Podboxer - 🎧 Mediocre as a competitive advantage

Starter story

• Learning to code was the pivotal skill that allowed Pat to build a startup. 
• After building his first startup (with room mate) they expected to get customers immediately. But hadn't thought about sales. Had to go out and hustle during the day job. 
• On first product (Delite) “It was more of a cool idea than a need to have. We didn’t validate it properly…they didn’t need it enough to set it up today”
• Signups are great but.. look at usage. Are people actually signing in and using your software?
• Focus on B2B products - “It’s a lot easier to make money from other businesses than from consumers”. A business spending $10K per month on an engineer will think nothing of a $100 per month tool (that adds value).
• On starting a content / affiliate business - Following guru advice of picking an in-demand niche isn't right for everyone. Pat started an affiliate blog in the pets space but gave up after 3 weeks. Decided to create content around something he was passionate about - Entrepreneurship.
• Built Starter Story as a vehicle to find another project and learn more. Doing something is better than nothing even if it's not yet the final business you want to build.
• Challenges (a 24 hour start up) are a great way to bring people into your world - whether watching or taking part. 
• On getting things to go viral - Sometimes he spent a lot of time and was sure it would be popular but no one cared. Then there were times where he never thought a particular post would go viral. Tries to build systems to enable that but it feels like 100% luck when it does happen. “When it’s really big, it’s always luck”.
• On building a business - “Consistency is the key. I don’t think it matters what idea you pick as long as you work on it consistently”
• Being public about ups and downs (ie being vulnerable) is a way to a) be true to yourself and where you are, and b) attracts people to you - it's a marketing tool
• Advice for new founders struggling -  "Impatience is one of the hardest things, it’s never growing fast enough, but if you work hard on something every day, progress is bound to happen. Be patient and just work and get stuff done, focus on the most important thing that can improve yourself or the business. Do that enough and you’ll have anything you want"

TLDR: mediocre as a competitive advantage

How a simple email newsletter became a $350k-a-year side-hustle in just 20 months

Indulging in my love of newsletter businesses again 😀

This is a great story of a newsletter that seemed to come out of nowhere with a 100K+ audience and making approx $1000 per day in sponsorships.

TLDR is a curated tech, science and code newsletter (think Hacker News type content) and gets sent out every weekday. 

On this episode the creator / curator, Dan, talks about his motivation for starting the email, how he grew it to a massive audience in a short time frame, and plenty of advice for other newsletter writers.

Lessons learned

• Dan was already spending time reading Hacker News, sub Reddits and similar sites so started to compile into a newsletter. It started to gain traction so was motivated to keep going.
• One of the hard things as a bootstrap founder is “you can just quit at any time and there’s no one holding you accountable”.
• It’s important to keep up the growth momentum to keep yourself motivated.
• He started with Reddit and Quora ads - Most people talk about Facebook and Google but with Reddit and Quora, a lot of companies don’t want to use them so there’s less competition and the ads are cheap.
• If you’re more strapped for cash than you are for time, you get a lot of bang for your buck. On Quora you can pick specific questions to target, eg ‘what’s the best tech newsletter for developers’ and it cost him $2 a month for 5 leads so very efficient. That was instrumental in getting the first few thousand users and after that people would link to him and word of mouth started.
• There are 2 types of growth strategies for a newsletter:
  1. percentage terms like word of mouth, cross promotions with similar sized newsletters.
  2. linear growth strategies like purchasing paid ads and posting in forums where you’ll get a set number of people per dollar.
• In the beginning you want to look at linear strategies because word of mouth won’t help that much with lower numbers of subscribers. Paid ads have you grow linearly and once you hit critical mass you can then go over to more exponential growth models.
• People always talk about exponential growth when it’s in the steep part of the trajectory but at the beginning it’s flat so if you can do linear at the beginning you’ll come out way ahead.
• Realized the business was going somewhere when his first sponsors reached out to him.
• Problem with subscriber lists at this scale - he has to take care not to be political in what he shares. People jump all over it.
• If you're a visionary, create stuff. If you're mediocre, curate stuff - there are lots of people with similar tastes to you.
• Optimize your landing page - keep it simple and focused on the one action you want a visitor to take: sign up.
• Also offer sign up via twitter, google or other - he gets 50% of mobile traffic taking these options (typing out email addresses on mobile is no fun)
• The newsletter is still a side project and only takes an hour per day 🤯
• Charging $10 CPM for sponsorship: why so low? Because Pieter Levels (Nomad list) says you should sell it at a low price until you either run out of supply or verify demand and then start raising it till people stop buying. So he’ll progressively raise it.