Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - From $1K Investment to Multi-Million Dollar AI Media Exit | Adam Biddlecombe - Mindstream Founder

Transcript

Lessons - From $1K Investment to Multi-Million Dollar AI Media Exit | Adam Biddlecombe - Mindstream Founder · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  In this lessons episode, discover how bias for action and intentionality fueled the rapid rise
• 0:05
  of a newsletter in a saturated AI content market. Learn why building something meaningful starts
• 0:10
  with small, consistent wins, understand how differentiating through voice and human touch
• 0:14
  creates standout content and explore how humble goals and focused execution turned early traction
• 0:19
  into a funded media business.
• 0:21
  What are your thoughts on the future of your project?
• 0:28
  Outside of lessons that you learned from, like, my first million and obviously,
• 0:33
  you know, Sam built the hustle, Sean built, Melk Road, so two great examples there.
• 0:38
  And I think they speak about them a lot, some strategies at how to grow scale.
• 0:42
  And I actually think it's a really interesting business model.
• 0:45
  We can talk about if it's something that can be done almost like predictably as a business
• 0:51
  model to sort of copy the playbook that they had that you had. And if you can, you know,
• 0:56
  someone listening can start one today and build it and exit. I think that's an interesting
• 1:00
  conversation because they seem to be so confident about it. And I guess you're a living example
• 1:05
  of listening to some advice and then running with it. But outside of the newsletter,
• 1:09
  advice that you got, what were some of the, because you've gone through sales jobs,
• 1:15
  Amazon, FBA, building a, building a band and being a creator before, what were some of the
• 1:23
  most important ideas that you've learned up to this point in your career? I know you're still
• 1:27
  young, but what were some of the most important business ideas that helped you make mindstream
• 1:32
  successful? I think the core of it is just having a bias for action. I think the majority of
• 1:38
  people today are consumers, and the load of people who think they're being productive listening
• 1:46
  to loads of business podcasts. And the year before I started mindstream, like 2023,
• 1:55
  sort of January when I was looking at my goals for the year, my main goal for that year was I
• 2:01
  want to become someone who does something rather than say something because I've always been
• 2:05
  able to sell myself as one of the best assets I have. The problem is when you're selling yourself,
• 2:11
  but you're not actually doing anything, it's just a lie at the core of it, you know what I mean?
• 2:16
  So I set myself the challenge that year of becoming the person who continues to sell
• 2:22
  itself but has something that's really exciting to sell. So having that bias for action
• 2:28
  is something I'm very, very grateful to have to have it kind of like in my core. And it's been
• 2:35
  there all my life, you know, started my first business at 14 doing events, went out and did the
• 2:39
  band, you know, I've always had the energy to kind of go out and do things. And then also the thing
• 2:46
  I'm really like my word of the year of 2025 is intention. Like I'm working quite hard to
• 2:54
  analyze all aspects of my life and optimize and really work on life building. And whenever I
• 3:02
  like discuss it, it always comes down to like being intentional. That's how I get happiness and
• 3:09
  success out of something. And to be intentional, you have to have like a big, you have to have
• 3:15
  a big picture. I don't think you can be intentional of you're really in the weeds. You just end up
• 3:20
  being reactive. So being able to kind of step out, analyze a situation, know the end goal you're
• 3:26
  going towards and then make intentional decisions that will help you get there. I think those having
• 3:32
  those two things really is kind of the core of what you need to go out and be successful in something.
• 3:38
  Yeah, I think that's very wise. I think that even without intention, her mostly speaks about
• 3:43
  this a lot, how entrepreneurs sometimes last in this cycle their entire life about starting something
• 3:48
  and getting excited about it. Then the hardship happens and then you get kind of disenchanted
• 3:54
  with it. Then you start the next thing and then you get the motivation to start it and then
• 3:58
  hardship happens and then you move on to the next thing. And I think it's because you don't have
• 4:02
  that big picture or that North star and you and you aren't intentional about what you're doing.
• 4:06
  Like intention in my mind is what gets you through all those inevitably hard moments that are going
• 4:13
  to occur whenever you're building anything meaningful. You need to have intention and you need to
• 4:17
  have North star and you'd have a vision bigger than the city thing that's bound to happen
• 4:25
  on the way to building the impressive incredible amazing thing. It's so, so, so important.
• 4:32
  I know that when you started Mindstream, it didn't like blow up right away. It took a second.
• 4:40
  So early days of sending that newsletter. Actually, before we even talk about early days of sending
• 4:47
  the newsletter, what made you want to focus on AI content? What was like, what was the signal in
• 4:51
  the market that that was a good idea? So this is May 24th of May 2023 that we sat down and when we
• 5:01
  sat down to decide on what we're going to start, we didn't know it was going to be a newsletter and
• 5:04
  we didn't know it was going to be AI. We made that decision in the space of two or three hours.
• 5:09
  So I have to think about what I was influenced by at that time. And most of my, like I said earlier,
• 5:17
  most of my time at work was spent outbounding on LinkedIn. That's a little bit of a lie.
• 5:22
  Most of my time at work was spent scrolling through LinkedIn, right? You know, and maybe
• 5:26
  of course, maybe a little bit of outbound. And obviously, there's an algorithmic effect
• 5:34
  to someone's LinkedIn feed, but mine became all about AI. And I was following these creators who were
• 5:40
  who was building these, um, following, talking about AI. If anyone thinks back to that time,
• 5:46
  it was just everything. Like someone could put a lead magnet of a hundred Chatchy Pity prompts and
• 5:52
  get like thousands of emails overnight. So it was the obvious thing to go for at the time.
• 5:58
  That's not the, that's not enough, I don't think. So when me and Matt sat down and talking about it,
• 6:03
  I said, I think AI is the thing. Do you, as the copyrighter, care enough about this technology to
• 6:10
  write about it every day? And luckily Matt did. Otherwise, we might have picked something totally
• 6:15
  different and not be where we are today. I think that, listen, there's something to be said for,
• 6:21
  like, writing a trend. I think that's, I think that's a, it's smart, but
• 6:26
  and trends are also busy. So that means that there was probably a whole bunch of other people
• 6:29
  writing AI newsletter. So I think that just jumping on like a bandwagon trend, it sounds compelling
• 6:34
  and it sounds like a great idea. But then you realize that everybody's doing it. So you still have
• 6:38
  to differentiate somehow. Um, it's not like it's, it's not like it's easy. Do you think, do you think
• 6:45
  that if you had chosen to write about anything else, you would have been as successful as fast?
• 6:52
  Definitely not. Definitely not. Um, you mentioned about the competition. Even when we sat down to,
• 6:59
  to start mind stream, they're, I remember looking at it and there were more than a thousand
• 7:03
  AI newsletters on Beehive. Like on our pay one, there was more than a thousand.
• 7:07
  That's ridiculous. I think, I think a reason for that is Sean Peary had said six months before
• 7:13
  someone needs to go and do the hustle for AI. Um, so I was, I was late. Like we were late. Um,
• 7:20
  superhuman, the rundown already had, I think half a million subscribers. So we were so late.
• 7:26
  There was big players in the game and there were hundreds and hundreds of smaller players in the
• 7:29
  game. So in those very early days when we kind of analyzed the market, what we realized is that
• 7:35
  most of the newsletters were quite smartly using AI technology to, um, to just consolidate
• 7:44
  what's going on. They were doing like a pretty good job of curating all of the buzz and there
• 7:48
  were so much buzz and then using AI to write these newsletters and they were just basically saying,
• 7:54
  like, here's what happened. That, that, that was it. And they were all formatted in the same way
• 8:00
  because they were all being built on Beehive, which had this like, you know, amazing way of building
• 8:04
  these newsletters. So they all kind of looked the same. Um, what we had was, with Matt, was like a real
• 8:09
  copywriter, like a real experienced copywriter who knew, who knew how to connect with people,
• 8:16
  who knew how to, you know, have a journalistic angle to something. And from day one, what we tried
• 8:21
  to do is not just report on the biggest AI news, but the AI news that we thought was really
• 8:25
  interesting and then to give an opinion on that news. So it's not just here. It's happened. It's
• 8:31
  here's what happened and this, this is what it might mean for you. This is what it means for
• 8:34
  X. This is what it means for Y. And that's how we differentiated from day one. Yes, Martin,
• 8:39
  just you make it to include a human component into it, not just, not just aggregating.
• 8:45
  And also we signed off every newsletter with written by humans. That was like our little tag at the
• 8:50
  end. In this time when everyone was like using AI to write copy in the early days and it was all rubbish,
• 8:56
  we were in by use. So this brings you back to the sort of the point I was
• 9:00
  alluding to before. When you first started, you did not get the traction that you were looking for.
• 9:04
  I think that from what I understood, you were getting like, you were sending this newsletter to
• 9:10
  30, 40 people a day, your dad was reading it like, like really, really early startup shit,
• 9:17
  right? Not like, not like immediately you get a thousand subs. So how long did you go through
• 9:27
  this period of just trying to figure it out? What kept you motivated? What made you think,
• 9:34
  you know what, even though it's not picking up, we're definitely on the right track because just to
• 9:39
  frame it, whatever, a couple hundred or a thousand AI newsletters, there's some with 500,000 subs,
• 9:46
  you start, you've never built a newsletter business before. You realize that it's a
• 9:52
  kind of like a crowded competitive space. You're not getting traction.
• 9:57
  And some people throw in the towel very quickly. I think that if you look at like even stats for
• 10:00
  podcasters, if you've done more than 10 podcasts, I'm pretty sure it's something ridiculous.
• 10:04
  Like you're in the top 1% of podcasters just by releasing 10 plus episodes. So what made you
• 10:09
  continue? So we had, we had pretty humble goals at the start. We both invested 500 pounds to get it
• 10:18
  started. And that that runway like gave us, I think a few months just in terms of like the small
• 10:23
  SaaS cost we had at the start. And our goal was, can we both quit our jobs before the end of the
• 10:30
  year? And this was May. So in six months time, can we replace our sales and copywriting jobs? And
• 10:38
  we weren't earning a lot of money here in the UK at the time. So it was just about these tiny
• 10:44
  building blocks. And my day used to be wake up at 6am, go to the gym, come home, write a piece of
• 10:52
  content for LinkedIn. Like Matt was writing the newsletter, I was trying to build a following
• 10:56
  on LinkedIn to generate subscribers. I then scheduled that piece of content, go to work and do
• 11:02
  my sales job. I would then run home for my lunch break, like five, five, ten minute walk from
• 11:09
  my house. So I would literally run home, get on my laptop and engage on LinkedIn around the time
• 11:15
  of the post. As you'll know, like creating content on LinkedIn, like engagement is pretty key.
• 11:21
  So I'd literally be sat on LinkedIn, like writing comments to all these people,
• 11:25
  kinds of comments on my post. Then I'd run back to the office, finish my job, come
• 11:31
  home at the end of the day and spend another couple of hours on LinkedIn. And when you're like
• 11:36
  that focused on essentially things that don't scale, you know, it was like DMing people asking
• 11:43
  them to join the newsletter. It was posting this content, commenting on all these people's posts.
• 11:51
  You can get like obsessed with the small wins, you know, oh, I've got a thousand impressions
• 11:56
  on the post for the first time. I've just hit a thousand followers on LinkedIn. And that was
• 12:00
  probably the first six or seven weeks. And we probably got like a thousand subscribers from
• 12:07
  LinkedIn. Then at that point, Beehive did this like promotion where they were offering like they
• 12:14
  they'd match your investment into their boosts program, which is like a cross paid cross
• 12:22
  collaboration across newsletters. So we then dropped in two and a half thousand, which was the maximum.
• 12:27
  So we got five thousand dollars of boost credits and started paying for subscribers that way.
• 12:33
  So suddenly we were having like two thousand, three thousand subscribers. And at that point,
• 12:38
  we made some money. Someone wanted to advertise in the newsletter. And they also paid me to
• 12:44
  post about their content on LinkedIn. I think it was like two, three hundred dollars for our first
• 12:49
  sponsor. And amazing. So that's like now you validated. It's been in a small way, the idea. Yeah.
• 12:56
  That was it. You hit the nail on the head. It was it was validation. And then you could start to
• 13:01
  build a model, right? You could go, okay, we have this many subscribers. We charged this CPM,
• 13:07
  a charge did this CPM for my LinkedIn. And you can just model it out from there. And with this
• 13:14
  model, we were able to secure some investment. So we had two and a half thousand subscribers.
• 13:20
  We'd made like maybe five, six hundred pounds at this point. And I secured a forty thousand
• 13:26
  pound investment for a 10 percent of the company. So it was like four hundred thousand pound
• 13:30
  valuation. And that was it. That was our runway. We'd achieve the goal of, can we quit our jobs,
• 13:37
  you know, three? So what? Oh, go ahead. Sorry. Three months in this was. So it was launched in May.
• 13:44
  And then yes, September October, we got this deal over the line. Thanks for tuning in.
• 13:48
  If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.
• 13:52
  And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description
• 13:56
  to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.