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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 14 — Emanuel Cinca from Stacked Marketer
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Louis Nicholls: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Send and Grow podcast. I'm your host, Louis Nicholls. In my day job at SparkLoop, I spend all my time helping the best newsletter operators and media brands in the world to grow their audiences. So I get to see firsthand what growth tactics, strategies, and channels actually work, which ones you should copy, and what mistakes you should avoid.
And now 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 so you can become really effective at growing and monetizing your email audience. Today we have our first returning guest to the podcast.
I'm joined by a Emanuel Cinca. Owner and Operator of Stacked Marketer Newsletter. Manu is one of the smartest newsletter operators I know, and when I heard that Stacked marketer had [00:01:00] recently acquired another newsletter, I knew we needed to get an episode in with Manu to learn all about the acquisition process and what happened behind the scenes.
Manu, it is great to have you here today. Why don't we start with a quick update on what's new at Stack Marketer?
Emanuel Cinca: Well, thankfully it's mostly good things, so we've grown a fair bit. We've grown our daily newsletter to over 55,000 active subscribers right now. The team has grown since a year ago. I think we, we.
Put together, like we are a team of 13 now. I think last time we talked maybe we were around half that, something like that. Approximately. We've also acquired our first newsletter, so we bought Psychology of Marketing recently. It's been a month ago, almost exactly now. So pretty interesting things and uh, as I was mentioning when we were chatting before, it's like.
Too many things to do. Too many ideas have to prioritize. Not sure yet which kind of things to put forward, like which things to do first. So it's kind of like a few good problems to have, but too many good ideas probably to pursue and just have to choose some of them.
Louis Nicholls: [00:02:00] I bet. Yeah, it's, it's a similar situation that I find myself in when I'm getting prepared to have you on the podcast or, or in an event with us, because there's so many different topics that we could talk about and I could ask you about, about newsletters.
You've been doing an amazing job recently of, of posting really useful insights and, and tips on, on Twitter and LinkedIn, so if anyone doesn't follow you there, they, they should do, because those are are really amazing. Some of the, the, the best, sort of, most insightful content I've seen around newsletters, I think from, from anyone really.
I think they're, they're awesome. Well, what I want to do today is, is to focus on one particular thing and what I think would be really interesting, something we haven't talked about before. Something that hasn't really been covered much in general. Is this acquisition of Psychology of Marketing that you did mm-hmm.
Of another newsletter. And I would love to explore why you did that, how you did that, what you do differently next time. What you would've done differently if you were the one who was selling. We don't need to get into all the gory details. We can, we can leave some secrets, but yeah, I, I think that would be super interesting.
So [00:03:00] maybe you can, you can kick his me off by telling me, We know what Stack Marketer is as a newsletter. If you don't, you should go back and listen to, to man who's previous podcast episode. Tell us quickly what psychology of marketing is, who was running it. A, a couple of details about that, and then let's get into how you approach the decision to, to acquire it.
Emanuel Cinca: Sure. So Psychology of Marketing is also a marketing newsletter. It's written by Abhi. You probably have seen him on Twitter as well. Really smart marketer, really cool guy as well. So he's been writing it since summer 2022. I've been a subscriber, kind of like got on my radar as a reader, as a subscriber. I think three, four months after he started it.
So towards late summer, early autumn, something like that. Then in December of 2022, we did a swap with him. So like, okay, so how people reacted to our newsletter, how our readers reacted to his newsletter. Uh, and then [00:04:00] for early this year we thought, you know, let's do more. And kind of to clarify like it's, uh, psychology of Marketing is a weekly newsletter and.
To compare it with Stack Marketers. Stack Marketer is a daily newsletter focused on news and, you know, insights from the marketing world. Psychology of Marketing is a weekly newsletter focused on providing each week one psychological effect that marketers might be interested in. So things like off the top of my mind, the cashless effect, like people are more likely to, you know, spend things that are not actually cash.
So if you. Think of casino chips, something like that. That would be a good example. Then there's, you know, there's probably so far 30 or so effects and there's one new one every week. Yeah. So it, it's very much the opposite of news if you think about it. Yeah. That's super
Louis Nicholls: interesting. Yeah. So just to quickly interrupt you there, what's the overlap do you think, in terms of like audience profile between Stack Marketer and Psychology of marketing?
Where are they different?
Emanuel Cinca: So I [00:05:00] think there's overlap in terms of interest. I think when we started providing some of our own content and what we call the Crew's Insights in Stock Marketer, that was very well received. Those are shorter, you know, insightful bits, but they're much shorter. They're not so detailed and they're not, you know, they're not, everything is, you know, scientific research where we link to academic research with sources and stuff like that.
It's more like, Hey, this is a popular thing. This is a thing you should consider. Some of them are like, you know, tested by us or tested by someone else. So it's a mix, but it's much shorter. Bite size almost you could say. Well, psychology of marketing is more in depth, but since those short ones were received so well, and then we also saw that our readers appreciated when we did a swap with Psychology of Marketing.
So there was a pretty good engagement for the newsletter. Then we thought, you know, we can maybe work more with them in the future. And then that's in January. I also started talking to Abi about, you know, how can we work more in the future? What? What would are his plans for psychology of [00:06:00] marketing? His plans, his goals for the newsletter.
If, you know, if it is comfortable to share his personal plans and goals as well to see how they mix together. And that's kind of how the conversation started.
Louis Nicholls: Got it. Okay. And I, I want to dig into that a lot more in a second, but firstly, When did you first start considering acquiring another newsletter?
Just in general, so not Psychology of Marketing, just when was the first time it was floated at? At Stag Marketer?
Emanuel Cinca: Probably mid of last year. Maybe a little bit later. It's hard to say. When it came into my mind, when it came into someone else's mind, when we did those on the team, bring it up together to talk about it.
But it, it did come up and it mostly, it's kind of like two reasons. Let's say the main reason it came, it comes up is because, like in our case, we've seen, okay, we can get some consistent revenue. There's some profit we can reinvest. How can we do best? Does it make sense to look at the newsletters that are, you know, a bit smaller than us, but still impactful would be, we'd be able to acquire [00:07:00] some of those, or you know, one, two of those, whatever.
It depends how we grow. And it's a question mark, so we didn't know for sure. It wasn't like, okay, we set money aside and we have to spend it. It was more like, if opportunity comes, we'll look into
Louis Nicholls: it. So what was the, the real kind of business need, I guess just to, to really concretize that where you thought, okay, we're trying to, to achieve this and acquiring a newsletter might be, The way for us to, to do that most efficiently?
Emanuel Cinca: Well, the main reason is growth, to be honest. Mm-hmm. Not to like go into growth talks only cuz like we said, there's only so many topics that can have good growth, but it is partially growth related. But to be fair, it's related to growth of subscribers, but also growth in revenue directly. So like business growth.
Uh, and we thought we can do that perhaps if a newsletter is big enough or has enough subscribers if they're engaged. But there's not enough monetization getting done there. There's not quite so much going on there. Uh, we thought that, you know, we can probably be better at monetizing because of the relationships we have with [00:08:00] sponsors, the experience we have there.
Perhaps also getting more engagement. Cuz I've noticed a lot of newsletters, especially if they're solo creators, they don't write the ads. It's, I understand why, like, it takes more time. It's a, it is. Way more effort to do that once you have to manage everything yourself. So we thought we can do that better.
And then growth in terms of subscribers, right? Like if someone likes Slack marketer, they might also like psychology of marketing. That's an assumption that we've made. And I think, you know, it's, it's a fair assumption and you can try it out without buying the whole newsletter, right? You can do swaps, you can buy ads, they can, you can offer some sort of deal that you can test that, so that, that's perfectly fine.
And then there's the third one, which I didn't really think about so much, and especially because Upscribe didn't exist and, but now it's like if you try to acquire one, uh, subscriber, someone signs up on your, on your website, there's tools probably could have done it customized by your own in a way, if we thought about it, but.
Now it's, you know, plug and play, subscribe, and then we can recommend other newsletters that we have directly. So right now if someone goes to our [00:09:00] website and they try to sign up the Stacked Marketer, they will also get recommended Psychology of Marketing. So it kind of helps our reach growth that way. And third, in terms of growth for subscribers.
I'm pretty sure that there will be some people who prefer the Stacked Marketer Daily Newsletter, and some people who just prefer the weekly Psychology of Marketing newsletter, but it still keeps them within our, you know, universe of content. And that kind of helps us reach more people. So the, the growth consideration was the biggest one.
Plus you can always say like, yeah, you can do something else with the money, perhaps you can try new things. But at the same time, what we've learned in the past five years is that if you do something good, like you would do something well, It's probably best to double down on that. So you cannot do more of that before you try too many new things where you're like, you know, they sound tempting, but you know, might not be so good about them.
So just to go with the times starting. Something that has to do with a tool like that plugs into a G P T and trying to do some things like that. Sounds tempting. Everyone is doing it or like people are having success with some of those [00:10:00] things, not for us at the moment.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, definitely. I totally understand that.
It's, it's so funny, it seems to me, or it just reminds me how much of of growth really and or just everything with the newsletter comes down to the ability to monetize it effectively. Just seems to me, with you being there, doing a really good job of monetizing Stack marketer with, with ads and other sources of revenue.
Once you get to that point, it means on the one hand, yes you can go out to other newsletters like the psychology of marketing and you can almost arbitrage the fact that you are better at monetizing than, than they were presumably to be able to say, look, I can afford to pay whatever your newsletter is worth and still make money on top of it, and bring those subscribers in to our newsletter to make more money through our inside of our newsletter.
But also, Because we're very good at selling ads and monetizing newsletters. We can bring some of our audience to your newsletter and we can monetize your audience more effectively because we're good at selling and, and writing the ads and everything like that. And it just means you grow faster, but [00:11:00] also you monetize your existing audience more effectively than as well.
So it's seems super smart to me.
Emanuel Cinca: Yeah. Yeah. Although there's still question marks all the time, like, can, does it really happen that way? Mm-hmm. Um, there's also downsides, upsides, but I think depending on, in, in yet, I think it's. It's a question of price risk. You know, like how much do you risk, how much do you really pay for it?
What, how does that affect your overall cash flow, your cash reserves? How quick are you to monetize? From our side so far, very happy with it, but I would say it, it's not some, it's not like a magical solution or anything. It's still, I think, There. There are downsides. Like it wasn't like something that we decided overnight, like, yeah, just do it, and whatever happens happens.
It's like, okay, we think that it's safe enough to do
Louis Nicholls: it. Well, walk me through that process. I think that's gonna be super interesting. From the first time that you thought, hang on, this cross promotion went pretty well. I wonder if that could be interesting. How long did it take to actually close and then.[00:12:00]
What were the steps involved?
Emanuel Cinca: So assume I forgot the exact date of when I first asked this, but I think. From the point of asking, uh, be like, Hey, what are your plans with psychology of marketing? Because at, at that point I was thinking maybe there's something useful. I mean, depends again, on both, it's two sides of things, right?
The two people. Mm-hmm. Or like two sides involved. More people involved in our case. But from that point, since asking him that to actually closing, It was three full months, so I would say not that long. If you think about it was from, let's say, 1st of January, roughly. It was a bit later. And then 31st of March, 1st of April, like that evening, we had a call where we went through the final details and had everything signed.
So that's essentially how things went. But it wasn't like super smooth. I think it could've been even faster. But you know, we talked a few like, what if this, what if that? I understand it from Abhi's side as well. He wanted to make sure that this is what he [00:13:00] wanted. So that's why I was like, yeah, you know, take your time, think about it, and then if this doesn't work, it's fine.
Like if it wouldn't have worked, it doesn't mean that I don't subscribe to psychology of marketing and I don't follow it. But yeah. That, that was kind of the length of the process.
Louis Nicholls: Definitely. And I guess we, we don't need to go into sort of the, the due diligence stuff that is more around just the normal sort of process of, of buying a business.
But for the newsletter specifically, what were you looking for in terms of signals that, or, or potential red flags that, that this would or wouldn't be? A good fit. On the newsletter side specifically,
Emanuel Cinca: we looked at first off engagement rate, so like open rate, click for rate. Those two were important to look at from our side, specifically creating any sort of segments of people who are dropping off, like disengaged and seeing how many of those would be disengaged by other standards that maybe not everyone has.
And then finally seeing engagement with ads, cuz the, the first way we would [00:14:00] monetize is advertising and then seeing what's, you know, how, how many clicks, what's the engagement that. The regular advertiser does, cuz based on that you can kind of estimate, you know, there's this range of CPC that you can probably charge roughly.
And then from there you can do some calculations and see does it make sense? Does it not make sense? How long does it take to pay off? Of course, wide range of unknowns still, but that, that's essentially it, those things. So making sure that the engagement rates are good. Checking for disengaged subscribers, making sure that there's not too many of them on the list.
And then seeing if people are okay with ads. How do they like ads, essentially? Are they super against them or do they click enough of the time on them? Those were the main
Louis Nicholls: things I, I guess my first question to that is, is sort of how closely were you looking at the. The similarities and the differences to Stack Marketer and your existing audience.
When you were doing that, when you were
Emanuel Cinca: evaluating them, uh, you mean how similar should the stats be? Are you thinking, not
Louis Nicholls: necessarily the stats, but [00:15:00] I I mean part of it sounds to me like part of the reason you were acquiring Psychology of Marketing rather than maybe some other newsletters is because there was domain overlap That's potentially audience overlap and presumably because.
A lot of your subscribers would like to subscribe to them and vice versa. And also you'd potentially be able to, to take some of the existing partnerships and relationships and sponsors you have and maybe move 'em over to psychology of marketing potentially and and things like that. So was that a factor that was in the back of your mind?
Were you looking at maybe other newsletters that could have been similar in saying, well, should we be acquiring psychology of marketing? Should we be looking into. Are there similar newsletters that might be more affordable or might be a better overlap with us? What were you thinking there?
Emanuel Cinca: So in terms of audience mix, I, I think it's just like, okay, it's an engaged audience that we've seen that.
It could like, like the psychology of marketing audience might like stack marketer and vice versa. So that was a factor for sure. And aside from that, the, the type of audience and the engagement rates look good enough that, [00:16:00] okay, we could be able to monetize this to a similar level, like to this level, like an assumption, like we made an assumption to whatever we could monetize.
Therefore it's worth paying X amount for it. And then working off of that. So it wasn't so much like going out there to say we need to spend the money on some newsletter. So we weren't really looking at other newsletters in that sense of like, if psychology of marketing is not a good fit, let's look at other three, four newsletters that are maybe similar.
But we definitely wanted something within the same, uh, marketing space, so that that was for sure. So we wouldn't go into something like Tech Newsletter. Even though there's some overlap or what else? Like finance business newsletter, again, could be some overlap. For example, we've seen good results when doing swaps with finance and business newsletters, but we would not be able to judge and just kind of evolve the content for such a newsletter.
So it definitely had to be marketing related newsletter and then not news. So to be fair, like it had to not be a news [00:17:00] focused newsletter. We have that already. It had to be something else except news and a good fit in terms of engagement type of audience that they have. So that that was the main factor and that's it kind of takes all the boxes there.
And then lastly, and probably like in the end, most importantly cuz that's the deal breaker, is the price that we talk about. Something that fits for both. So,
Louis Nicholls: And I guess one question that I have is I've, I've bought and sold businesses before and in most of those businesses, especially ones that I've looked at to, to purchase, often, it's a software business.
And I'm looking at that and I'm thinking, they could sell me their business today, and none of their customers would know or care that someone different owned it. As long as you kept doing the same thing, they wouldn't mind at all. With a newsletter, especially like Psychology of Marketing, it seems to me that that's very obviously written by one person.
And that a lot of people, I don't know to what extent they're signed up to hear from from Abhi specifically, but they do have a relationship with him and there's a reason they want to get his take on psychology of marketing [00:18:00] rather than there must be other people who write psychology of marketing style.
Well, newsletters about the psychology of marketing, right? So how did you factor that into the decision to purchase and how you figured out what the future would look like with. With Abhi or maybe potentially at some point, not with Abhi. I mean, obviously there may be some details you can't share, but how did that factor into the decision
Emanuel Cinca: basically?
Yeah, it, it was a factor, but essentially the main message there was like, we had to consider two ways and that was part of the discussion. One, does Abhi stay and continues to write it? If so, under what conditions or is it going to like quickly be without abi and then the hold us? Basically, we worked off of that and we had ideas for both.
I, I think the main consideration for us was that, We think that as long as it's done, you know, tastefully and we can pinpoint what people like about it, even if it's not written directly by Abhi but it's still with, you know, [00:19:00] a good tone. It's still providing the right type of content. I, I think it's still would be good, but for us, in, in our case, it doesn't matter cuz Abhi still the one writing it.
If there will be like a time in the future where he doesn't write it, the idea will be just to be very upfront and honest with everyone who's reading it. Like, Hey, there's this transitional period. Here's what's gonna happen. Who's gonna write it? Or like, is it gonna be another person? Is it gonna be, again, the whole group persona that we have, with Stacked marketer, we don't know sure yet, but we did consider that.
Can we write in a fun entertainment and entertaining enough tone while still educating the reader? And we thought that, yeah, we can probably do that. So we've had, we had ideas for both options and that's kind of like the same thing applies for the future. Like if or when the time comes that Abhi doesn't want to write it anymore, then we just do the same approach of like, you know, being perfectly honest with people that it's not the same person writing it, but trying to keep the essence [00:20:00] of
Louis Nicholls: it the same.
Awesome. Yeah, I, I suppose in that case it's, it's different from a real sort of personality driven newsletter where, I mean, there are probably, if any, people, maybe a handful who could successfully transition and take over James Clear's 3-2-1
Emanuel Cinca: newsletter, for example. Yeah. Like Tim Ferris and, uh, yeah, that, that, that's true.
So I, I think that that was a factor that, so for example, I can give an example of a newsletter we would probably like, just on this point, so, I think a lot of people know, uh, marketing examples, the newsletter. Harry is the writer of it. I think he does a great job, but I think his decision to switch it from marketing examples to Harry's newsletter or Harry's marketing examples would make it much harder to do such a transaction.
Psychology of marketing was called psychology of marketing. It wasn't Abhi's marketing psychology takes or something like that. And I think that was a factor that people still, like the first part was psychology of marketing. Of course [00:21:00] it's a great writer who knows what they're doing. So that was, you know, that, that, that helped the brand.
But it's the opposite where you have your full name first and then whatever you write about. So for example, I think that's the one newsletter that first comes to mind. Harry's marketing examples will probably not be able to do this switch as easily.
Louis Nicholls: Totally, totally. That makes, makes a lot of sense. I guess from there, a question I have is now that you've, I know we're only a month in, so.
There is a lot of unknowns and we, we may discover that some decisions were great and some decisions weren't quite as good as we we thought right now. But looking back at it, while it's still fresh in your mind, what are some things that you would do differently
Emanuel Cinca: next time? Hmm. I don't think we would do that many things differently, which is probably a good sign.
I cannot really think it, like so far, month one. It's pretty much as expected. And by that I don't mean that everything was like super perfect, but it's more like the things that we knew would be a little bit like, okay, you have to figure them out a little [00:22:00] bit. Those are exactly the ones that we have to figure out.
So mostly having to do with the sponsored post monetization side of things. So the content and especially the main content, the psychological effect, deliberate every week. That's. You know that that's something that Abhi handles well, so we don't have to really worry about that one. Of course, we do have now like shared document where we have the information about kind of what could come next, what's coming next, things like that to hope it doesn't happen, but like Abhi gets sick yet deliver there, there's, there's ways to jump into that and kind of make it work for the week.
But aside from that, just on the monetization part, which is. Again, exactly what we expected, that that's the part where we have to apply. What we've learned that wasn't going so well before, to give an exact example, is, you know, the media kit and more concretely the information about the audience. I think the way I would describe it is that the, the information about the audience that was scattered before was very much focused, kind of like a B2C type of newsletter.[00:23:00]
So, Gender, age, household income, I think very relevant for b2c, for b2b. Doesn't matter much. I don't remember anyone asking me. Like age, gender, income. Yes. But usually we put the company revenue or income or ad spend, whatever something like that is more relevant for for this. So, That part, like the media kit was with that information and now we've started running a survey to gather the information that we think is more, uh, useful for sponsors for advertisers.
With, you know, like I said, that that's the main comparison actually. So instead of gender, age, and household income, more like experience in the industry, position, seniority in the industry, revenue of the company, maybe ad spent, things like that. How about on the
Louis Nicholls: other side? If you were in someone's shoes, similar to Abby, who was selling a newsletter now.
What would you recommend as, as tips? We don't need to necessarily dig into sort of [00:24:00] what Abby did, did wrong or what you, you would've done differently, but what are some tips for, for someone who's considering selling their newsletter and wants to, to, you know, to, to do a really good job of it and also make as much money as possible from the, the sale,
Emanuel Cinca: I think it's really important to know why you want to sell it, cuz that was part of the conversation where it's maybe not so common, like, Not so much like you would have in a very, in a more distant conversation or like a distant relationship.
Cuz here it was, even though we only chatted a few times, like Abhi and I before this, I still was like, look, so if I were in your shoes, these are the things that I would be looking at. And this, you know, pros and cons, it's never gonna be perfect. And it's kind of like you said, and it's something that I mentioned to him.
Of course, my hope as the buyer is that I will make more money than I'm paying you as the seller. But what you have to think of also is like, If the price you're offered now as the seller, is it better in enough ways than what you can make on your own? So I know that there's like a, a [00:25:00] spread there, but that, that's the whole point.
That's why someone wants to buy the business. So that's what I told him then and now. As a seller, it again depends how much is that spread, right? Like if someone would say, for Stacked Marketer or the business, I will pay you one year's revenue. I would say no. Like there's no shot. Like why? Like it's not close enough.
I think the business is, you know, big enough and rolling without so many bottlenecks that one year's revenue is not relevant. It's like, it's not a life changing amount enough to, for the effort that's being put in and everything else. Like it's just gonna grow faster and it's gonna make that much.
Quickly enough that it doesn't matter. But if you are someone who doesn't want to work on their newsletter anymore, you probably want to sell at a lower price. So I think that's the main thing. Think of why you really want to sell it. And then if you want to get a higher price, yeah. You kind of have to think, yeah, what type of buyer you can get.
And I think for, let's say for the sake of the conversation, that it's a more, it's a smaller newsletter, [00:26:00] right? Let's say you're a solo creator that still has a newsletter. I think one factor there is realizing that your newsletter might not be a business, it might be a job. So then you're selling someone a job to do, and then the, your price will just be lower.
I think the main thing is quality of the audience. Quality of the audience, engagement with your newsletter, of course. And then what else is unique that they cannot replicate. Of course, if you have cash flow, that's great, but most businesses don't sell when they're making too much money. So I think a lot of creators, even though they would be, you know, on the smaller side compared to the morning brews and the hustles and stuff, would not sell if their newsletter is making good amount of money for them.
So in that case, if you're struggling with monetization, you kinda have to realize that you are competing a lot on, um, how much would it cost for the buyer to replicate what you're doing and how much, how much money, and how much time. And that's usually, you know, if you can be that much better, that much faster for them, that's how you can charge a bit more, I think.
Louis Nicholls: So I, I, [00:27:00] I guess now that the acquisition has, has gone through, you've had psychology of marketing for over a month at this point and nothing has burnt down. There have been no big, no big fires. What does the, the future hold for Stack Marketer and Psychology of Marketing? Are you planning on doing.
Further acquisitions in the in the future, what are you thinking?
Emanuel Cinca: Well, I think for now there's no plan to like acquire another newsletter. I think also because we want to see, you know, how well does it go with one rather than having two that are not completely like integrated and rumbling and everything.
So we first want to see does this one newsletter, are our assumptions correct with it? Are things going well? And then, you know, like six months later, three, six months later from now, towards the end of the year, maybe. I don't know. It depends on how things go, but as a long-term idea, I would probably still be open from what I know now.
I would definitely still be looking [00:28:00] around and be open to that. That's one thing I can say. And then other plans, it's just kind of figuring out. How to best support each other, like how to make the newsletter support each other. And I think one good thing that we've done, like from the beginning that was already planned, Is, you know, Upscribe from each other.
So like including, uh, as the, including as a pinned free recommendation. One of the, like, newsletter went to the other that's driving, you know, every user that comes to psychology of marketing gets also Stacked marketer as an option to opt in and vice versa. That helps, like, it is just makes so much, it makes things so much faster.
And then when you do swaps or something, or like add buys in other newsletters, again, like half of the people also opt into the other newsletter. So it's, it's really helping. Both of them grow like same ad spend helps both newsletters grow. So that thing that, that seems to be very good, and I think [00:29:00] it's probably good in the long term to have a portfolio of newsletters that can support each other.
This way, I think it can widen the funnel. That you have, so that means you can just get more people into your, all of your other newsletters. Of course, there's a cap. Not everyone would read every newsletter, but that, that's kind of what I see right now. That's, that's the assumption we'll see in, you know, as maybe next year in the next podcast, I have more information.
But yeah, that, that, that's the idea at least.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah. Awesome. I mean, you, you also started a, another newsletter, right?
Emanuel Cinca: Yeah, so at the same time, because it, it's funny cuz we said like, yeah, it probably makes sense to have another newsletter. And at the same time as talking about acquiring psychology of marketing, we had another idea.
Although, to be fair, the newsletter is not monetized directly right now. So the newsletter is called Tactics. And essentially what we do there is we extract some of the premium content that we write for our membership and we provide it in a free newsletter for everyone to read. Like we try to extract actionable stuff that you can, uh, go through.
And then the hope is that by, [00:30:00] you know, showing this actionable thing you might be interested in, you know, diving deeper into the. Original content into the source content and subscribe to our membership area. So it started with this idea. It's been, yeah, around a month that we start like, actually it's two weeks.
Yeah, two weeks and a bit. So we also started that one, and it's also included in the whole Upscribe area. But so far, I don't know if it's getting any, Of its own subscribers, right? I don't know. I don't know if, IF tactics, that's what it's called is if it's pooling new subscribers in. But I know some people will go to psychology of marketing because what it is and stack marketer for what it is.
But of course, they also get shown for both sides again. They also get shown, uh, the Tactics newsletter. And, you know, in two weeks we have 2000 subscribers on that with zero acquisition costs or anything like that. So it helps a lot to kickstart another newsletter and seeing the feedback early days, but so far so good on the feedback with that one.
But yeah, there's no ads in it, so [00:31:00] it's a, well, like there's ads for our membership area. Essentially it's promoting our own products for now. Hopefully it goes well that that's kind of our goal there to just make the content from our membership area more popular. What I find
Louis Nicholls: really interesting about the approach that you are taking now with tactics and with psychology of marketing, is you are building an expanding from your existing newsletter and your existing audience into.
The same audience or the same topics sphere, really, you know, it's, they're tangential and expanding on that in different ways. Whereas what you're not doing is what we see quite commonly when it comes to acquisitions and new, new newsletters being launched, which is more, well, we have stacked marketer. We know how to sell.
We know how to write a daily news newsletter. So next we're going to launch Stack to ai. And we're going to find a writer for that. Mm-hmm. Next we're launching Stack, HR, stacked, tech stacked, whatever the next one would be. Did you ever consider doing that and sort of like playbook-tizing it?
Emanuel Cinca: Yeah, [00:32:00] briefly.
But, but not, not, not so much. I, I think I, I would say there's a good reason for that and I hope I'm right about it, cuz that's why we did. So essentially the path you're describing is what Morning Brew has done. I'm not sure if it's still exactly what you're doing now, but if you look at, you know, Two years ago, it would be exactly this like three, four years ago.
Till two, three years ago, it was exactly that, at least till the, they were acquired by insiders. So the main reason we thought to not do this is essentially the way our team is structured, what our strengths are, and what we think our strengths are, and that's that. Everyone on the team is actually a marketer in one way or another.
Either we are still doing active marketing or we have done act like marketing, copywriting, seo, whatever for many years. And actually it's like still 90% we're still doing it cuz everyone who's on the team can still have a side gig and you know, side jobs, let's call them. So everyone's still getting their hands on marketing.
[00:33:00] Uh, and that's, that's essentially kind of answering the question, like, how can we do. Stacked ai. Okay. That's probably a topic where AI for marketing can fit. We actually did some content on that topic, but if you go like hr, no Idea Health, no idea IT, no idea. Like it, it kind of makes sense. I think it makes more sense if you start with a more mainstream newsletter.
So if you look at Morning Brew Business Finance, they, they moved quite a bit more towards broader news still, you know, still with a good. Tangent with business, but I would say, I would still call it like a mainstream news source. And then there you have people reading everything and then you can funnel them into, you know, if they're IT professionals, if they are retail professionals, marketing, et cetera, et cetera.
So I, I think that makes sense there. And also the type of content team they had, they moved from. Curation towards hiring journalists who would do original reporting and things like that. While for us, [00:34:00] it's kind of the opposite. We're moving, instead of saying like, we want to be the new ad week and ad age, we're moving towards more, like we want to go deeper and get, you know, more of our own content, more of our own educational stuff out there in a way that's, you know, Better than, you know, your favorite guru on YouTube or anything like that.
So like essentially trying to be practical, affordable on everything that has to do with insightful marketing content. Of course the news will always stay a big part of it, cuz. You have to know what's going on. Like things change pretty quickly. Like one year ago, there was maybe a bit more than a year ago, there was no Apple mail privacy, right?
iOS 14.5, iOS 15 yadadada, all of those things, like they change what you can do with your marketing campaigns really quickly. So it's important to know the news, but aside from that, like we don't want to go into more kind of. He said, she said type of reporting. Yeah. We want to go deeper into the marketing content that we can, uh, we know we can create.
And we've seen that our [00:35:00] readers like that, so we kind of also are going based off of that. So, Popular links click in our newsletter usually involve the annual report where we tell them what we've done to grow and things that we've done as a business. So that's a great one. And then things like, you know, a lot of reports, insights, worksheets, cheat sheets, whatever you want to call them.
Those sort of more insightful things, those tend to do the best when it comes to engagement, whether they're free, whether they're sponsored. They do the best. Therefore, it's, it kind of makes sense that providing content like that should be the way to go forward. But yeah, while trying to solve to do, and also like the monetization side of things also has that aspect.
The sponsors that want to reach marketing professionals, they that want to reach more marketing professionals. We have them already, but we don't have sponsors who want to reach HR professionals. So it, it just seems that this is the better path for us, at [00:36:00] least at our scale.
Louis Nicholls: Awesome. Well, that makes sense to me.
Great, Manu. What questions should I have asked you? Is there any question I should have asked? I. About this topic? Whew.
Emanuel Cinca: Hmm. I mean, I guess a question that some people asked is like, well, okay, but how much did you pay for it? Like I think that's the more common way, and I think everyone listening is probably thinking about that, but unfortunately, like for everyone who's curious, I think it's only fair to just answer the same way I've answered otherwise as well.
We're not trying to keep it a secret or anything, but we said Abhi. You can decide if and when you want to tell anyone what the deal is, we're fine. Either way. Don't put too much pressure on him. I think it's normal that these things stay private, but if not, if both of us don't agree at the same time, we basically decided to not share the details here.
So, yeah, that's, that's kind of it. Yeah, totally.
Louis Nicholls: Well, if someone wants to hit you up Manu for something other than finding that out, where can they go and find you? I know people should be following you on Twitter and LinkedIn because I think you are, you are [00:37:00] my easily my top three, maybe my top one of people who are writing really interesting stuff about newsletters at the moment.
So, Everyone should go and give you a follow there, but where else can they, they find you and
Emanuel Cinca: follow along. Those are the two main areas. So I'm only active on Twitter and LinkedIn, and actually I've only been active for the past, you know, two and a half, three months or something like that. There. I'll still be active.
Maybe I won't post it literally daily, but I'm gonna post a few times a week and I'll be around for, you know, dms replies and stuff like that. But yeah. Twitter @ emanuelcinca and LinkedIn. Same first, last name, not nothing too hard to find, I think. But those are the two best places to find me or, uh, you know, um, hit me up asking any questions.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah. And we'll put those in the show notes as well, of course, so people can, can find you nice and easy. Perfect. Well, Manuel, thank you so much for taking the time to join us again today. We're gonna have to have you back on very soon for a. A whole host of other stuff, but we'll, we'll give you at least a, a couple of weeks break now without having to, to spend time with me for a
Emanuel Cinca: while.
Awesome. Thanks for [00:38:00] having me.
Louis Nicholls: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Send and Grow podcast. If you liked what you heard, here are three quick ways that you can show your support. Number one, leave us a five star rating or review in the podcast app of your choice. Number two, email or dm me with some feedback with your questions.
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