Ep 34 - Bill Kerr
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Bill Kerr: [00:00:00] If you look at YouTube, one of the most important things that you have is the thumbnail. What does the thumbnail look like? Does it want, does it make you want to click and watch the video? If you look at, I would nearly argue 90 percent of the newsletters out there, there's no real brand when it comes to thumbnails.
And I think that's such a missed opportunity because if you log on to B2B newsletter and you see everything is black and white with the same logo or the only thing that changes is the copy and the title and you scroll and you scroll and you scroll. It's dead boring.
Dylan Redekop: Welcome to the Send & Grow Podcast.
I'm your host, Dylan Redekop. In my day job here at Sparkloop, I spend all my time analyzing how the best newsletter operators and media brands in the world grow and monetize their audiences. I get a behind the scenes look at how they're growing their newsletters and driving revenue every day. And there is so much to learn from their success and from their mistakes.
And with this podcast, you get that access to every week. I sit down with a different guests from industry experts to successful operators, and we go deep on the stuff that you need to know about. [00:01:00] So you can become really effective at growing and monetizing your newsletter. I'm excited to introduce you to bill Kerr on today's podcast, bill writes open source CEO, a newsletter, helping founders, investors, and leaders in tech outperform their competition with deep dives on CEOs.
Melanie Perkins of Canva, all the way to interviews with startup leaders like Tony Jamis. What makes Bill's story fascinating is the fact he's a CEO himself. Bill co founded Athena, a global talent platform, in 2018, and he's been the CEO since 2019. In today's episode, we dive into why Bill started a newsletter despite running a remote SaaS startup, how he manages it all, how he intertwines his newsletter and his business, and how he's grown the newsletter to nearly 30, 000 subscribers in under a year.
Bill, Thanks for joining me today. I'm really excited to chat about your journey from CEO to now newsletter publisher. But first Can you share a brief history about yourself and how you got here?
Bill Kerr: Yeah, no, well, thanks for having me, Dylan. I'm pleased to [00:02:00] be here. Big SparkLoop fan, so yeah, so a little bit about myself.
I'm a two time founder. Pretty non typical. Started investing in real estate really young. Then I traveled the world for I actually had a I was sick for a year there. Had a kind of health scare. I was about 22, 23. Shifted from real estate success, my portfolio to I want to go and experience things. I want to travel the world.
I'm all good now, but it was like a bit of a wake up call when I was. When I was 23, so I took off and traveled extensively for probably four years. I had the backpack on my back for most of that time and then came back, founded my first startup, which was called Adventure Fit Travel. We took people all around the world on adventure holidays for the wellness community.
Didn't make any money, but great brand, great experience, learnt a lot. That led into Athyna, which is what I do now. So Athyna is a talent platform. We effectively align job seekers in [00:03:00] Latin America with amazing opportunities in the United States. We have talent all over the world, clients all over the world.
But for the most part, the link is strongest between LATAM and the US. We normally work from sales, marketing, product, and engineering talent from SDR and account executive to kind of head of this director of that. So that's kind of what I do there. And then recently, so I think we had our first edition in March.
But about 12 months ago came up the idea that I wanted to start a newsletter. Probably like a lot of people in the newsletter space through listening to My First Million. Obviously that's normally the, the, the gateway drug to, to the newsletter and creative space for a lot of people. And then, yeah, it's been really fun.
I'm a creative at heart. So it's like, it's my creative, I think of it as art. It's my creative outlet. Outlet. And how it's going, kind of seems to be going well. We're growing really fast. People seem to be stoked and we've got some cool stuff that we have, you know, coming down the pipe, I [00:04:00] guess. So. Yeah, super happy to chat, keen to, you know, answer any questions and, you know, hopefully people get some, some value.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah, absolutely. I, well, I'm, I'm really happy to have you on here and, uh, excited to kind of go through it. It's not super often that we have, you know, a, a SAS CEO who is on our show. And they're on our show because of a newsletter, not necessarily because of their, their product. So I think it's a really interesting intersection of, you know, what you're doing with your company, Athena, which I would imagine it's basically all remote.
If, if I understand correctly, people all over the world, managing that it's got to be, you know, a handful in itself, plus trying to grow the company, et cetera, et cetera, all the, all the duties and responsibilities that come with being a CEO, and then in March here, you're like, Hey, why don't I add more to my plate and start up this, this newsletter.
So you mentioned that it's a creative outlet. But I would, I would think that there's, there's also some, some business, uh, sense in starting a newsletter in terms of content. So can you, can you give us an idea as to, I guess, [00:05:00] more so how you see open source CEO, actually, maybe first tell us what open source CEO is, who reads it and what, what you talk about in your newsletter and then, and then talk to us a little bit about kind of the, the content strategy behind it, what you're doing on there and how you're, how you're growing it.
Bill Kerr: Yeah. So basically I wanted to write a newsletter. I thought it would be interesting. I thought it would be fun. I thought it would compliment my job as CEO pretty well. And I can kind of explain why, but, but open source CEO, so we help founders, investors, and leaders in tech outperform the competition.
That's the, that's the tagline, if you will, really what we do is we write deep dives on successful entrepreneurs. We interview successful founders that are operating today. And we write original pieces, business stories, and kind of everything in between. So, at the moment it's a weekly newsletter. We're about to, when I say about to, let's say by the end of Q1 of this year, we're going to roll out a second, a second piece per week.
And I can talk more about that. It's going to be quite interesting, but the newsletter itself, the [00:06:00] idea was that I wanted to build, build something that's creative. I actually really like writing. I'm a creative at heart. I, I got really bad grades in all of my schooling. I got kicked out of school a couple of times.
I was a really problem child, if you will, but I got a plus in everything I ever touched in art, design, creative media, whatever. Cause I'm just, that's, I just, I'm a creative, I guess. So, so that was cool. But my day to day job as CEO of Athena. I saw a tweet once and it talked about the five jobs of a CEO.
And my goal when I saw that tweet was to actually get to that point because as an early stage CEO, you're doing a million things. You're doing sales, you're doing recruiting, you're doing all of the ops. But on my desktop, I have a sticky note that says my job description, nail down the strategy, deliver capital to execute that strategy, build an all star team, scream from the rooftops, which is communicate internally and externally, and hold people accountable.
That, in my opinion, is the job of a CEO. And I [00:07:00] am building a lot of what I've built at Open Source CEO around that idea. But, if you think of that job, so, nail down the strategy. What do I do at Open Source CEO? I research successful business figures like a Jeff Bezos, Melanie Perkins from Canva, Sam Altman.
I do really, really big, deep dives into what makes them successful. I process it, synthesize it, and try and teach it through the newsletter. So that's nail down the strategy. Deliver capital to execute. I've got now an ally ship of 28, nearly 30, 000 subscribers on the newsletter. A lot of them are investors, so we get a lot of inbound interest.
So deliver capital to execute. It's a positioning piece, the newsletter, but it also will open doors and has and will continue to open doors in the investor space. Build the all star team. I mean, the one thing that I and we do well through my newsletter and brand is we have incredible people kicking our door down to work with us at all times.
Screen from the rooftops is the fourth, that's communicate, this is a major part of [00:08:00] my communication strategy is building that, that, that community around me and it's a community of, of leaders, which is kind of our target market at Athena, and then hold people accountable is the fifth, and to be fair, that probably doesn't play into the newsletter.
But if you look at what I'm trying to do with the newsletter, and what I do day to day at Athena, you can see that there's an incredible amount of overlap. So yeah, it's been, it's been really nice. The interesting thing is trying to find the time because as a founder CEO, I don't work 40 hours. I work 50, 60, 70 hours, depending on what's going on.
There's. Some periods in time where I look at my calendar and I think, Oh my God, I might be able to have a normal week this week. You know, 30, 35, 40 hours. It's pretty rare though. So the, the, the struggle for me isn't creating the content isn't sitting down and writing it's making sure, and I've done a good job on this so far, but it's making sure the main thing stays the main thing.
And the main thing is Athena. That's always going to be the case until I exit Athena, but it's [00:09:00] hard for me because I don't talk about, Oh, I started a newsletter. Internally in my head, I say to myself, I'm building a media brand. You know what I mean? So I don't really have that in between switch I have all the way or not at all.
So that's the, that's the balancing act so far.
Dylan Redekop: And in terms of a media brand in your head, is the media brand. Is it a, an Athena media brand, or is it kind of two separate entities that work well together?
Bill Kerr: No. So it's, it's funny. So how it works is Athena. We incorporated Athena through Stripe Atlas. Athena is Athena Inc, C Corp in Delaware is an LLC through Stripe Atlas as well, LLC out of Delaware.
They're actually two separate entities with two separate marketing budgets, two separate expense charts, so on and so forth. They're separate companies. Where we work together is what I do. Athena is a sponsor to open source CEO. But that came from our head of growth. We have a big strategy [00:10:00] around the creator space, so podcasts and newsletters particularly.
So because our head of growth wanted to sponsor my newsletter, we put it to the leadership team. We said, this is what we want to do. I didn't want to do the old Adam Newman, you know, old boy. I didn't want to have the conflict of interest. Where I'm, you know, having my cake and eating it through. But what we did was we set up a, a deal where the leadership team knew, it came from a head of growth.
And Athena gets 50 percent ad rates on, they sponsor one in every four episodes. But what we do is, so, when we run an ad at Athena, we get a 1 percent click through rate on the ad. More or less, something like that. Kind of decent, but not great. We're working on the creative, we're working on the copy, and, and so forth.
But in the footer of the newsletter, in every edition, I have, hey, how you can work together. We've got a tracking link that mentions Athena. And then also, in every edition, In every edition, in one, two, three or more places, I strategically wedge Athena in there. Oh, interestingly, [00:11:00] at Athena we do something to my And we get around a 0.
7 percent click through rate on the native authentic, well, let's say authentic, authentic placements of Athena. So, so every time I produce a newsletter, Athena basically gets a poorly or a mediocre performing free ad. So, so the two entities are, are quite separate, but we have plans to build Athena's newsletter side, but the media brand of Open Source CEO is the media brand of Open Source CEO.
We have plans of if we want to go broad or, you know, vertical or, or, or wide in terms of Yeah, we'll see on the future, but yeah, that's kind of how it works today.
Dylan Redekop: That's really fascinating. I did see Athena sponsor as a sponsor of one of the recent additions. And, you know, just in my head, I'm like, yeah, that's, that makes sense, right?
Like you're the CEO of the company and you're going to put an ad spot in there. My general assumption was just like, Oh, I'll throw that in there because maybe I don't have an ad sponsor for this week's edition or what have [00:12:00] you. But it's really interesting how. You've kept a very, you know, you've kept those lines.
You don't, like you said, do the Adam Newman and have these conflicts of interest between these two separate companies. So I want to talk a little bit about. One thing that struck me, I guess I should say when I first started looking into, into open source CEO was, was kind of the general, just the branding and the vibe around it, you have definitely a unique style it's, it's eye catching.
And so you mentioned having a creative outlet wanting to have a creative outlet, always being good in school, getting good grades when it came to art and that sort of thing. So talk to me a little bit about your process. I know you outlined this a little bit in a, in a recent post, but talk to me about your process of like.
How you got from, you know, point a to where you are now with, with branding and why, because I think a lot of people read newsletters these days and when they're well done, they stand out because. As we see more and more newsletters out there, there are more and more almost just like basic article, blase, bland, and boring.
So talk to me about your, your idea around design, your, your beliefs, your feelings around that. [00:13:00] Why you you've done the way you've done it.
Bill Kerr: Yeah. So have you ever heard of the term pattern interrupt? Yes. Yeah. So. With both of my companies, Athena and Open Source CEO, I've always wanted us to have a pattern interrupt brand.
The first example of a pattern interrupt brand, oh well, first time I, first time I heard the term patent interrupt was The Dollar Beard Club, so they did a parody video on the Dollar Shave Club's video and it went, it's basically beard products and it was such a funny video, it went so viral that I remember sitting in a webinar 10 years ago maybe with the founder and they sold 4 million dollars worth of inventory, broke all of their, broke their website, broke their operations, their funnel, what have you, from this one viral video and I heard the term patent interrupt and a patent interrupt for those that haven't heard the term is You know, scrolling through your feed and something breaks your pattern.
It's in your face and you're like, Oh my God, what is that? You initially, you want to learn more because you're drawn in by whatever it is. Whether it's the brand, whether it's a video, whether it's a piece of copy. It's basically. [00:14:00] Taking somebody who was seeing everything that is all the same through all the media that we consume and grabbing their attention.
So, I've always wanted to have pattern interrupts as brands. Athena is quite a pattern interrupt. The brief for Athena, we have this psychedelic look with Greek God statues and so forth on the website. And the brief was the Greek Gods in the sky and the clouds on acid. That was the brief. It was actually, we had a small, uh, mood board that we gave to a designer that we really trusted.
He's now actually works full time with us. And we said, that's the booth. The Greek gods in the sky and the clouds on acid. When it comes to open source CEO, we, we coined the term dirtbag chic. That's what the brand look and feel is and why we kind of did it. So we've got a really great creative team at Athena and they were helping me with some stuff.
Marcia, do you think you can take a look at what I'm, what I'm building here? Hey, maybe we could add some of your illustrations. And I was using external help to kind of build the initial brand of open source CEO, and it became really cumbersome. So what I did was I thought, okay, I'm going to give myself two minutes and I'm going to try and [00:15:00] create a brand on Canva.
That's what I did. So we have a very loud brand, a very in your face brand, but it's also a patent interrupt. It's supposed to look dumb. It's supposed to look silly, but it's also kind of cool. It looks nice. It grabs your attention. So what I was thinking also with the brand is if you go on and I won't really mention, I won't mention some of the newsletters, but I've got a lot of great creative friends and some of their newsletters are phenomenal and we give each other feedback on.
All elements of what we're doing as creators. And some of the feedback I've given a couple of my creator friends, and I see it just across the space at large, is there is no brand when it comes to landing on someone's, you know, ConvertKit, a website on ConvertKit, Substack, Beehive, whatever it is, there's no brand.
So If you look at YouTube, one of the most important things that you have is the thumbnail. What does the thumbnail look like? Does it want, does it make you want to click and watch the video? If you look at, I would nearly argue 90 percent of the newsletters out there. Maybe not 90%, but let's say [00:16:00] 60%.
There's no real brand when it comes to thumbnails. And I think that's such a missed opportunity. Because if you log on to B2B newsletter and you see everything is black and white with the same logo. Or the only thing that changes is the copy and the title. And you scroll and you scroll It's dead boring, so I wanted to make sure that we weren't that.
And then when you actually click through the newsletter, I try and keep it fresh and silly and a little bit unique. I've been kind of, I've got a bit of a relationship, kind of like a creative buddy with Houck from Houck's News. I did a guest piece with Houck and I basically wrote it and then he kind of tweaked it and we published it.
And my first draft, he was like, nah, there's too much fluff. This shouldn't be in here, whatever, blah, blah. And I realized that we write totally differently. He writes very much like Lenny, where there is not one extra word that need be in the piece for value sake. He's optimizing for value. I'm kind of more like Packy McCormack.
I like to think like not boring where there's value in there, but I optimize for. Probably entertainment with [00:17:00] value, you know, mixed in the middle. So I've tried to be different. I've tried to make it entertaining. I've tried to make it stand out. I've tried to make it a pattern for us. And I think it's going well.
Dylan Redekop: You might not know this, but before I joined the Sparkloop team, I used to run a weekly newsletter of my own. In a couple years, I had grown my newsletter to over 5, 000 subscribers. But back then, monetizing was really hard. Especially as a bootstrapped newsletter founder working nights and weekends. I look back now and think, Man, if only Sparkloop's paid newsletter recommendations tool had existed back then.
From those 5, 000 subscribers, I'd have earned more than 10, 000 in extra revenue with zero extra work. It would have been a game changer for my indie newsletter business back then. And it's a game changer for thousands of the world's best newsletters today. This year, SparkLoop is on a mission to pay out over 50 million to smart newsletter operators, just for helping your audience discover other amazing newsletters that they'd love to read too.
Head over to sparkloop. app, sign up for free [00:18:00] in minutes and unlock life changing newsletter revenue today. Now back to the show. Um, so we've talked about branding. You you've been, I think you've been doing a great job on it. A because you know, I just visually, I could tell, I could see that, that it's good, the re the writing's well done.
It's not just extracting value out of every piece of word. It's more, there's more personality behind it, dare I say, which is maybe needed in the space. I guess you you've now grown, like you just referenced a little while ago, the newsletter to 28 to 30, 000 subscribers. And. So I'd say that also is some pretty, you know, strong indications that since March of 2023, so less than a year from when we're recording this nine months ago or so you've grown pretty substantially.
So I'd say, Hey, yes, I think the branding is working, but I'd love to talk through a little bit about your growth. Again, referencing your, your review post, you kind of mentioned like, yeah, it's kind of. A pretty boring trajectory for growth. But for those who haven't read that article and maybe don't understand as much, they're CEOs of a company maybe, but they wanna start a newsletter to talk [00:19:00] about sort of what your mindset was and how you went through your, your stages of growth from like zero to 250 subscribers then, you know, up to one K, to 10 K, et cetera.
Bill Kerr: Well, I actually have had a news, uh, a newsletter for nine months and I also had, uh, two podcasts in the past, one for a couple of years, and one. We did 10 or 20 shows with Athena. We may pick it up in the future, what have you. But I've grown, I've grown a podcast with, I had no social audience. This is 10 or 12 years ago from zero listens to 20, 000 a month in 12 months.
We grew 22 percent a month for, for, for a year. And then we kind of got inconsistent and we just fell off and what have you. But I've grown a podcast and attempted a second podcast to grow. And I've grown a newsletter. I find newsletter growth, I find it incredibly Easy. And it's, it's not, or simple. Okay. I keep hearing the, the, the phrase, simple, not easy.
That's probably a better phrase. So the way that I grew the newsletter initially was I've got a little bit of a social profile on LinkedIn. So I just reached out to my network. First step is, Hey, I'm [00:20:00] launching a newsletter. It's going to be for founders, investors, and leaders in tech. We want to help you outperform the competition is the signup page.
So I probably got to four or 500 before I published an edition. My buddy, Tom Alder from Strategy Breakdowns, he works strategy at Atlassian and now he's just gone full time as a creator. Tom, he's such a good writer. Tom had five or six thousand subs in three months before he actually published his first edition.
Incredible. So, so that's a pretty interesting way to go about it. I didn't really Build the audience, build the audience, build the audience before writing the first newsletter. Tom did, he had five or six thousand, so it was incredible. But I got five hundred from the initial post, then I started doing a little bit of hustling, so I would reach out to people who were in my network, people that were founders, people that I thought would be high value readers.
So, for us, it's great to have A hundred people sign up in a day, but it's much better if they're ten people that are Series C CEOs. You know what I mean? So quality of the reader [00:21:00] rather than quantity of the reader. And with some of the channels that I'll talk about in a moment, we have a survey so we can see where people are coming from, what their job title is and so forth.
But we can't control it as much. So I did a lot of grunt work. In the early days I reached out to a lot of people that were in my network. I probably got it to a thousand. Doing, you know, the launch and then a little bit of grunt work from my network. It's basically the same trajectories you see in any blog about how do you get, how do you get from zero to 10, 000 subscribers?
The next stage, I ran a few ads. I've got a fair bit of experience with Facebook and. Well, with Facebook ads in the past, but Twitter is the exact same. The backend is a little bit clunkier, but basically, you know, very similar. So ran a few ads, then I stumbled upon Beehive's Boost Network and SparkLoop.
Actually prefer SparkLoop. I'm a big fan of Beehive. ESP is Beehive, but I prefer SparkLoop for growth. It's phenomenal and we're not paying you to say that, right? Nope. Nope. But I will ask for it. Sounds good. Your check's on the way. But Sparkloop is great. So [00:22:00] we played around with Facebook and Twitter ads, but there's a fair bit of legwork to have social campaigns working.
So when it comes to Sparkloop and It's kind of growth on autopilot. So I have a really nice brand and I think the content resonates with people. People like it. So a lot of my favorite creators inside of the network all applied to boost my newsletter. And that's phenomenal. I've got a lot of credits that I really respect that send high quality subscribers across to us.
So from the stage from 1000 to say 5, 000 was a combination of Sparkloop, Beehive Boost and actually Refind, Refind ads. So Refind is a daily newsletter and you can run ads through it. When I started with Refined, they said, Oh yeah, normally we look at a 2 cost per subscriber. I said, yeah, okay. And I had a budget of 100 a day or something like that.
And we were getting to that budget within hours. And I thought, okay, well that means that if supply and demand wise, I could probably on the next [00:23:00] time I run some Refined ads, lower the CPA. So I ended up getting subscribers on Refind for 0. 75. And I filled the budget in a day, but it wasn't that great because refined ads had a 35% open rate, whereas I'm paying $2 on Spark Loop, but it's a 78% open rate with like a, with a much high click rate as well.
So I've moved away from Refind, had a little bit of a play there, but when I, when I went from, when I got to 5K, I started experimenting with acquisition. So we've now acquired four newsletters. All between 2, 000, 6, 000 and 4, 000 subs. But what I do is, I'll do a reactivation to the dormant subs. Not many of them click or open.
And then before I integrate, I get rid of all the dormant subs. So, so of the 28, 000, probably 8, 000 has come through acquisition. But yeah, I have other channels working. So lots of referral stuff, lots of getting PR in different places, guest posting and so forth. But it's really been SparkLoop has been the biggest [00:24:00] refined was.
And then acquisition is interesting because there's a lot of newsletters right now and I don't think many of them are written particularly well or monetizing. So you can pick up a newsletter for a dollar per sub, per engaged sub or less and that's what we've been doing. It's been working out pretty well in that regard as well.
Dylan Redekop: Very interesting. I think it's, that's something that is becoming more prevalent in the space is, you know, acquiring newsletters, selling newsletters. But what do you look for when it comes to, what kind of newsletters are you looking for when it comes to acquiring?
Bill Kerr: Well, I've been experimenting because with open source CEO, we have B2B interviews, deep dives, strategy breakdowns and so forth, but we also have tools and resources.
And the tools and resources are tools and resources that we use internally at Athena, built in Notion. So, OKR, templates in Notion, swipe file templates, a million different templates that make somebody's day easier. The first acquisition [00:25:00] we did was actually a Notion newsletter. I thought, OK, cool. We're going to have lots of paid tools soon.
We have a few that we're about to release. Everything's been free up to this point on, on our tools and resources. We're going to have some paid tools. So I thought I want to explore, this was a very small acquisition. I want to explore a Notion acquisition. So I did a Notion newsletter acquisition and the open rates ended up being around 38%, which is kind of low, but high click throughs because a lot of our tools and resources, obviously you've got to click through and we have them stored on a Gumroad, on a Gumroad page.
So about 5 percent click through, which was pretty decent. Then I've done two just B2B acquisitions, which is pretty similar audience. Those open rates have been around 45 percent with 5 percent clicks, which is really good. And then we're also experimenting right now with an AI newsletter. We've just acquired it and we're about to start to integrate it.
So, the reason I wanted to do that is, we don't really talk about AI at Open Source CEO, but who subscribes to AI newsletters? I would [00:26:00] argue, and from what I've seen in a lot of the data that I've seen when we were trying to purchase AI newsletters, is founders, investors, and leaders in technology subscribes to AI newsletters.
So my bet there is that, yeah, we don't focus on AI, but we focus on really good content for founders, investors, and leaders in, in tech. So that's going to be an interesting experiment, which we'll have the data from in, let's say four to six weeks. And the reason I wanted to do that is because there's going to be an absolute plethora of AI newsletters that are up for sale in the next.
12 to 24 months. So if we can integrate it and it's successful, we can acquire a good subscriber on spark. Look for 2, but it's also pretty interesting to acquire a newsletter. If you can get a good audience for 50, 75 cents, you know, a dollar per subscriber. So, so that's what we're doing with acquisition.
I think there's gonna be a lot more of that. I know how it's done a couple, I've seen a few from other creators in the space, and that'll be part of our strategy. [00:27:00] Moving forward, for sure, it's worked pretty well so far.
Dylan Redekop: So it's essentially a acquisition and you just merge in all of those subscribers, just into the open source CEO.
You're not running these newsletters as standalones as one of our other users is, is doing with Stacked Marketer recently in 2023, he purchased, I think it was Psychology of Marketing newsletter, but they're still operating it as like, you know, a standalone newsletter. So you're just purchasing the audience, essentially.
Bill Kerr: Rolling them in. I mean, we've been doing it, you know. We've been doing it in a staged way. So the first time we did this with the Notion newsletter was we purchased the newsletter and then from the Substack newsletter, we did a, we've been acquired post. Oh, exciting news. This newsletter has been acquired.
Thanks so much for being a loyal part of the community. I'm going to hand it over to Doc. My nickname's Doc. I'm going to Doc and he can tell you about Open Source CEO and all the exciting things happening. So, first thing we did was we reached out to the audience that we were purchasing through the newsletter itself.
Said, hey, this is, this is Doc here. This is [00:28:00] what you can expect in Open Source CEO. The next newsletter you'll see will be from Open Source CEO. Expect that in your inbox. So what we did then was we send on Saturdays, but a month we had the Saturday send, but also a Tuesday or it might've been Wednesday, a midweek send, which was one of our best pieces of content.
So, and in the entry to every newsletter, we segmented the new audience. And in the entry, the first kind of paragraph of the newsletter on the midweeks end, and on the Saturdays end, we reminded people of who we were, that we'd acquired the, the Notion newsletter, and that this was open source ER, and this is why they were going to enjoy it.
So, we tried to do it in a, in a, in a staged way, and it worked pretty well. I mean, these newsletter acquisitions, I saw Hauk do one first, and then I followed along a couple of other creators in there, you know. Building an open post about acquiring newsletters and just like all the others I've seen in the space, the unsubscribe rates are incredibly low.
They're normal unsubscribe rates that you would get [00:29:00] from sending out a newsletter to your existing audience. Maybe they're a little bit higher, but it's not like 40 percent of people say, I don't like this newsletter. I'm going to unsubscribe. It's not like that. It's pretty reasonable open rates to good open rates.
And pretty decent click through rates and we have a pretty, we have a good automation for cleaning our list. So after 60 days, we have a pretty engaged, pretty good audience and we have good content. So we back our content in. That's kind of the thinking around it.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah. Okay. That makes, that makes a lot of sense.
Thanks for sharing that by the way. I had no idea that said that was part of your strategy. So that's really interesting. Interesting nugget. And I want to quickly ask you what, what is the big picture for, you mentioned, you know, I'm running a media business, kind of go big or go home with open source CEO, but you are, you do have these two businesses.
What is the big picture for open source CEO? Where do you, where do you see that going? Like, what is the end game for
Bill Kerr: you? Yeah, well, there definitely isn't an end game because. I expect that I'll be the CEO of [00:30:00] Athena for some time to come. It might be 3 years, it might be 10 years, it might be 20 years, I don't really know.
But, that's my main gig. But, I expect this to be my passion project, or, once I do eventually leave Athena, whether it's, you know, I replace myself, whether it's via exit, I expect this to be, you know, this to be what I do. I really, really enjoy it. I've never had writer's block. I've never sat at the keyboard and thought, oh, what am I going to write about today?
I sit down and I'm like, oh my god, I can't believe I get to just sit and write about Jeff Bezos, for example. I'm releasing a Bezos edition this, this weekend. It's, it's awesome. So there's not like an, there's It's not an end state yet, anyway. All the revenue that we made through Open Source CEO, I've not touched any of it.
It just goes straight back into growth. And, I mean, I don't have a high salary at Athena. I pay myself the average rate for a founder doing our revenue at our stage, and so on and so forth. So, I don't have a crazy salary, but I have a salary that I live off. And I don't [00:31:00] need any money from Open Source CEO.
So my plan is to be the Lenny of leadership, really. So if you look at Lenny Lenny's content is product and growth, really strategy, products, growth, and strategy, but it's kind of more in those domains. And that's really applicable to a leader in tech, but I plan to be the Lenny of leadership. What I want to improve with the newsletter in 2024 is.
I always use the two analogies of Lenny, Lenny's newsletter, and Paki McCormack, Not Boring. So Paki's probably one of the two or three newsletters that I star in my inbox every time I receive one and I make sure I read it because I just love the way he writes. I'm more towards Paki's side, which is entertainment with value, whereas Lenny is straight value.
So what I would like to do in 2024, by the end of Q1, so, you know, by the end of March this year, we're going to roll out the curriculum we're calling it. So the curriculum is the mid week pieces, so at the moment we send, we [00:32:00] send a bonus piece in the middle of the week from time to time. But, we're a weekly send and it goes out on Saturday afternoon, U.
S. time, basically. So, by the end of this quarter, we're going to roll out the curriculum. And the curriculum is going to be value only, basically. And it's going to be our paid offering. You'll be able to receive 80 percent of everything that Open Source CEO does now and forever. So all of our posts will be open to, for the most part, in the curriculum, with maybe 20 percent that is gated.
So tools and resources might be gated, maybe one post a month might be gated. That'll kind of be the, you know, to drive the paid community. But curriculum, what we're thinking is at the moment I have a bit of an MVP and it's around the job of a CEO, which I mentioned earlier. So it's around strategy, capital, recruiting, communicating, and accountability.
So the first pieces in the curriculum are going to be under those five umbrellas. We're going to have five to ten pieces that will come out in a structured way every week around [00:33:00] nailing down the strategy. So how to set goals, how to manage goals, what are OKRs, other ways to craft your product strategy, so on and so forth.
Capital, recruiting, so on and so forth. Because what I want to do with Open source CEO is I don't want to just be entertaining with some value. I want to have an offering for people to be able to be better in business, really, really better. I want it to be able to help early stage, normally early stage, probably let's say C to series C, earlier stage founders in tech.
Maybe we're in the trenches together, or some of the things we're a little bit more advanced, but I want to help them be better at their job day to day. And I think we can do that through the curriculum. So the end state is I have an amazing creative outlet, a great community allyship. And yeah, I want to be the Lenny of leadership.
And I think it's just managing time, managing my workload and making it happen. That is probably the trickiest part, I think.
Dylan Redekop: It leads me really nicely actually into the kind of, uh, the last question, and that's what would you say to a CEO of a business your size [00:34:00] who is considering doing a newsletter?
Bill Kerr: Well, I have a couple of pieces of advice. So, I've been a creator in a couple of different formats, like I said. I've been a podcast host. I've been a newsletter writer. I've tried, I've tried to do Instagram, face down the barrel of the camera, you know, talking, talking head style. And I think the most important thing in being a creator in general is to remove as much friction as possible.
So when I take out my camera and I stare down the barrel and try and talk to the camera, I find it incredibly difficult. I have high levels of anxiety and the product sucks. So I'm not going to do that. I know that that's not my strength, and I don't really want to try and turn it into strength. I'm just not good at it.
I don't enjoy it. It brings me anxiety, not joy. So, scrap that. When it comes to podcasting, I was really comfortable at podcasting, and I was pretty competent as well. So, I always used to say that I don't think I was a great podcast host, but I could, I [00:35:00] could interview Arnold Schwarzenegger and I wouldn't break a sweat.
It just wouldn't be the greatest content. So there was a little bit of friction there always. So I've done podcasting. I might go back to it in the future, but probably not when it comes to writing. I find it incredibly peaceful and I find it a joyous experience. I go and grab coffee. I get some sparkling water.
I put on my favorite, you know, focus music and I write and I just, I've never had writer's block and I don't ever assume I'm going to. So the first thing, if you're a busy founder, CEO, leader, investor in technology, and you want to have a creative brand is you have to figure out what is going to have the least amount of friction.
Because if you have no friction and it brings you enjoyment, you're actually going to do it. That's the key because consistency is key. So you have to find out what works for you. And for me, it's right. So that's kind of my first piece of advice. My second piece of advice would be that you don't have to do it all yourself.
We have two main formats with Open Source CEO today. First is an interview piece, [00:36:00] and the second is a deep dive. And the two are wildly different in the investment that I need to make, time wise, to make the piece happen. So, for example, if we're doing an interview with a Series B founder, I have a number of questions that are my template questions in a Notion doc, and then I'll tailor maybe three to five questions, dependent on their industry, their experience, what I think will be most interesting, and I send it to them in a Notion doc.
They write the answers. And then we had a couple of revisions and that's it. That's a very, very low lift for me. So if I'm doing an interview piece, even if I'm creating some automations, I'm building a few new segments, I'm improving this, that or whatever of the newsletter, I'm probably only spending three or four hours a week on the newsletter when I'm doing an interview piece.
When I'm doing a deep dive piece, it's very different. I've had interview, deep dive pieces, excuse me, that have taken me 12, 16 hours. And it's normally, Oh, I'm going to do this on Friday afternoon. Then I'm going super late into Friday night. I'll finish it on Saturday morning. And then I'm [00:37:00] scrambling to get it out by Saturday, late, late afternoon.
So, so the, the deep dive pieces are different, but I have a content assistant. So what we do at Athena is we build, we build global teams. So we actually work with a bunch of creators in having copywriters, media buyers, editors, content assistants. to help them do more with less effort. So for me, in my example, I have a content assistant named Bia.
She's a 22 year old Brazilian girl, and she's incredible. So she sets a lot of things up so I can kind of knock them down. So all of the research for our deep dives is done by Bia. She also does all the All the AI research, all the, all the research within LLMs. So what we do when, when writing a deep dive piece is we ask, let's use Jeff Bezos, for example.
We ask both chat, GPT and Bard. We're doing a deep dive on Jeff Bezos. How would you structure it? It gives us the answer. We put it in the notion doc for the research. Then we ask, okay, knowing this, [00:38:00] if you were to structure the deep dive piece. In the format of the hero's journey, how would you structure it?
So that's for the storytelling aspect. If you are optimizing for learnings, how would you structure it? And what are the most interesting. pieces of information on why Jeff Bezos is successful. So we do LLM research and then BIA synthesizes that and creates a bit of an outline that I can kind of run with.
And I look at the research, I look at the prep, the so forth. And then I, but, but all of the heavy lifting assets, creative assets, research from different blog pieces, quotes that have been pulled out. It's all done by my content assistant. So although I say that I do only a few hours per week. There's a lot more work that actually goes into it.
I just don't do that work. So I would recommend that anybody, anybody that is building a creative brand or wants to launch a podcast, launch a YouTube channel, launch a newsletter is to find what actually works for you and has the least amount of friction. And then to figure out how you can do [00:39:00] the valuable stuff that you enjoy and none of the grunt work.
For the podcast that we had, I used to record the podcast. I would put it in a Google file, and then I would never think about it again. Our team would turn it into a YouTube full piece, three pieces for the Clips channel, two Instagram stories, two for the Instagram feed, show notes, and so on. It would all happen like magic.
And I would, that would do the talent booking as well. So get help, figure out who on your, on your marketing team, on your communications team can actually do the grunt work. And my third piece of advice would be just start because I mean, anything is going to suck at the start. If your content sucks, no one's going to read it.
So it's a free hit and you'll get better over time. I'm a much better writer than I was nine months ago. And I'll be much better writer again in another nine months from now. So that would be my piece of advice. I think we're going to see a lot more of this. Founder, executive investor brands in the future.
And I think it's great, really. I think it's great.
Dylan Redekop: And just lastly, how have you felt the impact with Athena since you [00:40:00] started open source CEO?
Bill Kerr: Yeah, it's awesome. The team really loved it. You know, every time I release a piece, our leaders, our individual contributors, people reach out. Oh man, that was super interesting.
Super, super awesome. But it's also created a really steady pipeline of. Leadflow as well. So it's actually really funny because we have the ads that we run in the, in the, in the newsletter and they have a form. People land on the form and put in their details and we haven't had so many people fill out the form and we've had much less than we would have assumed.
But my pipeline of my network has exploded. So, because people, people feel like they know me because I have a bit of a brand on LinkedIn and I write the newsletter. So I get people reaching out to me all day every day in my DMs. Hey doc, we're looking for a media buyer. We're looking for a content assistant like we've heard you talk about.
We're looking for a SDR or an account executive or a developer or whatever. The only thing that worries me is I never want our team to think that Athena is not the main [00:41:00] thing. That is one thing that I'm conscious of. I think it's everything about Open Source EO is positive and additive to Athena. I'm very conscious that I don't want people to ever think Doc's a creator.
Now he doesn't care about Athena. That's the one thing that doesn't keep me up at night, but I'm hyper vigilant to avoid. Oh yes. It's super so far. That's
Dylan Redekop: awesome. Well, I appreciate you sharing all that. There's a lot to synthesize and that I'm looking forward to break down when we review this podcast and publish it.
So a lot of great, a lot of great nuggets to share with us. Bill, can you share where people? Can find you on social media, follow along and where they can, where they can subscribe to
Bill Kerr: your newsletter. So, I mean, I'm not super active on Twitter, but you can find me on Twitter. LinkedIn is where I do most of my social stuff.
I guess you can just search me on, on LinkedIn. You'll find me no doubt Athena is. My startup, it's Athena with a Y, A T H Y N A dot [00:42:00] com. So if anyone's looking for the talent of any sort, sales, marketing, product, or engineering, we're a pretty good fit, especially in the creative space. We have a lot of creators that we work with, like I said, to help them continue doing the fun part rather than the grunt work.
And then, yeah, my newsletter is opensourceceo. com. Amazing.
Dylan Redekop: Thank you, Bill, for stopping by and hanging out with us for a bit. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do in the future and all the best in
Bill Kerr: 2024. Cheers Dylan, keep up the good work at Sparkloop HQ, big fan.
Dylan Redekop: Thank you, we will. Thanks for checking out this episode of the Sending Girl podcast.
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