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LATEST POSTS 📚

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🫡 The Job Description Of A CEO. Five roles to rule them all. The most detailed CEO job description to date.
🏴‍☠️ THE DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS. The wild story of the founder of the Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht.
🚀 Interview With A Google Peak Performance Coach. Lukas Stangl on strategic growth & unlocking potential.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I have been obsessed with the whole geopolitical state of affairs lately. So much so that I had to block my Twitter newsfeed, as it just puts me in a bad mood. The Zelensky vs Trump + Vance event though, really was something else. I’m not sure we have ever seen a more precipitous fall from grace, than what we are witnessing from the United States right now. It’s just a sad state of affairs for everyone.

Every day just seems to be a barrage of fake news, double speak, and ostracising of political allies. Anyway, I will try to refrain from ever writing political posts in this newsletter. But I do reserve the right in this tiny little housekeeping section to say what’s on my mind. And that for sure, is really all that’s been on my mind. Anyway, I hope you enjoy today’s post!

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

The Negative CAC Media Pyramid

Today, I’m going to tell you something that I shouldn’t be telling you—and if my team found out, they may come looking for you. So continue at your own risk. I am about to tell you about a strategy the Negative CAC engine we are building at my company, Athyna.

And how, whilst our competitors fight to build pipeline on the backs of high costs and low results on the back of Meta and Google, we are laughing our way to the bank, by getting paid to acquire a client.

Yes, you heard that right. Today, we are heading to the most blue chip of business real estate. So hold onto your hat, as we will not be passing GO, for this is a direct line, stopping no stations to the land land of Negative CAC.

CAC, but not as you know it

I don’t particularly have anything against CAC (the cost to acquire a client). It’s just a vanilla metric. A metric that lesser companies use. Companies that are yet to concoct a masterplan that allows for them to have more money and more clients when they close the books at the end of the month. CAC is for mere mortals. And that’s okay. ^{_{Easily the most disrespectful passage in today’s piece}}

Before discussing ‘Negative CAC’ though, it’s probably smart to brush up on how acquisition works. Customer Acquisition Cost or ‘CAC’ is how much a company spends to get a new customer in the door. It takes in the Cost of Goods Sold or ‘COGS’ but also the indirect sales and marketing expenses—tech, budgets, salaries—associated with the deal. Athyna for example, bundles in recruitment expenses alongside sales and marketing because it better reflects our costs.

For small businesses CAC might be low, but so is the Lifetime Value or LTV. Big businesses, Salesforce for example, can likely pay tens of thousands of dollars for a good ‘logo.’ Finally, CAC Payback is the amount of time it takes to generate enough revenue from that customer to cover their cost of acquisition. The whole cashflow cycle will often look something like this.

And payback period really matters. The best companies, that grow at an insane clip will often have short payback period, some only a handful of months. Conversely, companies that are good at raising money, but enjoy setting that money on fire via a poor product might take more than two years to recoup their cash.

Luckily for some, there is now another option. ‘Are you telling me someone will pay you money to put customers in your pipeline?’ I hear you asking. Well—yes. And here’s how.

Technology → Media → Technology

Let’s use a very quick example from some real world example, like Robinhood’s recent acquisition of the daily newsletter, Snacks. Numbers are made up here, but I hope to still convey my point.

Again, I am totally making those numbers up. But as you can see, not only did they spend $0 on the ads to acquire the users (CAC = $0), but their GTM channel actually made them money through other the other sponsorships in the daily newsletter (CAC < $0). It’s the same playbook run by Stripe, Pendo, SEMRush and more.

This is a very crude example of Negative CAC. And it the same playbook we run with this very newsletter. You may have noticed the scattered mentioned of my startup Athyna (CLICK HERE - CLICK HERE - CLICK HERE) throughout the newsletter to help boost pipeline. But that’s only one part of the aforementioned media pyramid we are building. Read on.

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A pyramid the Egyptians would be proud of

The four levels of our Negative CAC Media Pyramid are the following: founder brand, owned media, creator partners and good-old-fashioned newsletter ads baby. Let’s dive into each of them and how we see them working.

Founder brand

Scott Galloway recently said; “I would bet within 5-10 years max, a key component of a boards decision to make someone CEO is how big is their following.” And I agree with him. For that reason, the foundation of our strategy starts with me and my brand, which includes my social media and this newsletter. Although it’s only two channels, it’s been powerful so far, and we are very bullish, that with persistence it will continue to compound over time.

My brand already drives a lot of pipeline, and will continues to grow over time. We think of my newsletter and socials as both top and middle of funnel. Top because it brings people into my ecosystem, but middle because it acts as a massive trust accelerator for people that are interesting in hiring through us (see what I did there).

Owned media

The following layer of our pyramid is a suite of daily tech news brands that we are building on a daily basis. These are all being built in stealth because it makes a lot more sense for us to not have them branded because we run so much of our own inventory in the brands, the cut through will be stronger without the association. As of today, we have three brands, that we sell tens of thousands in ad sales per month, while constantly filling our pipeline with high quality leads.

Creator partners

The next stage are our creator partnerships we have built in the last few years. We raised a $2.5M round recently, and the majority of the round was filled by newsletter operators tech like Bay Area Times, Strategy Breakdowns, and more. So we now have over a dozen creator brands that have a vested interest in Athyna’s success, alongside large volumes of incredibly strategic newsletter ad inventory.

To put it into perspective, our suite of creators have audiences ranging from 10,000 to half a million. This initiative alone is now generating more than 50% of our pipeline with really strong prospects aligned with our ICP. Not bad if I don’t say so myself.

Newsletter ads

Finally, we plan to be one of the more aggressive players in the newsletter ad space. This is somewhat boring, but not really. We really love the ability to tell the story of Athyna through great newsletter partners, and become ubiquitous in the space.

Early results: 20x web traffic in 12 months

And the early results are what I would call: relatively promising. The majority of our pipeline comes today from our what I like to call our ‘Negative CAC Machine.’ And web traffic has seen a nice 20x return in the last 12 months alone (it’s actually 13 but 12 sounds better).

Usually, I’d hold off on sharing a strategy this powerful and instrumental to our growth. But I am telling you this, and handing you the playbook mainly because I feel like what we have done is incredibly hard to replicate. I think of the creator program, owned media founder brand overlap as a perfect Venn diagram of the skillset I have honed over the last years.

Build or buy good media → run external ads → run internal ads → rinse → repeat. Voila! You have unlocked Internet Sizelord Level 7 status. Now go weild your powers wisely.

Summary / Future

I wrote about this very strategy for a guest piece a few months ago and at the time, I talked about the fact that the aim is for this newsletter is to be at the scale and relevance of Lenny’s Newsletter, and our media arm Morning Brew. At the time, it was kinda of nerve-wracking to put that into writing. But now, I am more confident than ever.

We may not make it there, but as my dad once told me; “If you aim for the stars, the worst you can do is the moon.” And that’s the approach we are taking. I’ll do my best to keep you up to date whichever way it goes. Wish us luck!

Extra reading

And that’s it! If you enjoy this and want to learn more about Athyna, you can see what we do here.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

Caught a cool episode from Y Combinator this week where Dalton and Michael talk about the actual stuff young founders need to hear. The chat covers everything from the importance of side projects to choosing the right environment for growth. Enjoy!

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Paddle—a merchant of record, managing payments, tax and compliance needs—we use their ProfitWell tool.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳