribing them without without them
• 1:03:04
  even realizing. So we were like totally breaking GDPR. We were subscribing to our list,
• 1:03:10
  you didn't realize. And yeah, you can imagine what like open rate and click through rates were
• 1:03:15
  horrible. And I'm assuming a lot of angry emails back. Yeah, just a few. Yeah. So we realized we
• 1:03:21
  couldn't use this magic link strategy over time. We realized we couldn't use links at all because
• 1:03:25
  it would affect, it would affect sending of these emails. So we weren't reaching another open
• 1:03:30
  rates. And then we were trying things like reply. Yes. If you want to be subscribed and all of
• 1:03:35
  these things, but we never cracked it in the end. It was something we probably spent about
• 1:03:41
  $10,000 on over time, like testing and iterating and working with different partners. We thought
• 1:03:46
  they could help us and we just never found a found a system that worked. I still think there's
• 1:03:50
  potential. I think a great email marketer can make this work. And I think if you crack it,
• 1:03:54
  you know, you can be getting engaged subscribers at maybe 30, 40 cents, which is super exciting.
• 1:03:59
  Well, I think the thesis is, if enough people learn about your newsletter, a percentage of them
• 1:04:06
  will want to read it. That's really the thesis. So like, how do you, how do you get your newsletter
• 1:04:11
  in front of a million people, two million people? I mean, if you can do that, then a small percentage
• 1:04:17
  of them actually subscribe. Now you just figure out how, how much is it going to cost and how,
• 1:04:22
  how do we actually with GDPR and CCPA and all the other anti spam laws? How do we do this properly?
• 1:04:28
  I have no idea, but it does sound like an interesting idea. But if it doesn't, like, listen,
• 1:04:32
  there's so many ways to build a business and there's so many ways to build a list. I mean,
• 1:04:36
  I've listened to Sam Parr's story and I think a lot of a lot of his newsletter early days was like
• 1:04:41
  event based. It was like event signups for Hasselcon that he turned into his first, you know, his first
• 1:04:47
  whatever 100,000 or even like 50,000 Hassel subscribers. So there's a million different ways to do
• 1:04:53
  this. And I think acquisition is smart. I think paid is smart. I think he, I think the way you did
• 1:04:58
  it was incredibly smart because it saved you about $200,000. So like, yeah, like fuck yeah,
• 1:05:04
  for any creator, save $200,000, nothing wrong with that. In terms of monetization, I guess we're
• 1:05:10
  kind of just doing like a newsletter masterclass, but that's fine. People will, people will learn a lot.
• 1:05:15
  In terms of monetization, I guess two questions. You don't have to go into too much detail, however much
• 1:05:21
  you want, but you chose to do sort of advertiser and sponsor as the main way to monetize the newsletter
• 1:05:30
  versus a premium. So just very curious as to why. And then the second question just on the paid
• 1:05:37
  front is what's a good, what's a good CPM cost per mill cost per thousand newsletter subscribers
• 1:05:44
  that somebody who's starting a newsletter is thinking, okay, I want to go and get advertisers.
• 1:05:49
  How do I price this out? Yeah, so we chose sponsorship because at the core of it, we were trying
• 1:05:58
  to emulate the hustle and milk road. Like that was the business model we started with
• 1:06:02
  that we decided we wanted to do. And the reasons for this is me and Matt, we were interested in AI,
• 1:06:12
  but we were in no way experts who could offer something that somebody else couldn't.
• 1:06:19
  So what we were doing is doing a very good job of curating the news and then Matt was able to add
• 1:06:24
  kind of that editorial insight that our competitors weren't. So we were offering something different
• 1:06:29
  there, but we weren't an AI engineer at Google who is like at the breakneck who's able to give out
• 1:06:36
  some valuable information. So if you are going to do a great job of curating the news and putting
• 1:06:44
  it into a nice format, I don't really think that's something you can pay wall. If it's this like
• 1:06:50
  stimulus news and you look at the hustle was business and tech news, the milk road was crypto
• 1:06:56
  news, we were AI news, even though these are niches, they're still pretty broad topics in general.
• 1:07:03
  The whole thing about having a daily newsletter as well rather than a weekly newsletter is that you
• 1:07:07
  have seven pieces of digital real estate a week rather than rather than one piece of digital real estate
• 1:07:13
  a week. So that was why we were working at that critical mass. And the opposite business model is
• 1:07:21
  this paid version. I think if you are someone who is like a real expert and something and you
• 1:07:27
  or you have access to data that other people don't, you're so much better off going for paid. And
• 1:07:32
  like I know one of my good friends is a newsletter operator. He has like 7,000 subscribers and he's
• 1:07:38
  been building his newsletter for five years, but he has such a valuable niche and is potentially
• 1:07:44
  making more money than we were with Mindstream with you know 1% of the subscribers. So you have to
• 1:07:50
  when you kind of look at a newsletter business, understand that newsletter is just a medium
• 1:07:56
  and the content that you send through that medium is going to dictate how you should monetize it.
• 1:08:01
  I love it. So just thinking about pricing stuff out for advertisers, how did you think through
• 1:08:07
  what to charge people? So a lot of it was comparing to our competitors. So we would look at what
• 1:08:12
  the rundown and superhuman and AI tool report, these like bigger news than as we're charging,
• 1:08:18
  we could look at we could find out how much they were charging for a main ad, how many subscribers
• 1:08:22
  they had, what we thought their open papers and then calculate the CPM that they were that they
• 1:08:27
  were charging and we would just undercut slightly. Sorry. Yeah, we never had a sales team. I did
• 1:08:37
  all of our I did all of our ad sales and all of our ad sales came inbound. They came from
• 1:08:42
  firstly, my LinkedIn, mine and Matt's LinkedIn accounts. Secondly, now this is like the biggest
• 1:08:48
  hack for newslet operators. We paid to get like first space on articles of like 10 best AI
• 1:08:57
  newsletters. So we had the first, second and third spot of Google. One was auto GPT, our own blog.
• 1:09:05
  We created this article, put ourselves in the top space. I can't remember the name of the
• 1:09:10
  others for the life of me, but our Forbes was one of them. We didn't pay for Forbes. We managed to
• 1:09:14
  get on Forbes, but we were kind of top spot on Google if you were searching for advertised on AI
• 1:09:19
  newsletters. So we had all this inbound and I was managing the sales and the way we kept long-term
• 1:09:26
  customers is pricing at a position that just made so much sense for them. And when I was like
• 1:09:33
  scaling it and when I was looking at operationalizing, my rationale was let's get kind of a little
• 1:09:38
  bit less revenue than we could, but then not have to hire a sales person and a customer success
• 1:09:43
  people and churn for advertisers at like a quick rate. That's very smart because just the energy
• 1:09:49
  and it's so like what you did is you actually kept your you you slightly reduced margins,
• 1:09:55
  your top line and your profit margins, but then you didn't add overhead. So that actually that
• 1:10:02
  actually ended up working out of balance itself out. I'm assuming that's very smart. Yeah.
• 1:10:06
  And we were also able to project a lot better because you know we would we would bring on a
• 1:10:12
  and we had more than 50% retention with our advertisers. Some advertisers would go you know
• 1:10:18
  it wouldn't be a right product for market fit, but those ones that worked I would lock them into
• 1:10:22
  very very long-term deals. So you know we were almost having like be able to project MRR,
• 1:10:28
  whereas most newsletters you hear so I'm talking about this it's like you have a good month
• 1:10:33
  next month you have to go again. You like have to start from scratch. We didn't we didn't really
• 1:10:37
  have that because we had these long-term advertisers because you were pricing them right and and
• 1:10:42
  they were happy. They were happy. You weren't like pushing them so that they were like oh we're
• 1:10:46
  almost you know positive row ads or positive ROI on this but not quite so let's try and find
• 1:10:51
  something else. Yeah very very smart. So when did HubSpot turn from advertiser into somebody that
• 1:10:59
  was actually looking to acquire you? It was pretty quick. They started advertising with us in
• 1:11:03
  February 2024 and then in April we had the first conversation about acquisition. Then we then
• 1:11:11
  closed in October so it took a long time to get it done or although you know in terms of acquisitions
• 1:11:17
  it's not not that long but for me it felt long. So yeah a couple of months from advertiser to that
• 1:11:23
  conversation and and whatever you're comfortable sharing I'm curious about like what revenues that
• 1:11:29
  you were hitting or what level you were at before they thought like this is a good acquisition
• 1:11:33
  for us because this is the second newsletter acquisition they've ever made the hustle being the
• 1:11:39
  first. Yeah so we were doing like 40 to 50 thousand dollars a month at the time so like you know
• 1:11:45
  pretty pretty small revenues. The reason that we were appealing to HubSpot is they were looking at
• 1:11:52
  they were advertising in like so many AI newsletters and they were kind of able to like look at the
• 1:11:58
  performance across AI newsletters and I imagine we were just somewhere near the top of the spreadsheet
• 1:12:04
  and then they went a bit deeper and they liked our editorial style you know when we were having those
• 1:12:08
  initial conversations that was one of the main topics of the conversation that they really
• 1:12:13
  felt that our editorial aligned with what they were doing wider in the HubSpot media network.
• 1:12:18
  So it was it was a good fit. Do you are you were you always
• 1:12:25
  building to sell was this something that would like you mentioned even before like it was kind of
• 1:12:29
  like a surprise like it wasn't like you were going around let me let me prep us you weren't going
• 1:12:33
  around like shopping a deal you didn't have like an investment banker go into a whole bunch of like
• 1:12:38
  private equity firms saying hey you know this newsletter is on the market what can you give me
• 1:12:43
  for it this was sort of it was it was good business relationship that turned into acquisition
• 1:12:48
  opportunity was it something that you that you were expecting or wanted or were looking for
• 1:12:54
  no we weren't expecting we weren't expecting this we certainly weren't expecting anything so early
• 1:12:58
  you know this was this was April 2024 and I'd left my job in October 2023 so I was like seven
• 1:13:06
  eight months into working on this full time you know we'd only I talk about this moment where we got
• 1:13:12
  the hundred thousand subscribers that was December 2024 so it was like four months between hitting
• 1:13:18
  critical mass of actually really having a business that made sense to having these conversations
• 1:13:23
  about acquisition so you know when we when we sort of spoke internally with our co-founders and
• 1:13:30
  looked at the long-term future the possibility of a sale was always there and I always said to our
• 1:13:35
  team like let's make sure we don't have any skeletons in the closet you know my my CTO
• 1:13:42
  mattets I love them to bits but he would come to me quite often with like let's try this black hat
• 1:13:47
  like growth strategy and I go ah maybe not like let's just keep everything clean let's try and
• 1:13:53
  operate in the right way because you never know who's going to come knocking and then you want to
• 1:13:57
  you want to have the foundations right and then you can take advantage of the opportunity exactly
• 1:14:02
  you built it right from the ground up exactly but yeah help spot coming in that early um was like
• 1:14:07
  such a surprise it was it was such a surprise and it's and it's quite funny really you know
• 1:14:12
  I have this idea um I think I got it from Chris Williams and a modern wisdom that in life you have
• 1:14:18
  to choose your regrets like every decision that you make if you choose to uh go and play football
• 1:14:26
  or go to a nightclub and go dancing it's like if you do one of the things there's always a regret
• 1:14:30
  that you didn't do the other so when you make a decision in life you have to choose the regret that
• 1:14:35
  you can live with and of course I in an alternative universe I'd love to know what I could have
• 1:14:43
  done with mind stream by myself you know I had I had many ideas of how I could evolve the brand
• 1:14:50
  different products we could align next to it um and I have of course a little bit of regret
• 1:14:55
  that I don't I'm not able to find that out but I couldn't live with the regret of not working with
• 1:15:01
  HubSpot you know they've they yeah I know I get good no I was going to say uh I didn't mean
• 1:15:10
  to interrupt I'm sorry I was just thinking about I was thinking about how you came to this decision
• 1:15:16
  because I was actually just listening to Mr. Beast on Diary of a CEO last night and he was talking
• 1:15:22
  about how uh he said offers obviously for his channel and the billion dollar range and his thought
• 1:15:28
  process was well if I sell it I'm just going to want to do the same thing anyways so why would I
• 1:15:35
  sell it because I'm just going to start it again and I think Mark Zuckerberg had the same idea as well
• 1:15:40
  when he got the famous Facebook offers he said well I'm just going to start another social network
• 1:15:46
  that's all I know how to do so why would I sell it so I'm always curious about like what what
• 1:15:53
  calculation you do in your head or what thought process you go through when you choose to sell
• 1:16:00
  versus let's see how big I can build this thing and I think you're alluding to it but a lot of it
• 1:16:05
  is is it the right partner that yes there's a sale involved but I know you're not done yeah I was
• 1:16:14
  um I was at a co-working space this morning um and I bumped into a friend of mine called James
• 1:16:20
  he runs a company called Rupert and we were talking about exactly this I gave him the analogy that if
• 1:16:28
  if there was a two offers on the table one of them was HubSpot and the other one is random media
• 1:16:36
  conglomerate that no one's ever heard of and the other company were to offer me 10 times the money
• 1:16:43
  that HubSpot offered me and you play out those two deals over the next 10 years I think I will be
• 1:16:50
  wealthier from taking the HubSpot deal rather than taking the deal with 10x the money from unheard
• 1:16:58
  of company because now I am someone who has sold my company to HubSpot and that's going to open
• 1:17:04
  and already is opening hundreds of doors to me and the the the way I can build out my personal brand
• 1:17:11
  working with alongside HubSpot and always being the co-founder of MindStream and I know at HubSpot
• 1:17:18
  we're going to make MindStream something incredible that story is worth almost more than money
• 1:17:25
  yeah I believe that I mean I've seen what they've done with with I mean with Sam and and Sean
• 1:17:31
  and my first million and I mean it's one of the largest business podcasts in the world
• 1:17:36
  and and that was on the back of an acquisition like when when Sam sold he had no idea that my first
• 1:17:41
  million was ever going to exist yeah exactly exactly so you know a lot of people say to me like oh okay
• 1:17:48
  you've sold your company you're kind of done now right like well done mate part on the back
• 1:17:53
  and I I worked very hard with MindStream I think I think I was lucky that HubSpot came
• 1:17:59
  knocking on our door but you make your own luck and now is the opportunity for me to make the
• 1:18:06
  most out of this this acquisition you know the next few years working with HubSpot looking at
• 1:18:13
  opportunities that come up coming on your podcast is a prime example you know if I was someone
• 1:18:18
  who'd sold a company to someone you'd never heard of you know it's not too exciting it's just a
• 1:18:24
  different I mean like you're right 100% I think that I think that there's I think that having the
• 1:18:30
  long-term vision in an exit is very important and being to your point that you mentioned earlier
• 1:18:35
  intentional about everything including who you sell to you're right there's if you had sold this
• 1:18:41
  newsletter to no name private equity firm you would not have the connections you'd not have
• 1:18:45
  the relationships it would be it would be the end of this chapter and outside of like forget
• 1:18:51
  forget the jumping on podcast and building a personal brand stuff how many acquisitions how many
• 1:18:58
  times does like no name private equity company come in and buy something and they completely
• 1:19:03
  destroy what you've built so true so true I mean when when HubSpot when we were having the initial
• 1:19:08
  conversations they said we want to make MindStream the biggest media brand in the world and I said oh
• 1:19:12
  sorry the biggest AI media brand in the world I said cool how do I let's let's go you know and
• 1:19:18
  they do it well that's the thing they have the resources so they're not just I mean you you can
• 1:19:22
  look at you can look at proof that they've that they sort of live up to their word that's the point
• 1:19:27
  yeah yeah and obviously you know I haven't mentioned this specifically but the day that we started
• 1:19:33
  MindStream when we were locked in this office I said look at look at what happened to the hustle like
• 1:19:38
  let's try and do that for AI and then you have this full circle moment where we have the same exit
• 1:19:44
  to the same company as that so like it's that that just like the kind of irony of that like push
• 1:19:51
  me towards making that deal it is I know right it's it's like this nice full circle moment it is a
• 1:19:58
  nice full circle moment do you think that do you think that anybody listening if they are trying to
• 1:20:05
  figure out what to do and they you know they they don't know they want to be entrepreneurial they
• 1:20:10
  don't know what to start do you think a newsletter is almost like a not like a safe bet
• 1:20:16
  but like a pretty predictable business model that people can emulate it is it is so predictable
• 1:20:22
  that's what I love about it you know when when we were like when I said we had our first ad
• 1:20:28
  sale for like a few hundred bucks and we had two thousand subscribers that was sort of almost
• 1:20:32
  enough data for me to build a spreadsheet for the next two years to look at if we grow at this
• 1:20:38
  right we can charge this and we can do this it's a it's a very solid business model the other
• 1:20:44
  advantage you have today building a newsletter business is you have products out there that are
• 1:20:49
  specifically tailored to help you do that specifically be hive there I think the best player in
• 1:20:54
  this space and they have an amazing editor amazing website builder they have internal growth tools
• 1:21:00
  they have internal monetization through their ad network you know when when Sam was building the
• 1:21:05
  hustle he had to he had to build his own technology he actually had like developers on staff to
• 1:21:11
  I know and news letter you know whereas today you can just pay behive fifty bucks a month or
• 1:21:16
  whatever and get going so the monetization is not easy but simple the execution is not easy but simple
• 1:21:26
  but the software is now easy whereas that was very difficult for what what is one thing that people
• 1:21:32
  believe to be true about your success story that maybe is not true one thing people believe to be
• 1:21:39
  true that isn't true one thing that they look at you outside looking in and they just think wow
• 1:21:45
  that came easy or anybody could do that or I don't know something that you think that people outside
• 1:21:56
  looking into a very successful entrepreneur who built something very quickly would believe to be
• 1:22:02
  true but isn't maybe a story behind something that you struggled harder on more than that people know
• 1:22:09
  yeah I think is probably that I have it all figured out and I think that's probably applied
• 1:22:14
  for most entrepreneurs especially when you create a personal brand and you really tell a story
• 1:22:19
  of yourself and you hear that story a lot of times you know I am working harder than I ever have
• 1:22:25
  right now post exit post exit on lifebuilding and I am very very happy I am more at peace than I ever
• 1:22:37
  have been but that has come from so much intentional hard work and I think when when I was
• 1:22:46
  starting out and I'd look at successful entrepreneurs you just think like fact they've just got
• 1:22:50
  it man they've just got a thing like you know it was always going to happen for them
• 1:22:55
  and I have been a failure for like 10 years and a success for two you know yeah
• 1:23:04
  what would be a lesson that you've learned that was a very important lesson but you wouldn't
• 1:23:09
  wish that lesson on anyone else because it was so hard for you to learn when I was when I was young
• 1:23:15
  I had quite I had a few relationships with mental type figures that were very very toxic
• 1:23:24
  you know people like dangling carrots and then giving you the stick so I had to learn to be
• 1:23:33
  independent and to be almost distrusting because of getting burned so many times
• 1:23:41
  and the when I kind of look back on them now the relationships were all very similar you know
• 1:23:47
  it was someone more successful than me aspirational who who was very kind of quick to speak and
• 1:23:58
  very exciting to work with and gave me loads of energy and made me feel good about myself
• 1:24:04
  and I've sort of I can see that flag in people now because there's always there's always a bigger
• 1:24:12
  there's always a bigger fish you know so sometimes I have a conversation with someone now and
• 1:24:18
  they get me very excited about an idea and then I I realize that I could potentially be repeating
• 1:24:25
  mistakes going into business with somebody so that I think that's the main main one when you're
• 1:24:31
  for for a lot of my career I've been like the young exciting prospect you know when I started
• 1:24:38
  my first business at 14 one of the things like I loved was telling people how old I was it gave me
• 1:24:44
  such a rush of dopamine when people go like fuck you're only 14 like that's amazing and then
• 1:24:48
  when I was doing gigs when I was 18 and 19 people would be like fuck you're only 18 and now people
• 1:24:54
  say to me like fuck you're only 27 you know like it's really been a thing throughout my life but
• 1:24:59
  that I think that also you also attract bad players when you're something this young and exciting
• 1:25:05
  and up and coming so learning how to see them and avoid them is it's something that was very
• 1:25:09
  difficult but it's very I'm very glad I have it now I don't think I'll get burned again yeah I think
• 1:25:14
  that that I think that being young and excited and just wanting to like sort of you know conquer
• 1:25:21
  the world if you're not careful yeah for sure people can take advantage of that there are a lot
• 1:25:27
  of good mentors and and business partners out there but I think that everybody everybody who is
• 1:25:34
  ambitious will fall victim to that at some point everybody will make a wrong business partner
• 1:25:39
  decision I definitely I have for many times but I think that that's something that just has to be
• 1:25:42
  learned through failures which is also why I'm a big fan of like taking risks when you when you
• 1:25:49
  have the ability to take risks early on when you don't have the you know the financial
• 1:25:53
  commitments of family and wife and or husband and kids like I think that it's important to take
• 1:25:58
  those risks and to fail fast like these are all very cliche entrepreneurial ideas but I think
• 1:26:02
  they're all very valid like they it's so you don't take these risks and end up with the wrong
• 1:26:07
  people when you're 4550 and you have you know a lot of responsibility um I mean childhood friends
• 1:26:14
  don't always work out as business partners either I've never I've never had a childhood
• 1:26:18
  friend turned business partner but I know people that have it doesn't always work out I have a
• 1:26:22
  friend right now who's getting uh who's getting sued by a childhood best friend and it's like
• 1:26:29
  their parents and their grandparents and obviously they know each other and it was one of those
• 1:26:33
  situations where yeah um they've been close for like 35 years and now they do business together
• 1:26:42
  and now shit's hitting the fan I don't know dude I haven't had good experiences with partners you
• 1:26:48
  did I have not in my past it's tough I think I think doing business with friends or family is like
• 1:26:53
  the heart that like um high risk high reward potential but also you know you could you can also burn
• 1:27:01
  yourself really really badly um my partner Hannah has just left her job and she's coming to work
• 1:27:08
  in me with my my business and it's something we thought long and hard about um and god I am so
• 1:27:15
  excited I am so excited to start working with her to have her more involved in like my vision
• 1:27:21
  and our vision for the future and it really become our thing rather than my thing you know it's a
• 1:27:27
  it's a it's a step that I need in my business but it's also uh a very exciting step to take
• 1:27:32
  in our relationship it is amazing because what you what you solve for when you can do it properly
• 1:27:37
  especially with like a spouse or or you know fan media family or close close family and friends um
• 1:27:43
  because you solve for trust like you don't have to worry about trusts anymore right you can just
• 1:27:47
  be super candid um you you're not there's no politics there's no there's no what is this person
• 1:27:53
  going to think like just absolute trust and transparency which is like a hack in business
• 1:27:58
  if it if it's done right it's like a complete hack like it helps immensely but
• 1:28:03
  you also have to find a way to not tie business outcomes and let them influence like how you feel
• 1:28:11
  about this person like if they don't perform in business and you can still love this person
• 1:28:17
  outside of the business and care about this person but that's what people get fucked up and they
• 1:28:20
  then the business shit yeah go into their family shit and then that's just I don't know it's
• 1:28:25
  tough it's very tough yeah if you can do it right with my co-founder it's been it's been very
• 1:28:30
  interesting and one of the things that I think has um made a successful is we spend dedicated
• 1:28:35
  time together where we don't talk about business normally it's like video game we'll just hang out
• 1:28:40
  like we used to and we were 15 go for a walk we go for one run together workout together play video
• 1:28:45
  games and just make sure we have that time um to kind of still work on that friendship and then
• 1:28:52
  the business relationship is a is a different thing yeah I look I think that's very very smart I
• 1:28:56
  think it's smart especially if you're gonna bring like you're you're you're better half like not
• 1:29:01
  just a friend from childhood but like you're your partner if you bring that person into the business
• 1:29:07
  you do have to find time to shut off and just do like regular human shit and I always talk about
• 1:29:13
  business um what would be some of the most toxic entrepreneur advice that you hear a lot that you
• 1:29:21
  think people shouldn't listen to the main one is that um to be successful you have to sacrifice
• 1:29:26
  everything um this I think is some of the most common business advice like people talk about um
• 1:29:33
  like uh house all sprints and uh monk mode and like all this kind of stuff and the thing I
• 1:29:41
  realized like as I started building mind stream um I got more energy for life than I ever have
• 1:29:47
  before from building my company and I was able to apply that energy into building my company
• 1:29:52
  but also into all other aspects of my life so I am now fitter than I have ever been I have a better
• 1:29:57
  relationship with my partner than I ever have I have better relationships with my family um my
• 1:30:02
  mental health is better like I have um I have been able to kind of progress horizontally across
• 1:30:10
  all the verticals of my life and I genuinely think this is true of of most entrepreneurs like
• 1:30:16
  generally when you see someone be successful they start to also get in shape and they start to
• 1:30:19
  also prioritize other things um some don't but I think they use this uh this trope as an excuse
• 1:30:27
  the one place I think it applies in terms of sacrificing everything is if you're trying to become
• 1:30:32
  the best in the world at something if you're trying to become the best in the world at a sport
• 1:30:37
  are you trying to compete in the Olympics or you're trying to be the best in the world at entrepreneurship
• 1:30:41
  then you have to sacrifice but if you're trying to just be a a damn good entrepreneur um you can
• 1:30:48
  you can build another part of your life too and you should I agree with that completely I think
• 1:30:52
  that a couple ideas I think the first of all seasons seasons do exist so there can be seasons
• 1:30:57
  of of non-balance I think that's okay for a period of time but I think that the issue is when
• 1:31:01
  you don't migrate from one season to another and you keep that non-balance and then you let all
• 1:31:06
  the other parts of your life deteriorate that's not in my mind success also people don't actually
• 1:31:14
  need to make as much money as they think they do and you do not have to be like an exit that that
• 1:31:19
  makes you a few million dollars I mean that that is a lot of money for a lot of people you don't
• 1:31:26
  need a hundred million dollar five hundred million dollar exit to be happy so I think that also when
• 1:31:32
  you look at your you know entrepreneur heroes that you look up to um I think you're benchmarking
• 1:31:39
  against the wrong goals for most people most people do not you know you always I would I've been
• 1:31:44
  ripped on for saying this before and I'm like most people don't want to be Elon most people don't
• 1:31:48
  want to be a billionaire I know billionaires I'm sure you do too like they are not they're not all happy
• 1:31:54
  people like some of them are old and working very hard still yeah and the life they have is not a
• 1:32:02
  life that most people would want forget about the work the stress the lawsuits the the press like
• 1:32:08
  it's not fun like I think that's why well first of all I think most entrepreneurs I think are to a
• 1:32:14
  degree neurodivergent just by taking the risk and doing and doing this shit but I think that
• 1:32:19
  billionaires is a whole other level of neurodivergence drive something that is not
• 1:32:27
  applicable or or wanted by most people I agree 100% when I was when I was uh you know when I
• 1:32:35
  didn't have any money and I was trying to build businesses like 100% of the content I consumed was
• 1:32:40
  how to make money now I have a little bit of money I probably say like 60% of the content I consume
• 1:32:47
  is how to build a life you know and I think like it genuinely excites me more than anything else
• 1:32:54
  and me and my partner are like so aligned you know we have X amount of money coming in every month
• 1:33:00
  and we have X amount of money invested and we sit down and we're so intentional with how we inflate
• 1:33:05
  our lifestyle and we have inflated our lifestyle a lot but all in ways that are really important
• 1:33:10
  to us you know travel health food not like um too many material objects you know some but with
• 1:33:18
  very very intentional um with with our spending with our life building and you know in a couple
• 1:33:25
  of months a couple of weeks time we're moving to a part of the country we want to live in um
• 1:33:30
  we're spending more and more time traveling we're spending more time on on date nights more money
• 1:33:34
  on date nights and um you can build like a pretty amazing life with um a bit of money and that
• 1:33:43
  is really excites me yeah and that's what I think most people should optimize for I think that that
• 1:33:48
  would like listen um maybe maybe they won't build it in 17 months but if they start now I mean if
• 1:33:57
  you put five five to seven years of concerted effort towards building an audience that is life
• 1:34:02
  changing and again at the end of the day only one thing really needs to work and then your setup
• 1:34:07
  financially so that you can make smart decisions that actually fulfill you as opposed to reactive
• 1:34:12
  stressed out financial decisions about where you work where you spend your time what you you know
• 1:34:17
  I think that that's that's one of the most important ideas um I I know you speak about like
• 1:34:23
  compounding success across all areas of your life I think that's very smart too it's not just about
• 1:34:28
  financial success because second you have a little bit of money you realize like what's actually
• 1:34:33
  important I wish more people would um learn that before they make the money so I mean you made your
• 1:34:40
  money relatively quickly considering most people would spend 10 20 30 years trying to build a
• 1:34:45
  company to be acquired and they sacrifice their their their wealth their mental physical health
• 1:34:51
  their relationships all along the way so I hope people can learn from from what you how you're
• 1:34:56
  living now and just apply it so that they can live fulfill the cross all areas of their life
• 1:35:02
  while they're building not just after the exit I think it's very very important um
• 1:35:11
  I know you push back against hustle culture I I know you weekend hard these are all very important
• 1:35:18
  ideas I know there's a lot of things I think you have a very healthy entrepreneur mindset that's
• 1:35:23
  like the one thing that I take away from from who you are as a person I think that's something that
• 1:35:28
  everybody should take away if you wanted to leave the audience with sort of one last bit of wisdom
• 1:35:34
  actually I'll ask where can people connect with you first that's important um so give me like the
• 1:35:40
  socials the website all of that but then I would like you to think about some last piece of wisdom
• 1:35:46
  and usually the way that I frame it is if you could only pass on one lesson to your kids
• 1:35:52
  because it is so important what would that lesson be and why but first tell people like where
• 1:35:57
  they can connect with you so um to connect with me you can head over to LinkedIn that's where I post
• 1:36:02
  content every day to to read the mainstream newsletter you can head over to mystream.news
• 1:36:08
  my one piece of advice is um plan plan your life like it's the priority be intentional with your days
• 1:36:19
  um if you learn in your work how to optimize how to plan how to prioritize
• 1:36:27
  take those skills and apply them to your life don't allow yourself to be distracted by
• 1:36:34
  social media by Netflix um make sure of your spending time doing something that it's something you
• 1:36:40
  have been intentional about.