$500k/year AUTOMATED local newsletter owner reveals all...

How much money can you make with a local newsletter?

Matt Moody's Salina 311 makes $500k/year with savvy content automations and technology choices.

In this interview, Matt breaks down his technical stack, how Salina311 became Saline County's newspaper of record, and his thoughts on the future of local media.

Matt's socials
🕊️ Twitter/X:  https://x.com/matmoody
💼 Newspaper/newsletter:  https://salina311.com
🤙 SaaS: https://fractalsnetwork.com

Creators and Guests

Host

Aniket Panjwani

Senior ML Ops Engineer working in fin tech with expertise in generative AI, fraud detection, causal inference, and writing production-level Scala and Python data and model monitoring pipelines.

What is Content Quant?

At Content Quant, we translate messy business problems into actionable AI strategy.
Hosted by economist and MLOps engineer Aniket Panjwani, PhD Economics.

Aniket Panjwani:
[0:00] Today on ContentQuant, I interview Matt Moody, the owner and founder of Salina 311, a newsletter and newspaper in Salina, Kansas. Salina 311 is very interesting because it's almost fully automated on its content operations. And we get into the details of the technical stack that Matt uses, the parts of his content operations that can be automated and what can't be automated. And we also talk about monetization and in particular, how he was able to become the newspaper of record for Saline County, which got him close to an additional $100,000 in revenue every year. So I think you guys are really going to enjoy this, whether you're on the automation side, thinking about how can I add value to some business in the media space, or if you're on the local newsletter side and want to think about, look, how can I make more money with my local newsletter? And so, um, yeah, let's get right into it. Matt, thanks for coming on today.

Matt Moody:
[1:03] Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:05] So you are the notorious founder of Selena 311. Uh, can you tell us a little bit about how it all got started?

Matt Moody:
[1:18] Um yeah i mean it was kind of uh i mean it started a long time ago it's you know i started in 2021 um and it's not just me i do have like i have a i have a partner that's in salina because i don't live there i'm from there originally um and uh goes back even further than that really um i back in 2011 i started what was called the salina post and they do pronounce it salina And yeah, it's wrong, but that's how they pronounce it.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:47] I see.

Matt Moody:
[1:48] I grew up there and yeah, I never knew that it was pronounced. It took a long time before I realized that's not, we don't pronounce it the right way. But anyway, I started a local news network. Obviously, there was no newsletter back then. It was just a WordPress site. Started that and then started two other ones and then sold that to a radio group. Worked for them for a long time and then i started a software a sas company went through the whole you know raised money it got acquired um and a little bit before that one got acquired i you know i'd been working in sas and and ai sas at the time and um really on a weekend i was kind of like i'm gonna do a little side project for fun and um remembered kind of like what i had done previously and felt like, hey, I could probably apply a little bit of what I've been doing to that old business. And so just started up on a weekend. Really liked ghost and so i'm like hey you know i'm gonna try to use ghost in this project i like their api this could work um and sure enough we got a bunch of people that just signed up the first weekend we started putting stuff out

Matt Moody:
[3:04] and so it kind of took off from there how.

Aniket Panjwani:
[3:07] Did you get those um initial signups

Matt Moody:
[3:10] Really we just shared stuff on facebook um and then you know what we did is we put everything behind the free you got to subscribe and and log in it was a free subscription there was no there was no paid at the time um and then we just put out a bunch of stories and shared on facebook and so just the natural kind of like our our kind of networks that we had at the time and.

Aniket Panjwani:
[3:33] Uh when you started using ghost did you use it with the intention of this future automation in mind or was it more just like this looks cool

Matt Moody:
[3:45] It was all about the automation it was like hey i think i could do what we had done and kind of what i'd done years ago and i'm like i think 90 of that maybe more we should just automate it and see what else we could automate because i thought hey it could be done a lot better now than when i had done it previously i had no intent on like the newsletter part of it that was like an afterthought that was something that we kind of came to later than we came to later. It was just, hey, I think I can do what I used to do in a lot more efficient way.

Aniket Panjwani:
[4:17] So I guess you didn't even have this newsletter in mind initially. Would you say that there's a lot of media publications then that are under-utilizing newsletters, do you think? Like if, it seems like an important part of your business right now.

Matt Moody:
[4:33] Oh, it's, yeah, I would say the most important part. Yeah, no, they're just not paying attention. And I think that that's, When you kind of get into the weeds, then you forget about and you don't look at some of the other things that are going on and realize like, hey, they could have probably had these networks. I'm not going to be too humble about it. We've crushed the competition over there. And I think that some of them are still around, but they still don't quite realize that, hey, okay, you can get to a story before us and it doesn't matter because we'll just send it out to everybody. And it can be five hours, six hours later. It doesn't matter because you're waiting around for them to come in, whereas we're just going to go directly to them.

Aniket Panjwani:
[5:17] Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. So one thing a lot of people, myself and also on Reddit, are curious about are what are the sources of your stories?

Matt Moody:
[5:32] I should say a lot of it is not necessarily completely automated. Okay. So there's a lot of content that isn't um but the like the court cases i found through the state i was able to get like court cases for the day state has a website for all the counties we just scrape that um the public meetings all the public meetings were just it either they're on youtube um which a good chunk of them and in salina they're they're almost all on youtube so we just you know like you basically the same thing that you built. We just run that over the top of it. We get the transcript out of it and we turn those into stories. The weather, obviously easy to automate. The obituaries, easy to automate. Some of our daily content is all automated. Mm-hmm. And then the police briefings, those are semi-automated. So sometimes we're into a media list and they email that out. So I have another one that goes through using the Gmail API and we have identifying that. And so then it loads it into drafts and ghosts, which I still proof them and

Matt Moody:
[6:44] make sure because there's obviously still a lot of mistakes that can be made.

Aniket Panjwani:
[6:47] So what are, what are you proofing for and proofing against when you're proofing automated content?

Matt Moody:
[6:55] Yeah. Biggest thing is, um, well, in like the public meetings, the hardest thing is names. Um, so the transcripts are really bad at names. That's probably the most, that's probably the number one is like, is anytime anybody, uh, so names and anytime anybody speaks, we don't necessarily know, you know, which, if If it's a board, you don't know which one's actually speaking. There's no way to identify that in the transcript. So that one, we have to kind of go in and say, oh, no. Because it'll guess. A lot of ours right now, and we use Claude for ours, and it will actually pull up old commissioners' names from like a decade ago and assign that to them. And so obviously I'm working on ways to fix that because I think that's solvable.

Aniket Panjwani:
[7:44] And when you say you're using Claude, are you using Anthropic models also to transcribe the YouTube videos?

Matt Moody:
[7:53] Yes.

Aniket Panjwani:
[7:54] Hmm. Interesting.

Matt Moody:
[7:55] No, no, no, no. So I'll get, so there's two, there's sort of like two ways. Like, um, if the transcript is available, then right now we're just using the YouTube, like I just basically get the transcript from YouTube, um, and then hand that off to, to Claude.

Aniket Panjwani:
[8:11] Got it. If the transcript is not available, then what do you do?

Matt Moody:
[8:14] Yeah, then what we've typically done, because we have like, so now that we started to expand, some of these other counties, they don't even have, like the county that I live in right now, they don't do anything on video. So now I'm just sending somebody over with Otter, and I just have them record

Matt Moody:
[8:30] it, and then we just get the transcript from there. so.

Aniket Panjwani:
[8:33] What are the things that are outstanding that are not being automated so you said there's parts of the um police reports and and what else is there

Matt Moody:
[8:44] Yeah yeah so then sometimes the police reports then there's a they have a briefing with the media where they'll bring in the media and so obviously like we have to send somebody over we can't we can't you know access that via video We have that. We have somebody that goes over the photography. That's one big factor. So whenever anybody asks, how do we get so many subscribers? A lot of it is the photography that we do. So we have a group of local. They live in the community of photographers. We have a Slack group with them. We have it all organized. Largely, that's why we went down the road of an events calendar. We needed a place to organize all of those. Um, and then what we did is then every time they load a photo gallery of any event, it's pretty easy to realize that everybody wants a photo of themselves, their kids, their friends, they'll go look at that. When we first started doing it, it was all under the free, like you just have to subscribe. And then eventually with, especially with sporting events, then we added those under our paid subscription. So that's how we got a lot of the digital paid subscribers was that we do these photo galleries. And that kind of became what we were really sort of like one of the big things that we were known for originally was that we would do these photo galleries.

Matt Moody:
[9:58] Every time we do those, then it's a deluge of subscribers.

Aniket Panjwani:
[10:03] Yeah, it makes sense. It's on my website. I use this database of local newsletters as a lead magnet because you can see it. But then if you want to see the details, you have to give me your email. And so what makes sense in a local context? Well, you want to see the photos of the events you just went to. How does your relationship work with the photographers? Are they paid? Is it for publicity for them? And how for the automated content, there are usually photos there. So are those photos that one of these photographers has taken? How are you getting licensing rights for those photos?

Matt Moody:
[10:46] We paid them. We paid them since the beginning. We kind of look at them as, I mean, again, they're the lead magnet. They're going to drive in a lot of, that's content that we'll get subscribers on that for years. I mean, we can see like, you know, there was a year ago, somebody realized, oh, you know, oh, my kid was in that. I didn't see it. And they're like, they hear about it somehow and they'll go sign up. So, yeah, that's one of the biggest tricks, I think, is getting some of that non-AI content. I think it's kind of a blend. We automate the stuff that's low-hanging fruit that you can, and then we pay...

Matt Moody:
[11:21] Um essentially the the contract photography uh we have like six or seven of them um and they post that all that's all done manually they do all that work manually there's there is zero automation that goes into the photography so we pay for all of those we own all of those photos as part of the contract that we have with them um and then some of the other photos uh like we use unsplash i guess we do have a subscription to you know iStock and stuff like.

Aniket Panjwani:
[11:51] That is our facebook ads part of your growth strategy

Matt Moody:
[11:54] Or is.

Aniket Panjwani:
[11:55] It all organic

Matt Moody:
[11:56] It's it's it's largely organic the only other thing that we did on facebook was that i bought the two largest groups that were serving the community in different ways there was like a police scanner page i bought that one eventually we just turned that into we don't even really do all that much on them other than it just puts our name on it Yeah. And it gave us the ability to kind of go, oh, we don't, you know, because my strategy when I started the previous news, like local network, was it was all Facebook. And these old radio groups, they didn't, they weren't on it at the time. They didn't mess around with it. And so we just out, you know, we outmaneuvered them through using social back then.

Matt Moody:
[12:41] But, you know, towards the end, I realized, okay, they, you know, Facebook at the time, you shared it out. And almost everybody that was, you know, a follower got to see it. And then obviously they turned that dial and got to pay the, you know, I was like, hey, we're not going to do that again. It isn't going to work. And so I was, well, let's just go find these pages. Then when we really need to share something on there, when it's really big and it's really kind of like in that niche, then it just gives us another angle. And it's a lot better than us having to mess around with creating a Facebook page and doing Facebook ads. I've never really got the, and I know that's like the strategy. It seems like in local newsletters, I've never really understood that because it seems to me like it's a lot of like landing page and hey, come in and sign up. And I figure, yeah, you're probably getting people to convert, but you're not actually giving them what they're there for. And so I'm like, are they actually going to stay once you start giving them that? I always felt like that was a good way to convert, but not necessarily to retain them. And my SaaS company was in AI for retention. So I kind of always pay attention to the longer term as opposed to just get them to convert when it's free. They're not like paying. So I've never kind of understood the logic behind that.

Aniket Panjwani:
[14:01] Got a ton of questions. I'm actually going to pull up a Google Doc so I can

Aniket Panjwani:
[14:05] start writing things down and not forget while you're speaking. Um, the first one is about your previous company, uh, retention engine. What was retention engine?

Matt Moody:
[14:22] Yeah. Yeah. Um, so retention, so retention agent was the product, the, one of the products we built, the company is called Bellwether and, um, the, the real kind of, uh, concept I got into customer retention was the origin for Bellwether. And I started messing around with reinforcement learning. Um, and one of the products that we built was, um.

Matt Moody:
[14:45] We were, you know, we were kind of going into retention and, you know, one of the things that, but like low lying fruit was the the cancel flow um and figuring out okay well if you use that if you kind of know and understand what is causing somebody to end a you know business relationship um and and what doesn't or you know what can work or what doesn't work then then it also helps you optimize earlier in the life cycle of a customer and so we built a cancellation flow that used a reinforcement learning model to optimize that cancel flow in order to like retain the customer so everybody's experienced it now there weren't a lot of them back when we first started this there were very few um but essentially like i asked that first question you know why do you want to cancel uh second then it would um it it would start to it um you know so a lot of times you could a b test where you go in and say oh how about this well that seemed kind of silly and so instead we used a reinforcement learning model that would take in the customer data and then what was wrong, why they wanted to cancel their subscription, combine all of that, and then optimize the offer to retain them.

Matt Moody:
[16:05] And so we did that. It would save almost 30% of the subscribers. And so we sold that into the Shopify subscription platform. Space i.

Aniket Panjwani:
[16:19] See i see i see um could you describe a bit your prior technical background um many people are interested in automating content but uh something i'm curious about and what i think others are curious about is like what what do you need to know to do what you did so what what was your technical background

Matt Moody:
[16:44] Yeah my technical background is in software development and machine learning um self-taught i have no degree um i've just been doing it i'm pretty old at this point so i've been doing it a really long time yeah and um yeah that's it i doubt to be able to pull off a lot of this stuff anymore man i don't i don't know that my technical background helps me a whole hell of a lot. I think there's probably, you know, I may not necessarily pay attention to some of it anymore, but I just kind of know some stuff that I don't, you know, necessarily, you know, think about all that often, but I don't necessarily need that much. I've been telling a lot of people, I'm like, hey, there's a lot of stuff that you could do in your normal work that you shouldn't be doing, you know, whether or not your boss necessarily knows it or not, but you could automate a lot of that stuff and probably make your day a hell of a lot easier. And you don't really need i mean if you have a little bit of a python background and to be able to just connect things then and hell anymore you don't even really need that um jump into cloud code or cursor and you can you can figure your well yeah you can get up a lot of stuff or you can end up with something pretty helpful 100.

Aniket Panjwani:
[18:04] Percent um or the automations that you make

Matt Moody:
[18:08] Or selena311.

Aniket Panjwani:
[18:10] What is your technical stack

Matt Moody:
[18:14] Um, so it's all, we're, everything's Python. Um, and then we run everything on digital ocean.

Aniket Panjwani:
[18:21] Okay. So you have, um, a server on which these Python jobs are running by cron or some, uh, orchestration tool. Yeah. And, uh, they just write out maybe intermediate things. Just keep them on the server and everything goes into ghost so it's just from python to ghost is that the pipeline or are there other pieces to it

Matt Moody:
[18:52] The uh yeah that's that's primarily how everything works and obviously now that we're we're kind of brand you know kind of there were there there were other things that i ended up having to build you know in order to work with a ghost and so that's part of the reason why i started building my own um kind of similarly similarly to kind of what you're doing um i'm like i'm gonna start building my own thing and i'm why there's just more flexibility that i kind of need and so um yeah at at first everything just got pumped into ghost and then you know recently we started building out fractals um and that one makes everything a little bit easier but that's that's a that's a django application um running with uh, I hate front-end frameworks, and so I just use HTMX with Bingo. And I'm like, all right, this is going to help me get where I need to go for an early product. I went down the other road when I built Retention Engine and spent all this time doing everything the way that everybody would recommend you do. And I'm like, yeah, I just wasted a lot of time and money doing that. And I'm like, I can do this way more efficiently. And there's some things that are going to be a little bit more janky,

Matt Moody:
[20:10] but i don't know that it necessarily matters a lot much.

Aniket Panjwani:
[20:12] Yeah makes sense if it gets the job done i don't think uh users are going to care oh one so uh two questions i have there first

Matt Moody:
[20:22] Um are.

Aniket Panjwani:
[20:23] You the only developer of fractals okay and um could you describe your development workflow are you using cloud code or cursor for fractals do you use git like just tell us about how you work yeah

Matt Moody:
[20:40] Uh use just using um cursor right now um it's been built 100 with cursor um then get and then get connected to digital ocean um and yeah it's pretty pretty easy um pretty straightforward and i try to keep it a little bit more simple in the past i did all kinds of crazy stuff and i'm like i'm not doing that again yeah i'm gonna build this and i think um once we get a little bit further down the road i'm also you know i've contemplated going down the the vc route again um i did that the last time said i wouldn't do it again um and i don't you know i'm in a different position now but um you know i'm i don't want to say i would never do that but um last.

Aniket Panjwani:
[21:29] Time was with the retention engine you went on the

Matt Moody:
[21:33] Vc route yeah with ball weather we raised a three million seed round went through

Matt Moody:
[21:37] tech stars um did all did all of that stuff what.

Aniket Panjwani:
[21:43] What were the pros and cons of going down the vc route with your previous startup

Matt Moody:
[21:49] Well i think it's the same with any time that you're looking at vc it's like okay you're gonna be able to do everything a lot faster um you're gonna do a lot faster um the problems are you well there's some differences It's not necessarily problems, but the problems are that now you're on somebody else's timeline. You're not on your own timeline. And there's a lot more, even though you're a founder, you're not the only decision maker. You could try that. And if everything goes well, then that probably will work. But as soon as you start running into hiccups, then that's when you realize you understand really quickly the problems that can occur when you go down that route. Now, the other reason that I don't know that it's necessary right now is I built all of that myself. And I built all of it in... Oh, I mean, fractals itself, uh, when like I built the event calendar and a week, um, actually I don't think it took that long until like two days and then all the rest of that's been built in the last 30 days.

Aniket Panjwani:
[22:57] How long do you think it would take somebody who doesn't know how to code to make fractals or the events calendar?

Matt Moody:
[23:08] Um i think the biggest problem is still like getting it you know getting it into production, that part i've not used anything else to try to do that but it seems like you you probably need to know a little bit about that or you're gonna just you're gonna have you might be able to pull it off but you're probably gonna have headaches um yeah because as soon as you know a migration runs incorrectly and you just jacked everything up hope you don't have that many subscribers um because you're gonna lose you're gonna lose whatever you you gathered so i think that's probably the biggest hurdle right now in in actually like deploying it or you know getting something like that building it i mean building and running on your you know on your computer uh your logo is going to be easy um yeah somebody would be able to build it um maybe faster than me i have a lot of little irons in the fire and so you know if i was only doing that then yeah you could you could probably knock something out like that in a few days yeah.

Aniket Panjwani:
[24:10] No i uh i generally agree with that i think uh databases and deployment are big problems for like the vibe coder crowd

Matt Moody:
[24:22] Yes yeah and i'm sure that some you know there's going to be something that like walks you through, that i mean i'm sure i'm fond of digital ocean i'm guessing that they probably have something that's going to make it even easier and something to where yeah if you're a vibe coder you can knock this out and get it deployed um i think you're probably still going to have problems um at some point and as you know some of those problems aren't easy to rectify yeah yeah yeah.

Aniket Panjwani:
[24:49] Um, one more question on, uh, your technical architecture. So, uh, fractals is a software that you're providing as a service to other media operators. Is each instance running on a separate VPS or is the whole thing multi-tenant running on your single VPS?

Matt Moody:
[25:18] It's it's single tenant got.

Aniket Panjwani:
[25:20] It yeah awesome um and i should give you the opportunity to say a little bit about what fractals is so let's

Matt Moody:
[25:28] Well yeah and and largely what i would also say is like we have so we have three other or like organizations that are outside of you know that i that are using fractals um but i kind of built it just to scratch my own itch i was like all right it's time for us to replicate and move horizontally and so we started opening up other markets we just just started them um so they're they're pretty fresh um but that was kind of like the the the original idea was like hey all right this we want to be able to replicate the model that we built in salina because obviously we're doing close to half a mil um and i'm like all right well now it's time to scale and it's not you know going to be vertical it's going to be horizontal and we'll start replicating it in other communities. Now it comes with all kinds of other hurdles, but you know, that's essentially what it is. Like, all right, we're going to use and we're going to use this to replicate our model ourselves in multiple markets. And then we're also going to, you know, hopefully everything looks great and everybody else wants to use it. And so then that becomes its own SaaS again. Obviously, i'd you know i think once you've gone down that road then it always

Matt Moody:
[26:42] sticks it's like hey somebody else might want to use this too.

Aniket Panjwani:
[26:45] Yeah yeah yeah are the three or four um in other markets like sass clients or are they kind of equity partners with you like what is your with them yeah

Matt Moody:
[27:01] They're sass sass clients.

Aniket Panjwani:
[27:02] Okay yeah that's awesome yeah um

Matt Moody:
[27:07] I mean, I do want to, you know, that's, you know, I think there's a lot of discussion in the local newsletter space and like once you're successful online, then, you know, I think there's, okay, partnering up with other people is one way to scale it. There's, you know, starting your own in other communities and then they're just, you know, buying other ones.

Aniket Panjwani:
[27:27] And so, you know,

Matt Moody:
[27:28] We've kind of like discussed a lot of, a lot of those things. Um and yeah i mean the opportunity is just massive right now so i think there's a lot of different there's and there's a lot of hurdles to kind of jump over and figure out what the best way to go about is.

Aniket Panjwani:
[27:44] Yeah 100 uh one topic we haven't touched yet which i want to get to is costs and revenue because a lot of your reddit haters are very skeptical of these numbers and i want to give you an opportunity to shed light on some of them. I believe them. Like they, they make perfect sense, but some people on there just can't do math. So yeah, let's, let's start with subscription revenue. So you have a print edition and a digital edition. So how does that break down between the two?

Matt Moody:
[28:17] Yeah. So the majority of the revenue comes to the paper because our paper is not cheap. Like it's not cheap. I mean, you can go in there and it costs $300 a year if you want, if you want the so we print twice a week um and the we print on a wednesday we print on sunday if you want a year subscription to that that's three hundred dollars i like the opposite of most newspapers that are like you can subscribe for a year and get you know for twelve dollars because most of them are like they're trying to sell the ads um i'm like oh i'm not worried about the ads i'm gonna sell you want a newspaper um, then you're going to pay. I mean, that's what costs. So I'm not going to go down that road. It seemed like a mistake that the newspapers made by doing that years and years ago when their advertising revenues were insanely high. And so we just said, all right, ours is going to be really expensive.

Aniket Panjwani:
[29:07] You don't, you don't sell ads in the print newspaper.

Matt Moody:
[29:11] No, we do, but we actually just tossed there. They're actually just a value ad for everybody that does digital ads with us.

Aniket Panjwani:
[29:17] I see. I see. I see.

Matt Moody:
[29:19] And now we will, i guess i should say we do um so there's two as they're paid for in the newspaper so we'll do like specialty ones where they just want they don't want anything digital there are some businesses that do that and just about their end clientele are not digital they're mostly elderly um and that's the large number of the subscribers that we have for the print is i mean it's obvious like they kind of like want they're not messing around phones or they just want print newspaper like they used to have um and so we have those that you know if they have a big ad we'll sell those like full page and stuff like that and then the legal notices um which we can talk about but that that's the other part that's definitely paid in in the in the newspaper and really the other reason we even still continue to print the newspaper because it's not um i guess i shouldn't necessarily say that because we are um contemplating some other ways to make the print do.

Aniket Panjwani:
[30:18] You um do you make money on the print newspaper separately of the at the legal notices revenue

Matt Moody:
[30:29] Yes yeah so we turn a little tiny profit on so like those those huge prices so um when we started this we were doing like the big broadsheet like the old school newspapers um and the one problem we ran into was that we wanted to print multiple times a week at the time we thought okay hey the legal notices all the all the ones that had it were printing multiple times a week well to do a broadsheet where we were hiring like a contractor to do that they were just doing it once a week and we're like this isn't gonna i think we're not gonna get the legal notices we're not gonna become the paper of record unless we're doing this more like twice a week at the minimum and so So we kind of tried to go with, I mean, just, we went to the UPS store and worked out a deal with them to print it like a magazine. So it's like a full color. It's more like a magazine. We call it a newspaper, but it's a magazine. And the only problem with that is like, you know, when you do like the broadsheets, really you're paying for the, oh, I can't even think of the, it's like the, you know, the, the, the tens, you know, you get those, those are the expensive part. And then like the paper is dirt sheet and then they just stamp them, you know? Um, and, So that model works when you're going to do a ton of newspapers. The problem for us is like when we went to this other route, then it's every copy costs more.

Aniket Panjwani:
[31:56] I see.

Matt Moody:
[31:57] It's, you know, every time we get another one, there's costs. So we've just made it to where we just essentially try to cover our costs. We turn a little bit of a profit on the newspaper.

Aniket Panjwani:
[32:09] So this is a separately of legal notices?

Matt Moody:
[32:12] Yeah, separate of legal notices. yeah then the legal notices push that up into where then it's a really then it then it makes so.

Aniket Panjwani:
[32:20] You you you started a print edition because of the prospect of getting legal notices if you didn't have legal notices and this is too much work for too little profit

Matt Moody:
[32:32] Oh yeah for sure yeah we did it um so when we kind of started this we had some discussions with some of the old newspaper guys that were in the town.

Matt Moody:
[32:46] And they were, you know, they're pretty bitter about the way that newspapers have gone. They love, you know, kind of how this would work. And like I did the discussions and I said, I don't see how this makes any money. It just seems like a waste of resources and a good way to lose your ass. And they were like, well, but did you know about the legal notices? And I'm like, no, I have no idea what that is. So they explained the regulations about that.

Matt Moody:
[33:12] And then everything kind of clicked because if you notice, if you go look, you can find all these different newspapers that are still being bought and sold today. And you'd think, what in the world is, why would it, why do people keep doing this? And especially like when you start tracking back the large ones, they're all like, they all have private equity, you know, behind them at some, in some way. And I'm like, okay, those guys are not stupid. They know what they're doing. So why are they doing this? And so then when i find out about like a legal notices so i get it so then they'll go in they buy them they got the staff they then they um centralize the the content so there is very like almost nil um local content they'll go in and buy one and then they'll produce at one and then they get you know 20 across the state or whatever it is and then and then they just take the the profits from the legal notices. So I was like, oh, well then I think we just figure out an angle to do that and we'll see if we can pull this off. Because if you could pull it off, then maybe you could pull it off in multiple markets and do the same thing that they're doing.

Aniket Panjwani:
[34:25] Did you start the newsletter with the intention of having a print edition which gets legal notices revenue or was that a separate decision?

Matt Moody:
[34:36] No no no that was like later and it was just after we started doing everything online yeah and i don't think you know i'd have to go back because i'm trying to remember when we actually started doing the newsletter it was just a website it was just a website with stories like the local stuff that was automated that was all it was yeah and um at some point i think i came i kind of started noticing and i was like hey we can you know i think it was just another factor in ghost just another feature all right well let's start doing this and then we started hearing a lot of people saying hey i like the email and i'm like okay yeah and it kind of took off from there and then the discussion started with some of the older um news um you know past journalists and kind of there and you know we wanted to talk to them about hey could you you know the local newspaper used to be the the thing and it's like how do you is there a way to bring that back so we had discussions with them and that's what kind of led to the legal notices Makes sense.

Aniket Panjwani:
[35:34] Makes sense. So for other local newsletter operators, do you think that they'd also be able to have a chance at this legal notices revenue? What are the processes to become the newspaper of record? Is it difficult? Is it straightforward? How does that work?

Matt Moody:
[35:57] It's it's difficult uh i don't know if it's possible i think that it should be um and i'm i'm a little opinionated on this because originally when i thought about it i was like this is just a racket this is just some stupid like arcane regulation that's really dumb and after doing it for a while i kind of and obviously like you know it butters my bread so i i might have a different look at it look at or you know a different perspective on it but what what's kind of happening right now is that a lot of these.

Matt Moody:
[36:29] Counties and municipalities, a lot of them have this. I don't know if it's every state, but what's kind of happened, which is interesting, is that, A lot of them don't have an alternative like us. There is no, there is nothing. And if like the Gannett or, you know, whatever, if they pull out, then that regulation is kind of like, okay, that doesn't work. So then the cities and the counties will put it on their website, which nobody sees. Which was the, I mean, that was the origin of the law was that there's these things the public should know about, like their budget hearing. Okay. Well, if it's not held by a third party, then you're, okay, they get a hold of budget hearing and how many people show up to these budget hearings anymore? And everybody wonders why their property taxes are going through the roof. And because nobody shows up, nobody paid attention because there was, they had no way of knowing. And that's where I get a little opinionated on this. I'm like, yeah, if we weren't doing it, then it'd be on their website. Nobody goes to the city website. Nobody's going to the county website or signing up for their stuff. I mean, there's 20 people that probably do that um could so they can could you have.

Aniket Panjwani:
[37:38] Gotten the public notices revenue without having a print edition

Matt Moody:
[37:43] No um so that's where the regulation now that's the right part of the regulation that's kind of silly um is that um is it has to be printed um and they're finding ways around you know like i said like they're finding ways around that but that was the regulation and And so that's why we were like, all right, here's, and the process was daunting. Um, because A, you had to do this. We had to make the investment for 12 months. So we had to print for, we had to have 12 months of print, of printing. And then once we, once we'd been doing the, like we had to do that for 12 months, then you have to go through what's crazy is you have to go through the United States Postal Service. So you have to go set everything up with them. You got to do all this crazy ownership stuff. And there's all these different regulations about dealing with them in order to get postal class mail.

Matt Moody:
[38:42] Um, then once you do that, then you have to like go to the count. It's, it's most of them, I think in Kansas, at least it's handled the county level. So then you have to get into the county and actually convince them that they should take this up. Now that's relatively easy. If you have like a good county treasurer, which Selene County, um, has right now and had at the time, he was great. And he was like, yeah, this, I don't, everybody knows the newspaper has been gutted and it isn't helpful and they're just taking this money from us. So we worked out a deal and we said, uh, they, they put it up for, uh, for bids. We came in and we just cut it in half. Basically. I think we came in half of what, you know, you can go in and look at what the county paid the year previously.

Matt Moody:
[39:24] So we just went in and we're like, all right, let's go back through and see exactly where.

Aniket Panjwani:
[39:28] Um, so let's say another local newsletter wants to try to get at this public notices revenue how would they find out um who is the newspaper of record and how much that newspaper of record is currently being paid

Matt Moody:
[39:44] Um yeah so your your strategy would be to go first see if they're if the newspaper it's like okay if there's a newspaper in county go see if they're doing legal notices so you got to go through and find out okay is that even a thing because it may not be in some places they're either too small and there's different they fall under different regulations um but your first step would be like okay are do are they printing these things, um then b then you just got to go back through uh you usually like the the expenses for the county are on their website you can find that relatively easy um if you can't then you should build a contact to like the i don't know if it'd be the treasurer or wherever we just found it all online um and then that'd be like your origin for it is you go see how much they're making and yeah.

Matt Moody:
[40:34] And then try to just out compete them, which you're going to have to, you know, you can't just necessarily like go print one and then go, Hey, we printed one for a year and it costs, you know, you gotta, you gotta try to grow that audience and you got it because ultimately like the County commissioners are not going to vote for something that they're like, Oh, this is just a scammy thing. They don't necessarily want to do that. They, I think most of those people are, are, are well-meaning and they're like okay if this makes sense and then you go oh yeah then it saves the county a lot of money then that's how you and you know as long as you get your unit economics okay then you should build a mate a profit off of it yeah 100.

Aniket Panjwani:
[41:19] That makes sense um okay so you're uh and the the legal or public notices revenue that you get at selena 311 it's split between what you get from the county and then a variable amount that you're getting from the community is that correct

Matt Moody:
[41:40] Yes yeah so you have you have the count well you have the county we also have the city so the city you know that's two um and then um there's other entities too like the library um they all kind of have their own statutes and stuff that they have to follow as far as like what they have what is considered like a legal notice or a public notice is what, used interchangeably for the most part. And then, there's all these other things that, like, when somebody passes away and there's, you know, if there's questions about, you know, how, you know, the... You know, the funds and everything else they have to publish a notice. So the legal, like, so all the legal, um, the firms that handle that stuff, uh, name changes, uh, there's all kinds of things that have to be, you know, public notice. Um, you know, for the County, it's like the sale of things. Then they're like delinquent tax. They have to publish that, um, their budget hearings are the big one. Um, and if they're going to raise, you know, if they're going to raise the property tax, the, the mill levies, then, you know, all, all of those have to be.

Aniket Panjwani:
[42:51] And, uh, this, this information, is it coming to you directly from some contacts in city or county government, or is it stuff that you just promised to cover by your automations for these public meetings?

Matt Moody:
[43:09] So the public meetings, like when we first started, um, with the legal notices then we weren't covering the public meetings so until we figured until i kind of started working through um with you know the the um the application that takes the public meetings and turns those into news then we didn't even cover them at all yeah because it's too expensive to send you know um and you touched on that on your video i'm like yeah these things are really important and it's crazy that there's just no publicity like they can go spend money over here and over there and there's nobody paying attention to it because nobody shows up to these meetings often they're having it at 8 a.m on a weekday and there's most people working they're not paying attention to this stuff and so um i think the ramifications of us covering it have been enormous and especially we've really doubled down to where now every single meeting they have like planning commission yeah your manatees like every time there's something then we're every one of those is covered now um but yeah and i kind of went on a tangent there but um yeah back to the original question was yeah we didn't it didn't really have anything to do with um us

Matt Moody:
[44:19] getting the legal notices uh.

Aniket Panjwani:
[44:21] The um here's a topic that i think a lot of people are interested it in um uh most of the content on selena 311 is automated fully or partially does your audience know and does your audience care

Matt Moody:
[44:40] No they don't i don't think they know but i think that they're also like we just don't talk about it um and i think that they don't necessarily i think that they wouldn't care if we were like talking about it all the time um but i think that's just sort of um i don't know if i'd call it a political opinion um just sort of like uh, personal opinion about ai i think a lot of people are negative especially i mean we're in, a very i mean it's pretty rural um you know they i don't think they necessarily call them you know in slide and we never said it's rural um but um but it is and a lot of folks that are older and traditional interviews and they would say no i don't like this at all, but then i'd say well yeah but you also didn't like the fact that none of your meetings nobody you didn't find out and the government did whatever they wanted and you you probably prefer the latter yeah and and so that's kind of yeah so no they don't necessarily know although they they probably know i don't think that they're that naive i think that they just don't pay attention because we don't blab about it.

Aniket Panjwani:
[45:54] Got it got it that makes

Matt Moody:
[45:56] Sense george is like you know It's like George.

Aniket Panjwani:
[46:01] Your friendly local news provider just turned away from the camera, George.

Matt Moody:
[46:07] Yeah, it's George. And if you look up George's name, it's George Nilrak, which is George Carlin backwards. And we've had, I mean, there's probably been a dozen people that have emailed into George and they're like, I get it. And I'm like, yeah.

Aniket Panjwani:
[46:22] That's, that's pretty funny. That's pretty funny. what are the demographics of salina and what are the demographics of your audience

Matt Moody:
[46:34] So i i don't necessarily know all the exact demographics uh it's it's a fairly rural i mean it's a it's a city it's 60 000 in the county roughly um it's uh you know i don't know what the the main age is obviously skews older most of the rural, locations do um but it's probably you know and and and we kind of nail the demographics we just obviously at this point we're like we almost have everybody we think you know obviously everybody isn't necessarily all the subscribers aren't necessarily in sling count we know that yeah what's kind of what what proportion.

Aniket Panjwani:
[47:18] Of your subscribers are in saline or saline county

Matt Moody:
[47:24] Uh it's we we don't necessarily even know because it's tough to know when they when you know when they sign up obviously when we get the print then we know that one for sure and that's all that's pretty much all for everybody there's it's maybe like 98 percent um the the rest i i think the way that like we we look at the the way that they interact with things then uh we think it's it's about two thirds are actually like in the county and there's a third that are in like you know because that the way that the the population skews and cans this is like that's like your last stop before like once you start getting west of there anybody that's ever traveled it gets a little bit a lot more sparse in the population so it's like the it's the hub of everything west of there a lot come over to do their shopping and all that stuff so there.

Aniket Panjwani:
[48:17] There are um places is outside of county limits for which uh salina is still an important city and so it's likely that um a lot of the non saline county subscribers are still in kansas but just far out it's a rural area

Matt Moody:
[48:38] Yes and it's always kind of been that way back when the um the salina journal was the newspaper for the longest time that was the paper of record um, And, um, I, I talked to the former, um, publisher and editor and, and I can't remember exactly what he said, but there was like a huge chunk of their newspapers that went West. Um, and it, it makes sense because it was the, it was the, the next call. It was the closest hub.

Aniket Panjwani:
[49:07] So, yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. Um, all right. So we've got subscription revenue, which we discussed. Um on the print i guess you're not netting that much without the legal notices and then the legal notices give a huge bump so that helps out a lot that's like your margins basically on the print edition

Matt Moody:
[49:32] Yeah and i should probably yeah and i'll probably you know i want to break down why, because i want because that'll be the next question is like okay well okay if you're charging that much for it surely the paper and the printing isn't that much and that's true um so we have uh an employee that goes or it's a contract uh employee that goes and gets the newspapers from the printer gets them to the post office um so we have you know she does that every week uh and then also handles um some of like the there's some people that will actually drop them off um when we first started the newspaper we actually had we had uh god i can't even think of the app. We had an app. We had our own delivery group.

Matt Moody:
[50:18] So we had all these contractors that were dropping off papers for us. We didn't use the postal service. We only did that actually after we started getting the, once we were the paper of record. Then we were like, well, we kind of have to use the post office now because that's part of the regulation. But yeah, originally we would drop them off at the door. We had like old paper routes, like old school paper routes, which I thought

Matt Moody:
[50:41] was pretty cool at the time. But so we've had that cost. And then we have a contractor that still designs, um, the paper. And that's the biggest expense ball is that, you know, I've tried, I've tried to automate that. Um, because yeah, if we could figure that out, then we're making a really nice profit off of, off of that.

Matt Moody:
[51:06] But it's, it's complicated because you do like jump pages and stuff. You know, if you're kind of trying to make it look like a, uh, a traditional newspaper where, you know, you have a column and that column then continues on page 12. Automating that, not easy.

Aniket Panjwani:
[51:23] Yeah, it could be an interesting area for some developer to take a look at and see if it could be solved now.

Matt Moody:
[51:31] Oh, yeah. And then taking like the images and like when we do the photo galleries, then we'll lay out like two pages of the photo gallery for, you know, the sporting event or the event or whatever. Yeah, we've not. and I've been actively working on that and I just, it still feels like it's a ways off.

Aniket Panjwani:
[51:49] Yeah, that's super interesting. And then... On the digital subscriptions, you said that's about 30% of your subscription revenue. So it would be something around 80 to 100,000. Is that correct?

Matt Moody:
[52:09] Yep. That's right.

Aniket Panjwani:
[52:10] And is that basically pure profit? Like what are your costs to support digital content?

Matt Moody:
[52:18] So the customer services and AI agent, Sarah. We got another random name um so that originally we handled that we had somebody that did that we automated that um, the but yeah the rest of it's you know goes into all the cost of like the servers for you know everything every program we're running on digital ocean all the api calls um ghost itself you know then of course stripe takes their cut um but yeah the rest of that the rest of that's profit.

Aniket Panjwani:
[52:52] Awesome yeah would you

Matt Moody:
[52:54] Say it's like.

Aniket Panjwani:
[52:55] 90 margins 80 margins on the digital part of your business oh

Matt Moody:
[53:00] Yeah yeah and then and then i guess the photography you know obviously like the photography content which again that drives a big chop and really like the paid subscriptions that's the paid subscriptions that's why that's why we're getting those so i saw some of the comments and i don't usually read the comments i thought i like you know why would anybody pay for that. And I'm like, well, yeah, you didn't. If you don't have any kids, then it probably is a little bit more confusing. But once you have kids and you find out your kid's pictures in the paper, then you're probably buying.

Aniket Panjwani:
[53:29] Yeah, yeah. So the main thing the main content a paid subscriber of selena 311 gets which a free one doesn't is the photo galleries

Matt Moody:
[53:41] Yeah there's we do some random content that we'll put behind the paywall but we don't do it a lot just using the photo galleries and then this obviously just because we have cost involved in that yeah.

Aniket Panjwani:
[53:50] Yeah yeah that that makes a ton of sense um okay so we've talked about subscriptions talked about legal notices the other big pillar is advertising so selena 311's content operations are almost fully automated are your advertising operations automated

Matt Moody:
[54:10] No um but that's next that's what i'm working on with fractals so there's now there's different components there um so we don't actually have that many ad units um the ad unit that we sell the most of is the the title sponsor in the email. And that one's been sold out. That one's $400 a month. And then we have like secondary ones that are in there. Then we have, you know, then we'll kind of bundle that up with some of the print ads. But as far as like the process goes in the digital ads, we have that. We have the events calendar so they can feature an image. Sorry, they can first, if they want an image to go with their event, And then those events go into the newsletters and it's daily. So that's another thing that's, I think, a little different than a lot of the local newsletters where they're doing it like weekly. Now we're doing it. We do it every day.

Matt Moody:
[55:07] And so we have ads that go into that. Now, the other thing that's interesting and different with the way that we do things versus a lot of the other local newsletters is that a lot of them are weekly. We do it daily. But then we also, because in Ghost, we have multiple newsletters. So we have like crime. So if you want to get the crime story, it isn't like a full list like newsletter. It's just one crime story. But if you want crime, then you can get crime. If you want the obituaries, then you get the obituaries. And each one of those is separate email.

Matt Moody:
[55:38] And then we have all the other ones like the community analytics. If you're interested in the charts and the data for the county, then you get that one. And so we sell ads that will go into all of these different things. They're just images. we don't create any of the images we have them do it we just give them the specs, um and then and then we will either if it's an automated piece then that's all placements automated yeah and the like photography now we are starting what we're what we're kind of messing around with this year is, taking on sponsors for the photography so then we'll we'll remove the paywall on the on the photo galleries and we'll pay like here's the sponsor um so we we have those um, the uh in the events calendar the other thing is like if they want to boost it so we can guarantee like basically we we have the events calendar we let everybody load up their events for free um and then if they want to add an image to that then they gotta pay per like they pay a one-time fee for the image to be included and then if they want to be featured in the in the email which is you know that's where you're going to get the most eyeballs yeah um then um then then you gotta pay and there's a fee per day for all of those how.

Aniket Panjwani:
[56:58] Much does salina 311's event calendar bring in

Matt Moody:
[57:03] So right now it's about a thousand a month um and that that's growing quite a bit so this was this is relative this is all really new yeah the events calendars three months old yeah and maybe i don't know it's kind of i think it might be longer than that but about that and then when we started turning it into a more uh fully functional application then that's when it started making yeah.

Aniket Panjwani:
[57:33] Makes sense makes sense i have some questions going back to that but i wanted to keep on advertising a little bit um are your advertisers coming through inbound or outbound

Matt Moody:
[57:46] Inbound we don't do you know it's now this is this is where i look like a dumb ass um and um, Yeah, we should probably not be doing that. We should probably have outbound. I hate it. I just, I fucking hate it. I hope the language is like, okay, on this, because I just fucking hate it.

Aniket Panjwani:
[58:09] Yeah, yeah.

Matt Moody:
[58:10] I hate every ounce of it, because I hate getting it. You know, and being in SaaS and like being the CEO, you get so many stupid emails, and I just never understood. I'm like, I'm not responding to any of this. This is stupid. This is spam. and now you know hopefully you didn't have your real domain associated with that because, now you now you're not gonna send any email um but that that's my opinion of it i just i just fucking hate it because i i don't i would never buy from it i'm like i'm not buying anything if you email me in something stupid i'm like it has stupid automation and oh sorry you didn't respond you know i'm like this is dumb and i don't want to do that now i won't i'm not gonna i have to admit like we've tried it and it didn't work and i'm like yeah okay it proves my point that yeah this is just annoying behavior yeah.

Aniket Panjwani:
[58:58] What did what did you try with outbound

Matt Moody:
[59:01] Oh i built my own sequences and that was all orchestrated and and um you know we had the typical one percent success rate which means you know and in the especially in the tech ecosystem means well just load in more um you know the problem in the local level it was like you're gonna run out, yeah that's a small small time yeah i mean you're gonna run out at some point you can't just go oh load up another hundred thousand and annoy these people you don't get to do that um but yeah i as you can tell i'm pretty opinionated about that and i like i hated doing it when i had my sass company just fucking hated it.

Aniket Panjwani:
[59:38] Yeah i'm like

Matt Moody:
[59:38] I don't want to be an obnoxious person here if they you know but.

Aniket Panjwani:
[59:42] You were you were also using outbound cold email to grow retention engine your previous s and did that work better than ad sales

Matt Moody:
[59:53] Um yes yeah the outbound now those were different because we were doing like outbound on a freemium, Um, and so in that case, I didn't necessarily, I didn't feel quite as bad about it. Um, and we were just like, it was one email. We weren't doing like crazy sequences or stuff like that. And, and I had a lot of people that were internal that were, you know, that probably still to this day would say, yeah, things would have gone a lot better if we would have done that more and done that better. And I wouldn't have been as opinionated about it and hated it as much as I did. Um, and they're probably right. yeah because i mean there's a reason why everybody does it is because apparently i mean it seems to work i just again i it didn't it isn't gonna ever work on me um so.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:00:40] It seemed it seems to me like something that

Matt Moody:
[1:00:43] Could work.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:00:44] With fractals targeting um like smaller or mid-sized media organizations

Matt Moody:
[1:00:52] Yeah oh it absolutely could and i might just have to get over that um but as it stands right now i don't have to so i'm like i i'd rather just hey like i like the organic growth and it just feels like okay and i kind of buy into elon musk talks about that i think um it's like okay if you have to worry really you just spend all this time on your marketing your products is shitty yeah and that's kind of my point is like i'd rather just go focus i'd rather just go focus on making the product better yeah um and obviously like the product and that's the other thing it's like right now the product's it's it's early stage i'm not worried about the design i'm not worried about any of that stuff i'm just trying to make it yeah do what it needs to do um and do more of that than you know making it really pretty but that's you know i think that's the next step is just um you build a better product and hopefully um i think i don't know not hopefully but i think if you do that right then it's working to stop yeah.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:01:51] Um one interesting aspect of fractals is it's inspiration by this tweet or the ideas of you know the the vc guy balaji srinivasan so could you describe um his impact on your thinking just how how did he inspire you

Matt Moody:
[1:02:10] Um yeah um so i actually took a um i took a course from him on i think it was corsair a long time ago um and it was like uh SAS. It was like he had to build a SAS. And so I followed him and he followed me way back then. And so I'd been following him for a long time. And then he kind of threw out this idea of.

Matt Moody:
[1:02:37] And I think it came from like a, you know, just how, how un, just the, you can't trust the media. And it's like, okay, so then let's get into it from an analytical standpoint and let's cover the, just cover the, the, I think he's kind of on the same rationale that I have is like, okay, if none of this is being covered, then your local community is like, you have problems. Um and technically if you're part of a community you should be able to track how like the health of that community there are things going well in that community um and i think the way that i've kind of understood his his take on this is that it's uh there's like the narrative way which then it's just opinionated and it's just stuff that you can't trust um and so large you know then okay then the rationale is like okay let's get into the numbers let's keep track of the numbers that are important in the community. That's, you know, I mean, it can depend. There's, okay, the economy. So you can track sales tax. You can track marriages and divorces. Okay. Is the community healthy on that standpoint? You can't do, it's tough. We're trying to get actual death rates. That's really hard to get. We're trying to figure out how to do that.

Matt Moody:
[1:03:56] Births, so you can track kind of like the growth the actual growth of the community um how many people are being arrested and how many people are in the jail how many animals are in the animal shelter uh how you know like we have an airport over there um how many people are using it um and then like you know you can do like building permits how many you know okay is there a lot of building going on how do.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:04:18] How do people uh respond to this dashboard have you gotten comments on it do you see a lot of engagement what have you seen

Matt Moody:
[1:04:26] I think that it's it's it's a niche um because there's a lot of them that came to us and that's not their that's not their that's not their approach, and so it's not we don't have a pure analytical niche but we have such a broad market that we get that we do it and then there's you know like the 10 i would i would call it about 10 um, that are in the community that, that love it, that think it's like the most important thing that we do. And I tend to think so too. I mean, I think that's why I tweeted that out to him when we did it. Cause we put it into the newspaper. I'm like, okay, we took your idea and we, and we used it in a, in an even old, like in a very old school format. And so we throw them into the newspaper. And so that's where people like it. And I think the most is in that format because it's, it's just okay here's a data page here's the data about the community, and you know we have the interactive charts on there we move those for the longest time we just put them into Ghost and like they'd be in you know yeah.

Matt Moody:
[1:05:36] And then as I kind of wanted to build this out, then, yeah, I was like,

Matt Moody:
[1:05:44] I want this to be a piece of this. And, you know, the other thing that's really interesting is that for automated content, I think that this is like the origin of, it could be the origin for half of it. Because like, so yesterday we published a story about the number of citations, like traffic citations in Salina, it doubled last month. How else would you know that yeah you would there's no way you would know and so that gave us a story that was automated yeah so like okay hey look at the data from july to august and now i triggered that because i looked at the chart i'm like jesus what wasn't that hell happened here yeah.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:06:23] But you you could even imagine building as part of fractals or separately an agent on top of this data whose role is to take in the data and then just like write or analyze what is shocking or surprising about it based on some rules that you give it

Matt Moody:
[1:06:42] Yes exactly exactly and that would be i mean i think that's kind of the next step for what we're doing here um and that that's been my the part i'm most excited about with factles is i want to build that i think that his idea is awesome and as uh anybody that's kind of in the ecosystem knows um he knows what he's talking about um and if he's on to something then it's probably wise to follow and so that's why i'm like yeah all right i think and i i can you know i can see it um, as uh as maybe the the biggest part of this now i think that the events is something that's just another little like market opportunity so we've kind of merged the the the different components into into fractals.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:07:27] So so fractals consists of this community dashboard plus events um and what else what is in fractals

Matt Moody:
[1:07:37] Yeah so we're i'm kind of i'm merging in a lot of different components um so we have polls polls is the growing that's the biggest one that one's exploding right now our our growth on that is up 800 um we had polls we were using type form um but now we have like like to where anybody in the community can go add a poll and then that poll will then show up in the in the email and so then that email goes out and then it's just a deluge of people that are jumping into these polls because they're all for the most part local polls.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:08:14] And do you have to be a free or paid subscriber to participate or create a poll

Matt Moody:
[1:08:21] No but what i'm doing right now so i'm logging my ip addresses so we want to make it unique we don't want it to where you know anybody can kind of like screw with it but i didn't necessarily want everybody to have to sign in to participate in the poll to see the results of the poll yes you have to subscribe, otherwise you won't you don't get to see the results so that's kind of like the lead magnet there yeah is okay you voted but you don't get to find out unless you sign up yeah and so that's the um but then we'll allow like the anonymous um voting anonymous but we're tracking the ip address and so um uh and i'm probably going to make that a little bit more um, flushed out to kind of knock down some of the stuff that can be done to kind of skew it. But I like letting people kind of engage with it that way I can then get them to subscribe.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:09:15] Yeah, makes sense.

Matt Moody:
[1:09:17] So we have polls, we have we launched Q&A.

Matt Moody:
[1:09:22] Now this one, I don't know if it's going to work or not but the idea was like there's a lot of questions and we have all these people messaging in like Facebook and email and they'll ask questions like what's happening over here what's why is you know what that demolition of that building when's that going to be done and so we kind of looked at it as like.

Matt Moody:
[1:09:40] Our we're kind of like being like the the arbiter of like okay you could go email that into the city of the county and good luck getting an answer uh but they'll answer us so the idea was like i want to now that's that part's not automated yet but obviously you can see how that would be automated yeah where you can get a question and then we can we can then ask it to the right person and then get the response and then we'll have like this q a like hey why didn't that pot when's that pothole gonna get fixed okay well we can probably do that yeah so we have that that one's brand new and i think people don't quite understand what that one is um and then the the biggest like for for revenue obviously the events calendar and the upgrades that we have there is like the revenue side but then we also tied in like a business directory but what we didn't what we also did is um the um you know one of the other big scams all these newspapers around is these like best of it's like oh the best of you know whatever unless you've ever been involved with it and somehow then you don't realize like what a huge scam it is um it's like okay they you gotta pay you won And now for us to publish that you won, it's going to cost you $1,000 or something.

Matt Moody:
[1:10:54] And that's just such a scam. And then anybody can vote as many times as they want. So then the companies that win are sending it out to their employees and going, hey, make sure you vote 5,000 times. And then they get the honor of paying for the award. And I'm like, this is bullshit.

Matt Moody:
[1:11:12] So our directory is actually that. It's the ability to do that. We added this heart component to where you can add a heart. And those are only users. So only a signed in user can give a heart. And then what we're doing is then we're saying, okay, at the end of a term, then we'll take the top hearts for each category and we'll put that into one of our polls so that we're, again, you were using one of our other components to like build the next component. And then at the end of that, then we'll end up having the award, which they won't have to pay for because then everybody can just see that it's transparent and just went through our system.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:11:50] Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

Matt Moody:
[1:11:53] Uh, and then I guess I should say like then the revenue component of that is then like what we've done is then our idea is like, okay, every, they already have a Facebook page. They already have a Google page. We're not, I don't think that, that it's, I don't, I'm not going to try to compete with those guys cause we're not going to be able to be them. Right. But, um, what we can do with a lot of them don't have is like their actual calendar. They have a calendar on their website, but there's no like organized structure around this calendar. So I'm like, all right, your profile page with us is going to be like your calendar of what's happening and what's going on. You could load up your specials, then, you know, you pay and that can show up into the email. And that's so that's what's all being built out right now is just turning like us trying to provide the calendar for these businesses and organizations. are.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:12:41] The content automations like the public meetings agent or the interview agent part of what somebody gets by subscribing to fractals or is that a distinct thing

Matt Moody:
[1:12:52] Yeah no that's that that is part of it too i guess i forgot stories yeah so because we used ghost i wasn't necessarily sure about doing stories and i kind of wanted to get away from just nobody trusts the media um and i And I think those are the people that don't trust us either. Because we're, you know, in Solana, we're the media. And so, but ultimately I kind of thought, okay, but there's some people that dislike the narrative form. They don't want to read a chart. They don't want bullet points. They want to actually read the narrative. And I'm like, all right, as long as we hold ourselves to some standards on some of these things, then we could add stories. And then these stories are powered by the agents so they're like the public meeting one yeah it's all part of fractals and that's largely what the stories are going to start as we're going to try to prevent um anything outside of those lines um i guess i should say one of the other things i kind of forgot that we do also we have some of the old school um.

Matt Moody:
[1:13:55] Traditional journalists like kind of like the legends in salina that will contract them to do.

Matt Moody:
[1:14:01] Specials so like they'll do special stories um and obviously their names hold a lot of credibility and it gives us something that it's not you know i think some things should be ai a lot of things but then you should also give it it should be it shouldn't just i think any of these you know i've seen some of these guys that are like oh it's 100 automated and i'm like yeah i don't think that's going to work yeah i think you have to have some other things and so we look at the photography and we look at the um you know hiring some of those stories that i think need a lot more work and that's in the favor of the traditional journalists that hate a lot of this stuff is i think none of you wanted to go sit there and sit through a commission meeting and you're a liar if you say that if you say otherwise you're lying you're just you wanted to get paid yeah um but there's a lot of content that can't be done in an automated way and i think the the way that humans right is still way better um and telling stories yeah so um that's the other component that that we pay for and that now that's the part that i don't necessarily have part of fractals um as far as like our story component so the ai piece and then you know my vision of how this kind of functions in communities is that you should you know you could have something like fractals that does all this other stuff that is low-lying fruit for ai and it and it's good it's like helpful and for it's informative and then you that lives in the community should be like adding the flavor yeah.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:15:29] I i completely agree with that i think um there's people who are trying to use ai to write novels and then they you know publish thousands of junk novels on amazon which collect in a few hundred dollars per month and kindle fees and it's not like i think that there are a lot better things you can do with your time than just increase the spam problem that the world has and so i think that the nice thing that i've seen about what you've done with salina 311 first and fractals is you've created these very targeted things um agents automations that are providing something valuable to the community but which are just hard to get at by manual standard reporting processes because no journalist is going to create tabulations of crime statistics by hand, but you can scrape it and you can organize it for a community. And that's what makes sense to automate.

Matt Moody:
[1:16:31] Yep.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:16:33] Yeah. Hey, terrific. There's not, I think we've, we've gone well over. I want to be respectful of your time. Is there any sort of closing comment or any, any socials that you'd like to give out to people to reach out? I don't think you're like super active on social media, but. Nope.

Matt Moody:
[1:16:51] I'm not. Like everyone's on there. Like there's been a lot of people after you posted, there were a bunch of people that followed me. I'm like, oh shit. I'm also the high school baseball coach and this, smaller town than salina that i live yeah about away from there yeah high school baseball coach and everything that i post is like their videos yeah.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:17:11] Yeah i saw that

Matt Moody:
[1:17:11] As you can see like that's what all this stuff is behind me because we own a my brother and i own a indoor uh batting cage for softball and baseball oh awesome yeah um yeah so this is like i've worked out of here uh and uh yeah everything i share is on that so yeah i don't i don't share that much even though now i feel like i need to um but like i was saying the other day i think uh first i'll just thank you and yeah i should have hired you a long time ago because the way you've explained what we did i was like damn that's like that's way better than how i do it i i go off and shit so nobody knows what the hell i'm talking about i.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:17:46] Appreciate it i appreciate it i uh i enjoy your uh son's baseball highlights too so keep keep posting that never stop even if you start uh getting into actually talking about fractals there were there were people in the reddit comments like uh like blaming me for this being guerrilla marketing for fractals and if it's guerrilla marketing for fractals it's really guerrilla marketing because you never mentioned it to me i had to like dig it off from the bottom of your website where it just says fractals network and i found it and i just made this video with barely any input from you on your revenue figures it was like you you're the You're anti-marketing.

Matt Moody:
[1:18:27] It's hard. It's hard to, you know, I don't know. I'm not as, uh, there were times when I was, um, a little less humble and I'm like, I don't know. I just, I feel like if I just focus on building something awesome, then that'll get it out. Um, yeah. But at some point, man, I was like, yeah, the people that were like, oh, you're just shilling it for them. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, Hey, at this point, I should have hired you a long time ago. Cause way better at this than me.

Aniket Panjwani:
[1:18:53] I appreciate that all right hey uh thanks matt this is a it's really been great appreciate your time i think people are gonna love this once it's out awesome