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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.
Eric Lam - Exploding Ideas (Send & Grow Podcast: Ep 20)
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Louis Nicholls: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Send and Grow podcast. I'm your host, Louis Nichols. In my day job at Spark Loop, 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 I'm joined on the podcast by Eric Lamb.
Eric runs the Exploding Ideas Newsletter. He only started it a few months ago, and he's already got thousands of happy subscribers. The key to his growth being really good [00:01:00] at Reddit. Eric, we're gonna dive into your Reddit newsletter Growth Playbook very soon, but can you kick us off with a quick 1 0 1 on your newsletter?
Eric Lam: Thank you for having me on the podcast. Really appreciate that. Love what Spark Loop is doing. I wish I came up with the idea myself, to be completely honest. But yeah. Long story short, ever since January I've been trying to come up with a new idea and I kind of have this framework of ways that I test new ideas because I've had a couple businesses in the past that I've been profitable.
I kind of have this like, Iteration framework that I've come up with in terms of, I put out an M V P within like 24 to 48 hours for an idea that I have fully branded, put it up on an X jss landing page that I create from scratch, and then I post it on Reddit. In the past it was Facebook groups and I see if anybody signs up to it or purchases or whatever, just like a quick like kind of like startup iteration thing that I do.
And so ever since January I was coming up with new ideas. One of them was like an N F T website. [00:02:00] That was N F T Analytics, and so it was doing like on chain stuff that didn't work and the market plummeted, so that kind of got washed out. Then there was another one that I had around podcasting, so it was like a podcasting advertising marketplace so advertisers could find podcasters that are maybe don't have millions of listeners.
But they're much lower than that. And those podcasts might want somebody to sponsor their podcast, so we connect them. That didn't work. I also am not in the podcasting space, so I wasn't able to relate to the advertisers and the, uh, sellers, so the podcasters. So anyways, that didn't work. I had a couple other ones that didn't work, but I was trial and erroring them like a couple weeks at a time.
Like four months into the year, so I guess like January or March April, around there, I came across the exploding ideas concept, in which I basically was like, okay, I have this thesis or this idea that I think that since the market seems to be deteriorating, people will go back [00:03:00] to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which, I dunno if you're familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy, but just for the sake of people listening, basically, it's kind of like this philosophy around when people.
They lose their income streams or whatever it is, they kind of revert back to their fundamental needs. So I saw the market was kind of deteriorating. People were getting laid off from their jobs. They were getting paid cut pay cuts. So I figured, okay, they'll probably want to find ways to supplement that income, find ways to make more money so that they could put food on the table and make rent, whatever it is.
And I felt that this could kind of plug that need in the market because I felt there would be momentum. For this type of business or concept because of the state of the market. So with like a looming recession, I figure a drawback to Maslow's hierarchy of needs is probably a smart move in terms of building a business.
So that was the concept, and I posted about it on like Indie Hackers and Reddit and immediately started getting signups. So usually in this like startup iteration framework that I have, [00:04:00] I test it for like 24, 48 hours. If I can get like a hundred signups on something, I know I'm probably onto something and I try to like double down and I continue to test it.
That didn't happen on the prior ideas that I had had since January, but this one, I got like a hundred signups in like 24 or 48 hours, and I had like a thousand signups in the first, like under two weeks. So I was like, there's probably something here. I'm gonna run with it and just continue to listen to the market as far as like what they want.
So when I send this newsletter out, I'm just gonna like iterate on it. So when people respond, they tell me what they like, they don't like, I have like a welcome email that goes out that asks them What are you interested in? And I just listen to user feedback and kind of iterate from there more or less.
And yeah, that's really been the process. I started with the newsletter, parlayed it into Twitter, have been building there. And yeah, I'm just gonna continue to build it out and just listen to what the market wants. As far as like what they want sold through the newsletter, what they would find valuable, and I'll just build it out from there.
So hopefully that's helpful.
Louis Nicholls: [00:05:00] Yeah, that's, that's a great overview of, of how things got started. I think maybe what would be interesting for the listeners is to get a frame of reference for where the newsletter is today. So are we talking, is this daily, is this weekly? How many subscribers do you have at the moment?
What are readers getting when they, when they open that in their inbox, who is the audience for this? And then maybe let's move quickly into, into how you monetize or how you intend on, on monetizing the newsletter in the future as
Eric Lam: well. So I have about like 6,700 subscribers, which I've built over the last four months, three months, something like that.
And the newsletter is sent twice a week. So on Sunday you'll get the high level of what the idea is that we're covering that week. So for example, one week it was green noise, which green noise was a Google trend that I had saw that was going up a lot. Uh, in momentum over the past like couple months. So the high level on the Sunday was basically, here's what the idea is.
It's called green noise, and [00:06:00] here's how you can monetize green noise. It's going up a lot, like it's getting very popular. A lot of search trends around it. It's getting popular on TikTok. That's why the trend is existing in the first place and people are going to Spotify, YouTube, and streaming green noise, which green noise.
It is like a sleep sound, so it helps you sleep. And so I was like, okay, if you wanna monetize this, what you'll do is you'll go. On Logic Pro, which is a music software. You could create some green noise in there through a music synthesizer, like Native Instruments. They have one called Massive. You can create green noise in there.
Then you upload it to a streaming service like Distro Kit or something like that. Create a brand around it in Canva. And I kind of go through the whole process of here's what you do, and then I put it out and I'll be like, okay, on Sunday you get the high level. Tuesday you get the super deep dive on like how you actually do it.
Here's all the analytics. So like SEMrush, if you've heard of SEMrush, it's a, uh, keyword research tool. Also use hres, A H R A F S. [00:07:00] It's also another keyword research tool, Google Trends. I'll use all these like s e o tools essentially, and I'll deep dive on it and show you exactly where the opportunity is.
And how to monetize it. So for example, on the green noise concept that I overview it on the Sunday email, but deep dove into on the Tuesday email, which the deep dive is monetized. So you have to pay to unlock the whole thing. So if you wanna get all the analytics, find out how people are making money on this, where the opportunity is, you have to pay to unlock it.
But the Sunday email that gives you the high level of like, here's what the idea is and high level how you can monetize it, that's free. So I attract people to come into it through the high level free email. Then if they wanna opt in and pay for the Tuesday email for the deep dive market research, they can do that.
But basically I was like, I'm gonna try this out and I'll show you that you can make money doing this. So through that deep dive email, I basically detailed my expenses to go into it where $20, and I just got the revenue numbers for the first month and I posted them [00:08:00] on Twitter and basically I made, I think it was like $350.
So the first month, my expenses were $20, made, $350, so $330 in profit, and there's no ongoing monthly expenses, so I'm just in profit from here. So I like to detail those kind of ideas in the newsletter. And these are things that I've been building on the side for years on my own. So I'm just kind of putting out the research for everybody else to read because.
I had seen like trends, VC trends.co, which I love these newsletters, but I felt like there needed to be something maybe in the market that was a little bit more expanded. And so that was kind of where I wanted to go with this. So I was like, I think people might be interested in really deep research. cause when I create businesses on my own, I have to do so much research. I have to find exactly Google trends where the, uh, trend line is like if, is it linear? Is it exponential? I need to research it on my own. Has it been going up for five years, 10 years, 20 years? Is it a recent phenomenon that's only [00:09:00] been going for six months?
What else are people searching for? So if it's like green noise, are they also searching for white noise or are they searching for green noise for my pet? Because it's a pet phenomenon that it's helping their pet sleep. I wanna find out exactly what the opportunity is so I can create a brand around it and I could basically monetize it so I really go in depth in the newsletter.
That's what this is. It's all about long form content. Well, about going deep and finding out how to actually make money off of these opportunities, if that makes sense. And I'm really just publishing my own research for things that I pursue on my own. So in terms of monetization, I've kind of been taking it one step at a time, but right now I have SparkLoop set up, so that's one way that I'm monetizing it.
So that's like a, like a high top of funnel way to monetize it. I have traffic coming in, so I make money off of them hopefully right away, where they subscribe to other newsletters. I have more of like a, I would call it like a. Part of the funnel where people can upgrade to pro plans. So on Tuesdays, the deep dive.
So the deep [00:10:00] market research on here's where the opportunity is, here's the SS e o research, all that kind of stuff, Google Trends, etre, here's where the keyword opportunities are. That's all in the mid-level Funnel Pro plan upgrade. So that's another part. I also have sponsorships, so companies will sponsor.
The emails, and that's for the Sunday email. So the, for the one that's free, that one gets a sponsorship. The Tuesday email does not get a sponsorship. And so basically the way that I set up the Sunday email to get sponsored is that every time in my email it goes out, there's an opportunity to advertise in the newsletter.
It's linked. So if a company, they are subscribing to the newsletter where I have a lot of VCs and companies that are subscribing to this. They can click the link that says advertise, and then that'll bring them to a Calendly where they can book a date to essentially advertise in it. And there's a Stripe payment automatically integrated so that in [00:11:00] order to book the date sponsorship, they have to pay.
So I just see a notification on my phone that so-and-so company is sponsoring your newsletter on this date. And that's it. It's kind of a passive thing. Usually for the non-recurring revenue streams, whether it be sponsorships or whatever it may be, I try to set it up to be as passive income adjacent as possible.
I only want to pursue recurring revenue streams in terms of like actually putting forth a lot of like day-to-day effort for it. So that's kinda my thought process there. Those are three of my revenue streams so far. I've also kind of been since. On Twitter, I've been getting pretty popular around the whole Reddit strategy concept.
I've been having some pretty large a hundred thousand plus newsletter subscriber newsletters reaching out to me to help them do the Reddit strategy on their behalf or help them with it. So I've been toying with this kind of like agency concept. If that makes sense. I haven't figured it out yet, but I have a couple, like, I don't wanna call it beta, but [00:12:00] it's like kind of like a stealth launch where it's not announced, but I'm kind of toying with this model with a few companies right now to see if I can grow that and scale that.
And that's more of a bottom of funnel thing. So people found out about me, they're probably subscribed to my newsletter. I've proven to them or shown them that I have like a deep thought process around finding ideas. Monetizing them, doing research around them on the internet, and then they wanna work with me.
So that is through the agency model that I've been playing with. And I've also been doing consultant. So people will hire me for 30 minutes to have a conversation. And that's also included in the newsletter. So right next to where it says, advertise in the newsletter. There's also an area that says how I can help, and it says, I'll set up a one-on-one and we can talk about your idea, or I can help you with the Reddit strategy, or whatever you need help with.
Let's talk for 30 minutes about whatever you want. And that's a 30 minute thing that people can book that is build up the same way [00:13:00] that my sponsorships are. And that the sponsorships are hooked up through Calendly and Stripe. That's also how the consultant calls are going, and I'd say at this point, my revenue is pretty evenly split between the different revenue streams.
I'm trying to pick up a little bit more on affiliate, like linking to whatever company, like books or whatever, but I haven't really been able to tap into that. I don't know if it's because I'm using emails to push the links out. And they're not on like U R L hosted websites, but that's something that I anticipate growing in the future, but I haven't really cracked the code on it yet.
Louis Nicholls: I love that. What, what I like about the, the, the revenue streams you're mentioning is that it's something I've been thinking about that I talk about a lot, which is called the Rule of Tens, which is basically if you think about how to monetize a newsletter, you, you have your, your audience, your audience has different levels of willingness to pay.
So a hundred percent of your audience. Can be monetized indirectly, basically, right? A hundred percent. Your audience can be monetized for free. They may not purchase anything, but you can monetize 'em through ads, [00:14:00] through subscribed, paid recommendations, through through other stuff like that, affiliates.
And then roughly how it tends to break down is that each time you divide your audience by 10, you get to the next level. So 10 times the willingness to pay. So if you imagine you have that sort of a hundred percent of your audience is willing to pay, nothing have to be monetized indirectly. Take it down a level to 10% of your audience.
So happens they will tend to be happy to pay 10, 20, 30 something dollars like that, take it down another notch to 1% of your audience. They tend to be happy to pay hundreds, take it down another one, um, 10th to to 0.1%. They'll pay thousands and and so on and so on. And I think it's really interesting what you've done there with sort of.
Having a product or a service or something that is packaged for each of those levels. So you, you've almost got each of those sort of free tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands potentially covered, which I think is, is really smart.
Eric Lam: That's a really interesting point, like I guess I used to work at Universal Music Publishing, so it was like a big [00:15:00] music company.
And one thing that I learned there is that you never want to overindex on one revenue stream. Because the market will change and you don't know if one of your revenue streams is gonna collapse, so you need to be diversified. For example, the market, say the overall market is going down and it's kind of deteriorating.
Advertisers might not be willing to spend in the same way that they were in the past. So if you're in a bull market, advertisers are gonna be throwing money at advertising and it's gonna be great for you. But then when the market turns, that revenue stream might dry up and that could kill your business.
So you need to make sure that you're very diversified and you also need to make sure that the revenue streams that you put the most amount of. Effort into, I guess this is my perspective, should be fully within your control. So I don't feel that advertising is fully within my control. That's kind of something that advertisers need to come to me and offer me money, and that's not within my control.
I need something that people are really reliant on me and they really need to give me money, and I have full control over the [00:16:00] full funnel of it. I just think that's way more solid of a foundation to build something strong on. But regardless. Diversification is really important because the market will change.
Definitely.
Louis Nicholls: And I think what's really interesting about your newsletter and the opportunity we have today to talk about it is that very often on the podcast we bring on people who have been. You know, part of larger teams and running their newsletter for ages, you know, there'll be hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of subscribers.
And we have to go back. We have to talk about, okay, well how did you get your first a hundred first thousand, first 10,000 and so on. And what I think's really interesting here is you are still in that, you are like in the middle of that sort of beginning phase, right? You're sort of three or four months in growing very, very quickly.
You know, for the, this kind of newsletter already up in the the six, 7,000 subscriber mark. Walk me through, we, we, I don't think we even need to get as granular as a hundred thousand and so on. Like walk me through where growth has come from to this point.
Eric Lam: Reddit pretty much exclusively, I'd say 92 to 95% of my subscribers have come through, come [00:17:00] through Reddit, mainly because I identified something in the very beginning that worked.
Usually when I come up with an idea, in order for it to be something that I'm interested in pursuing, I need to be able to bootstrap it and it needs to be something that I can get traffic to. Organically. So a lot of people are into paid ads, which is totally cool. What I found is that the easiest way to bootstrap something and to get it profitable is to find something the market wants so bad that you could basically put it out for free if you find the right traffic source.
And people will just gravitate towards it and they will come for it. And I think it's just a matter of rolling the dice over and over again until you find an idea that people want, which is why I have this quick iteration framework for when I'm starting new ideas that I test them through, because I'm looking for that market momentum when I'm creating an idea and deciding if I wanna pursue it.
Being able to have a great go-to-market strategy paired alongside that is key. If I don't have a great go-to-market strategy that I could replicate and really dive in on, then I'm not really that interested in pursuing it, [00:18:00] because you can build something off of paid ads from scratch, but what happens when you're just spending a ton of money on those ads because the space gets oversaturated?
What do you do? Also, if you're not monetizing it in the beginning, you're just coming out of pocket. So it's making it extremely hard for you to become profitable. So, When I start things, I like them to be bootstrap able. I like to be able to drive free organic traffic to them in a replicatable way, like a way that I could keep repeating over and over again.
And yeah, that's kind of what I found with this. I found that on Reddit, I was able to push it and get subscribers basically instantly. And I think within like. My first, like two weeks, a little bit less than that, I was able to get a thousand subscribers and that told me all I needed to know. Just keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Kind of like put myself in the position of a computer, just keep doing the same thing and uh, you'll be able to ramp up. So I don't know that that'll necessarily take me to a hundred thousand subscribers, but I'm very confident that it'll take me to 10,000 [00:19:00] and I mean, the way that my funnel is set up in order to make decent living. I don't need to necessarily get to a hundred thousand subscribers, even though I want to get there. It doesn't necessarily need to be the end goal. I could basically monetize through other revenue streams like the agency, for example. Also, if I wanna do an academy, so many people wanna learn the red Reddit strategy right now that I can monetize through that as well.
So I think that it's really important to have an amazing go-to-market strategy that you can drive traffic to your newsletter for free in the beginning. And basically go all in on that one strategy until it starts kind of tapering off a little bit and then parlay it into something else, which I've been parlaying it into Twitter, which I haven't really cracked the code on driving traffic from Twitter to my newsletter, but I think I'll get there eventually.
But that's more of a long play. But the goal is free traffic from Reddit, free traffic from Twitter. And maybe I can find one more in the future, but I don't know that I can Two [00:20:00] to get to 50,000. I had a newsletter in the past. That was built off of a, uh, music software company that I built. I sold it in 2021.
The newsletter was kind of just like an add-on kind of thing. When I sold it, it wasn't really valued the way that I feel like newsletters are valued now in that like, newsletter can be a whole business. But I built that up to 55,000 subscribers and that was mainly off of like Facebook groups and Twitter, I mean, and uh, Reddit.
So those were my two streams that I got traffic from. Most of it was organic and free. I supplemented it a little bit with Facebook ads, but like not much. And I ran it for like a year and I just got a ton of subscribers to it and I'm really just planning on doing the same kind of thing with this. Got it.
Louis Nicholls: Awesome. So tell me about the Reddit strategy then. If, let's imagine we're sitting here and someone comes to you and they have a, a new newsletter and they want to get some subscribers for it, and they're looking at Reddit. Firstly, I, I guess. Explain really briefly, like what you're talking about when you say the Reddit [00:21:00] strategy may, maybe we should start there.
Eric Lam: So the Reddit strategy is a framework that I developed of driving traffic from Reddit subreddit to your newsletter to sign up.
Louis Nicholls: And we're talking about organic traffic, right? So we're not talking about paying ads, we're talking about
Eric Lam: no paid ads. Yeah. This is telling great stories on Reddit. As comments, 'cause posts don't do that well anymore.
It's all about comments. I tell great stories and it's topical, so it's around what people are talking about. So if somebody makes a post on Reddit and it says, Hey look, my business is doing well, but I wanna ramp it up and I want to get some VCs to invest in it. I think there's opportunity here because I have a lot of revenue, but I just need more.
I just need more like influx of capital so that I can really drive growth. I'll basically create a comment response that just offers a lot of value. Like I worked in venture capital for a little while, so I would relate to the poster. I would give my advice, and [00:22:00] then if my newsletter makes sense to plug as a resource for, here's something that could provide you good information on how to kind of get that capital that you need, check it out.
Then I may plug it, and usually I try to include at least a hundred words. In my comments. So they need to literally be stories, like little stories that can capture people's, like emotional attention, if that makes sense. They need to be like invested in this story as far as it's providing really great value and it's a little bit emotional and I.
There'll be a call to action somewhere in there to check out this newsletter as a resource, but it's not a plug of, go check out this newsletter I made. It's really great, but it's more, here's a newsletter I found. It's really helped me. Maybe it'll help you kind of thing, but if you don't wanna subscribe to it, whatever, here's kind of what it's about.
And so you kind of put the information on Reddit as well. You don't make it so they have to subscribe to the newsletter in order to get the information. You also give them the information on Reddit so that they know. If they don't [00:23:00] wanna subscribe to it, what it's about and what the information that you took from it was, it's really just value first.
It's all about value first. And I actually developed this strategy on Facebook, so I'm calling it the Reddit strategy right now, and people are like really taking to it, but that's not where it was conceptualized and first executed. I built it on Facebook. So this was something that I was going into Facebook groups.
I had that music software company. Basically, I built it off of Facebook, parlayed it into Reddit, but my first traffic source that I was using was Facebook. And I would go into these Facebook groups that were about like music software. They were from music producers, whatever. Just people in the music space that were on the technical side.
I. And I would be like, Hey, like here's an interesting software that I found and I just kind of told a story around it and would write that as a post or a comment to somebody asking for advice. And I would get so many subscribers through that. I mean, I got 55,000, so I. It's really just a concept that I [00:24:00] developed on Facebook and parlayed into Reddit that now people aren't really going onto Facebook groups anymore.
So it's really only applicable on Reddit. But I'm gonna eventually find a way to apply to Twitter too. But at the end of the day, it's all just about telling great stories, offering a lot of value. Really just not asking for much, if that makes sense. You can include a link, but it's a resource. It's not something you have to go to.
It's just if you wanna check it out, go check it out.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously it's working well for you with the growth you've seen over the, the first couple of months. I, I guess a question for me is, if I'm listening to this as a newsletter operator, I'm thinking. Well, this sounds really interesting.
If I'm in the early stages of my, my newsletter where, where that's sort of like, you know, I'm still investing my time into growth versus, you know, where as you get slightly later you'll start thinking more about flywheels and paid, because just the, the absolute numbers don't make sense anymore on the the time investment side of things for growth.
But if I'm thinking about this and I'm at that stage where it might be useful, I guess the first big question in my head as a newsletter operator is, would [00:25:00] this work for my
Eric Lam: newsletter? I. So there's so much nuance to it. I think generally speaking, what would apply to your newsletter? I've worked with a couple different newsletters and different niches already, and it's worked for them.
Is it gonna work for yours specifically if it's in some random niche? It's, there's so much to it. There's so much nuance. It's what market are you in? For example, crypto has been really blowing up and that has kind of not been doing the best. So if you're putting out a crypto newsletter right now, You kind of gotta look at the overall market too.
You know what I mean? Like look at, is this something people are interested in? Go to Google Trends. Is this something that people are flocking to? Like if you look at all the AI newsletters that have been doing extremely well, they're riding the wave. The market is really interested in ai. My dad's asking about ai.
My fiance's parents are asking about ai. Everybody is interested in ai. So if you're the rundown or you're superhuman and you put out a newsletter, when that was first starting to get traction. You're in there and you're riding a wave. [00:26:00] But if you're riding a deteriorating market like crypto, for example, or maybe something else, then it's gonna be extremely difficult.
But those aren't headwinds from Reddit. Those are headwinds from the market that you're pursuing just. By your choice. So there's that that you have to kind of look at first and kind of like look yourself in the mirror. Like what market am I pursuing? Is this an actual opportunity right now? Or am I just pursuing an upward battle?
That uphill battle that's not really worth the time? That's for you to decide as an entrepreneur, but then you have to think, okay, like how am I positioning this on Reddit? So if you're. Providing value on Reddit in certain subreddits, you have to provide a lot of value. You have to be a decent writer, and you have to not shill.
So, so many people when they first try this strategy, they're going on to Reddit, they're writing one sentence and they're linking their newsletter. You're a Schiller. That's just, everybody's gonna look at you like that. They're gonna see your past comments that you were showing. You've automatically identified [00:27:00] yourself as a Schiller.
You have to write long posts that are providing value first. It's not about your newsletter, it's about helping the original poster. So the person that's made the post, you have to help them. Don't just link it in your newsletter that here's where you get the help, provide the value in the comment that you're writing, and at the end of it, then link.
Link your newsletter if it's applicable, if it makes sense. But it's all about providing the value to the poster. So, I'd say number one is market. Are you in a market that people are interested in? And then number two, how are you positioning your newsletter on Reddit to actually get the attention? So much of this is creative writing strategy that somebody who's just doing this for the first time and has never built a business, they might struggle a little bit, but that's all part of the trial and error process, but, There's so much nuance to it that you really have to look for these little things and you have to really iterate over time.
I've been on Reddit for seven years, so I've been there for a while. I understand the culture, I understand what people are talking about, what does well, what doesn't do well, so I have that [00:28:00] experience. If you're going there and you've never been on Reddit before, you might struggle a little bit, but if you read my tweets and just find, try to like apply them, then it'll kind of get you there a lot faster.
But there is some experience that comes into this in judgment. It's a lot about creative writing, telling great stories, and offering real value. That's another thing that I found that some people struggle with. They will create a newsletter that it's just, it's something they're interested in. So it could really be about anything, pets, whatever.
But they're just interested in this newsletter concept, but they haven't seen that the market is interested in this. That's why this iteration framework that I've created in the beginning, It is so important because I'm testing market momentum when I'm putting something out in 24 to 48 hours and posting it on Reddit or Facebook groups or Twitter or whatever it is, I'm testing momentum, so I'm trying to see in 24 to 48 hours, well a hundred people sign up for this.
If not, not enough people probably care, or I haven't [00:29:00] positioned it in the market to be something that they understand that it's something that they care about. So you have to really crack that code first. I'd say it's really just product market fit that really applies to this because a newsletter, just like any online business, it's a product.
And if you're not like pursuing it like a product, Then I think you're not pursuing it in the most efficient way possible. So I would suggest product market fit is the most important part that you could put the most time into at first. Get that product market fit, get some, get like a hundred people to sign up for your newsletter in like 24 to 48 hours off posting on Reddit, Facebook, whatever it is.
Then really dive into these strategies. I think that you need product market fit first. Got it.
Louis Nicholls: Okay. Okay. What are some of the mistakes that people make when they start with, with Reddit? So especially if they're then newer, went to Reddit. I know you already mentioned the big one is, is just the lack of content and the lack of the, the writing quality.
What are some other sort of either mistakes that people are likely to make, or what are some [00:30:00] steps that people should be taking if they want to try it out and have, have a good chance
Eric Lam: of success? So number one. Find subreddits that apply to your niche. So for example, if you're in ai, go into the chat G B T subreddits, go into the singularity subreddit, see what the top five posts are about, what are people talking about in there?
Then when you check out those posts, what are people commenting about? Is it like overly emotional speculation? Is it argue, people argue like arguing with each other or like what is the meat of the content? And where can you potentially insert yourself? I think that is like key. You really need to identify the subreddits that apply to what your newsletter solves because at the end of the day, your newsletter should solve a problem.
Just like any product in the market, it should solve a problem like Spark Loop. Spark Loop helps you make money. A lot of newsletters struggle to make money, but you guys make it easy right off the bat to make money. That's why you guys do well. That's, [00:31:00] I think, like key. You just need to find that fit. What is gonna help people make money?
What's gonna help them elevate and become more either profitable or just more popular? Just find out a way to give value to people. And so I think that your newsletter needs to provide that. Then you go on Reddit, you find out what subreddits apply to that. So for example, you have an AI subreddit that's aggregating AI tools.
Go into the singularity subreddit, go into the chat, GT subreddit, read the top five posts, read the comments, and just strategically try to figure out where you can insert yourself. I think that's really important, and at the end of the day, if your newsletter solves and need in the market, it provides a solution.
It'll be easy to kind of create that narrative inside of your comments and drive that traffic, if that makes sense. I'd say that's really it. I think in terms of mistakes that people make, I think that it's not really doing those things. Really, it starts with product market fit. [00:32:00] I think that the newsletters that struggle the most on Reddit don't really have it.
Maybe they're just only using paid ads to acquire customers, but they don't really have a free traffic strategy because they're really just shoving their newsletter down people's throats through paid ads. But they're not, they don't have like a real strategy behind it. I think that it all starts with, That product that meets, that provides a solution to people.
And you can kind of back into it from there. I think everything else is easy, but you really just need to figure out how to get something that people want in the first place, like any product. And I think marketing kind of wraps into it a little bit because you need to have your H one and like your subtext on your website to kind of reflect where your value proposition is and make it clear so that when people come from Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, whatever it is, whatever organic social channel it is to your webpage, you want that converting really high.
So you want them to be primed to basically come to your page and [00:33:00] want to sign up and make it extremely clear what the value is that you're providing, how it separates from everybody else, and ultimately just keep AB testing it and iterating on it until you get something that's converting it like 60%, something like that.
And until you get to that point, I would keep iterating your, your landing page. But I'd say, yeah, back to the mistakes. Product market fit. A lot of newsletters don't have it and they don't start with it. They just pursue what they wanna do. And I think that's kind of ego driven and I think that it's really important to test the market first.
Have a couple different thesis or hypothesis type ideas for different newsletter concepts that you think could work. Maybe pick five. Test 'em all out over 24 to 48 hours, see what people will subscribe to, and then pursue the one that actually has the market momentum. Double down on that, abandon the other ones.
It needs to be unemotional and something that you are just using data to direct your [00:34:00] decisions around. So hopefully that's helpful.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah. Awesome. It's a, it's a great, great overview. Super useful. One question I have, which is, it's something that's come up. For me at sparkly with our own Send and Grow newsletter is so just for any listen who's not aware we have.
We have one newsletter called Send and Grow, but we have three additions a week. The Tuesday's, a tactical Tuesday, where we do a essentially sort of an overview of a strategy or a tactic or something you can use to improve your newsletter. So it's something actionable. A quick takeaway you read in five minutes, Fridays, we do a deep dive on a, a newsletter that's doing something particularly interesting.
So we take a look at their, their newsletter, their business model, and we pick out some highlights that you'd want to know. And then the Sunday is what we call the Sunday scramble is, Essentially a roundup of all the news and the links and the info that's happened in the newsletter industry that week.
So it's sort of, you know, the, the five minute digestive of what you need to know about newsletters effectively from the week now, the Friday and the Sunday newsletter. There are always going to be [00:35:00] interesting newsletters to feature. There is always news about the newsletter industry. Sure, it has to be written well and it has to be put together, but, You are never going to sit up on, on a Monday morning and go, oh no, I don't have any news.
Or, no, there's no newsletter to cover this week. Right? It's always there. The tactical Tuesday. However, we need a good tactic to be able to write about each week. You know, it has to be good enough to be interesting to share, and it has to come to us in time for us to share it. So that's quite similar to what you do with exploding ideas where you have to have a good, or at least a good enough idea to talk about each week.
Which seems like it could potentially at some point become a challenge. So how do you make sure that, I mean, do you have a repeatable process in place? How do you think about that? Is that something that's on your mind where you go, well, I need to make sure we have something in place every week?
Eric Lam: Basically, I. So all my businesses have prof like processes and systems around them. I try to leave nothing up to like what I feel like doing that day. I always have [00:36:00] systems that I'm implementing to just, I need to basically be a computer, if that makes sense, like need to be unemotional. I just need to follow the script.
So I just try to build systems around doing that. With this a hundred percent. So basically, I would say in terms of coming up with ideas, I'm constantly on the lookout for ideas, and I have a notes app in my phone where I have an ideas folder basically every day. If I see something, I might add it. If I don't see anything, I'm not gonna add anything.
If I see five things in one day, I'm gonna add them, but I'm always adding to it every day. Then on Monday, every single Monday, I basically go through my list, which I have a massive bank of different ideas that I've piled up. I pick five and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do some light research on these. I'm gonna go into like SS e o tools, I'm gonna do some deep dive research.
I'm gonna read articles online. I. Like doing a lot of manual research. I'm gonna go on YouTube, Twitter, a TikTok, see what's trending, see what's working around these different, different ideas that I'm researching. Do some light [00:37:00] research on these five, and I'm gonna pick by Tuesday. I'm gonna pick one.
Which one seems like the best prospect for a business idea? Which one is ramping up in the market? Is it building over five years? Is it building over 10 years? Is it a recent phenomenon? But I'm gonna pick it by Tuesday. So Monday, all I'm doing, I'm just going through different ideas and I'm like gonna pick one.
So I already have a bank. I'm just picking five to draw from. I decide by Tuesday which one I'm gonna pursue. I put the other four back in the bank because maybe they're gonna be applicable in the future. I don't know. So Tuesday comes around. That's my research day. Tuesday, Wednesday. I am just like doing a lot of research.
So I'm reading articles, I'm going onto YouTube. I am going into like ss e o tools. I'm doing like a deep dive. Where's the opportunities? Are they around keywords? Are they just a market trend in general? I. Like, where is it? Where's the hole? And then on Wednesday and Thursday, so there's a little bit of [00:38:00] overlap.
On Wednesday, I'll start writing and I'll have it completed by Friday. So I'll spend about like two and a half, three days just writing. So I've compiled all the articles that I've read, all the Ss e o research, everything in different tabs on my computer, and I write it and I put it all together by the end of the day, Friday basically.
And then Saturday comes around. My fiance, she is my editor, and she will go and she'll read the Sunday edition and the Tuesday edition, and she'll just go through it, read them all, make all the edits, grammatical, whatever it is, and then I set it Saturday afternoon, Saturday night around there, whenever she finishes.
I set it to release on Sunday and on Tuesday. So the high level on Sunday, the deep dive on Tuesday. And then Sunday after it goes out in the morning, because I think it goes out around like 9:00 AM. Fluctuates a little bit, but I take the rest of the day off. And I go hang out with family, do whatever I feel like doing, hang out with my fiance.
I go to the bookstore, whatever, and [00:39:00] that's kinda it. I just take the day off and then it all starts again on Monday. So it's a process. I just do the same thing every week and I have a bank of ideas that I'm pulling from, that I'm constantly adding to. I. So I might be, I don't know, at the beach with some friends, and I saw an article online, or one of my friends says something about a cool idea, maybe it's the Apple Vision Pro or something like that, some new thing or permanent jewelry or something like that.
And I'm like, okay, that sounds interesting. I'll just write it down and maybe I'll research it next week, maybe in a month. Who knows? But I'm just gonna log it and put it into my ideas app. I'm constantly adding things there. So yeah, I have a repeatable process around. I'm constantly creating this large bank of ideas to draw from.
Louis Nicholls: Awesome. I love it. So to finish up with, I have one slightly out of out of left field question for you, which is every week and our Sunday scramble edition of the newsletter, we include a little section, which is a newsletter we wish would exist basically. And it's sort of like an idea. Ver, you know, we're limited, limited to like two or [00:40:00] three sentences, but just basically saying, look, we look at thousands of newsletters every month and we haven't seen something like this.
It'd be kind of cool if we could read this. If anyone wants a newsletter idea, go and take it. And so since we have you here, and you are the ideas guy off the cuff, no preparation, do you have a newsletter idea that you think would be interesting, that you think should exist that is a big opportunity that you think someone should
Eric Lam: do?
So immediately I'm gonna say not really, because I'm always looking for things to start. So I mean, if there was one, I would really try and start it unless it was in a niche that I knew nothing about. But then in that like context, I wouldn't know that one needed to start because I wouldn't know enough about the niche.
So, short term, not really. I think there's a lot of newsletters out there that provide a lot of value. I don't know one off the top of my head that you can create tomorrow. That would be amazing. But maybe there is. I just don't know what it is, if that makes sense. But I do think early next year around the Apple Vision Pro Launch, that's gonna be an amazing [00:41:00] opportunity.
I don't know if it's gonna be as great as the AI opportunity to create newsletters like The Rundown and Superhuman have kind of taken advantage of, but I do think it's gonna be a massive opportunity. Mainly because so many people are fading the Apple Vision Pro. They're saying it sucks, it's too expensive, whatever.
I think that's an amazing opportunity to take the opposite perspective in an optimistic way and potentially start something with a low startup cost. So I think there's that. I also think that Apple's gonna pump billions of dollars into that, just like Facebook did with the Metaverse. And if you can ride that wave, you could just ride this wave that Apple's basically creating and meta, I would imagine.
They're gonna double down on it or they're gonna put some more money into it. So riding these big tech companies, basically moving the market. I think creating a VR newsletter or something around the Apple Vision Pro will be a great prospect, and that's something I plan on doing around January, maybe around there.
So monitoring the subreddits and the trend at large, just on Google Trends. And you can see [00:42:00] when they made the Apple Vision Pro announcement in Google Trends that just spiked, it was insane. They pumped so much money into that. Just in terms of like media attention that. They can just move the market. So I really think that come January when they release this thing, it may be a slow build over time in terms of like getting the public to adopt it.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't. It's hard to speculate. But I think creating a newsletter around VR at that time, you're gonna be able to ride a great wave just completely subsidized by Apple, basically. So I plan on doing that and I think that's a good opportunity.
Louis Nicholls: Awesome. Well, you, you heard it here first, Eric.
We're gonna put all the links in the show notes. Where can people go and find you?
Eric Lam: You can, number one, you can hear about me through exploding ideas.co. That's the website. That's where you can find the newsletter, the deep dives, the high level market research, that kind of stuff. If you want to hear about just like high level, high funnel stuff, so like Reddit strategy, that [00:43:00] kind of stuff.
Go to my Twitter, which is at Eric Lamb Ideas. Maybe it looks like Eric, I am Ideas on Twitter, but that's not what it is. It's Eric Lamb Ideas. That's my last name, l a m. So yeah, go to either Twitter or the website exploding ideas.co. Both of them are great resources.
Louis Nicholls: Awesome. Eric, thank you so much for joining us.
It's been great to have you.
Eric Lam: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it and you guys are
Louis Nicholls: killing it. 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 dmm me with some feedback with your questions. All with suggestions for future episodes. And finally, number three, share your favorite quote from the episode on social media and tag both me and our guest, all of the links for that are available in the show notes and whatever option you choose.
I am really grateful for your [00:44:00] support. Thanks, and see you next week.