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Discover how the best media brands and solo operators are winning at newsletter growth & monetization.
Hosted by SparkLoop's cofounder Louis Nicholls and SparkLoop's newsletter nerd, Dylan Redekop—we take you behind the scenes and share the strategies, trends, and tactics you need to know to build your email audience and revenue.
Featuring exclusive interviews with the smartest media experts and operators out there today. Including from the Hustle, Morning Brew, Workweek, The Pour Over, and more.
EP 28 - Brad Barrett
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Dylan Redekop: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Send Grow podcast. I'm your host, Dylan Redekop. In my day job at Sparkloop, I spend all my time analyzing how the best newsletter operators and media brands in the world grow and monetize their audiences. I get a behind the scenes look at how they're growing their newsletters and driving revenue.
And there is so much to learn from their success and from their mistakes. With this podcast, you get that access too. Every week, I sit down with a different guest from industry experts to successful operators. And we go deep on the stuff that you need to know about, so you can become really effective at growing and monetizing your newsletter.
Today I'm joined by Brad Barrett, the co founder of ChooseFI. Brad's journey in content creation is as unique as it is inspiring, starting from humble beginnings with a personal finance blog, to leading one of the most successful podcasts in the personal finance space with over 65 million downloads. But what stands out in Brad's story is the pivotal role newsletters played in his success. He's here to share how [00:01:00] newsletters not only supported his journey, but became a cornerstone of community building and engagement.
We'll explore Brad's innovative approaches to newsletter growth, community engagement, and the delicate balance of monetization while maintaining trust. Brad, it's fantastic to have you with us. To start off, I'd love to hear how you got started on this whole content journey.
Brad Barrett: Dylan, thanks for having me.
I'm really excited to be here. This should be, should be a lot of fun. I've never really dove into business, if you will, of, of newsletters and, and how it's helped me. And, and actually what was funny was before we hit record, we realized just how significant newsletters have been on my journey. To content creation, basically.
And so, yeah, hopefully we can have some fun here with the, with the chat, but just to give a little background on me. So I, for, I guess the last almost 11 years have been creating content, if you will, on the internet. And it started with a little personal finance blog. Well, [00:02:00] frankly, it started well before that with Tim Ferriss, four hour work week esque like drop shipping sites and then like horrible like content farms and just like, you know, ridiculous, the bowels of the internet, but I really look at it as like about 10, 10 or 11 years ago, I started a personal finance site called Richmond Savers and wound up getting into the world of travel rewards.
Some people call it travel hacking. And wound up actually helping people one on one with travel rewards, thinking, okay, this site. He's never going to get millions of visitors. I'm not the points guy. I'm this dopey little Richmond savers site, but maybe I can take my, my CPA brain, I'm an accountant and kind of merge it with, Oh, I am getting thousands of visitors a month.
Maybe I can turn this into a business. So I actually wound up offering free travel rewards coaching, right? Literally at my lunch hour. Jump on the phone with people on a free call. I would then type up a plan for them to [00:03:00] take a trip to Disney world or Paris or wherever Hawaii. And when they use my affiliate links to sign up for cards, I would be compensated.
So it was okay. There's a business here. And then what was wild was I realized, okay, I can't scale this one on one, obviously. So I started in January of 2015, I started a website called travel miles one on one and back then, This was like cutting edge. I had what you and I in 2023. No, as an email autoresponder series, there's nothing right.
But it was a 30 day course on travel rewards. And Dylan, I kid you not in February of 2015. I was literally creating this course like day by day, like, Oh man, I've got to send this email that the autoresponder goes out in the morning. It has to be done. I was creating it on the fly. And what's cool is I created that course and then it stayed intact to a large degree for really the last eight years.
We put [00:04:00] almost 50, 000 people through that email autoresponder series. And I think we have a Facebook group with about 30, 000 people for, for travel miles one on one. So really a large part of my success in the online world has been because of an email newsletter, essentially. I didn't even realize that at the time until we, we just talked about it 20 minutes ago.
It's really
Dylan Redekop: funny how email has been like an integral part. And, you know, most people know you about from the podcast that you have and everything like that. And, and yet this was kind of the foundation and the beginning of it all, the inception, so to speak.
Brad Barrett: Yeah. It absolutely was. And then, yeah, just to, to finish the little about me here is what most people know me for now is my podcast, which is called choose FI, like make a choice, choose FI for financial independence and yeah, it's wild.
And this just shows like just how. Much impact. You can have just from a spare bedroom in my case in Richmond, Virginia. Like, I think, I think our [00:05:00] show has been downloaded 65 million times over the last seven years. And we've become really one of the biggest, I guess, one of the biggest podcasts, certainly in the personal finance world, if not just generally.
And, you know, we actually have real world impact. We have 300 choose FI local groups in 300 cities across the world. And actually we can dive into that also, because that's another way that I'm now using email. Like previously, most of these were just stuck on Facebook and they're just these, these groups on Facebook, but you know, with the Facebook algorithm, it's, it's so difficult even with the new at everyone tag, it's so difficult.
To get in touch with people because Facebook throttles everything. And I mean, no joke, literally in the last week, I've decided, okay, I need to get these people on an email list. And, you know, frankly, I should have done this six years ago, but that's neither, neither here nor there at this point. And so that's a new part of my, my newsletter strategy as well.
So I'm, I'm literally going [00:06:00] through like convert kid, creating a landing page for. Each one of these 300 groups, and it's just, you know, a tag for everybody. It's, it's really wild. So email and newsletters have become like a really integral part of, of my strategy going forward. And it's all kind of happening now in real time, you know, in, in no small part, and this is not an advertisement, but in no small part, thanks to SparkLoop and ConvertKit.
And like, it just made me so much more interested in it. Like it's, it's. It's fun again, you know, that's, that's
Dylan Redekop: really cool. So would you say, um, it's been much more recent experience for you to focus on newsletter growth and, and if so, what brought you there, maybe you mentioned Facebook, but you know, you started the podcast in 2017.
Dabbled a bit with email, but then now you like kind of realized that newsletter is a thing to focus on.
Brad Barrett: Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question and it's probably a bit of a winding and long answer, but, but hopefully this will be interesting in that. Yeah. We just kind of always dabbled. [00:07:00] With our newsletter for four years, we probably got, I don't know, about 50, 000 newsletter subscribers over the first handful of years.
Just kind of with no real strategy, frankly, it was just like, okay, we have a lot of listeners. People go to our website and they sign up and there wasn't really. A product, there wasn't a, you know, we had a couple lead magnets, but nothing ever really stuck and there was no weekly or any kind of cadence to a newsletter.
And I guess it was probably about three years ago, I think I would say three years that I personally took over. Okay, I need to start me to and want to frankly start writing a weekly newsletter. So every Tuesday I send out what we call the five weekly. And I think it's just like a little touch point with our community.
I think to me, community is everything. That's that's, I I'm maybe a little more naive with like the [00:08:00] business side, but I think the good things run off of like, I always look for win wins. So good things run off of, Hey, how can I provide value? How can I get like the biggest thing that I have going for me is that my community.
Trusts and respects me. And they know that I'm not hawking things. I'm not trying to sell them things like they know that I'm literally sitting down personally and writing this email. Unfortunately, I usually do it on Monday and 6, 6 AM on Tuesday. Cause I'm a procrastinator, but like that, I'm literally sitting there and writing this and I, like, I tell people hit reply, hit reply to this email.
I want to hear what's going on and I want to. We, we call it crowdsourcing and you know, it's, it's kind of a stupid phrase that is stuck in our, our, our little world, but like we try to crowdsource the podcast and the newsletter and what a large part of that means is actually me curating things from the community.
[00:09:00] Yeah. And a lot of those are like our, we call them our weekly wins. So every single week I ask the audience to hit reply. Right back with, Hey, what was the one action you took this week to make your life better? Whether it's personal finance, you know, we're in the financial independence world, but health or relationships or whatever, just anything.
And like, man, Dylan, I get the most interesting emails back every single week. And then I highlight six of those the next week. And it's just this cool, like, you know, Nathan Barry would call it a flywheel. Like. It just works and it's awesome. And like, you know, as much as I'd like to believe people are coming for my little curated sections at the beginning of the newsletter, like, I think frankly, people are really coming for that little bit of inspiration and like, that's a piece of advice I would give to all the newsletter operators listening.
To this is, man, see how you can get your community involved. Like people want to hear stories, [00:10:00] people, whatever journey they're on. I don't care what kind of content niche you're in. Like people want to be part of something. I want to be included, right? Yeah, absolutely.
Dylan Redekop: And that it's so interesting. You shared so much value just there that there's a few different tangents I'd love to just go off on.
I'll start with just that, that point of feedback, because, you know, whether you're cognizant of it or not. What you're doing is from like a technical standpoint, getting people to reply to your emails is going to improve your deliverability. It's going to increase, you know, buy in from your subscribers to respond when they see that other people are getting featured and, you know, next week's newsletter that even incentivizes them that much more.
So you've really. Like you said, Nathan Berry has termed the flywheel. Also, one other metric that goes overlooked. A lot of people love to talk about open rates and click rates and that sort of engagement. But in some ways those can also almost now become vanity metrics in some ways. Whereas something that's a little bit more [00:11:00] meaningful.
To really know how engaged your readers are is the open to reply rate, right? Like how many people are actually replying to your newsletter, whether you're asking them to or not. And I think it's just a really underused strategy. I think Anne Handley, I don't know if you're familiar with Anne Handley.
She's a B2B content marketing professional. She's been around for years. Uh, really great writer. And author as well. And she has a newsletter and she says her number one metric is my open to reply rate, basically. So you're a great example of somebody who's like really
Brad Barrett: doing that. Yeah, that's super cool. I like that as a metric and, and yeah, it just, it feels like.
You're part of something both from the content, you know, the newsletter creators side, but obviously the people on the other end, that this is not just like someone from on high sending out an email, right? Like I literally want people, I want their feedback and like, and I feature it not just in those wins, but like people send things all the time and I'm always giving the, Oh, [00:12:00] Kelly wrote in with this, this little piece of extra, because.
We don't view our community as this is Brad and, and my former co host Jonathan, but Brad and Jonathan, again, talking from on a high as some financial experts, like we're living this journey with you. And I think that connects with people like I'm always looking for these points of connection. And I think, you know, podcasting is unique in the sense that people really, when you're in their ear, they know you trust you.
They understand the cadence of how you talk and like what's going on in your life. And like, and I take that really seriously that people trust me because it can take years to build and you can lose that in a heartbeat. Absolutely.
Dylan Redekop: No, it's, it's totally true. And so the value there in that trust is, is really, it's, it's priceless to a, to a large part.
Um, it's what, uh, you know, the foundation of what your business is built on. Right. So you've talked about [00:13:00] Brad, how. You, you respond to all these, these replies to your newsletter. When you ask you feature people in your newsletter. And so that gets people, like you said, to trust you. And so in terms of the revenue for the newsletter, obviously you're doing this as a business as well.
So how do you, I guess. Respect the trust that people have for you and also make a living from your
Brad Barrett: newsletter. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. And it's something that I, I do think about a lot and, and again, because my most valuable currency is that, that trust of the audience. So, and this is not to say that my way is better than anybody else's.
Obviously it's just, this is the particular path that we've chosen. And frankly, We've done it a great expense to ourselves, to a large degree. So the overall holistic thought of this is, so I say that, but there will be a caveat. So had we wanted [00:14:00] to go all out with podcast ads. So I know we're, I'll get back to the newsletter, but podcast ads.
It's media still, right? Right, right, right. So across 65 million cumulative downloads, that would have been many, many millions of dollars had we done five or six ads per podcast. Over seven years, we have essentially, I wish I could say zero, but we have essentially had zero ads for a very short time during COVID when our business got disrupted and we needed to keep people on the payroll or contractors paid.
Let's say we put ads for a very short period of time. So I wish, I wish I could still say we had zero ads, but we have had essentially zero. So, I mean, quite literally millions of dollars foregone. That said, like you said, this is a business. And, and it's not altruism entirely. Right? So what we've done is again, those win wins of, okay, we talk a lot about just a [00:15:00] few, a few different services and products that we personally use.
So again, this is not like, Hey, we're hawking something just because this advertiser sent us an email and we want to pay you 20 grand to do this. Yeah, this is all right. Jonathan, my cohost used M one finance. So as a trading platform, so. That is something that we get paid when people sign up for M1 Finance.
We have a tracking, a free network software called Empower now is personal capital. Like, you know, anybody who listens to my show could probably tell you the five or six ways we make money credit cards being the biggest one because travel rewards are huge aspects of the path to financial independence.
So it's like, Hey, if Brad is opening up a Chase Sapphire preferred, I'm probably going to too. And oh, it would just be super simple to go to choose up at a com slash cards as opposed to just googling chase Sapphire preferred. It's the same. It's the same difference, right? So like they want to help us basically.
So [00:16:00] was it really millions of dollars of foregone? Revenue without the, with the ads? Probably not because I don't know that people would have really wanted to go to bat for us on the affiliate. You can never prove the counterfactual obviously. Right. But like, like would people have been as likely to sign up and go out of their way because there's a lot of friction on a podcast, right?
Like to go from somebody's ear to them signing up for something, there was a ton of friction, right? Like, you know, that like to get people to do any kind of call to action, like follow through on it is really, really hard. And we've seen like a significant outperformance over what we would have expected.
So anyway, like that's kind of the background. And then I take that to the newsletter, which is, you know, frankly, if you looked at my click through rate, it probably would look abysmal because I just don't put that many things to click on that often. But when I do, I think it performs dramatically better.
Then it otherwise would have had. I just been littering the email with so I'm very [00:17:00] judicious with with the things and you can expect that if there's some massive new credit card sign up bonus that I think is remarkable that I'm going to mention that in my newsletter. And yeah, I think at last count, you know, we don't have a massive newsletter, but it's, it's 62, 000 people, which is not nothing, obviously.
And, you know, I'm going to get a boatload of people signing up for that credit card when I mentioned it, because they know I'm not mentioning just, Oh, here's the way for Brad to make money this week, it's maybe three, four, five times a year. I say, this is something remarkable. So good that it rose to the level of, I only put three sections in my newsletter every week, it rose to the level of being one of those 150 per year, basically that I need to include.
And, you know, we've seen obviously some significant. I mean, five figure mentions just from one of those credit card mentions. And again, I'm not doing it [00:18:00] every time. I'm doing it only a couple of times a year, but, but it turns the newsletter into something that cumulatively makes a nice bit of money. So it's, uh, I think it's a strategy that works because it's genuine.
I mean, Dylan, at the, at the heart of it, like it is, this is a win win for everybody involved. And that's how I like to
Dylan Redekop: approach business. Yeah, I like that. And I, I've seen, you know, so many, I think before we hit record, you mentioned, you know, the, the content farms of the mid 2010s and 20 teens or whatever, what have you.
And, and, you know, there's still people that are trying to sort of play that game and, you know, there's the odd person who will succeed with that. Right. But I think what you've done is. Like we mentioned earlier, you've built up this trust and I don't like the term leverage because I don't want to see you've leveraged that trust, but you've earned that trust for your subscribers.
They know that something you're going to recommend to them is going to be something worth checking out because you're not pumping 15 links to different, you know, affiliate products and [00:19:00] that sort of thing in your newsletter. So, um. We've interviewed quite a few people. I think you'll, you'll be, uh, close to the 30th episode, you know, once we publish.
So we've interviewed a number of people in the news newsletter space, and there's not too many that I would say have been as successful as you with the, for lack of a better term, like an affiliate revenue model, right? Is there a reason you would say no to add revenue if it was from. From an advertiser who you like, you know, like, and trust that you would, that you would feel comfortable putting in your newsletter.
Brad Barrett: This is something Dylan that I struggle with and, and I don't. Because like I said before, you can't prove that counterfactual of like, what would have happened had I done X, Y, or Z, right? Which makes it tough because then a lot of this is just feeling and intuition and flying by the seat of your pants.
I'm like, that's not a way to run a business, obviously. But I get so many emails. So I actually just moved recently to ConvertKit. For the choose if I email, I've been with convert kid on travel miles [00:20:00] one for like eight years, but just recently moved, moved, choose if I, and Jonathan and I came up with this really awesome, like email template.
And like, not that it had bells and whistles, let's say, but like it just, it looked cool or I thought it did at least, and man, I can't tell you how many emails I've gotten saying. Hey, I love your newsletter. It's like the highlight of my week, but I really liked the old version better because it just felt like something that you were just sitting there and writing it to me.
Dylan Redekop: So the stylization of your newsletter, like has been detrimental.
Brad Barrett: Yeah. It like. It detracted. Isn't that fascinating? That is interesting. And so, so I guess why I bring that up and, and again, this, this is feeling, this is intuition. It's not like metrics, but I fear that any overt attempt, especially with [00:21:00] our community now, not that I think there's a caricature of.
Financial independence people as like misers or depriving themselves or cutting the expense. And like, that, that's something that we've tried really, really hard to dispel at choose a five for years. But I think like an overt attempt at like commercialization, it doesn't seem to be received very well by, by our community.
And it's one of those things where I'm like, okay, the methodology I have is working. And it's, it's working nicely and it, it feels like this, this like really wonderful organic spirit of like, like a true community. And I'm just, I, I'm just so scared to, to break that. So, I mean, Dylan, as you can tell from my voice, like I struggle with this mightily because, because I know that I I'm probably from a sheer business perspective, I'm probably making.
a suboptimal decision. I won't say a bad decision, right? Making a [00:22:00] suboptimal decision. And, you know, I know also that I can serve my community better. If we had more resources that I could then reinvest in the business and do X, Y, and Z, like there's a clear case for that, that for the greater good, that probably would be the right decision.
So again, I struggle with this, but the short answer to your question is like, yeah, if there was someone who is absolutely in line advertiser wise, and I would not hesitate to do it, but I think that for me. Again, with that mindset of win win, like I would want there to be some type of like special benefit for our people that they were getting for basically putting up with this ad, if you will.
Uh, you know, so I think that's, that's kind of how I would look at it. Yeah, it's, but to, to be determined, I think, uh, it's something I'm thinking about constantly.
Dylan Redekop: So we've talked about affiliates and [00:23:00] Your, your revenue model in general. Is there any other ways that you have monetized your newsletter?
Brad Barrett: Monetize the newsletter. No, not, not monetized, but the one kind of interesting thing that I've done recently, and, and this frankly is, is a hot tip to SparkLoop is I'm trying to establish. And, and still the, the, the tech is still, it, it's just about there. Like, and basically what I'm trying to do is do cross promotions with other, other email newsletters that I, again, with light trust and respect, like I'm not just going to send people to any old newsletter, like it has to literally be one of the 12 or 15 that I read.
Because again, people can tell when I'm just hawking something versus something that's real. And like, and I think cross promotions are an interesting way to grow your business generally. So even just going to podcasting. So I wound up doing a cross promotion with my first million. [00:24:00] So huge podcast, certainly in the business world.
And what's really interesting is those kind of cross promotions usually convert at about. Six tenths of 1%. So it's, it's not fantastic, but that's just like the industry average. And when I cross promoted my first million, it converted at about four to 5%. So almost a full, like an order of magnitude higher than the average.
And it was because like. I wasn't worried about that ad being 30 seconds or it has to be exactly a minute. Like I sat there and I talked about my first million because frankly, it's one of my absolute favorite podcasts. Like it was the easiest cross promotion in the world to do because I listened to it three times a week or as many times as they put it out.
I mean,
Dylan Redekop: it came from a place of authenticity and your, your audience would recognize that in your voice. I would assume immediately.
Brad Barrett: Right. Exactly. And that like, and what does [00:25:00] that mean? So, okay, that's great. I sent my first million a whole boatload more of listeners than, than they probably quote unquote would have expected or deserve based on a normal, a normal cross promo.
But I think what that means now is even though choose if I is a, is a pretty large, massive podcast, like I can punch above my weight. Yeah. I can potentially like my cross bombers are worth a lot. So I can use that metric when I go talk to whomever I have one coming up with bigger pockets, which is a massive real estate podcast.
And like, who knows where we go from there? Right. So, and what I've done to get back to the newsletter is cross promos again, using like the magic link. I think that's the coolest aspect of one of the coolest aspects of SparkLoop is like that one click. Sign up and my good buddy, uh, Clint Murphy from the growth guide.
And he's huge on Twitter. I think he has like, I forget exactly, but 350, 400, 000 there. And I [00:26:00] wound up putting similar to the, my first million, I wound up putting a very significant. Little blurb about Clint generally something that he had mentioned on Twitter that I thought was great adding value It's like the Gary Vaynerchuk jab jab jab right hook.
Yeah, like I'm jabbing all day You know like it's like 700 jabs basically and then you get that very impactful right hook, right? But like so and then I mentioned Oh and Clint's newsletter is one of the ones that I read Religiously, and you know, I don't know the exact wording I use but I'm in SparkLoop right now that one mentioned that one magic link sent Clint 1, 118 newsletter subscribers.
Wow. That's incredible. It's crazy town. Yeah. And you know, and then what does that mean? Like again, Clint's a buddy of mine, but like now in convert kit, we are referring each other as free subscribers and he sends people to me at a crazy 50 plus percent conversion rate. Like it's, so it's wild. And like, [00:27:00] you know, it's not a sense of indebtedness, obviously it's just, it's.
It's synergy, right? Like we are now going to refer each other forever. And like, when I can get a group of five or six, this is how, and I've been chatting behind the scenes with, with some people at SparkLoop of like, what would it look like to have a, like a little section in my newsletter where it's just, it's these magic links.
And it's just a little one line thing of the five newsletters that I, that I love the most. And again, I'm trying to, I basically tell my audience, like, I'm trying to send you to the best newsletters I can find. And they're sending people my way that they think would be good fits for the financial independence community.
So it's this virtuous circle, right? Like that's how I view it. And it's like, man, if you could have that, and then I'm featured in. Brian, for all these newsletter and Steve Adcox and Clint Murphy, Chris Hutchins and all the hacks. Like, you know, like that's how I see that as [00:28:00] like, man, how cool would that be?
And I think, I think we're just about there in terms of like actually making it happen, which is cool. That's really
Dylan Redekop: awesome. I was going to dive into growth next on the growth side of the newsletter. I think you just touched on one of your. Yeah,
Brad Barrett: I think I might've just, uh, buried the, buried the lead a
Dylan Redekop: bit.
Um, well, so let's, let's dive in a little bit more about, um, growth then. So you, you talked about this cross promo opportunity, uh, using Magilinks in other ways as well. So is there anything else that you're doing? Obviously your, your podcast is a, you know, you've got a large audience there. I would imagine a lot of those have crossed over into newsletter subscribers as well.
But what have you been focusing on recently, perhaps other than cross versions, if there is anything that you found that's been working?
Brad Barrett: Yeah. You know, this is something that is top of mind for me and I'm, I'm exploring, I think we, one area where we have not done as well as we should have is with like lead magnets.
If we're still using that, that phrase [00:29:00] in 2023, I don't think we've ever provided like anything. Significant enough of value other than I have a, uh, download actually the one thing that we've used, which has been really useful is I have a PDF download of basically we call them 2 per person per meal. It's like a cookbook almost.
So it's basically like the 30 year. So recipes we've curated over the years that are fantastic. And I mean, that's gotten us probably five plus thousand subscribers over the years. And So I think we need to be a little better in that regard. But, but yeah, just, you know, I got, and again, this is not an, not an ad for, for convert kit by any means, but like, I just got really excited about the creative network.
I think it's, I think it's one of the coolest things going. And like, you know, I just love that ability to refer people and have them. Reciprocate and refer you. So I'm really, really exploring that, you know, I've been testing SparkLoop and paid paid acquisition. I'm in the very early stages of that. We've had, I think I've signed up about 2000 subscribers.[00:30:00]
And, you know, I, I think I maybe got a little bit ahead of myself in the sense of like, I don't have exact metrics to, to determine like, Hey, does this make sense? Right. Like, or do I have the full, because again, this I'm so used to getting warm leads that I don't think I've adequately prepared. Cold traffic to be like, welcome them to the financial independence community.
So I think I can be a lot better in that regard. The one kind of fun thing that I'm doing recently is I mentioned at the top of the podcast that we have 300. Local groups in 300 cities across the world, which is like a really interesting part of choose FI and our overall kind of footprint. And I mean, these are people who are having real in, in real life meetups all across the world under the banner of financial independence and choose FI specifically, and which is super cool.
I mean, it's just, it's like one of [00:31:00] the best things we have going, but, you know, frankly, like just through inertia and just how things work, like. We wound up setting these up on Facebook years ago, six plus years ago. And that's, again, like I said, through inertia, like that it's always worked. Right. But I think a lot of people realize now like, man, Facebook's algorithm is so hard and they just, they really do throttle how many people see a post, even from the group owner or, or admin, right.
It just makes it, uh, you know, you're shaking your head. It just makes it so frustrating because you don't really. You don't have a way to really, truly get in touch with these people. And, you know, just in the last week, and I, I kid you not, it is. I've been trying to figure out a way. How can I get these, these members of our groups onto email lists, like and very specific email lists for each particular group, and then [00:32:00] give some type of access to each of those, the.
Administrators of the local groups to maybe to be able to send out emails because it can't be me. It can't be the single point of failure.
Dylan Redekop: You can't manage 300 email lists?
Brad Barrett: Yeah, I'm at my wits end as it is. So, but nevertheless, like, you know, I've been, I've tested the first couple of these and like even just our local Richmond.
One, I wound up putting a post, so I created a new landing page, a new tag and convert kit for that Richmond local group and just dropped it into this group with the, the link to the landing page. And just in the first 24 hours, we got like 150 people to sign up for it, which I mean, considering like this is a little Richmond, Virginia, like that was a not insignificant percentage of the Facebook group.
Signed up for the email newsletter and that email list to now get, Hey, we're having an event at the local brewery or we're having a potluck or a case study on someone's personal finances. Like we can now get in touch with them. And I [00:33:00] mean, Dylan, it's awesome. Like, you know, we have this community that's dispersed, but like, how do I get them so I can actually get in touch?
And I, I, I think this is going to work to the tune of. Many, many thousands of email subscribers, which is, which is really pretty awesome.
Dylan Redekop: And what's the, what's the long, I don't use the word play, but what's like the long play of, of these local meetups and that sort of thing. Is it building just generally building affinity for choose a fi and the financial independence movement or.
Brad Barrett: Yeah, that's how it's always been. I think we have determined that I think for people pursuing financial independence. You often feel like you're the only one in your local area. And you're like, you're this little island unto yourself. Like, we don't think that we're doing anything weird. We think we're living wonderfully, like, optimally.
But like, but it's like, let's not lie. Like, it's counterculture. Like, it's, it is unusual to not spend all your money. Like, [00:34:00] I can't believe I have to say that out loud. Like, it is unusual to not spend all your money. Which is ridiculous and preposterous, but like, so people pursuing financial independence, people being mindful of their money, people looking to for more important things in life, like how can they spend their most precious resource time?
Like these are, these are kindred spirits. Right. And like, so I think what the original goal of setting up these local groups was, Hey, how can we create in real life meetups? With people who are like minded. Like I just wanted other people to hang out with who weren't just living the same, like consumerism lifestyle as everybody else.
Right. And like, it's pretty cool to, Hey, we all love a lot of people in the fight community, love board games. So let's have a board game, like, you know, like little things like that. Like let's have a potluck dinner. Let's whatever it may be. So it's always been about community building, but yeah, I mean, you know, obviously.
And I was just talking to my [00:35:00] wife about this yesterday is, okay, once we have a way to contact people in a local, local area, well, who's to say, again, with, with the concept of win win because everything about choose a via is win win who's to say we can't find some amazing deal in this city or that city and send it out just to those people that, Hey, this, whatever organization or this business or this restaurant, like, They want to offer you 20 percent off to come in.
I I'm just making it, but like, like little things like that. You never know where, where it actually could lead. But I think the most important thing is without having them on my email list, like they're not really part of my community, like they are tangentially, but like, I have no way to get in touch with them.
So yeah, I mean, Dylan, no joke. We are one week into this experiment. So like, I haven't, this is not a fully formed thought, but like, that's what's so fun and exciting about it. It's like, It can go any which way. And I think, I think that's cool. I think like, [00:36:00] that's what I find exhilarating about. Creating.
It's like most of the time you're just flying by the seat of your pants trying to figure something out. And like, you know, I'm not gonna lie. Like it's worked pretty well for us to choose if I like we had this random idea to create these a facebook group as stupid as it sounds like it's obvious now.
But like seven years ago when it wasn't so obvious and we have 105, 000 people in our main facebook group and like we have all these local groups that probably have number more than that in total. And it's like, yeah, Wow, you just never know when a random idea sitting around, uh, having a beer turns into something significant.
So I think it's, I think there's just something like indescribably fun about this.
Dylan Redekop: That's cool. The light bulb idea that turned into, you know, the, the spotlight, right? That's, that's, that's really cool. I think. I'd be curious what your advice would be to somebody who is, let's say they, they're into for sake of the context of the conversation to, you know, financial independence and they want to start a newsletter.
What would be your, your advice to somebody in [00:37:00] those shoes who they want to start a newsletter, grow it, and eventually make a living with it? That's kind of a loaded question, but, uh,
Brad Barrett: No, it's a great one. And yeah, I mean, so I first is get started. I think we Slept on this for a very long time. And, you know, frankly, our email list should be many times as large as it currently is, and that's to our great detriment and to our community's great detriment, because again, I'm sitting in and writing this I'm adding real value.
I think like I produce two pieces of content a week, and I think they're both equally valuable, the podcast and the newsletter and. Because of my inaction, I think far fewer people get the newsletter than that otherwise would have. So like that is one of the biggest things is like, get started. This is like a wonderful way to connect with people.
It really is. And. And especially when you're small, like this was one of those things we did at, even when our podcast was tiny, when we were getting under a thousand downloads and probably [00:38:00] under 500 downloads an episode, like we made it about the community and we, people wanted to feel part of something they would, they love being.
Hearing their voice on the podcast or hearing their name read aloud or something like that. And like, when you have a small audience, like that's your time to get in touch with people and to try to understand, like, what are they thinking? What are their pain points, right? Like you can actually reach out to people.
You can have calls, like do things that otherwise. When you have a large audience that like, you're probably not going to have as much time as you want to, if any time to do like do it, then figure out like what could set you apart. Like, if you're just going to be, there are hundreds of financial independence newsletters, right?
Like probably more than that. Like if you're just one out of 500, like how are you going to differentiate yourself? And like, it might even just be like. The part of the audience that, or the part of the community in our case, that, [00:39:00] that you're looking to reach, like sometimes niche down, right? Like, but find whatever that niche is.
There's a new, there've been very few podcasts or communities to really. I guess rise above the noise in the financial independence world in the last handful of years. And like, there's a new one called catching up to fi and it's like, all right, they're targeting people who are 40 and older who feel like they're behind.
Yeah. It's like, Oh wow, that's really, really cool. Like there have been probably 2000 financial independence blogs or podcasts, probably 5, 000 that have started since choose if I started to catching up to fly. Really very few of them have risen above the noise. But this one has, because they got their, they got the niche, right?
So that would be what I advise to people is like, how are you going to stand out? Like how, what are you going to provide in value? Like. It has to be something like nobody just wants to hear you because you're just brilliant. And like, they're going to flock to you because of like just how wonderful you are.
Like it's not going to [00:40:00] work. You have to, you've got to put in the work. You've got to figure out like what sets you apart and why are people going to want to open your email? Like that's a big, that's a big lift. To open an email and read it for three, five, 10 minutes. Like why are they going to look forward to your email every Tuesday, Sunday, whenever it comes out?
Like you got to make it interesting. You have to make it something of value that just doesn't feel like an ad every time.
Dylan Redekop: My financial independence newsletter about this week. Well, I've taken up a good amount of your time, Brad. I only have two more questions for you. One, we've been chatting for about, you know, 40 minutes or so right now. Is there anything that, that you think I should have asked you that I failed to, or that, that you'd like to share about your, your newsletter experience?
Brad Barrett: I think we've covered a whole lot here, which I, this has been an amazing conversation. It's, it's amazing how wide reaching it can be in only 40 minutes, but yeah, I can't really think of anything. I think a lot of, you know, we're, [00:41:00] we're talking to newsletter operators, so most people have already gotten started.
Right. Uh, I mean, I think for me, it was just, I, I wish that I would have. Spent more focus on it. And I think I'm, I'm only belatedly coming to that. And it's a very interesting way to get in touch with your community as far as I view it. So yeah, I don't have really anything further to add. I think we, I think we covered that pretty, pretty well at this point.
Awesome.
Dylan Redekop: Thanks Brad. So. Let's, uh, share where people can find you fine. She's a
Brad Barrett: fi okay. So I guess three different ways. So choose like, make a choice, choose FI for financial independence. Just search for that. You'll find it pretty easily. If you're interested in the financial independence concept or trying to figure out what we're all about, go way back in the archives to episode 100.
That's our kind of welcome to the FI community.
Dylan Redekop: We'll try to share the link right in the notes so that people can get those.
Brad Barrett: Cool. If anybody's interested in my newsletter, I'd be remiss for not mentioning that. ChooseFI. com slash subscribe, or on any page on our website, you can just go [00:42:00] in the upper corner and it's the FI weekly newsletter.
And yeah, I'm on Twitter, Brad at ChooseFI. And as you get into the community, if you're interested, uh, ChooseFI. com slash local. That's where you can actually join one of those local meetups. Yeah, I guess it was four ways, not three. I threw in Twitter there, actually. Awesome.
Dylan Redekop: Thank you, Brad, but it's been a great conversation.
Loved having you on and, uh, all the best in the future newsletter success.
Brad Barrett: Thank you, my friend. I appreciate it. This was fun.
Dylan Redekop: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Send Grow podcast. If you like what you heard, here are three quick ways that you can show your support. Number one, leave us a five star rating and review in the podcast app of your choice.
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Thanks and see you next week.[00:43:00]