00:00
You wanna talk about paid newsletters really quick, a topic that we've discussed a lot.
00:04
Yeah. Let's do it. But this one is particularly interesting.
00:08
The reason why is we've talked about this company a lot, Agora Financial. I've brought it up to you a ton.
00:13
They spun off a couple of their brands and they tried to do a spec. And when they tried to do back, the company that they were spacking with just like kinda like went down, like, dropped, like, significantly.
00:24
So they was already a publicly traded company that was gonna buy a a few Agora brands. The stock went down big time, but that not that important. What's important is the numbers behind this paid newsletter business. So there's this company called, actually, I don't know call this little. It's a subsidiary of Gordon of Agora. I think they call it Beacon Hill. It owns six oh, sorry. Twelve different newsletter brands. Collectively,
00:49
those newsletter brands do
00:52
where did I put the number? Five hundred and fifty million dollars in revenue.
00:57
And two hundred million dollars in profit.
01:00
And by the way, growing some that grew seventy seven percent over last year. Is that crazy? Now I'm gonna tell you all some more numbers. They have ten million free subscribers. So kinda like the hustle. That's like they've got ten million of that.
01:12
This is even wilder. They have five hundred and fifty thousand people paying them six hundred up between one dollar and six hundred dollars for subscribers
01:21
Then they have a quarter of a million people, paying them six hundred dollars to five thousand dollars.
01:26
And finally, they have a hundred thousand people. Paying them more than five grand for a product, for a paid newsletter.
01:34
And what is in this paid newsletter? What's the what so here's where things get it's way here's where things get way crazier. They have some paid newsletters that cost thirty five thousand dollars. Now the reason why what gets cray what gets crazy with this is that they have a hundred and sixty products
01:51
across twelve brands. So what's that math? So each each brand has, twelve twelve or thirteen,
01:57
products.
01:58
And the products, I don't even understand. But basically, I understand the business model. The business model is they get you to buy a fifty or forty nine dollar thing, then they get you to buy a two thousand dollar thing. And they're and so they get you to buy that forty nine dollar thing and that forty nine thing is like a monthly paid newsletter. Like, it's not significant. Right. I don't understand
02:18
how they get it to work. And a large percentage of those forty nine dollar people buy the two thousand dollar thing. Okay. So, but I I feel like okay. So these must be b to b newsletters. Right? No. They're not. I yeah. That that's an important part that I left out. Nearly all of this
02:34
is around, and we'll link to their deck. So they have a whole deck when they they they it's kinda scammy. So they It's a financial
02:40
and a wellness company, which is kind of weird. They're talking about health and they're talking about wellness. And if you click a gora up there, Sean, under my name, you'll see the deck. They say that their their target demographic is self directed investors. What's that mean? Well, I'm gonna tell you if I look at the website, it's just a bunch of old kind of wealthy white people who are probably Republican
03:02
and because the reason I think this is they have
03:05
ads that say like Nancy Pelosi is coming for your guns, you better invest in these eight stocks. Like they say, like, crazy shit, like, that. Right. It's basically the, like, motley fool on,
03:15
you know,
03:16
steroids. Right? Yes.
03:18
But I think motley fools out the goal. These guys they also sold a book on how to cure diabetes.
03:23
Oh, okay. I was gonna ask you why do you think they're unethical and then you answered my question.
03:28
And so it's all financial news financial newsletter,
03:33
financial news related stock picks.
03:36
And it's just a just a crazy story. I brought this up tons of time. We don't spend too much time on it, but it's pretty wild to actually see these numbers I actually guessed that this is how big they were. Now we have proof.
03:47
Yeah. You've been talking about Agora as, like, you know, doing hundreds of millions of dollars. And know, some people know about them, but I would say most people don't know about this empire and most people I mean, this blows away most people's expectations of you know, paid newsletter. Right? Like, oh, I'll, you know, like, I just had a paid newsletter as an individual. Right? I mean,
04:05
you know, a few hundred thousand dollars total. And I thought I was crushing it. These guys are making hundreds of millions of dollars. So when you look at this, it's my honest my honest
04:13
reaction is,
04:15
dude, why couldn't you have done this with the hustle? Why? What what did they do or what was the why was the hill too hard to climb where you could scale like this? Cause this is huge. I don't think it was too hard to scale. I think I could have done it. I would say that this business has been around since the seventies.
04:31
Right. So it's kicking ass now. It didn't always kick ass. If you're willing to be patient, you can do it. Second of all, if you're willing to put your ethics aside a little bit, it actually is quite easy to do. It helps. So it's not gonna be optimal. How would you do this? You let's say you wanna
04:47
beat these guys or beat these guys.
04:49
What does, you know, you're saying you're probably one of the most well equipped people in the world to do this. How would you have gone about it? Well, what you have to do is you've gotta create multiple brands under one. It's really hard to have one brand and only a couple products make all this monthly. Right. So you'd have to have for us, we would have done and we were going to do this, but then we got bought. And the reason I got was a whole different reasons, which is basically I wanted to,
05:10
get a pay day, like, and I wanted to I mean, like, I would I was pretty clear about that before. Like, I wanted I, like, it was cool. It was it's awesome. I'm gonna stay here, but, like, it was nice to, like, get a lot of ticket.
05:22
But if I wanted to be patient,
05:24
and do it for fifty years, which I kinda do to to be honest.
05:30
I would have created trends, but for subset
05:33
sub categories, and you make the first newsletter, the one that people pay for only, like, forty nine or fifty bucks, and we send you just a couple things a month. And then the second thing is you go to subcategories and you charge thousands of dollars. For example,
05:45
if there was a newsletter that,
05:48
dissected media companies, work in the media industry, and you told me it was four thousand dollars, and I also got access to a community. I ain't gonna complain about it. Right. I'm I mean,
05:56
I'm gonna do it. If there's something for digital streaming and that you know that the five analysts are smart, Twitch is gonna buy It's not that, like, challenging. It's not that hard. Right.
06:07
And so that's what I would do from multiple industries. And the thing that a lot of newsletter writers do, which I've talked about those times, and I don't have to talk about too much is they do one of two things. One, they charge too little, and two, if they charge too little, they don't have a higher end back back product. You need a back a front end and a back end. So you need your cheap thing that gets a lot of people, and then you need your paid thing that gets only a few people, but in charge, it makes a lot of money. So so you guys at trends is, like, I don't know, three hundred something a year.
06:34
You could have been forty nine dollars and then five thousand dollars would have been a better mix of value if you are if you were optimizing for how do we get this thing as profitable as we can, lucrative as we can. Yeah. And had we not gotten bought I would have done that. I would I would like we were about to change it. We're about to make that change. And by the way, what happens to trends now? People will still pay for it or it's free now.
06:55
They pay for it. We're gonna we might lower the price before we are either gonna make that the back end or we're gonna make that the front end, but we were gonna copy this model of a ninety nine dollar thing and then a two thousand dollar thing.
07:05
Yeah. Dude, when I see companies like this, it just makes me wanna do it so badly,
07:10
because it's, like,
07:12
It just seems so doable. Now I know that in practice, when I and by the way, we get we get heat for this sometimes because we're like, dude, it's so easy. It's so simple.
07:20
We're talking, like, relatively, like, building a successful business is hard. Okay? Like, it's not just gonna instantly happen. We're not saying things are easy. Sometimes we actually do say that word easy, really what we mean is simple. So, like, being able to bench five hundred pounds, that is,
07:37
simple.
07:38
Like, it's straightforward, straightforward. You just you here's how you get strong in the bench press. You lift a lot and then you eat a ton.
07:45
Now that is quite hard to do for five years, but that's that was that's the steps you take. So it's like simple. And so what we're saying is that this is simple. It is not here. I think I think weight loss is actually a better example because five hundred pounds is a is a hard thing to bench. Weight loss is is literally simple where it's like, Hey, you need to eat these, you know, avoid carbs, void sugars. You need to eat a little bit less, less calories than you're at the burning. And, like, you should work out regularly.
08:08
Do kind of whatever. Just try to get an hour a day of, you know, break a sweat. If you actually just did those two things and be like, hey, give it, like, four to five months, six months,
08:17
Boom. You're in great shape. Everybody knows that formula. It is actually
08:21
simple
08:23
executing it and doing it, having the plan and having the rigor to, like, actually stick to it. Hard, but it is way
08:30
easier, relatively
08:32
than becoming a crossfit champion. Right? And so when we're talking about business,
08:36
the scale is that it's, like, it's hard to create the next Facebook. That's really freaking hard.
08:41
Is it hard to create a paid community? Well, I don't think most people who try it will do it, but it's relatively way easier than creating the next Facebook. So for people that out there, they get all sensitive when we call something easy. It's not we're not trying to mislead you. Like, yeah, it's gonna take work. Most likely it won't work. It'll take some time. But we're on a scale of one to SpaceX,
08:59
this is more like a one than it is a SpaceX. And, like, that's a that's a scale for for people to think about. I completely agree. And,
09:06
I think, like, now let's talk about what makes this hard. The first,
09:10
and is that you have to sell your soul a little bit. Now, many people will not be comfortable with this stuff. Sean is pretty comfortable with it. I think I'm comfortable with it, but I think I'm a little bit less comfortable with it. You have to be a face. Sometimes. You have to be you have to say I'm an expert at X pay me money to for me to tell you my thoughts. Right. Second,
09:31
Well, no. This is all that. So guys like James Altacher who we've had this podcast, he was ridiculed for doing this with Bitcoin. Everyone made fun of him. He made sixty million dollars doing it. But he still got mocked constantly and shockingly, most people would actually prefer not to make the money and not get made fun of than they would to make the money and get made fun of.
09:49
Well, the way I think about it is most people truly will not they they are afraid that they're gonna get the not gonna get the money and get mocked. And so they're like, fuck it. I I I won't do it. If you really had a guarantee, I think people would happily trade reputation points for bank points. But Well, the yeah. And perhaps, but that's some moot point because the is that most people don't even wanna because the first one that you said of, like, they may not get the money at all. That is also true, and that's what they're they're they're not gonna do So you have to do that. Second, it's a treadmill. You can't stop. This is a lifetime
10:21
job. So if you are a content creator, you I hire people to do it for me. You one hundred percent can do that, but you're you're gonna you can't you have to you actually have to do the work for a little while. In the anyway. So you're gonna have to work. And by the way, quick question, hiring, because people ask me this, and I have no idea. I'm like, why don't you ask Sam? Let's see. He's the one who did it while you're asking me. They'll be like, dude, the hustle has had amazing talent. Like, they talk about Trunk, they talk about Steph Smith, what some of the people you guys can do. Me, I mean, right, I mean, I consider you be part of our crew. You, me,
10:54
trung, Stepff. It's got Colby. We've got, yeah, we've got a bunch of people. So so the question is, where the heck did you find these people? So can you give me the ten seconds on each. Where'd you find Trunk? Where'd you find Steph? Where'd you find Colby? Where'd you find, you know, all these people?
11:08
Colby was, worked at a PR firm where he was doing some copywriting work
11:12
an,
11:13
trung,
11:14
Eamon. Did he just apply to you or you, like, recognize, like, oh, this guy's good? Mutual connection, friend of a friend said, you should talk to this person.
11:22
Trung came from Amen Troy, a mutual friend and investor of the hustle. Steph, I found on Twitter because I read her blog.
11:28
Who else?
11:29
That's it. I I just kinda wanna know. And then when you found these people, are you what's your did you cycle through thirty people who kind of sort of saw weed before you found the gems? When we actually sold to HubSpot, they're like, well, you guys have a lot of churn. I'm like, yeah, but here's what we do. Like, this is actually quite normal in the editorial industry.
11:46
But you hire a bunch of people and you've got a you you either fire or there's a mutual, like, alright, we try it.
11:53
And that happens a lot.
11:55
Yeah.
11:56
And you also you have to do a tone. I would say that was also a key. Right? Cause you were writing it originally
12:01
And so you Yeah. And you saw the trends community, like, people. And you saw the trends community. Like, I was the one actually doing all the work. Every day you were posting in that thing. Yeah. And that's that's the culture and it attracts like minded people. I also think that, once you find the winners, then you go all in on them. So Trung is what I call he's he's a made man. Steph, a made woman. Whatever Steph wants to do something,
12:23
Cool. Sounds good. What do you need?
12:26
When other people meet with an idea. Time to negotiate, maybe. Time to time to double it. Trying to double that number. Whatever's number, Sam gave you time to double it. These guys are all doing great.
12:36
Whenever if a if an outside person, Erva, a a non main person comes with an idea. It's, you know, let why don't you just show me a little MVP and let's just see what people think. If trunks says something, it's alright. Yes, sir. Right. Yeah. Like, you you you're a proven hitmaker. So and then the,
12:53
the last thing is when we interview them, I always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume, which is like college classes and all the things that they take because I want them to, like, entertain me during the interview. So in the same way that you are really good at storytelling, you have to have other people that are good storytelling.
13:06
Right. Right.
13:12
I feel like I can rule the world and know I could be what I want to.
13:17
I put my all in it like a day's off on a road. Let's travel never looking back.
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