Brian [00:00:00]:
Starting a newsletter and keeping it going for a couple of months is one thing. Maintaining it permanently and actually reaching out to those audiences again and again, that is a treadmill. I think there will be increasing opportunities over the next six to nine months to look at other newsletters that are in your space and in your category that have kind of fizzled out. Reach out to them and acquire their newsletters as a way to kind of aggregate newsletters together. I could see consolidation coming in the next couple of months, so I think there'll be opportunity if you have capital to do so.
Greg Isenberg [00:00:33]:
So this is gonna be fun. Brian, I feel like you don't do enough podcasts, so I feel lucky that you're joining us. You are a big deal on Twitter and other places. You've racked up almost a million followers on places like that where you're demystifying the stock market, finance stuff. You're becoming a multipreneur in your own right. And I just wanted to jam startup ideas. That's what we do here. Thank you for joining me.
Brian [00:01:01]:
Love it. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Big fan of the podcast.
Greg Isenberg [00:01:06]:
Before we get to the ideas, you were telling me about a story about Jimmy Buffett and the story about the Motley fool. And tell me more about why you're into Jimmy Buffett to start.
Brian [00:01:21]:
So I'm not into Jimmy Buffett, the musician at all. Like, I could care less about his music. It's just not my vibe at all. But one. One of my favorite podcasts that I listen to is the Founders podcast by David Senra. And he recently, that podcast is all about digging into founders or musicians or directors and just kind of jamming on their life, essentially. And he came out with an episode on Jimmy Buffett, and I was like, do I want to listen to this? But for whatever reason, I decided to push, push play on it. It probably automatically came on, if I'm being honest in my feed.
Brian [00:02:03]:
And I love it when I go in to consume a piece of media and I have one expectation about, especially if that expectation is going to be, I just got to get through this, this is going to be disappointing. And on the other end, I'm like, that was a thousand times better than I thought it was going to be. So I found it. I found Jimmy Buffett's entire life fascinating, but I had no idea that he was such a ridiculously successful businessman. I think. I think he died. He died a couple of years ago, and he died a multi billionaire, making him one of the top ten grossing artists of all time. And I just loved hearing his story about how he did things differently, and then he essentially went on tour and never stopped and spun up all these businesses along the way.
Brian [00:02:56]:
So I think there's a lot that entrepreneurs can learn by studying Jimmy Buffett, even if, like me, you don't care for his music.
Greg Isenberg [00:03:02]:
I'm pretty sure he was friends with Warren Buffett. Is that right?
Brian [00:03:06]:
Yes. Correct. The two of them were. Were friends, and even though they had no relation to each other.
Greg Isenberg [00:03:12]:
So what's the story? He, you know, what's the story with him? I know he. He grew up in, or he was living in Key West. I think he was, like, for playing on the streets. How did he go from playing the streets of Key west to being a multi billionaire owning a bunch of companies?
Brian [00:03:28]:
Yeah. So he actually tried to get into. He wanted to be a musician. He knew that about himself. And he tried to get into the music industry through the front door. So he went to Nashville and he tried to get a recording deal, and he would come in and the record labels would be like, we don't know how to classify you. Right? Like, you're not. You're not country music, you're not rock music.
Brian [00:03:52]:
So he tried, he got a couple of records out, I think, the traditional way, and they utterly failed. And he actually picked up and went to kind of green pasture, Key west at the time, which when he went there was like a shell of what it is today. Like, rent was super cheap, and he was actually going from bar to bar saying to them, I'll play here for tips and booze. And that was his fee, if you will. And he basically was super scrappy and lived off of tips and slept where he could in the beginning. But he went, he slowly started to develop a name for himself, and he actually was playing so often that his style started to become more formalized. And since he was leaving living in Key west, he started to make that a part of his Persona and a part of his. Of his music.
Brian [00:04:47]:
And he just worked his tail off, going from venue to venue around Key west. And then he started to expand, and then he started to go on. On tour, and he never had. It wasn't until he was doing this for a couple of decades before he had his first, like, breakout hit that actually made him more well known as a mainstream singer. But along the way, he just developed these interests and he partnered to open restaurants. And he owns, like, the land shark beer brand, if you're familiar with that, which is, like, actually a brand of beer I really, really enjoy. And now he's, like, in. He built his own record label.
Brian [00:05:30]:
He's got his own marijuana brand. He's got hotels. He's got casino. He's got apparel, home decor. You can even buy pickleball sets that are branded Margaritaville. So again, just a super scrappy guy with, like, really super humble beginnings. But I think he became a category of one, and he rejected kind of like, the main way, or he got kicked out or failed trying to go into an industry from the main way and kind of built it up for himself. I think that is a lesson that basically every entrepreneur listening to this should know.
Greg Isenberg [00:06:00]:
And it's pretty interesting because you would never think that Jimmy Buffett and Warren Buffett would be friends, although their names are the same besides from that. Right. And, you know, I'm just reading an article about. About the two. They've actually got no family relation. And I see that there's a quote in the Wall Street Journal. Warren leaves messages for cousin Jimmy and always has. And Jimmy used to call Warren uncle Warren in return.
Greg Isenberg [00:06:37]:
They met in the eighties, and they actually took a DNA test. Wow. So they took a DNA test. They are, in fact, not family. But I'd imagine that Jimmy looked at what Warren was doing with Berkshire Hathaway, and it seems that Jimmy was a. Was a. Quite a big investor in Berkshire Hathaway, and just saw how he was structuring it with all these different companies and said to himself, how can I leverage my brand to do the same? Like, if you think about Warren's strategy around buying everlasting brands like Coca Cola and sees candies, like, it's not too dissimilar to how Jimmy was thinking about, for example, building his real estate empire and licensing his brand out that way.
Brian [00:07:23]:
Yeah, total. It's a. It's a time tested strategy. And. And how cool would it be to have Warren Buffet as a someone that you could call up and, you know, shoot ideas around with? Warren Buffett, I think, just likes being associated with famous people. I know that he's actually developed a close relationship with LeBron James, for example. So, you know, if you could have a moderate level of success, maybe one day you can become friends with Buffett, too.
Greg Isenberg [00:07:46]:
Well, I think he's a brand guy. You know, I think it's probably two things. Number one, he's a brand guy, and I think he's. He understands the power of a brand. And number two, I think he's just probably loves world class people. And anyone who's, like, world class, he's into. So the combination of those two things, I think, just make people like Jimmy and people like LeBron. Like, oh, yeah.
Greg Isenberg [00:08:07]:
Like, you know, very interesting to him. The other company that our brand that you were telling me about that I actually haven't heard the name a long time, and I think it's a story that younger entrepreneurs don't know much about the Motley fool. Tell me a little bit about the story of Motley fool and why it's interesting to you.
Brian [00:08:31]:
So, the Motley fool is a company that I have worked for for nine years now, but they have been in so many ways ahead of the curve. They've essentially been a part of the creator economy for. For almost 30 years now, and they've done things, especially with their business model, that make a ton of sense to people today. But back when they started made no sense at all. Like, they were one of the first companies I'd ever come across that had a freemium business model. I mean, I myself was a consumer of content from the Motley fool. So I'm an investing nerd, and they produce a ton of. Of great free content on money.
Brian [00:09:14]:
Their website, fool.com. And they create these articles, and I would be reading these articles, and they would be high quality analysis, and they clearly knew what they were talking about. And I was like, how am I reading this for free? I don't understand how this isn't behind a paywall somewhere. I don't understand how this company makes money if they're producing all of these articles and I'm just consuming them on the Internet for free. Lo and behold, I only understood later that, well, the business model is, yeah, produce a lot of free content, get a lot of eyeballs, monetize that with advertising, and then try and convert you on the backend to be a paying member. And then once you become part of their ecosystem, you know, they have multiple tiers of membership that start at, you know, basically $100 per year all the way up to, geez, I don't know, 510 thousand dollars per year. And, you know, once you're a paying member, they really try and upsell you. So they have had this business model in place now for basically 30 years, but they tried.
Brian [00:10:14]:
They figured this out along the way. And they were doing newsletters. Newsletters back in 1994, before the Internet was a thing, before the Internet was really a distribution center to them. So, if you're not familiar with the Motley fool but you are a part of the creator economy, I think it's a business that you should definitely study or at least understand because they have perfected the art of attracting eyeballs to their, their properties, turning those eyeballs into monetizable users, upselling those users over time. And they have built a business that does. I don't know the exact figures, but I have to imagine it's nine, nine plus figures in annual revenue each year and growing.
Greg Isenberg [00:11:01]:
Yeah. So it's really interesting. So if you go to the Molly fool website, they have a. If you go to our services, they list out basically a bunch of their products that they sell. And, you know, the lowest price service that they sell is like, is $100 a report, which is essentially a research report on one stock recommendation. By our analysis. What is that? That's a blog post. It's a newsletter.
Greg Isenberg [00:11:26]:
So you're paying $100 for a newsletter, or they have these other newsletters that you can sign up to. They call them services that pretty much are on average, three, four, $500 a month. But they have ones that go up to 1000, $2,000 a year. And I think you would never think of a newsletter costing $2,000 a year. But I think what's really smart, what Motley fool does that's really smart, is it's all about the value. It's like, oh, if I get one good stock pick, it's worth it to me to pay $2,000 a year. And I think that's how a lot of people think about it.
Brian [00:12:07]:
Yeah, absolutely. Especially depending on the subscribers that they have. Many of the people that sign up for the low priced ones, they're probably working with five or six figure portfolios, maybe seven figure portfolios on their own. But they have plenty of members that are worth 510, 20, 5100 million dollars. And for, at that level of clientele, for them to spend ten grand a year on a service is like, you know, chump change to them. So they've done a really good job at segmenting their audience, their back end audience, and then upselling them over time. The other thing that they've done that's really fascinating is they have taken their initial business model, initial brand name, and they've actually spun off from there a number of different brands. So they have a hedge fund that they run called 1623 capital, and that I believe, employs a fairly traditional two and 20 model, which is very obviously lucrative.
Brian [00:13:01]:
And that is they service a very small number of clients, but they have a very high net worth client base that goes in there. They have mutual funds that they've spun off, they have ETF's that they've spun off, they've had sister brands that they've spun off that focus on personal finance and real estate. So they have just done an excellent job of taking this core business functionality and finding multiple ways to monetize it at different price points throughout their business. So again, if you're in the creator economy in any way, it's definitely a business that is worth studying.
Greg Isenberg [00:13:32]:
One of the things I like to do when I hear about businesses like this is to really go through the funnel. It's the best way to describe it. So Molly fool is one of those businesses that has a funnel worth studying. And it's essentially, I listed off the 20 different services that they have. Those are 20 different funnels worth understanding. So, for example, right now I'm on one of their landing pages. It's very, very tight, I would say the messaging, it's our top ten stocks to buy. The Motley fool stock advisor just identified these ten best stocks for investors to buy right now and learn how to get access by entering your email below.
Greg Isenberg [00:14:14]:
These are actually, I call these tweet size landing pages because it's, you know, 280 characters or less. Create some, some curiosity, and once you get in there, you get that email. I'm sure I haven't put my email yet, but you get that email, you probably hopefully get some value. And then you get into that flow. They could see that, oh, you clicked here, you clicked there. And, you know, you don't make nine figures by not, you know, keeping, keeping to send emails. My partner Jordan always says, if you ain't sending, if you ain't sending, you ain't winning. That's what he says.
Greg Isenberg [00:14:54]:
So I'm sure Motley fool is sending a lot of emails and the funnels are tight.
Brian [00:15:02]:
Oh, like you, I've signed up to many of their funnels. And if you have a one, um, trepidation that I have when I, when I create funnels for myself is like, I don't want to be annoying. I don't want to be annoying and salesy to the people that are on the receiving end of my funnel. I always want to be helpful. And it's like, well, how often is too often to email? Is like once a week too often? Is two times a week too often, etcetera. When you sign up for these Motley fool funnels, you get up to four emails per day. Per day. And that is obviously an extremely deliberate decision that they have made.
Greg Isenberg [00:15:39]:
Right.
Brian [00:15:40]:
They've been split, testing this and doing all kinds of optimization of this over the course of years. So if they are sending four emails per day after you give an email to them, that that isn't by accident. Right. That that was all pre thought about and tested. So their data clearly showed that sending lots of emails to really get people to convert is the way to go.
Greg Isenberg [00:16:01]:
Yeah. So you bring up a good point, something I've been thinking a lot about, which is, you know, recently, a lot of founders that we know are obsessed with conversion rate optimization. So how do I get as much juice out of this lemon as possible? And I get it right. If you're converting at 8% and then you get that up to 12%, that could be the difference. That could be. That could, you know, that could be hundreds of thousands of dollars, not millions of dollars of profit for your business that year. So, like, it may, you know, I get why people optimize for conversion rate, but I think that people are making a mistake by just optimizing for conversion because it's not really long term thinking, you know, long term. And this is like a half baked thought.
Greg Isenberg [00:16:48]:
So, workshop with this workshop with me. But it's this idea that, like, yes, I could send four emails a day and I'll probably increase sales. And, you know, that's great. But think about those people who unsubscribed and who are now going to tell their friends, oh, you know, or they're at a dinner table and some brings up the Motley fool and they're like, I got so many annoying emails from them, I have to unsubscribe. So I think that there is a balance between conversion rate optimization and no optimization. And I actually call it community rate optimization. CRO, where you're optimizing it, you're optimizing it for what the community actually wants, which is kind of somewhere in the middle.
Brian [00:17:36]:
Yeah, I think that that's fair. The other thing to think about is, you know, it depends on if you're sending emails as a personal brand or you're sending them as a company. Right. You don't want your personal brand necessarily associated with spamming of people. But if you're on the company side, my hunch is that they know that your likelihood or your interest in signing up for these service is super high at the start, and then it kind of rapidly diminishes from there. So they know if you click to give them their email address to download some report, that's when you are a white hot lead. And the odds of you converting then and there within that 24 hours are probably the highest. So they really try and hammer that and then it just diminishes from there.
Brian [00:18:22]:
But if you study the Motley Fool's marketing practices, people have been complaining. Members have been complaining about that, or non members have been complaining about that for years. Right? For years. They say, this is too over the top. You guys produce too many reports, you send too many emails, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then if you look at the behavior of the people that actually sign up, many of them only sign up because of the way that the marketing is done. And then once they become members, they grow an affinity for the brand, because once you're through the paywall, the experience is completely, is completely different. So it could also be a sense of be worried about learning too many lessons from what people say and follow what people actually do, not what people say.
Greg Isenberg [00:19:09]:
Totally. There's one interesting point I want to bring up with the Motley fool that a lot of people don't know about. So why is the Motley fool the Motley fool? How did it get so popular initially? Well, the Motley fool had a partnership with AOL in the nineties and into the two thousands where for those of those people who don't remember AOL, it was basically, you dialed up, you got to this. They called it a portal, which was essentially a website. And there'd be different buttons that you can go in and explore. So you can go ahead and chat, you can do social networking, you can go check finance. And then once you went to the finance section, that was all powered by the Motley fool. So basically what happened was as AOL grew and increased their network effects, Motley fool grew, and they were standing on the shoulder of giants, basically.
Greg Isenberg [00:20:06]:
So the question for, you know, for me and you, Brian, but also, everyone listening is like, you know, what is that equivalent today? Right? Like, you know, do you go build on top of Shopify or shopify already too big, right? Do you go, you know, what are different ecosystems that you can go build upon? And then how do you go and reach out to those people so that you have placement and you've partnered with these people? So I think a lot of people create startups and they think, okay, how do I get to market? I create content. I'll do paid ads. I'll create these marketing funnels. But a lot of people miss the strategic partnership point, which is probably the fastest and easiest way to grow.
Brian [00:20:54]:
Yeah, I've heard Andrew Wilkinson call this the barnacle on a whale strategy, where you just want to create, you want to attach your business and your business model to some idea that is crazy, crazily. Rapid going. And for people that don't remember back in these days, like, AOL was the Internet. Like, that's how I first got started on the Internet. It wasn't like you went to the Internet, you went to AOL, and then you were on the Internet, and those two things were synonyms, and AOL was growing at, like, insane rates. Like 100 plus percent compounded for year over year. So you are 100% correct that the Motley fool deployed the barnacle on a whale strategy super successfully. And if we rewind the clock just over the last couple of years, how many brands have been built or how many personal brands have been built off of just the enormous growth in TikTok? Like, if you were creating on TikTok in 2020, it was extremely easy.
Brian [00:21:50]:
It wasn't easy, but it was much easier to go viral from nothing and gain hundreds of thousands of followers and use that kind of, that growth to sprinkle across the rest of your ecosystem. So I think you're asking a fantastic question. I don't know what system is doing that today other than to say something related to AI. I mean, that is a thing that has gone parabolic over the last year. It's hard to know where we are in the growth curve and how you can take advantage of that as an entrepreneur. But I think, I think that idea is correct. When a new platform comes along, find a way to attach yourself to that platform, find a way to create a business model around that platform, and if you do it right and get lucky, you can build an entire huge business on top of that. Yeah.
Greg Isenberg [00:22:36]:
And I think, you know, to me, there's a difference between TikTok, which is a plot, you know, it is a barnacle strategy. Like, it is a platform that's growing or. Although now, you know, you might, you know, you might lose your whale because it might be. Get banned from.
Brian [00:22:51]:
Right? Yeah, there's always risk, right?
Greg Isenberg [00:22:53]:
Always risk. So there's, there's that where anyone could join, but it's still growing. And then the other, the other, the even better motley fool approach is you go to the whale, but you say, I'm going to be the only barnacle on you, right? So you essentially sign, like, an exclusive agreement that, hey, I'm going to be only providing financial content. And to your point, on the AI side, like, yeah, of course, there's, it's a whole new world with this AI movement. So it is tough to go to, you know, open AI and be like, hey, let me be your de facto, you know, financial provider. But I actually think that you, when it comes to reaching out to whales for this sort of stuff, you actually don't want to reach out to them when they're, you don't want them to be whales initially, right? You want them to be like, when. I'm sure when the Motley fool reached out to AOL, like, the AOL was like a startup. They were literally a startup.
Brian [00:23:59]:
Yes, for sure.
Greg Isenberg [00:24:00]:
It just so happened that they grew to be a whale. One last thing on the subject, which is, I know you might be listening to this and you might be like, how am I going to be able to do this? You know, like, easy for the Motley fool in the nineties. But the reality of the situation is if you're a series A, series B seed startup, you're looking for ways to add value to your user base. And if someone can come and help you do that faster, you're all ears, right?
Brian [00:24:30]:
I mean, yeah, you can't replicate this exactly as you've seen, but you can riff on the theme. And in AOL's case, their whole thing was get people online. And one way to help give people a reason to go online. Like, they were literally looking for reasons for people to log online. Like, back then, you had to tie up your phone line to go online. The connection speeds were crazy slow. Like, I'm talking, like, super early on. So the Motley fool became an enabler or a reason for people to go online.
Brian [00:25:02]:
So that in that case, a partnership made a whole lot of sense. You do have to think, what can I offer this platform to help them get? They want, and at the same time, I get what I want.
Greg Isenberg [00:25:13]:
A daily reason, too, because like every, you know, you want to check your stocks daily, you know, and I think that's, that's another way to think about some of these partnerships, is how do you, how do you create, how do you, how do you go to them and say, like, I'm going to help increase your retention rate, your retention is going to go up? Because the thing that I provide is a daily use case.
Brian [00:25:37]:
Absolutely. I don't even think that they necessarily had to create a special, a special, a special deal. Like, I think AOL actually had a program in place because they were, again, looking for content. They didn't want to be content creators. They wanted to partner with content creators. So again, it was easier for them. It was easier for them in the first place, just given the nature of what they were trying to do. But I totally think that that general strategy, the general idea is find something small, that could be big and find a way to partner with them or find a way to help them get they want.
Brian [00:26:09]:
That can be a great way to build a business.
Greg Isenberg [00:26:11]:
So, Brian, this is the Ideas podcast. This is where we give free ideas to people, some nuggets, and I want to give people some nuggets to chew on. What did you bring to the table, to the pod? What do you want to talk about?
Brian [00:26:28]:
Yeah, so my category is I'm a content creator, right? So that's the business that I'm studying and trying to get to know really well and trying to get off of the ground myself. So that's the place that I kind of spend the most of my time thinking, what are some, what services do I need or what ideas could be out there that could help other creators that are depending on where they are in the creator journey? A lot of people, myself included, I did not. This wasn't like a thought that I had ahead of time. I kind of like accidentally discovered the whole creator economy thing. I was actually, the reason I started to put so much time into twitter was, one, the pandemic, so there was not much else to do. But two, I actually signed a book deal. So I was writing a book, and I knew at the start of writing this book, well, there's no point in writing a book when you complete it. You don't have an audience to sell it to.
Brian [00:27:28]:
People have to know who you are and care about it. So much of a book success, especially early on, is just the marketing of the book. So I put as much time into growing my social accounts, specifically with the goal of having an end audience to sell, to sell my book to it. It was only after I built an audience that I kind of backed into the, wait a second, you can actually earn a living if you have an audience. Like, beyond just selling, beyond just selling them book. And, oh, by the way, of all the ways to monetize an audience, a book is probably the worst way that you can possibly, possibly do so. But I think that there's a lot of content creators out there, small content creators out there that are doing good work, really love the content creation side of it, but don't think about the back office end of it at all. Like, that is a whole nother skill set to develop a whole nother list of work to do.
Brian [00:28:28]:
So one idea to have would be to raise some capital, reach out to a group of podcasters or Twitter users or x users, whatever you want to call them, youtubers that all are in the same category because a lot of times people start on one platform and they just focus exclusively on that platform and get them that are all similar size, say maybe like 5000 followers to 50,000 followers, pay them and go to them with a deal and say, hey, I will pay you some modest salary, right? I will allow you to turn this into a job, an actual job with a predictable income. In exchange, you're going to essentially continue to create, I'm going to have access to sell sponsorship opportunities on your podcast or on your, your platform, et cetera. And I'll handle all that back office stuff. And I think if you would be able to pick a category that you think was a growing category that was monetizable, and you could cobble together, say, ten or 20 of these smaller accounts and kind of handle the back office for all of them, you would have a decent size of inventory to sell to potential sponsors and you could provide them with a small amount of salary that they could use to kind of put more time into it. And as long as you set up the relationship so that it was mutually beneficial, if you place enough chips on the table, the odds are pretty good that a handful of them will take off and become fairly sizable accounts in time, especially if you pay them to do so. You know, this is something that David Perel has done successfully with the cultural tutor. That account went from like zero to what? I don't even know what it's at now, like over well over a million Twitter followers. And David essentially just gave, I forget the man, the gentleman's name that writes those threads.
Brian [00:30:26]:
And behind his cultural tutorial, he just essentially paid him a salary and said, this is what I want you to do. Write a thread on the cultural tutor every single day. And that has worked out tremendously well. That account has grown like wildfire. Now, in David's case, his whole business is I help people become digital writers. So he invested in a very high quality case study, more than that. But I think you could take that idea and apply it across different platforms and spread out your bets. And if you structure it correctly, that could actually turn into a relatively meaningful business.
Greg Isenberg [00:31:01]:
So basically, the proposal is to productize what David Perel did for the cultural tutorial, but with having a bit more of a services back office layer. Because I imagine that David, I mean, I don't know exactly, but I just imagine that he went to the cultural tutor and was like, hey, I'll give you x amount of dollars per month and just like continue doing what you're doing and just go do this full time and make it better, and then almost as like, a patron of the arts, it sounds like. Is that fair?
Brian [00:31:40]:
Yeah. And I know in that specific use case, I think the cultural tutor was working at McDonald's. So he essentially said, I'll give you the same salary, or maybe more of a salary that you're working at McDonald's, but quit that job and spend all of your time doing this. But I think there's an opportunity to apply that same thinking cobbled together, for lack of a better term, a podcast network, but do it across different platforms. And if you build up a decent enough size and have a decent enough trajectory for the accounts that you go after, I think for the small accounts, it gives them an opportunity to actually monetize their platforms without having to think about the back office way before they could reach any scale on their own to turn it into a full time living. And in exchange, they're giving up some of the future upside if they really hit it big. But I know a lot of small creators would happily make that trade. And then on the other side, if you're the one aggregating it, you have to think like a venture capitalist, right? You just need a handful of those.
Brian [00:32:44]:
If you have, like, you know, 20 or 30 of these on your payroll or in your network, you just need a handful of them to really make it big for the entire payoff to be big.
Greg Isenberg [00:32:54]:
I wonder if the type of creator that make, you know, is the right creator for this offer is like, is it the McDonald's? I'm working at McDonald's creator, you know, because, you know, if I'm going to pitch Lenny Riccisky five years ago, four years ago, and he has 15,000, 10,000 followers, and I would give him this offer, you know, he wouldn't take it because he sold a company to Airbnb and, you know, he worked at Airbnb for like, nine years. Like, he wouldn't need it. So I'm wondering, is the idea to find some of those, like, maybe younger talent, maybe, you know, talent that's working a job making 30, 40, 50 grand a year? Is that the idea?
Brian [00:33:43]:
Yeah. I think that what Lenny, I think is a special use case in many ways. I totally agree with you that he would be nuts to be kind of take that, that deal. But on the flip side, I know there's lot, the vast majority of creators that are at the small scale kind of do it for because they're interested in it and they're not. The odds of them having a massive bank account to kind of bankroll that on their own are fairly low. So you are absolutely correct that it would take a certain type of creator that would be interested in taking a deal that would be worth it for you to take on the risk of bringing them into your network. You know, the law of large numbers out there. You could definitely find people that would be willing to do this if you turn over enough rocks.
Greg Isenberg [00:34:28]:
And any thoughts on categories? So I recently spoke to Eric Thorenberg on the pod. We talked about b two b media podcast. That podcast actually went a little bit viral. If you haven't listened to it, go and check it out on the channel. But do you have any thoughts on, you know, categories that make sense and how you, how do you think about b two b versus, you know, your classic b two c funny meme account?
Brian [00:35:00]:
Yeah, you're asking obviously excellent questions because it has to be in categories that you could monetize them in some way. So having a bunch of, you know, prank channels get together isn't going to be, isn't going to be great. But you could certainly focus on like one category that I love consuming content on is like the building category. So I love watching YouTube videos that are people constructing houses or doing home repairs or doing product reviews of tools and services. That could be a very lucrative field to enter because there's a bunch of ways you could monetize that on the back end. I'm also in the finance world, so that's the one that I know best. And obviously there's lots of ways to monetize people that are interested in stocks or investing or real estate through brokerages that you could partner with. Or there's tools out there that you could sell to people that have interest in that.
Brian [00:35:59]:
So those would be the two that come to mind. But I'm sure there's lots of categories that you could apply it to.
Greg Isenberg [00:36:03]:
Yeah, I mean, finance, obviously, massive category, even for consumers. Like, people spend money on financial products. No questions. You know, building, although at the surface that looks like, okay, is that super niche? It's actually in the real estate category and the development category, which is absolutely massive. You know, if you go to a lot of small towns, a lot of the biggest companies in small towns are your home renovation store. They actually do the most amount of revenue in these small towns. So I think one way that people can think about how do I pick a category that's, you know, high value is watch linear tv and see who's advertising. Look at who's spending money on advertising a lot, because those those are some of the categories that are big and they have money to spend.
Greg Isenberg [00:36:53]:
And then what you have to do then is think about what is it? I call it a super niche. So it's like you pick a niche in that, in that category, but then you only focus on the top 10% of that niche. So even go a little bit nicher, super niche. I think that's a good exercise for folks.
Brian [00:37:10]:
Absolutely. I mean, it was recently pointed out to me, when I look at some of my favorite YouTube channels that I watch regularly, what they essentially are is the modern day version of hit tv shows that existed 20 or 30 years ago. If you think about one channel that I love is Mark Rober. My entire family loves watching his content, and he is basically the modern day version of MythBusters just on YouTube's format. Or if you look at some animated shows, I love history. Like, a lot of YouTube channels that are all about history, such as crash course, and it's like, well, that's obviously what the History channel literally was 20 years ago, just turned into a free YouTube channel. So that's an underrated tactic. I think we basically looked like what actually worked on old traditional legacy mediums, or who is actually advertising on old legacy mega legacy tv.
Brian [00:38:09]:
And how can you bring that? How can you apply that to the platforms that are actually growing nowadays?
Greg Isenberg [00:38:15]:
So that's a huge insight that I actually think people don't talk about enough, which is looking at proven ways that proven products, proven creators, proven media. In the past, we did it a little bit with Motley fool, but looking at that and just being like, what are the sort of takeaways I can have? And how can I modernize that? Because, and I'll give you a concrete example, we're actually, through LCA, our innovation agency, we're working on a really major AI product. And we noticed that a lot of the AI products are kind of look the same. And we started asking ourselves, well, why do these AI products all kind of look like chat? GPT it's because they're all kind of looking at each other for inspiration. And then I had brought up the example of ask Jeeves.com, which was an old search engine that had this mascot called Jeeves, and it was kind of this kitschy Butler, and he would give you the answers to your questions and I think through, and it became like, you know, it was an ultimate success, even though people don't remember it, and even though it had like 0.5% of market share, it still sold for like, you know, $2 billion or something. So it was a success. And, and it's like, what can you take from that and then implement that into today's? Like, what can we learn from that? So I think your insight is a correct one.
Brian [00:39:46]:
Yeah. Or even the whole idea of looking back at the year 2000, there was a huge graveyard of business ideas, innovative business ideas that were just way too far ahead of their time. The obvious one to talk about is, I think it was called Webvan, which is essentially grocery store delivery to your house. That was a very innovative idea that tried to get off the ground in 2000, but that didn't work because people didn't have mobile phones and there wasn't an Uber on already established in place. Well, fast forward 15 years, and that exact same business model is now called Instacart, which is, what, a ten plus billion dollar company that's out there. So you didn't have to come up with new ideas. You can just look at the graveyard ideas and ask, was this a good idea? But just timing what's wrong? That's another way to do it.
Greg Isenberg [00:40:41]:
All right, give me, Brian, while I have your brain, give me one more idea.
Brian [00:40:45]:
Sure. So I'm in the newsletter space. Like, I know many of the people that we know are, and I know that you have said, I believe that you think we're in a newsletter bubble where so many people have been incentivized to take their audiences that are on rented land and kind of going to, quote unquote, owned land in the newsletter space. And we've seen tools like Convertkit and Substack just make that so easy to do. And starting a newsletter and keeping it going for a couple of months is one thing. Maintaining it permanently and actually reaching out to those audiences again and again, that is that. That is a treadmill that I think a whole bunch of small creators do not want to be on for the long term, especially when ad rates are under pressure and dropping. So I think there will be increasing opportunities over the next six to nine months to look at other newsletters that are in your space and in your category that have kind of fizzled out, but have, you know, a couple thousand subscribers to them and to reach out to them and acquire their newsletters from them at some price as a way to kind of aggregate newsletters together.
Brian [00:42:02]:
I don't know about you, I am subscribed to probably 20 or 25 newsletters, if not more, many of them in my own category. And I just asked myself, how long can this keep going? And will the people behind these continue to run business models that are ad, especially those that are ad supported. I don't know. I could see consolidation coming in the next couple of months. So I think there'll be opportunity, if you have capital to do so.
Greg Isenberg [00:42:29]:
Yeah, I think the newsletters that are supporting themselves via ads, as soon as it gets more and more difficult to acquire real subscribers, which I think is happening.
Brian [00:42:45]:
Real subscribers is the key word.
Greg Isenberg [00:42:47]:
Exactly, exactly. And we can talk more about that. But real subscribers and ad dollars, there's just more supply, there's more inventory of newsletters. So obviously the price is going to go down. So I think a lot of people who are like, oh, yeah, I'm making five grand a month, or seven grand a month, or nine grand a month now I'm making three grand or one grand. They're just going to lose interest. And I think the ultimate winner of this whole gold rush for newsletters is going to be, when we look back on it, will have been the largest creators in the space who are buying tons of newsletter subs and have become like the king of their categories, king and queens of their categories. And those people, I do believe, will commend high ad rates.
Greg Isenberg [00:43:38]:
But I think it's a lot of the smaller to medium sized people that are going to struggle. And yes, I agree with you, there's a huge opportunity to be buying some of these up. I'm personally interested in buying some of these up. And so if you are selling, holler at your boy. It's just an interesting framework to look at. In general, it's a good framework to be like, if there's a bull market, like, what are the opportunities that people aren't seeing? And if there's a bear market, what is, you know, what are the opportunities that people aren't seeing? And that's just a framework for coming up with how I can actually build something that's going to be long term and lasting.
Brian [00:44:17]:
Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm in the newsletter business and I would welcome a bear market to it. One thing you said was, who are the ultimate winners? Well, the ultimate winners in any bull market is the picks and shovels providers. Right? So we've seen Convertkit, we've seen substack, we've seen many other newsletter operators themselves kind of being really leaning into that growth and helping to push that growth as much as possible. And they are making millions in revenue off of that just by being in the picks and shovels providers to that. But being in the newsletter space, I for sure would welcome a prolonged bear market in that industry to kind of wash out some of the weaker players. That would make it easier to reach subscribers in inboxes with, with, you know, newsletters that will persist. So, like you, I'm going to be on the hunt over the next twelve months for, for picking up newsletters that, that don't want to do it anymore in my category on the cheap.
Greg Isenberg [00:45:18]:
Yeah. And I think there'll be opportunities also for investors. So, like for example, maybe you find a newsletter that has 150,000 subs. You want to buy it, but you don't want to fork over whatever it costs to buy it. Maybe there's an opportunity that, wouldn't it be cool if you went to your community and said, hey, I want to buy this newsletter. Here's some of the open rates. Click through rates. What I think it can generate over the next two years, like I want to raise $500,000 from you and here's some perks that you're going to get.
Greg Isenberg [00:45:52]:
And I think I anticipate there being some interesting models like that that will emerge.
Brian [00:46:00]:
Yeah, you could also structure the deal with the newsletter in some way to say, look, just give me the subs, I'll continue to run it, and I'll give you some revenue split on this in perpetuity or for some amount of time. That would be a way to taking over a list with zero cash upfront. And then you're also sharing the risk that the open rate goes down or sponsorship ads kind of clean up while still making sure that your incentives are aligned with each other. So you're absolutely right. There are ways to structure deals that wouldn't require huge amounts of capital out of your pocket to take over lists.
Greg Isenberg [00:46:37]:
All right, Brian, give me one last idea.
Brian [00:46:40]:
So I've become a huge user and consumer of LinkedIn content for many years. I kind of ignored it as a platform. It was like so many people, it was Justin Welch that kind of turned me on to the idea of using LinkedIn. And when I think about LinkedIn has many characteristics that make it a great platform for creators to focus on. First and foremost, the competition there is still very low when compared to other platforms like Instagram or X or TikTok. They've become far more competitive. LinkedIn, by its very nature is less competitive. It's also a growing platform that reaches over a billion plus users and it continues to grow.
Brian [00:47:26]:
But the real overlook, think about that, is just the way users act on LinkedIn versus other platforms. When you're on LinkedIn, you're there thinking career, you're thinking business. You're thinking, how can I help myself? You're also thinking, my employer might be watching. So the number of trolls on LinkedIn is like one, 1000. It is on Instagram or on, on, on Twitter. But learning how to master LinkedIn, learning how to grow on it, learning how to create content for it, is certainly a unique skillset. Just like every platform, there's always a unique skill set that you have to develop for getting there. So I think there are big ghost writing opportunities to be taken care of on LinkedIn.
Brian [00:48:10]:
I think you can. One other opportunity to take care of or to think about is finding even small LinkedIn accounts, connecting people on LinkedIn to other accounts on LinkedIn to do one on one transactions. Some of the value of those potential transactions can be tens, hundreds, or even hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in value. So if you created an agency that, whose whole goal was to take a high profile account and connect them to other high profile accounts, like, if you were a, a chief marketing officer in one industry, and you're like, I just want to connect with chief information officers in my same industry. And you had whole accounts that were just developed around connecting one account to, say, five or ten other highly targeted but highly valuable accounts. You don't even have to get a big follower account to go on there. But if you can make that connection happen in some way, there could be huge value added for there. One idea there, Greg, as you know, as a podcast host, what if you help them create, help that account, just create a podcast.
Brian [00:49:23]:
And instead of reaching out to people to do sales calls, you said, would you be a guest on my podcast and allow them to create an hour long conversation with each other that had zero sales connotation to it, but allowed that relationship to start that alone as a service could lead to super high value sales and content down the road. So I think there's a big opportunity on LinkedIn for ghostwriters to connect, and that doesn't even involve growing the account to being, having huge followings.
Greg Isenberg [00:49:57]:
Yeah. And I'm starting to see more and more ghostwriting firms, like, focused on LinkedIn pop up. And I always try to think, okay, how do you. So I agree with, like, you know, goes back to the whale and barnacle. Like, the whale is LinkedIn. How do you become the barnacle? And I'm kind of like, the barnacle everyone's trying to be is the ghost writing agency. And I'm like, what is? And if you want to create a services business, what would be something that is more non obvious. And I think that LinkedIn is going to be more and more video focused over the next few years.
Greg Isenberg [00:50:35]:
And the reason why is because LinkedIn is literally like three or four years behind everyone always, you know, they're. They just.
Brian [00:50:43]:
That's fair.
Greg Isenberg [00:50:44]:
Yeah. You know, they're just always. They're always copying features, but it's always three or four years. So in three or four years, it's gonna just like how Instagram is video focused, and Twitter x now is video focused, and TikTok obviously is video focused. You know, I think LinkedIn will be video focused. So the question is, how can you reach out to LinkedIn creators or people who post? You know, I call them LinkedIn creators, but it's basically people who post on LinkedIn. And you say, I will help you create video content or repurpose your content to be video first, and this is what it's going to cost. I think that is an interesting opportunity.
Brian [00:51:25]:
Yep. Video is a completely different skill set. Doing video the right way has much higher technical barriers, but ten x, higher barriers than it does to just write a tweet or create some kind of quick little post on a text based platform. So I think you're right, there is an opportunity to help text based creators become video based creators. And I totally agree with you that over time, LinkedIn is going to gradually lean into that video content more, more and more.
Greg Isenberg [00:51:56]:
Brian, as expected, this has been a pleasure. If folks, folks, if you like Brian, you want him back, go comment on the YouTube. And if you're not, if you're not, if you're listening to this, just go to the YouTube and subscribe. It's my name, Greg Eisenberg Isenberg, and let folks know. You know, I think you did wonderfully, and you brought a lot of good energy and vibes to the table. Jimmy Buffett. Like, come on, we had everything. Where could folks follow your journey on the Internet?
Brian [00:52:34]:
I'm on all the major platforms, so, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, it's all YouTube. Whatever your platform is, it's all under my name, Brian Ferraldi, and my company website is Longtermmindset Co.
Greg Isenberg [00:52:50]:
I love it. All right, later, Brian. See ya.
Brian [00:52:53]:
See you, Greg.
